The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

I stepped to where he originally had greeted me, and from here I was more convinced than ever that it was a hedger that he had taken into his hand: a sharp-bladed hedger with a hook in the handle.

  “My name is Nazhuret, yes.” I spoke slowly to avoid misunderstanding, for the manner in which he now regarded me was more unsettling than the manner in which he had closed the heavy door. Perhaps he thought I was mad and speaking gibberish and he needed the tool to protect himself. More likely he was mad himself. Whichever, he had his hand on the hedger, and the door to the outside was bolted against me.

  The brass button swung in shorter arcs now, and nothing more had been said by either of us. I was wondering whether the pull cord opened the door as well as closed it. It seemed more practical to essay this than to run screaming and clawing at the oak (my first impulse). I caught the button and gave it a yank.

  He shook his head, between contempt and pity. “Things do not work that way, lad. How could the same vector of force move a thing in alternate directions?” He had stepped away from the table very quietly while I was making my futile try at the cord and he held the hedger. It looked scandalous in his manicured hand.

  “I just thought it might,” I replied. I sounded silly even to myself. He smiled at me.

  “Nazhuret, you are well named”—the pity on his face grew and overspread the contempt—“for I believe you will have to die now, before we can do anything else with you at all.”

  As he spoke, my rapier was out and at ready, though I have no memory of drawing it. My mind was filled with the horror of his madness: madness with a hedge sickle in its hand. But the man with the smooth face and the pretty coat made no move to engage me. Instead, he smiled even more sweetly, grabbed another of the hanging cords with his left hand, and dangled from it, like a big brass button himself. His fine shoes swayed left and right in the empty air. There was a scraping from all the walls of the room, and he began to sink slowly toward the floor.

  It was the windows. He was closing all the shutters of the clerestory windows together, and the light was failing in the room. It would be dark in another moment and I would be locked blind in a strange room with a madman brandishing a crude blade. I sprang for him as the last light went out, trying to grab the hedger from his hand.

  I met only empty air.

  Spinning my sword around me in a vain effort to find the man by touch, I crouched low against the stone floor. The flagstones gave off cold; I was chilled in all my sweat. I told myself that if I couldn’t see him he couldn’t see me, no matter how familiar he was with the chamber itself. Surely a sane man could be more silent than a mad one, especially if the sane man was fighting for life itself, as I was. I resolved to make no noise.

  It was amazingly quiet in that stone-walled block of a building: no traffic of feet or of wheel nor song of bird nor cry of dog, cat, horse, or ass in the distance. I heard my breathing only, and the alarming percussion of my heart. A drop of sweat fell from my hair to the flags, impossibly loud. I held my breath, but my heart only beat louder and more erratically. It seemed to me that my body was making such noise I would not be able to hear it if my enemy ran full tilt over me, swishing his agricultural implement in the air. I felt self-betrayal and a touch of panic. I would run for the entrance hall at any moment, not knowing at all in which direction to find it.

  While my brain was giving way in this manner, my long-trained body remained in a posture of defense, and so when the foppish madman whispered “Here I am, Nazhuret. In front of you. Engage me,” my rapier began the deed just as I had been commanded. But halfway in the motion I remembered that this was a naked blade, noble-sharp and without cork or button, and that my enemy was no enemy at all but some mere mad burgher in a frock coat with a tool that could not touch me at my fighting distance. My attack, which began lustily, ended as no more than a tentative, chiding prick.

  Which met nothing. “Misplaced condescension, lad. Or are you merely inept?” The words seemed to come from my left. The stinging, flat-bladed blow across my face came from a different direction. I spun toward the source of the attack and lunged.

  This time he took my impetuous sword against his hedger, and I felt the weight of his body as we came hilt to hilt “Better,” he whispered, and he kicked my leg out from under me.

  I fell in a clattering pile and bounced up again. My useless eyes were open so wide I felt my eyelashes brush against my eyebrows—sir, this is the sort of thing one does remember—and I felt around me with my rapier as a blind man does with his stick. He cleared his throat most graciously behind me so I would know his position. “Are you blind as well as crazy?” I shouted, “that you can see in the dark?”

  “I am not as blind as you,” he answered. “Nor half so mad.”

  And he laughed at me. Sir, I did go mad with that laugh, on top of all my terror. I lunged for blood—to kill. I would have run him through again and again had I had my way, though the man had countered my attacks defensively and done me no more affront than to slap me across the face with a garden tool.

  Again my blade met only metal and we engaged, rapier to hedger, but this time he dropped his blade to the fourth quadrant and took the slim rapier into the hook at the guard of his weapon and it broke. I heard the point of my blade skitter across the floor, and I thought inconsequentially that this was the sort of blade one gives an untried noble’s son to wear with his signet belt: not a meaningful blade, no great loss.

  And Nazhuret: not a meaningful young man, no great loss. My last thought.

  The heel of a boot took me across the jaw and my head hit the flagstones and I felt cold opening my throat.

  I was above, hanging in the black dome, looking down at my body and at the man who had killed me. The darkness was no obstacle.

  The killer indeed had a bald spot beginning on the back of his head; from above this was very noticeable, especially as he was bending over the small, shrunken body with the yellow hair. He went away and I was left with nothing to see but the dead boy with one smear of blood across his face. His eyes were closed, as in sleep. He looked very young and hopeless. I felt a distant pity, not too sharp. Then the killer came back, dragging a bench, upon which he sat and leaned over his victim. His patch of pink scalp gleamed.

  The importance of this scene was soon exhausted, and it began to recede and grow smaller. It became nothing but a spot of light in the middle of an emptiness that expanded without limit.

  Decide, was said to me. Grab on to this that is passing, or let it go. Madness or death.

  This was not a comforting choice, and with it came no instruction or clue. But all comfort was past anyway, along with Nazhuret and the ten stubby fingers on his hands and the two splayed feet that moved him from place to place. Out of what instinct or guidance I do not know I turned from that shrinking light amid the darkness and let go of Nazhuret and of all of the first-person-singular pronoun as well.

  My king, this is a memory of a memory, but I speak as truthfully as I know how. Try to follow me, no matter where.

  The darkness was not darkness (is not darkness, even now) but light, and in every reach was knowledge, content and endless. So, too, was time (that thing which we know only through its being gone): content and endless, not a river but a sea.

  Yet there was a voice, and it said, “Tell me about Nazhuret.”

  Amid infinite light nothing is hidden, not even Nazhuret, so the answer came easily. “Nazhuret looked often into the mirror, yet he was not vain.”

  “What else?”

  “He made third in the ranks at Sordaling School, and would have been first, but for his background.” “What was his background?”

  “He had none.”

  “Tell me more.” The voice was familiar. Ironical.

  “Nazhuret loved the Lady Charlan, daughter of Baron Howdl. But she is gone.”

  This, although true, had never been said aloud.

  “Go on.”

  “So is Nazhuret. Gone.”

  The voice amid the l
ight was no stronger than a draft through a cold hallway, but it could not be escaped.

  “Was Nazhuret a good fellow, as men go?” it asked, and after slow. rolling time came the answer.

  “Yes. He stayed out all night sometimes, but he was a good fellow.”

  The voice laughed: not an annoying laugh. “Good fellows are not everywhere, these days. Nazhuret could be useful. There is even a need, perhaps. And perhaps he will come back to us.”

  The reaches of light were moving. There was a haze, a glaze, a network of brightness through them. “Nazhuret is dead,” it answered, but the voice continued, “Nazhuret can come back, if he chooses. If he cares.”

  The light ran into veins, coalesced, leaving dark and unknowing around it as it shrank.

  “Will he come back? Will you come back to us, Nazhuret? Back to the world and the cold stone floor?”

  The light spun cobwebby fine, tighter and tighter until it extinguished its own inner radiance. I became aware that it was I. That I was. I. First person singular.

  Oh, grief and loss and straight necessity, that light and time and knowing be pressed down until it is matter, until it is I.

  “Why must I?” I said. “Nothing is worth this. Not this. This is terrible.”

  And he answered, “You are not compelled to return. Yet I have a use for you here. I ask this sacrifice of you, Nazhuret, Will you return?”

  I opened my eyes, saying, “Yes. Enough. All right, damn it,” and there, leaning over me, was the smooth face of the man with the hedger and the bald spot and all the fine tailoring. “Nazhuret,” the voice said as he lifted my head and put white linen on my bleeding cheek. “Welcome. My name is Powl. I am your teacher.”

  I can scarcely believe it has been four weeks since I began this manuscript, sir. I am appalled to have been so slow in fulfilling a command of the king, but believe that I have not been merely desultory; along with the local haying we have had epidemics both of summer fever and dueling, and they have kept me tolerably occupied. I hold the pen now in a hand neatly silk-stitched from knuckle to wrist to prevent the flesh from gaping.

  No, I mislead you. It is an injury from a grass scythe. I lent a hand (this hand) to replace a sick harvestman. I could try writing left-handed, but it is not fair, sir, that you should be the sufferer in such an experiment. I will proceed slowly, but I will proceed.

  In the garden of your city palace at Vestinglon, where I hazard the guess you sit to read this—that is, if the weather remains fine and I do not continue writing on into the winter—there you have a very clear pool. Rise if you will, take this page with you, and go to the bank of it. I remember the day we played colt games by this water, and His Royal Majesty went in, rearmost foremost, and seven members of the Privy Guard were dissuaded only with difficulty from filleting His Majesty’s wrestling partner like a trout. Doesn’t this water appear to be scarcely shin-deep, though we both have reason to know it is deep enough to float a sizable monarch?

  Not even the bulk and bustling of a submerged king could muddy this pool, which rises from unknown depths and issues out through a marble dolphin mouth at your left hand and settles there back again, unnoticed amid the reeds to your right, far enough from the kitchens and offices to take no stain from them. I could count the red pebbles on the bottom and the blue ones and the white even as we hauled you out, dripping.

  Look into this depth, so much clearer than air and so much colder and heavier, and keep it in your mind as you read of my first day of return, after my death at Powl’s hand. For I was sunk deeper and more silently into the confines of my body and into the airs of the world that day than the blind, translucent fish are sunk in the water of this pool.

  The bench he laid me on was rough and porous. The wood had absorbed the wet and the smells of night, and now it issued them against my face, and the touch against my broken skin was full of sparks. The wall of bricks glowed with the terrible colors of its kilning: flame-red, blood-black, and the yellow of sulfur.

  The fortressed door stood open again and yellow light poured in, along with the endless song of a bird. I sat up and stood up and Powl came with me. He led me through the blossoms, traps, and snarls of the September grass, which might otherwise have held me for all this second life (I was so bemused), and he sat me in the green glow of a maple tree.

  “If finally I am damned,” he said, “it will be for this, lad. Forgive me.”

  His words were lightly spoken, but I considered them for a ridiculously long time. At last I answered him, “It was not murder, but a fair duel. I had the better weapon, the longer reach. And a lifetime of training.”

  He smiled. His teeth were white and even and did not quite meet. “No, Nazhuret. Between you and me could be no fair duel. But I did not mean damned for that, but rather for dragging you back again, to this”—he touched my head in two places—“to where your skin is split and there is at the back of your head a lump that you will feel soon, and to where you were thirsty and I presume still are, and … and all that is to come.”

  In my mind the constellations wheeled slowly. No intelligence, mind you, but very many stars. “You could not drag me. I came,” I told him, and I was very sure of myself.

  His pale, ironical eyes, colorless themselves, caught the sun. “Back to a world that is full of pain and confusion? Yes, so you did. Do you know why?”

  I shook my head, and he was right: It was going to hurt soon. “No,” I said, “you have to tell me why.”

  Fowl leaned forward, into shadow. He pointed a neat and delicate finger at me. “Because, Nazhuret. Because the world is full of pain and confusion. That is why I called you. That is why you came.” Then he rose and lifted me by the back of the collar and marched me back through the door of oak, where I was given water and strong coffee with cardamom and the end of a very fine cheese. I slept and dreamed not at all, and when I awoke, the coat of boiled wool was over my shoulders, the moon was streaming blue through the high windows, the door was cracked open, and the fine gentleman was gone.

  I went out to relieve myself, ate the rest of the cheese, played with the disks of glass, worked the mechanisms of bone, and ascertained that the torturer’s rack was actually a gear and wheelwork that somehow connected with the wooden crenellations edging the dome roof. I climbed the platform and peered up at the slot in the roof through which the hinder stars of the Great Hog could be seen, and I wondered how the rain was kept out. By then I was chilled and headachey, so I returned to my bench and the gentleman’s coat.

  Not once through that afternoon and evening did I spare a thought for Sordaling School, or for Baron Howdl, or for the dream that had brought me away from both. For the rest of the night I slept like a dead man.

  The next morning I was still on my hard bed when Powl opened the door and walked through to the central chamber. “Still asleep, I see,” he said, but it was obvious he meant “still here.” He was carrying a bundle.

  I got up, shook out his felted coat, and followed him.

  In the morning light he was smoother than ever: smoother and cleaner and more pink-scalped. His plumpness was an illusion brought on by small features and the delicate joints of his fingers. While his dress was conservative, everything he wore had a little bit of gold about it, including his teeth. He put down the bundle on the boneworks table, where it clattered. He took back his coat, examined it—for fleas, possibly—and said: “The rules, Nazhuret:

  “First, never piss against the walls of this building.”

  I started to interrupt, to explain it had only been the outside wall, and on a structure this massive, that could scarcely matter, but it occurred to me to wonder how he could possibly have known, and in the face of his inexplicable knowledge, my protest died.

  “It is unhygienic, it stinks, and it only encourages dogs. I find it an unappealing habit, and you will not do it. Further, for the sake of my sensibilities if not your own, you will wash every day—yes, of course you do, but I mean head to foot. Neatly. Cold or hot. Y
ou will launder your shirt every evening.” At this I must have gawped, for I had never heard of anyone except the clergy living with such nicety, and among those, only such who had servants with time to waste. Powl paid my expression no mind, or perhaps he answered it in directly, for he continued, “This training would be easier if you had been fifteen years instead of nineteen. You’re now at an age to balk, to challenge everything I say.”

  Indeed, I was about to challenge his rules as time-consuming and inappropriate considering my station in life, when I was overcome by a feeling of uncertainty amounting to pure dizziness, for I no longer knew what my station was nor in what voice I was about to answer this man.

  The student of sixteen years’ training in obedience was dead, as dead as if the body still lay cold on the cold stone flags. The perfect detachment of yesterday also was gone; I had awakened without it and not noticed the change. The fellow who had tried twice to object to very minor inconveniences was neither of the Nazhurets I knew. I heard him squeak my own confusion and I did not recognize the man. I was nauseated. I lost my balance.

  I think I fell to my knees, for I remember Powl holding me up, stronger than he looked, with the small hands with little gold rings about the fingers. He put my seat down on a bench.

  “Boy,” he said, “I understand. Don’t worry about it. Such moments were not made to be held to. What is necessary is simply … faith. Or obstinacy. That what happened did happen.” He let me go then and began to pace, his shoes with their lacquered heels making surprisingly little noise against the floor. “That, actually, is the only legitimate meaning of the much-abused word ‘faith.’ It is the … the cussedness … to insist that what we knew to be true remains true, in the face of confusion and distraction. When it is hidden from us. Because …”

  And he looked sharply into my face. “Because we were not made to live constantly in a glow of divine illumination.”

  He sighed and rubbed his lips with the tip of a finger. “Most people, I think, experience all the unutterable perceptions of a saint, a sage, or a scholar in their own times. Burghers, smiths, soldiers like yourself: all ripe for blinding illuminations. But these perceptions can’t be readily communicated, called for at will, or stored in a jar against future need, so …”