Dowln sat down at the foot of the bed. “… to take me north?” His eyes went from confusion to anger to dreary amusement. “By the sanaur, I suppose?”
I answered him, and he sat there unblinking, looking through me. Dowln was hardly older than I was. Amid his dreams, treasures, and prophecies it was easy for me to forget that fact, but now in this uncertainty, and in the uncertain light, he looked no more than a boy.
“Well. That is certainly like old Mynauzet.” He continued to stare past me—at the rain-clouded window, I suppose. “Which do you think is true? Did he expect you to protect us, or us to protect you?” I asked him, mostly to smooth over the betrayal I felt in sympathy with his.
“It’s probably both,” Arlin said, scratching her black head with both hands.
Dowln gave a little smile, taut and chilly. “Knowing the sanaur as I do, my friends, I would bet money that he had a third idea in mind, that he shared with none of us.” His expression grew even sharper and his eyes came into focus as he added, “Perhaps he has filled me with false information, so that if you take me to your king he will be led astray.”
“I doubt you would tell anything to damage Rezhmia or the emperor,” I said to him. With his grin unchanged, he answered, “I don’t imagine myself immune to strong persuasion. Few men are.”
This idea did more than surprise me; I was angry. “You don’t know our king either, fellow. He would never harm an envoy.”
Now the grin changed. It became less painful, but more malicious. “Can King Rudof afford that kind of gallantry, Nazhuret? When he might save the lives of hundreds of his own men, or even the women and children?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I stated, but I have to admit that I was thinking of the single survivor of the Naiish raid, five years ago, and how his cries shocked the camp.
Arlin cleared her throat. “It doesn’t matter, Dowln. We aren’t taking you to the king, but to our teacher. If we can find him. And you may believe that he is one of the few you mention, who are immune to strong persuasion. Or any other kind.”
He glanced from one of us to the other. “What sort of teacher is this? Of sciences?”
I answered readily, “Of sciences and more. He… he made both of us what we are.”
Dowln’s blue eyes, lit from the side by gray window light, fixed on mine and I saw the black pupils expand to fill the eyes and then diminish again. “Him. Yes, him.”
He got up from the bed and pressed his face against the beading glass. It was cold, and he was still naked, as white as marble. “Yes, I will see him before it’s over,” he said, and he picked up the clothes he was going to wear and turned his back to us.
I glanced at Arlin, to see what she had made of all this, but she was sitting upright in bed, as naked as Dowln, her gray eyes black, her face intent, and her mind in the belly of the wolf.
The rain was daunting, but to remain in the town was dangerous, especially after my masquerade of the previous evening. There came a number of small tremors while I washed, and when the servant came with our breakfast tray, he was skidding his hip against one wall to prevent toppling over in the next disturbance. He was a boy—too young to be snatched by the mobilization, I thought—and by the set of his face I knew he had not grown any more accustomed to the earthquakes than I had.
On the tray was a beautiful assortment of late green grapes and early red apples and oranges and chestnuts. And pastries of three or four kinds. It was the most abundant moment of the year in one of the most generous climates, and this was the traditional harvest breakfast of the well-off who visited the vineyards, where Rezhmian soil met the equable winds off the Old Sea. Such an unexpected luxury for people in our situation. We had come to the palace and gone from it, and had eaten only leftovers and poison. Now here, in the gray and the driving rain and between long rides, we got the good food.
“It won’t happen again,” said the boy, putting his work of culinary art upon a table and spreading out plates and glassware.
“We won’t eat like this again?” I asked earnestly. So many people had engaged in dreams and prophecies around me that I was quite prepared for the busboy to reveal my future.
He showed a moment of adolescent contempt for my stupidity. (Here was one who had not mistaken me for royalty.) “No, sir. I mean the earthquake. Professor Aganish of the Institute says that these are the last vibrations of the war-day quake, and that they will not hurt anything else.”
“The war-day quake?”
He had finished his table-setting and left in the center of the table a stained copper bowl of grape leaves, just touched by the colors of autumn. He adjusted the decoration until it was perfectly symmetrical and said, “That’s what they’re calling it.” He took his gratuity without expression and left the room, spinning his empty tray in the air.
Arlin and I were well into breakfast when Dowln strode in, his face white and glistening with rain. “The ponies are gone,” he announced. “Stolen during the night.”
Behind him stood two men, one of them obviously a horse groom and the other the hosteler himself. The latter wrung his hands and grimaced for us.
“Not the good horses, mind you, and not the mule, but the ponies.”
Arlin and I got up without a word and followed them out. I remember that my lady was carrying a bunch of pale grapes, which glowed in the morning light like dewdrops or like fish eggs against her black sleeve.
The party of us had the satisfaction of staring all together into two empty stalls sprinkled with horse manure. The hosteler made apologetic noises while reminding us that he was not responsible for things stolen. Arlin sighed and went to see whether our saddlery was intact. When she returned she told the flurried hosteler and the outraged head groom that it was all right.
They stared, and so did I. “How—all right?” asked Dowln. “They weren’t much but you may need the money they would have brought at sale.”
Arlin leaned negligently against the stall door, the very image of a cocksure young idler who knows more than you do. Her hands were playing with a feather. I looked at the feather.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I know what happened. There won’t be anything else missing.” As the hour was getting on, I went back and finished my breakfast.
Dowln questioned us again and again as we climbed the vine-covered hills on wet and laboring animals, on our relations with the King of Velonya and with our teacher. Explaining was more difficult than was the climb.
“We are not soldiers,” I told him, and when that wasn’t enough to be accurate, I added, “We don’t fight at anyone’s command.”
My wet silks clung as close to me as my skin, leaving me steaming and with the feeling of being naked on the back of the horse. Arlin’s black, quilted velvet was soaked and heavy, but the individual drops were trapped in the nap, giving her jacket of crystal. Dowln’s linen was scarcely wet; it shed the rain.
“Everyone fights at the emperor’s command, in Rezhmia,” he said. I heard Arlin cough, and I cursed the weather.
“Everyone fights at the king’s command in Velonya, too,” she answered him. “We don’t, because it is inappropriate for people of our teaching. If the king doesn’t like that, he can always have us hunted and hanged.”
I thought she coughed again, but it was Dowln’s laugh. “And would you permit yourself to be hunted and hanged if it were the king’s wish?”
“Yes,” I said, and “No,” said Arlin, together.
By midday the rain had eased up, but the road had gotten worse, and the vines gave way to rock. By the position of the brightness in the clouds that marked the sun I guessed we were approaching the mountain ring and the city of Bologhini. We got off and led the beasts, except for Arlin, who went easier by driving her stallion from behind while holding to its tail. I tried this, but it was awkward for me, while Dowln expressed no desire to take such liberties with a mule.
We all suffered, pumping our stiff bodies over the stones, but I did not hear my l
ady cough again, and the horses, free of weight, fairly dragged us forward. The afternoon was downhill, which was lighter but more dangerous, and Arlin’s stallion took a slip and came down on his chin, nearly smashing her left leg under him.
Again Dowln pressed for answers, shouting over the stones and through the rain. What arts did we study, who was our patron, and whence came the money to keep us? Arlin had relapsed into her usual silence, so it was up to me to bellow back, “Optics! We studied optics and astronomy. And languages. Arlin learned some medicine, when the teacher felt inclined, and of course we learned to fight…”
(The art you scorn most and teach best. We learned to fight.)
“But you said you won’t fight,” answered Dowln, controlling his mule with effort. The beast had decided it had had enough running and would now walk. Its decision was unalterable. (Dowln’s voice had begun to give way that afternoon. Contrary to my ignorant expectations about the vocal power of eunuchs, he spoke neither shrill nor strongly, and I don’t recall that he ever sang a note before me.)
“I said we won’t fight on command,” I answered. “And more than that: we would be useless in an army. Our skills are solitary. By impulse. Instinct, perhaps.” I had never had to describe our eccentricity so openly. I felt everything I was saying to be wrong.
“What you appear to be, is temperamental. Art without discipline.” Dowln shook a wet finger at me, and now it was Dowln who was coughing as he rode.
I lost my temper as I rarely do. “‘Temperamental’? Perhaps. ‘Without discipline,’ I will not grant you! And as for our patron, our monies… Know this, you horse-faced Rezhmian dreamer: everyone and no one is our patron, and our monies are what we can beg! We are beggars, fellow! Beggars and simpletons who have just lost a baby and did not want to be sent sick and grieving into a catastrophe of the earth and of treachery in the country of the enemy!
“… and that’s what Rezhmia is to me, ‘grandfather’ or no. The enemy. I want to be home!” Then, to complete the circle, I began to cough.
Dowln looked closely at me, under his pouring hood, seeming completely unoffended by my outburst. Arlin trotted up and stared as well.
“Zhurrie! Are you really angry for once, or is this also a public entertainment, like being ‘King of the Dead’?”
“I’m really angry,” I said, and at that statement I was suddenly angry no longer, but only weary, cold, and very disheartened.
In the dome city, they told us that if we had been there a few days previously, we would not have had a chance at a room, for the city was mobilizing. (I wondered whether Velonya, too, was mobilizing. I hoped so, and I feared it.) One day later and we would have been out of all luck again, for they were expecting the Shoreland Infantry to pass through, going west. As it was, Bologhini was empty, and we had our choice of good rooms and fresh food.
Arlin ate without conversation and went to bed early. I was aching, but a long way from sleep, so I went to the bath house to breathe the steam. After a few minutes, Dowln joined me. He did not use his towel to dab sweat or to cushion his head on the bench, but instead he stuffed it under his golden collar, to keep the metal from burning his skin. In the dark he smelled differently from most men. I tried to analyze the difference, but the room was scented with orange oil and my nose is no scientific instrument.
“She says you dislike almost no one,” he whispered after a quarter of an hour. “But I feel that you dislike me.”
“Don’t say ‘she,’” I said, and I peered around as though the empty room might not be empty. “Not in public.”
“All right. Arlin says…” He left the rest of his statement hanging in the air.
I was too tired to be embarrassed, and too tired to deny for kindness’ sake. I took a steamy breath and told him: “You do things I can’t like. You… twist the fabric of life with your ‘visions.’”
“You don’t believe in visions?”
“I don’t approve of them. I think they are a path going nowhere. I think perhaps you started this war.”
He laughed at me. “If I did, Na-Zhurett, then you did too, for you are my vision.”
I ignored that. “And you whip people on the street. I find that terrible. You are arrogant with the poor and harsh with animals. And you love my wife.”
“Now we have it,” he said, and sighed, and rested his long Old Vesting chin on his knobby Old Vesting knee. “Though she says she is not your wife.”
I did not feel ready for this exchange. I poured water over my head. “There has been no public avowal: so what? A legitimate child of mine would be in danger…”
“Evidently, any child of yours is in danger,” he said. His eyes were pale in the firelight like a dry winter sky, and I could not be sure I saw sympathy in them.
“But you don’t deny you love her, I notice.”
He showed his teeth. Perhaps he was smiling. “No, I’ve always been a little bit in love with death.”
“There!” I pounded the bench. “That’s what I can’t stand about you. Arlin is a person, with different sides to her, and a history all her own!”
Dowln pointed his finger at me. “Don’t call Arlin ‘her.’ Not in public.”
I almost got up and walked away from him, but I wanted him to understand. “Listen. I knew her at the age of thirteen years, when she escaped her house and played in the markets with me, riding the swan boats on the river and getting into trouble. That is what a person is. Not a mere vision, word, concept. Even if you were to title her ‘perfection,’ it would be a diminishment from what she is really: eyes and mind and twenty-eight years of life.”
Dowln nodded, as though I had merely agreed with him. “I’m not ignorant, my friend. Nor stupid. But I also saw her with Reingish, and equally with all those things, she is death.”
I flopped down on the bench, the towel over my eyes to shut him out, but he continued talking. “But you have no reason to be unhappy because I love your wife. She loves you. I have never seen such a passion or such a loyalty. To me she is kind, as she would be to a horse.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “There. You don’t know that Arlin is never kind to men as she is to horses.”
“Well, I am not a man, am I? Perhaps she has never met a eunuch before and thinks me some sort of beast. I don’t object. And you should be gratified that I love her, like any man who owns a jewel that other men covet.”
I waited before answering, and the peace of the hissing fire and the firelight dancing on the rows of benches quieted my mind. “I don’t want to own anything other men may covet,” I said to Dowln. “And don’t say in front of Arlin that I own her.”
Then I did get up, rinsed, and went to bed. It was our last bed of any kind for some days.
The mule was useless to us now. It had lost confidence, or at least its temper, and it would not move under saddle. Dowln was compelled to sell it to the innkeeper for much less than its worth and to buy a horse of less sensibility. We were further delayed because it had to be a horse that would fit a mule’s saddle. Luckily the back of a racing animal is much like that of a mule. (Perhaps this is not random chance. I was missing the good sense and comradeship of Daffodil already.) Dowln was mounted, and possibly overmounted, on a bay gelding not long retired from the five-mile track outside Rezhmia City.
For a while we kept to the road by which we had first approached Bologhini, but when the teeth of the mountains opened onto the plain, Dowln pointed us south of the way we had first come, where no path lay over the dead grass and autumn-dry scrub, and said this was the straightest way to Warvala: safety for us and the beginning of the royal courier line. At first I thought this was another of his visions, but he showed me the compass in his saddle pommel and the map in his waxed bag.
Now the eunuch led, on his fresh and anticsome horse, and I was surprised by the coolness Dowln showed while being flung around in the saddle. A man who usually rode a white mule would not be expected to deal with such mischief, and in the continuing rain besides. Ag
ain I could see Dowln rising in Arlin’s estimation, but as the hours of rain hit us and the horses slipped upon slick ground and floundered in sandy ground and the whimsical wind of the flatlands buffeted us north and then south, I lost interest in personal worry.
I had said to you that I wasn’t sure war could be avoided or should be. Now I was appalled at such arrogance. Such ignorance. Now there was war, and I had failed to stop it.
What now? We were pounding along as though we had a real message to deliver: as though lives would be won or lost by our speed, but surely King Rudof had put spies and messengers in place long before he had sent us. Were we running to save the North, or to save ourselves from the army that followed?
“How far behind do you think they are?” I called to Dowln. As he leaned to listen to me, the dark day was lit by lightning and his horse objected and Dowln hit the ground.
I caught the beast, cursing it, and helped Dowln back on. Even doused in mud he looked fair, tall, and noble. Like Old Vesting. He made no fuss about the tumble, and did not waste temper on his horse.
“The Hainaure Cavalry? They won’t make this sort of time. A week, easily. But the Shoreland Infantry is before us. They may have reached Zaquashlon by now.”
This filled my cup of misery. I felt the wet cold through the woolen shirt I had put under the silks. Rain dripped off my hair as though from so many downspouts. Arlin turned her horse to us, not to check upon Dowln, as I had thought, but to ride a while with me.
I felt obliged to give the man his due. “He handles that asshole of a horse pretty well, doesn’t he?” I asked her. “And he’s not one to complain.”
She sniffed, not necessarily from scorn. “He’s all right. I wish he would trade with me; I’d appreciate a horse like that. But he has some sort of superstition about riding a stallion.”
We were riding slowly enough to chat, because the bay had bruised himself a little with his stunt. “Maybe he feels people would mock him for it,” I whispered to her.
The Lens of the World Trilogy Page 51