The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  “Who it is that designs your death I can’t say, offhand. I am inclined to believe that the source of your problem lies up here, however: Leoue or Endergen. Perhaps together. Perhaps even Fowett, although the man is old and without male heir.” You sighed, rose, dusted yourself off, and stepped into the loose-box with us, whereupon you took a tiny flint and set spark to a charming small lantern of a sort I had never seen before. Your own design, or I miss my guess.

  We found our teacher dressed neatly in indigo broadcloth, with gold lacing around the double row of buttonholes in his jacket. Had I asked you why you dressed in so different an apparel from that which you recommend to your students, you would have said once again that you were in disguise. If so, Powl, you live most of your days in that disguise.

  “Once more, it is my influence which has led you both into danger. Had Nazhuret merely agreed to be the son of his father, the king would have placed him in such of his father’s honors as was possible—Leoue’s spoils, at least—and all would have grumbled but moved over for him. That would have been understandable to the heads of cork we call our aristocracy. This denial of your ‘place,’ my boy…”—you pronounced the word place with poisonous irony—“is something they will not and cannot understand. Especially while you maintain ties with King Rudof.”

  “I have never even been tempted to ask… ,” I began but as I spoke, suddenly the ghost of Timet of Norwess sat beside me, bitter as the high frozen wind, and I did not know whether I was telling the truth.

  What you saw in the lamplight, or what you heard in my voice I don’t know, but you have always been very good at reading people. “Even though you are not tempted, Nazhuret, I might have used my influence to press you into such a role…”

  In astonishment I said, “But you always have said the most perfect life is…”

  “Yes. Running about the landscape with the clothes on your back and infinite possibility in your future. As you are, in fact.” You made a small gesture to include Arlin and myself. “But I might have been willing to sacrifice your happiness, my son, for the sake of political simplicity.”

  My amazement was total, both because you spoke of sacrificing me and because you called me your son. You only said such a thing once before, and that in a letter.

  “But the truth is, you would make a very bad duke, Nazhuret.”

  Here at last was a statement that was no surprise. Yet Arlin contradicted him.

  “As for that,” she said, in the pipe smoker’s voice that meant she was concealing feeling, “it is my opinion that Zhurrie would make a fine duke. His dependents would love him.”

  You turned your face a bit and smiled at the straw. “Some would love him, certainly. Those in need of mercy. But you cannot love forever what you cannot understand, and how many understand either of you, even now?”

  Arlin’s gray eyes widened and lost focus and I knew that she, like I, was remembering the oratory and how quickly the other beggars had forgotten the life we had established there.

  “Zhurrie, I can see you as the headmaster of a school. I can see you as an archbishop. Our nobility in Velonya more resemble wolves—no, feral dogs—and among them you would cause only greater carnage.”

  “Then isn’t it a good thing I don’t desire a position among them,” I answered, and Timet of Norwess sat silently beside me.

  You were quiet for some time, your eyes flashing with the light of the lamp. “I wish I had come to help you with this, instead of pulling you out with the matter unfinished,” you said at last, and both Arlin and I frowned in puzzlement. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Why else did you chase us from the oratory here, if not to help?”

  Your shrug, my teacher, is very elaborate, very foreign. Perhaps I think of it that way because you shrugged so frequently when teaching me the Allec language.

  Another thought rose. “Where did you come from, Powl? You’ve lost a lot of weight. Have you been traveling?” I think there was some envy in my words. I would like to go to foreign countries, as the Earl of Daraln does. It is harder for a beggar.

  You answered, “I’ve been in the capital. Largely with the king. And the parliament, damn it.”

  Arlin lifted her head. “What’s up?”

  “War is up,” you said, and with those words Timet of Norwess faded, like smoke from a quenched candle.

  We three leaned against the rough oak boards, and I remember that you smelled faintly of sandalwood and of roses. Arlin and I smelled not-so-faintly of horse manure and sweat. The little lantern threw the shadows of your small gestures against the straw, and I felt taken out of reality altogether.

  “Sanaur Mynauzet is seventy-eight years old,” said Powl. “His sister’s son—his heir—is dead this past winter, perhaps naturally. His oldest son is in his middle twenties, and is Minsanaur of Bologhini as well as heir to all Rezhmian territory. It is with the Minsanaur we shall have to deal.”

  “Reingish? This is the same man who wears the dagger around his neck, day and night?” It was Arlin who spoke. I knew the famous dagger of the Bologhini minsanaur was only three inches long and made of gold, but still it was a dagger.

  Powl nodded, causing a flood of black shadows before the lantern. “Yes. Possibly it is merely a symbolic gesture. Possibly the minsanaur’s well-known hostility toward his northern neighbors is equally symbolic, or will fade as his responsibilities increase.

  “Or possibly we will suffer an attack that will break our nation.” As you spoke these words, you let your lantern go out and we were left in cold darkness.

  I reached for it, hefted it, and finally shook the thing. I heard oil sloshing. Then you began to tell us about the lantern’s experimental nature and the difficulties you had had increasing light at the expense of heat and soot—as though nothing of greater moment than the malfunction of the lantern had been discussed so far.

  For me the darkness was filled with a hundred thoughts, a thousand images. I had never been to Bologhini, though I had spent one winter close to the border, and lived and worked with the trading guilds that moved between Warvala and the South. I knew the flavor of the speech of Bologhini, and I knew the flavor of the mind.

  I could taste the cherry liquor that was a Bologhinese specialty. I could hear them in argument (another specialty).

  War. I was raised in a military school. I had seen horses and men exploded by a petard. I had been blown into the air myself and only by mercy could I hear at all.

  My father had been commander of a Velonyan invasion of Rezhmia.

  My mother was Sanaur Mynauzet’s niece.

  “You are sitting very quietly, Nazhuret,” you told me. “Have you heard any of what I said?”

  “You want me to go to Rezhmia,” I replied, “don’t you?”

  You inhaled in careful manner, as you do when you do not want me seeing your feelings. “So you are paying attention.”

  I shook my head, then realized that would do no good in the darkness. “No,” I said aloud. “I haven’t heard a word. I only knew it.”

  I hid myself in the belly of the wolf—in what others call “meditation,” though I do not understand that word—for long black moments, and when I looked around again the two of you were still sitting beside me and the lantern was still malfunctioning. “Am I supposed to presume upon my relationship with the sanaur?” I asked you, and I thought your answer slid a little—was too diffident. Too diffident for you. “You are to do what seems advantageous to you.”

  Arlin cleared her throat then, and spoke as though she had been rehearsing words for a long time. “Which sister was eldest?”

  She had never asked that question before. Nor had I—aloud. I waited for your answer in a sweat of fear.

  If you sweated I did not know it; you were fiddling with the damned lantern; I could smell lamp oil in the air. You put on a lecturing voice. “It may seem unlikely to you that the eldest daughter of the royal house of Rezhmia would be given to the general-in-chief of a foreign invasion, and a defeated f
oreign invasion at that. But at that time the sanaur had a healthy, ten-year-old son and a wife not past bearing age. And Eydl of Norwess was gallant, the sanaur himself whimsical, and the girl… determined. It was not a bad bit of politics.”

  It was hard to remember that this bit of history we were receiving was out of your own memory, and not a crabbed footnote in the Sordaling archives. “And was it politics: the marriage?” I asked him. Though I knew the answer in my heart.

  “No. It was madness,” he answered, and in those words the pain in your voice broke free.

  “So she was the eldest, and Nazhuret, as well as heir to the Duchy of Norwess, is…”

  “… a penniless lens grinder with a hedge trimmer on his back,” I finished for her, because I could not endure the rest of the sentence.

  Arlin let the silence sit for a while, and then added, “But a gallant one. Like your father.”

  The next morning I took a step up in social class; after washing under the stable pump, I tucked in my shirt and put on one of your burgher jackets, which was too large for me. I wonder, Powl: is your neat burgher dress the earl’s equivalent of my peasant woolies? Is burgher gabardine, which was my proudest tailoring, a greater humiliation for you than homespun? Answer me later.

  With this change I altered my accent to court standard. Arlin did nothing, but she never looked or sounded like a beggar, anyway. We were both grateful for the good breakfast you bought us at the same inn where I had cut wood the night before, but I had not slept and so was too weary for appetite.

  “You are not to be a spy, Nazhuret. The king would not ask you out so against your mother’s people.”

  “No. I am to do—what? Prevent a war?” You regarded me blandly from behind a loaf of sweet bread, from which you were peeling a charred bottom with your penknife. No one but you can do this without getting fingers greasy. Wonder of wonders.

  “Preventing wars is generally a good idea,” he answered.

  I was unaccountably angry, with you, with Arlin, who sat across from me and kept such a wary eye on my responses, with the morning, bright and bland as my teacher. “But Velonya is strong, and Lowcanton would come in if she needed it. Rudof says so.”

  With no change of expression you said, “Rezhmia is strong, too, and Lowcanton will not ‘come in’ for us. Whatever the king says. War will be catastrophic. We will lose the largest part of a generation.”

  “A generation of whom? Velonyans?”

  “Humans,” you said, and you watched me not eat my breakfast for a few minutes. “Nazhuret, are you afraid?”

  “I am terrified,” I said, and I looked over your head—over the shining bald spot that never seemed to grow larger—at a Norwess sky of blue and white.

  “Good. I am glad you understand the situation.”

  Weren’t we walking from the table to the outhouse when you tripped me? After my first shock, this was a greater relief than the rich breakfast. I managed to come to earth on top of you, at least for the moment (or were you letting me do it?), and we had five minutes of contest, which proved a more reasoned and meaningful argument than all our night’s talk, while Arlin leaned against a tree and supervised, one hand resting on her sword pommel. I seem to remember that the bout ended with me in a headlock with the breath choked out of me, but that may be a confusion of all the other, similar times you choked me. Whatever, the interlude cured me of my sullens, and my creeping dread. It also ripped that seam out of your spare jacket.

  I was disappointed that you would not come with us, though I understand why the king would not release you from court. But it is my guess you would not have come at any rate; not while you had influence in Velonya. Not while he had the ear of the king.

  You certainly extended your couriership long enough, considering all this. I think we must have looked odd: two ragpickers walking beside a small burgher on horseback (with sunburn on his balding head) plodding down the long southeast slope of Norwess. It was a gentle progress in beautiful summer weather. It was good of you to try to give the horse to Arlin. You failed to move her, possibly because riding would have been more difficult for her. Equally possibly it was merely as she said—she didn’t like your horse.

  I hope our teacher was as happy to have our company again as we were to have his. Rarely did the three of us travel together.

  (Like most men, I have taken the years of my schooling and converted them in memory into paradise. They were not paradise, old teacher, but they were equally strange and unworldly.)

  A week’s westward progress had us solidly into Ekesh Territory, just north of the Satt boundary, and as soon as you started to hear the whine of the Zaquash dialect on the roads, we began looking around for suitable mounts for our southeast journey.

  Your idea of suitable was not Arlin’s idea. She would certainly have purchased a close approximation of her assassinated Sabia, if a horse so splendid could have been found in this land of shallow green waters, deep soggy fields, and large mosquitoes. None of these were to be found, however, and at last she consented to ride your choice: a smallish, short-coupled mare with flat sides and a dull, black coat. Her rolling eyes and flattened ears spelled trouble, but I wondered whether equine temperament would be a useful distraction for Arlin. I was very happy with my gelding, short, lean, and colored as yellow as a summer squash. Since I have neither Arlin’s background with nor abiding interest in horses, I was relieved to find the fellow was not full of himself, but inclined to abide by majority decision.

  I recognized these beasts as cousins of blood with the animals of the traders of Warvala, who come north from Bologhini and even Rezhmia Capital with the most exotic (and expensive) of goods laid across their dusty backs. Cobs, we might call them, but about them is nothing bunchy or round. Nor are they heavily boned, and yet I have seen one of these creatures all but buried under the mass of a large carpet that it had carried hundreds of miles: eating and drinking under that burden also, as though it had all the ease in the world.

  Also in that equine family are the ponies of the Naiish nomads, I believe, which are their workbenches and easy chairs as well as transportation. Some of the animals I have seen have spent such a large portion of their lives under saddle that their very spines and ribs have taken the shape of the underside of the little leather-and-tendon saddles, and yet they often remain in service until their thirtieth birthday.

  None of these attributes endear the beasts to Arlin, however. They are not beautiful, not inclined to affection, and riding them is not riding the wind.

  Once we were mounted, our speed of travel increased, and increased further when we purchased two other ponies (as such became available), and packed them with travelers’ food and with Rezhmian-style garments and weapons. It was possible to purchase bows: the little, lip-shaped, cherry-colored bow of the South, which I knew by experience and Arlin knew to her regret, carrying still as she did a large, puckered scar from five years ago, when she had been sure an arrow could not travel three hundred feet.

  For a man neither landowner nor landowner’s hireling to carry a bow in Velonya is a crime. South Territory operates under Velonyan law, except when it doesn’t. The bows were easy enough to find in the markets, along with the short, lacquered arrows that go with them.

  Ekesh passed behind us, and we were in South Territory, which is really more east than south. Warvala was a day away, and Warvala is the balance point of our subcontinent, where the culture of my mother’s people begins to overwhelm the imposed manners of Velonya.

  That morning, after washing, I folded my decent homespun and put on the tunic, trousers, and high boots. My hair was not long enough to tie back, as is strict Rezhmian custom, but with the triangular scarf tied back of the head, the lack was not apparent.

  Arlin stared at me for half a minute unbroken, with no expression upon her face that I could read. At last she shuddered. You, already in your reputable burgher clothes, said, “The last time I saw you dressed like that, Nazhuret, you were not so dark.”


  I found I was very self-conscious. “I have been outdoors almost constantly this year,” I said, as though in apology.

  You said my name again, with your impeccable Rayzhia court accent. “Nazhuret. For once the name needs no explanation.”

  Through the floorboards, I felt Arlin shudder again, as a frightened horse will. She kept to her garb of gentlemanly, travel-stained black.

  It had been a few years since I had traveled that hard, rolling country, all sky and stone. The presence of my companions did much toward alleviating that feeling of being both impossibly big and completely invisible which South Territory imbued in me. I was experimenting controlling my yellow horse with my feet, for that is how such Rezhmian mounts are trained. My fellow, for all his homeliness, had a great sensitivity in him; I felt we were well matched. I tried riding with hands clasped behind my head, swinging Daffodil from one side of the road to the other, singing the “Hymn of Sordaling School” to the rhythm of his hooves. The horse obeyed, but he sighed frequently, the sound rolling under me like wind in a tunnel. It could be he found the language of my heels too prolix. It could have been my singing.

  At this time, I recall that Arlin and you rode together, considerably in front of me. That also could have been my singing.

  I was singing when you noticed something and shushed me. You were also riding without reins, but making no large thing about it. “You could have a company of horsemen for protection, you know,” you said.

  “Now you tell us,” said Arlin.

  “It’s not too late. There is a small military station south of Warvala. I have the letter of authorization here.”

  I met eyes with Arlin and then said, “I don’t think we would have much use for a company of horsemen. I wouldn’t know what to do with them.”

  You nodded and resettled yourself in the saddle. “That’s why I didn’t mention it until now.”

  I thought the matter was over, but Arlin kept staring from myself to you. At last she said, her voice very compressed, “Do you think that Zhurrie can’t command loyalty?”