The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  I approached the steel barrel and felt it. I put my hand on the flange of brass at the bottom of the slugcasket.

  “Watch, Papa. It’s still hot,” she said, and I returned that I believed her. I blew down the barrel, forcefully, getting a faceful of stink and oily dirt, and I heard her say the thing was coming out.

  The little casing looked sound, except for the discoloration where the primer had struck powder and the smears of brightness where it had been forced from the barrel.

  Sninden was magnificent at ignoring the lordship in his gallery. “The idea is sound, girl. Only the slugcasket needs to be reduced in size a trifle.”

  “Then it won’t block the backfire, and we’ll be where we started, with blown breeches and split barrels.”

  The council lord plucked my sleeve and I was led again into the display room. “You subject your daughter to that stench and noise, sir?” He was ready to make a joke about it. A friendly joke.

  “No, I abhor guns. She subjects me,” I answered, and once again I asked the state’s man—the stately man—what he wanted of me.

  Lord Damish stared at me a long moment and then asked very plainly what I was planning to do about the death of King Rudof.

  I had resented the man’s artificiality, but I resented more his pointed honesty. “He is dead, I’m told,” I answered, “and it’s too late to do anything at all about it.”

  Dead. “If it is dead, then it had better pass out,” had said Arlin, about a miscarriage. Arlin, too, was dead. Could one word stop so much?

  “Are you planning to return home?”

  I told him I had no plans. That was true enough. I might have as perfectly told him that I had no home.

  “I ask because Canton is concerned. Canton is concerned because Lowcanton is concerned. It’s not vulgar curiosity on my part.”

  I shrugged. “I’m sure it is nothing vulgar, on anyone’s part but, my lord, I still have no plans.”

  The tall lord sighed. “I obviously came too soon. Please send for me when you have thought.” He stalked the length of the room and then bowed. “Duke Timet.” Then he bowed again. “Aminsanaur.” I heard him going down the stairs.

  Navvie was at my back, as was Sninden. “Papa, you have more sets of names than anyone I know.”

  “He certainly put me in my place with them,” I said, and Sninden dropped the cooled brass casing in my hand.

  That evening the port of Canton was more beautiful than I had ever seen it. The quiet water, deep enough not to be muddied by traffic, lapped at the multitude of piers. The wavelets were bright and the piers were black, in a pattern like winter branches against the sky. The real sky was washed in flesh colors: pink, ivory, and sallow, and someone hidden was playing a reed box with tinny, lonely sounds. I sat on the upper floor balcony of our little house, halfway between grief and sulking, for there was nothing in this landscape to remind me of my dead friend and king, and it seemed unfair to have no tools for my mourning.

  Lights came on in the streets below, because Canton is too busy to close down at sunset; its commerce goes daily until exhaustion.

  It seemed to me I had never given Rudof half enough in recompense for all he had done for me. I remembered all the times I had paraded my refusal of the simplest duties a subject owes his king. I would not war for him; I would not accept his authority over me nor the authority he wished me to take up over others. What was it I had said to my king, on our first meeting, on the southern marches of Zaquashlon? “Let us not stop here like fools discussing my accent…”

  Why was I still alive and free after all that? He had been known as a touchy man. A redhead.

  His only surviving son was a redhead also, and the boy had never appreciated my qualities. The boy was now a man: the king of Velonya. I was not entirely unhappy to be away from Velonya as he ascended the throne.

  Navvie was standing at the balcony with me. Her hands gripped the balustrade and she allowed her feet to swing between the uprights. There were green stains on her fingers and she bore a smell of crushed grass. “I don’t know if the railing is safe,” I said.

  “It will hold my weight,” she answered, with the complacency of the very small. “Or do you think I should be acting my age?”

  This was so ridiculous I didn’t respond. Nothing I have taught Nahvah has had anything to do with acting one’s age.

  “By my age,” she continued dreamily, looking at the thirty-foot drop beneath her, “I am really a hopeless old spinster.”

  My daughter is twenty-seven, though she looks fourteen. I asked her if she even knew how to spin, with the idea she would turn a toe-pirouette on the wooden slats and then laugh, and maybe then I could laugh, too. But Navvie did not give me that laugh. She just shook her head. “No. Mother did not remember how, so she could not teach me. Unless you mean spinning a blade.”

  “Still, that’s a form of spinning. I suppose you qualify as a spinster—and will even if you marry.”

  “Marriage doesn’t run in my family,” Navvie said calmly. “Neither my mother nor my father ever married.

  “That was just a joke,” she added, after staring at my face. “Please, Papa. Just a joke.”

  There was very little light outdoors by now, and I left the piers and the ocean for lamp-lit rooms and dinner.

  I was thinking of young Jeram as much as I was Rudof that evening, wondering what effect the political turmoil would have on his troublesome little philosophy, which the boy called a religion and which he blamed on me. Ofttimes I have wanted to hang Jeram, for his enthusiasm was only matched by his ability to miss the essence of things. I did not want anyone else to hang Jeram, though. What a miserable shame it would be if he died for a teaching he didn’t even understand.

  Navvie opened a bottle of wine. I did not know when she had purchased this luxury; I was too depressed at the moment to ask. In retrospect I guess she had the bottle ready to celebrate the success of her breech pistol, and instead it went to help us drown the sorrow of Rudof’s death.

  Navvie’s mother used to while away the time putting dagger holes in rented furniture. Navvie herself always leaves things in better condition than when she found them. Our souls come out of a grab bag, I think, and our parents have limited power to endow or influence. Tonight Navvie seemed to be mending and freshening clothes. I watched her, scarcely seeing.

  “The church, Papa? Is that what’s bothering you? Your expression is more peeved than grieved.”

  “Rudof has certainly peeved me as well as grieved me, child. But you’re right. I am wondering whether your friend Jeram’s silliness has gotten him into final trouble.”

  Navvie sighed at me as I often have sighed at her. Or her mother at both of us. “It isn’t fair to blame Jeram on me, Zhurrie, just because we are both of an age. It’s you he reveres. Besides”—she stacked three folded blouses and pounded the pile flat—“‘The Belly of the Wolf’ is not entirely silly. If he hasn’t understood your practice very well, you haven’t spent much time teaching him.”

  I protested that I hadn’t wanted to teach him at all. It had not seemed appropriate. “But he refused to understand that. He broadcasts his own lessons like grass seed come stone or soil. And he did not hesitate to set himself up as a teacher before anyone complimented him on his wisdom.”

  Navvie finally gave me the giggle I wanted. “Oh, poor man, if he had to wait for compliments, he’d be tripping on his beard before he could start to lecture. He waited so long to be taken seriously. Especially by you.”

  The wine was bright and rough, probably produce of Canton itself. “I fear that the Norwess Provincial Assembly will be taking him more seriously than he’d like, from now on…

  “… If the crown party leans on them,” I concluded, and for a moment the wine was like blood in my throat.

  “I know,” said Navvie.

  The last veil of numbness ripped away, and I was no longer able to pretend this death—this assassination—this murder had nothing to do with me, or with
the people I touch. “We shall probably have to do something about all this,” I said. I looked at Navvie through the ruddy lens of the wineglass, and I saw what she was doing.

  “I know,” she said again. “That’s why I’ve been packing.”

  It was the middle of the night when I woke, out of a dream not about Rudof but concerning Arlin, who was explaining to me why she would not return with me on the wharfside horsecar. It had something to do with the weight the poor beasts could pull, I remember, and I was telling her she had grown so thin with the cough the horses wouldn’t feel her. She held out an omnibus card stub, saying, “One trip is all you get for your ticket,” and she walked out, ankle-deep, into the sandy water. Her intransigence made me angry, but when I woke I was not angry but wet-eyed, and there was someone moving about on the downstairs floorboards.

  I had given up carrying my dowhee on the overcivilized streets of Canton, but had not lost the habit of putting it under my bed at night.

  At the top of the staircase was a shape, but I knew that shape; Navvie was not the source of this midnight disturbance. >From birth she moved without noise: an astonishment to her mother, her father, and their teacher as well. She also had the good ears of youth.

  In Navvie’s right hand was a pistol—not the experimental weapon but a serviceable thing we kept loaded in the closet of her room. In her left hand was one of her mother’s beautiful, nasty throwing knives. “There are two,” she murmured in my ear. “They are looking for the staircase.”

  Incompetent. Or perhaps the intruders had not been given time by their employers to prepare for this—what? This kidnapping, murder? I made a quiet suggestion into Navvie’s ear as the first of the two found the stairs. We withdrew, she to the lavatory doorway, and I to the shadows at the end of the hall.

  The men carried razors, which caught the slim light coming through the hall window. My dowhee’s gray blade did not. As the second of the assassins (for so I had to call them) came tiptoeing past the head of the stairs, I struck him hard with the pommel of the dowhee and the sound rang in the air like a spoon against a wooden bowl. He grunted and died thereby, for his companion spun around in reflex with his razor out and slit half the man’s face and half his throat. I think he died unconscious.

  There was a good opportunity to take the other one down while he stared at the work he had done, but I did not want to kill him if I could avoid it. My dowhee had almost three times the reach of his blade, and I knew my house.

  He was soaked and spattered with blood, and it ran in his eyes. Blinking, he made a screaming charge for me and I struck at the razor with my heavy blade and deflected it. Then the assassin’s screaming was drowned out by a huge report and his bloodstained face was orange-lit and I heard the small but distinct splat of his shoulder joint exploding. He screamed again.

  “You made it hard to get in a shot, Papa,” said Navvie. Methodically, she checked the barrel for wadding, tested its temperature, and stuck the pistol into the sash of her nightrobe. I went out to find a militiaman, leaving Navvie with one drained body and a bound, wounded man with a very foul mouth.

  Navvie had seen it all before, and sometimes her father felt very unhappy about this. When I said as much, she told me being a doctor was harder on the nerves than any scrape I’ve gotten her into. I would like to believe this.

  The militiaman, as I recall, was an immigrant from Morquenie: a blond Velonyan. He charged up the staircase and was sick on the hallway carpet runner. After that, many other militiamen came, and we were made to tell our story a number of times, and our sullen prisoner was taken away. His shoulder was a ruin, because of the soft lead Navvie uses in her pistols, but it had been neatly cleaned and bound. The rug soaked in the blood of his fellow would never be usable again.

  “They were agents of Lowcanton,” said Navvie as we rolled the carpet up and pushed it out an upper window. “Hired in Boxan last week. They were supposed to do us in two days ago, but the weather made passage slow.”

  The best thing about our borrowed house was the water tank in the lavatory, which gave us water on demand both in the kitchen and upstairs. Navvie pumped for me and helped me try to remove bloodstains from my nightshirt. “He didn’t say a damn thing in front of the militia,” I said. “Nor in front of me, unless you count his expletives.”

  She smiled. The expression was softened by her youth and by candlelight, but I suspected it was the predatory smile of Navvie’s mother that I was seeing. I remembered my dream again. “Of course not. Assassins rarely betray their masters. But to me it wasn’t betrayal, but bragging. I didn’t count. Not a… a little thing like me.” Now there was no mistaking the quality of Navvie’s smile.

  “So, Papa. This answers the question of whether the king’s death was murder, doesn’t it?”

  I dried my hands and dabbed the towel against my cold, wet shirt. “We still can’t be certain about that.”

  She laughed. “All right. I will bet you ten tepels against your three tepels that we discover it was murder, and connected with this attempt upon us.”

  I told her I did not enjoy betting, and she laughed at me again. Her mother’s laugh. We were out of that house before sunrise.

  When I was young I had no difficulty parting with things. I had no things of my own, and it seemed the world was so cluttered with useful and curious objects that I would bang into all I needed, even if blindfolded, and that I would lose them, too. My teacher’s warnings about the impermanence of things in life seemed no more than attempts to convince me that snow was white.

  Now that I am past fifty, I know the pain of admitting that I can’t take things into tomorrow: not that mitered glass cutter, that single-spotted puppy, that perfectly balanced knife, that book of ephemera, that shirt with double-turned seams (not too long in the sleeves, for once), that dear and closest friend, and that Nazhuret.

  To be accurate, the last of these I have lost so many times I’m never sure I have him. No grief there.

  The cutter, the knife, and the shirt were left behind in Canton. The puppy was left earlier—he found a home with a young lady at the Rezhmian court five years ago. The book of ephemera I still have by me, waiting its turn, but at this time Arlin was almost four years dead.

  So civilized was this city that we effected our secret escape on an omnibus car, both of us carrying a dowdy bag made of carpeting and an odd-shaped canvas case filled with odd things: a survey tripod, two small telescopes, and an assortment of glass and swords. I had wanted Navvie to bring along her Cantonese collection of medical and surgical tools, but with the ruthlessness of youth she had pronounced them replaceable. I do not know now whether she noticed I had packed them all away with my clothing.

  My dream of the night before came very clearly to me as the four huge horses pulled the vehicle over the flat, flat pavements toward the university. There were no hills in Canton: no reason to get out and walk. There was no one using this route but us and our luggage; not even the dawn colors were up for the day. I had a distinct feeling of farewell toward this gray stone, the heavy blond horses, the dark and sensible driver, dressed so much better than a man of his station could dress in Velonya. I had liked the city.

  Navvie and I left our luggage in a heap blocking the stone walk by the arts quadrangle. She went to find the Medical Dean while I made my excuses to the Warden of Philosophy, by whose invitation we were in the university and in Canton. He was not surprised at my leaving. He said that in the last twenty-four hours I had become unusually popular, but that he could not venture to say whether that ought to make me stay or to hurry.

  Lord Damish, I thought, and said the name aloud.

  “Count Sibold,” the warden answered, astonishing me.

  Sibold was not a count of Canton; the city-state has only vestigial nobility. He was Lowcantoner. Once he was ambassador to Velonya, and in Vestinglon I had met him and judged him dangerous. Now both he and I had come to Canton.

  There was a bird singing, though it was midwinter. I we
nt to the warden’s deep window and sat on the sill. “The ambassador himself? Or do you mean one of his men?”

  “I mean Sibold. He came dressed like an honest burgher instead of a count.”

  “I knew an earl, once,” I said, still seeking the bird among the skeletal locust trees of the quad, “who dressed more like a burgher than the richest brewer ever born.”

  “I know,” said the warden, with a hint of warmth. “I read your book.”

  I felt a moment’s shock and leaned my forehead against the glass. “I didn’t publish that history,” I said, holding back a dozen sharper retorts. “A young idiot named Jeram did. Out of personal letters.”

  This sullenness was not fair of me. The warden had invited us to his country, paid for a great deal, and now was put into political danger with us. I started to apologize, and he started to wave it aside when another thought occurred to me and I interrupted myself.

  I asked the warden when Count Sibold had been by—yesterday or today. He said yesterday, late. After the campus had begun to buzz with the news of King Rudof’s death.

  The warden was a large man, probably of northern heritage, like so many in the city. He came to sit next to me on the window seat, his academic robes of red and gray spilling over the open window and down the outer bricks. (In Canton only the university doesn’t dress like an honest burgher.)

  “I did not tell him where you were staying,” he said to me. “I told him you and your daughter had moved out of guest housings into your own establishment.”

  I had to grin at this spark of conspiracy, coming from a man like the Warden of Philosophy. “But it was no secret: where we lived,” I said.

  “True. But Canton does not tell Lowcanton. Not for free,” he said. Among these honest burghers, it is more than a proverb.

  Navvie was not with the luggage, so I trotted over to the school of medicine, which being practical and useful is not permitted on the university proper. There, amidst the odors of blood and opium, I walked in upon her being embraced by the dean’s first assistant.