The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  The Lowcantoner was curled over the bow, sick once more and making noises. It did not seem appropriate or kindly to ask him if he could swim.

  We were making progress, for the shore was closer, but I doubted it was our work that moved the boat, for the bodies had kept good pace with us. The dead Felonk captain lay bobbing off to port, face up, blandly looking past the sky. I shoved the body with an oar; but it only sank and rose again, and I settled back to rowing.

  I heard Dinaos make a sound not like that of emesis, and I glanced up to see him pointing into the dark water.

  “That’s it,” said Navvie in wonderment. “That’s the thing I saw. Only it looks a lot bigger from down here.”

  I shipped my oars and scrabbled for the dowhee, though I had small faith in its usefulness against the horse-headed creature that swam toward us, towering above the waves.

  Once again Count Dinaos laughed, as he had at the threat of Navvie’s pistol. “What a trip we are having,” he cried, half-standing in the rocking boat.

  Close up I could see the creature was not scaled, like a fish, but had a pebbly skin, a limp frill around its neck, and many, many little teeth. Navvie had her pistol out again, and into her ear I whispered, “Only if it shows aggression. It may be the shot will only anger it, and why take the chance?”

  Through clenched teeth she answered, “I will do more than anger it if I hit it through the eye and into the brain. But it will have to come closer.”

  Dinaos had crawled close to us. “Closer? Perish the thought! Goddess of the hunt you may be, my lady, but let’s …”

  He got no further when the creature struck, with great speed and a lot of spray. Its target was neither us nor the boat itself, but the body of the dead Felonk captain, which sank under the water and did not rise again. All three of us stared into the black water as though patience would allow us to see into the darkness. After five minutes the water swirled farther out, and the sailor Navvie had stabbed simply vanished.

  “This is becoming boring,” said Dinaos, though his voice betrayed no boredom. “Let’s continue toward shore.” All sign of seasickness was gone from him.

  Soon the direction of the water seemed to change and the waves became more linear. “Approaching surf,” called Navvie. “How much surf I don’t know.”

  I didn’t like the feel of this, but as I had no alternative to offer, I just kept rowing. Then my daughter added, “Here he comes again, very close to the boat this time.”

  We waited for the impact. “No. It’s not the monster. Look.”

  I paused and leaned out to see the shape of the big dolphin, Pilot Pol, almost as long as the lifeboat and almost as frightening as the horse-headed creature. It blew its breath beside us and Dinaos held his nose. Again he pointed, this time at the dolphin’s smooth black back. “Look at the wounds. Look!”

  There were more than a dozen red weals running diagonally across the animal, right behind the blowhole. Its handsome dorsal fin was torn. It upped-tail and disappeared beneath our little craft, appearing immediately on the starboard side, where it blew again and raised a splash with its flukes. Hopping the water, it bounced twenty yards off at about two o’clock in direction, and slapped again.

  We were bouncing, too. There was more than a little bit of surf ahead, where the white beach gleamed under moonlight. “It’s playing with us,” said Navvie uncertainly. “It’s friendly.”

  The dolphin blew again and breached water completely. It gave another slap. “Follow it,” I shouted, over the water’s increasing grumble. “It’s too sore a thing for play. Follow the pilot, by your lives!”

  I could hear my shoulder joints popping with the effort I put into rowing that boat sideways to the direction of the surf. The boat rocked dizzily and shipped water with every wave, but necessity overcame Dinaos’s seasickness. He bailed, using his own velvet hat.

  The dolphin’s tail shone white as it slipped between two crags of rock. I did not stop to wonder if we could manage the squeeze or the current; I merely set the tiller and rowed. We bashed the portside rock fiercely, staving the top two boards, but once through, we found ourselves in a smooth channel, inside a wall of ragged black stone and smashing spray. I set the bow toward the strip of white and pulled for all I was worth.

  “Papa,” said Navvie very gravely. “Take a glance to port.”

  There lay our original course, where the going had looked smoothest and most flat. The breaking surf rose up in height at least the length of this boat, and curled in a long tube, through which I could see the first stars. “It would have been ironic to die that way, and not by steel,” murmured Dinaos. He was shivering in his velvets, despite the work.

  “I don’t see our pilot anymore,” said Navvie. “But I see something down there. Maybe the sand of the bottom.”

  Dinaos wiped his wet face with the inside of one wet elbow. “Why, I ask you? It is a fish—we are no kin to it. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered, and then the boat ground against the bottom.

  It was a pebbly beach, with rocks rising behind it. A sea wind reminded me that I was cold. Navvie, in her spray-drenched jacket and skirt, was shivering, and wounded Dinaos was doing worse. I leaped into cold water, waist-deep, pulled the boat up the incline as far as I could—which was a matter of a few feet—and I climbed aboard again to toss out our belongings. “I regret having to tell you this, but we cannot stop to rest here. The cold will set in our bones, and spread in your injury, my lord. We have to keep moving until we find shelter from the weather.”

  Navvie sneezed, just once, and she tried her best to quench the sound with her hands. Count Dinaos spoke through chattering teeth. “No difficulty, my lord duke. We are within a few miles of my border estate—not the most elegant of my properties, but good for a fire and a change of apparel.”

  By now there was so little light the beach was a strip of pale glimmer that seemed to float above a horizon of rock. Very few stars shone through the thick, gray sky. “How do you know where we are?” I asked him, though my heart was more interested in the term “border estate.” Upon which side of the border were we? I had hoped strongly that Lowcanton had been left behind before we left the ship. “It’s very dark out here.”

  “I grew up launching my own little rowboats from this shoreline. Though not, I admit, from this malicious beach here.” He swayed as he stood, and when I took his hand, it was like ice.

  He did not resist my touch. He looked at me, his expression hidden in darkness. His knees began to buckle.

  “Leave me here,” he stuttered. “Take my ring. Send men back for me. I can’t walk.”

  Instead I scooped him up in my arms. He was an awkward burden, being so long in the limb, but not very heavy: no heavier than Arlin had been. He shivered so that the silver of his belt and buttons made a bright clatter.

  Navvie was prying at his sleeve as she walked by my side. “The rowing opened his wound further. He’s still losing blood.” She then disappeared for some moments, leaving me to find the path into the black hills. I was not worried about my daughter; her movements are as quick as a songbird’s and as unpredictable. Before I had hauled my burden past the sound of the surf she had returned, her hands filled with something furry, and her pack bouncing on her back.

  “Dried sea moss, Papa. It’s good for packing wounds like his. Cleanly.”

  I stopped and leaned against a rock while Navvie ripped open the brocade of Dinaos’s vest and the linen of his blood-blackened shirt. With more firmness than I would have dared, she packed the soft matter against the man’s skin and wrapped it there with the ruined linen. Dinaos thrashed and cried out. His words were “Mongrel bastard! Stinking mongrel bastard!” During the next ten minutes, as I scrambled and climbed, he repeated this phrase three times more, always when I joggled him, or slipped, or came up against an obstacle in the dark.

  “Don’t be hurt by his abuse, Papa,” Navvie whispered into my ear. “I don’t think he’s entirely responsible.”r />
  “I know he’s not,” I said. He was steaming like a kettle in my arms. I even had hopes he was not referring to me at all.

  We left the black rocks behind and came to fields of infant grain, reflecting the poor light in waves of silver. There was a road beneath our feet, parallel to the seacoast, and to the right of it, another road lay broad and well maintained, heading south and away from the water.

  “But for him,” said Navvie softly, “we could make an easy jog to the border of Ighelun; dry our clothes with mild exercise, and sleep in safety.”

  I sighed, for the weight of my burden was pulling at my shoulder joints. “We don’t know Ighelun is safe, my dear. Only that it is not Lowcanton. But there is no reason you can’t have your jog, and your night’s sleep. It doesn’t need two of us to take a sick man home.”

  Navvie put her arm around my waist, or tried to. “True, Papa, but if one of us stays, shouldn’t that one be the doctor? As soon as we come to a reasonable-looking doorway, you can put him down and leave me to wake the occupants. I’ll meet you along the sea road tomorrow, or whenever he’s out of danger.”

  Nahvah had succeeded in offending me. “That’s bullshit! This is the land where women can own neither business nor land, and where women without family are property of the state. Do you think I would leave you here for five minutes alone…”

  “It looks like we go together,” she said.

  We went on for only two miles, I reckon, but because of the cold, the burden, and the worry, it seemed half the night. We first encountered a few hay sheds: buildings scarcely more than a thatched roof on pillars, now almost empty of last year’s harvest. Next we came to huts that looked like miniature versions of the sheds, except that rocks had been piled roughly to reach to the eaves and a wooden door shoved into place in the center. Though we knocked loudly, no one came to help.

  Dinaos was now groaning constantly, and the air was too cold for a sick man, however fevered. Over the flagstones of the good road I began a lumbering run toward what looked like the candles of a village.

  It was a town of very old style, with tiny houses of mud and wood palings leaning for support against the stone outer wall of a castle. I knocked at a couple of houses that had lights in the upper windows, only to see the lights blown out.

  Navvie’s gaze was caught by the big spiked door that marked the end of the road from the sea, the door that led through the castle wall. Upon it was graved and painted a sigil, and she held up the limp hand of Count Dinaos. She has inherited my sharp vision.

  “Look, Papa. We’re there.” Immediately she began to pound on the huge and heavy door. It made no noise. She shouted, in Cantoner. I joined her, though by now I had little hope.

  There was a bawling reply, and then a loud curse, and from the west down the street came a big, heavy man, somewhat pearshaped. When he came close, the embroidered emblem on his tall cap could be seen to be a variation upon that of Dinaos.

  He was waving a bludgeon as he came. He showed no signs of stopping as he got closer. “We have a wounded man,” called Navvie.

  “You’ll have three dead men in a minute, you goat-fucking Harborman thieves!” he roared back, and he swung at the closest thing to him, which was the head of the count.

  I did not let the blow find its target, and my daughter did not permit the fellow to have another shot. With her little knife she stabbed between the bones of his hand, locking it to the wood of the bludgeon. Next she pulled hand and bludgeon up behind his back, and as he stood there wobbling with his legs braced, she grabbed his genitals from behind and sent him to the ground.

  “Think of it as a favor,” I said to the man, as calmly as I could. “Had you succeeded in hitting his lordship, I think he would have killed not only you, but your entire family. Am I right?”

  The sheriff’s man (for so I learned he was) fixed his painwidened eyes at the face of Dinaos. He gasped and prayed to God the Father, which is the only divine aspect recognized by the orthodox Lowcantoner. He scrambled to his feet, regardless of the damage done his privates, and so terrified was he that he tried to fish the gate keys from his pocket with a hand still impaled by Navvie’s jeweled knife. She removed the impediment.

  The white stone of the gateway darkened in speckles, for the guard’s hand was still splashing blood. As we stepped through into darkness, I could smell it, and could smell pine resin as well. Homesickness for my black Velonyan forests nearly made me reel, or perhaps it was the awkward weight of the man I carried.

  Navvie led me over a walkway of gravel and stone. I hated to trust the whole job of protection to my little daughter, but I could not give her the nobleman to carry. Even if she could have managed the weight, his red heels and ringed fingers would have dragged in the gravel.

  Another wall approached, this one mottled with vines instead of blood. I heard the resounding knock, and felt warmth as the air within met my wet clothes and salty face. Here was the source of the pine incense.

  There was speech, very quick and in dialect, so that I could not understand, but I stepped forward so the door could not be shut on us. Beside me glimmered the face of a woman, decently dressed and of middle years, with her black hair braided and lacquered tight to her head. She did not seek out the count’s face, but instead his left hand, with the signet of carnelian. She started an almost noiseless howling.

  “We need a bed!” shouted Navvie in her seacoast Cantoner, taking the woman by both shoulders. “And blankets! I am a doctor, and will need water for my medicines!”

  I sighed and shifted the weight. “Bellowing doesn’t make the foreigner understand better, Nahvah. And remember, it’s we who are the foreigners.”

  I tried in Cantoner myself, and when the lady paid no more attention than before, I tried Velonyie, and then Rayzhia and Zaquashlon. To my wonderment, the Zaquashlon worked. Her lament, if such it was, faded into a series of gasps, and she met my gaze like a human being. I repeated Navvie’s list of requirements.

  The woman touched his limp hand again, with one hesitant finger. “But he’s dead. Only the slaves of the household have the right to lay out a Conjon. You may not touch him!”

  “The man is not dead; he’s hot as a furnace. Since when do the dead run a fever?”

  This time she touched his lean and briny face. “Not dead?” She did not sound much happier.

  “I have an idea,” whispered Navvie. She took the count’s hand from the woman’s grasp, held out the signet, and pointed with it. “A bed, you old hag! Clean sheets and hot water! Show respect for your master or I will have your hand off at the elbow!”

  In four seconds the woman had disappeared the way she had come. I gaped at my daughter. “I do hope you’ve done more than just to scare her off, my dear,” I said, and Nahvah merely shrugged.

  “Or impel her to have us spitted,” I added.

  We continued our progress along the stone passageway toward light and the odor of pine. I heard light feet pattering nearer and soon we were surrounded by servants, both male and female. None of them volunteered to take the burden from me, and indeed no one touched Count Dinaos or helped his body avoid the furniture except Navvie and myself.

  There were stairs, I remember, and large rooms with tiled floors that echoed in an empty fashion. Navvie mentioned the place seemed old to her: old and in poor repair. The bed to which they led us, however, was elegant after its fashion. It was a cabinet-bed, made of some black and oily wood that had been carved into an approximation of lace. The sheets were silk, but thin with age, and my practical daughter shook out one of our own woolen blankets and lay the count’s filthy form upon it.

  Instead of hot water from the kitchen, we were given a tripod charcoal burner and a heavy cauldron of iron. I stripped the wet finery from our patient, while Nahvah communicated the idea of towels to the householders. We had him clean, if not comfortable, and under blankets ten minutes later. Soon the air stank of angelica and other herbs.

  I do not have the art of making unc
onscious people obey me, but Nahvah does. Though he seemed no more alive than a doll—a hot doll—he took medicine from her and he swallowed for her and even tried to roll over on command to be washed.

  Imagine: the spadassassin Count Dinaos of Lowcanton, feared by the entire populace of Canton and parts of Velonya and Rezhmia, rolling over on command. In the exigencies of the moment I put that memory away in my head, to wonder over at leisure. It took both of us to hold his hot shivering body still for the rag and towel.

  The blade that hit him had come close to the lung, but by his breathing and the lack of blood in his mouth, Nahvah guessed it had not pierced the lung sac itself. Even the outer membrane, she said, would be bound to become infected if touched by steel or lead, and we could only hope. She packed the hole with a drawing poultice, and as I held up his torso for the job, I could see evidence that he had paid dues for his skill with the rapier; there were three or four puckered scars, one very near his throat, and a number of long pink seams that I doubt came from encounters with berry bushes.

  “Well, it is no mistaken identity,” I said to her. “This must be the wicked swordsman we were warned about.”

  “I didn’t doubt it for a minute,” she answered dryly. Then he was clean, dosed, wrapped, and warm, and there was nothing to do but watch.

  Nahvah took the cauldron off the brazier and used it to warm herself. She looked around the room and up toward the rough beams of the ceiling. “This is like the old castle in Vestinglon—the abandoned one with the big stones and no glass in the windows.”

  “But I wouldn’t pay a crown-eighth to tour it,” I replied. We were both still damp, and the wool of my trousers steamed visibly up into the darkness. “This is theater,” I said. “We need a witch.”

  “I’ll do,” said my daughter, and she made a circuit of the walls. Her skirt crackled as she moved: I suppose from the salt. “You know, Papa, I see previous working on some of these stones. Could it be that there was an even older building here, in the middle of nothing?”