The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  He was a beautiful stallion, almost black in color, and despite the season, his own heat had kept his coat short, marbled by veins and tendons. He was awe-inspiring. “I killed one just like this,” I told the stable manager, “on a run of about three days once, from here to Warvala. I have to go about half again that far, and I don’t think he’ll make it.”

  Horsemen all seem to take pride in never being surprised, but my words surprised this one. “Aminsanaur, he is the best we have.”

  I asked if I might look around and took his silence for assent. The stables were large, clean, and filled with elegant horses. Some of the stalls bore the insignia of private owners, and these I skipped by, but most of the animals were crown property and all were jewels. All bore lovely, firm, well-tended flesh and beautiful crests on their necks. I was very frustrated.

  In the back two rows of stalls, where there were fewer windows and the boxes were smaller, I found animals of less evident breeding. And feeding. There was a half-clipped dun I considered, despite his white eye and bared teeth, and there were a few dusty bays with some of the blood of the Naiish in them. Almost at the end of the stable I saw a white glimmer in the shadows, and at my request out stepped a slender gray mare with a long neck, slightly lady-waisted and high on her legs. I stared at her and said, “Three faces of God!”

  The stable manager was at my side. “That’s just one of the messenger horses, Aminsanaur. They are nothing much. Their pedigrees are lost, or embarrassing. A mare without an honorable pedigree is of no account.”

  I asked him very politely to show her. He did so, dismissing her utility all the while. “You don’t want a mare for a solitary, forced joumey, Exalted. She may come in season and become unusable to you.”

  “In midwinter? That would be some mare indeed. Besides—I have ridden mares in season, and stallions in rut. Let’s see this girl go.” I took the rope lead and tied its end to the knot of the halter, then threw the loop over her head. She was not terribly tall, so I boosted up bareback. She did not have a back that invited such a style of riding. With the stable manager trying to clutch me back, I pressed the girl forward along the stall line. Her easy, springing movement was more of a shock than her appearance. I leaned close to her ear and whispered, “How many years is it that you’ve been dead? Twenty-five? Twenty-seven?” The mare turned back her head on a flexible neck and looked at me with both eyes. She made a sound that seemed to say she hadn’t been counting.

  “What have you been calling her?” I shouted to the stable manager. He answered, “I don’t know that she has a name. She’s only one mount in forty, in the courier service.”

  The mare was dancing in place in the dark aisle. Her tail made white ghosts in the air. “She’s one in a million,” I said. “Her name is Sabia.”

  It is quite possible that Navvie’s departure had left me too alone, and since I had not been alone for some years, I retreated into the past at first opportunity. Or it could be (as the stable manager surely thought) that the old beggar-noble, always eccentric, had gone beyond the line at last. I traded Count Dinaos’s respectable gelding for this wild gray shadow and rode through the pink city at a plunging prance, which relaxed to a canter as I let her go.

  Sabia had been Arlin’s youth: a slightly outlaw horse for a thorough outlaw. In my time I had been very jealous of Sabia. In her time the gray mare had shown her temper to me, too. She had been only fourteen when she was cut down by assassins; I had seen the whole thing.

  Of course, this Rezhmian courier horse was not Sabia. I must say that now, or I myself will begin to think I am insane. But now that I have said it, I can forget it and relate how I said in her ear, “Sabia?” and she nickered in response, and how her back half seemed to float and flap like a kite tail in the wind while her front legs followed the bit. This behavior is not laudable, but it was Sabia’s behavior, and neither training, discipline, nor heavy burdens ever made her change. I am not a fancier of horses, though I have had to ride hundreds, but with this creature I felt such a presence of my dead Arlin that I was half in love.

  “Sabia,” I whispered. “Let’s go fast.”

  We were in the wine country by midmorning, riding through the gnarled, leafless vines and past hundreds of refugees in their hopelessness. Two men threw things after me—stones and curses—but they hadn’t a chance of hitting at the speed we were moving.

  All those years ago, a few months after the death of the first Sabia, we had done this same route—Arlin, myself, and the sanaur’s own prophet. He had found us a shortcut right through a vineyard that cut away from the sea and straight toward Warvala. There was no possibility I could find that trail, if it still existed.

  It did exist, and the mare found it. She leaned right, clamping firmly on the snaffle, which is the only bit the horsemen of Rezhmia recognize, and charged between two rows of vines no different from any other I had seen. I was forced to duck my head and close my eyes to save them from whiplike branches, and I hoped only she wouldn’t run us into the winery wall, or off a cliff.

  When it seemed we were clear of the foliage, I looked up to-find we were climbing a stony hill and had left more than one field behind us. “Is this how the sanaur’s couriers ride?” I asked her humbly, but she was too busy to respond.

  That day passed swiftly, in more ways than one. It was not travel in the same sense as Navvie and I had traveled up the coast. If the mare’s progress was breathtaking, so was my solitude. By midday, her gait had slowed—if indeed it was any slower—to a long trot, which did not seem to tire her any more than standing in her stall. As I seemed to have no say in where I was going, or at what rate, I was free to look about me, and to think.

  Now that I had lost Navvie, I had lost everyone who was anyone to me in my whole life. I was remarkably cut off, remarkably singular, on the back of that rushing horse. I did not even belong to the ground. Most odd about it was that I was happy.

  There is no wilderness within a day’s ride of Rezhmia City, however fast the horse. Through the whole day we had been within sight of human beings or human works. It surprised me, therefore, that the sun sank upon us in a highland area devoid of shelter and without even a clear road.

  Had the mare taken me all the way to the Bologhini Peaks? That was an impossibility. Nor had she taken me so far north that I was out of my reckoning, because the sun would have informed me by its angle. I did not know where we were, why there was no worked field or habitation thereabouts. I had a small stock of grain for the mare, but to use it up in one night left us vulnerable for the future. Yet this Sabia was not a spirit, to live entirely on memories, nor could she run on her own body fat. I gave her what I had, in small handfuls to prevent colic, and allowed her nose to find her a small runnel of water.

  I did not trust the looks of the stream, but the stewardry of the Towers had packed me leather bottles of the Rezhmian new wine. This specialty of the country can be stored only through the winter, being scarcely fermented at all. It would never be popular in Velonya, where people like their wine to hit them like a hammer, but to be just to my people we have beer and ale for travel.

  I also found—as I recall—a waxed round of cheese and an assortment of breads, both hard and soft. I do remember dried olives, for I spat the pits into the darkness and the mare startled broadly each time. She never got tired of the game.

  It was a cold camp, since not knowing where I was, I did not try a fire. We were under way with the light, the mare having shared whatever bread and cheese I had left. I still let her pick the way, for I was utterly lost.

  The sun rose behind us and picked out the jagged teeth of the mountains ahead. We were not at Bologhini, but we were near it. I must have covered seventy miles that first day.

  We would not go so far today because the going was a jagged trap, with stones lying scattered across the few flat stretches. I wondered how many of those stones had been left by the chain of great earthquakes of a generation before. I had been in these very mountains to wi
tness the first few shocks, and in the City for the big one. How many passages had been closed by the upheaval, and how many opened?

  As the heat of the day came up, and the hills increased their angle, I got down off the mare and tried to lead her. This was a miserable practice, for she was a ruthless bully on the path, and wanted to go faster than I. After losing a bit of skin and a bit of temper, I decided to grab onto her tail and let the idiot pull me. She was going where she liked, anyway. In this manner I sprang over the ground with considerable ease, though I had to trust she wouldn’t kick me.

  We had just scrambled down a broken hill face, where her speed had almost pulled me off my feet, when I looked at the pattern of rocks against the sky and I knew where we were. I lifted my eyes to the left and saw the squat domes of Bologhini a half-mile away. The mare broke into a trot and I almost lost her.

  Bologhini is not easily accessible from the south road, and so has never had a strong Velonyan influence. Most of its people make their living somehow off the plains to the west—which is to say, they are Naiish by blood, though not always as bloody as the Naiish. I was disturbed to see the same squatters’ camps spread on the high outskirts of Bologhini that I had seen around Rezhmia: the sad, inefficient attempt at nomadism by people with no talent for it. And I heard my native tongue spoken, shouted, shrilled, and wept in, before my nervous mare even entered the town.

  Here my face was to my advantage, but my hair was against me. I had donned the Rezhmian men’s kerchief before entering Rezhmia, and now I stuck all my dusty locks into its dusty linen. My eyebrows were by now as much gray as blond, and there was nothing I could do about them, anyway.

  Besides a horse, some wine and cheese, the stewardry of the Towers had given me money. I don’t think I had ever had as much money in my pocket before, unless I was carrying it for someone else. I rode past the bubble-shaped houses and those strung up like tents, through a public garden all of water and colored rocks, and into an innyard that I recalled to have a good livery.

  The groom looked distrustfully at the dirty man on a dirty horse. My accent, however, was of the best (Powl had made certain of that long years before) and as the man approached, he said, “I know that mare!”

  “So do I,” I replied, far too weary to explain. “She’s come from the capital in a day and a half. She has farther to go. Please do as much for her as you can.”

  I took a room, but spent only a few hours in it, lying motionless on a bed, between sleep and wakefulness. I took a bath, ate, ordered a meal to be packed, and returned to the stable by late afternoon.

  Sabia was resting her head on the stall door. Her eyes watched me. I filled her pack with oats again.

  She had been washed down and brushed, and even her flying tail detangled. “You seem to like her,” I said, tipping the groom.

  He laughed like a Zaquashman. “The couriers call her ‘Hazardous Duty.’ But I don’t have to ride her. I know she is as fast as a sinful thought. Where are you taking her?”

  I was stopped for a moment. I almost didn’t answer the man or gave him a lie, because what I was doing was so much like spying. But lies are inauspicious, as is offending a groom, so I told him, “Norwess.”

  His sly face went sober. “For the crown?”

  “Not officially.”

  He walked over to me and spread his hand horizontally below my eyes, to make a map of it. “Say this is the mountains,” he began.

  “You don’t want to go down here,” and he ran his left finger above the root of his right thumb, “… because the riders are gathered in the plains. They’re upset, like everyone else about this thing with the snowmen. Also, they’re robbing the refugees. They won’t see you as any different. So run her up the crescent here until you reach the place the mountains dip down, beyond Cieon.” The left finger moved along the crevice between his right index and second fingers, to the smallest joint, and then slid over and off. “Then you’ll be far enough north that there’s some trees, and if you don’t mind the uphill grade, you’ve a straight west shot toward Norwess.”

  I thanked him and tried to tip him again, but he refused. “Not if it’s for the crown,” he said. I left without knowing myself if I had cheated the man or not.

  I left Bologhini, and my horse seemed fresher than she had been in the Towers stable, and on the river-bottom road that ran north of Bologhini we made excellent time. About an hour after that we were ambushed.

  It happened where the road was pitched by outcrops, during a time Sabia felt like galloping. I saw the string glinting across from rock to rock, but she did not let me pull her in or turn her. The impact took her just below the knee, and I did not try to stay with her, but rolled to be clear of her body. When I stood up again, I saw two young men running at the floundering horse, knives in their hands, and for a moment I thought I would see the death of Arlin’s mare repeated across time. But this creature had her legs in the air, and they were pumping like those of a startled spider. The men had not succeeded in getting near her before I was at them, and with my own version of the Naiish battle cry I swung my dowhee within an inch of their faces. One ran and the other slipped and fell.

  “What the hell did you want to kill me for?” I shouted in Velonyan, for this one by his long face and fair hair was obviously a countryman of mine.

  “Not you, your horse,” he answered me, in the broad accents of Norwess—my father’s accent, I suppose. It is not mine.

  For a moment I thought I was looking at a disgruntled crown courier, for whom Hazardous Duty had been too much. But no, there were no Velonyan couriers in the sanaur’s service. “Why?”

  “To eat it, of course,” he said, and there was more resentment than fear in his voice. “We have had no meat to eat for over a week. Nothing but barley.”

  I stared. “You’re not even thin! My horse should die so you don’t have to eat barley? The people of Bologhini live on the stuff.”

  He stood up as though all danger was past. “The little peasants can do so. We can’t. Our bones are bigger, and our …”

  I touched the dowhee to his neck. “You don’t seem to understand. I am angry at you. I don’t like your excuse. I would like very much to kill you. I think you should run away.”

  This took time to sink in, and when it did his retreat was as slow and sullen as his speech. I led the mare a while, until I was sure her gaits were even, and then got upon her. Immediately she broke into a canter.

  I’m sure there were refugees from Velonya who really were starving, but as it happens I didn’t see them, and my feelings toward my native country were rancorous for the rest of that day. At evening we reached the little sheep town called Cieon, where the mare and I found accommodation.

  When I left town the next morning, it was with a new set of shoes on the mare. Her feed bag was filled with Naiish-style fodder: dried fruit, lamb fat, and gristle. I find it unsettling to feed such stuff to a grass-eating animal like a horse, but there was no way we could carry enough grain to see her through, and she seemed to be used to such stinking fare.

  By now it was cold: true Velonyan cold, and I feared that the gray skies might release their rain and do us damage. All day we descended the north cut in the mountain range, and by evening we were on the flat again. I had never come through this way, though once I had made the journey from Rezhmia to Velonya as far north as the Sekret steppes. Here there were scattered copses of pine and wind-twisted oak, and the winter-killed grass did not appear to have been grazed heavily. I hoped we would not meet herders.

  I saw no people, though the trails were clear. I kept the setting sun in front of my left shoulder and trusted I would find Norwess eventually. I made a camp without fire, ate food not much different than the horse’s , and wrapped myself in my blanket, wishing for stars. It was so cold within a few hours that I rose again, hauled myself onto the mare, and lay full length on her back, my face warmed by her mane. I stretched the blanket over both of us. I am not sure either of us slept in this positio
n, but we were warmer.

  Toward morning she decided to lie down, and I got off to let her do it. Once she was settled, I wrapped myself again and put my back against hers, and we both had at least an hour’s good sleep.

  I woke with a familiar smell around me, and found snow on the blanket and on my kerchief. The earth was dusty with the stuff and the sky was lead. The mare and I relieved ourselves, ate rank mutton and wrinkled apples, and got under way.

  It snowed steadily, and still she went at her springing trot, her head between her knees to judge the ground. Perhaps her fall the day before had made her overcautious, but I let her go her inelegant way. Had she stumbled I certainly could not have pulled her up; my hands were under my shirt, in the waistband of my trousers.

  Soon the snow was not a dusting, but a thick blanket. I don’t know what trail we were following, if any. I could only guess the position of the sun.

  I had been woolgathering for some minutes when I noticed that Sabia had found a track to follow. It was the trampling of an animal not too large—neither man nor horse—for in some places the wind had blown it into drifts where the mark of the beast’s barrel was evident. As I wondered about it, I noticed large dog prints coming from the left to join it. I thought the dog left the trail again, but I stopped the mare and looked carefully. This was another dog, coming and not going. I thought about this. After a few minutes I opened my frozen lips to talk to the mare.

  “Do you know you are following a wolf pack, my lady? Is this something the sanaur’s couriers regularly do?”

  She didn’t respond. Since her nose was down there by the path, I assumed she could smell the beasts that had made it. I hoped she knew what she was doing.

  The sun came out so brightly my eyes began to water. It was directly before me, so we had slipped our direction a bit. I tried to rein the mare right and out of the beaten trail, but she began to flounder and skid and pulled her head back to the opening the wolves had made. At this rate we would touch on Ekesh before Norwess and waste time going north, but the alternative seemed to be to wait for a thaw.