The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Dinaos, or rather he began to say it. There were three hard, even bumps beneath us, and one of the floorboards sprang up like a whip, missing my nose by inches.

  The pursuing horses were close now, but for some reason coming no closer. A few swords were thrown like knives, one of them sticking into the edge of the hole Dinaos had made, where it vibrated alarmingly. The cavalry faded behind, as did some of the dust. The coach shuddered to a stop. I heard a horse coughing.

  “Well, that was the border,” said Count Dinaos.

  I dared put my head to the window, only to meet the eyes of a soldier in different uniform. “Please step out of the vehicle,” he said in very poor Cantoner. I looked behind me, first.

  There was a wind-scoured wooden barracks and a small building with a peaked roof. Except for the fulcrum-balanced gate across the road and an orphaned little stretch of fence running fifty feet to either side of it, there was nothing else of human provenance in sight. Unless, of course, I were to count the angry, milling cavalrymen very close to the other side of the gate. As I watched, the long chestnut tail of one of the horses whipped over the white wood and that part of the Lowcantoner cavalry, at least, was in Ighelun. Soldiers, dressed in the dry-grass color of the little country’s army, pointed at this, and there were some high words exchanged, which the wind didn’t bring to me. I got down and reached to help the count, whose face was sick and sweaty after his wood-chopping. He grinned like a shark.

  “Count Dinaos!” The soldier backed away and his Cantoner became incoherent. He gave the universal signal of one index finger in the air and ran back toward the buildings.

  Navvie came trotting around the front of the coach. “Be careful, my lord, Papa. They may have a gun or bow after all, and we are well within distance.”

  The count, looking fierce and martial in his victory, pointed to a knot of Ighelunish regulars hauling something into the road close to the gate. “Someone has a gun all right, my lady, but it isn’t that turncoat cavalry of mine.”

  It was a small cannon, but it seemed modern and in good condition. As the cavalry troop noticed it they divided, hugging the edges of the road on dancing horses, and they waved their sabers tauntingly.

  The artilleryman drew a couple of iron pins from the cannon’s carriage, and the long brass barrel caught the sunlight as it swiveled toward the left, where the Lowcantoner lieutenant had gathered some of his men. They sprang to the right of the road and the cannon barrel followed. Spinning and cursing, the entire troop retreated along the highway, shaking their useless sabers.

  “It was the miserable road that let me know how close we were to the border. Within a hundred yards or so, the people refuse to do repair work. It is as though they feel their duties are attenuated by the nearness of a foreign power. And the three bumps are directly under the gate, to prevent the border from being forced by speed at night.”

  “It was very close,” I said, putting an arm around Navvie’s shoulder.

  “It was wonderful,” Dinaos answered, sitting himself heavily on the coach’s running board. In the weariness that follows crisis, we watched a man march smartly toward us, wearing a goodly amount of gold with his Ighelun tan uniform.

  “It may not be over yet,” murmured Navvie.

  My knowledge of military uniforms was very out of date, but the wreath and two bars on the epaulet had once meant major. I said as much to Count Dinaos, but he returned, “It doesn’t matter what he is, my friend. It is only important that he knows what I am.”

  And indeed, the fellow gave Dinaos a sharp glance, my daughter and me a duller one, and bowed smartly, clicking his heels. “Count Dinaos Proulin of Norll and Eslad?”

  “Yours as always, Major,” drawled the count, still seated.

  “And these?”

  “My party.”

  The major spared hardly a glance for us. “Count Dinaos, I must ask you what this has meant—those men chasing you.”

  Dinaos lifted his dark, heavy eyebrows. “Is there some question of my welcome in Ighelun, Major?”

  The major blinked and then shook his head hurriedly. “You misunderstand me, my lord. But if there is some question of trouble with your own government, is it not better to let us know now?”

  Dinaos got up. He made it take a long time. “Why, my lord, you’re wounded,” said the major.

  “One of my first pleasures is dueling, Major. The occasional pinking is accessory to that. It keeps me sharp.

  “But let me tell you that you misunderstand what you have seen. That rabble on horseback is not Lowcanton cavalry, but outlaws in fancy dress. At least four of them have been judged and condemned to be sectioned. When caught. They assaulted us on the highway where no man could see.”

  This, at least, was the truth. All of it was truth, if one considered that the count had the power to outlaw, and to condemn to torture and death at whim. The major was willing to be convinced. He nodded even more forcefully. “If you will be so kind as to sign a paper to that effect, Count Dinaos…”

  The count bowed his head graciously. “I am going to my house in Bugel. You can bring it to me there.” He climbed into the wrecked coach again and sighed gustily. “Get us a trap or wagon from my property on the south side,” he called out. “I am going to take a nap.”

  Property? On the south side of what? Bugel?

  Where was Bugel from here? I ran to the horses, with the idea of pulling one out of harness and riding away in three directions at once, when Navvie pulled my sleeve. “He means the coachman, Papa.”

  I watched the Zaquash servant disappear into the dusty distance, bouncing as he rode the highstepping trotter bareback. “What’s to bring him back, my lord?” I asked. “Ighelun has no slavery.”

  Dinaos opened his eyes in irritation. “Ighelun has no slavery but neither has Lowcanton any wall around it. Any borderman with ambition ran long ago.” He closed his eyes again.

  Before the early winter twilight had fallen, we were aboard a light, open carriage of two seats and riding into the town of Bugel. The architecture was Rezhmian, though the people were generally taller and larger-boned than my mother’s kind, and the language was nothing like. I had never studied it and rarely heard it spoken, for Ighelun is a very small country.

  The ground was still rocky, but here there were locust trees and a kind of squat oak that held its battered leaves through the winter. There was also a good attempt at agriculture. We passed a vineyard, where the vines were thick around as a man’s thigh and trained on low fences to shade their own roots.

  “This place doesn’t make a lot of wine, but it’s very good,” said Dinaos, coming out of his slumber suddenly. “Some of it is fermented under pressure in the bottle, and some fortified.”

  I asked him how his shoulder was doing. “It hurts more, and I want something to drink,” he said. With a wary glance at my daughter he added, “Something nonmedicinal. But no matter. We’ll be at my house within a half-hour.”

  I didn’t say anything, having had some little experience with Count Dinaos’s houses, and I didn’t say anything again when the pleasant, two-story housefront came in view, in neat red brick and white trim, with ranks of glossy windows and a carriage drive edged with evergreens. I said nothing but I almost wept in relief.

  Here the servants greeted him at the door. Since they had warning of our arrival, there had been time to begin preparation of a lordly dinner. Before this, there were large tubs, and many hands to draw the water. While I soaked, these same hands washed my clothes: all of them.

  Navvie and I were served our dinner alone, the count keeping to his bed, and afterward, we went out into the evening garden, where there was running water and fittings of alabaster that shone like white flowers in the last light. I left my daughter staring at the ornamental fish, with some questions in her mind as to whether they were asleep. I went into the rose garden, which was in this season a circle of black branches and large thorns. I felt rather like the ro
ses, and I sat myself on the marble bench in the center. It was cold to sit on, even through my borrowed woolens.

  Powl Inpress, earl of Daraln, was sitting next to me. I turned in surprise and the thought came to me that we were the same age, he and I. Perhaps his mind was working in that channel, for he said quietly, “Tell me which of two men is dead—the one who changed, or the one who stopped changing?”

  I opened my mouth, not knowing what I would say, but he was quietly gone.

  I was very tired. I sat as composedly as I knew how, because Navvie was approaching, and things were hard enough on her without letting her know her odd father was becoming still more odd. She sat behind me on the end of the bench and rested one hand on my shoulder. “I remember him as bigger than that. Of course, I was a child.”

  “What?”

  “When Powl died. I was a child.”

  I turned on the cold marble. I noticed her breath made clouds in the air. We were not that far south, and it was winter. “You saw him?”

  Navvie nodded. “Very clearly.” She did not ask me whether he had spoken, or if so, what he said. I was tempted to ask if she ever heard the voice of her mother in conversation with me, but I feared to know the answer. We got up and went indoors.

  No one in Bugel knew very much of what was happening in Velonya. Ighelun is a little country that suffers the influence of its large neighbors, Lowcanton and Rezhmia. It has no weapon except to encourage these two against each other, and the difficulties of the northwestern kingdom were important to them only inasmuch as they might be used for that purpose. I spent the next day and evening seeking information and another ship.

  The best information I got came from my second search, for in Port Bugel I found out that the packet ship Nananie had docked the morning previous, with twenty-two passengers and five crew, and twenty-six stories of what had happened aboard it. The one man who had no story, the tongueless Sieben, had something better in the sealed authorization of Count Dinaos. The company had supplied a local captain and one extra sailor, and they had gone again, leaving the ex-pirate behind. No one knew where he went.

  I also learned that the shipping line was cutting short its trips around the Morquen Sea and avoiding Velonya altogether. There had been violence in Morquenie and a threat of confiscation of foreign properties. There were smaller companies that still ran short-line service between Morquenie and Rezhmia the City, and I was told these were crowded now with civilians fleeing Morquenie.

  A man behind a little pine desk in a square pine building on the wharf itself told me these things, and added the unsubstantiated rumors that the fighting was heaviest in the East and North-Central parts of the country, centered on the duchy of Norwess.

  “Why do you say ‘Norwess’?” I asked him, leaning on the desk so I would not fall.

  He gave me a dubious look. “I say it because that’s the name I was told. I think it’s some kind of sectarian dispute. Why not Norwess?”

  “Why not indeed?” I answered, and I thanked him for his time, and I went out onto the wharf again. I stood by the sparkling water in the strong northerly wind and considered Norwess and its sects, and that it might be better if I threw myself in. But I would probably have just swum to shore at the first shock of cold water. I am not suited for suicide.

  I thought that on my way back to the count’s holding I might do a small favor for Dinaos, who had done so much for us. I went from tavern to tavern (Bugel had two) looking for Sieben, but I didn’t find the count’s pirate.

  This household, bought by the count’s father only forty years previously, was so different from the ancient seat of honor he possessed in Eslad—and so much more comfortable that I felt a burgher’s satisfaction in the success of the commercial over the noble. My years in Canton Harbor had worked this change in my politics—or perhaps it was that most anti-aristocratic aristocrat, Powl. But what if we had come pelting in to discover that commercial reverses had caused the count to lose this pretty property, and we had sat in the road before the custom house with nowhere to go? Then we’d be beggars, no worse. Nothing new.

  A beggar is no more like a burgher than he is like a noble. I resolved to keep this fact in mind.

  That was a day of three good meals, and the count was rested enough to join us for supper. He seemed to feel no uneasiness over the absence of Sieben, and only the slightest irritation that he hadn’t his painting to contemplate. Had he felt stronger, he said, he would have wanted to try me in other poses, other backgrounds.

  I found the artistic personality interesting. I noted that he rearranged the ragout on his plate into a series of shapes, with the slivered meat in strips neatly across the bottom and the horsebeans scattered individually across the ceramic sky like fluffy clouds. I waited to see what he could accomplish with the salad.

  “Nonetheless,” he sighed, “I do not recommend that you stay for my recovery. If assassins found you in the Harbor, they will have no difficulty locating you here. And the border is open.”

  “It will have to be a new set of assassins,” said Navvie demurely, but with a pigheaded set to her jaw.

  “Yes, Doctor,” said the count with exaggerated respect. I watched him eat the clouds off the sky, and then assault the earth. “But I think you would run out of energy before my government—or perhaps your own—runs out of assassins.”

  “I think we ought to leave tomorrow, my lord,” I said, and he raised his fork with a turnip promontory on it to stop me.

  “Don’t tell me where you’re going, Aminsanaur. I am a loyal member of the Senate of Houses, and if someone were to ride up and tell me my guests were adjudged enemies of the crown, I might be put in a difficult position.”

  Navvie, like me, was watching, the count’s pictorial dining, and she raised her blue eyes only momentarily to ask, “Would that be different than the cavalry stopping your coach to arrest enemies of the crown?”

  “Nobody stops my coach,” he murmured, making emptiness out of the creation on his plate. “Nobody but the god of breakdowns, to whom we are all subject.”

  The salad was of pickled long beans and beets, and more suitable, it seemed, to nonfigurative design. Or perhaps his construction was supposed to be a clock face. That would be suitable, under the circumstances.

  “My lord Nazhuret,” the count said after his plate was redrawn to his satisfaction, “I would be grateful if you would wait upon a sick man in his rooms tonight for a while.”

  I nodded, wondering what he didn’t want Navvie to hear. Suddenly I was certain the man was going to ask for her hand in marriage, and I began to sweat.

  “What’s wrong, Papa?” she asked me, once we were alone again. I was picking through the house’s library. Most of the books seemed to predate the old count’s purchase, and were in Ighelunie, which language I scarcely could understand spoken, let alone in antique, smudgy black-letter print.

  “A hundred things, of course.” My hands found a volume in Allec, which seemed a medical treatise. Or a cookbook—I don’t remember. I showed it to Navvie.

  “Then let a hundred things go. You can’t cure them by being nervous. Or so you tell me.”

  I sat down in a leather chair, which surprised me by being on hidden rockers. “The count. Do you trust him yet? Do you like him at all?”

  Navvie found nothing interesting in the book I showed her. She snapped it shut impatiently. “I am inclined to like any man who saves our skin and then invites us to dinner. As a matter of fact, Papa, isn’t it true that women in Canton do not usually eat at the same table as men?”

  I put a foot down to stop the chair going back and forth. “The politeness of the courts is much the same from country to country, I’ve found. The Lowcanton noble who subjects women of good family of other countries to his local indignities would make more enemies than he can afford to keep.”

  “But how many foreign women of good family visit that fusty old country? And, if it comes to that, am I a woman of good family? I mean… we are eccentric,
Papa.”

  I found myself rocking again. “I imagine the count is inclined to respect my family who saves his wet and wounded skin,” I said.

  I gave him an hour and then knocked on his bedroom door. He was abed with a sketchboard propped on his knees, chewing the blunt end of a charcoal pencil. He saw me and flung away the top sheet, and I saw a very careful drafting of one bedpost float across the room. “Sit in the high chair,” he ordered, and for a longtime he said nothing else.

  It is easier to keep still when seated than at full attention with dowhee outstretched. It is easier to keep still after dinner.

  After ten or fifteen minutes he asked lightly, “Is that the ‘belly of the wolf’? Where you have been these last few minutes, I mean?”

  I blinked. “I guess so. I don’t use that phrase much anymore. Where did you learn it?”

  Instead of answering he motioned me back into position, and there we were for another fifteen minutes. At last he put down his knees and commanded me to fetch the fixative and roller from the far table. “You’ll get the stuff all over your sheets,” I told him, but I did as he said.

  “I have already got charcoal dust on them. Now it will not spread, is all.” The sharp smell of lacquer filled the room.

  “I got the phrase from your book,” he said. He displayed the sketch. It gave me eyes of a depth and intensity that I do not possess, but I suppose that is art. I did not criticize, but I did tell him I had never written a book.

  “Your series of letters, then, which was no doubt published without your permission. Unfortunate, but there it is. I read it. So did a number of other people.”

  Though he had put aside the sketchboard, he still chewed casually upon the charcoal pencil. Now not only were his fingers multicolored with stains of oil, but his mouth was surrounded by a gray smear. Despite this, the count looked in no way comical, but very intimidating. “You know, fellow, I don’t know whether you would be in more or less trouble, had those letters to King Rudof not seen print.”

  “I am convinced that many people would be in less trouble but for Jeram’s enthusiasm,” I said spitefully, but he shook his head.