Lens of the World (16 page)

I took to the streets again with very little peace of mind. I knew enough about law in the Velonyian-controlled Zaquash territories to guess that the penalty for armed assault was likely to be more than a few years in confinement. The man called Gellik might go to a labor gang. Might die in a labor gang was almost to say the same thing. Or he might die at the end of a rope.

Had the Guard captain blinked at the wrong moment, or had I not had the fortune to appear to have slipped, it might have been myself awaiting one of these ends. A short result to Powl’s long labor.

The puppet show in the market had folded and gone. The grocer and his fellows were packing. I asked a baker if I might help him load, in exchange for one of his unsold bread rolls. He was a portly man, and it was obvious he didn’t think I had enough size to be of real help, but he allowed me to amuse myself, and I spent the middle of the afternoon in the odor of brown crusts and raisins. He gave me six large poppyseed rolls in a bag made from a single sheet of folded white paper.

Though poppyseed rolls are a specialty of Ekesh, I had never seen such a container before, and was as taken with its simplicity and cleanness as I was by the speckled treasure within. I ate of one and examined the other’s cleverness while I looked for some place to rest my abused foot.

The sign proclaimed the place to be an inn and the door was open, though no sound of activity leaked out. It came to me, fresh from my success at the little market, that I might be equally able to lift things over my head in here and win a glass of something to go with the bread rolls. I was very thirsty.

Though it was quiet inside, it was not empty. Both the inn residents’ bar and the locals’ bar had groups of men sitting over ale, and the barmaid, slouched in the doorway between the two, stared out toward the street, oblivious to both sets of customers.

I entered the shadow of the front hall and glanced at the two doors before me, unsure which was which. No sign informed me, of course. It seems to be a rule of territorial hostels that the stranger must guess which room was designed for his use, or else inquire of the spirits of the air.

Three dull-looking men occupied the right-hand chamber. None was eating, so it was impossible to tell whether they were residents of the inn or locals desiring a glass. One had his head in his hand, while the other two were drawing in beer spillings on the bar itself. I turned to the other door.

It was almost the same group, dull, drinking, composed of three men, although there were dirty plates piled at the bar’s end. It took me more than a glance to realize that these three were the men I had led from the maple woods of Satt to these Ekesh lakes.

In that same moment, a part of my mind spoke up from below (I know no better way to put it, sir) to tell me that I also knew their mirror image across the wooden bar wall. Without moving, I turned my eyes back to the right-hand door.

The shoulders of one of the men gave him away. The tip of a spur, seen out of the comer of my eye as indeed it had been seen before, as I ran for my life and for that of young Jannie… I could not be certain, and yet I was certain.

From the left door came a sigh that slid into a groan. Grofe, almost certainly. From the right came some tired laughter. I stood between the two, and what my course of action was to be I had no idea.

If I had owed Master and Mistress Grofe anything for their marrows, pastries, cider, and the half acceptance that had come with it, I had paid that debt already. With Commerey, sitting silent and square as a rock behind an untouched ale, I had no connection, though even now he had my sympathy. I had just gotten one man into the hands of the Guard and I strongly suspected he would die in those hands. I wanted no more part of this.

Yet there were the three men who had stolen Grofe’s income; kidnapped his daughter, perhaps to kill; tried in a sprightly manner to kill me; and ended by waking a young man from his sleep only to murder him. I disapproved heartily and wished them every sort of unsuccess if only they didn’t drag me down with them. I might have gone quietly into the left side, waked up my Satt friends, and explained to them who their neighbors were, but then I would be committed again. I might have even more quietly walked away.

Instead, I decided to let the moment create itself. I stood and I waited, and I watched the wooden partition and the two doors flanking it with the same aimless attention I had paid to the bricks of the observatory.

My eyes were scratchy. My ankle made itself known.

“Here, boy,” said the barmaid, coming out from the bar into the left side and approaching me by that door. “Don’t block the door that way. What is it you want?”

Three sets of eyes on the left side of the bar lifted casually, drawn by voice and movement. Three sets of eyes on the right did also, and the door was clear and open between the residents’ bar and the locals’ bar. The Satt farmers were quicker to react, though only by an instant. I heard Commerey’s chair falling backward and then Grofe’s bellow. I grabbed the barmaid by her arm and flung her out into the street.

“They’re going to fight!” I told her, and she in turn took hold of my wrist.

“How by perdition do you know that?” she shouted in my ear, “You haven’t even been inside!”

I slipped her grip and jumped back into the place, closing the door behind me. When she pounded, I jammed a ladder-back chair beneath the knob. I did not want to have to carry this lass on my back as I had Jannie; the barmaid was bigger than Jannie, and I was not fresh.

The Satt men were over the bar and shoving through the partition door, which the avengers were trying to brace as I had braced the outer door. The little deal pine bar door, however, had no knob, and a blow of Commerey’s huge shoulder splintered both it and the barstool. He stumbled into the room and was hit on the head by a one-pint beer crock. The avenger with the spurs was standing on the bar, displaying a knife that looked much like a shaving razor. The third, less limber or more saddle sore, attempted to climb the bar but gave up and decided to enter the fray from behind, through the hallway. Past me.

I did not recognize this fellow, but he must have recognized me, for he took out another of those thin-bladed, Rezhmian-work razors and sliced upward at my groin. I skidded backward so that the thing sparkled an inch from my face, and as my thigh encountered the chair I had used to brace the door, I knew I was in trouble. I kicked his elbow as I came down on the caned seat, but he did not drop the razor; he circled it above his head and brought it down at my face.

Both my hands had grasped the chair arms to control my fall, and I used that support to launch myself, feet first, at his head. The blade sliced my shirt, but I put both boot heels into his chin hard enough to throw him against the end of the partition, which resounded.

Still the man kept his razor and still he flailed it at me. I parried his arm once more, tried to grab the thing, failed, suffered a cut hand and then as he bent with the force of his strike, I saw below my hand the back of his head and his neck. I struck down with the heel of my hand as heavily as I could, and I knew immediately I had killed a man.

Within, the avenger with the other razor still was on the bar, holding off Grofe and his son with his weapon and his feet. The other avenger was flat out on his back, and Commerey was braced on hands and knees, shaking his head like a sick cow. I heard a little silver sound in the distance. A whistle.

“Out!” I shouted. “Guard! Guard! Guard!” I shouted, and by the third iteration of the name, even dazed Commerey was knocking me aside in his hurry. They issued out the door as close as flies in a cloud, and even the avenger with the knife ran with them. I limped along behind.

The Satt men had left their horses in the inn stableyard, but evidently they had left them saddled, for they were charging back again before I had made half the distance. Grofe cantered past me, his son half stopped and then thought better of it, but massive Commerey brought his beast to a halt before me and plucked me up by the neck of my damp, gaping shirt.
 

Shelbruk went by me at a great rate, with cobbles looming large enough to break a horse’s leg or a man’s head. I had a mouthful of red horsehair before I found a secure position on the pommel in front of the rider. We flew past the market, empty and echoing, and made a clangor over the flagstones around the well. I heard the Guards’ whistles again and again, but I saw no uniforms, and we were out the town gates before any thought to close them on us.

If they had any intention of closing the gates.

“You’re bleeding freely, lad,” said Commerey, I was surprised that a man so recently brained would have attention to spare for that, and after glancing at my hand I told him it was not a bad cut but that razors make for long bleeding.

I looked behind as we climbed the steep hill over the town. No one seemed to be following, least of all the avenger with the knife.

“Did you kill that man I tripped over in the hall?” Commerey asked me, and I admitted I had. It sounded impossible to me, even as I said it. It felt like a lie in my mouth.

“I’m indebted to you, then,” he answered me. “He’s the one shot my Coln right through the heart.”

He put me down on the road where we had left Quaven and Commerey’s boy, and once again I was put to tracking, like a dog. I found signs that the two had come out again, shuffled a while in the roadway, and then pushed their mounts carefully into the undergrowth. There was nothing in these marks Grofe or Commerey might not have seen himself, had they had the patience or the vision to look.

My Satt men’s horses did their own share of aimless circles and impatient pawing as the riders discussed whether to wait for the boys or to leave. Grofe’s opinion, as best I remember, was that pursuit would come eventually and we ought to ride on. Commerey believed the Shelbruk Guard was glad to have seen the tail of us and that we should wait.

As they disputed the matter (never asking me my opinion, though I was the one who had had to kill, and the one without a horse under me), the two missing members pressed out of the woods, dragging briars. For a moment all the weary men stared at one another. “We got the maggot. We buried him,” said Quaven, and for another silent moment all drank in the excitement of this boast and swagger, and their tired eyes glowed. Then they began to laugh and pound each other on the back.

I stood in the middle of the road, the legs of the sweating horses all around me. I called for Quaven to repeat what he had said, to explain what they had done to the man with the broken knee.

“We took his Ekesh heart out of his Ekesh body!” The hired man’s face was gray, aside from two red circles directly under his eyes. His eyes grinned and glittered, but he was so tired he was leaning backward against the reins, dragging his horse’s head in. The beast was even more tired and did not complain.

The boy chimed in, “He was lying on his fucking bed with his fucking wife cluck-clucking over him. Dad, and that’s it where we did him. Like a hog, he was. A big, long hog.” He was no more than sixteen years old—Jannie’s age—and his voice was filled with glee and horror and exhaustion.

Commerey said nothing in return. He was looking instead at me—the only one to do so. “What would you have us do, walk him into Shelbruk, to be patted on the back? They killed my son.”

“He didn’t kill your son. He had a broken leg. He was helpless.”

“It’s all the same,” he said to me, his heavy face without expression. “My boy was helpless.”

Quaven kicked his resistant horse forward. In his right hand was a cavalry saber he had not owned earlier in the day. “I’ve had enough of this weasel,” he said, and he shook the blade in the air at me. The horse, not cavalry-trained, began to dance sideways.

“Fold it up, Quaven, the man’s been a friend to us,” said Grofe, and he pushed his horse between the steel and myself. The hired man still was drunk on his violent success, however, and though he slid the weapon away, he spat in my direction.

“I won’t ride with him. He’s another filthy Ekesh and I don’t want him following anymore.”

Grofe bristled. “Where did you get the power to say who rides
and who doesn’t, plow-pusher? I hire you to—”I interrupted. “I haven’t
been riding at all, as you might remember, Master Grofe. And as for following—I led, not
followed you to this day’s work, and I’m very sorry I did so, for it’s been a
nasty one. So I will bid you good day here and hope our ways do not intersect
again.”

I retraced the path the horses had made in the brush until I was far enough from the road that I no longer heard their many-hooved progress. I followed a narrow path for a few miles, back west and south toward Satt according to the sun, and then my travels caught up with me and I curled where I was and slept.

I awoke cold in the dark of night, with deer leaping over me.

It took me three days to retrace the path I had run in half of one night and a morning, and those three days are of a piece in my memory. I might have been under one of the lakes of Ekesh, so odd was the autumn light and shadow and so poor and unconnected was I. No pack to carry and a foot that reminded me momently how bad I had abused it.

I took my time walking, avoided the traveled road, and when I was hungry I set a snare of birchbark and caught a rabbit. After an hour of trying to start a fire without any tools at all, I gave up, stuffed the beast in my shirt, and went on. I ate cattails from one of the countless ponds instead. That night I lay on a bed of fir, covered by more branches, but I was a shade too cold to sleep. The moon was first quarter and not yet set, and I wondered if it would be wiser to use the next few hours in forward progress. The straight road was only a mile or so below, and I had no qualms about using it at this dead time. But when that astronomical body finally rolled on and under, it would leave me in greater cold and greater darkness, without even the comfort of a fir bed. I stared out at the white stripe of the path from my hiding, until the stripe took on a life of its own. I had never seen a ghost, but it seemed appropriate I would see one tonight. Perhaps it would have a broken neck.