Lens of the World (28 page)

knife between her fingers: Zhurrie of twelve years old and a girl no older. She had known me from first glance and I had failed with her, altogether, though in retrospect I perceived that she had not changed so much.

I perceived, I am saying to you, but despite three years of training to do little else but perceive clearly, I had not perceived at all, and the woman had disarmed me at every step, using truth misunderstood as her weapon.

I used that very weapon now to fend off the king. “Arlin… ,” I said, and though I was deaf I tried to whisper for his ear only. “About Arlin there is an element of physical manhood… missing. For many years. I think he would risk death rather than allow himself to be disrobed by strangers.”

The king blinked and came out with a sound half guffaw and half snort, quickly smothered. “Well. Physical, is it?” he mouthed elaborately. “That would explain certain oddities. Your explanation pleases me better than my own first suppositions. We must find him, certainly, but we can be discreet about it.”

“I will find him,” I told the king, and was irritated at the manner in which he shook his head to deny me.

“You will not,” his lips said. “You cannot stand without help.”

I had not noticed that the king was bracing me by one arm. This was even more irritating, and I shook my head at him as he had at me. In another moment I was vomiting bile all over the king’s boots, and then I blacked out for the second time.

When I woke next, in firm possession of my own head, more than a day had passed and the king’s force was heading smartly north toward Velonya proper, all its eyes and ears out for signs of repeated assault.

Sixteen men had been buried, among them the engineer I had tried so uselessly to help and who in his death agony had set the fuse of the king’s petard. Arlin/Charlan had not been found, and in my desperation I considered revealing her secret to the king, to make it easier to find her. I did not, because I was not sure it would help and because it would be too large a betrayal. Larger, perhaps, than her life was worth.

This time there was no mistake in guarding the captives. We had been left with eight who were sound enough to talk, and with the assistance of a spoonful of tincture of opium I was able to witness the interrogation.

It was not what I would call torture, though it was forcible, and since hanging was the natural end of any attempt upon the king’s life in his own country (or what he claimed as his own), baits of clemency seemed of more value than threats.

Seemed of more value, but in the end all was fruitless, for the nomads resisted blows and offers alike with the indifference of wooden posts. Only their eyes moved, straying from the face of the king to those of his marshals to my own. Upon me they glared with a heavier resentment, seeing, I suppose, their own blood in the lines of my face. But why should that have been cause for hate, when these nomads kill other tribes of Red Whips with as much eagerness as they spend upon the Velonyans? More likely it was my own knowledge of my mixed blood that made me sensitive.

They told nothing. All but one were hanged the next morning, and that least lucky of men was shackled about the neck and ankles, to be brought along for more leisurely questioning. Before that death dawn, however, I had borrowed a horse and ridden back the way we had come, looking for Arlin.

I woke on a plodding horse in a field of stones and purple crocuses, where water ran like strands of hair—bright hair. There were a few oaks and bushes of hazel and alder, deer-thinned. I had been following tracks, light scratches of hooves, impossible to identify, and I must have fallen asleep riding.

I could not expect the horse to have continued my job for me, but I slid down anyway and looked over the glorious carpet of bloom for some sign of a horse’s passage. There was nothing.

I was shaking with cold though the sun was shining. Bright air, bright water, and the purple of the flower cups, each holding blood-red threads within. The place and time had that calm sweetness that accompanies funerals and makes them harder for me to bear. I squatted on a stone with needles of pain driving in through my ears, gagging on a dry stomach, and it seemed to me the beauty was telling me that Arlin was already dead.

In my shirt pocket was the tincture of poppy, and I drank from it, taking in my clumsiness more than I had been advised to swallow, I put my hands over my ears and my nose between my knees and made a ball of myself, while the borrowed horse wandered over the flowers, looking for something better than crocuses to eat.

I awoke when a man picked me up and put me over his shoulder. There was little I could do to resent the liberty. Neither did I feel much resentment, for his hands were kindly (though large, and he thumped me between the shoulders as though I ought to be burped. He was a large fellow, long-faced, yellow-haired, well-tailored, and no more belonging on that empty prominence on the borders of the southern territories than might a flock of peacocks. Out of the comer of my eye I could see a gown of blue silk with white embroidery, which floated with the wearer’s movement, or perhaps it was only a lace of high clouds in the sky that I saw, moving with the spring winds.

He carried me with no sign of effort, and even in my sickness and stupor I thought that here I had come upon a real Old Velonyan, wide as a house and strong as an ox. I saw the stones and the flowers pass under his feet, and then there was the door of a very fine house under the oak trees, where I had previously seen only air, and as the gentleman took me over the threshold (kicking the door open with his foot, I recall), my head lolled and I could see that there actually was a gown of blue silk, and above it rose the face of a young woman—tiny, dark, and very beautiful. There was something more to be noted about her, but as we passed into the house I found that my poor stock of attention was used up.

Again I came to, propped on a grand bed of heavy wood intricately carved, but it was not silk-dressed like such a bed called out to be. Instead it was clad in good white linen, like my bed back at the observatory, or like the beds at Sordaling School. Beside me sat these two unlikely protectors of mine, seated together as calm as a portrait, but less formally. Like couples long married, though neither seemed old. The room, like the bed, was of carved wood, green or brown or golden I cannot remember.

For such an exalted chamber the furniture was very curious; the chairs were solid oak, with their backs in the shape of a heart and a small heart cut into the top of each, and pillows of red broadcloth were tied to the seats, cottage-style. The windows were large rectangles such as are found neither in grand houses nor cottages but in institutions without pretensions to luxury, such as schools, and on the far wall hung—I swear it—the sort of wooden clock that holds a bird.

Here I woke with an idea that I had been fed by the hands of this kind couple, though how that might have been accomplished while I had fainted I don’t know. It occurred to me that I ought to explain to them about the injury to my ears, so that they did not think they were befriending a halfwit, and I turned to where the lady sat beside me, to signal somehow or to ask for paper, and seeing her clearly, I stopped and gaped—a half-wit indeed. She was surpassingly beautiful, with a tiny, heart-shaped face, black hair, eyes of the earthy green of the quiet lakes of Ekesh, and despite the eyes she was without doubt Rezhmian.

Behind her the tall blond man met my gaze and said nothing. He put his hands over her shoulders, and his eyes, ordinary blue, met mine. He smiled at me, and though his face was young, I had only seen such a smile on the faces of very old people. She did not smile, but she put out her hands, tiny like bird wings, and touched my face with them, stroking my hair back over my ears. I saw that her fingers came away tinted with blood, and I looked down at their clean sheets with concern. It came to me that I ought to go die someplace else, so as not to bother them. It seemed to me that I had had this thought once before in another context, but I could not recall it exactly, I propped myself up, which deed was no longer difficult, for the dizziness was gone, but when I raised my head again the blond gentleman was standing over me and extending (of all unlikely things) a very young baby.

Except at weddings, a beggar like myself is not asked for blessings,
but I found myself taking the child, who kicked in its white wrapping, and saying the traditional
words “Grace to you from the Trinity: God the Father, God the Mother, and the God Who Is in Us
All.” At least I thought I said them; without hearing, it is difficult to know. With tincture
of poppy it is difficult to remember.

I let the little one down onto my chest. It had no hair, and its eyes were cloudy baby eyes. It stared at me seriously for a few moments, then wiggled and extended one arm toward my face in the commanding way that babies have, and I felt a great warmth spreading through me.

I thought the little creature had pissed on me; it would not have been the first time such a thing had happened since I had left Powl and become a jack-of-every-trade. This inconvenience was so minor compared to everything else in my day that I laughed aloud while I waked for that quick warmth to turn to chilly wetness. Instead it spread throughout my body and mind, like sudden delight or like the release within lovemaking. When my eyes could see again, the baby had vanished, though my silly arms were still in position, holding nothing but the bright, still air.

Somehow I had lost this fine couple’s child, though I had no idea how, and in bewildered remorse I turned to them, but they were missing, too, and as I peered around the room I was no longer even sure of the identity of the cottage chairs. Nor could I say whether the bird I heard calling was from the carved clock on the wall, or a simple feathered cuckoo on a branch of the oak overhead.

At that moment I became convinced I had fallen into events of great
meaning and moment, at least to myself, events not yet categorized by Powl’s observational
methods. I did not know what they were, exactly, but if I somehow had the ear of powers greater than
King Rudof’s, I did not want to miss my chance. I stood up in the crocuses where there had
just now been a tall-post bed, and I called out to the event even as it passed: “Arlin! You
must save Arlin, who is actually Lady Charlan, daughter of Howdl of Sordaling
City!”

As though the Triune God would not know who people were without my prompting. I heard my words, in my own unexceptional voice, ring over the hills of stone.

As the glitter in the air softened itself into sunlight, I added;
“If it pleases Your Graces.”

Of the damage to my ears there was no trace, and the pain and dizziness were vague memories. My borrowed horse was rolling over the crocuses, trying to get rid of the saddle. Both horse and gear had been stained gold with saffron. The hillside was wild and empty.

I found the vial of tincture, and it seemed I had downed almost all of it at one gulp. I certainly had no need of it now. By the position of the sun, I had either been amid the flowers for an entire day and night, or for a short time indeed. I don’t think the horse would have stayed for a day and a night; he was trying to wander off even as I mounted him again.

I do not describe this incident to you with the intent to convince you that I participated in a miracle, sir. There was material in that vial of mine for a great deal of embellishment upon reality. There is material in my head for even more. But as I perceived it, I have recounted.

And later that day, while trying to recover the lost tracks, I discovered a large yellow stain over the front of my woolen shirt and not at all the color of saffron.

I claim, sir, to deal in clear perception, and using weapons of reason and intuition upon it, to arrive at some understanding of what is true. This is an outrageous claim on my part—an arrogant, offensive claim—and perhaps someday I shall have to pay for my arrogance.

For the time comes again and again when I cannot make a reasonable
assumption out of the perceptions granted me. I could put the events of the day together under the
heading “Opium Dreams.” But then what of the yellow stain? Did something else happen in
my delirium that my muddled mind translated into a baby who pissed on me and disappeared? Did
perhaps a real family, without faces representing the Velonyan and Rezhmian boundaries of my
existence and not living in a home made up of bits of places that had been important to me, pick me
up and nurse me, and my grandiflorent brain make up the rest? If so, why was I not sick unto death,
as I had been, but as well as if I had not been blown up?

If enough time had passed to heal my broken eardrums and the infection they had brought on, then how could I have forgotten the weeks it must have taken to finish the cure, and remembered the first fevered dream alone?

If my brain were that unreliable a tool to me, then how could I hope to sort out my own memories with it? I was lost before I started. I would not know how long I had been gone unless I returned to the king’s procession and asked someone.

As with all events of great moment, I had to pull my interpretation from a dark closet behind my eyes. I chose to believe I had had a kindly visit from God in all three faces at once. I decided that there was significance for me personally in the manner in which the blond man had laid his hands over the shoulders of the dark woman, and that the urine stain on the shirt I wore had great meaning for my future. I also resolved to wash the shirt.

For three days I rode through the sparsely settled countryside, seeking one set of tracks where it seemed half the horses in the known world had trotted by. Arlin’s gray mare had particularly small hooves, only differing from those of the local