The Lens of the World Trilogy

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The Lens of the World Trilogy Page 58

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;


  Navvie did not appear either involved in or angered by the young man’s display, so I did not feel obliged to intervene or to withdraw. After a few moments, during which he poured tearful entreaty into her ear, he noticed me and sprang back.

  “So,” he said. “I am told that we must bid farewell. I am sorry to see your daughter go. Very sorry.”

  At his age, I could not have handled the situation half so well, but then, I would not likely have been embracing a girl in university chambers.

  Navvie led the way out again. “Old Dean Aulen could have been more pleasant. He took the line that the college had invested time in me and that my walking out in midterm was a sort of theft. Can you imagine? When they never even accepted me as a student, let alone a Fellow.”

  “What sort of line was young Fepper taking?”

  My daughter groaned. “Just what you saw. Such an embarrassment! I had no idea he would do something like that.” She walked out onto the sidewalk with the self-composure of a cat.

  “You never do have,” I said.

  The luggage was not on the pavement where we had left it, but a passing student told me it had not been stolen—nothing is ever stolen at Canton Old University—but picked up by the grounds keepers. The only thing the honest burghers hate worse than theft is untidiness. By the time we had picked up our bags and apologized in three separate offices, all hope of leaving early or leaving unnoticed had faded. We took another omnibus to the Embarc, hoping to catch the eastern packet boat, which left every day at noon. Yestereve’s bright sunset had ripened into rain.

  Travel in winter on the Morquen Sea is a miserable thing, but Canton’s regular service stops for no wind or wave. There is a certain basic humility in the arrogant Velonyan, engendered by the violence of his winters. The Cantoners lack arrogance, but also lack enough ice to make them humble.

  This is not to say they do not get sick in their barrel-bottomed, groaning ships. More than half the passengers heading east out of port lined the rail like so many balustrades—retching balustrades. By luck neither Navvie nor I is subject to seasickness, but the atmosphere was nonetheless unpleasant. Spray wet our clothing, but belowdecks smelled too much of vomit to make us want to retreat. She worried about her black powder in the damp; I worried about our health.

  The wind blew at a good angle, perhaps twenty degrees from the bow, and I sat myself there in the battering chill to clear my head.

  My teacher taught me, thirty-six years previously, to sit still. In an effort to distract a babbling nineteen-year-old from his babbling, he used the old story of the black wolf of Gelley, which had nothing in its belly. For the next thirty years, I called this process of self-collection “the belly of the wolf.” Arlin borrowed the phrase from me. Jeram Pagg stole it outright and stamped it over his own philosophical baggage. Now I disliked the much-abused old fairy tale and the phrase itself, which had come to stand for some sort of dark magic, some mystery with secret words and secret gates of knowledge. I am supposed to be the father of this sect and in it I am much revered. Damn them all—I have only one child, and that not a religion but a girl: Nahvah, named after her grandmother whom she never met. Navvie’s daughterly reverence is minimal.

  All I had left of that aspect of my history was the sitting still. It is enough of a mystery and enough of a gate for me. I sat in the hollow of a rolled-up rope, under the clean wind of the ocean, and did not think about where we were going.

  The captain came by, holding to the rail. He was a Felonk; a heavy-built, russet-skinned man not much taller than I. He was not sick, I was glad to see. He recommended my moving to the center of the ship. He went away again.

  Clouds tumbled in the sky. In the moments when the sun shone through, the water around us was a cold blue. Most of the time it was a frozen gray, only slightly darker than the clouds. I did not particularly look at it, but when a long neck arched above the bow of the ship, I felt my balance shifting, and I went from the belly of the wolf to the orange eyes of an improbable sea monster.

  The deck rose four yards above the water, and the creature’s head hung well above the rail. That head was as large as I am, and shaped somewhat like that of a draft horse, though no horse has such a pair of ears, stiff and webbed and slightly iridescent, even under the diminished sun. The gray skin, too, had an oily sheen.

  The apparition rose above the rail and fell as a wave lifted the ship, and then it was back again. Its mouth was closed and it did not blink. I wanted very much to see the rest of it, and I wanted very much to be away from that spot in the hollow of the rope, within the stretch of that long, pillar-like neck. While I was still between these two impulses, the creature gravely sank into the water and did not rise again.

  It was another half-hour before I went to find Navvie, and in that time the wind subsided somewhat, but I found the smell of the ship to have grown even worse. Navvie was busy treating the suffering—not with sophisticated medicine, but by the old wives’ remedy of squeezing the wrists. Her tiny hands are strong, and she has always had the proper touch.

  The captain was kind enough to praise her to me, and he suggested the shipping line hire her to accompany all spring voyages. He laughed as he spoke, so that I would be sure it was only a joke.

  I said, “Captain, did you know there was something in the water investigating your ship a little while ago?”

  “In the water? Oh, yes. He is Pilot Pol, an old friend to sailors on the Morquen. He keeps us company, and he will guide a ship through the rocks of Sevech Harbor. Once he even indicated that the tide was too low for the approach to Morquenie. That was before the dredging, of course.”

  I have no great experience as a sailor myself, though I have been passenger on a number of long voyages. I stared at the complacent, square face of the Felonk and wondered how I could have missed knowing about such a beast. “Pilot Pol? Well, he certainly does have the eyes of a parrot. I never heard of his kind, though.”

  “Why should you have heard of him? His world and yours are very different.”

  I agreed with the captain.

  “He is a great silverside, and their home is mostly in the East, and in warmer waters. I am glad you saw him, for we missed him in port, and I feared some scoundrel had taken a shot at him again. Once before it happened, and Pol left the ship lanes for months. Nor will he ever guide that ship again—The Worrel Provider. I wouldn’t hire on to her for my pension, for I’m sure I wouldn’t live to enjoy it.”

  I leaned over the rail, letting spray batter my face, and I shouted back to the captain that I had heard stories like that about dolphins, from time to time.

  “Well, of course he is a dolphin and nothing else,” he answered, also shouting. “Only of a large kind, and unusually marked.”

  I straightened up. “Very large, Captain, and very unusual. I don’t think this was a dolphin I saw. It was more like a snake.”

  He nodded forcefully. “They can give that impression, to a landlubber. You must not expect them to look like the statues: the carved candlesticks. In the water a dolphin looks like quicksilver with a fin.” Clapping me on the shoulder, he left me with my confusion intact.

  That evening the sun sank very bloody, and the water, too, sank—to a flat, twitching surface. I found salt crystals throughout my hair. Navvie was very tired and she was hungry, as was I. Had we been ravenous, we could not have made a dent in the food presented to us: good food in the usual heavy style of Velonya. No one else seemed to be eating at all.

  It was either the next day or the one after that when Navvie came and told me we had Count Dinaos on the ship. Until this time my only immediate worry had been our stopover at Kast, in Canton itself. If the Cantoners were looking for us, we would then be in trouble, but as we were traveling under different names than our own, it would require real effort on the government’s part to inconvenience us. Dinaos, however, might be an inconvenience at random; he had the reputation of a quarrel-breeder and a duelist. Such as he have not existed in Velonya sin
ce Rudof’s father’s time.

  “Stay away from him,” I said to Navvie. “Even at the expense of remaining belowdecks until after Kast. Don’t let him know you exist.”

  My daughter sighed. She was polishing one of her mother’s knives. “Too late, Papa. He was sick as a crow yesterday and I treated him. I didn’t give him my name, either the true or the false, but he does know I exist. Besides, he is one of the finest portrait painters in the world. Why should I avoid him?”

  “Because he is known to paint portraits of the men he has slain: tombstone miniatures. Avoid him;”

  Though I reckoned that Navvie’s kindness might have softened the fellow’s scrappy heart, I watched her continue to clean the weapons, one after another, and I approved. That afternoon a tall, thin fellow in brocades accosted me at my position in the coiled hawser. He cleared his throat. He did look pale, despite the flat seas.

  “You, sir, do not have the face of a civilized man,” he said to me as he leaned against the wheelhouse wall.

  “No, sir, I do not,” I answered wholeheartedly, showing no more resentment than I felt.

  He walked around me. His eyes were calculating. “I request the honor to paint you.”

  “Alive or dead?” I answered him, rising up and turning, so he would not be entirely at my back.

  He cleared his throat. He had the coldest stare I had ever seen. “By God, in motion, if I could. Why do you ask? Is there reason I would prefer you to be a corpse? Are we enemies?”

  I hopped out of the coil, which was constraining me. “I certainly do not desire to be your enemy, milord. But you have been known to paint with… an aggressive brush, shall we say?”

  He was dark and pock-faced. He came close. Though he wore a rapier, his right hand propped his chin and his left hand supported his other elbow. “I do not murder unarmed men,” he said.

  “I know who you are, Nazhuret, son of Velonya and Rezhmia. I had the honor to meet your beautiful daughter yesterday.”

  I could think of nothing to say.

  “As a noble of Lowcanton, I have no reason to feel friendship, or even tolerance for you. And further—you are known as the deadliest man in the northern world, and of course I find that dubious. No one man could do the things credited to you…”

  “Then obviously I have not done them.”

  “Be quiet. There is no need to placate me. Look at my hands.”

  I answered, “I see them. They are stained with various colors, most prominently madder and ultra-marine.”

  His mouth smiled, slightly. “They are not the hands of a civilized man. I am a painter before I am a nobleman, or anything else at all. I want to paint you. Now. On the ship.”

  I felt a chill emanating from that long, elegant face. “As a clown, milord? Are you looking for a touch of comedy in the corner of some large narrative piece?”

  The smile climbed higher on his face, but did not reach the eyes. “As an exotic, sir. A beautiful exotic.”

  I couldn’t think what kind of game he was playing with me. I heard the water lap the sides of the ship. “You must be speaking of my daughter. She is beautiful, and to a Lowcantoner, exotic.”

  He looked past me at the ocean, just for a moment. “Yes. She is your daughter. But I have painted beautiful girls. I want to paint you.”

  “And then promote a duel, milord? Is this how you arrange your sport—with an appeal to your opponent’s vanity?”

  The smile died entirely. His eyes were onyx, and might have been without pupil. “I make no promises. I want to paint you. Most of the world would consider that an honor.

  “And don’t call me ‘milord,’ fool. You outrank me in two separate nobilities.” He stalked away from me, with no regard to protecting his back. “In the morning,” he said.

  Navvie thought there could be no loss in giving the gentleman his way. She thought his odd request perfectly natural in a painter, and if he were bent on murdering me he would find it no easier with a palette in his hand, she said. Besides, she could hover nearby with her mother’s little knives. In the end we compromised. I said I would be painted if she would deign not to guard me, but to stay at the other end of the ship.

  That night the wind came up, and I hoped the count’s malaise would recur and make the painting impossible. I walked out on the deck under scudding clouds to find the captain leaning out in a meditative manner. “Still no sign of him. Of Pol,” he said. “Not since you saw him this morning. Off the north coast of Canton he is usually with us. Because of the rocks.”

  I leaned with him. “If the creature I saw really was Pilot Pol. I never knew a dolphin to have such a long neck.”

  He sighed, like the groan of ship’s timbers. “It’s called a rostrum, really. The weather will be fair and fresh in the morning.”

  “Too bad.” I did not explain my remark, but stared into the sparkling, bow-broken water. “Tell me, Captain. Does Count Dinaos ride with you often?”

  Abruptly the Felonk captain stood upright, his two legs braced on the deck. “Avoid that man,” he said. “He is deadly.”

  “I know,” I replied. “But your ship is very small and he does not want to be avoided.”

  He slapped his hand against the gunwale, in evident turmoil. “I’ll put you ashore: your lovely daughter and yourself. As soon as the rocks are behind us. I’ll send out a boat tomorrow evening.”

  “Tomorrow evening will be too late,” I said. “Our appointment is for the morning.”

  The captain gasped: a very frightening sound.

  “You can put my daughter ashore tomorrow evening, if you need to, and I would be grateful,” I said, and the Felonk nodded to me, his eyes wide and black.

  Within the hour the wind began to die down and there was barely a stir in the sails by morning.

  Out of my ignorance, I brought a few props with me to the sitting—a glass blank, my battered journal and the old collapsing telescope I had carried all my years with Arlin. My noble painter informed me he was not doing a burgher’s portrait here, and sent me to pack them away and return again with my sword. The closest I have to a sword is my dowhee, which looks more like a hedge-blade than a dueler’s weapon, but he accepted that.

  He demanded I take off both jacket and shirt. We of Velonya are not raised to expose our pink skins to the world, and mine is especially “exotic,” having three different shades of suntan and more scars than is comely. I was determined not to allow the man an excuse to quarrel, however; so I stood in the sea breeze barefoot and bare-chested, first freezing and then smelling my skin burn under the open sunlight.

  He asked to see some of my practice forms, and the pose he chose was widespread and close to the ground, with the dowhee about to rise into a sword lock. At least, that’s what I told the man it was. It is as easy to split a man from sternum to rectum from that position as to block a rapier, and either deed is easier than holding the damn position for forty minutes at a time.

  He held his brush in the left hand. I found that interesting; I have always wondered what it would be like to be left-handed.

  First all the ship turned out to watch, but painting is slow and the painter was surly, so soon we were alone but for the captain and (despite her promise to me) Navvie sitting on the opposite rail.

  When permitted to, I straightened up and almost fell flat from stiffness. She came and threw a shirt over me. “Are you cold or hot, poor Papa?”

  “Yes,” I answered and shuffled over to the tall, battered-looking, and many-colored easel. He was still working: blocking in the ship and whatever was visible behind her in the water. I begged permission to look.

  “Nothing to see,” he growled. “But please yourself.”

  Actually, the man worked very fast. The underwhiting had been laid before, but the crayon work for form had all taken shape in this first pose. All the lines were suggestions of movement, rather than anatomy, but they were superlatively correct movement. Already, by the broadness of the cheekbones and the slanted eyes, I could rec
ognize myself, though I thought he had flattered me somewhat in terms of proportion.

  My mind filled with stupid remarks, which I recognized as stupid. “Did you expect to see it all done?” the count asked, still scratching away at the texture of the deck. His nails were cracked and filthy. Something about him reminded me of Arlin: the pride, the dirt, the competence. And the severe tongue.

  “No,” I answered. “I am surprised to see it as far along as it is.” The bit about my face and the proportions I left unsaid.

  “No time to be slow. Also no time for mistakes. Drink water and get back there again. This sun won’t last forever.”

  The sun’s position lasted for two more sessions, and mine would not have lasted much longer. At the end I was shaking like a sapling, and had the man desired, he could have slain me with a paintbrush.

  Navvie was standing close behind him, I think not to be in position to defend her papa, but out of fascination. He was still at it, not scratching anymore, but daubing. He used a heavy brush and thick paint.

  It was a thing of splendid light; it made me catch my breath. I stared at the honey-gold deck, the busy sky, the glints of brass, the syrupy shadows, and lastly at the figure that almost filled it. That figure terrified me. It nearly brought me to tears, and despite all my resolutions to behave well I heard myself say, “I wish I did look like that.”

  Count Dinaos shot me a look dirtier than his charcoal. “Do you have any reason to believe you know what you look like? Milord?”

  This criticism might have been from my own teacher. “No. That is exactly what I cannot know. Milord. Forgive me.”

  “Papa is convinced he looks like a gnome,” said Navvie into the man’s ear, for all the world as if he were her close friend. I pulled her aside, under the guise of needing support to stand.

  He made no return to her comment, but watched me getting my feet under me. “It’s not easy to take a pose like that. Actually, I had no expectation you would last.

  “When you are settled, Aminsanaur, you must send me your address, and I will paint you a sketch of this.” He screwed the canvas into an awkward box frame that would keep dirt from the wet surface. “Oh, and I had no intention of challenging you. I really don’t do that at random, whatever the gossips say.”

 

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