The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  Many of these marks were those of the white dog, though I had not seen its furry face since it denied me a share of its dinner, and I looked at those with an attempt at disdain and pronounced them dog tracks, not wolf tracks. No one asked me the difference.

  I did not think the brute could have been here four days before to steal a child. I did not think it had the art of stealing children from high windows. But I wasn’t certain. It took me another two days to discover a track worth following out of the village, and I only knew that success because the snow melted again, revealing what it had held in storage for most of a week.

  It was not a wolf track, but it was not that of a man in boots or clogs, either. It looked like feet wrapped in rags, which is no garb for the Zaquashian winters. The steps came heavy on the toes, and each was placed in front of the last, like the gait of a sheepdog, or of a man dancing. There was the bulk of something that fell and was dragged some steps through the muck, and then one perfect, tiny child’s footprint, with five toes spread, and then another, and then the tracks went up the back of the road onto drier ground.

  It was very little evidence, and seemed less as I quartered the thawing turf above. The road was cleared for safety fifty feet from the public road, and beyond that the forest was allowed to press, a dry strutwork of birch and maple, simple as a block print against the gray sky. There I found a passage among the trees—hardly a path—and more of the formless prints. I followed with the hedger in my hand, though I had no intention of chopping branches.

  The day grew older, and the air freezing in my nostrils and ears made a hammer-string sort of music, like a distant clavichord. I saw three deer, and I found the empty skin of a rabbit hanging from a tree. It had been rough-ripped and yanked off the body, and though it was thoroughly chilled, it was nonetheless fresh, for such a tempting thing would not make it through one night of foxes and their like.

  Men do not skin rabbits where they are caught unless they intend to eat them immediately, for it is much more convenient to carry the beast in God’s wrapping. Beasts do not skin their prey. I stood in the freezing wet and contemplated this sad bit of fur, and I considered it might have symbolic significance. So many of the worst sights do.

  I caught no rabbit nor tried to that evening, but ate a hard black loaf I had saved from breakfast, along with a bottle of ale. By twilight it was frozen above the ground, but two days of thaw could not be reversed so quickly, and the earth was nasty wet. Ripping a dozen small limbs from the birch trees, I made a platform high up in a maple, and my leather bootlaces secured the thing in place. My pack and I rested better up there than we might have on the ground, but lying still is not the same as sleeping, and the cold crackles of the woods jarred me awake repeatedly.

  Since I found the skin I had not known peace of mind, though I am not sure it was fear I felt. The night sky was obscure and interrupted with clouds like faces, like that of the man I had killed, and that of Solinka, whom I had left curled up with her sister and her sister’s husband.

  There was a brushing and a crashing below, so noisy that it could be made only by a deer. (It is a popular misconception that beasts are silent in the woods.) I pushed to the edge of my tree fort and made out under starlight the flat back of the doe and her pale breeches. She breathed raggedly and slammed down the path anyway. I waited to see what was chasing her.

  Short behind came another set of four feet pounding, but these in peculiar rhythm. For a moment there was the round top of a very hairy head, or perhaps a furred cap, and then the disturbance passed. In the distance I saw a flash of white buttocks. Not a deer’s. And I heard a human giggle.

  It seemed my mind had lost the ability to do more than witness, but my hair had gained the ability for independent action, for it stood erect and crawled about my head. I told myself to move, if only to retreat more firmly under the covers, when there was another sound, and this time the passerby was unmistakable and familiar: a pale, furry shape with plume tail hanging behind. Even the sound of his panting identified him. So intent was he on his own pursuit (of the doe? of the pursuers?) that he did not scent me on the earth below, or did not care to stop if he did.

  I sat up, wrapped the blanket around me, and stared into the darkness as though it were a brick wall.

  Moonrise came only slightly before dawn, but in the sliver of light I unwound my temporary shelter and followed after the hunt, using the flounderings of the doe in the shrubbery for marker instead of the frozen ground. The sun joined her brother in the sky by the time I had reached the carcass stretched out beside the path. The black-red of the frozen blood was the first color I saw that day. Her throat had been ripped. She had been half carved and half gnawed. The remaining meat had been pissed on, and there was a mound of watery shit on the path. I moved with a greater attempt at stealth after finding this.

  The day had brightened considerably and the bare trees were groaning, as though they might be forced into thaw again by the light of the sun. My stomach, too, was groaning with hunger, and my sense of smell sharpened when the path I was following broadened, cluttered with footprints both canine and human. The wind was coming at me from before, and it carried all the most objectionable smells of settlement and some that were merely unknown to me.

  The dog had gone this way and not returned, so I had to assume there was one alert creature with a good nose ahead of me. At least one. On both sides the underbrush rose to my hips, with dead briar and vine maple. It would be hard to get off the path quickly. I resisted the temptation to drop to an inhuman crouch myself, and I walked forward until I could see the forest open up ahead. Then I opened my pack, took out my lens case, stuffed it in my belt, and climbed a likely tree.

  Two lenses, positioned a certain distance apart, become a telescope. Large or small, the principle is the same, so I had turned my great art into small artisanship and made a hand-held, collapsible telescope out of stiffened leather, held into tube shape by buckles and holding the light-gathering lens in place with leather washers. Into this a small bronze eyepiece slid in and out. Second to the hedger, it was my favorite toy, but I had never had to cling to the trunk of a tree while fitting it together. A standard spyglass is more convenient in the long run.

  I was not in clear sight of the place yet, but I was close enough to make out a very tiny triangular hut of saplings roofed in fir boughs (which must have been carried a distance) and backed by a stone-faced hill, which stood out like a gaunt hipbone of the earth. In the area before it there was dead grass, some pointed sticks like crude javelins, a fire pit, and a small cairn of rocks. I could not see significance in the latter, unless it were a grave.

  From this angle the entrance to the hut was black; I could not tell if it were a dark wooden door or an opening. Not much could fit into a place that size, regardless.

  I dismantled my glass and came down. Nothing changed as I approached the clearing, not even the wind, but as I left the trees and felt the sun on my back, out of the crude entrance to the hut stepped the white dog, or wolf, which I no longer thought of as mine. As though by law of opposition, now that I showed him no affection he put his head down and fawned toward me, wiggling his hind end like a saucy girl.

  I did not try to touch him, so I don’t know whether he would have let me. I approached the empty doorway with my hedger at the ready.

  The hut itself was only a doorway. The living space was under the hill, in a cave that yawned a good five yards deep. There were pots and pans cluttered into a corner, the ceiling was black with soot, and on poles hung skins of deer and larger beasts, badly tanned if tanned at all. There was a cot in the back, against the wall.

  All this I saw in a moment without paying it attention, for on the cot was the center and focus of the room. Crouched on that dirty bed was a woman of middle years with no clothes on, and over her, engaged in conjugal rites after the style of a dog, was what might or might not have been a man.

  His legs were long enough and his hands (propped against her shoul
ders) human enough. The hair on his head continued down his back in a thin line, and I saw that it was not merely long hair but instead a large expanse of short, bristly growth. His ribs had a good covering, too, and his ears. He was working away at full intensity at the moment of my arrival, and before I could react—I was as shocked and embarrassed as I have ever been—he reached his satisfaction with a grunt and a groan and collapsed upon the back of the silent, seemingly uninvolved woman. And then he saw me and I saw his face.

  His forehead was normal enough, though fashion prefers more height. His eyes seemed human, seen in this light and at this distance, but under them like a mask was a growth of bristle like that on his head, joining with his overgrown beard like a mask cut from a bear’s hide. His teeth, which in his understandable outrage were exposed to me, were too discolored and broken for me to say much about their size or shape.

  With a howl—again human enough—he vaulted off his partner’s back, but was brought up short in a manner I could not understand, and I was about to retreat the way I had come when I saw that he was his own impediment: that he was tied into the woman in the manner of a dog with a bitch. Horror and amazement kept me where I was as he strained and lunged toward me and she cried out in pain, her hands over her head.

  The coupling broke by this force, and as the fellow rushed at me, his penis still half stiff, I saw there was a red swollen bulb at the end of it, like the bladder on a jester’s wand.

  Whatever he was, he was in the right of it at this moment, in his own house and with his lady-wife, and I was aware of my infringement in every atom of my body. I could not turn in time, nor did I fancy being chased through the woods by an angry husband, wolf or man, so I lowered both my hedger and my head and caught his charge to fling him over my back.

  In the light he was very pale under the hair, and his skin stank and glistened. I am told certain primitive natives of North Sekret grease their bodies with fat to hold out the cold. I had never been told these people were furry, however, nor that they had fingernails thick as horn, as this one did as he hit the frozen earth and sprang up again. I swished my blade through the air between us, both as a warning to him and to encourage him left, so that I could exit to the right, away from house and home and all. I heard the woman moving behind me but I still was young and had never taken seriously being hit with an iron frying pan.

  It was a good blow. Had she hit with the rim she might have broken my skull, but she went flat-on to the crown of my head.

  The world rang like a bell, but I did not pass out. Through long practice at being hit, I have become difficult to knock out. The monster before me took this opportunity to advance, nails raised to rend or strangle—I don’t know what—and I found my blade slapping him across the face, flat-on as the woman had struck me. He reeled enough for me to leap through the entrance and past him, and then he spun around, crouching, fingers spread wide.

  The white dog was barking, barking and running in excited circles around us. He seemed to be enthused but neutral in his opinions. The woman threw the pan at him.

  I hesitated among flight, attack, and apology, but my resonant head decided on none of these. I danced from one foot to another over the dead grass, blade toward my naked enemy, and I said, “Is that a grave of a child over there?”

  He did not rise from the crouch nor speak to me, but the woman let out a howl between grief and outrage and sank into the doorway, head in hands. Then the man spoke.

  “Yes. It died. They all die.” His voice was rude, but rude according to the mold of peasant Zaquash, not beast-rude. The woman behind him looked ordinary of face and form, though loose and stretched out. I had not seen many naked women.

  Again my tongue spoke without consulting my mind. “It was yours? Not stolen?”

  At this he leaped for me again, his expression frightful, and I was forced to kick him in the jaw. As he lay there I asked, “What are you, fellow? What is your nature? Is it … magical?” I felt myself blushing at the question, as though Powl were behind me.

  “I am not a beast!” he bawled out, his face in the earth, his pointed horn-talons digging into the earth. By instinct I dodged the heavy iron pan, which had been sailed out after me and which was a more deadly assault than any the werewolf had offered. The woman shrieked and called me murderer and claimed I was there to kill them all.

  I was not sure myself why I was there, and my enemy was down and blinking with watery eyes at the sunlight. I found myself retreating, and what my own face looked like I have no idea. Around me frisked the dirty white dog, more trusting than he had ever been to me. At the edge of their pounded clearing I stopped and pointed at the creature. “Tell me one thing!” I shouted back at the man. “Is it wolf, or dog? If you know, tell me!”

  Without looking, the man set up another keening. “I am not a beast!”

  I nearly tripped over my pack where I had left it. The wolf-dog followed me, its tail up but not curled. It took me three days of heartfelt effort to discourage it.

  In those three days my mind spun between two shames: that I had left a monster in the woods when children were vanishing, and that I had intruded with force upon a pair of very unfortunate people. At last I was able to let these two conflicting disgraces strangle each other, and I was left admitting that I did not know what had happened, or what it was I had seen.

  Eighteen years later, I have become more used to admitting that.

  One month later I was in the city of Warvala, the largest in all the territories and the first real city I had seen since Sordaling. There is snow in South Territory, but it is not the unbroken five months of cover I was used to, and I was so far protected against the climate as to be sleeping in the basement of the Territorial Library as janitorial assistant and stove minder.

  This was a time of lordly comfort: warm, fed, and surrounded by books in three languages, which I had to myself all evening and night. I earned some small money and spent a larger sum of the library’s funds in lamp oil.

  It was an enlightenment to me to discover that I could read the titles on the exquisite, calf-bound books that had found their way north from Rezhmia’s fortress capital. The language of mysterious significance taught to me by Powl in the last year of my residence was nothing other than Rayzhia. Even more important was the content of these volumes, for the intricate flow of history, poetry, and fantasy I discovered had no counterpart in my own language. I could hear it all in Powl’s voice, for every nuance echoed my teacher’s own floridity when speaking in that florid tongue. I found I liked such stories greatly, and the naughty ones opened my eyes in many ways.

  The janitor, a semi-lettered man, discovered me chuckling over one scandalous jewel, and when he found I was not merely cherishing the pictures, he had the idea I might earn some extra money by hiring out as a translator for the foreign quarter.

  This I did, more out of a spirit of adventure than from any particular need for money—my job plus the occasional production of spyglasses or spectacles had left me wealthier than ever I had been—but my first glimpse of the market in the foreign quarter of Warvala was more than adventuresome. It was the most important event that had happened to me since meeting Powl.

  In the foreign quarter were merchants of other territories, and a few daughter shops of Vestinglon itself, as well as a scattering of Falinks selling bright cloth and touristware, but the largest single group were the émigrés from the South, from the city of Bologhini down in the plains, where it is too dry to snow, and from Rezhmia itself. In the broad, clattering square of the market I encountered my first real Rezhmians.

  I knew what they looked like from pictures, and because there is a trace of Rezhmian blood—or more than a trace—running through every Zaquash peasant. And in first glimpse I saw only echoes of that picture of the light-armored noble Powl had showed me in the library at Sordaling: slight, moon-faced, dark of hair and complexion, and delicate-boned, like a child in adult’s clothing.

  But not all the émigrés were w
earing the styles of Rezhmia, for the waist-length free hair, the bright cottons and silks, and the slippers of molded felt are not convenient clothing in a windy winter with snow up to the ankles. I came around the corner of a saponier—and I remember that in the glass window was a bar of soap into which had been imprinted tiny violets, which still retained a hint of color against the white soap, laid on a scarf of purple gauze—and there was a young man loading barrels onto a cart, and he wore my face.

  He was darker. He had brown eyes, I believe, but the resemblance was overwhelming, down to the attentive set of his ears, which were bluish-red from their exposure to cold. Retroactively, all the other images of the people of Rezhmia in my mind (and I had called them monkeylike to Powl) slid over his and were made real, and I knew my own origins.

  He smiled at me, companionably. I returned his salute as best I could and walked on. A minute later I was back and said, “Excuse me, sir, but are you … were you born in this area?”

  “I know where things are, if that’s the help you need,” he said in an accent heavier than any I had yet heard. I shook my head. “Are you, by any chance, Rezhmian by birth? I ask not out of idle curiosity, but …”

  As I spoke, his bluff friendliness vanished, to be replaced by offense, which in turn gave way to his own curiosity. He loaded one more empty barrel and sat down on the cart. “I was born three blocks from here. My father is Rezhmian, of course. Why?”

  I was too shocked and too sober to say anything but the truth. “Because you look like me, I think.”

  Evidently this hadn’t struck him, or was less a matter of note to him, but he gazed at me critically for a bit and replied, “Except for the yellow hair and a certain spread of shoulder, yes, I do. Why not? Are we related? Who are your people?”

  I answered that I did not know. That I hadn’t known I was part Rezhmian until that very moment.