Arlin is clever with machinery, but I am passionate about it. I never even approached the offered chairs, but attached myself to the first device I saw. “What does this cut?” I asked him, fitting a small steel rod into one of the holes drilled through the center pole of the thing. The saw blade came down from above.
“It’s an old-fashioned stone faceter, with preset angles. I can show you more sophisticated sorts, if that appeals to you.” He had brought out a bottle of something—I cannot recall whether wine, water, or apple juice—and stemmed goblets, which were spread in his clever fingers as I remember cards spread in Arlin’s clever fingers.
“It is not too different from a glass miter saw,” I answered him. “If there are improvements upon the idea, I would be very happy to see them.”
Arlin had chosen a chair, and leaned her elbow on the table and her chin on her hand. “Nazhuret is an avid optician,” she said to the man. He gave her a disbelieving glance and she added, “I am an optician also. We are all opticians, where we come from.” With her dry, ironical enunciation, she made the truth unbelievable.
I could see that her words had confused him, and like Arlin, Dowln had no intention his confusion should be seen in his face. He opened his mouth to speak, but the earth spoke instead, and Arlin and he spent the next few seconds keeping the glasses on the table. I held on to the sturdy gem-cutter.
He spoke again, to Arlin. “We have not been introduced, and I have not exactly—seen you before. My name is Dowln, jeweler to and personal slave of the sanaur. Who or what I was before being captured at five years of age is not really relevant anymore.” He poured for her.
“My name is almost always Arlin,” she said. “Who or what I was before I escaped captivity at thirteen years is really not relevant anymore either.”
Dowln slid into a chair beside her. “You were a slave? In Velonya is that possible?” All this time the earth was shuddering beneath us, but everything that might be knocked off shelves had been put away by now. I felt under my hand the steel upright, singing in tune with the earth.
“I was a baron’s daughter,” Arlin answered Dowln, from inside her cup. (She has no more manners than I.) “The distinction is a small one.”
She put the cup down. “Why did the guard call you ‘lord,’ then? If you’re a slave…”
“Because I am his employer, and he is polite. And because I am a rich and powerful slave.”
She nodded, as he had nodded at her description of the daughter of a baron being a captive.
I thought the brave performance of these two, ignoring the tremor in favor of their own dignity, deserved some recognition. I clapped for them and then sat down very carefully at the table. I do not know whether he knew why I had applauded, but Arlin knew.
Dowln filled a glass for me. I think it was wine, but cannot recall the taste of it. “Tell me, Nazhuret. Do you believe in dreams?”
There was always an instant of open-mouthed silence before this Rezhmian/Velonyan eunuch jeweler spoke or replied to questions, just as there was always before Arlin spoke. I must wonder now whether it was the fact that both lived anomalously, and in much solitude, or whether it was merely that he was not good in the Velonyie he insisted upon using. The effect was to give an atmosphere of the portentous to the whole conversation.
I am an enemy of the portentous.
“Dreams? How could I not believe in dreams? I have ludicrous dreams, almost every night.”
“I mean dreams with messages. Dreams foretelling the future.”
Now it was my turn to pause, though without intending dramatic effect. “I have had dreams that seemed to… to rehearse the future, if not foretell it. But I can’t be sure there was real meaning in them, or put a science to that perception at all.”
He leaned back in his chair and laughed, and his voice, always high in pitch for a man, rode up into the registers of a little boy. “Put a science to the perception! Oh my friend, you are not what I expected at all…”
Here he became serious again. “Although I dreamed you once a week for this whole year.”
All notion of science flew out of my head. “What did you dream?” I asked him. “How do you know it was me you dreamed about, if I am not what you expected?”
He cleared his throat before answering. “It was never the same. One day it was an invading army that would steal me back to the North. One day it came to kill me. Once it was nothing but a voice, and a star in the dark, but always there was you in the thing somewhere, and always I woke in a sweat.
“By you, I mean your face, your coloring, your size, your voice… And your name. At first I thought I was dreaming Reingish, and had given him Velonyan hair for some dream-reason, but the voice is very different. And the feel of you in the mind.”
The jeweler was playing with his goblet, running the foot of it in circles over the table, staining the already stained wood. “Sometimes in the dream you kidnapped me, and sometimes you killed me, or ordered me dead. Sometimes you had a woman at your left shoulder and sometimes black death.”
Arlin let out a long sigh, and I could not read her feelings at all. She asked, “What about you, Dowln of the Sanaur of Rezhmia? Did you ever kill anyone, in any of those dreams?”
He did not look up. “No, I didn’t. My skill is not in combat; my skill is in dreaming, and in his pocket, there.”
Arlin was startled when I drew out the ring, as though there were some prearrangement between this strange fellow and myself. As I gave her the ring I said, “I forgot. I met this gentleman last night as I was hauling stones, and he gave me this. So many things happened after I forgot to show…”
Arlin had taken the ring, raised it to the light, stared into it and perhaps read it, and now she sat looking at nothing at all with perfect attention.
Dowln did not understand. “What are you looking at?” He touched her hand and then looked at me. “Is she subject to trances?”
“Do us the favor to use the male pronouns for Arlin, I beg you. And it is not a trance, actually. We call it ‘the belly of the wolf,’ though it would take a long time to explain why.”
“I’m still here,” said Arlin, and quietly she put the ring on the table. “You saw the essence of Nazhuret, if you made this.”
His gaze rested on the ring as though it had no meaning or attraction for him at all. Perhaps, as it was his creation, that was true. “I was a true dreamer from childhood. That was why they gelded me. The belief is that a child who has this skill will lose it at puberty, so the sanaur cut me for the good of the realm.” He raised his eyes for a moment: very fine eyes, only less expressive than Arlin’s through being less dark. “What does your science say to that, Aminsanaur Nazhuret?”
“Don’t call me that!” I spoke more sharply than was polite, but he laughed his little-boy laugh again. I was about to explain—if it can be explained—our peculiar status of having no status at all, but Arlin cut in with a more pertinent question.
“Did you speak of these dreams to the ’naur?”
His blue eyes shifted uneasily. “Of course I did. It is my purpose in life. Besides this…” He poked the black ring and I took it back off the table, putting it on my finger.
“And could the raising of forces in Rezhmia be based on your dream invasion? It would be very ironic if that were so.”
“The sanaur does not tell me why things are done,” answered the jeweler, seeming even more uneasy. “Why would it be ironic?”
I answered this time. “Because it’s the Rezhmian militarization that caused us to be sent here. Do you see?”
He saw, and he rubbed his eyes with both hands against the sight.
No one else came for us, and so I supposed the jeweler was acting on the ’naur’s behalf in affording us hospitality. Once during that afternoon Arlin expressed concern about our horses, and with the tinkle of a small bell, our host summoned a servant—Rezhmian in appearance—to find out where the beasts were stalled and make sure of their comfort. By this, as well
as the presence of the guard, I was convinced that he was right in calling himself a rich and powerful slave.
Such a concept is foreign to a Velonyan, but then so is slavery. People are expensive to keep during our six months of snow, when there is more eating done than work. In Rezhmia the general emancipation that occurred twenty-four years ago freed all but the slaves of royalty, and most of those were manumitted or grew old and died before the time of our arrival. Dowln, with his double gifts, was a rare thing in the palace: a one-of-a-kind bird kept in a lavish cage, destined never to find a mate.
Of course, destined never to find a mate.
I asked him why he had advised me to leave, when we met in the evening under the shadow of the broken wall. He answered, after some thought, that he had thought it better if I left—better for me, better for him, and better for his elderly protector. (That is what he called the Sanaur of Rezhmia: “my elderly protector.”)
He fed us fruit and cheeses on a worktable marred with burns and with splashes of gold and silver solder. When requested, he displayed more of his work: an eagle in silver with amethyst; a rose of five petals, in gold; two rapier hilts, one of which I recall as of onyx and knotted gold wire and the other of purple shell inlay, pommeled with a fragment of human bone.
I have never seen the equal of his skill, whether at home or upon travels, and his gift of art (a thing apart from skill, but dependent upon it) was consistent and perfect and very stern. Yet I had the sense that this man was not born to be living the life he was living.
The choicest machine in Dowln’s factory was a large furnace that fed a very small refinery. I was allowed to unfasten the intake door of the great iron thing and examine the load of anthracite coal that fed it: stuff nearly gem-quality jet in its hardness. “I prefer to use ground oil, when I can get it,” he said to us. “Then I change this orifice, here, which is threaded between the furnace and the smelter. But the army has requisitioned all stocks of oil, and good coal will do. It uses a lot of air, though. You should feel the draft through the hall, when I’m running coal.”
When describing technical matters, Dowln dropped back into Rezhmian, and his conversation then seemed to gain spontaneity. Perhaps it was not the linguistic switch, but the subject, that caused his animation.
“Here. Look,” he said, unbolting the top of the smelting chamber. I looked in to see the nozzle of the furnace, a thing like a hopper with a screen bottom, a steel rod running from one wall, and nothing else. The interior was not as large as my head, and colored the sad gray of metal that has been heated too hot, too often. “What do you think I do in this?” he asked me.
I remembered my second night with my teacher. “You’re not the first person to set me a puzzle of this nature. I’m known for giving original answers. Original, not correct. Please tell me what it does.”
Dowln took out a set of keys, opened a cabinet and presented me with a thin sheet of red glass.
I thought it was red glass, although I know no way to make glass take on so rich a coloring. The moment I hefted it, though, I knew my mistake. I am very used to the weight of glass, and this was heavier. I held it up to the window light, and I knew that this chip, six inches square, was a single ruby.
His face lit slyly, seeing my amazement. “It’s my own process. I drop in a dust of carborundum, and keep the fire hot. What do you think?”
I gave it back to him, and told him I thought he was a great inventor. “And you ought to be the richest man in the world,” I added. “To make gems!”
My outburst dampened his mood entirely. He looked down at the glaze of red in his hand, spun it on end in one palm, and then in sudden anger he sailed it onto the table, where it hit the wine jug with a sound of bells. Nothing broke.
“Why would I want to be the richest man in the world, Nazhuret? How would that improve my life?”
It seemed to me odd that a self-proclaimed beggar like myself would be arguing on the other side, but I wanted to know more. “The riches would be useless because you are a slave? Or because you are a eunuch?”
“Because I am human,” he answered, and this verbal victory restored his humor.
“First I made sheets like that one: very nice for buttons. Next I discovered that if I shot the dust of carborundum at a fine post sticking out of the wall, I would get a shape more useful.” Dowln displayed a set of earrings made of teardrop rubies. So true a red were they that one felt stronger looking at them, as though with an infusion of extra blood in one’s veins, and when they were held up against the light they each created a dancing red dot on the tabletop, surrounded by a halo of brilliance.
“And these were a step forward,” he said. I passed the earrings to Arlin, and the red dots danced over her pale skin and black hair. The effect was magnificent. “But only for cabochons and drops like these. There is something inexact in the crystal structure of my rubies. They will not facet well.”
Arlin put the stones back into his hands and leaned over the smelter. “Had you asked me to guess its purpose, I would have said it was some sort of new stonecutter, gear-driven. But then of course the wire or rod in the middle would have to spin.”
I was gazing at the rod idly, while wondering if I had just felt a quake at the edge of my perception. The machine did look like a saw, once one granted the necessity for such a large furnace to drive it. And I knew that jade is often cut using nothing but a wire, lubricated with water to keep it from burning.
The smelter, of course was always burning. “Dowln,” I heard myself saying, “… if you did spin the rod, the crystal structure that accumulates would be different.”
The jeweler stared at me. So did Arlin. Well they might, for my voice sounded odd. I had had what might be called a vision—not a divine vision or a philosophical vision but a mechanical one, and I was in a sweat because I would probably never know whether my idea was as perfect as it seemed to me.
Arlin grinned indulgently at my excitement, being the sort of person who is clever with things without being enthusiastic about them. Dowln went into a sort of trance, staring down through the hopper of his little smelter, biting a callus on one hand.
“It would be very interesting. The problem would be the gasketing, of course, but I could make one of high-temperature steel. I… want very much to try that,” he murmured.
Over his words I heard steps in the corridor, and the crack of the guard’s heels snapping together. A second later, those same heels fled lightly down the corridor, taking his two strong arms and his cavalry saber away from us.
Once again my senses reeled, not through movement of the earth, but through a cracking in my own identity, for I stood confronting myself, dressed in perfect, foreign tailoring and with hair dyed dark, but still myself. It was the Minsanaur of Rezhmia: the crown prince.
His face, looking at me, was taut with loathing, and with fear. I noted with a low satisfaction that the fear predominated. And I noted that the shock of our encounter was as bad for him—perhaps worse. After all, I may have had no idea I looked like him, but he had had no idea I existed.
“And this is what claims me as a cousin?” he asked the air, while looking straight at me. “This?”
I could not endure this ridiculous manner, and I asked, “To whom are you talking, Minsanaur of Rezhmia? The emperor’s servant? My companion? The men behind you? If you are talking to me, you may use the second person directly. The familiar will do; I am no great personage.” My answer was perilous, but I hate conversations that are both hostile and oblique. (One of these at a time is enough.)
“And you’re insolent, too?” He put up a hand, like my own hand but better kept, as though to slap me backhanded. On one finger was a ring that glittered amazingly, though the late afternoon air was losing its light. I hoped he would not feel it necessary to finish the gesture. I could not predict what Arlin might do.
As earnestly as I could, I said to him, “No, great lord, I am not insolent; I only like to understand the conversation. And as for b
eing your cousin, I don’t ask you to acknowledge the relationship. I have no need of such, and I can appreciate that you cannot like it.”
The raised hand sank slowly, reluctantly. For a few seconds he regarded us quietly, and for the first time I saw not mere temperament, but a quick, passionate mind behind all the Rezhmian pride. I wondered, inconsequentially enough, whether it had been difficult for him to grow up a crown prince and so short. Would that be worse than being a short nobody?
Of course Reingish had not been crown prince until a few years previous. There had been his father. I did not immediately remember how the ’naur’s closest nephew had died.
I knew his other nephew, my mother’s brother, had died of ground glass in his food, but that was Velonyan poisoning, ironically. We are not usually known as poisoners.
Reingish looked over his shoulder at a stocky man in civilian shirt and trousers. “Zhern, what do you think? Is it as I said?”
Zhern answered, “I have never seen so great a likeness between strangers, Minsanaur. Except for the hair, of course. And I don’t think any of it is paint or padding. I cannot think where they got him.”
I don’t know whether they had forgotten I had ears, or merely that I was there. My first impulse was to answer that if I were going to change the appearance of my face and person, I would have chosen a more imposing model. That, however, would not be politic; the min’naur might consider himself a handsome fellow, and I had seen no sign of a sense of humor yet.
I also felt I was intruding onto a private conversation.
“I don’t know who you think ‘they’ are, Prince. Arlin and I make our home in Norwess. I did not intentionally look like you. If I had had that in mind, surely I would have dyed my hair.”
He smiled at that: a tight smile, but it improved his appearance. Was it my smile I saw?
Behind Reingish stood five men, three of them armed and one in a very decorative costume of red and gold. They shifted from foot to foot and their eyes never moved from their attention to their master. Intent as dogs. Uneasy dogs.
The Lens of the World Trilogy Page 43
