Lens of the World (5 page)

I went out to relieve myself, ate the rest of the cheese, played with the disks of glass, worked the mechanisms of bone, and ascertained that the torturer’s rack was actually a gear and wheelwork that somehow connected with the wooden crenellations edging the dome roof. I climbed the platform and peered up at the slot in the roof through which the hinder stars of the Great Hog could be seen, and I wondered how the rain was kept out. By then I was chilled and headachey, so I returned to my bench and the gentleman’s coat.

Not once through that afternoon and evening did I spare a thought for Sordaling School, or for Baron Howdl, or for the dream that had brought me away from both. For the rest of the night I slept like a dead man.

The next morning I was still on my hard bed when Powl opened the door
and walked through to the central chamber. “Still asleep, I see,” he said, but it was
obvious he meant “still here.” He was carrying a bundle.

I got up, shook out his felted coat, and followed him.

In the morning light he was smoother than ever: smoother and cleaner
and more pink-scalped. His plumpness was an illusion brought on by small features and the delicate
joints of his fingers. While his dress was conservative, everything he wore had a little bit of gold
about it, including his teeth. He put down the bundle on the boneworks table, where it clattered. He
took back his coat, examined it—for fleas, possibly—and said: “The rules,
Nazhuret:

“First, never piss against the walls of this building.”

I started to interrupt, to explain it had only been the outside wall, and on a structure this massive, that could scarcely matter, but it occurred to me to wonder how he could possibly have known, and in the face of his inexplicable knowledge, my protest died.

“It is unhygienic, it stinks, and it only encourages dogs. I find it an unappealing habit, and you will not do it. Further, for the sake of my sensibilities if not your own, you will wash every day—yes, of course you do, but I mean head to foot. Neatly. Cold or hot. You will launder your shirt every evening.” At this I must have gawped, for I had never heard of anyone except the clergy living with such nicety, and among those, only such who had servants with time to waste. Powl paid my expression no mind, or perhaps he answered it in directly, for he continued, “This training would be easier if you had been fifteen years instead of nineteen. You’re now at an age to balk, to challenge everything I say.”

Indeed, I was about to challenge his rules as time-consuming and inappropriate considering my station in life, when I was overcome by a feeling of uncertainty amounting to pure dizziness, for I no longer knew what my station was nor in what voice I was about to answer this man.

The student of sixteen years’ training in obedience was dead, as dead as if the body still lay cold on the cold stone flags. The perfect detachment of yesterday also was gone; I had awakened without it and not noticed the change. The fellow who had tried twice to object to very minor inconveniences was neither of the Nazhurets I knew. I heard him squeak my own confusion and I did not recognize the man. I was nauseated. I lost my balance.

I think I fell to my knees, for I remember Powl holding me up, stronger than he looked, with the small hands with little gold rings about the fingers. He put my seat down on a bench.

“Boy,” he said, “I understand. Don’t worry about it. Such moments were not made to be held to. What is necessary is simply… faith. Or obstinacy. That what happened did happen.” He let me go then and began to pace, his shoes with their lacquered heels making surprisingly little noise against the floor. “That, actually, is the only legitimate meaning of the much-abused word ‘faith.’ It is the… the cussedness… to insist that what we knew to be true remains true, in the face of confusion and distraction. When it is hidden from us. Because…”

And he looked sharply into my face. “Because we were not made to live constantly in a glow of divine illumination.”

He sighed and rubbed his lips with the tip of a finger. “Most people, I think, experience all the inutterable perceptions of a saint, a sage, or a scholar in their own times. Burghers, smiths, soldiers like yourself: all ripe for blinding illuminations. But these perceptions can’t be readily communicated, called for at will, or stored in a jar against future need, so…”

He paced. “The perceiver first classifies them as undependable and later, useless, and finally, unreal. Most ordinary people are so practiced at this negation that by the time they are in their mid-teens they suffer their sudden understandings as though they were bellyaches and are quickly over them. The sage or the ecstatic, on the other hand…”

His face tightened. “Do I have it right, Nazhuret, or am I previous, and you were only swooning from insufficiency of food?”

I told him he had it, and that as Zhurrie the Goblin was certainly dead, and peace-filled Nazhuret the Revisitor seemed to have disappeared also, I had no idea who was talking to him at all. I stared not at the floor but at his gleaming shoes, soiled by September dew and forest mulch only a bit on the sides of the toes, and he patted me on the head, where I would have been bald had I been Powl.

“That is a very good beginning,” he said to me.

The clothing in the bundle—that I was to wear and wash out nightly—was a coarse handweave shirt as well as woolen knee breeches, stockings, and wooden clogs. “I am to dress like a peasant and wash like a lord?” I asked him, trying not to make it sound like a protest.

“Yes,” he replied, with his grin turned away from me. “And eat like a lady and talk like a scholar with a long gray beard. All these things, you see, are perfection in their own variety, and perfection is what we strive for.”

I was grateful for the lack of mirror in the room, not because I thought I looked so much worse in the poor clothes but because I was very much afraid I would find they looked more appropriate on me than my frock coat. “Peasant shirts are more perfect than… than linen and pearls, Master Powl? Then what about—”

“No ‘Master,’ Nazhuret. Just ‘Powl.’ And as for my own dress—if it is any of your business—I am in disguise.”

Powl glanced over me with satisfaction as I stood before him in my rude finery, and I was more and more certain he thought it the right clothing for the sort of person I was. I was tempted to remind him about Sordaling School and its rules for admission, but among the lessons I had learned at that school was that many things were for sale that were not supposed
 
to be salable, and how could I say that admission for a low-born or bastard son was not among these? I held my peace. He fed me more cheese, bread, and beer, until the natural man in me began to climb out of his stupor.

“Do you remember why you came here and why you stayed, Nazhuret?” Powl ate more slowly than I and far more delicately, so that I had been waiting across the table from him for five minutes.

“I remember…” I began, and then memories that had
seemed perfect and coherent as long as I didn’t look directly at them began to behave
alarmingly. “I came because of a dream,” I answered at last, “and I stayed because
you…” and here I became unsure of myself, wretchedly so, so that it was almost
impossible to continue. Powl prodded me. “Because I what, lad? Speak.”

“Because you called me back. From death.”

Powl skinned an apple. Its fragrance filled the air, even overwhelming the cheese, “Called you back from death? Now, how could I do that?”

I don’t know where my anger came from, but I was shouting, “Don’t make fun of me that way! You were only an hour ago saying that I must believe my own memories, that it required cussedness that was actually faith, that—”

He waved me down with a light gesture, “No, I’m not making fun of you. It was a legitimate question. By what power could I call a man back from death? I’m not God, I assure you, nor some prescientific notion of a wizard.”

This outraged me, for although I didn’t confuse the man with
the Almighty, yet he was exactly my “prescientific” idea of a wizard. “And yet you
did it.”

“I don’t think so,” answered Powl, so very mildly I was ashamed for my temper. “Examine your memories again. In all honesty.”

I could not; what had been so coherent the day before had become as cluttered and handleless as the dream that brought it about. “I don’t remember. I don’t even remember why I’m here.”

“You can leave again.” Ever so coolly, Powl began to eat the skin he had carefully excised from the apple.

This left me utterly blank. “Leave? But you said you would be my teacher.”

“So you remember something, then. But what is it I am to teach you?”

I thought mightily but could remember nothing of the experience relevant. Except how easily he had beaten me at my own skill. “Swordwork, I imagine. Isn’t that it?”

Powl laughed outright, which I doubt a proper lady would have done with a mouthful of apple. “You are asking me? Like that? You have no idea, yourself, and yet you’ve sat here and chided me…”

I could only shake my head.

He put his knife and his tine sticks down and wiped his fingers with a clean handkerchief. “We could certainly begin with that, Nazhuret. If it’s swordwork that interests you, I can teach you to be the most deadly duelist in all of Vestinglon and the Territories.”

I blushed to think how easily taken in he thought me.
“I’m not really so interested in it—” “So much the
better.”“It’s only that since you have reason to know you’re so much better
than I am, I naturally thought—”

“Naturally.”

“But Master—Powl—I have to be honest. I have ranked third out of two hundred at Sordaling and after all these years I’m as good as I’m going to get. I work the rapier hours each day and I know I have reached my limits.”

His wide, colorless eyes had no expression as he answered, “That would be too bad if that were true, but I don’t think it is.”

I sought to excuse myself, for calling myself third of Sordaling had
not been my idea of a pitiful confession, and Powl’s “that would be too bad if that were
true” really rankled. Still, the man had played cat and mouse with me. “I have been
fighting with wooden swords or steel ones since I was four. Though always the smallest in my
sessions, I had to stand there and take it and take it until I could figure out how to turn it
aside—and I did learn, despite my years and despite my size. That is the school system. Can
you think of a better, more realistic one for producing able fighters?”

I was quite amazed to see Powl lose his temper, even though it was only revealed with a sneer and a slap to the table. “I can think of none worse!” He rose, and his lacquered heels glinted in the light of the high windows as he strode in high energy to and from, striking the hanging buttons from his path so that they swung to and from in the air like reapers’ blades.

Silently, I began to clear the table. I kept back the bread heels and the scraps of cheese and the rest of the apple skin in case he was about to toss me out, for I had no idea where I would go in that event.

Not back, certainly.

Powl returned to me and in his hands he held something in a sheet of flannel. I sat on the stair of the platform beside him as he unwrapped the item.

It was the size and shape of the bottom of a small bucket and about a thumb’s length in thickness. It was clear, perfect glass, with only a touch of green in its makeup when examined along the diameter. “It’s a lens,” I said, fairly sure of my information.

He propped it on his knees, and his round face looked like a happy cat’s. “It is a lens. I’m glad we can start with that understanding. Now, do you know exactly what a lens is?”

His brightness dimmed a little when I could only say it was something made of glass. “To help see things,” I added, and that cheered him again.

“Yes. This is to help see things. Everything taught is merely to help us see things. Nazhuret, I will teach you the arts of conflict, since that is your background, and as I have heard said, one can only teach a person what he already knows. I will also teach you five languages, two of which are dead and one of which has—for you—what are called magical properties. Together we will study dancing, too, and a sort of history more accurate than that fed you poor brutes at your school. But the only perfect teaching—the only treasure I have—I can give you in a few words, right now.

“You, Nazhuret, once of Sordaling, are the lens of the world: the lens through which the world may become aware of itself. The world, on the other hand, is the only lens in which you can see yourself. It is both lenses together that make vision.” He paused, terribly still.

“Do you understand me?”

I listened, and I looked into the cool clearness of this immense glass, which showed me magnified the fine pink fingers of Powl and the glint of gold and the blue-rose-colored drop of a discreet ruby on one of those rings, and superimposed over all this the ghost of my own face, turned upside down and thus unknowable to me. I had to put both hands over my face and retreat into darkness.

He asked me again, “Do you understand me, Nazhuret?”

The words, meaningless to me, were locked in the dark box of my head, and like powder charges, were set to go off. I knew about handling powder charges, and knowing they were locked in with me and the fuse ignited, I began to sweat.

For a moment I saw myself from above as I had briefly the day before.
For a moment I felt the blackness that preceded death. Then I remembered more. I opened my eyes
again and let go of Powl’s words. “I don’t understand at all, Powl. Not at all.
And I can’t think. My head fills instead with memories of… of before I knew I ought to
come back.” “Good.” He nodded forcefully, as though I had said something profound
instead of failing the test completely. “Knew you ought to come back. No nonsense about my
calling…” He nodded and nodded. To himself.