Lens of the World (18 page)

During that dark end of autumn I fitted my first pair of spectacles for a wealthy farmer’s wife who had been reduced to touch to tell corn flour from bean flour. Her cooking was thereby much improved, and with the money I thereby made I was able to buy more blanks in Grobebh Township, multiplying my material wealth. I seem to remember, however, that the expenses of food and lodging while in that metropolis just about returned me to my natural state of indigence. I could formulate a natural law from this.

That year, like this, had its late-autumn madness, and its theme was werewolves. I sat in the inn along Brightwares Street, toasting my feet at the fire and attending to rust along the blade of my hedger (and yes, I had used it to cut hedges more than once this season; I am no Rezhmian warrior to think I keep my soul in a stick of metal, but if I did think so, I hope my soul would be sturdy enough for work), and I listened to four men discuss the nature and habits of the wolfman.

Two opined that he had hair all over and two thought not. Three agreed that he had rather the shape of both creatures—man and beast—and had the choice of human or animal locomotion at will, but the dissenter was firm that a werewolf was a wolf in all respects except when he wasn’t, when he could not be told from a man. That his teeth were immense, strong, and pointed there was no arguing against, nor did any dispute the fact that he ate meat, and human meat by choice.

I added nothing to this discussion, having never seen a werewolf or even a wolf, but as a stranger to the neighborhood I felt a certain relief that my own teeth were small, blunt, and slightly irregular along the bottom row.

The small kernel that sprouted all this fancy was that three people from around Grobebh had disappeared since harvest. One, the twenty-year-old son of a goldsmith, had vanished from this same inn only a month before and never made it the four blocks to his home. On that same eventful night the wife of a rental cart man disappeared from her bed, leaving her husband and a young child behind. The consensus was that the monster had eaten the man and buried the young woman to consume later, or vice versa, for it could scarcely be supposed that even a werewolf could consume two grown people in one night.

My own opinion was that the people of Grobebh Township were a naive lot and that these simultaneous disappearances could be explained much better without recourse to a werewolf at all. I felt no need to disabuse them, however. I wrapped the blade again and toasted the soles of my boots in the ashes.

The other disappearance had taken place only a week before, and as it was singular and involved a much-loved grandmama who sold sweets every market day, was not subject to the same explanation. Still, it seemed to me that in a place the size of Grobebh, people would fall out of sight now and then. If they had not had their hearts set on a monster, they would have been dredging the canals for the old dame by now.

I was considering buying a pint of hot ale, knowing it would be the end of my evening if I consumed it, when the door was dramatically thrown open and a lean figure stepped into the light and announced that there were wolfprints on the wet pavement all around the building.

The voice and figure belonged to Arlin, my friend of the elegant horse and dirty haberdashery, and my heart sank with his every word, for I knew or thought I knew what had made those prints. They were made by my poor, faithful, fearful dog, who would neither leave me nor let himself be touched, and would come under no roof but that of a barn. By the time I reached the door it was pressed solid with bodies, all of them taller than I. There were many loud exclamations, and I heard men stepping out left and right from the door. Then I heard them returning, more quickly than they had gone.

“The size of a man’s foot,” was said, and another added, “And the scrape of its claws, did you see? Like iron.”

The potboy came trotting out from behind the bar, and when faced with my own problem, he leaped lightly onto a tabletop and peered over all heads. I followed him.

There they were, a few soppy dogprints surrounded and obliterated by the booted feet of the men. The day’s rain was turning to snow. As it didn’t seem likely I would be able to elbow my way through, I leaped for a crossbeam and swung out the door, coming down in the middle of attention. “I think that’s only my dog’s prints you’re looking at,” I said to the innkeeper, who stood nearest me. “He… follows me.”

The innkeeper rubbed his hands on his apron while snow fell on his bald head. I was a stranger and badly dressed, but I was a paying customer. “Your dog? The brute that made those tracks must be larger than you are.”

I considered this and answered that he was. Upon being further questioned I explained that he was the sort of dog with a curly tail and fuzzy face and was very timid. White, or nearly so.

The snow was falling harder, and my explanation had dampened the crowd’s enthusiasm. We returned within, where Arlin had ensconced himself in a chair by the fire and was amusing the potboy with dagger tricks, and spinning a saber blade around his fingers.

I did such things when I was a boy; we all did at the school, but I had given them up back in the days of the swan boats on Kauva Riven. I certainly had never been as good as this young man. He watched me watching him.

“Do you remember me now, Zhurrie?” he asked through a wheel of spinning steel.

I admitted I did not, but that I remembered the period in my school career when we had all been crazy for such dangerous games as this. He grinned in return and answered that some stayed crazy.

Arlin had a face of some character and elegance, but starvation was written over it, perhaps merely of food, perhaps of a more subtle sort. His were the classical features of Velonya, overwritten by black eyes and sallow skin. My own coloring belonged with his features, to create in him the image of aristocracy.

Unlike myself, he did not temper the accent of Velonya when traveling in Zaquash territories, and that face, that voice, and those spinning blades all together served to make him an impressive figure to the peasants. They gave him room.

I told him I couldn’t thank him for what he had done upon entering the inn, that with the autumn hysteria upon us, he might have caused a poor dog’s death, and all for his own amusement.

The dagger came down in the wood of the table between us and stuck. “So you don’t believe in werewolves?” asked Arlin, with no expression in face or voice.

It was not a question I could answer. Powl had disbelieved in werewolves, blood-sucking foxes, and witches of all variety, but I thought his attitude inconsistent for a man of science. “I have never seen a werewolf,” I said to Arlin, over the knife. “I have seen a dog.”

The thin man stared at me for a good count of ten, as though he could make no sense of my words. Slowly he worked the dagger out of the wood of the table. “You have become something strange as a werewolf yourself, Nazhuret,” he said, and then turned his attention to the next table, where a game of Does-o was being set up. He put away all his cutlery and slid down the bench and into the game.

I did not have that pint of ale after all, for the discovery of the pawprints had worried me, and I might simply have risen and left the inn, hoping the dog would follow, had it not been that to leave now, after having paid for my bed (by the hearth), would have been to raise suspicion that I myself was a werewolf. Instead I sat alone and paid attention equally to the sounds of the tap and of the card game and to the silence of snow outside. Perhaps half an hour later Arlin leaned over again and whispered in my ear, “There is a gray wolf outside in the street, staring in at the door with his tongue hanging from his mouth.”

I looked over his shoulder and out the window, not moving my head. “That’s he. That’s only my dog.”

Arlin examined his cards, gave a bid, and answered me quietly, “No sign of a curly tail.”

I had to admit there wasn’t. “It curls only when he’s happy,” I whispered.

The man sniggered. “It’s a wolf,” he said for my ears only and returned to the game. Shortly after this I saw the dog dart away, white against the white snow slop, and a heavy horse came by pulling the town’s snow drag to clear the street.

Arlin was talking to—no, lecturing—the townsmen on the subject of the court of our young king. He would have us know that things had changed in the few seasons of Rudof’s monarchy: that new titles had risen and old blocs of power had been
 

broken. He had created three earldoms out of the ruin of the old House of Norwess, to which there had been no heir, and was ennobling dozens of hot-handed young blades and sending them out on missions of discovery: some north, to the Seckret fur routes; some south, to study at the schools of the walled city of Rezhmia; and some past the Felinkas to find for Velonya new islands to stamp on the maps.

I had a strong sympathy with the man whose deeds Arlin was recounting, for it seemed to me he was employing men to do all the things a healthy youth would want to do himself.

And further (according to this lean and grimy authority), the king had put his court on wheels, or even horseback on the rougher roads, and insisted on obtaining the latest information with his own ears and eyes, through Old Velonya, across the territories and to the dry-land borders, where the Red Whips had broken his father’s expansionary drive. Six weeks in the springtime and six in the autumn. Free as a lark.

It was great fun, and not only for the young king. Great opportunities for young men with ambition—young men after the young king’s heart.

Arlin was calling my name now, asking me why I did not go forth and find my king an island.

As I had not spoken to any man or woman in the room since the incident at the door, and as I was not dressed in a manner that suggested I had easy intercourse with swords and velvet and blood horses, there was a general public startlement, and a dozen pair of eyes were turned down to the ashes. To me.

I had not been paying strict attention, trying instead to bring together into one image Arlin’s view of King Rudof and my teacher’s. I closed my eyes and heard the question again from memory.

“I would have more success at finding an island than some, I suppose,” I answered. When Arlin merely pulled his brow and stared at me, I thought to add, “Having a knowledge of telescopes—being an optician, I mean.

“But though adventure is all well and good, I’d rather be at peace with my wife—if I were a king. If I were Rudof.”

My explanations seemed only to make things more murky and the public attention closer, so I put the question back to Arlin. “Why is a young hotblood like yourself, sir, not engaged among the king’s progress?”

“Oh, I am,” he said very lightly. “Off and on, I am.” And he dealt the cards.

I didn’t know the rules of Does-o; then and now card games have only served me as a cure for insomnia. I watched the men idly, noting only that Arlin was a great bluffer, and when he bet gold the others abandoned their silver to him without matching him to see his hand. Perhaps it was the influence of the spinning blades, or the knowledge that this man had seen King Rudof face to face.

I could not tell the strategy nor the plays, save when coins were shoved from one side of the table to the other, but at the same time my ignorance of the game freed my eyes, so that I noticed when the red trey fell into his lap instead of joining the others slid across the table to the sorter. With four men playing Does-o, the absence of a card is not immediately evident, and with the various rounds of picking and discarding, its subsequent reappearance as part of a favorable hand caused no comment.

It certainly caused none from me, though I was shocked to the bottom of my young soul to find that one of our old students had devolved into a card cheat. Cheating at games at Sordaling was a crime that meant immediate expulsion, even when the stakes were marbles and lacquered acorns. But I had no doubt Powl would have informed me that this game and these three strangers and indeed Arlin himself were none of my business. All none of my business.

Arlin had seen a wolf and found it to be none of his business, too.

I withdrew to my purchased hearthstone and settled for the night, and when the game was over I tried not to hear the manner in which the old student crowed over his winnings, excited as a boy—an obnoxious boy. The others, townsmen all, grimly exacted from him the promise that he would return the next night to allow them revenge.

I learned something that evening: If one is going to deal doubly, it is wise to be exuberant about it. Nobody suspects enthusiasm. I feigned sleep, but Arlin sank down with a great cracking of knees and rubbing of palms against his trousers. “You’re not asleep—don’t think you can fool me. Not with all this clattering about out here. Not you.” He poked me between the ribs as he spoke.

I was forced to look at him, and he took immediate offense at what he saw in my face. “What’s the difficulty, Zhurrie? Got a tick up your ass?”

“Not a tick, but a red trey, and on your lap,” I answered before I could think whether it was wise or not, lying as I was flat on my back and wrapped in blankets.

Arlin’s sallow face flushed, or at least the fire made it seem
so. “The last man who accused me of cheating—” he began.

“Had eyes at least as good as mine,” I finished for him, and I turned over. The man was unchancy, but I did not think he would stab me in the back. I had a moment’s peace and then Arlin grabbed me by the shoulder, or tried to. He was not a heavily built man, and he came down flat on the hearthstones with the wind shot out of him. For some time he stared at me in surprise, his face upside down to mine. His temper seemed to have dispersed as quickly as it had built.