The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  I was astounded at this reasoning, and after giving it thought, I strove to tell Arlin that she was wrong, for you, Powl, our teacher, once had to beat me in danger of my life, merely to get me to punch you solidly on the jaw. Even if I thought all good depended upon it, I would go into a fight against Arlin a handcuffed man. But I said nothing of this. I said nothing at all, for the drug and the honey had buried me in its gold.

  It was Dowln who decided that we should strike across country next day. I had to press my horse’s shoulder in front of his mule, to get a glimpse of his face above the linen cowl. “Have you much experience at traveling cross-country?” I asked him. “At traveling light?”

  At traveling at all, is what I meant.

  For a moment he considered whether to be offended; he tautened his face and lifted one eyebrow toward his high hairline. The expression was so much Arlin’s I must have stared.

  “I have ridden north as far as Teykattel Port in Sekret, after amber,” he answered me. “And I learned some of my smithery in the Felonk Outer Islands. Also, of course, I go west to Warvala every few years, to buy jade and opals. I know roads that go more directly to Velonya than does the sea road.”

  Sekret? The far islands? I let this new image of Dowln the traveler ripen in my mind. “I lived in Warvala for six months,” I said at last. “But I did not frequent the sort of crowd that buys jade and opals.”

  The fair face stared out of the curve of its hood, like a moon not yet full. He looked at me with blue eyes that grew flat and blank as he spoke. “But they traded something, didn’t they? I see you at a table with four others. They are drinking wine, but there is more to it than that. You are talking in two languages and making them laugh, but there is more to it than that. I see you with a barrel above your head. I see you taking a knife from a drunken man. But there is more to it than that…”

  I must have shuddered because Dowln’s mule flinched, but he himself did not. “I was a barman at the Yellow Coach,” I said. “And a translator, when that was needed. And a peacekeeper.”

  The mule’s sudden motion had caused the flaxen hood to slip off the flaxen hair. Dowln’s face looked as though he had never endured the sun, and around his neck was the intricate, solid ring of gold. It shocked me to see it.

  We were climbing a hill: very rocky. As usual, Arlin led. I heard the clang of his mule’s shoes against stone and I smelled sparks. “The ’naur freed you, Dowln. Or he told me he had. Whyfor the collar?”

  He shrugged and did not look back at me. “When it was time to leave I could not find the key. I don’t know where I last left it.”

  “The key to your collar was in your own care?”

  “Of course,” he replied in his stiff Velonyie, looking straight ahead. “One wouldn’t care to take a bath wearing such a thing… And I was late enough, you grant me, with your ponies and their gear.”

  That bright little circlet slid and snarled on his shirt with the mule’s bouncing trot. It was a heavy chain of complex linkage, and I could not take my eyes from it: symbol of a man as property.

  “I have the tools to cut it off,” I offered at last. “It would only take ten minutes.”

  He chuckled. “Longer than that, Nazhuret. This collar is hollow and lined with steel cable. I made it myself; I should know.

  “At the moment, it’s all I have. Besides, my prince, what matter?” At some signal of his, the mule pumped its lean hocks with more vigor and caught up to Arlin’s black Rezhmian horse.

  Her mount was a stallion (perhaps by some last irony of the sanaur’s and perhaps by her own choice), and as I paid some attention to his mule I found it to be a she-beast. She wiggled her long, elegant ears at the stallion. Mine was a humble horse and needed some encouragement to catch up with the other two.

  Why would a man forge his own collar, and anchor it on steel?

  We rode fast: very fast. I have ridden that smartly once or twice in my life, on a horse of the king’s stable, carrying a message of the king’s household from Vestinglon to Inpres. Still, never had I pushed for so many hours altogether, not even when Arlin’s mare carried the two of us together from Rudofsdorf and my teacher’s life seemed to hang in the balance.

  I felt a great compassion for the Naiish ponies. Like them, I am short-legged and sturdy: not made to travel far and fast. By now they were both released, for they carried no gear we were too afraid to lose. Arlin and I possessed no such gear. At times I thought we had lost one or the other, because Arlin’s black and my old Daffodil would disappear for a half hour at a time. We were among the vineyards, now, and I thought that such creatures as our ponies might be easily snagged by the locals. Perhaps they would be better off stolen, unless stolen for the stewpot.

  Each time I began to give up on one of them, however, it appeared again. Daffodil was no longer a horse of unusual color. He was a gray: black sweat and white froth intermingled, lit by gold where one or two hairs stuck out from the rest and dried. His breath made the booming sound of a forge fire, when the bellows are at work, but he stayed with us. Horses fear being left behind. I could feel the heart of the Rezhmian horse banging between my shinbones, and he was so slick and shrunken by sweat the saddle could be kept on only by my own balance.

  At last, near twilight, we were made to slow by the increasing traffic. “Tabyuch,” called Dowln over his shoulder. “It’s a wine center: very popular among visitors in autumn. We may find some mobilization here, but there’s no way to go around.”

  We found some mobilization; we found the little city’s streets solid with the dried-blood-color uniform of Rezhmian infantry. We could not turn corners on horseback without shoving some poor recruit off his feet and perhaps under the feet of the horses. The mass of the recruits (or more likely conscriptees) were new to the uniform, and behaved as random clogs in the flow of traffic. Some of the men without uniform were also obviously in the army. If there were any tourists there for the harvest, they were not enjoying themselves.

  We shouted and bellowed to one another. I remember thinking it odd that the smallest person in our company—myself—should have by far the deepest voice. Night fell long before we found a place to rest, and the horses’ coats were stiff with dried foam; I pitied them and us as well, though my head was much better today and I had not succeeded in dying. There was an overcast, with a red tint to it from the dust still hanging in the air and once, as we approached one more inn that would have no space, a heavy tremor rang the earth beneath us. The horses were too tired to spook, but I felt the large heart of the beast jolt with my own.

  Arlin had been leading, as she had all day, and she was using her gift of invective to win us a slow way through the streets. Her voice, always used at the bottom of her register, began to fail her, and as it grew darker the black shape on the black stallion grew invisible to the milling men who were at least as confused and weary as we.

  “Let me go first,” shouted Dowln, pressing his mule against her. “I’m all in white and so is this thing I’m riding. They will see me.”

  Arlin gave back gratefully, and our march immediately doubled its time. An open swath appeared behind Dowln’s mule, into which I urged my own horse, closely followed by Daffodil, who was taut with dehydration, glassy-eyed, and seemed to have put his chin upon my knee for the night. Rezhmian soldiers and the burghers of Tabyuch were darting smartly out of our way with glances of immense respect, and I saw to my amazement that the eunuch slave had a whip in his hand, a small ivory and leather whip, with which he lay at the populace left and right in a most practiced manner over the head of his mule, which seemed to approve.

  “How can you do that?” I asked him, before thinking whether it was politic. He misunderstood my question entirely. “It’s not so difficult. The mule has been trained to lay its ears flat along its neck when the whip comes out. It isn’t startled.”

  Even in my exhaustion I was fascinated and repelled that a man who had been (in Velonyan eyes) so humiliated by life should feel it justifi
able to flog innocent citizens on the road. I remembered his insistence upon speaking his birth tongue with us, and his lack of proficiency in it.

  “If you think this trip is taking you to your real home,” I muttered aloud, “you have a surprise coming.” Fortunately he did not hear me, or never mentioned it.

  Still, we went very fast once Dowln took the lead, and came to a street upon a gardened hill where the quality of the buildings caused me to feel I would be asked my business at any moment. Here there were fewer milling infantry, but quite a few cavalry, troop and officer alike. “There will be good stables, here. Too bad, but the horses will need some money spent if we are to ride this hard again tomorrow.” I glanced at Arlin, for in this remark Dowln had hit her harder than any slight against her family. And she did stare, and her face did look moon-pale in the light from a tavern window. I thought (so assured was I of my lady’s regard) that I might offer Dowln a word that evening, concerning Arlin’s feeling about her horses. I also thought I might be too tired to spare the time, and as I considered the question, a small company of horsemen in the emperor’s green filed down the street in great discipline, leading a half-dozen prisoners.

  Some of these were clearly Velonyans. One looked remarkably like a native of the Felonk Islands, complete with dowhee sheath on his belt, but most of them I could not see. One prisoner, though, was on ponyback, and led another Naiish-style pony behind her. I knew those dirty skirts, and I knew the intricate headdress, and I knew very well those eyes, half brown and half silvered with age.

  He knew me also, and he looked at me with great interest and surprise but no pleading for favors. I kicked my horse up with Dowln’s mule. “I must get him out of there. That… that woman. I must get him out of there.”

  Dowln glanced sideways at me, eyes widened in alarm. He thought I was raving, and it was a reasonable conclusion. But as I pushed my horse forward, he came with me and was in front of me when we stopped the cavalry.

  To my relief, he did not use his whip against the officer. Instead he shouted, “I am the emperor’s slave, Dowln the prophet, and maker of Adiamant, the minsanaur’s ring. This old woman of the Red Whips: we must have her from you.” As he spoke he pulled from his head the linen cloak, and the symbol of his powerlessness caught the light of a close street-lamp.

  The company came to a difficult stop, and some of the prisoners on foot suffered for it. The lieutenant stared perplexed, or perhaps stunned, while the lesser horsemen shifted in their saddles and did not fear to murmur among themselves. I saw a hand reach for his sword’s hilt.

  Dowln seemed not only oblivious to, but above all their doubts, and he showed no fear. I thought it better to have a sword between him and danger, however, and besides—I had led us to this contention. I pushed the mule behind my own horse.

  The company gave back, and the lieutenant made a deep salute. I saw a dozen pair of eyes glistening at me under lamplight, and after a moment I noticed that their eyes were on my ring—which was certainly not named Adiamant—and that its own starburst was shining as the full moon shines through a rent in curtains.

  At a snap of the officer’s fingers, the ponies were led out, and I looked directly at Ehpen, the Naiish magician, once more in his woman’s garb. He seemed calm as always, and reasonably entertained by the way things were going.

  “You’ve changed again,” he said to me.

  I had no energy to ask him in what way. I was tired, I had been drugged, I was dressed in foreign silk: so what? “I thought you were going to winter in the City,” I said. “By the direction you are now going, you must have headed away at great speed when we left you.”

  He snorted. “There is no benefit in a broken city,” he said. “There is no benefit to a stranger in a war.”

  I looked from him to the cavalrymen of Rezhmia surrounding us: men or boys not much larger than I and years younger. “Is there benefit to an old friend in a war? To a family?”

  Perfectly calm in his captivity, surrounded by the sabers of his enemy, he shook his belled headdress and answered, “I leave that to you to decide, Nazhuret, for this war is yours. It is both sides of your blood.”

  White eyes glinted in the darkness as they who thought me Reingish heard me titled “King of the Dead.” The old magician in his female role folded his hands together over the pony’s saddle.

  I remembered one Red Whip rider who had withstood the persuasions of our military to defend a traitor Velonyan who had only paid for his services. That Naiish died unbroken, and he was only a simple rider.

  This was Ehpen, the magician of the plains eagle horde. He would enter the fortress and not return, unless we could intervene. I found the lieutenant and looked him sternly between the eyes. “The prophecy requires hi… requires this one.”

  They did not think of refusing. My old magician was pushed out to us like lint from a bellows, with his ponies and all.

  “What prophecy is this?” whispered Dowln into my ear. In Velonyie.

  “Surely you must have some sort of prophecy with this old woman in it,” I answered in the same tongue.

  Didactically he said, “I deal in dreams, not prophecies. And I have had no dreams about an old woman with bells on.”

  As the magician left the sorry group of captives, all eyes followed him: some sad, some resentful, and one man purely despairing. In indecision I entered the belly of the wolf and I heard myself shouting, “No! No! I know it. These must be scattered! Even here on the street, they must disappear. Go! Flee lest the prophecy overtake you all!”

  In a riot of feeling they scattered, and I drove my weary horse into the center of the troop with no great care for the cavalrymen surrounding me. My arrogance overcame them, as had that of Dowln, but his was natural and mine the result of ridiculous inspiration.

  All the prisoners were gone, and though one or two of the troopers had watched them go, none had tried to take them back. The magician was gone, too, into nowhere with both his ponies. “You lied,” whispered Dowln, sounding quite hurt.

  My antic mood had not left me, and his words stung me into further baroque action. To those among the cavalrymen still close enough to hear, I called, “You obey me because you think me to be Minsanaur Reingish. You are wrong. Reingish is no longer with us, nor is the ring Adiamant.” I held out my hand showing the black ring and its star of blazing silver. “This is not it. ‘i find my light in darkness,’” I read to them and then I pulled off my kerchief to expose my sun-whitened hair. “I am not Reingish but Nazhuret.”

  They fled. All the troop horses plunged away, knocking pedestrians right and left. Some screamed. Even the lieutenant was gone from view, and the intersection was much quieter.

  The mule’s picky little steps caught up with my horse again. “It was your prophecy, then, that made you do this thing? Not mine but one of your own.”

  I glanced back in surprise. It seemed my absurd babble had convinced him, and I wondered at the quality of his own visions, if he could be so gullible. But he had seen me in his dreams, and he had seen Arlin. “I had no prophecy, Dowln. As you first said, I lied.”

  He trotted behind me dubiously. “But the next part. About who you are. That was no lie.”

  Arlin, who had been flanking the cavalry troop (in case of difficulties), now pressed up with us. “No, it was all true, but Zhurrie made the most of it. He has a gift for rhodomontade, when he needs it.” She spoke smugly as any wife over her husband’s claims to fame, and I glowed complacently as any husband.

  Dowln was not done with it. “But what you said—and my ring on your finger, shining in the night. I did have that vision. Of you as you were just now. That’s why I made the ring. It must be important.”

  I hated this. “Sink your visions on an anchor,” I said, and the subject was dropped.

  The inn he found for us was very nice. The dinner almost made me weep. After eating, we all slept like the dead, and I was king among them.

  It began to rain in the middle of the night, or so
I gathered next morning from the soggy appearance of the street outside. Our inn room, too, had a soggy feel to it, as did my knees, that had spent too many hours hugging a horse.

  Dowln was awake first and I let him have first cry upon service. He bathed in front of the tile stove, with a Rezhmian disregard for modesty. I remember that naked he did not look so much like a lean woman: so much like Arlin. His gold collar stole the first light in the room, and when he lifted it up from his collarbones, I saw it had left a ring of scarring around his neck.

  I wondered what we were to do with him.

  “Where will you go, in Velonya?” I asked him, using the mumbling voice that usually will not wake my lady. “Have you family somewhere?”

  He dried his face in a towel before answering, and I thought perhaps he was weeping, but when he looked at me he seemed cool enough. “If I had, Nazhuret, I would go anywhere but to them. What soldier of Old Vesting would welcome the return of a son like me?”

  “A soldier like me,” was my answer, and I meant it, though I distrusted his dreaming-gift. He did not reply to that, but he said instead, “I am charged with seeing you home to Velonya. After that is done I will have no further interest in the place.”

  It was in my mind to ask him how this attitude meshed with his insistence upon talking in his parents’ language, and how he had introduced himself to me so forcefully as “another snowman,” but the other surprise he had just offered buried that question. “You are charged with seeing us home?” It was Arlin speaking, her voice growly with sleep. She was sitting up in bed, her hair in her face. “I remember being told it was we who were supposed to take you north.”

  The damp towel sagged and slipped down his body, catching in the chainwork of the collar on its way. As Dowln stared, I heard the rain against the window, cold but peaceful in sound. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that the plaster under the window was water-stained. On impulse I touched it with my finger and left a mark.