The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  The note was short and the letters careful and tiny. if my kinsman has a taste for theological discourse, know that eyluzh will overfill his need. there is no obligation, but the shrine serves good food. (signed) grandfather mynauzet

  The others must have thought the message dire, the way I stared at it, and the rapidity with which I blinked. But it was only at the signature I stared.

  I was four years old the last time someone had admitted me as a blood relative.

  “You wish me to go with you and discuss the nature of God?” I asked the priest. “Why?”

  Eyluzh spread his hands elegantly outward. “I would be honored.”

  I shifted my stare from the paper to the man. “But why honored? Such discussions are not my province. I have nothing to offer.”

  It was bad enough that the priest looked disbelieving, but when I looked from him to Dowln, the Velonyan seemed also to distrust my words, while Arlin, standing behind him, seemed to express that I was capable of talking endlessly about any and all subjects under the sun.

  Eyluzh seemed more than disbelieving, however. He appeared really disappointed. “Then what subject would you like to discuss, O King of the Dead? I would like very much to aid in the entertainment of so sudden and strongly heralded a visitor as yourself.”

  I could not tell whether the man was sarcastic, gently ironical or merely overpronouncing my name. I gave him the benefit of doubt. “I would like to see the shrine itself, if I might, Ngaul Eyluzh. My conversation then can consist of gasps and cries of admiration, and I will thus escape contradiction.”

  The priest’s eyes narrowed for a moment and he said nothing. I wondered if I had asked for too much, but then he said, “I think I can arrange that. You understand it will be at a disadvantage, what with the wounded…”

  “We are all at a disadvantage now,” said Dowln, perhaps to himself, and the priest turned his red presence around and started toward the door. I followed and Arlin after me, but Dowln, not rising from his chair, plucked at her sleeve and I heard him whisper: “It is very difficult to get permission from the abbot to allow a foreigner into the Appid. Eunuchs may not step into it nor yet touch the outer walls. They suspect our touch will cause decay.”

  I was not the only one to overhear this. Eyluzh’s face filled with distress. “No, artifactor! You misjudge us. It is only that the strengths of your spirit are different from those of sexual man and not appropriate for H’Appid Niaus. We do not say inferior: only different.”

  Dowln’s long pale face remained set. “Remarkable how those differences you detect never work to my benefit, priest. Not in religion, law, or life itself.”

  Eyluzh shrugged like a northerner this time, rude or not. “Remember that I am not responsible for the creation of any of these, Dowln: not law, not religion, and certainly not life itself.”

  I had the feeling none of this was being said for the first time. Arlin threw her black shadow between the men.

  “Enough. It doesn’t matter. I have no interest in fancy basketwork anyway, and Nazhuret does not need me to wipe his nose. If you permit, Dowln Goldsmith [and she relapsed into Velonyie, to please the man], I will remain here and distract you from work. We could play cards.”

  “Or just sit here and contaminate each other,” answered the blond, smiling tightly. As we were passing under the doorway, I heard him add, for her ears, “They are not over-enthusiastic about women either.”

  As we passed down the cool stone corridor, lit only from clerestories and shining a dim russet from the color of the stone, I heard the jeweler’s guard returning, accompanied by booted feet and the jingle of arms. We did not see the soldiers, since our paths had now diverged, but I was gratified that Dowln, despite his slave status, had the power to win protection from the highest subject in the land.

  (Or perhaps it was because of it. Frequently our only recourse against abuse is that our suffering inconveniences someone else. That is a horse’s only recourse, at any rate, and a slave does not have much better standing. I wondered if the emperor’s horse would be called “Lord Horse” by the populace.)

  I watched the turns of the hall with great attention, because I hate to get lost, especially withindoors. We went past three left-hand doorways, all closed, and then took the next turn, which had no door. Here the windows were at eye level and I was able to see we were a story above the ground. Below was a garden, of the usual Rezhmian tubs-and-flagstones-around-a-pond variety, but this place, by the earthquake’s whim, had suffered great damage. The tubs were thrown and broken, the pond an empty hollow of stone and mortar, and the three-colored fish these people value so highly lay as so many gray husks on the pavement. Some of the fish had been as long as my arm.

  My guide, more ornate than the red, black, and white fish, had not stopped with me, and I had to jog so as not to lose him. We went downstairs, again to the left, and then took a sharp right into a narrow hall finely inlaid with shell and coral, that was lit by torches—like something from the dark ages. As we passed along, the smell told me that the lamps were actually modern oil lanterns, fed—like Dowln’s ruby smelter—by Rezhmia’s tar and ground-oil pits.

  This room opened out to an empty chamber of immense size, with spear-thin windows reaching thirty feet up toward heaven, and with spots of lighter color on the walls and on certain of the tiles, as though a decoration had been removed. The clean spot on the wall was in the shape of a triangle and that led me to think I was in an abandoned church. For a moment I felt a pang for the loss of our home in Norwess, that was an abandoned monastery, and then I was following my guide out of the pink stone and into late sunlight.

  My first reaction to H’Appid Niaus was that its size was greatly overrated. It looked like a wayside shrine, painted in clean, sky-colors. The lines of its architecture (I am no student of architecture) went up and up, as though the whole structure was exhibiting the weightless nature of the willow wands of which it was constructed. Then I noticed the size of the courtyard that lay between the shrine and us, and the numbers of workers and the teams of oxen that were made small by comparison with the building, and I knew that the perfection of its design made both distance and size illusory.

  Ngaul Eyluzh was watching me watch it. “Well. What does the visitor think?” he asked me.

  I answered, “It has an effect like the stars. It reduces us to insignificance.”

  He laughed, but as though he expected that response, and he rubbed his hands together.

  I had not uttered my entire thought, which was that I think it right and proper for the stars to reduce man to insignificance, but that I prefer places human-built to have a human scale, for the truth is that we are not insignificant at all.

  I remember that the yard in front of the shrine was a crazy pavement, made crazier in the last few days, and that one spot of it was thick and sticky and brown with blood. It would have taken all the blood in a human body to create such a stain, and the carpet of flies that covered it gave a fuzzy appearance, as though it were a spot of crawling mold upon the rock. Eyluzh strode over this wallow of blood, giving it no attention, his red skirts scraping over and sticking to the stuff. The sight of the red silks pulling over the brown blood made me slightly sick.

  Or maybe it was the smell in the hot afternoon air. There was the odor of a slaughterhouse around us, and I began to wonder whether the worship of Niaus involved animal sacrifice, when it came to me that a slaughterhouse, a battlefield, and a hospital all share the same unpleasant stinks.

  The stairs were of the usual pink sandstone, but the wall before us was as strange as I had been led to expect. It rose fifty feet in the first story alone, and ranked beside it was a row of pillars, each an entire fir trunk, peeled, dyed, and inlaid in the shrine’s colors, and connected to the building proper by “ropes” woven of willow, thicker than my leg and ornate of pattern. There was something both odd and familiar about this style of building, and after a moment’s thought I realized that H’Appid Niaus was built like
the houses of Bologhini, if one of those homely dwellings were raised to imperial size.

  Above the second floor the walls swelled outward in what was doubtless more elaboration, of which I could see only the floor itself, serving as an awning for the entryway where I stood. That entryway led in funnel fashion toward the main doorway, that was perfectly round and woven into the whole like the rim of a basket. The effect of this was to make the pedestrian feel he was being led, pulled, or sucked ineluctably into the building.

  We, however, resisted the pull and stepped through a small and more ordinary-looking doorway to the left. Once within, I heard weeping and other unhappy sounds, but at some distance. Here the smell was more intense.

  The interior of H’Appid Niaus made the stone corridors of the fortress seem a marvel of simplicity. Not only were these smaller and lacking in the right angles that reassure visitors, but the interior walls were woven so sparely that some light could pass through, and so it was possible to pack more and smaller rooms tightly into the space (like the grain of a loaf of fine white bread). The stripes and speckles of light that touched upon each individual willow wand were echoed in large upon the walls themselves, so one did not always know whether he was about to cross a room or slam his nose upon a door two inches away. Hearing might have made up for this confusion of sight, but the porosity of the building made the sense of hearing equally unreliable. I almost lost the priest a number of times, and it seemed that H’Appid Niaus was intent upon convincing me that I was not only insignificant, but a dolt, besides.

  I needed another sense, and so I unfocused my eyes, quieted my mind, and found one. I don’t know exactly what my perception was, whether air against the face, echoes, or something more esoteric, but suddenly I had no trouble with H’Appid Niaus.

  I caught up to Eyluzh, and it seemed he was disappointed that I wasn’t lost already. Even priests appreciate petty mischief.

  The rooms that opened out from the corridors were all closed by wicker gates woven tightly, and so I had the impression that there was only this tube of a passage, round and winding like the gut of a huge beast. The smell helped the image along. When the passage opened into the great assembly chamber, we were already at the back of the building and I could see the open top of the basket—the great door—at the other end, with bright light of day shining through.

  The hall was high-domed, and the floor of it was not willow but pink stone, that reflected the shell and coral inlays of the wall. Standing in rows as straight as soldiers on parade or pieces on a game board were statues: twice life-height, each of them different. I could not make them out at this distance, but by the number and lengths of the limbs I suspected they were not carved in the realistic school. I spent little time examining these, for mixed among them, in rows of less order, were the ranks of wounded and sick, and the nurses that bustled among them.

  Some of the patients were on folding cots, military style, and some of them were laid out on the floor itself. It was from this room that the groans and weeping had come. And from this room came the smell.

  Eyluzh had already taken hold of my sleeve, to prevent me from stepping further toward the infirmary. “Alas, visitor, I cannot show you the hall today.”

  I told him I wished only to see how the people were doing, but he shook his head until his hat tinkled. “No, it is exactly because of them I cannot; the presence of uncleanness I have renounced.”

  I must have stared at the man, for he continued. “It is not that we are heartless, visitor. We have our healing orders, too. But my work is different.”

  When I hesitated again, he added, “And they do not need your help, my friend. They did not ask for it.”

  We climbed, and my orientation began to fail me for the numerous turns and the lack of windows along the staircase. I depended more heavily upon the sense or combination of senses I had discovered in the passages below, until it became easier to step with my eyes closed. I would have taken off my boots as well, to feel the texture of the tiles that crusted the wicker stair treads, but I suspected bare feet might be prohibited in the heart of the Appid, along with eunuchs and women and people in physical distress. Instead I rolled up my sleeves and let the air speak to the hair on my arms.

  Now I could feel the breeze that had blown through the shrine yard, and which blew in reduced form through the huge basket that was the shrine. I made a little model of H’Appid Niaus in my mind, added the staircase, myself, and the blowing wind, and regained a perception of where I was.

  We had climbed for some minutes and the priest was puffing like a porpoise in front of me. I heard this noise echoed from above and knew we had reached a ceiling.

  I opened my eyes and blinked at the light pouring through a high-arched window. Wind made the woven shutter shudder against its moorings. I looked out and saw the Fortress City rising below me like raw pink mountains. Here and there oily smoke made ropes across the sky. The hall of fake torches was across the yard below us, and farther off stood the gate through which Arlin and I had entered the City only this morning. My self-conceit rose measurably; the building had not succeeded in turning me around at all.

  Ngaul Eyluzh was trying to close the window, but the breeze fought him. I helped him haul around the big shutter and secure it, whereupon this high chamber became as dim as the rest of the shrine.

  “Better!” the priest said. He dusted his hands upon one another. He caught his breath and looked at me closely. “Sometimes people get lost on their first trip into H’Appid Niaus,” he told me.

  “I believe that,” I answered. “And for many visits after, too. It’s not obvious.”

  “You did not get lost, visitor.” His voice seemed to hold a little disappointment, but he turned away from me and led across a room the size of a good house in Sordaling, again all of willow and furnished only by one woolen rug and three wicker boxes. Eyluzh’s sticky scarlet hem pulled against the imperfections of the wicker as it had against the dried blood.

  Each wicker box was missing its top and half of one side, and had been piled with pillows. There was a tea service of three precious metals spread out on the rug between them. Eyluzh doffed his high hat, fell backward into a box, and let the pillows support him. I could see only his face and feet. “We test everyone with the maze and staircase. I am glad you did not fail it.”

  I laughed at him: his portentous words and idiotic appearance. “I’m glad I passed, too. I hate to ask for directions from strangers. But why test me? What can it matter that a nobody like me knows east from west?”

  Eyluzh pointed a finger at me. I had thought the gesture was considered impolite in Rezhmia. “You are not nobody, visitor. Besides, we test everyone. Everyone tests everyone, constantly. Have you never heard of the War of Wisdoms? Oh—sit down. I don’t mean to be rude.”

  I squatted on my haunches on the rug.

  “No, no. In a chair, of course.” He waggled that finger again. “Either chair.”

  I looked into the padded recesses and felt I had to draw the line. “No thank you, Ngaul Eyluzh. I’m happy enough on the rug.”

  His dark eyes were bright, like a bird’s. “Afraid of closed places?”

  I considered the matter and could not convict myself. “No, I just can’t imagine feeling comfortable in a box of pillows. And I have never heard of the War of Wisdoms.” As I spoke I was thinking, with some feeling, that Rezhmia seemed to interpret everything as a matter of war.

  Eyluzh must have read my face, for he smiled, and his round cheeks grew rounder, and his mouth, much like a woman’s, made a shape like the bows of the Naiish. His feet (so obvious in the strange couch) drummed against the pillows in glee.

  “Oh, my dear visitor! You misunderstand me. This discussion is not to make you unhappy. We play at our wordbattles as other people play check-board. It is a way of passing the time and also… and also of discovering truth. And, of course, we are going to feed you: tea and sweet cakes.”

  His manner was so winning that my worry mel
ted. I knew a moment’s pang for Arlin, who had been eating toasted barley and wild roots for so long now. But Arlin preferred her food piquant; I was a child in my tastes.

  “Ngaul Eyluzh, at last I realize that you are a comedian, under your imposing robes,” I said, and Eyluzh gave me an owl stare.

  “It took you so long? And I don’t think the robes are imposing: only uncomfortable. To a stranger I must be a sight!” As I heard him, a wicker door butted open and a very small figure shuffled into the chamber with a tray. This tray was large and gold, and he set it down between us.

  The cooking of Rezhmia puts our own to shame, old friend. It is not that we have a racial inadequacy. We have merely a short growing season. I counted seven different stuffed cakes on the tray, as well as three pastries. Some were obviously sweet, while others smelled wonderfully like dinner. Tears sprang to my eyes, for fancy cakes have a spiritual significance than nobody in this world understands but me. Beside all this glory was set a tall golden teapot with a spout in the shape of a stork’s head and bill, and two ornate gold cups.

  “Don’t feel obliged to drink the tea,” grunted Eyluzh, as his foot soles scrabbled and extended from the box with their owner following. “It’s not a taste for… for northerners.”

  I am as typical a northerner as Arlin is a typical woman. I poured for both the priest and myself. Then I bit into a pastry.

  Food never lives up to its smell, but it was still welcome. Eyluzh started right in on the sweets, and after he had reduced one to crumbs, he wiped his baby face with his baby hand and began upon me.

  “Tell me, visitor. What is the name of God?”

  I ceased chewing, let the question ring in my head awhile, and said in turn, “Your city is broken and your people suffering.”

  Eyluzh heard me expressionlessly, in the same manner that Arlin cheats at cards. He lifted his cup and swigged the hot tea, loudly. I imitated him, and the beverage tasted like the blade of a sickle that had cut weeds all day.