The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  “Lowcanton claims to be the most ancient of northern cultures. No, actually it claims to be the only culture among us. But why rebuild on such a barren site? Well, Navvie, it could be there was good harborage here once, and the sea eddies changed. Or it could be this was fertile soil, but they overgrazed it with goats and sheep. Or it could be…”

  “It could be they are coming to get us soon. There’s always that to think about.”

  She had reached the hangings of the window, and gave them a resounding whack in housewifely style. From my position at the brazier I could smell the mildew. I was sorry my daughter’s mind was hunting that trail; I had tried to conceal from her my own worry. “You mean the guard you wounded?”

  She shrugged and leaned into the window embrasure. Her small feet left the ground before she could touch the window itself. “At least there is glass here: not calves’ intestines or paper. And it opens, I think.

  “I mean anyone of the household or of the village who saw us. And remember, there was some surprise the boat’s captain had for us. He wanted us on land close by here.”

  I wasn’t certain of that. “Perhaps he meant the surf to do for us. More likely, we were never intended to survive once he had us in the boat.”

  Navvie had disappeared behind the drapery. I heard a scrape of iron, and her fist pounding the framework of the window. A gust of cold air made the glow of the brazier dance through the room, like light on water. “I don’t know, Papa. I don’t know what the Felonk meant, and I don’t know what the Lowcanton lord means—if he lives to mean anything. I have my suspicions, but I have never felt in so ambiguous a position before.”

  The gust stopped. “Be comforted, daughter,” I called out to her. “I have. I have.”

  I went out into the hallway to find what had become of the occupants of the castle who had shown us in, if not welcomed us. The chamber door had a bar, and I requested my daughter to close it behind me, and hoped she could hear me knock behind the archaic thickness of the oak. The hall was without light, and only the echoes of my footsteps and the unnamed sense that informs the skin of one’s face helped me avoid the walls.

  Years ago, before Nahvah’s birth, I had been lost within a building of wicker, where sound, air, and light conspired to confuse me. Here I invoked again the skill I had learned there, retracing in darkness the steps I had taken encumbered by a man much taller than I. The wind had come up, and as it twisted through the lightless passages, it brought a ghost of the surf with it, and I had a vision of myself lost in the darkness below the water. Sucked down like the Felonk captain, into black weightiness.

  Where the monsters lived.

  At one intersection of ways my instinct deserted me, and I stood without an idea of how to go. Nor was I certain of the route I had come. I imagined Navvie by the glowing brazier, where the lacework of the cabinet-bed cast intricate shadows on a sick man’s face, and the sound of his breathing kept her from being alone. I was not afraid for my witchdaughter, not at this moment. I wanted to hide behind her skirts.

  I heard voices along one groined passageway: animated voices in Zaquashlon, accompanied by the sound of clattering metal. This comforted me enough to choose, for though the clatter might be that of blades or armor, I wanted it to be the sound of pots and pans. In another moment odor joined sound to lead me, and I came to a cavernous kitchen with a half-dozen shabby people clustered at one end of a heavy oak table, eating.

  I greeted them in the Zaquashlon colloquial to Warvala. They stared. My stomach, impressed by the nearness of their dinner, greeted them in universal language.

  “My daughter and I would be grateful for a ladle of that porridge,” I said, and I took a hard chair without invitation.

  They stared.

  “We are hungry. I rowed your count to shore and then carried him all the way here.”

  The same woman who had met us at the door, and who sat at the head of the table now, answered, “The count himself will have to command the dinner, paistye. Then it will be more than porridge.”

  Their brown, blue, and hazel eyes were oblique, and they turned their heads slightly away from me.

  “I’m not a lord—a paistye, a hut-crusher—woman. There is no need to use your Zaquash canniness against me. I’ve done backbreaking work for this household; and I will take my due.” I rose from the chair feeling heavier than I had when I sat down, found myself bowls and spoons, and took them to the ample pot on the stove. One I filled for Navvie, and I put both down on the table where the servants were eating. I was so hungry I really didn’t taste the porridge.

  “You talk like you’re Zaquash yourself,” said one of the men. “What with your ‘backbreaking work’ and your ‘dues’ and all.” Even the Zaquashlon people find their own sly stubbornness comical.

  “I lived some years in Warvala and outside, keeping order in the inns,” I told him. He nodded.

  The old woman was not so easily gentled. “You didn’t talk like any common man when you came in, nor did that—that girl of yours.”

  I caught her eye. “Madam. If you think I am a paistye after all, then how is it you dare speak of my daughter that way? To my face?” Her head sank between the protective wings of her shoulders, and she gave me a look I am more used to getting from snakes.

  “Either I am a lord and you give me respect due to a lord, or I am a man among you, and you are bound to give a man aid when he is sent to your house on the duties of your house.”

  I heard the same man whisper, “Paistye or man, this fellow is definitely Zaquash.”

  I was finished with the bowl of porridge. I had thought I’d want another, but it filled my stomach uneasily, like briars and burrs.

  “Now to the second matter. Your count will need care. My daughter must explain the use of the teas, and the tending of his shoulder.”

  The old woman spoke, and there was a kind of grim glee in her voice. “He doesn’t have a body man here. There’s no one who can do that at all.”

  “I’m not talking about fancy tailoring, woman. I’m talking about washing an injury. A sick man. Your master.”

  “Yes, yes, the master. So we can’t touch him. Not allowed. Not until he’s dead, and then we have to lay him out.”

  “He’s not dying,” I said defensively. I wasn’t really certain.

  “Then we can’t touch him at all. We’re house servants. His body servants aren’t here, so no one can touch him. Against the law.”

  They all nodded forcefully. They had me now. “If I did touch the master, and him alive, then I’d die, by law. By law. So I won’t.”

  The man who had spoken narrowed his narrow eyes and said, “But you, there. Paistye or man, you’ve touched him already. Lots. And if you’re a lord after all, then it’s none of our business. And if you’re man like us, then you’re forfeit already. So no fear.

  “You touch his body. You feed him his tea. You do it,” he said, with a fine sense of judgment.

  “And that girl of yours,” added the old woman.

  Navvie ate her porridge more moderately than I had and, I hope, in less irritating company. “I wasn’t sure we could leave him anyway, Papa. He is feverish, and there’s a lot of work in forcing liquids into him.”

  In counterpoint to this, the count groaned. He opened his eyes, which were black mirrors from the poppy sedative. I took a candle and went over to see if he wanted something. He gazed up at me and sighed. “Barbarian angel,” he said very clearly and closed his eyes and added, “beauty cuts like the light off a sword.” Then he was asleep again.

  “He’s not with us at all,” I said.

  I noticed there was an alteration in the gloomy room. The absence of two of the velvet curtains made it even gloomier. These had not gone into the sickbed, as I first thought, but out the window.

  “It is only twenty feet or so,” said Navvie. “Down to rubble at the back of the castle. I made a ladder in case we must leave quickly.”

  I shoved open the casement and examined the
thing. “What a good little housewife you are: so handy. And how neatly you broke the glass to tie it to the iron frame. I am proud of you.”

  Navvie stood behind, poking the charcoal of the brazier. At last she said, “I’m sorry, Papa. I’m really sorry.”

  I turned. “About what, my dear?”

  “That you are so sad. About Rudof. The uncertainty. Abandoning our home in Canton.”

  I felt my grief rising even as she named it. “It’s for you I’m worried, Nahvah,” I said to her. “This must be very hard for you.”

  She shook her dark head. “No. I’m still in my twenties, and many of these incidents are happening to me for the first time. There is a fascination in that, even when uncomfortable. For you, though…”

  At my daughter’s advice I sat down against the wall of the bed and allowed myself to feel fifty-five years old. I had needed it.

  All night we kept the brazier burning, though it required stepping out to replace the fuel ourselves. No one interrupted us, and I heard almost no human sounds from within the stony habitation. Sometime around midnight I went looking for the earth closet, and found instead a convenience not much different from an antique garderobe.

  Nahvah fell asleep sitting up cross-legged, her blanket hooded over her. I had seen her rest this way before, when she wanted to be ready to hear a patient, should he wake. I knew her knees would suffer for it, and her feet go all pins and needles, and yet I didn’t want to wake her up to tell her to go to sleep again. As I watched her in the flickering light, I kept going a long dialogue with Arlin.

  In my mind, Arlin becomes more vocal than she ever did in life, when she communicated by the quality of her silences. The silence of the grave is so overwhelming that it has drowned that language for us, so in my imagination she could only talk. Often we talk about Navvie.

  I didn’t know why she was still with me, at the age of twenty-seven. Twenty-seven is old for a woman to find a man and leave her parents. Always for some distressing and worthless man. Ten years previously, we had lived on tenterhooks because of our daughter’s wild affections; there had been the assistant head groom at Velonyie Palace, who behaved like the worst of his own stallions, and then the third son of Duke Gorman, who was not only featherheaded but too close kin to me to be acceptable. From this boy’s blond, bumptious mindlessness she recoiled into the arms of the chaplain-in-training to the king himself, who was so very respectful and serious she could have ground him for a sleeping powder.

  We had not raised Navvie in a manner that made it possible for us to institute a rule of force at that late date. I don’t know what imprudences she committed with any of these young or not-so-young hopefuls. I would not know how to ask. For a few years we wondered whether illegitimacy could be inheritable, and we would have been in no way surprised to have been presented with another stray branch to the family tree.

  Then it all trickled away, and here was my beautiful tiny daughter, proficient and loving and unflappable, alone but for Papa.

  She should have gone by now, I said to Arlin. I spoke silently, as always when speaking to ghosts.

  Arlin considered a moment before answering. An animal, like a dog, or even a lion, she answered—silently, as ever—bides with its mama for a little while and then becomes too big and too much bother, and it gets spanked away. There is no great pain there, and little memory.

  Nahvah never became too much bother, I said to Arlin, who seemed to laugh. Little memory, she said again.

  But (my dead lady continued) if a man takes the little lion and raises it outside of its brute nature, the rejection does not happen. Not unless the taming man forces it.

  And so I should drive her away? I whispered. I was astonished and worried at the thought.

  The lion raised by man is not a lion anymore, she replied. So what is it to do? What is the man to do?

  I found I was rocking in place with my concern, and my head went thump against the wooden side of the bed I leaned against. Is our daughter then not a woman anymore? Have we done her such a damage?

  Arlin’s voice grew sharper. She is not a brute human being. We were very careful she should not be. Did I not remember Powl leading her in the riddles of reason before her mouth could form her words right? Remember the game “What makes what thing happen?” carried out to the ninth place, with both of them on the ground, dirty-kneed and keen, and her finishing the proof-of-reversal before the old philosopher? And the water clock she designed out of bark tubes and kitchen gear before she was ten?

  You should see her experimental pistol, I said proudly.

  In some disgust Arlin said, I have seen her experimental pistol.

  Our daughter outgrew most of the human race before she was twenty. Yet she looks like a little girl-elf, and the brutes treat her as a little girl-elf. So did Rudof, who should have known better.

  Is Rudof there with you? I asked wistfully, but no other voice except Arlin’s answered me, and she would not be distracted. We created in Nahvah a lonely, self-contained person. Well, why not? The world is a lonely place, and he who doesn’t feel that has a head of wood. Besides: her blood is of all the aristocracy of the northern nations; would you expect her to warm to many?

  I was stung. Powl never taught you such ideas, I said to her, nor did we teach them to Nahvah. He said the only blood connected with aristocracy was the innocent blood they shed on the earth.

  As always, when I got hot, the Arlin in my head stopped talking.

  “Good morning,” said Dinaos, though it was not yet anything like morning. Called out of a dream, I thought it was Arlin again. I stood in confusion as he rumbled open the lacy wooden side of the bed.

  Navvie was still in her place, and as I had feared, her legs didn’t want to support her. Carrying my blanket as a shawl, I approached the man on the bed. I put my hand to his forehead and he didn’t resist me.

  “I don’t know if you’re still fevered, my lord,” I said, “but your bed is damp with sweat. That’s a good sign, I’m told.”

  He grinned with a tight mouth. “It’s a damn chilly sign, Aminsanaur.”

  “We’ll take care of that,” I said, and I assisted my daughter to her feet.

  Count Dinaos blinked at us in the puzzling light of the brazier. “Have you become my servants?”

  “The only ones who seem to be operative,” murmured Navvie, and as he still glanced around him I added, “We were not able to find the magic word to bring the household to life. There is a great deal of Zaquash legalism here, it seems.”

  He sighed. “Our common folks are of that ancient, stubborn line. I understand every nasal-mouthed peasant among them. I’ll command obedience.”

  I had been entirely frustrated with the servants a moment ago, but this statement opened a flood of memories: “The word for nobleman is ‘paistye’—hut-crusher,” Powl had said, teaching me the outlawed language of Zaquashlon, with which he helped make me an outlaw. I saw again the face of a teamster lad in Warvala, so much like my own I recognized my foreign origins for the first time.

  “I too am of that ancient, stubborn line,” I said to the count. His eyes widened and his thin-cut mouth gave an undisguised giggle. “I am a painter,” he said. “I can’t deny the bones of Rezhmia when I see them.” He looked like he would say more, but he laid his head down again and concluded. “But you would be utterly useless as a servant.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Dinaos took a few deep breaths and rose again, more slowly. “Fetch me one of these renegades. Force-march him in here, if need be. We’re going to have need of them.”

  I nodded, dropped my blanket in a heap, and made for the door. Before I reached it I heard my daughter saying dryly, “You seem to have no difficulty making a servant of him after all.”

  As I closed the door behind me, Count Dinaos was laughing again.

  Of course, the staff was all abed, and locating their little cupboard-sized rooms in that pile took me until first light. To add to my problem, each wooden be
droom door was fixed within by a diagonal wooden brace that rested in a joint on the floor. I was compelled to backtrack to the kitchen and beat a pot with a spoon until all in that wing of the house must have been awake. Awake, but not out of their bedrooms.

  Finally, the room I had chosen for my drum tattoo emitted a scuffle of footsteps. When I decided someone was on the other side of the door, I bellowed, “Count Dinaos demands your attendance!”

  I had chosen the chamber of the very woman who had let us in the night before and made my evening rancorous. It seemed she slept in her gown, with a hat over her lacquered hair. “So he’s not dead,” she said, voice devoid of emotion.

  “No,” I answered her. “He’s up and about.” I dropped the pot and spoon clattering to the floor and left them there. Halfway down the hall I turned again and shouted, “Check and checkmate. I win,” and then I ran back to the sickroom.

  The woman had been right; with the count commanding it, the kitchen would produce more than porridge. There were eggs in that breakfast, and white bread and lots of dried fruits, sweet ale, and coffee. The ale sent our wounded man back to sleep, but Navvie said that was probably a good idea. She had thought to prompt him to call for warm water and a tub, which was delivered after he had returned to sleep. I stood in the doorway lest the two young men who brought in the big urn try to take it out again before we could use it. I did not know how far the servants’ legalism would stretch. With this warm water we were able to wash ourselves as well as the most objectionable of our salt-caked clothes. The soapy salt water I threw out the window.

  When the lads returned for the copperware, I asked casually for the news. “You are the news, paistye,” answered one of them, bowing warily to me.

  “I meant something of more worldly importance. You see, we have been out of touch for some time. Are there no rumors; at least?”

  Rumors are as much a part of the Zaquash tongue as nouns and verbs.

  The lad considered the wet bottom of the copper tub. “Well, there’s only that Velonya is at war. That’s in the past week.”