The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  “There is more to the life of a warrior than that!” He rested his hand on the plain hilt in its fancy sheath, as though he would soothe a dog.

  “Oh? I don’t know what that would be,” I said with borderline politeness. I did not look at him. The duke fed me, anyway.

  This little force of humanity, which seemed scarcely able to move itself along the road, had already had two full encounters with Velonyan cavalry and had given far more losses than it had received. Velonyan cavalry could afford far more losses, but still the record was impressive. According to Mackim, they succeeded because they fought with reason and instinct, against the rote and drill Forwall, the Commander of Cavalry, had learned in school. I suspected they won partially because the rebels could live off the land and dissolve into the towns and villages when pursued.

  Considering the weather, their camp was meager. There were not tents enough for all, and though they built fires, their wood was limited to what they could find, take by force, or pry from demolished buildings. The men who traveled under the banner of The Wolf built no fires at all, but were warmed and fed at the fires of others.

  “I wouldn’t give them a thing,” I said to Mackim. “Ablebodied fellows like that, can’t they work for their bread? And for their fire, too?”

  The young duke sat in the warmth of his own campfire and looked sideways at me. “They have chosen the path of perfection. Is it so different from…”

  “Perfectly useless is what they are.” I was being cranky, and I knew it, but it was complain or cry for me.

  “They are the backbone of our fighting force, and deserve our care for no better reason than that. They ask no great thing of me—of us—no lands, no office or honors. Just food and a fire. Besides, Nazhuret of Sordaling: are you not the first beggar-warrior, and father to all of these?”

  “That damned manuscript. I wrote it years ago. I lived it so long ago I don’t remember the people involved. Damned Jeram has a lot to answer for.”

  Mackim smiled. “Then I wish he were here to answer you, instead of me. Discourse is not my specialty, though I admit to reading the LENS. Without it, none of us would be here, I think.”

  I looked into the darkness past the fire, where so many men slept, or did not sleep and wished there had been more to eat, or nursed wounds of war or wounds of the frost. I wondered where the dead were, whom these had left behind: stacked no doubt like cordwood, waiting for the cemeteries to thaw in spring. “God in three faces help me! When I wrote that I was honest, in my own way. How could I have been so misunderstood? Where did I validate war between nations, let alone against the legitimate crown?”

  “… Not legitimate anymore,” Mackim interjected. “Not after parricide…”

  “… Do you really think Benar had any part in killing his father? What evidence?”

  The duke’s eyes glistened in the firelight. He looked at me with calm certainty. “The prince was too prepared, Nazhuret. Within two days of his father’s death, he was oversetting old policy. He replaced the Minister of Trade with Lord Ephlan, and announced the creation of two new regiments, to be permanently stationed in the South and Norwess. This before he buried Rudof. But as for validating war, I know what Powl said. But I also know what he did, whenever push came to shove. And how you saved the king against treachery, and saved Powl from the king.”

  “He didn’t need my help, lad.”

  “Your reasoning mind tells you to avoid matters of war, Nazhuret, but patriotism is your instinct, deeper than reason.”

  I recoiled from the duke almost into the fire itself. “Save me from such imputation! Mackim, you bewildered man, does the word ‘scientist’ mean anything to you?”

  The calm certainty faded a little. “I know that you grind glass lenses. It is a metaphor for Vision. And you have studied the meaning of the stars…”

  I shouted, “The stars have no meaning—save that of their existence. I mapped the stars, long years ago, along with many other people who have not had the misfortune of having their names made public. I make glasses so Grandmother may not replace sugar with salt in the biscuits. I am a scientist who happened to grow up in this cold, backward, and superstitious country, and I do not give you permission to claim me or anything I have done!”

  Out of long habit, I had kept my pack in order, so there was nothing for me to do but pick it up and stalk away from his fire. My horse was in the picket line, at one end. She tried to kick me when I approached her with the saddle again, but I didn’t take offense.

  The young standard-bearer was beside me as I tightened the girth. I don’t know how long he had been there. “You are leaving already?”

  “Yes. I can’t stand it. I’m going to Norwess Palace to throttle Jeram. Or maybe to Vestinglon. I can’t believe Benar…”

  “You’re going to end the war?” he asked simply. I had to laugh.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing, lad. Or what I’m going to do.” Seated on the mare, I looked down at his youthful, intelligent face, and I almost asked him to come with me. Had he not made that remark about “the path of the void,” I surely would have. Instead I called, “Try to stay alive, son. When my daughter comes, please ask the same of her in my name,” and pushed the unwilling mare into the dark.

  Vestinglon is not far from Norwess: not in terms of the travel I had been doing, but it is cold, jagged, high-altitude going: down to Goss, up again over the old border ridge, and down to the capital. Now that the mare went slowly enough to need pushing, I didn’t have the heart to push her.

  The air and soil were frozen. All noises rang like bells in the dark. The sky was starless and gray, like a fustian lining to an old coat, but the snow glowed dimly under light from somewhere.

  My stomach was hurting, I remember. Want had shrunk it, and I had eaten that evening too much of Velonya’s notoriously heavy food. Perhaps I was squirming in the saddle, but the mare began to throw her head in protest, right and left as well as up and down. Her neck was lean and supple, and her head whipped around alarmingly. I lost the reins from numb hands and the mare took off.

  I could not see where we were going. I hoped she could. The forest swept by us and over us. I clung to her neck.

  I have no clear memory of the branch that swept me off. There was a strong smell in my nose, a confusion and the impact of the frozen ground. I lay there, thinking it unfair that I could not reorder the latest ten seconds of my life: thinking it was too bad. The knowledge that I must freeze in place or catch my horse drove me to my feet again, and I was surprised to see her glimmering on the trail in front of me, only twenty feet away, looking over her shoulder with her damned head and slender neck. I shuffled forward, though all feeling in my feet was gone.

  “There you are, you bitch,” I said quietly, sniffing through a bleeding nose. “Now don’t run away from me. I hate you, but don’t run away from me. Only way you’ll get your breakfast is from me. You can’t reach into your pack, can you?”

  She didn’t run from me, but neither did she wait. She strode just out of reach, nosing into the brush at either side, ripping icy twigs from the branches. I followed the flicker of her scissoring legs.

  I could feel my nose bleeding into the snow. I hoped this would not attract predators. I wondered where the white wolf was that had followed me into the rebels’ camp. It seemed irresponsible of me to have lost it. I said as much to the horse, to the wolf, if it was by, and as always, to Arlin.

  “Talking to yourself again,” she said from the back of the mare.

  “No. I’m talking to you,” I answered, and sprayed blood in a sneeze.

  “Then you should speak up,” said my lady.

  I followed along, leaning forward so not to stain my clothing. Though I could not feel them, my feet remained under me.

  “She’s not bad, this mare. Almost like my Sabia, if she were prettier. She certainly goes.”

  I tried to laugh. “She does that. From Rezhmia’s Towers to Bologhini to Cieon across the steppe and all the
way up to Norwess. And now this. I don’t know why she isn’t dead.”

  I heard Arlin slap the mare’s neck in comradely fashion. “I’ve often wondered that about you, Zhurrie. But some of us are made to endure.”

  That didn’t sound comforting, and I wanted comfort. “Actually, I don’t feel very well right now,” I said. “My head hurts. My feet are missing altogether.”

  “I know. But now is what I have, old love, so listen. Do you remember when we first attended the conference of astronomers in Morquenie, over twenty-five years ago? You attended three meetings and one banquet and left, announcing to all and sundry that there was more to science than star charts and more to understanding than could be put in a paper to any society.”

  This made my head hurt worse. “I remember they were horses’ asses. Stuffy, full-of-themselves pedants with obsolete technique and more answers than questions…”

  “You will get no argument from me, Nazhuret. But I was there to see you, and for a while you acted entirely the creature these poor rebels have tried to make you: mystic, dangerous, exotic…”

  “I wasn’t… I’m not…” I peered over the horse’s white tail, seeing nothing but the dark. “Did you see them all, Arlin? The idiots with the banner? Self-serving Mackim?”

  “I saw them and I saw you, love. My cold, practical scientist.”

  “Cold I am. Very cold. And my stomach hurts. But those people are worse off than any number of pedants. They have perverted Powl’s teaching to the point…”

  “Bullshit. They have no interest in Powl. It is you they follow, Nazhuret, with your half-bred face and your clever hands and words and all the unusual things that have happened around you.”

  I jogged to keep up. At least it kept me warmer. “Not so unusual. If people would only look about them, life is remarkable.”

  “… And if they got the lessons wrong, well—you never condescended to teach them.”

  I felt this as an injustice. “I never found anyone who would condescend to listen. Except Navvie, and she set up no religious orders. Or do you mean Jeram?”

  “At least Jeram tried,” said my lady. “And they are astonishing fighters.”

  We went on for some minutes with no sound but my own labored breathing and the jingling of the horse’s pack.

  “What are you going to do now?” asked Arlin.

  I had been half asleep in my jogging. “Do? I think I’m going to kill the king, love. I think I have to.”

  There was another few moments of silence. “You could have brought the boy with you,” Arlin said, and it took me a while to remember which boy.

  “The one who drew the banner? I thought about it. Do you mean I should teach him? If I live through this, I mean? And him. If he lives through this? Do you mean that?”

  There was no answer. I sprinted forward, clumsily, finally awakened by my efforts. “You know, Arlin, though I talk to you almost constantly, you’re not usually there—out there. I don’t usually see you, I mean.”

  “Do you see me now?” she asked, and I squinted and looked hard at the air above the back of the white horse, but I didn’t see Arlin.

  Nor hear her more.

  I woke in Goss, in a stable, in clean straw and with a pillow under my head. I stared at the oak walls of my stall, and then at the pillow, which was crusty with blood. My head hurt terribly. I heard a banging: maybe my own pulse.

  Before I could sit up, or try to do so, a man approached the open door of the stall. He was dressed in a coarse woolen shirt and leather breeches, as befits a groom. “Welcome to the living,” he said. “We didn’t know whether to feed you or bury you, so we settled on giving you a bed.”

  I could make no sense out of this, nor out of much else, so he continued, “You walked in here at dawn, behind your horse. She’s the one raising dust on the other side of the stable. Doesn’t seem to like being stalled.”

  “I remember the horse, but not this place. Please, where am I?”

  “In Goss, where else? Public stable. That hellion of a mare of yours knew where to go, though I don’t recall having seen her before. We considered calling a doctor for you, but most of them’s off in the war and the ones that’s left—well, we decided you’d be better off with horse doctoring. We gave you ice and a cataplasm. Doctor might have drilled a hole in your head to let out the pressure. I seen them do that before.”

  My good angel squatted down in the straw beside me. It was fairly warm in that place, and yellow straw was heaped over me like a blanket. “I am grateful,” I said, and my own voice reverberated unpleasantly in my head. “But why, in a nation ravaged by war, would you waste your time with one stranger?”

  He was a middle-aged, middle-weighted man of the usual Velonyan type. His face was as dry as leather, and the stubble of his beard shone gold over it. “Well, maybe it was your mare, bless her nasty heart. She’s one of the best I’ve seen, and from the looks of her, you’ve gone hard and fast. Mostly, though, I think it was your big dog convinced me you were worth something. I like dogs, and the way this fellow hung by you—his devotion—that convinced me you must be too good to lose.”

  My head spun, and I wondered if I had lost months of my life to amnesia. Then I remembered and asked, “Is this a long-legged white dog with prick ears and triangular eyes?”

  “The very same. I don’t know where he is now, but…”

  “That isn’t a dog,” I told him. “It is a wolf I killed a few days ago. The mare, too, is a ghost. Thirty years a ghost.” I ended that conversation abruptly by passing out.

  The next time I woke I was able to stand up, and had a full bladder that made it imperative I do so. In the corner of the stall was my saddle, with packs still attached. Since there was no one in the stable to offend with my distrust I peeked through the packs and found I had not been robbed of anything, not even money. Perhaps my saintly savior had not even riffled through them. My devoted “dog” was not to be seen, but the mare was pawing, just as she had been doing in her stall at the Towers of Rezhmia City.

  Lacking a mirror, I looked at myself in the water trough; my nose was decidedly wider and of a different color. My forehead had an intellectual swelling about it, and also a purple cast. I pulled a bucket and washed the best I could, dressed in clothes in the Velonyan style, put what I could from the mare’s pack into mine, left a goodly pile of coins on the straw where I had lain, and set out on foot for Vestinglon.

  Before I got to the door of the barn, the whinnies of the mare began to follow me. As I blinked in the sunlight of the doorway, the slams of her body against the stall door also followed me. Before I was well out into the yard, I heard the squeal of steel nails being drawn out and the mare herself followed me. She near knocked me over, getting in front.

  “I thought you had enough of this rider,” I said to her, and she nodded her head forcefully, but stayed where she was. Despite this unconventional loyalty, it was ten minutes before she allowed me to catch her, and as I felt her limbs for damage she objected to every liberty.

  Against all probabilities, the beast seemed sound. I repacked her saddle and lifted it on her, added to the pile of coins in the straw, and once more I mounted. We trotted down the long slope from Goss to the capital no slower than we had left Rezhmia.

  My country was still locked in winter, but as we descended the depth of the snow grew less. The ground beneath our feet was mushy, and splashed the belly of the mare and splashed my own legs up to the knees.

  There was not so much destruction here, nor refugees to be seen, but there was a strong military presence. Ten miles into our travel I encountered a refectory wagon with a broken axle, dragged by effort into the snowbank at the road’s edge. There was an army cook reclining along the driver’s hard seat, wrapped in a horse blanket and asleep under the sun. Ahead there seemed to be more vehicles on the road. I took a handy farm driveway and trotted unchallenged down to some decent folks’ house and barn, turning from there onto the track the milch cows used in their daily p
erambulations. The cows had not been turned out today, which was doubtless wise with so many soldiers about, and when their old tracks unwound into a snowy pasture, we continued to the gate, forced it open, closed it behind us, and rode on.

  After a half-hour’s uncertainty, I found the highway again, and the troops were behind us. We reached Salid by midday, and that meant we were almost to Vestinglon.

  Salid is a very old place, which was originally (I have it on authority) a palisaded village in a lake, which could only be reached by boat. Now the town surrounds the lake and the palisade surrounds the gardens that have made Salid famous. They still can only be reached by boat.

  I expected to find the place occupied by the army, either Forwall’s men or some other general’s . I saw no evidence of that: only the white walls, the peaked slate roofs, the calf market, the cabbage stalls, the pubs advertising their summer-brewed and aged ale. All busy, all noisy, not like a nation in civil war. Perhaps the favored status of the place was because so many of the members of our parliament had their houses in Salid instead of Vestinglon proper. But then, Mackim had told me that King Benar had dissolved parliament. I did not sit out in the cold thinking too long about this; I turned into the first public house that possessed a livery, ordered oats, luncheon, and a hot bath. My name there was Tim Glazier.

  Unlike Norwess, here no one seemed about to discuss politics, no matter how open I kept my ears.

  The mare and I took to the roads for the last stretch of our journey. The sun shone down as brightly as it can in winter’s second month. The wind was light and the snow melting. The weather was excellent. It was a fine day to kill my best friend’s only son. It was a perfect time to murder my king.

  I had dandled this lad on my knee. Only twice, it is true, because his mother did not approve of her husband’s raffish friend, and unless Rudof had made a point of it, she kept Benar away from me. At Rudof’s request, the boy had received a few lessons horseback from my lady Arlin, but he had called her a few unpleasant names and his father had struck him down from his pony in red-haired rage.