The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  Benar, too, had red hair. As I splashed through the pretty villages and fine fields that surround Vestinglon, I wished heartily that Queen Caudrin had not disliked me so overtly. I had never wished for her affection, for I had none for her. A concealed or polite aversion on both sides would have made no trouble, but the lady was honest, and vocal about it. To Rudof I was always the younger brother he did not otherwise have, and an attack at me brought out the defender in him. Hard on the queen. Harder on Benar.

  Crows rose from the side of the road, shining purple in the light. I saw a family of swans waddling over an icy pond. The maples of Vestinglon wove their branches into the sky everywhere. I was almost in tears with the familiar beauty, and with the brilliance of the sun. I entered the bustling city between two wagons: one of onions and one of turnips, their domed tops shining as purple as the crows. Though there were guards wearing the blue and white, they were gaming and I escaped their attention completely.

  In Vestinglon there are forty teams of heavy horse that plod the streets all winter, clearing snow with an iron blade. This makes passage easy, but on the other hand it is damned difficult to open one’s door after they have passed. I saw the teams, and the redfaced tradesmen with their shovels cursing behind them, and felt such a flow of peace and contentment at being here that I could not myself believe what I had come to do. For the first time in a week, I went into the belly of the wolf, to contain myself. As I did so my demon horse lowered her head, stretched her back, and let out a groaning sigh of relief. I wished I had given her this comfort much earlier.

  I did not take Sabia to my favorite stable, but to an overpriced affair that skimped on fodder but was near the palace. I left her there with instructions to quarter-groom her soundly, bran her, and turn her out blanketed into their small paddock. I also warned them that a large dog I had lost might be along anytime. Out of whim I ordered a dinner for it. I pretended I would take my saddle with me, as well as my pack, for I knew the employees here to be thieves, but when no one was looking, I hid both in the hayloft. I left the mare with some doubt I would be able to return for her, if I got out of the palace at all. I hoped she did not look too much like dog food herself.

  I cannot describe Vestinglon as I do Canton, or even Rezhmia City, for she is so intimate to me she is like my own round, cornshock head. I believe her to be more beautiful, however, for all her buildings rise skyward like pikes or good aspirations, and in the winter they outshine the snow.

  I must admit that the streets are miserable, because they are old, from the days when little traffic came by coach, but rather by foot of human, ass, or horse. The red bricks of the paving are heaved by frost, however often chained gangs of men hammer them down again.

  In Vestinglon there was always the chance I would be recognized, and being dressed in dirt would not make it harder for anyone I knew to pick me out. Easier, perhaps. I had friends among tradesmen, soldiers, scientists and courtiers, beggars and thieves. Of all these, I had only to worry about the soldiers, and though there were many of them in evidence, most seemed to be conscripts, and none of them paid me mind.

  On my way to murder the king, I thought I might stop by the Royal Library. I hated to miss a trip to the capital without visiting the stacks. A notion of my own absurdity—to combine regicide with a prowl of the newest publications—sent me into painful giggles, but I stopped at the marble stairs nonetheless.

  Before the bronze doors of this establishment is an immense, flat case of glass in which The Vesting Verity is posted daily: two copies, really, so both sides of the journal can be read by those who cannot buy the paper themselves. Along with the other men in shabby clothes, I stopped to read. I discovered that the minor uprising of malcontents in the East was nearly all suppressed, and that all of Norwess had established its loyalty to the crown. Foreign influence was suspected in the disturbances. Trials were expected shortly.

  When I was eighteen, I had not believed what I read in the newspapers, and the knowledge of my own perspicacity comforted me. Now, at fifty-five, I did not believe what I read in my country’s newspapers, and that knowledge made me want to weep.

  The journal did not print the usual notice of where the king was that day. That seemed understandable, under a condition of “minor uprising.” I hoped the duke was right about his having returned home. I did not go into the library after all.

  When Rudof was king, he had spent most of his days at his apartments in the military quarters of the palace. His son had never spent much time there, but now that he was the titular commander of the armed forces, he might have changed his habits. I knew three ways into those apartments that would be unlikely to come to notice. I had shared their secrecy with the king, who liked to get away from things. I also knew a likely servants’ entrance into the palace proper, which I learned not from the king but from my lady Arlin, or more exactly, from her old nurse. I did not think I would be able to break and enter both buildings without discovery. I chose the palace as most likely to contain Benar. I figured my chances at one in three.

  In the market I bought three things: a cheap shirt, a butcher’s apron, and a half of farmed venison. I chose the venison simply because I could not carry a half of beef by myself, and a quarter would not offer enough concealment, but as I blundered along with my face in the aged carcass, I realized I had bought meat that had hung a bit too long, and I felt my disguise to be very appropriate to my errand. People on the street got out of my way. Though it was winter, I heard the buzzing of flies.

  I beat on the door with my boot toe. When it was opened by a guard, I said, “Please. I gotta put this down or I’m gonna puke.” It was through no deliberate intent that my voice sounded different, but only that I could not make myself breathe through my nose.

  The guard grimaced. “Why they want to eat stuff that way I don’t know,” he said. “Kitchens are to the right.”

  “I know, I know where they are,” I replied, having already turned to the kitchens. Over my shoulder I called, “Maybe if we was nobles, we’d have the taste for it.”

  But not likely, I added to myself.

  There were servants in the joint-kitchen, and despite the midwinter freeze three huge fires burned under the spits. I knew the place well, having once bet on races among the treadmill-dogs that used to power the instruments in the days of my youth. Rudof had won those races easily, for he knew the dogs better than I had. We had baited the long, short-legged hounds with meat scraps taken from an ice closet at the other side of the chamber, which connected with the pastry kitchen. I opened the door and staggered from heat to freezing cold under the weight of the deer. I closed the door behind me, and it was dark. I stumbled over shards of ice, blocks of ice, and frozen carcasses, and despite the cold I could still smell the dead and rotting deer on my clothing. I had a fantasy—almost a hallucination—of the half-frozen, half-rotten bodies of men that must be stacked all over my poor country.

  Next my hand slapped something smooth and hard. First I thought it to be leather, but then recognized it as frozen bread dough. When I felt this, I knew where to look for the far door. I had remembered that the doors to the ice closets could always be opened from within, so as not to freeze some poor scullion solid, and I hoped such humanity still existed in the king’s kitchens. I reversed my apron, so the smeared meat juice would not be evident, and opened the door into light.

  Before me was a woman with a pig-stomach bladder in her hand, frosting the latticework on a cake. Between the lines of white icing were dried cherries, cut in halves. It was enough to make a man swoon with desire. She looked at me in blank surprise.

  “I see the dough is drying out in there,” I said with a shade of ill temper. “How long did you think you could keep it?”

  She glanced from me to the door and back. “Master cook, it isn’t my…”

  “Isn’t your what?” I shouted. “Tell that to the spoiled bread!” She ran to the freezer and I ran from the room.

  In the preparation chamber t
here is a dumbwaiter, used mostly to bring chocolate to guests in the morning and unpleasant substances to the sick at all times. Once the king had lowered me in this contrivance, which had required courage on my part, for Rudof had a horselike sense of humor and an invincible conviction I could survive any calamity. Now there was no one to work the thing, but I managed to push it down past the kitchens enough so I could climb into the brick chimney which contains it and start to climb.

  It was not a difficult stunt, but there was in it so much an air of our old good times together that I could not keep it in my head that I was going to murder my dear friend’s only son. I kept drifting from smiles to tears as I humped up my toes and my back alternately to do the three-story climb.

  Up at the fourth floor I found the hatch locked against me, and for a moment was stymied, but then I remembered the lock was a simple hook and eye of brass, and though I had left my dowhee behind, I had a knife. It was not one of my lady’s pretty daggers, nor yet my daughter’s scientific throwing knives, but a simple camp blade with a hinge in the middle and a wooden case. The inelegant blade slid easily between the hatch and its jamb and popped the hook.

  Getting out was more difficult than climbing, for it required hanging from the jamb for a moment by one hand and one knee, but I did it unobserved, and then I was out on the good carpets of the royal residence. I closed the hatch behind me, resisting the impulse to throw the smelly apron down the chute, where it might be found lying atop the dumb-waiter and give rise to thought. Instead I stuffed it under my shirt, giving myself an imposing belly. At my age, I deserved one.

  Most of the rooms along this hall were the use-rooms of the queen’s ladies. There was also a library, which Rudof had made his own. Most of the books in it were rare and precious (at least to a person like myself) and at least half were not in Velonyie. I had never seen his son there even to visit, and did not imagine many of the palace accessories had an interest in science or foreign histories. I determined to wait in this room behind a certain couch I knew, and use my senses to help me locate the king, if he was here.

  I heard nothing in the corridor, and nothing from any door along the hall. I slipped to the third door along the right, opened it, and went in.

  There was the room, just as I had left it four years before. There, against the far wall, was the leather settee. Sitting upon it, a large volume open upon his lap, staring up at me startled, was young King Benar.

  My body left my mind far behind, leaping the distance from door to settee. My weight struck Benar in the chest, and we both went over, hitting the carpet and rolling once. My body did not finish the work, however, and I was left with the young monarch straining away from me, my hand over his mouth and my own mouth spitting out strands of his auburn hair.

  I wedged my left knee into the small of his back, and with some difficulty I forced him onto his stomach and pulled his head back from the carpet. In this position he was open to a rabbit punch, which would break his neck cleanly. I did not deliver that punch. I sat there for some moments, riding the king of Velonya like a jockey on a horse, but I did not strike him.

  He was trying to speak—not scream or shout, but speak—and I slipped my hand up to his nose.

  “Is this… did you come to steal me away?” he asked, his voice twisted by the stretch upon his throat. “Like my father and you planned for the sanaur, when you ended the Summer War?”

  “I came to kill you, to end the Winter War,” I answered, and my own voice was not much more pleasant.

  This seemed to catch him by surprise. His body bucked under me once, and then he went limp. “Then do it and be over,” he whispered.

  I let my knees slip sideways, until I was straddling him. I listened in the corridor, but there was no sound. I remember the smell of dust and dirty wool from the carpet. “For the last twenty-five years you have considered me your enemy, Benar. Now that you have made me your enemy in truth, why shouldn’t I kill you?” I heard myself justifying my actions, and closed my mouth.

  Benar took a deep breath, which rocked me back and forth. I kept my free hand between his shoulder blades, with my weight behind it. He was lithe and well built, but not his father’s equal in size. Nor had he been taught by his father’s teacher, or by his father. Nor me.

  “You were not King Rudof’s enemy, so how can you be entirely mine, Nazhuret? At least that is what I thought…”

  “It is because I was not your father’s enemy that I have come to kill you.”

  I could feel him testing himself under me, but nothing gained him purchase. When my words did not seem to be followed by action, he sighed. “This is unbearable. Why don’t you do it?” And in another mood, “Are they really thinking… saying… that I killed my father?”

  “A goodly number of ‘they’ are,” I said, and I chuckled. It was a grim, inadequate laugh, but having let it loose, I was aware that I had lost my last chance to kill the king. My mind was in utter refusal, and even my hands let him go. “Did you?”

  “Oh, my God!” said Benar. As I rolled off him, he turned on his side, curled like a hedgehog, and hid his face behind one hand. I pulled that hand away. “Did you?” I asked again.

  He said, “No,” and he said it with no elaboration. He did not try to get up.

  “Did your mother?”

  At this his warm brown eyes narrowed in his narrow, half Lowcantoner face. “For three years before his death, my mother had not been in the same city as her husband.”

  That I had known. “Still, did she kill him?”

  He rolled over on his back, releasing the full mustiness of the carpet. “I am not in any position to know,” he said to me. “You would know that better than I. Anyone might know that better than I.” He sneezed. I remembered he had had asthma, as a boy. “All my advisers told me I wasn’t suspected in Papa’s death.”

  He looked full and intent at me. “It is supposed to be some scorned mistress. He had many… paramours. You knew that, of course.”

  “Yes and no.” Since I had lost my chance at murder, I straightened up and righted the settee again. I sat down upon it. It smelled better than the carpet. “We never spoke of it. He probably knew I would be… judgmental about the matter.”

  The king of Velonya made to sit beside me and then thought better of it. “And yet you lived with… you lived unmarried for so many years with the Lady Charlan Bannering.”

  His entry into my own private history offended me, but I considered that this man, being king, had no privacy himself and I reined myself in. “Arlin and I could not marry, because I was dispossessed and dared not have legitimate offspring. Nobles are jealous of their possessions, whether old or newfound.”

  I don’t know if Benar had been given that explanation for the long, central scandal of my life. He was enough a king that I could not read it in his face. He merely nodded. “Nobles are also ambitious for new possessions. Is this not the real explanation for the rebellion in Norwess?”

  I gazed at his wary, expressionless face and felt a strong desire to spank the king. I could not think what good that would serve, so instead I answered, “Nobles are ambitious, certainly, but had Rudof died by falling off his horse, I think there would be no war today.

  “Listen to me, Benar. Perhaps I am also ambitious. My aunt in Rezhmia has promised to recognize me as rightful king of Velonya. The connection with your line is tenuous, but with enough regiments in occupation—Rezhmian regiments—it will become more convincing. You see, the Rezhmians cannot afford to have a clear enemy on their northwestern border. They intend to take Velonya out while it is at war with itself…”

  “A war they themselves have financed and fomented!”

  “No!” I shouted. “No. Wait until you see what sort of war the sanaur’l could finance and… and foment, if she desires. What you have is Velonyan outrage, and most ironically, it is outrage at foreign intervention.

  “Benar, a large percentage of Velonya wishes your mother and her whole tribe to hell. Get used t
o it. Deal with that or you cannot deal as king of Velonya.”

  Anger had overcome Benar’s wariness, and he sat himself on the settee with me and pointed a finger. “First you tell me you’re going to be king of Velonya and then you dare to lecture me on top of it.”

  I slapped the finger away. “I don’t want to be king. I loathe the prospect. At my age, too! But I look at you and I don’t think you’re big enough to save me from it!”

  “Look who is talking about ‘big’!” shouted the young king, and then the door opened and Count Dinaos stepped in. We both stared.

  “Forgive the interruption, sir. That geography you recommended. You said it was here…?”

  King Benar had been reading from a book of maps, which now lay spine-spread against a bookcase with its pages like crushed feathers beneath it. Without will, the king stared toward the book, which Dinaos retrieved. Leaning against the case, he smoothed the abused paper, page by page.

  “How are you here?” I asked. I found my hands were folded in my lap. I was blinking.

  “By packet, of course,” he said. “Much faster that way. And of course, more civilized than riding the roads.”

  I cleared my throat, which had grown slightly hoarse. “And your shoulder?”

  He rolled it tentatively. “Not perfect. But it is better every day, thanks to you and the doctor.”

  “I don’t know about this,” said the king, looking from one of us to the other. The spell of good manners had somehow taken control of the situation, and he seemed as disinclined to continue shouting as I was. “Are you acquainted with my mother’s cousin, Nazhuret?”

  I, in my turn, stared at Dinaos. “Not with your mother’s cousin, exactly, sir. With a fellow traveler on a boat, who does most excellent oils, yes.”

  “You flatter me, Nazhuret,” Dinaos said, not meaning it. He closed the book. “We never traded genealogies. Why should we have?” He smiled smoothly, bowed to us both, and opened the door.