“The unknown can disappear so tidily, into a grave.”
“I aspire, rather, to disappear tidily into the living world. And that my daughter, who has no connection at all with those letters, should be hounded by officials and assassins alike… it offends me.”
“Is not at all fair,” the count said. “What is?” He slapped the pencil down on the bedclothes. “But I don’t want to talk about your daughter, my lord Duke of Norwess and Aminsanaur in Rezhmia.”
I took one breath of relief. One.
“It is you who interest me, Nazhuret of Sordaling. Nay, you fascinate me, and have since I glimpsed you squatting like a heathen in the bow of that depressing little barge.
“You rouse my art and my instincts,” he said, his dark eyes hot. “I want desperately to possess you.”
Before I could reply to this surprising statement, if indeed I was going to reply—if I was ever going to find a word of my vocabulary again—he continued. “But here I am, punctured like a paper target and weak as paper also. So you can close your mouth and go your way and wonder how you have managed to misunderstand me so thoroughly these past days.”
I mumbled, “Navvie told me I was misunderstanding you… .”
“For the last time, I don’t want to talk about your daughter, but you. Remember I have read these scandalously intimate letters, and I know that you gained a poor respect for the sexuality of men and men by being made to suffer as a boy. That is your misfortune, and you will never understand yourself until you overcome that. And isn’t that your great endeavor, my barbarian philosopher—self-understanding?
“So. When we meet again I may be in better shape to challenge you: in this manner, or in others. Things may not be better, Aminsanaur, but they will be different. Good night. Good-bye. Don’t wake me when you leave in the morning.”
We did not wake him.
It would have been so much easier if I had dared to take the coastal boat the rest of the way around the turn of Morquen Sea to Rezhmia. Six days and we might have been in the rose-colored old walled City, among friends I had known for over twenty years. It was too much of a gamble, however, and we could not depend upon being aided by a world-renowned swordsman twice in a row.
Instead we had horses from the count, which were waiting for us saddled and bridled when we left the next morning. The steward made us feel we would be subjecting him to his master’s ire if we refused what Dinaos had ordered for us. I promised I would get the beasts back, but I didn’t say when.
Had it not been for the state of my poor country, I might have been happy on the slow journey east and north, for the horses were good ones and the weather stayed dry. We had gold to buy food when hungry and fodder for the animals, and there was the occasional inn to break the monotony of sleeping on the ground.
Ighelun is pastoral, and all the sheep and cows have bells. I remember that plodding journey as having the sea on my left hand and a great tintinnabulation and baaing upon my right. There was also a lot of fog.
Eight days into our travel we came to the great river Aen, which descends from the Transmont Range and creates a belt of lush green in East Ighelun, dotted by towns and cities. At the brown delta of the river rose Plaerie, which in its gray stone walls and little round turrets looked remarkably like my home, Sordaling.
Here there was a school, which Arlin and I had visited once, riding south and east from Rezhmia. I could not remember the name of the dean nor yet that of the arms instructor my lady and I had met those many years ago, but we didn’t need acquaintance to make acquaintance (as the saying goes), for the place was surrounded by taverns: student taverns, sailors’ taverns, taverns frequented by people speaking Ighelunie, taverns where Rayzhia was the norm, and others so polyglot most conversation was done by hand signal.
After finding an inn that had livery service, I left Navvie and made a brief circuit of the various hospitalities, looking for one where Navvie could drink an ale without having to kill three men for the privilege. It was not a sailors’ tavern, nor yet one of the students’, but finally I discovered a place where the bartender was an ample, red-haired woman, and where citizens of both sexes gathered to talk.
I tried out its beer, standing at the bar.
“There’s chairs,” the bartender said Rayzhia, and I replied that I’d been sitting all day. She continued to stare.
“Are you gone gray, man? All gray already?”
I put my hand to my hair, wondering if it could be true, with all that’s happened to me. “If so, Mother, no one has told me.”
“Then you have very unusual coloring. The face of Rezhmia, but not the hair.” She leaned forward. “And I suppose you can see all right, too. That’s not cataracts?”
I almost spit my beer. “Mercy, woman! Surely you have seen a blue-eyed blond before in your life!”
“One or two, I’d guess. One or two. But they were towering, horse-faced people—not civilized.”
“I am glad I am civilized,” I answered her. “Old, perhaps, and with bad eyes, but civilized.” If she understood my sarcasm, she didn’t show it.
That evening, when Navvie accompanied me back to the place, the talk in the barroom was not of war in Velonya, but of the drought. To travelers, it is fair weather; to country people, it is drought. This was supposed to be the rainy season in Ighelun, but most of the area’s famous round limestone ponds were drying, and many stockkeepers had to haul barrels of water from the Aen daily for the cattle. Even the sheep could not keep going without supplement, for the grass was dry. The price of beef was down, as men culled their herds, and by that complex law which ties the fate of man to the fate of beasts, many people were out of work.
I tried to turn the conversation to politics, but the others at our long table were two drovers and a butcher. There was no hope for me.
“There’s no sense calling this a misfortune,” the butcher stated, punctuating his remark with the clang of a tankard on the battered wooden boards. “What is one man’s difficulty is another man’s fortune. Sometimes two men’s . Now we have meat, plentiful and cheap. Even the poor can afford it. Had the rains come on schedule, what would they be eating this winter? Buns and onions, that’s all.”
“I like buns,” I answered. I did not particularly like the butcher. “Especially with poppyseeds, hot and dipped in honey. I like onions, too, but buns are more satisfying.”
He looked down his nose at me. “So you say, but if you had ever had to spend your winter with bread as your staple, whether with honey or without, you’d get tired enough of it.”
There was no possibility of informing this comfortable Plaerieman, with his gabardines and his great silver buckle, just what varieties of hunger my daughter and I have endured, both the chronic and the acute. Nor would he have been interested, had I the words. Some imp of mischief, however, prompted me to say, “I never have had too much bread yet, nor honey, nor even onions. But during the long winters in the western forests, when most of what we ate was what we could kill, I grew heartily sick of red meat and crunching bones. And tired of the way it binds the guts together.”
Whether it was my insult to his occupation, or my vulgarity at the table that did the trick, I had succeeded in offending our butcher. He rose in majesty, tankard sloshing, and retreated to the bar. The drovers, who seemed by their faces to be brothers and who had not opened their mouths yet, rolled brown eyes at me like cows themselves.
“I didn’t mean to drive everyone away,” I said to them. “I had just had enough about one man’s misfortune and another man’s fortune.”
Still they said nothing.
“What my father means,” said Navvie very gently, “is that we are people of Velonya and have been a long time away. We hear there is misfortune at home and hoped to get some news here, but all we hear about is the drought.”
I was inclined to resent being so clearly interpreted, by Navvie or anyone else, and beetled my brows a bit. But the leftmost of the two drovers opened his mouth.
“Is that what is happening in Velonya?”
“Humm. There’s certainly refugees. I see’d um.
Far east as the Old City in Rezhmia. And it usually takes killing before there’s refugees, don’ it?”
“What are they fighting about?” My twenty-seven-year-old daughter put her hands in her lap and widened her eyes until she looked about five. Both bovine brothers expanded under this treatment.
“It’s politics,” said the rightmost one. “It’s always politics, when there’s fighting.”
“It’s religion,” said the leftmost one. “When it’s religion, it comes to killin’ easy.”
“So. What exactly is the politics of the fight? The religion or the killing?” I asked, trying to remain calm and unthreatening so that we would not lose these two. “On one side we have the prince, now king, and the queen mother’s party. On the other side…?”
The drovers whispered and squinted and nudged each other. Then the leftmost spoke for both. “The rebels have some dukes, I think, and some soldiers who won’t follow the new lad. They’re fighting under the banner of The Wolf.”
“The Wolf?”
“Whoever that is,” said the drover, and he shrugged.
It was a bad night, but my nightmares did not involve Velonya, or wolves, or even death itself. I dreamed of Count Dinaos, and the dreams were most confusing. I was glad to leave sleep behind.
“Where are we going exactly?” Navvie asked me at breakfast. “It can’t remain your secret forever.”
I apologized, and said I hadn’t meant it for a secret. It had been only too uncertain to talk about. “To Rezhmia City, my dear. Where there seem to be refugees. I want to talk to them.”
She cut her hotcakes with surgical skill, while saying, “But no matter what the refugees say, you will then have to cross the border, won’t you? To Velonya.”
“I don’t know why you think that of me.”
“I don’t know, Papa. Inspiration, I guess.” She dropped her knife and fork with a clatter, and I raised my eyes. Navvie is not a clattering sort of person. “You are going to try to leave me behind. It is not going to work.”
“I don’t even know that I’m going. What on earth good could I do?”
“You’ll know at the time,” she said, and she picked up her fork and her knife again.
I don’t remember much about the horse I was riding, though I spent all day for at least three weeks on his back. There was a time when I would have remembered such a thing, and not only because Arlin would never have let me forget a horse. When I was young the world around me was a piercing thing, in good and bad senses. I was always either drunk on my own reality or bitterly stung by it. Each visitation, whether it was a visit to the school by a patron, a visit to the observatory by a renegade and thief, or a visit in dream of the parents I never knew or a royal visit in borrowed clothing, came inexplicable and unique. I reached many understandings this way, but I was almost always in trouble.
Now life tends to hit me like a dull drubbing on the back, and I have to work hard to keep my eyes open to the world. I hope I have succeeded to some extent. I stay out of trouble now for whole seasons at a stretch, but I have lost all memory of that good horse.
“What did he say to you?” asked Navvie. We were well into eastern Rezhmia by now, riding within sight of Morquen Sea under a gray, heavy sky and a slick wind.
I had not been paying proper attention, and when I realized what she had said I felt my face grow hot. I had been hoping she would never ask me about Count Dinaos. I was trying to think of a better answer than “I have no intention of telling you,” when she added, “Powl. When he appeared in the garden, what is it he said to you?”
My mind changed gaits in midthought. “How did you know he said anything?”
She pressed her horse close to mine. Hers, I recall, was a bay. “Because he was Powl. Never the sort of person to make a trip just to show you his new waistcoat. Nor to give you a kiss for past’s sake.”
“No. He gave no kisses, for any sake,” I answered, and the conversation seemed to be edging toward the difficult again. Dinaos must have read what I wrote about my complicated feelings for my teacher. I wrote too honestly, having no idea that anyone calling himself my friend would put my words into cold print.
“Powl said, ‘Tell me, who is dead—the one who changed, or the one who stopped changing?’”
Navvie turned her face forward and rested both hands upon the pommel of her saddle. We rode on for a few minutes.
“That was certainly Powl,” she said at last. “Do you have an idea about it?”
I had thought about my teacher’s words, when not occupied with assassination, war, and my own unpredictable nature. “I remember that when I returned to him after my first season alone—that was when your mother took me up on her mare and ran us back with the idea of saving him from the king’s rage—he said that he probably already had changed his mind about half the things he taught me. He said it lightly but it hurt, because I had worked so hard to learn. This sounded a lot like the same thing.”
My daughter shrugged. “Being dead seems to make for a lot of changes.”
“Yes. And I haven’t died for a very long time,” I said. “And things do change more slowly as one gets older.”
She yawned and shifted in the saddle. “I truly hope so. But remember, Papa, dying is not always an appropriate action. And change takes care of itself.”
“I truly hope so,” I told her; and the conversation was over.
We saw the city of Rezhmia two days before we reached it, sitting as simple and perfect as a child’s dream on the mountainous horizon. The first time I entered that City, it fell down around me in a great convulsion of the earth, and though I have spent years of my life within its pink, rose-marbled walls, it is still to me a place of infinite, frightening possibility.
A few miles outside the gates we saw our first refugee camp, a place of forty people, many of them with dandelion hair like mine, and most of them much taller. This settlement was not only poor but slatternly, with a sewage pit right behind the mildewed canvas tents and dirty-bottomed children in the cold. I halted my horse and stared, for never in my years had I seen Velonyans living like this: the Zaquash camps outside Morquenie, yes, and those of the Sekretie people who have given up their icy homes to pick through the southerners’ garbage, but never my stodgy western farmers. I was unaccountably embarrassed, and then grieved to think I might have had something to do with creating this.
We did not speak to the residents, and they had no way of knowing we were fellow countrymen. As we trotted down the road among the tents and shacks, one big blond stuck his head out of his tent flap, and he hefted a long billet of iron. I pushed the side of my horse close to him and put my hand to my dowhee, and he vanished under the canvas again, but as we rode on someone threw something, which landed between our horses on the road.
“Why should they resent the Rezhmians?” Navvie asked me. By her expression, she had not been so shocked by the sight of displaced Velonyans. “If they have been allowed to enter the country and pitch here in sight of the capital, they have been granted more than people can expect from a foreign nation.”
“People aren’t reasonable when their lives are in ruins,” I answered her. “And anyway: perhaps they weren’t mistaking us for locals. Perhaps they knew exactly who we were.”
“Now you are getting conceited, Papa. They didn’t know you.”
There were crowds in the sprawling New City outside the gates, and many of these looked more Velonyan than Rezhmian, but there have always been many people of Velonyan ancestry (and language) residing here. I could not see any difference. I saw no more than the usual amount of poverty.
When we came to the east gate, however, I was surprised to see a guard station. The gates of the Old City had been open
for the last twenty years and more, so that the distinction between the Fortress City and the commercial center had begun to blur.
Two women in good silks passed by the guards without receiving attention, but we were stopped smartly by crossed pikes, and our names and business demanded of us.
I was in a quandary. I had very strong connections to the Rayzhia court. In fact, if I wish to press the matter, I am a member of the royal family—which is an extremely extended family and without much family sentiment—but with the border flooded and relations with Velonya undoubtedly chill, the Rayzhia court could be wishing me to the devil. If I were to use my patrilineal name, I would be another bothersome Velonyan.
Though the truth may not be always the best policy, it is the easiest. I announced myself Nazhuret of Sordaling: Rayzhia name and Velonyan “title.” I did not mention any business. The leftmost guard stared at my face intently for a few seconds and then pulled his pike. The other man dropped his more reluctantly. Navvie followed me through without challenge.
Within the walls the City appeared much the same as it had for the past twenty years. There were the carved stone lintels, the ornamental trees in tubs, and the pools of very large goldfish. The occasional broken tower or cracked pavement reminded the visitor there had once been a ruinous earthquake, but for the most part the Fortress City was busy and prosperous.
We walked our horses to the commercial stables, and were very glad to get off them; though I don’t remember the appearance of the horse, I do remember the soreness of muscle it caused me.
Most of the inns of Rezhmia are in the outer city, but there are a few houses that have gone from grandeur to taking boarders. We went to one near the court complex which was familiar to me from previous years, but it was under different ownership now, and strangers took our money without a smile.
Soon we would be completely without cash. Perhaps it was time to buy blanks for eyeglasses, or for Navvie to paint the sign of mortar and pestle on our window glass and be discovered by the sick. But this was Rezhmia, and that meant guilds and licenses. Perhaps we would be reduced to begging again.
The Lens of the World Trilogy Page 64