Lens of the World

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Through an extended study of the headstones and markers, I realized the extent of the influenza epidemic that had touched both Powl and myself in the previous winter. There were dozens of graves bearing death dates from the first month of this year, most of them of people under twenty or over fifty years of age.

  I imagine many of these victims had to wait for spring to be planted, for there can only be a certain number of graves predug before the frost, and no one expects an epidemic. This year the sexton had learned his lesson, and there were rows of empty holes and no one dying.

  I took to doing my day’s sitting in the chapel, finishing with a short intercession for the dead (my hosts, as it were) to God the Father, God the Mother, and the God Who Is in Us All, but my notion of deity had changed so in the past year that I think this was more a social than a religious exercise. I also meditated in the empty graves, which seemed much more meaningful (like the empty belly of the wolf). The chill I received in my knees from this particular activity still bothers me in some weathers.

  Powl found me there once, sitting in an open grave. What could he say? He had never forbidden me to sit in graves. He led me home, for the weather had unexpectedly cleared and he wanted spend the night correcting Adlar’s charts for the November sky.

  Winter is the time when people go mad, drink themselves to death, or kill other people. This winter was the time I tried to seduce Powl.

  I had had no experience with women, except that wary and childish summer with Lady Charlan so many years ago, and I did not connect such tentative feelings with the physical brutality I had suffered even earlier in my childhood, at the hands of the schoolmasters. My obsession with Powl had some of the feelings of passive disgrace I remembered from my days of being boy-raped, combined with a large share of the entrancement of my puppy love. I analyzed my feelings only when I could not avoid doing so—perhaps three or four times a day. They were, however, very compelling.

  From this vantage point, I think the best explanation is that I did not have enough to live on. Though I had conversation and human touch in abundance for six hours each day, that was not enough for the body and brain of twenty years. Perhaps no amount is enough for twenty years. I was in superb health, save the one bout of influenza, and I had nothing to do with eighteen hours of the day but expect the arrival of Powl for the other six.

  (Or perhaps all this argument is merely to excuse a part of myself with which I am not now very comfortable. I will try, at least, to be honest.)

  I never sat down and admitted to myself that I wanted to encourage Powl to have sexual intercourse with me, no more than any farm girl might when trying to catch the eye of the landlord’s son. But my actions were on purpose, as hers are.

  I was not aggressive, but instead more docile, tending to go limp in practice, letting his weight rest upon me, trying to fulfill his commands before they were asked. I ceased looking at him directly. I froze under his touch.

  Alone, the awfulness of what I was doing (considering my past experience with buggery) would overwhelm me, but the awfulness was part of the attraction. Horror wipes away boredom very effectively.

  Powl pretended to be oblivious to all these games for about a week, and then one morning, on the icy turf, when I pulled such a slack, clinging stunt, he threw me away from him, quite forcefully. He went into the observatory and came back with his boiled-wool coat, holding out a gold half regal.

  “Here,” he said, dropping it into my hand. “Go visit a whorehouse. Make sure she’s healthy. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  I stared at the coin for an hour, and then I buried it under an oak tree. That simply was my spell of randiness broken.

  It cannot have been too long after this that the soldier came to the observatory, and my shyness was overcome by necessity.

  He was not by any means the first visitor since my residence. Locals passed by the squat building every few weeks, and once a man tethered three goats in the field, without any regard for the rights of the property owner. Boys had come climbing once or twice, and there was a day when I stood below the roof slot by the eyepiece of the telescope, ready to catch young mischief as he fell and either save his life or kill him, depending on whether he had damaged the works, so much had I identified myself with Powl and his interests. But the boy never made it higher than the clerestories, which were too narrow to permit the passage of a good-sized body. I never exchanged a word with the passersby. I imagine they were ignorant of my existence.

  This fellow was different. He came out of the trees, followed a shadow to the brick wall, and circumambulated the observatory, hunched over and pausing at times to listen.

  I had been sitting on the root of a tree at the time, doing my daily self-collection, and so I heard him come from a distance away, and I watched him.

  I called him a soldier before, but he was not a man-at-arms as I was, or was to have been. He was instead (I know in retrospect) that unfortunate thing called a campaign recruit, enlisted out of some furrow or gutter for the duration of the Felink excursion and cashiered afterward. By this method many wolves are made out of harmless vagabonds, and this one still wore his russet army jacket, over the white canvas breeches of a kitchen man. He had one woolen stocking but two shoes. He had some excuse for a sword. Like the turner and the gardener, he moved as though it hurt.

  Finishing his circuit, he came to the oak door and peered within. Quiet to his eye and quiet to his ear. He pushed the door, which was, of course, unlocked, and went in. I followed him, not very closely, leaving my high clogs at the door. I found him at the grinding bench, dropping all the lenses and blanks into a sack.

  I was far less afraid than I had been in my meeting with the farm wife. I paused to adjust my languages and said, “You will scratch them like that, and they will be worthless.”

  His sword was a saber, and he drew it out of its cheap board scabbard with both hands, cocked it back over one shoulder, and swung to split me in half at the neck.

  I suspected the man was sick, for his movements were lackluster though his face was a grin of hostility. I ducked under the blow, watching him, and as the weapon continued under its own impetus, wrapping his arms to the right, I simply pinned them there and rapped him smartly over the nose.

  I picked up the sword as he dropped it.

  Fury became fear in his face and he scrabbled for the door, leaving the sack behind. I thought to let him go, but on impulse tried a casual foot trip, which took him down on the flagstones. Holding to his regulation collar and the slack of his liveried breeches, I slid the man over the floor on his knees and locked him in the room with the experimental earth closet, to wait for Powl’s judgment. If he dug his way out, he would save me much labor.

  He did not attempt to dig, but bawled and cursed me all night long.

  Before producing him for my teacher the next morning, I warned Powl that the man was likely sick and possibly contagious. Powl rounded his wide-apart eyes and went to see for himself. He crawled up the wall (much more proficiently than any invading boy) and peered through the tiny window.

  “He doesn’t look sick to me,” Powl said, coming back to earth. “But he has pissed in the corner. What an absurdity, with the facility in the middle of the floor as it is. “I’m something of an amateur of medicine, Nazhuret. Let us look at your sick soldier.” So bright and interested did Powl look that I swelled with pride at having for once been able to give him something he did not already have; an experimental subject.

  Now that I examine the matter, I realize he had even that.

  I unlocked the door and was forced to knock the man down again as he broke past me for the opening. I brought him forward in a simple hammerlock, and Powl, without a word, examined his ears, gums, and eyelids.

  “Why did you think he is sick?” Powl asked me in our current language, as pleasantly as any doctor called by a father to his child’s bedside.

  “He staggers, of course. He has no balance; he can scarcely stand without help, and then
he is confused.”

  Powl stepped back, appraisingly. “Let him go,” he said.

  I did so, and the soldier ran to the hall and out the door, skidding on the flagstones. He left behind both his sack and his saber.

  “He’s not sick at all, Nazhuret,” said Powl, washing his hands. “It’s just that you have grown unused to people. And if another sneak thief happens by, please boot him out and don’t detain him. I want to remain as invisible as possible up here. It’s not as though I own this building, after all.”

  “You don’t?”

  His glance at me showed he was very pleased with himself. Powl was wearing a new hat over his half-bald head: a russet felt with flecks of red and blue. “Oh, no. It belonged to Adlar and now, since the man’s suicide, to his heirs—not that they are likely to have any interest in astronomy.”

  “The astronomer killed himself?” I had forgotten that.

  “Yes. Hanged himself from that crossbeam there. I merely found him.”

  Very clearly did I remember how that first afternoon I had seen Powl dangling, booted feet in the air, from the window-shade pull, and I felt much more in the stomach at hearing this than I had when the soldier had tried to slice off my head.

  Powl put his arm over my shoulder. “Don’t go green, lad. We all die. You’ve done so already, haven’t you?” When this had no effect, or at least no good effect on me, he continued, “… and by the by, are you aware that for now there is no one at Sordaling School, not master, instructor, or student, and probably no one man of the king’s regular forces who could stand against you?”

  As I stood gawking, almost offended by such an outrageous statement, Powl went to assay the damage to the lenses in the bag. “Of course, men’s skills vary a lot day to day, and then the arts of war are a very minor study. You still have very bad grammar,” he added, and I was sensibly relieved.

  As the summer of my second year in the observatory drew to a close, I passed some sort of balance point in my studies. It occurred to me one evening, as I was setting up the telescope for a clear night’s watch that this period of my life would end as all the others had ended, and unless I got the influenza again, or Powl hit me on the head too hard, there would be time after. I had no notion yet what that time would contain, but the fact that it interested me changed my attitude to my present studies.

  I began to decide myself when I should sit, when I should work out, watch, and (of course) grind glass. I faced the bricks in the early morning after feeding the stove. I did exercises after breakfast and studied in the heat of the day.

  Within a week after I had passed this point of balance (though I said nothing aloud), Powl started to take me on excursions. He arrived in the morning with a rucksack stuffed with coarse-weave linen, the same as my summer outfit, and I had the educational experience of seeing my dapper teacher make a peasant of himself.

  That first day we went nowhere much, just down the deerpath to the road and right, until we came to a knot of men repairing the road, where Powl stopped, sagged against a tree, and gossiped with them, adopting a strong Zaquashlon accent and idiom for the purpose. In this conversation I first learned about the war of the previous year and the death of the old king, and very surprised I was, too. My single attempt to interject myself into the conversation met a startled glance from the smudgy crew and a nudge from Powl that almost knocked me down.

  “Don’t you want me to talk properly?” I asked him when we had left them behind us. “You have been correcting my pronunciation and grammar for two years!”

  “I want you to talk like a courtier and write like a scholar,” he answered. “But by choice—not because you have no other language.”

  “I have three, thanks to you.”

  “Weel, learn ’tother new,” said Powl, and for the next two weeks he spoke nothing but South Zaquash and made me do the same.

  We went to the Royal Library at Sordaling, and I was flinchy as an owl in my townie clothes, which now were too tight across the shoulders (though no shorter in the legs, alas) and two years out of style. Walking down the River Parade took great courage; though I knew I had broken no laws in leaving the school, had anyone recognized me, I surely would have broken and run. My old life and my new one seemed to batter their realities against one another, and there was only my same ugly face in the reflection of every shop window to tie them together. As we passed the flower market, the sight of Powl moving before the scenes of my young recreation was unnerving, because so natural. A well-dressed and very graceful gentleman strolling a street of gardens and fine shops.

  I was the element out of place.

  In the library Powl showed a pass that served to admit us both and he disappeared into the history shelves, leaving me to follow my own impulses.

  I was not familiar with the classification, since our school library used only ten categories and alphabetical listing within them, but I found a volume of very expert prints, hand-tinted, of tropical birds, and that kept me for some time. After that I found the section called Celestial Mechanics and was amazed to discover that almost all their information was obsolete or simply inaccurate. Most of the telescopes described were of the open refractor variety, consisting of a large spherically ground lens on a pole and a hand-held eyepiece that the observer chased around with until he had found the focal distance for himself. Irritating as squatting in nettles.

  Powl had found another book of pictures, and he lowered it down atop my small stack. It was a catalog of military costumes, and that he wanted to show it to me I found amusing. Every sign on my part of interest in the arts of war was met by Powl with denigration or irony, and yet his own preoccupation with the subject ever surpassed mine.

  The picture portraying the Velonyan mounted in armor was a very fine etching of a blond man, handsome in face and large in scale, seated on a heavy horse and wearing heavier plate. It was titled “THE DUKE OF NORWESS, IN ACTION AGAINST REZHMIA.”

  “What do you think?” Powl asked me.

  “We studied that campaign. Disastrous. I think he must have been half boiled and half frozen going into the eastern desert in that. Even twenty-five years ago people must have known how to dress for a dry climate.”

  Powl stared rather sharply, and I apologized for the volume of my voice. Living in total solitude does not encourage modulation.

  “The Rezhmian excursion was not in all ways a failure, Nazhuret. And concerning the picture, I meant to show you… the quality of the reproduction. Look at the fineness of the lines.”

  I admitted it to be striking.

  “Even for talents of twenty-five years ago,” he added, with more than his usual irony. “Look at this other one.”

  The horse was much lighter and so was the rider. He wore no flowing robes and no armor except a leather cuirass, and his black hair flew behind him in a braid. “Also very good, Powl. Mostly artists make the Red Whips look like so many apes. This one looks at least human.”

  “True, O scholar, but note that the picture is not one of the pony brigands, but a knight of the Sanaur of Rezhmia itself—one of the fellows who made such a disaster of that campaign.”

  He slammed the book shut almost on my nose.

  Walking out of the library, Powl was very quiet—offended, I guessed. I wasn’t sure in what way I had blundered, so I kept my mouth shut and waited for him to tell me. He did, before we had reached the gates of the old part of the city.

  “It is a provincial, narrow-minded attitude to see another group of people as looking more like animals than our own race,” he stated, his face pointed straight ahead.

  “I didn’t, exactly—”

  “They say we have faces like horses.”

  This was a new idea. I played with it for a few city blocks, evaluating each innocent passerby. “For some the idea has merit,” I said to Powl in an attempt to be truly broad-minded. “The traditional Old Velonyan nobility is supposed to have a long face with high-bridged nose and straight mouth, though few, indeed, fit that mo
del.” I extended my observations to my teacher himself, with his oval face; neat features; and wide, wide gray eyes. I was convinced, nonetheless, that Powl was Old Velonyan nobility. “But I don’t think your face looks at all like a horse.”

  Now he looked straight at me. “Neither does yours,” he said without smiling.

  I think it was on that same day trip that Powl and I noticed the robbers ahead beside the road. I saw a movement, and by the twitch of his nose, I think Powl smelled them. There were two of them, and I could see at least one heavy club waving brown against the black and white woods as its carrier settled in place for the pounce. Powl and I drifted to a stop a good hundred fifty feet away and conferred.

  “There’s been a lot of that,” said Powl very calmly, facing me to the north but with his attention locked northwest, along the road. “What with the flu and the war and all.” He scratched his chin and cracked his back; a very picture of nonchalance.

  “So what shall we do about them?” I asked, feeling a youthful eagerness to display myself.

  Powl scanned the country, not turning completely away from the twin black humps, which were now motionlessly waiting ahead behind the first row of trees. “I think we might turn off here and come back to the road perhaps a mile farther along. There are some very interesting growths of fungus I have seen in these oak woods that I would like to visit anyway.”

  “Not this early in the spring, Powl. No fungus now. Besides, shouldn’t we teach them a lesson?”

  He winced. “Nazhuret, I have difficulty enough teaching you lessons, without sparing effort for common brute marauders.” Powl stepped daintily onto a deer track that crossed the road very near where we had stopped. I plucked at his sleeve and did not follow.

  “But if we leave them, won’t they attack the next poor traveler and perhaps kill him?”