The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  The courtyard was as ragged as the teeth of the mountains we had climbed the previous week. There was a red murk in the air as thick as bloody water. There was a perfect white rose blossom hanging on an undamaged vine above my head. Daffodil, with me upon him, was the only standing creature to be seen.

  I thought to get off the horse, but so badly was he blowing and starting that it seemed he might die of sheer abandonment if I left him, so I pressed him among the crowd of fallen, looking for my friends.

  Now the air was filled with living noise: living noise and dying. Now came the screams and the scrabbling and the protests of men broken and of horses with their hooves caught in their reins. I shouted for Arlin, but a scream drowned me out, and then I heard her own voice shouting for me.

  It was unmistakably Arlin, and for the moment she had forgotten her role to the point where her voice was above contralto, and in the two syllables of my name (I am always “Zhurrie” when Arlin forgets herself) there was as much rage at fate as there was fear, and enough strength that I did not have to worry for her life. I remembered the Sanaur of Rezhmia and put him down on his feet, where he could survey his devastated courtyard.

  Instead he was looking up at me, his familiar/unfamiliar face now blank with shock. I leaned over and put one hand on his shoulder. “’Naur,” I began (for the term “sanaur” when not used with “Rezhmia” means literally “my king” and I could not go so far as that), “I think it is over for now, though there will be strong rumblings. You have survived a great disaster.”

  He drew away from my hand and the shock withdrew, to be replaced by fury. “I have survived? I? What does that matter. What has become of my people?” As he spoke, there came a crumbling, a roar, and a boom as another weakened building came down, but the old king did not flinch from the sound. My horse did, however, and I had thought to give the beast some free rein and look for Arlin, when I felt a touch upon my boot.

  The sanaur held my gaze, and he was not now only an old man with bloody hands. I saluted with the heel of my hand. “Who are you?” he asked me, for the second time.

  I bent beside my horse’s broad neck. “Pay no attention to what the Naiish said, except that my name is Nazhuret.”

  He kept his fingers locked into the top of my boot. “The only Nazhuret I know is dead these twenty years in Vestinglon. By treachery, I think.”

  I might have been more politic, but I could not call my politics to mind at the moment. In the middle of the wails and the dust and the rubble I told him “By treachery, most certainly, Sanaur of Rezhmia. But the teacher was not Velonya itself, but a man and that man is dead.” I raised my head and I found Arlin, as much red as black with all the dust in her velvets. She was on her feet and all her attention was on a weal on the leg of her mare. I pointed at her. “Arlin of Sordaling ended his intrigues five years ago.”

  For the third time the sanaur asked me, “Who are you?” By now there were people running, limping, and crawling from all over the square toward his side. In the moment of privacy I had left I said to him, “I am that Nazhuret’s nephew, half-bred son of Nahveh and of the Velonyan Duke Eydl of Norwess.” I had to smile at the complexity of the expression on his face. “Now you know everything,” I said.

  He rubbed the dirt from his face with both bloody hands and shook off the soldiers who came to assist him. Into my ear he whispered, “If that is true, then it may be you are my heir!”

  At this my heart plunged, as Daffodil’s had plunged in the earthquake. “No, great ’naur. It seems you do not know everything, after all.”

  I found Arlin, who had seen me upright and so had no time for me, and I found the Naiish magician, who was gathering his ponies from among the wreckage. As there were now no gates to keep us out nor walls to hold us in, we led our beasts out of the fortress itself and pitched a camp upon the ornamental lawn.

  The magician was taking off his woman’s headdress, pin by pin. “Well, you have given me the story you promised,” he said, and his voice started out high and ended low.

  Arlin watched this behavior with wary humor. “We try to keep our word,” she said. “Though I think we would have done fine without the earthquake.”

  Though we had suffered dozens of earthquakes on the road, many of which did damage around us, this morning’s affair had become “the earthquake.” It would not share attention with its lessers.

  The magician continued to strip, changing female to male with every gesture, every piece of silk and linen. “I had planned to winter here,” he said, placing a blanket over his privates as he replaced skirt and long trousers with a rider’s ballooning breeches. (The Naiish, like most people who sleep in small spaces, are very concerned about their privacy.) “Now there will be heavy work and no food or heat to spare.”

  “You might find the sanaur will spare some of both for you,” Arlin offered, twirling her knife. Inside the City, we heard a bagpipe wheezing in three-part time. There was actual laughter accompanying the music. People are endlessly strange.

  “And maybe he will have me skinned. And you, too,” the Naiish made this suggestion unemotionally. “Having announced you King of the Dead, snowman, it is appropriate of me to go elsewhere. Bologhini, perhaps. They could not have suffered as this place did, and besides, they are ready for quakes.”

  “You are afraid,” Arlin said, and she prodded his arm reproachfully. “After all this, you are afraid to stay.”

  He looked at her and I could not see his answering expression, but the chiding humor died from her face. At last the magician reached out his hand. “Give me something of yours.”

  Arlin did not ask for explanation. She took out her dagger and gave it to him, pommel first. She did not tell him that this dagger had a reputation across all Velonya, as having ended an attempt against the Velonyan king. He took it, and he asked for something of mine.

  I stared at him, perplexed, and he added, “Something that you have carried. Have treasured. Something to represent you.”

  I shook my head, able to think of nothing that fit that description. Of all possessions, I liked my horse best, but a horse was too troublesome to become a souvenir.

  Arlin spoke for me. “Nazhuret has nothing. Nothing special.”

  In my humiliation I had an idea. I drew my dowhee from the pack. “Here,” I said, and he drew back in exaggerated surprise. “Does a tiger give away his claws?”

  I insisted that the thing was not special to me: that it was the image of any other well-made Felonkan blade, whether to be used for war or making paths in the forest. He took it silently and hid it and the poniard underneath his bedding on a pack saddle. On impulse I said to him, “Now give us your name, magician, and we will give you ours.”

  He smiled as he put the saddle on his pony, and even the smile was different from the smiles he had worn as a woman. “I have given my name to only one foreigner before, and that was long ago. But have it: Ehpen, I am called.”

  The name was two words of Rezhmian—“no safety.” I asked for the rest, and he laughed.

  “That isn’t enough, Nazhuret? It wasn’t enough for the other snowman either. Hear this. ‘There is no safety in this life.’ That is my full name.”

  He turned his face to Arlin. “Now give me another for you.”

  She stared past him for five seconds before answering. “I am Charlan, daughter of Baron Howdl of Sordaling in Velonya.”

  By his expression I could not tell if he had guessed her secret before this. “Tell no one that. No one here. Remain Arlin the eunuch instead.”

  “I was never a eunuch. Never that.” The magician was mounting his horse and affected not to hear.

  “Now you, without the poetry.”

  I answered that I was Nazhuret of Sordaling, nephew of the Nazhuret who was son of this ’naur’s father, and that my father had been Duke of Norwess in times past. But I added that none of that touched me.

  His bleary eyes blinked down at me. “None touches you? I’ll remember that, Nazhuret,
and lest it touch me instead I’ll be on my way. No, I am not afraid, but with no hope of safety we can still seek our best comfort, can’t we? And you—you are yellow-haired death riding a yellow horse.”

  He started along the road that ran by the sea, but Arlin shouted after him, “The other snowman. Might I guess his name?”

  Ehpen squinted back and Arlin ran after him, or rather she limped, having been struck by more than one brick that morning. I followed.

  “It was Powl, wasn’t it? Powl Inpres.”

  Slowly the magician nodded, and then he booted his ponies on. He would answer no more questions.

  I was astonished at her acumen, which seemed supernatural, but Arlin answered, “He said that to me more than once. ‘There is no safety in this life.’ It had to be Powl.”

  (You might have told us about the magician.)

  I followed her back to our camp by the City, from which now came a smell of fire. “I never heard those words from Powl. Not at all.”

  Arlin grunted and poured more water over the dressings on her horse’s leg. “Perhaps he never had need to tell you that,” she said.

  I could not stay out of that fortress, although Arlin lay with her swollen leg propped on a fountain (it was dry, as of this morning) and insisted this trouble was none of my business. And that I could be of very little assistance, knowing nothing of the place.

  It was not real compassion that pulled me into the Rezhmians’ long effort, or at least I don’t think it was, but rather that sort of reflex that causes one to respond to a voice calling one’s name or, for that matter, causes many men to gather and do nothing around one man who is digging in the road. There was such a feeling of urgency in the shouts and the answers of the leather-bucket corps, and the cries as new bodies, or even new living people, were discovered among the ruins, that I would have had to return to the city, even had I no arms to lift with, and only one leg to hop.

  I came through the broken gate into that broken courtyard and saw no one and nothing save the bodies of a few horses, swelling in the autumn afternoon’s heat. Everything was a-crumble, and all the big stones ran with cracks, but what amazed me was not the devastation, but that so much of the structure was still standing. It had been my personal conviction that the Fortress of Rezhmia had been flattened around me, but more walls stood than were shattered, and most of the buildings were as rectangular as before.

  There was, however, a shortage of towers and spires, and amid the fires of the City the streets were flooded by broken pipes.

  My ignorance of Rezhmia seemed to put me at no disadvantage, for there was opportunity to stand in a line with fifty other men, women, and children and pass sloshing buckets toward the smoke that billowed from a building so heavy in stone it seemed paradoxical that it could burn at all. Soon, however, our duty was taken over by a tank wagon with four horses that needed only four men to pump, and so I lent the width of my back to hauling stones away from the base of a fallen wall, in case there were people beneath it.

  There were three people beneath it, two of them children, and though I have seen many terrible things, starting in a bad infancy, this sight was stronger than I. Stronger than my stomach, and as I stood puking bile and empty air in the privacy of a garden (wholly untouched by the earthquake but muddied by the floods) a voice behind me said, “This trouble is none of your business.”

  The voice was like Arlin’s, and for a moment I believed she had limped into the fortress to pull me out again, but when I wiped my face and turned, it was to see a complete stranger: a man dressed in what might have seemed the canvas of a workman, if not worn so arrogantly, with a marvelous face and a marvelous necklace of gold around his neck.

  His features were much like Arlin’s also, although his coloring was only a shade darker than mine. He was tall and not very broad, and he leaned against the wall as a man usually leans against a garden wall, not as a man would lean on the day of a disaster.

  He allowed me to stare for some moments: to stare and to wobble, I imagine, for my stomach had not entirely recovered. He then added, “Not that I question the efficiency you have been showing, but obviously you find the work more distressing than some, and others also have more at stake in uncovering their dead.” Now I noticed that he was speaking Velonyie, and with a strong Rayzhia accent.

  He shrugged himself off the wall and came toward me. The fading daylight glistened in the intricacies of the ornament around his neck, though there was nothing of special care or expense about the rest of his person. His fair hair was almost untidy, and when he put a hand upon my shoulder—to steady me, perhaps—I could see that his fingers were callused and discolored along the side. His air was both conspiratorial and reserved as he said to me, “You would be of more value to the City if you presented yourself to the sanaur, who has been asking about you, and of more value to yourself, if you simply rode away.”

  Now instead of sick, I felt only dizzy. I always feel dizzy in the presence of people who know more about me and my circumstances than I do myself. “Did the ’naur send you to find me?” I asked him, in Rayzhia, which seemed his native language.

  He withdrew his hand. “No one sends me for anything. I send myself,” he replied, again in difficult Velonyie.

  I sat down on a stone bench and looked at the soggy ground, for this man was one too many things crowding into my head. Surely arrivals, earthquakes, and farewells were enough for one day. He allowed me quiet.

  “Who are you?” I asked when I looked up again.

  He had his arms folded in front of him. They were strong arms, but not burly. “Did you say ‘what’ or ‘who’? No, you said ‘who.’ You are a person of native courtesy.”

  I bent and rinsed my hands in the wet grass. “I’m not known for being polite. ‘Who’ delivers more information in one question. Who are you?” Since he seemed to want it, I spoke in Velonyie.

  “I am Dowln,” he said, with some emphasis. “A snowman like yourself. If the term does not offend you.”

  I shook my head blankly.

  “And I have something for you.” He reached into a pocket of his stiff apron and pulled out something that he put in my hand. It was cold and heavy. As I lifted it into the sunlight, he turned abruptly and strode toward the dangling iron gate of the garden.

  I saw that the thing was a ring, and precious. I chased after him. “No,” I said. “Don’t give me something like this. I can’t keep it.”

  He didn’t stop. “I made it for you,” he said. “What else should I do with it?”

  I caught up with him on the other side of the gate. “But listen. I will only sell it, when I have nothing to eat, or when someone else is hungry. Or for a worse reason. Or I’ll give it away. Besides…” Here I forced him around to face me, though it was clear he didn’t appreciate such violence. “… you can’t really know who I am.”

  He looked at my face and at the ring, and he said, “Give it away, then. I make such things, and therefore cannot be sentimental about them.” He shoved me away from him with such significance I had to let him go.

  It was a ring of heavy silver, tarnished to a midnight blue except on the three raised wires that ran its length and took polish from the friction of the hand. Its stone was a sapphire of so dark a blue as to be black, and through it ran a star of six points, that caught the evening light and the red light of the fires and returned it in a cold silver.

  Around this stone ran engraving, neither in Rayzhia nor Velonyie, but in the dead language Allec, and it said these words: i find my light in darkness.

  Altogether it was a work of great craft and beauty, but stern to the eye, and it had not been completed in one afternoon. Wonderingly I slipped it on, and it fit over the third finger of the right hand as no other ring ever fit me. I took it off my finger and put it into my deepest, most secure pocket, and left the Fortress of Rezhmia for the second time.

  Never before and not since have I seen a sunset so bloody, for the red dust of the broken stone and of the roads
filled the air. Every inch of my skin was caked pink, too, even under my clothes, with sweat creases and mottling that turned my stomach into red marble. It was difficult to breath, and Arlin’s cough had returned under the influence of the dirty, smoke-filled air.

  Because we had suffered the shock within the old city, and had seen it coming down around us, we had both forgotten the much larger Rezhmia City that lay behind the fortress park. Now it proclaimed itself to us, lit against its many hillsides by many blazes. We were no longer alone on the shaven lawns and by the green waters; weeping surrounded us. We gave away all our food.

  Halfway through the red night hours, we heard cornets in the City above, and the citizens around us who could do so left their camps and ran to stand by the road. I went with them, more guardedly.

  The sight was most dramatic, though I don’t think for a minute it had been staged for drama. Four horsemen came riding abreast, holding torches aloft. After them came the cornetists; their faces and those of their nervous wet horses were pulled with worry. After these rode a few ranks of officers, flanked by more torch bearers, with the flickering light reflected in every button and blade. The crowd had begun to murmur.

  There was no man there, I thought, who had not lost someone that day, and few of them even knew the tally. I felt extremely lucky, myself, being far from home, and I tried not rejoice over my state. The pedestrians were shouting two syllables, and not all together, which made it difficult to understand. Then my ears picked up the thread: it was “Reingish! Reingish!” that they were shouting. The minsanaur, the heir of the sanaur, was riding in.

  The horses were all very grand: tall, fine-boned, and nervous. I could scarcely see the faces high above. I pressed forward, as eager as any proud burgher of the town, for I too had an interest in this man.

  Here came a fellow in a grand helmet with plumes, looking slightly old-fashioned in his array. No—he was only a lieutenant by his uniform, and he carried two flags tightly furled and strapped to his saddle. Behind him was another, in scarlet (or so it seemed in the light of torches, moon, and houses burning) who had his saber drawn and held crossed before his body ceremonially, but another moment showed him to be only a captain. Next came a space, and then some anxious middle-aged men in civilian dress, then another space, and then a horse of so cold a color that, like my ring, it could transmute the red light into silver. It was not such a huge horse, and though all beasts around it trotted heavily and dripped at the mouth, this one still argued with the curb in its mouth and pranced diagonally over the road.