Lens of the World

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Two more riders, dressed darker than the dead scouts, were trotting at the grassy shoulder of the far side. They were so far ahead of us that we could not tell whether they were wearing the black and yellow of the field marshal’s personal horsemen or the rough leather and bright silk of the nomads. Fortunately, I had had the forethought to assemble my spyglass before leaving camp, and now Arlin pulled it from the top of my pack and put it to his eyes. “Ours,” he said at last. “And a couple of fools, too: riding down the road as though down Barya Boulevard with girls admiring them. We can catch up with them and tell them what we have seen.” His mare turned on her hindquarters, leaped back over the stream like a deer, and continued north. I followed on my old gentleman as best we might. I doubted the field marshal’s scouts had anything of interest to tell us, or they would have turned back to report. The prints of the enemy embossed the wet ground all around us: dozens of horses. I wondered if Arlin had any notion where he was going. For myself, the hair on my arms and neck was beginning to rise up with fear.

  In only two minutes we had come even with the Velonyans, and Arlin followed a path between two grassy mounds to the road. I followed after, glad to see no hoofprints going in our immediate direction.

  The scouts were halted together, and one was pointing up and ahead of him. We were so close I could see the horses’ breath fogging in the air. Arlin hailed from the other side of the road and both men started in their saddles, put their hands to their swords, and turned to stare at us, their faces empty of any expression except surprise.

  Another cry came from the road ahead, and without warning the road two hundred feet ahead was crawling with small, ewe-necked, slab-sided, slope-rumped horses ridden by men no handsomer than they.

  Arlin opened his mouth and pointed at the two scouts, who were so terribly close to the enemy. “We can’t help them!” I shouted. “Run! Run!” His mare wheeled, and my horse let himself be hauled around. Neither was a dull brute, and they took off with a will down the rutted road. Through the crisis of the moment I was kept aware of the old gelding’s spine.

  Arlin looked back over his shoulder. “They’ll never catch us, riding those!” he called. Lest he become overconfident, I answered, “They don’t have to!” I, too, looked back, just in time to see the first of the stubby arrows of the Rezhmians sail close between us.

  Arlin gaped, disbelieving, but Arlin seemed to share the Velonyan contempt for foreign customs and weapons: contempt built on perfect ignorance. Powl had made sure I knew that the Red Whip archers were superior to ours—it was to be expected in a people who both hunt and fight from running horses. Remember, my king, it is not illegal for a common man of that nation to possess a bow.

  I had no chance to share any of this knowledge with my companion, for even as I noted the accuracy over distance of our pursuers, one of their shots hit my horse just above the hock. The beast plunged, floundered, and went down on his knees, leaving me standing beside him, watching the assassins come on. They shouted a welcome as they saw me before them.

  Arlin committed an act of great stupidity. He skidded his mare to a stop and spun her once more. I screamed for him to go on, I stamped in place, but the gray mare’s legs bunched beneath her and she leaped back the way she had come. He was above me, he had me by the back of the collar and was trying unsuccessfully to haul me up in front of him, and then I saw him flinch, clawing at his right arm. I grabbed his leg and the saddle and I jumped up behind.

  The mare took a hit as well, glancing off her croup, which served only to urge her more heroically on. Arrows hissed around us, then clattered at her hooves and then fell too far behind for me to hear. The shouts of the riders also faded, but I could hear them screaming, “Old horse! The old horse!” for five very nasty minutes. I wondered if any had stopped to put my old horse out of its agony.

  Arlin was rigid with pain, and the hand that held the reins gripped white-knuckled the high pommel of the saddle. His other hand he had thrust into the lacings of his jacket, and the arrowhead through his upper arm looked too bloody and awful to be real. With a word of warning I pressed the arrow farther through. Arlin screamed like a cat in anger, and the horse hopped once and went on. I reached around him with both arms and broke off the triangular steel arrowhead. With the movement of the horse it was a very rough business, and Arlin almost went off the horse. When I could let him go again I pulled the arrowhead out from behind.

  The overburdened mare was booming like a drum with every step, and her lungs also were beginning to whistle. We were going slower now, and I looked back to find our lead only five hundred feet. There were perhaps thirty of the nomads behind us, and their ugly ponies seemed to have as good a wind as Arlin’s high-bred dancer.

  It stumbled, and Arlin cried out from the shock on his wound. Our pursuers cried out also, like hounds who see the hare before them. The mare went on.

  Before us was a tiny settlement I could not remember having seen on the way north. But it was not by the road; it was in the road, and the houses were on wheels. I was looking at the wagons of the king’s company, standing all alone with their draft horses standing placidly in sixes before them. I could not understand, but as we came I shouted a warning, as though our appearance weren’t warning enough.

  We pulled even with the first wagon, which had wheels that rose above my head and sides of waxed canvas. I reached around and gave the horse a check, for Arlin was too near fainting to do it himself. I looked back at the Red Whip riders; the sight of the king’s supply wagons had not daunted them in the least. They would be with us in seconds. In mystification I glanced down left and right at the ground and saw the marks of the king’s soldiers leaking away into the hills.

  “Behind the wagons!”

  I could not locate the voice, but I had a sudden insight, and I let the mare’s failing momentum take us down the row of wheels.

  We turned behind the last of the abandoned vehicles just as our pursuers came even with the first. They divided, so as to squeeze us between them, and they cantered along each side of the road. I could hear the noises of their horses’ breathing, much like the gray mare’s but multiplied by number. Arlin gasped and spoke. “I’m sorry, optician,” he said, and he put his good hand over mine. “I should have left you content back in Warvala.”

  “I still am content,” I said, though it was only true in certain ways. I had my hedger in my hand, though much good it was going to do me. Then came a beaten gong, the canvas sides of the wagons all rolled up together, and a dozen primed harquebuses were fired point-blank into the lines of the Red Whips.

  The mare was no cavalry horse. Both Arlin and I were in the air, and when we landed, he was on me and I was on my back. The infantrymen hidden in the wagons swarmed out over what were left of our pursuers, but the eight or ten riders who still were alive and horsed turned with remarkable precision and plunged off the road and into the hills.

  I had shrugged off my pack and picked my companion off the road. The infantry lieutenant sent a man to assist me but I brushed by, denying any help. I did not have to be told where the great mass of the king’s men had concealed themselves, for the broken grass and chopped earth led me right. In a narrow cleft between hills too steep for horses they had deployed themselves, with horse troops and lancers at either exposed opening and a small brass cannon I had not known they were carrying.

  The cavalry opened to let me through with my burden, and there was a well-tailored civilian at my side. “I am the king’s physician. As of yet I have no important wounds to attend to, so I will look at the fellow.”

  His neat jacket and breeches had gold piping at the seams, as Powl had used to wear. Otherwise he did not remind me at all of my teacher. “No, thank you,” I said, stepping smartly by him. “This man belongs to a sect that does not admit the services of a doctor.” I was looking for a tent, box, or large barrel that would give me privacy to pad and wrap the wound, for Arlin was bleeding too heavily to delay any longer.

  “H
e is hardly in any position to enforce his views,” said the doctor with a fruity chuckle, and I explained very firmly to the man that I would do the enforcing.

  There was no such thing as real concealment, for this was not a camp, but with the cooperation of the men a canvas tarpaulin was set up on four short tent poles. Someone also lobbed the doctor of a quantity of gauze and flannel.

  I ripped the velvet sleeve open down the long seam, revealing a shamefully scrawny arm, with the oversized forearm muscles of people who work with their fingers—musicians, sword jugglers, card cheats. The wound had at least bled itself clean, and I had not heard that the nomads poisoned their arrows. I clamped a pad of flannel over both holes and wound gauze tightly over them. “This will have to be loosened every once in a while, or the whole arm will rot off. Can you stay conscious to do that? Can you? Or else I’ll have to ask someone else.”

  Arlin mouthed the word “no.” Then he said, “No one else. But I don’t think it will matter. I’m gone.”

  “Very weak, but not gone,” I said, hoping it were true. And then I added, “I remember you now.”

  Arlin smiled wolfishly. “Do you then? Well, I never forgot. Not anything you taught me.”

  I laughed. “You now excel me by far in tricks, I’ll give you that.”

  The smile went away. “In tricks only. If I die here, Nazhuret, I want you to know that you always have been my ideal of the true knight and gentleman.”

  I thought then that I might faint from astonishment. “By the Triune God, Arlin, I’m neither knight nor gentleman. You’re raving,” I said, and went out. It was easy to get one of the infantry officers to place a foot soldier before the makeshift shelter, with a promise Arlin would not be disturbed.

  I found the king with his field marshal, and as I had come to find usual, they were bickering. The Duke of Leoue was not in favor of packing the company between precipitous hills. They had neither room to fight, he said, nor room to run if the Rezhmians chose to fling down stones. King Rudof, still with his leather helmet over his orange hair, was in no mind to change his unconventional strategies, which had worked so far to his great gain.

  “Thirty years ago my father came south with his head stuffed with such strategies as yours, Leoue, and he left half his men between here and the mountain passes.”

  Apparently the field marshal had forgotten the hat ruse, for he was holding his cavalry helmet under his arm. “I fear this strategy, sir, will not leave so many to tell the story. You have boxed us in like cattle in a pen.”

  He spoke with feeling, and I, who had trained for fifteen years in broad lines, vectors, and squares over the walled field of Sordaling School, could understand the marshal’s distrust. I wondered if the king knew how far the bows of the Red Whips could accurately reach. I was in a position to tell him.

  Both men sat on stock before the same portable table on which I had scrawled my maps the night before. The king’s infantry slouched around in a deceptive disarray, while the cavalry horses stood fully geared, pawing or sleeping or lipping the ground as temperament decreed. A line of servants went around the hill to the road and returned, as disciplined ants, bearing burdens from the wagons on their shoulders. A few more were digging the usual trenches a few hundred feet north of the encampment. Aside from the looming slopes there was no shelter, and the wind blew hard down this cleft in the hills.

  “At least, Leoue, you now seem to believe in the assassination attempt.” King Rudof leaned back over nothing, using his feet locked against the table legs for support. He looked ungainly and entirely at his ease. It seemed to me, as I stood watching, that he was either very used to devising strategies or he had that rare constitution that thrives in an emergency. Either way it would be fortunate for the nation—as long as his strategies were right and the emergencies controlled, of course.

  The field marshal was twenty years older than King Rudof and, like most ranking officers in such a situation, looked worried sick. “Oh, I have always believed there was treachery here, sir,” he said. “I have only been less trusting as to its source. I think we had the instigator in our hands last night and let him get away.”

  As it happens, I was directly behind Field Marshal the Duke of Leoue as he was speaking, and by chance the king met my eyes at the instant my character suffered such calumny. I must have been a grand sight, so covered with Arlin’s blood I looked more like a butcher than a cook in my white linens, and a scratch over my scalp that I do not remember acquiring was bleeding down my head with the energy of a much heavier wound. Immediately the king glanced away again and put one finger into his mouth, as a boy will to smother a grin. “I don’t think it’s fair to say we had him in our hands, Leoue. Not at any moment, as a matter of fact.”

  The duke grunted and also leaned in his chair, but not so dramatically as the king. “It would have been only a matter of time, sir, had you not forbade it.”

  Now King Rudof let the grin appear. “Surely, surely. A line of cannons might have brought him down. Or a concerted press of cavalry, though I’m not so certain of the latter. What do you say, Nazhuret? What force would be necessary to overcome you?”

  The field marshal followed the direction of the king’s gaze and spun to his feet, knocking over the stool, and swung a large, wild fist at my head. I deflected it as respectfully as I could and stepped back from his angry, startled face.

  “To… overcome me, sir?” I said the first thing that came into my head. “A cold in the chest, or any sad story. Or seventy vengeful Red Whip riders, for that is the number I figure to be left out there.” As I spoke, my attention was admittedly on the man before me, as tall as the king and broader and who flexed his hand repeatedly as though he wished it around my neck. “Why did you come back, fellow? Weren’t you grateful to escape with your life? Do you dare to speak more impertinence to your king, or does your Rezhmian blood deny him that position?”

  I had no idea how to answer, for I could not speak of my respect for King Rudof before his face, as though he were the kitchen cat, and neither did I want to offend further the first officer of the Velonyan military. Fortunately, the young king took the problem from me.

  “I think his information is very pertinent,” said King Rudof, rising from his seat with a yawn and crackling his spine left and right. “He has done more than any of our regular scouts—so far, at least.”

  “That, my king, is the other information I have come to tell you,” I said. “Four of your scouts were taken by the enemy. Two Royal Infantry my companion Arlin found stabbed, and two men in your livery, my lord duke, were overrun by the same force that pursued us.”

  The field marshal frowned black at this news, and King Rudof played with the strap of his helmet between his fingers. “That leaves only the four who went south at the crossroads, then. I have to be doubly grateful to you, priest. We might have waited here for news forever, or until the Red Whips chose to ride down on us.”

  “We still might,” said the Duke of Leoue, squinting over the mass of cavalry and the line of harquebuses on their tripod stands. “If there still are seventy of the devils out there. Just because one lot came down from the north doesn’t mean the rest haven’t circled us already.”

  “I don’t care,” said the king. “North gate or south gate, they’re welcome to try. Without one of the optician’s spyglasses I can tell my preparations are complete. Come beside me, Nazhuret, and I will tell you my plan.”

  “No!” The duke’s roar turned the heads of fifty soldiers from their blade sharpening or boot polishing or whatever little work of hand was taking their minds off their peril. They stared from him to the king to me, as though they wouldn’t want to be in my wooden clogs. “Sir, grant me at least this much, that you do not allow this impudent half-breed access to every military secret we possess!” He slapped his hand against the light armor of his thigh, bowed to the king, and stalked away.

  The king blinked at this, and as he watched his field marshal go, his redhead’s coloring ro
se, but after one heavy breath let out through his nostrils, he smiled again. “So be it. Nazhuret, you will have to be surprised. I hope it is a good surprise, lad.”

  He put his hand between my shoulder blades and led me away from the attention of the multitudes. In my ear he added, “The good duke is my bullmastiff, Nazhuret. He hugs my side and growls at all my friends. He played that role for my father before me. What can I do?”

  I felt the charm of the King of Velonya, and it seemed excessive that a man born to such authority should also have that undefinable character that makes men follow a leader, whether that leader is born to authority or not. Also, with the king’s arm around me that way, I felt myself in equally undefinable danger. Perhaps from that very charm.

  We came through the press of men toward the hill that blocked us from the road. The king seemed to be looking for something here that he did not find. The artillerymen who had saved Arlin and myself had been dispatched to the north and south “gates,” as the king called them, and he had to summon their lieutenant back again.

  While he waited, I took the opportunity to tell him that my friend Arlin bore more of the credit for discovering the hiding place of the nomads than I did, and all the credit for getting us back alive. The king’s glance was ironical. Much like Powl’s. “So I should reward him—though I am surprised to find that any of these civilian fops who ride our train like peacocks are capable of action. What does he want?”

  The question stymied me. All I could think of, where Arlin was concerned, was money, for what else does a card cheat work for? But gold was not the King of Velonya’s greatest power of gift. To suggest money would be insulting. What I had recently learned of my old friend caused me only to shake my head. “Not entitlements, certainly. Nor military office. Court position… he would also find that difficult.