I had seen drawings of the southeast countryside, and even a few paintings, but I had assumed that each artist had chosen all the notable features of the area and concentrated them as maple sap is concentrated over a fire back home. Thus my cynicism was my own naivete, for now I found Rezhmia really did look like that. At least from the mountain pass east of Morquenie, it did.
That night we were able to withdraw from the stony road into a dell where the mountains’ bones were well padded, and there was enough summer-baked brushwood for any size of fire. Even above the level of the countryside, the old magician swore he could smell fallen grapes. I myself thought I detected an odor of the sea. Arlin used a kerchief and ostentatiously did not talk about smelling.
That evening I sprawled on the grass and watched the shadows of the mountains close eastward like the jaw of a trap. Though I remember this dire image, I cannot say I was in dread of the land before me; it appeared so pretty, so prodigal, so very feminine in its lineaments that I could only wonder that a part of me had its origin in such a place. My own youth was so bleak and empty of beauty, I do not know how I lived through it, if I were born of this.
It had been only two days since I had met myself in the mountains, in the rain, during an earthquake, riding a horse that left no hoofprints I could see. Was that apparition the shape of what I would have been had my father stayed with his wife’s people, or if I had had some other father entirely? In my brief, impossible meeting of the eyes, I saw nothing but the shock my own face must have shown.
I was almost asleep when the memory returned to me of that vicious springtime just passed, ending in our trudge to Norwess, and the ghost child that had haunted me there. Again a home I could not remember but that perhaps remembered me.
Even through the night, we heard troops moving above on the road, massing for war. Both my ghosts were awake in me, the big blond one and the slight dark one, along with the forms of brutes and angels: all me. I sat up in the shelter of two rocks and spent all the moonlight in the belly of the wolf.
I did not relate these internal visions to either of my traveling companions. I inflict them only on you, Powl. They are your sort of conversation.
The lonely rockiness was gone; plantings and settlements slanted down at either hand, and the military atmosphere we encountered in Bologhini was cut by the even more disciplined actions of harvest.
Arlin, the magician, and I rode toward Rezhmia Fortress with the year’s grapes. These overflowed wagons and wains and spilled from the huge panniers of small donkeys, and over each caravan hung a cloud of flies, hornets, drunken bees (yellow, not black like our northern bees), and sharp odors. By the side of the road sat men in small booths or under umbrellas, selling fresh grape juice or that pulpy, beerlike stuff they make from broken grapes and age all of five days.
I liked the fresh juice better, but Arlin said she could not taste the fresh juice, whereas the fermented stuff at least gave a tingle to her tongue. The magician made no claims for the taste, but he drank the fermented stuff for what it did.
We slept in an inn, either that first night or one soon after. It was no different from the Yellow Coach, where I had worked, except that here the Rezhmian accent was purer. I cannot even say that there were fewer blond heads along the bar that evening than there would have been in the territories. My own coloring, which had become rarer the farther we traveled from Norwess, and disappeared utterly amid the heights of Bologhini, had retrenched in Rezhmia itself.
It was not just a matter of dandelion-fluff hair on Rezhmian faces, but an entire set of men might have passed at Sordaling (of course, I had passed at Sordaling) and women who might have passed anywhere. These last were crowded at the bar with cups in their hands, shouting good Rayzhia into each other’s ears like so many Rezhmian princesses.
In the middle of the afternoon I had taken the temperature of my surroundings and, having seen no press-gangs nor recruiters for many miles, changed from my lady’s draperies back to men’s ordinaries. I had done so because the stark reversal of our small procession seemed too much a challenge upon fate, and because you failed to teach me how to maneuver a skirt. Now, wanting drinks for my companions and myself, I felt I had erred. In woman’s clothes it would have been permissible to shove and shoulder my way through to the bartender. I, at least, would have permitted myself to shove. As it was, I could only quarter territory three feet from the bar and wait for someone to offer me an opening. I pressed through as soon as I could, almost losing my headkerchief, which is a social error in Rezhmian eating places. (Perhaps they have an outsized abhorrence of hair in their food, or perhaps this is only more of the human tendency to fence about pleasure with rules.)
When I got my belly to the bar, I was in a very bad mood, and my call to the bartender sounded sharper than I had intended. The reason I addressed him in the familiar, however, was merely that I had worked a bar so often and I simply forgot I didn’t know the man. Putting aside all excuse, I admit I sounded autocratic and that I made no attempt to adjust my accent to the local patois, but spoke as you taught me, six years before.
There was not immediate silence after my order; that took two or three seconds to rise tidally along the chatterers at the bar and another five seconds to spread throughout the room.
The bartender, who was a man of fair complexion and some size, turned from another customer to me and stared and stared. So did the drinkers with their elbows on the tin of the counter. The room full of people began to rise, with a scraping of benches.
I heard a roaring in my ears, my heart raced and I felt sweat cooling on the skin of my face, but whether there had been another tremor or whether I merely recognized a bad situation I do not know. With an attempt at nonchalance I asked the bartender if I had said something out of the ordinary.
His almost-Velonyan face darkened. “No, lord,” he said, standing before me with hands folded over his belly. “What can I do to please you, old lord?”
All around me were eyes. Never had I been so much the public cynosure, and I did not like it a bit. I had not removed my pack in shoving up to the bar, and I had room to draw out the dowhee, but how could I hack my way clear in a room as full of flesh as a well is full of water? I glanced from the bar to the rafters to see if I could swing clear back to Arlin’s table, but that would be a flight worthy of one of the magician’s own plains eagles.
I pointed to my stained and ragged tunic. “Do you see an old lord here, good bartender? An old lord in rags?” I asked, and looked at him as comically askance as I knew how. There was a sprinkling of laughter in the room, but it was all nervous laughter.
He clenched his hands together more fiercely and blinked at me. “Oh no!” he said.
“My old lord,” he added.
The man was not doubly blind; he did not see in me both a noble and an ancient. The common people of Rezhmia have a habit of referring to the house in the person of the man, and therefore even an infant of a house of ancient power might be an “old lord.”
The sanaur was my granduncle, but that did not mean I looked like him. I had seen enough likenesses of the man to know we only resembled each other in the way of common humanity. The minsanaur I had also seen in etchings, and though horseback portrayal confuses an image, he certainly seemed a head taller than I. Of the rest of the swarming nobility of Rezhmia I had never concerned myself. I did not know who the barman had mistaken me for, and could not judge whether the greater danger lay in ignoring the mistake or confuting it.
I slapped money down upon the bar. It was Velonyan money, but my years on the border had taught me that no one cares too much what portrait stamps the silver, if it is silver. I asked for hot wine for three, as politely as I knew how, and directed it be brought to me at the table end where Arlin, the magician, and I were sitting.
Perhaps I was wrong about the Velonyan coinage, for the barman was very reluctant to touch it. “Oh no, old… You must not pay, my… ,” he said, and the ellipses in his phrases were wide enou
gh to lose a horse in. Meanwhile, the staring circle around us had withdrawn to a respectful distance, but by the same token it now contained more eyes. I was more than daunted, I was defeated, and I went back to my bench without another word, my eyes on the floor.
My Naiish magician had cataracts, but he was not blind. By the expression on his old woman’s face, he found the situation very enjoyable. “They know you for someone,” he said, prodding me in the ribs jovially.
“Then they know more than Nazhuret himself,” Arlin answered for me. She put her handkerchief to her swollen nose for emphasis. “He is determined to be no one at all.
“But then…”—her gaze upon the man went from vague to pointed—“… we don’t know who you are either.”
The magician shook his head until his starched headdress rattled, and his belly also shook with laughter inside his skirts. “That is true, rider. Names, for us, would lead to misunderstanding.”
He had called Arlin “rider.” To a Naiish, no outsider merits that title. What exchange of names could have been more important than that? For a good five seconds I forgot my own confusions, until a pitcher of hot wine arrived, smelling of spices and brandy, and surrounded by three tumblers of chased silver.
I had ordered wine, yes. Rezhmian beer is not as good as that of home. I had not thought it necessary to stipulate that the vintage of the wine be ordinary or the presentation simple.
Arlin was the first to dare the offering, perhaps because she had been raised as daughter of a baron, or because her cold made her want the drink more. She took a long sip, sniffled, and announced what my nose had told me before.
“This stuff is half brandy. And very good.”
The dinner that followed the wine was of a quality Arlin and I had not enjoyed since our last visit to the capital: the capital of Velonya, that is. I remember five different sorts of meats, each wrapped in tissue dough and drizzled with honey, and a sort of fish stew flavored lightly with lime. Neither Arlin nor I did it justice, being more wary than hungry, but the magician maintained honor for us all.
After dining not leisurely but long, we rose from the table and left the inn, looking neither left nor right. At least I didn’t look. Among my various regrets was this: that overwhelming service requires payment, and it was necessary for me to leave a large portion of our travel silver on the table behind us. I suppose I could have stiffed the house and dared them to ask us for payment, but things were already very tenuous for me as well as for the man dressed as a woman, and for the woman dressed as a man.
And also, I have worked taverns.
We slept outdoors that night, when my body had been primed for a mattress. (In such manner does one pay for notoriety.) I believe that night was the most lively for Arlin and me since we started traveling with the Naiish magician, for we were rested, well fed, and travel-hardened, and she had recovered largely from her cold. The sweetness of the Rezhmian countryside inflamed us both, and I don’t know what the old magician made of it all.
I remember there was a bird singing all that night, a series of liquid trills interspersed with bell sounds. His song was too complex for me to memorize, and besides I was distracted.
How can one discover a night-singing bird? He is only heard from windows, or under blankets on the cold ground: a gift to us out of the unknown. As was that night.
The morning was clear and very fine. We started late, giving the horses a chance to feed on the good grass that now lined the road. In the midst of the greenery and the smells of harvest, I could not keep my mind upon my task—my shapeless task. At midday, however, we passed a group of cavalry, led by a grizzled and scarred lieutenant, and though there were no faces I remembered from our tavern mystery, these troops reacted to the sight of us—of me, rather—in the same manner. To a man, they bowed over their horses’ heads. Unfortunately, they were traveling in the same direction as we were, so there was no quick way to leave them behind. We trotted on and they trotted on, becoming a sort of terrifying honor guard for our ponies. I considered stopping to replenish my face stain, but I feared that if we were to stop, so would the entire troop of them, and I feared that as one fears challenging a dream that may turn real.
In the middle of the afternoon we passed through what seemed a reasonably sized city, not after the Bologhinian pattern but much like any city in Velonya. We were forced to rest and water our mounts here, and took some dinner ourselves. To my delight the Rezhmian troops did not stop at our heels, but rode on past us, only pausing to steal glances as they went by. We found an inn and things began well, but halfway through our meal I started to hear whispers, and Arlin’s wine cup was filled three times before she noticed it had begun to empty. Looking around the place, I noticed a man in cavalry boots and tunic, seated at a table alone at the other side of the room. This alarmed me, for soldiers on maneuvers do not eat or drink alone. As a rule, soldiers do not do anything alone. I ate my bread and drank my beer with the best composure possible, but I let the Naiish, with his unmistakable accent, do all the talking. That afternoon, as we took to the road again, we found our honor guard waiting in two files at the grassy berm. They let us proceed then.
The town we had encountered did not fade away as it had begun, but continued in a series of interlocked neighborhoods that paralleled the road. Soon the smell of the sea was clear, though no view was to be seen, and I wondered aloud whether we were actually in the outskirts of Rezhmia’s capital.
Arlin, feeling much better today, took a breath of the saline air and looked around her. “The difficulty is,” she answered, “that the capital is called Fortress of Rezhmia, and we have seen no sign of such a thing. Besides, I have seen paintings.”
The old magician squeezed his pony up to us. He was still demure in his skirts and headdress. “This is the Fortress City. It is not the City Fortress yet, but it is the City. We are there. Didn’t you know?”
We rode through the city outskirts all that afternoon, and there was nothing in the architecture to inform us we were in a foreign country. The inhabitants were dressed in lighter, looser garb, certainly, but that could be explained by the sweetness of the climate. They appeared in no way more exotic than the territories people, unless one called the men’s headscarves exotic. Late that afternoon we found ourselves in a neighborhood where even those differences failed.
I remember rounding a corner occupied by a shop selling small leather goods and hearing the voice of a boy calling to another boy in Velonyan. It was not perfect Velonyan, but the imperfections were those of any young boy. Another child answered, and then both ran across the road in front of our horses, in the careless manner of boys. One was fair-haired, one was brown. They were dressed like any boy of Sordaling City.
Because I was tired, and because I was far from home, this anomaly hit me very hard. I thought for a moment I would slip over my horse’s neck and lie on the road with my hands over my eyes. Arlin’s gasp of disbelief did more to strengthen me than would any words of comfort. The boys were Velonyan, and in the heart of Rezhmian territory.
The old magician trotted up. “Well, what do you want? We have entered the City along the snowmen’s quarter. Would you expect to hear Felonk?” As he spoke, a girl somewhat older than either boy chased the two across the road, explaining to her brother all the ways in which he was erring, and what Mother was going to do about it. Our horses started forward again, and around this corner we came upon a commercial street with many gallows signs, each written in Velonyan, Rezhmian, and picture-language.
The magician gained a great deal of amusement watching our astonished faces. I tried to explain. “To come so far,” I began, “… and to find things becoming more different every day, and to reach the heart of difference and find it just like home…” As I spoke, I realized that what I was now saying was all I had learned of life. And of death. I could only shake my head, which amused him further.
“You are not the usual idea of a great spirit,” he said. The word he used for spirit was the one
that among the Naiish is used to describe ghosts, great storms and messengers of the gods. I made a crude noise. “I never said I was such a thing!”
His grin grew naughtier. “You didn’t say you were, and I don’t say you are not!” He squeezed his pony between ours and led us through the Velonyan quarter.
“This is not the first time I have been in the City, of course,” said the magician. By now we had left the Velonyan quarter, but we had not left all the blond people behind. In this heart of the East, I found heads on almost every street wearing as bright a yellow as my own. Of course we could only see the women’s hair, and Arlin whispered to me that much of it looked as though it had been bleached in the wash with the linen.
We had taken the chance of stopping indoors for the night. There was nowhere to camp anyway, and in Rezhmia City we had seen very few press-gangs. “Stopping indoors” seems a wicked insult for the hostel in which we were abiding, however. So fine was the service that we were able to toss all our desert-abused clothing out into the hall, and it was returned to us after a few hours, sweet-smelling and with the wrinkles pressed out. It was now obvious that every stitch of clothing the Naiish had worn—each malodorous rag—was made of fine silk.
Myself, I had reclined so long in the scented water of the bath (a clever device with a fauceted tap and a charcoal furnace below the copper, keeping the water constantly warm) that I felt I had slipped out of a skin of dirt and callus as a snake might, and when I rose up I expected to see a hollow shell of myself hanging limp in the water.
The Naiish magician had bathed first, and I was slightly surprised, not knowing that the plague of the plains engaged in watery amusements like bathing. Perhaps the magician indulged for the novelty of soaking in a shining copper tub, or perhaps his traveling life had made him cosmopolitan, but he emerged looking a much younger person and less like a Red Whip rider.
The Lens of the World Trilogy Page 39
