The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  “They’re gone,” I said. “The whole family.” Then before he could respond to that, I continued. “Tell me, dreamer. Should I go?”

  He didn’t wonder where. “Why ask me? I am the emperor’s man. As no one else in Rezhmia, I am his.”

  The feather bed was seductive. I rubbed my face in my hands. “Yet I don’t think you’ll lie to me. Should I go?”

  He sat up, using the cold to bring him fully awake. “You also hate my gifts.”

  “But I no longer doubt them. And I have nothing else. I cannot see how this town… or my king… or Arlin and myself can survive through tomorrow. Not with any human help.”

  His face, so pale normally, was touched blue, by cold or emotion. He looked at me, black-eyed, and then Dowln ran to the window and vomited bile convulsively.

  I was astonished. I put a blanket over him until the spell was past, but he shivered hard for five minutes, then shook his head, stood up, and dressed in fresh clothes.

  He looked down at me again, as composed as he had been in the ruined City. “Very few whom you know here will survive tomorrow, unless you go with your king.”

  I took him by his bony wrist, to thank him, but he trapped my hand there. “And also, unless you take me with you,” he said.

  I know that when our suicidal little procession left Warvala, I had been washed and given new clothes, but though I have sat here at my table these ten minutes trying to remember, I don’t recall where I bathed or what I put on. I doubt it was Rezhmian finery, but I am not certain even of that.

  Arlin dressed in black, and she rode a black mare I had never seen before. The king dressed in dull russet, and that was the color of his horse. Dowln, who had been introduced to the king only as our guide, was cloaked in gray, the color of the horse he had been lent. We looked like children’s toys, dipped into buckets of paint. Simple. Simple-minded.

  Young Leoue was with us, dressed almost as black as Arlin, and three others of the king’s personal guard followed us splashing through puddles as the light faded.

  The stars were astonishingly bright, and as I believed I was looking at them for the last time, I tried to forget the geographical patterns by latitude and the astronomical patterns by level of light. This was very difficult for me; science reared its head and gave me ten stars of the third magnitude and seventy of the first, as well as the constellation of the Goose, just touching the northern horizon with one wing.

  The plains are splendid for star counting: not like my occluded native forests, which I would not see again.

  It was very cold, and I remember feeling I could bear the rest of this idiocy if only my fingers were not so chilled. And if Arlin were not here. I was also irritated by the noise the guardsmen made—they who were honored to be in small company with the king and probably did not believe they were riding out to die. They shifted and creaked in their saddles, and tinkled their spurs, and spoke among themselves in a ridiculous sibilant whisper.

  To my slight surprise, King Rudof was irritated by them also, and about an hour past sunset he sent the three back to Warvala. So I guess they did not die.

  That left three of us who had been stealth-trained by you, Dowln (who was inexplicably good at being quiet), and Leoue. The young duke had had his father for a teacher: that man so much my enemy. He taught his son stalking very well. As well as you taught me. So we prowled toward the cavalry of Rezhmia silently, as though stealth could make any difference in the end.

  When we saw the glow against the clouds in the sky, we buried our horses’ reins in the soil. It was an anchoring that would serve until the beasts got hungry, or afraid. It was enough. They would find their way home.

  The king led.

  We walked over miles of short grasses, old but too wet to crackle underfoot. It seemed we had dismounted too soon, because the fires were higher than we had thought and the encampment farther away. As we topped the next rolling down, I saw the fires themselves spread out before us, filling the near horizon. They were impossibly many, like all of Velonya’s midsummer bonfires gathered on one hilltop. In the middle were some flames that might be proud of themselves, but for the most part the fires were paltry: not military issue. Together they all made a pattern (I speak fancifully) like the sun wearing the crescent moon as a skullcap. The sun’s skullcap was on the other side from us. No more was visible.

  I relayed what I saw, for among us my vision was the best. Arlin, meanwhile, had stood on tiptoe and then lowered herself to the grass, turning right and left and sniffing like a dog. “I smell blood,” she said. “At first I thought it was the sea, but it’s blood. Blood and guts.”

  Rudof snorted once or twice. “Maybe it’s a dead animal, somewhere downwind. We are too far to smell anything from the camp.”

  I did not want to contradict the king unnecessarily, but Arlin’s nose is as reliable as my eyes. I could smell nothing, but I tested the air. “Wind’s coming from the South, sir. From the Rezhmian camp to us.”

  “Maybe they overtook a herd of bison or cattle and slaughtered them for tonight’s meal.” The young duke’s voice shook. I wondered how much fighting he had seen, if any, and why he wanted to be with us in this dementia.

  Arlin very haughtily informed him that it is not the custom for armies about to go into battle to slaughter large animals: at least not in public. It is then that soldiers are most aware of the similarities between the bodies of beasts and our own, and least inclined to watch entrails spilled upon the ground. Leoue took the contradiction meekly enough, but I could feel his shivers through the earth.

  Dowln gave nothing toward the discussion, and I was glad, because I had learned to be frightened every time he opened his mouth. When the king led us forward again, Dowln was close behind him. I cut in between the two.

  “I hear them,” said King Rudof. He flattened himself and spoke into the grass: much better than whispering.

  Arlin sank down more gracefully. In the same manner she said to us, “Isn’t it fine that each of us has a special sense or skill, better than the others. We are like the five old men in the parable—the king has the ears, and Zhurrie the eyes, and I can smell a stink anywhere…”

  Leoue was close by my right side and I saw him flinch.

  After a moment of thought I realized his misery was due to Arlin’s words. He thought we were making ourselves special at his expense. Even the way he stalked with us, out to the side and behind, reminded me of the wolf in the pack whom no one respects, who hunts with them on sufferance.

  Why had he come? Did he hope to win the king’s favor? The king was throwing himself away, so there was not much to win.

  There was the slightest of noises behind me, and I looked around to see Dowln, tall and thin like a mile marker, obscuring the stars. He had remained standing while the rest of us had followed the king to the ground. His pale eyes, reflecting pale light, were calm and self-possessed. He did not feel it necessary to imitate our actions.

  If he was not his own man, he belonged only to one other. I thought: he’s a slave, but he’s the emperor’s slave, and his humility is another man’s arrogance.

  And I was a beggar, but I was a beggar protected by the king. I felt a strong compassion for young Duke Leoue, who would face the whole Rezhmian force believing that a beggar had more honor than he did.

  “I need no more remarks about my ears,” said the king, pointing a long finger at Arlin, whom he liked deeply despite all disagreements. “‘Large ears make a deep soul.’”

  “‘Long ears make for obstinacy,’” she answered. “Witness the donkey.”

  Now I heard, too. The sounds were Rayzhia, but where generally that language is a series of hisses and growls (to the Velonyan ear), the sounds I heard were shrill and abrupt. And then there was wailing.

  “Perhaps a religious rite?” asked the duke, and I hoped no one would snap his head off for his ignorance. No one did.

  “They’re grieving… someone,” said the king, raising his head again to look. “They
must have hit opposition already.”

  I heard Dowln lower himself to the earth and sigh.

  We waited until the sounds had died down: until the bottom of the night. Despite my woolen jacket—there! I have determined that I was wearing a woolen jacket—I was chilled and stiff. My mind was more upon Arlin than upon my own death.

  I remembered her as she had been in the spring, when her pregnancy had first begun to change her. For a while she was sick: not just in the mornings, but at times all day, but then she blossomed like a flower, at the same time the first flowers were blossoming. She smiled a lot, and her saturnine personality lightened as much as I had ever seen it. Now she was black night again, with a calm coldness her training had only purified.

  Another man would have done his best to keep his lady out of this nightmare. Another man would have wound up crippled or killed by Arlin, trying. Myself—I don’t know whether I could overcome and bind a fighter of Arlin’s standard, but I know I could not beat Arlin herself. Besides, she was one of your students, Powl, and so her freedom was inviolable, even if it was only her freedom to die.

  I was almost equally sick about the king, not merely for his own sake but for that of Velonya. There was no one else so perfect for the role of leader of our nation: no one else who had the personal power over men and yet who would let himself be chained by increasing law. There was no one else who was taught by you.

  But because he was another of your students, and because he was king, I could not leap upon him, bind him, and drag him back to Warvala. I thought of it, I felt the ropes in my hands, I almost hallucinated the act as a young man may hallucinate copulation, but I did nothing. Instead I sat in the belly of the wolf, and waited, and shivered.

  It was a silent wait. Arlin was deep in her own contemplation, and the king (to my surprise) was engaged in a similar meditation. I hadn’t known he had been taught the art. The young duke sat with one knee up and his face taut with discipline, and Dowln—there was no guessing the mind of Dowln.

  We moved again when the king decided. Half the fires were out, and the sounds from the camp were muted. We walked upright, trusting our eyes were better adapted to dark than those of soldiers sitting around campfires, and that we were more alert than the average sentry.

  We were wrong, for the first figure we saw we had almost overrun, and he turned and sniffed the air even as Arlin had done. She was behind the man and she stood at least two hands taller. She put one hand over his mouth and slit his throat with her dagger. The man had a bow and she took it. This whole act astonished the king and Duke Leoue, too, but neither dared make a sound.

  “That’s odd,” said Arlin in her deepest, quietest voice, but she did not explain. We went on.

  Almost immediately the stink went from something to be noticed to something to be avoided. It was fresh death: slaughteryard, not rot. First we found a horse, reduced to a barrel-shaped lump on the ground, and next his rider. After that the ground was dotted by corpses.

  They were all Rezhmian. Astonishingly—all Rezhmian cavalry. There was another sentry, whom Arlin took through the throat with an arrow stolen from her last kill. He went down cleanly.

  “She is mother death herself,” said Dowln in my ear, with no emotion. So angry did this make me that I took the tall fellow by the collar and knocked him to his knees, which put his face not far below my own. I uttered one or two incoherent threats and in self-disgust I let him go. He rose up again with no more emotion than before.

  Five hundred yards farther and another two dozen corpses behind us, we encountered sentries of the more usual sort: cavalrymen close-spaced, with harquebus and sword, and eyes rolling at the dark around them. Behind them loomed the shadows of tents, and one of these was huge and complicated of shape, although it seemed half collapsed. Both Rudof and I recognized it as a command quarters. Perhaps the Sanaur Mynauzet was not within, but if he was not, I could not guess where he was.

  At the king’s signal we lay ourselves down among the dead and considered matters. “If we can cut through quietly, we can make it to the pavilion. Once we have the emperor, we can use him for protection.”

  King Rudof spoke as though he really believed this possible. I didn’t. The Rezhmian sentries were standing no more than fifteen feet apart. I estimated we would have to kill a dozen to break through, and that was without any nonsense of secrecy. Once through, we would drag the entire line behind us, like a large fish in a small net.

  Arlin crept up beside him. “Excuse me, sir,” she said to the king and the grass. “But I have an odd thought.”

  “I expect no less of you, civilian,” answered Rudof, with artificial formality. “Expound your eccentricity.”

  She rubbed her dirty face with two dirty hands. “The men I killed I could not see clearly, but they were carrying recurved bows and short arrows. They were not dressed in uniform.”

  He stared intently at her, and even under starlight I could see a touch of green in his eyes. “So?”

  “So, remember the last Velonyan incursion. Remember that it was not Rezhmia that destroyed our heavy cavalry on the plains.”

  The king’s whole frame jerked, silently. He shook his head. “You think it is the Red Whips? That have done this? All this to the second largest cavalry in the modern world?”

  When she nodded, he stared again, and shook his head again. “It is almost impossible to get the tribes to unite, even against a large enemy. You know that.”

  “They did it before. Thirty-two years ago.”

  I suggested that if the assailants were Naiish, then there was a chance that the ruined cavalry might be approached peacefully. I had a chance to do it, with my resemblance to the family, and if the soldiers knew I had proved friend to my “grandfather.”

  Duke Leoue was at my side, still shivering. Now he sighed as well and ground his teeth. He put his hand over my mouth urgently, and I shut up. He crawled up to the other side of the king and said into his ear, “No, sir. I doubt it. I think it would be fatal to attempt a rapprochement with the Rezhmians now. I have another idea who has harried the enemy. I think it is the troops of Norwess Province. Of my own house.”

  Now King Rudof was not only incredulous but angry. As he could not shout, he shook the young man by the shoulder. “What possessed you to give orders to attack without my knowledge or permission? And why did you let us crawl out here on our bellies…”

  “No, sir. No, sir, I did not order an attack. I did not even bring troops with me, except my personal guard.” He dropped his face against the turf, hard enough to bruise. He did it again. “God! Oh God! It is only that I suspect… I suspect…”

  He groaned and he waited to get his voice back.

  “I suspect there are some of them who are not fully loyal to me. Who never accepted me as replacement to my father.”

  “And you let this continue? Year after year, you lived with mutiny!” The king scarcely bothered to keep his voice down. I thought we might get a dose of Rudof’s famous temper, and that would surely see us into the next world at the swords or guns of those nervous sentries. But we were lucky.

  “No, sire. Sir. I didn’t know. I was at school, and with my teachers. And with you. Only recently have I suspected… They loved my father.”

  King Rudof’s temper shut itself off like a water valve. “Was it your men who have been trying to murder Nazhuret? Who chased these two over the western plains like a beat of hunters after deer? Who attempted the life of his… of his wife and killed the baby in the womb?”

  You must have told the king all this. I had not. Leoue grabbed the dead grass in both hands. “Not by my order, sir. In fact, when this man came to me this spring, I was confident it was some other enemy who was trying to kill him. It seemed to me that a fellow like him would have many enemies. I wanted to believe this.”

  “This isn’t the time or place for this discussion,” I said, but no one was listening to me. Arlin, with marvelous little respect for royalty, had leaned over the king’s back
. “Your troops have been burning Rezhmian cities, Leoue. Killing more children than just… Nazhuret’s. Your troops have started this war.”

  As she said this, I realized it must be true. “We can’t know that,” said the young duke in misery. “We can’t know it.”

  King Rudof, as is his custom when serving as judiciary, sighed and scratched his beard. “If not you, Leoue, who is it your father’s men now obey?”

  Leoue looked at the ground. “I don’t know,” he said. Then: “My mother,” he said.

  “She never accepted his death. Nor that he had done… what he did.”

  He did not look up, and we all crouched there on the chilly earth in the dark, wondering.

  “Your accent is best, Zhurrie,” said the king into my ear. “You do it. Back up a good hundred feet and call out. Cry for Garel: there’s always a Garel in a Rezhmian company. Ask him to save you. Show pain. Be theatrical. And don’t let them find you.”

  “You don’t trust me to go in with you,” I said. Oddly enough, I was not angry at this, nor hurt.

  The king grunted and shook me by one shoulder. “Right, old friend, I don’t trust you. Not between myself and this ‘grandfather’ of yours. You stay here.”

  It was almost silent on the plains now. No moon and a fog over the stars. I dropped my voice even further as I answered King Rudof. “I will stay if Arlin stays with me.”

  I heard the duke’s anger in his throat. “You’ll do what the king says, ingrate!” He spoke a bit too loudly.

  “That would be a first,” answered Rudof, more quietly.

  Arlin tapped me on the head. “No. No, Zhurrie. One of us must go in with them or they’ll never make it past the tent flap. Don’t worry, Nazhuret. I doubt one of us will outlive the other by very long.” She looked over to the king.

  “But before we move, sir, remember that I am the one who killed the usurper, Reingish, and so saved the emperor’s crown and his life. Do you still want me?”

  Under his muffling hands, King Rudof laughed: a reckless, red-headed laugh. “We’ll ‘never make it past the tent flap’ without you, correct? So we haven’t much choice.”