The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  My head spun. “At war with whom, boy?” My voice must have betrayed agitation, for both fellows raised their brown, untrustful eyes to me and stood still, like deer caught by a dark lantern. “With whom?” I asked more moderately.

  It seemed the lad had trouble with his words—unusual condition for a Zaquash man. “With Velonya, I guess.” He hefted his end of the tub and his mate took the other. “That’s all I know, my lord,” he said and backed shuffling out of the room.

  The day was windy. I remember the sound that whined through the hole my daughter had stuck into the window. I remember the banging of the window itself against its metal frame. Dinaos woke again in midmorning, very thirsty and hungry. We all had a second breakfast, after I had run and found the housekeeper.

  “What do you do usually when you need assistance, my lord? Bellow?” I asked the nobleman.

  He glanced up from his plate, shrugged and cursed (either at his wound or at the impertinent question), and answered, “I don’t usually travel alone. Or with rogue northern dukes’ sons.” He glanced at Navvie, who was making bandages out of one of his monogrammed sheets. “Nor do I usually travel with my own doctor, but it seems I chose appropriately this time. If there was choice involved.”

  “I seem to recall our little boat ride being your idea,” she said.

  He sat up straighter and spun his silver charger to the flagstones, like a boy skipping stones over the pond. It added its racket to that of the wind. “If the alternative is being slaughtered, do you still call it a choice?”

  “Of course,” said my daughter and I, together. I added, “Many of our best choices in life are thus.”

  He gave me a long stare with his black-brown eyes. “Perhaps that attitude explains why you are here, sitting by a foreign bedstead, waiting for the Lowcanton government to discover you and take you.”

  I wondered at the intensity of his regard, and put it down to the tincture of poppy Navvie had administered. “We could not leave you last night, my lord. We will now, though, if you are awake enough to dominate the Zaquash horde you employ here.”

  He snorted, then winced, putting a hand to his injury. “I do not employ them, Duke Nazhuret. I own them. They were all bred here. When I have the choice—choice again—I’d rather tame a pirate. And as for leaving me, you will not be able to do that.” Very moderately Navvie said, “How will you stop us, my lord?”

  “I’m not going to stop you, my lady. I’m going with you.”

  “Why?” I asked of him. “How?” Navvie demanded.

  “In the coach. I think I left the coach here, when I was by last. Of course, in three years the straps may have perished, or the wheel-felloes dried apart, but I think the coach is our best hope. If these people of mine haven’t eaten my horses. And why is it the best choice? Because you won’t make it the few miles, otherwise. These border peasants kill whatever creature they have not seen before.”

  Laboriously, Count Dinaos crawled out of bed. “Get my trousers ready,” he called over his shoulder as he walked heavily over the stone floor and out the door. “I’m going to the privy.”

  “I’m afraid he’ll fall,” I murmured to Navvie in Velonyie.

  “No chance,” she whispered back. “Arrogance buoys him up.”

  I studied his retreating figure. “Arrogance is only one herb to the recipe. There’s something he is hiding, that one…

  “I think he fancies you, daughter.”

  Her stare was as fixed as the count’s . “No, Papa. You misunderstand.” I explained. “I don’t mean you like him; I know better. But there is something there…”

  “Papa, you misunderstand.” She added, “And I think you’d better have his trousers ready.” Navvie gave me a brief hug as I started looking for them. “My old pirate,” she said.

  They had not eaten the horses, but neither had they fed them well. The four gray trotters should have been high-headed and round in neck and quarters, and instead they were skin stretched over barrels. The coach itself had been rained on, and at some time had served as a roosting spot for birds.

  In a fury only slightly thinned by weakness, the count ordered the horses groomed and a good feed of oats for each. The servant who harnessed them sighed and sighed, and I was certain the oats in question had been destined for the castle kitchen.

  Navvie eyed the elderly vehicle with some doubt. “Are the roads between here and the border sound enough for this, my lord?”

  He was leaning upon both of us, dressed in clothes that still sparkled with salt. “Either they are or they aren’t, my lady, and if they aren’t we’ll all roll on the ground.”

  Dinaos smiled at the idea. He opened the door of the coach, releasing an odor of dried leather and mildew. He slid in and we followed.

  This was my first glimpse of the eastern border of Lowcanton. It was barren and rocky, and I wondered that the northerly winds could blow dry over here, cross the sea, and dump such benign moisture on foggy Morquenie and on Rezhmia’s vineyards. The winter grass was dead, not from cold but drought, and the soil made an inadequate covering on the bones of the earth.

  Those bones made our progress troublesome, intruding themselves at odd places in the packed road. The leather straps that suspended the body of the coach creaked and groaned every time a wheel hit one of these rocky outcrops and the seats bounced as though we were being tossed in a blanket.

  The count groaned with the leather. “Ow, I would fire that coachman, if I could!” He held his injured shoulder still with the opposite hand.

  “You could always free him,” suggested Navvie as she supported him from the other side.

  “Free him as a reward for his uselessness?” He laughed heartily, despite the pain. “Actually, dear lady, I can’t. By law.”

  “Their laws here are very complex,” I called across Dinaos’s back. “I’m beginning to understand that,” she returned.

  The road lifted out of our bowl of rocks and emptied onto a windy plateau where a highway ran east and west. Dinaos gave a satisfied sigh. “You will not understand us while you think of us as the southmost part of your northern group of nations. Instead, Lowcanton is the northernmost of the southern countries. Culturally we are most like Claiden Range.”

  “But with fewer camels,” I said, and he nodded.

  “And monkeys,” added Navvie, and after a moment the count answered. “Oh, we have monkeys, my lady. We just left a number of them behind.”

  My laughter died as I remembered Powl’s words. “It is a provincial, narrow-minded attitude to see another group of people looking more like animals than our own race.” Besides: Was it really another group the Lowcantoner was mocking, or my own? I stared out the open window at a yellow-dun world.

  “You know what is the best thing about this region?” Dinaos asked, five minutes later.

  “The solitude?”

  “The light. Dry eastern Lowcanton by the water has the most useful light in the world.”

  Navvie cleared her throat. “Is one sort of light more useful than another? Assuming there’s enough…”

  “For a painter, it is. This hard, empty light is perfect. It does not interfere with the subject, but glorifies it. Except for that reason, I would never come to this dingy place at all.

  “That, and the fact that I cannot sell my border properties under crown law.”

  We passed a colorless sort of village, where gray board-sided huts and grayer stone cottages endured the wind’s blast, and rows of splitfish, drying like laundry on lines, flanked the road. I saw only one person—a shape that darted behind one of the huts and did not reappear. The predatory peasants of the region had no courage before the sight of a noble’s coach, however dreary and inadequately pulled.

  “How far are we?” Navvie asked. “From the border?”

  “About halfway,” he answered, and above his voice and the creak of the coach and the slap of the trotting hooves I heard other sounds: other voices, other hooves.

  Without speaking, I so
ught my pack on the floorboards and loosened the dowhee. Navvie leaned out the other window. “Could we have been reported already, less than a day off the ship?”

  “Just,” said the count without attempting to crawl over one of us. “If there was enough moonlight, they might have docked at Bugel, in Ighelun, and sent a message back over the border here to Welz, where there is a cavalry station. If they moved spritely. Or it could be the essential malice of my house staff—though I believe they would rather live, on the whole.”

  “They are cavalry,” I called behind me, leaning out and squinting as best I could with eyes that used to be sharper. “Lighthorse, I believe, and regional, not crown. There’s no gold on the harness. They are drawing toward us, but not at any great speed.”

  “How many?” asked Navvie.

  I admitted I couldn’t tell: somewhere between six and ten. The count tugged me back inside the coach. “Please spare the rude peasants the sight of a man hanging half out the window of a noble’s vehicle. Whether they are six or ten will be of no matter.”

  “You have a great respect for our fighting abilities,” said my daughter. “Or none at all,” I added. Then it occurred to me he had not said he would support us or even be neutral in a confrontation between the soldiers of his government and us. He had never expressed any but a pragmatic unity with us, born of the moment’s need. That need was now over.

  “I would venture that this little troop is combing the roads for foreign spies,” Dinaos said. “Spies that happened to survive being thrust ashore at twilight from a leaky; Harborman coastal tub.”

  “Why not?” asked my daughter. “They sent assassins into our house in Canton. When that didn’t work, Lord Sibold himself came to the university.”

  The count sniffed and rubbed his shoulder. “So what is Sibold, that you should have been afraid of him? A simple baron, an inadequate swordsman, a brute without art…”

  “… the leader of a cadre of spies and cutthroats, whom we know to be after our lives,” I concluded for him.

  “Exactly. That’s why you ought to have spoken with him. You might have learned something.”

  The sound of the hooves drowned out his words. Dust rose in and around the coach. “I think we’re about to learn something now,” I answered.

  “Stop the carriage!” The voice had not the accent of Dinaos, but it spoke in Cantoner, not Zaquash. We had scarcely slowed when the count was past me with his face out the window. “Do so and I’ll roll your head down the road,” he shouted, either at his unfortunate driver or the lieutenant on the tall bay gelding. We joggled on.

  The bay horse backed hurriedly across the roadway. There was a pause, and then the lieutenant said, “Forgive me, Count Dinaos. We had no idea you were within.”

  “Yet it is my coach, poor as it may be, with my coat of arms on the door, is it not?”

  “Yes, but you… we didn’t know you had returned to Eslad Province.”

  Count Dinaos was almost lying across my lap by now, and I would find it very hard to draw. I glanced to the other side of the coach, where Navvie had drawn the tattered curtain over the window and was very still, pistol resting in one hand and dowhee in the other. I had not even heard her move.

  “Well, why should you?” asked the count with a clearly false bonhomie. “Am I to tell you of my movements? Do you suspect me of being a spy?”

  The lieutenant kept pace with our coach. I could catch glimpses of his leg and the horse’s side. Then he leaned over the beast’s neck and I saw his face. “No, my lord. Of course not. We’re looking for a couple of Harbormen, a man and a woman, who may have been let off a boat recently.”

  Still, the count did not move. My legs were falling asleep. “Oh, lieutenant? How do you know this?”

  “Sources,” the man answered stiffly, and then he saw me. For a half-dozen paces of the horse, he said nothing, and neither did I. The count finally got off my lap. “Well, I have no Harbormen with me, so go about your business and stop raising the dust.”

  The lieutenant tried several times to speak before he could control his voice. “But my lord, who is that with you?”

  The count’s affability was now no thicker than a straw. “Ah yes! These two are none of your business. May I present to you Lord None of Your Business, and my Lady None of Your Business.”

  The lieutenant was a frightened hound, but he was a hound. “I must examine these people, Count Dinaos. I must command you to stop.”

  The affability disappeared. “Command all you wish, you stinking lackey! But what effect you think it will have upon me, I don’t know. Your Regional Guard has no authority over me or mine: not my person, my house, my estate, my people, or my coach. If you dare to detain me you will not simply die, fellow. You will die in a manner of my invention, and I am known for being inventive.”

  Now the head and the horse disappeared from the window, and there was a confusion of horses and voices behind us. “They can simply shoot thought the wall and have done with it. If they have handguns,” said Navvie, but her voice was calm.

  The count sank against the squibs of the coach, groaning and favoring his shoulder, which he had somewhat mashed against my ribs. “They can if the lieutenant is willing to murder me. But if so, he must then kill his entire troop, elsewise at least one will eventually betray him and he will be pulled by horses, flayed, and sectioned.” Stiffly he undid his belt and, holding his rapier by the scabbard, pounded the pommel into the roofboards. “Faster,” he called to the coachman. “Make those sorry beasts remember when they were alive.”

  The jarring of our progress increased, and the count wedged himself between Navvie and me for support. Out of the window I saw the lieutenant draw up again, but he did not speak.

  “They could simply kill your driver,” whispered Navvie, who followed the cavalryman’s progress with her pistol.

  The count sighed. “The punishment would be no different. My body or my property.”

  I heard one of the horses coughing. It seemed terribly significant. I listened for unevenness in the hoofbeats in front, but four horses made too complex a rhythm to follow. The dust in the air worsened. The road seemed to grow worse.

  Navvie had the hardest time remaining in her seat, for she had so little body weight. She clung to the frame of the window with one hand and the front seam of the seat with the other. This failing, she extended both legs and braced them against the opposite seat. I remember how her long skirt bounced, billowing through the interior. “You know, Count Dinaos,” she said meditatively, “my departed mother would have forgiven you anything but your treatment of your horses.”

  He grunted and made use of both of us for his own stability. “Your mother was an unusual woman, Doctor.” His eyes narrowed and he looked directly at my daughter. “What should I do, then—stop and wait for these yokels to lose interest in us? Would your mother sacrifice your own life to rest four scrawny nags?”

  Navvie kept hold and answered between clenched teeth. “It is because they are scrawny she would not forgive you. You simply forgot they were here?”

  “Not exactly,” he answered, his voice broken with a gasp as we hit the largest obstacle yet. “It is merely that I have more than I…”

  As we regained the road after our brief flight, there was the crack of something wooden breaking, followed by a grinding below, and then a terrible jarring as the horses slammed into their harness, the harness into the singletree, the singletree into the kingpin, the kingpin into the coach body, and the coach body into us.

  “The off rear wheel bearing.” I identified it.

  There was an ill-bred cheering outside quickly squelched by a shout from the lieutenant.

  “The axle is resting on the floorboards,” said the count pensively.

  There was a knocking on the near door. “My lord count, you must stop,” called the lieutenant. “Your horses are dragging the coach by main force.”

  With a courtly bow of his head, Dinaos turned to Navvie. “Madam shall dec
ide. Do we stop, as he suggests, or drag on?”

  Navvie tried to smile. “Not even my mother would ask you stop, my lord. Drag on.”

  He pounded the roof with his pommel again. “Drive on, damn you,” he shouted. “Drive on!”

  “Master, I am afraid!” came the unsteady answer. I had never thought to hear a Zaquashman admit as much.

  “All the more reason to drive on!”

  There came a thump against the rear wall of the coach, barely audible over the grinding and the hoofbeats. It was repeated and followed by another, louder. The blows were heavy enough to jar us in our seats. The count cursed luridly. “Give me that,” he said, grabbing for the dowhee I held in a loose grip. I did not see fit to argue with him. “Now, get over to the other side: both of you.”

  We did as he commanded and were rewarded by the sight of the Lowcantoner noble hacking viciously at the shaped panels of his own coach. First there was a glimpse of light, then a breath of hot dust, and then a ragged window looking out at the chests of horses.

  The count bent to the hole even as two more blows rained around him. He put down the dowhee and pointed through the opening. “You. And you. And you. You are all dead men. Before the week is out your flayed bodies will be covered in flies in the tanner’s market at Welz. And your lieutenant for allowing this to happen.” His voice was just loud enough to carry, and it was very cold. The horses dropped back from our window, and there was no sound but the increasing grinding of the wheel and the worsening banging of the wheels on the road.

  Suddenly there was a shrill cry from many throats, and I bent to see the entire troop coming forward at us, sabers raised.

  “Now they have nothing to lose,” I said. I picked up my dowhee and wondered what kind of fight we could make of it in this wooden box. Navvie was leaning out the window, her pistol in hand. She would certainly take out the lieutenant before they closed with us. Would they lose heart without their leader? Could she load again before we were reduced to close-fighting?