Lens of the World

by R. A. MacAvoy

  He looked up past the foot that was holding his face down and made the three-finger signal for yield. “Enough. Let me up. Only don’t go blabbing… that around town or you’ll get worse answer than mine.” He stood up. Because the street was frozen, he had acquired very little dirt, and this he allowed me to help brush off. “You ought to know,” he said somewhat sullenly, somewhat shamefacedly, “that when you’re half-breed especially, family becomes important, because so many babies of mixed parentage are children of… of—”

  “Prostitutes,” I finished for him. “I imagine so. But in my case I don’t think that was likely.”

  No. It was more likely, given my age and upbringing, that my mother was the victim of rape.

  Almost certainly it had been my mother’s birth that had gotten me into the Royal School at Sordaling, for few men would feel such an obligation to a by-blow by a foreign woman, paid or not. Perhaps my mother was a young noblewoman or gentrywoman seduced by a member of a diplomatic embassy, or by a rich merchant in the foreign quarter of some Velonyan city, but I doubted that. The appearance of a Rezhmian is not prepossessing to gently raised Velonyan females. I thought it rather more likely that she had been one of the numerous wives who had followed the king’s last incursion south, thinking it a lark and themselves above all harm, and who had found themselves amid an alien army without protection.

  That seemed to explain everything: my family’s lack of interest in me; my admission to the school (both by virtue of the woman’s blood and her husband’s); and my face, hitherto thought by myself to be unique. It only required that I be a few years older than I thought I had been.

  Powl had known. Probably from that first odd look he had given me as I entered the room. Certainly from the moment I gave him my name, which he had pronounced quite correctly and I never had. “Nazhuret,” I had now learned, was a Rezhmian name, not too common, originally of the God of the Underworld and now occasionally bestowed upon boy babies.

  What had Powl called me at first? “The King of the Dead,” his words had been. In a way he made me so, but that had always been my name. My teacher had been discreet. Had he thought the information of my birth would drive me to despair, or had he simply thought it in bad taste?

  Not the latter, for he had spoken of our hereditary enemies as a very civilized and interesting people, and he had taught me their language with enthusiasm.

  It would be significant to me, he had said. He had expected me to come this way. Perhaps coming home. Perhaps his silence had been only one of his dry jokes, and now I had hit the punchline. Or perhaps he had kept quiet because he thought telling me my origins was one more item that was not his business.

  I end this long discursion and return to Warvala in winter.

  I had a reasonable success as a translator, especially when there were to be records kept of the interchange. There was more demand for such skill than I would have thought, for few Northerners bothered to learn the language, and most of the émigrés were not lettered people. My accent was a matter of amusement, for as it turned out my Rayzhia was courtly, of the South (trust Powl to make sure of that), and very few of the traders of Warvala spoke its like. Neither, however, did they object to having a functionary with such elegant drawling vowels, even if he did have hair like a dandelion.

  Yule came and went. I spent the holiday alone, but then we had never marked it out at the observatory, either. I was invited to the Deepyear celebrations of Pasten’s silk warehouse, however, and danced the fire dance and the sword dance and drank spirits of cherry, a southern specialty, very soft on the tongue and deadly the next day.

  I had so much money I bought lens blanks by the dozen and ground them into spectacles for old men and women who otherwise would have squinted the rest of their lives away.

  One of these, a goodwife born in Bologhini and possessing no Velonyan, rewarded me by instruction in all that an educated boy must know, which I had obviously missed by being brought up by the savages of the northern forests. She taught me the proper address to court a girl of rank above, equal to, or below myself. (Certainly there were few in the latter category.) She taught me how to bow, and the techniques of disciplining the mind, which must be learned in various stages to distract the chittering rats that are our thoughts. In turn I told her my history of the black wolf of Gelley, which Powl had

  set upon me and which likely would pursue me for the rest of my life, and she retracted everything she had said concerning my education, for this teacher, she stated, had been a master of the mind.

  The library let me go in midwinter, for the janitor’s son had come up from the country and it was thought proper he have the job. I did not repine, for they left me my reading privileges, and I found new work keeping order in the Yellow Coach, a large tavern in the foreign quarter, I made conversation in two languages and was very polite in showing the door to the overly enthused. It was light work.

  It was an evening in early spring, and I was hovering over the table of my sometimes patron, the silk merchant, who was having difficulties with the emissary from Sordaling Tailories. This man made a practice of being rude, whether only to Rezhmians or in general I had not the opportunity to discover. Pasten knew the man was being rude—his Vesting was not bad—but in translation I turned the Tailories man’s demands into polite circumlocutions and thus Pasten was able to pretend they had not been said.

  There was some dust of snow on the ground still, but the smell of the day’s air had left no doubt in mind that the season had changed.

  Like all changes of season, this had put me out of context with the affairs of my life. Change was everywhere, and anything had a chance of happening. What did happen was that Arlin walked into the door of the Yellow Coach, complete with his velvets, his dirt, and his jeweled rapier.

  The outfit was silver in color, which went well with his dark hair and fair skin and hardly seemed grubby at all. He even had a cape of fur over his shoulders, and his face was weather-scrubbed, if not by water.

  I gave him a wave of recognition and he stared at me blankly for some moments before sinking into a chair. I concluded my business as quickly as I could and sat down beside him. My friend the bartender sent over the boy with two glasses of hot ale.

  Arlin was much impressed. To the edge of laughter, perhaps. “Zhurrie! Old stoat, do you own this place? And how is it you preside over a convocation of cat yowls like that one?”

  I denied ownership of the Yellow Coach entirely and explained my position. I also explained, with my new Rayzhian indirection and delicacy, that I would pay for his drinks as long as he wished to sit here, but that he would not be allowed to gamble in this house. (I had discovered in myself a nose for card trickery in the past few months. I owe that to him.)

  His eyes gave one silver glint, but he did not dispute my authority nor my logic.

  “And as for the translating, well, I am half Rezhmian after all.” I had gotten to the point where I could say this with no outward flinch. “Like many in the southern territories.”

  Arlin goggled at me but managed to say quite calmly, “Indeed, Nazhuret. And have you always been half Rezhmian, or is this a recent development? I never heard you rattle off in that tongue before.”

  “I learned it a few years ago.”

  “After you left the school?”

  His curiosity was so pointed it left me uncomfortable. “Yes, of course. After. You must remember Rayzhia is not offered—”

  “While you were studying optics?”

  “Exactly then,” I said in a voice of great finality, which affected him not at all.

  “And where did you pick up sorcery, Nazhuret?” He lifted his mug with a complacent smile as I gaped at him. “What did you do about the werewolves?”

  “I know nothing about werewolves,” I said. It was both true and heartfelt, but I spoke in the intonation of Powl at his most waspish, and as Arlin only looked cunning and answered, “You’re keeping something from me, you weasel,” I realized I had take
n the role and attitude my teacher had taken whenever I had accused him of being a magician. Whenever I had asked him to explain more than could be explained. I felt harried and without patience.

  “How goes the king’s progress?” I asked in turn, and Arlin let me turn the conversation. “Long over for the year, I suppose.”

  “It has begun again for the new year, as you can see by my presence in this charming backwater. He goes to assure himself that his territories are secure against southern invasion.”

  Twice, in the course of the winter, my face and my fluency with Rayzhia had caused young Rezhmian hotspurs to forget themselves in front of me and to utter remarks prejudicial to Velonya, and in particular toward Velonyan administration of the territories. Both times I was forced to floor the fellows before they could commit themselves to anything demanding greater violence on my part. I was well aware there were tensions.

  I had not heard anything of an attempt at the border, however. I asked the young gambler what reason there was to expect the Sanaur to break treaty after twenty-five years of peace.

  Arlin gave me a superior smile, mouth closed. “Not the High Sanaur, Nazhuret. Worse, for that could be dealt with in civilized fashion. It is the Red Whips who are massing against us.” The smile opened out. “As a half Rezhmian yourself, I would have thought you would know that already.”

  My answer was delayed by a raising of voices a few tables over, where (if I remember correctly) someone had mistaken another man’s wife for something different. By the time I returned, I had had time to think on things.

  “No, Arlin. To speak of the Red Whips massing is to speak of wildcats banding together or hawks perhaps. They travel and raid in clans, and their hate of one another—”

  “Is dominated only by their hate of the North,” he finished for me. He pointed his mug in my direction, perhaps for emphasis or to make known that it had become empty. “You do not believe me; only go see.”

  I filled it from mine, which I had not touched. “What would I see, other than a parade of nobles moving very slowly and a king no older than I am? You can hardly expect an army preparing for invasion to display itself upon the horizon for the benefit of a tourist like myself.”

  Arlin put the glass down, undrunk. His long face, always elegant, became beautiful when in earnest. “A tourist like yourself? Zhurrie, I remember when you called yourself a blood knight and had best cause to do so.”

  I had to laugh. Had I ever been such a dewy fool? “At that time, a better word for me would have been ‘schoolboy.’”

  His mood had changed again. “But anyway, isn’t it worth a journey of forty miles to meet the king of Velonya? As a student of Sordaling—”

  Now it was my turn to cut him off. “Meet the king? Nothing I’d like less. In fact, the thought makes me want to head north right now, without my clogs on my feet.”

  “Well, then see him at a distance. Every Velonyan must want to see his king, and it could be your only chance, if you insist on haunting the far territories like this.”

  Arlin hit a chord in me with this suggestion. Powl had talked about the new king. Had been enthused about him. He was very popular, even in Warvala, where Velonyan rule was more theory than fact. He was said to be very handsome, or at least brilliant in color.

  And the smell of the season had changed that day.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll go south with you.”

  Arlin’s long face grew longer in surprise. “With me? That was not my suggestion, schoolmate. I’m very picky about the men with whom I travel.”

  “So am I,” I answered him, thinking of his grime, his smell. “In fact, I am so picky as not to appreciate men at all.”

  His grin said that he knew a few things I didn’t. “You speak out of ignorance.”

  Evidently Arlin had not shared my early years at Sordaling. I was beginning to place him in time by the things he said. Too old to have been in danger of rape, but too long in the past for me to remember. About the swan boat time, when I was walking abroad a lot. “I speak out of better knowledge than I wish I had. So often was I held down and raped as a boy that I wished my breeches glued on and my backside glued to a bench.”

  Arlin’s face floated between amazement and disbelief. “You, Nazhuret? Forced? You? I can’t believe it of—” “Why not? They did not have to look at my face that way,” I said, and thereby embarrassed myself so that I found excuse to leave the table.

  We did not travel together after all, because Arlin had a horse and I did not. I tracked him south down the soggy road. The land changed decidedly in my first day’s march, from the rutted lowland and maple ridges of Zaquash to hills rolling like a shaken blanket, going up and down but mostly up. The trees gave way to pine and then gave way entirely, exposing me in openness like that I had never known before in my life. I imagined it was what the ocean must look like: broad, rolling, but without concealment. The sky seemed to reduce me to insect proportions, and I had been small enough already.

  I was seeing the beginnings of the plains and seeing them at their springtime best, tinted with yellow eranthis and early lupine. Despite the prettiness, there was something formal and ponderous in so much visible distance. I felt I ought to be thinking in large concepts, and in rebellion I kicked a pebble along the road.

  Atop one particularly crested hill I stopped to stretch out and practice my hedger forms, entertaining the huge, cloudy sky. The world was spread out below, and one gray, glimmering dot was Arlin, or his horse at least, trotting easily toward the pale distance. He probably would reach that smudge that was a village before nightfall. I doubted I would.

  Left of him and somewhat beyond was a herd of red deer, or perhaps cows shrunk by perspective. I took out my glass and assembled it.

  They were men on horses, and much farther away than had appeared. I wondered if I were looking at the king.

  I did reach the town (not a village at all), but Arlin had gone on. The inhabitants of the downs seemed to be as crossbred as I was by their appearance, and not a lot larger. This was a pleasant discovery. I went to the homeliest of the two inns and was immediately recognized as the peacekeeper from the Yellow Coach, whereby the landlady stood me to ale, and we exchanged pleasantries of the publican business.

  “By your face, coloring, and your name,” she said after some minutes, “I’d suppose you to be Fortress Rezhmia. But you talk like North Vestinglon itself. That’s a combination we don’t get much.” There were so many surprises in her one statement that it shut me up for a moment.

  I hadn’t realized I had let my accent slip, but now it was too late to repair that. In the speech of Sordaling I answered her, “Name and face—maybe face—are southern, mistress, but how can you claim my yellow hair as Rezhmian?”

  She brushed her own dark hair out of her face. “Not Zaquash-Rezhmian, of course. I mean the city. There’re plenty of blonds down there in the city.”

  I must have looked disbelieving, for I was. The man seated closest to my right got a laugh out of my expression. “She means because of the slaves. The nobles down there have a fancy for pale-skinned women in their beds. Have so for hundreds of years, so of course the hair crops up now and then.”

  The landlady cleared her throat mightily. “Lendall, you can turn anything into an insult. I never said a word about this man being no slave.”

  “Nor did I,” said Lendall. “I only said that there were slaves, and that’s why the hair!” I broke in to say I was not insulted at all, merely amazed, for I had never heard this before.

  Lendall had a Velonyan name, but he looked southern and not at all blond. “Oh, it’s sure. They took their choice of women, not longer than thirty years ago, didn’t they?” The landlady gave him a glance with teeth in it but refused to be drawn to argument, and I went out to lie in the stable and think about things.

  The fortress city. I could speak the language. I could go down there and find my exact double. Perhaps. For months previous I had thought that in coming
to the territories I had found my natural place, or as close to it as I ever would find. Now I had a new and more colorful vision to pursue.

  I had been going south for a long time, anyway.

  I followed Arlin for three days, and after the first day I fell no farther behind. His speed on that first day’s travel seemed to me designed only to leave me behind, and having accomplished that, he proceeded as his lazy, elegant self. The second night I spent sleeping under that very broad bowl of stars, and on the third the hills had shrunk to ripples on the landscape no larger than houses, and the wind blew through my homespun as though I were naked. I passed a thing such as I had never seen before: a hamlet of some eight buildings and a cattle pen burned to the ground. Not even the driven palings of the fence had survived the flames. The black ruins had been rained on, perhaps snowed on also, but they were obviously less than a season old. I walked down what had been a street and that now was paved with

  glossy black bits of charcoal that had recently been carpenters wood. The stones of the houses had fallen and scattered, and no living creature was to be found except for great numbers of crows.

  I was young enough to be fascinated by ruins (I still am), and I wandered in and out of the foundations, hoping to find either an explanation of the misfortune or at least a poignant reminder. I found nothing but the scattered bones of a dog. Passing back to the road, I discovered a patch of broken earth, some four yards square, not mounded but rain-sunk, with a large staff surmounted by the Holy Triangle. It was all very crude. I stepped close, but as soon as my foot touched the loose soil it began to sink, and I chose to go no farther. My hair stood all on end with the knowledge that I was sinking into a mass grave. Below the sacred sign a paper had been tacked, but the ink on it had run the whole thing sky blue. As I walked on, I noticed that something had dug a hole slanting into one corner of the square, something the size of a large dog.