Lens of the World (21 page)

He did not rise from the crouch nor speak to me, but the woman let out a howl between grief and outrage and sank into the doorway, head in hands. Then the man spoke.

“Yes. It died. They all die.” His voice was rude, but rude according to the mold of peasant Zaquash, not beast-rude. The woman behind him looked ordinary of face and form, though loose and stretched out. I had not seen many naked women.

Again my tongue spoke without consulting my mind. “It was yours? Not stolen?”

At this he leaped for me again, his expression frightful, and I was forced to kick him in the jaw. As he lay there I asked, “What are you, fellow? What is your nature? Is it… magical?” I felt myself blushing at the question, as though Powl were behind me.

“I am not a beast!” he bawled out, his face in the earth, his pointed horn-talons digging into the earth. By instinct I dodged the heavy iron pan, which had been sailed out after me and which was a more deadly assault than any the werewolf had offered. The woman shrieked and called me murderer and claimed I was there to kill them all.

I was not sure myself why I was there, and my enemy was down and blinking with watery eyes at the sunlight. I found myself retreating, and what my own face looked like I have no idea. Around me frisked the dirty white dog, more trusting than he had ever been to me. At the edge of their pounded clearing I stopped and pointed at the creature. “Tell me one thing!” I shouted back at the man. “Is it wolf, or dog? If you know, tell me!”

Without looking, the man set up another keening. “I am not a beast!”

I nearly tripped over my pack where I had left it. The wolf-dog followed me, its tail up but not curled. It took me three days of heartfelt effort to discourage it.

In those three days my mind spun between two shames: that I had left a monster in the woods when children were vanishing, and that I had intruded with force upon a pair of very unfortunate people. At last I was able to let these two conflicting disgraces strangle each other, and I was left admitting that I did not know what had happened, or what it was I had seen.

Eighteen years later, I have become more used to admitting that.

One month later I was in the city of Warvala, the largest in all the territories and the first real city I had seen since Sordaling. There is snow in South Territory, but it is not the unbroken five months of cover I was used to, and I was so far
 

protected against the climate as to be sleeping in the basement of the Territorial Library as janitorial assistant and stove minder.

This was a time of lordly comfort: warm, fed, and surrounded by books in three languages, which I had to myself all evening and night. I earned some small money and spent a larger sum of the library’s funds in lamp oil.

It was an enlightenment to me to discover that I could read the titles on the exquisite, calf-bound books that had found their way north from Rezhmia’s fortress capital. The language of mysterious significance taught to me by Powl in the last
 

year of my residence was nothing other than Rayzhia. Even more important was the content of these volumes, for the intricate flow of history, poetry, and fantasy I discovered had no counterpart in my own language. I could hear it all in Powl’s voice, for every nuance echoed my teacher’s own floridity when speaking in that florid tongue. I found I liked such stories greatly, and the naughty ones opened my eyes in many ways.

The janitor, a semi-lettered man, discovered me chuckling over one scandalous jewel, and when he found I was not merely cherishing the pictures, he had the idea I might earn some extra money by hiring out as a translator for the foreign quarter.

This I did, more out of a spirit of adventure than from any particular need for money—my job plus the occasional production of spyglasses or spectacles had left me wealthier than ever I had been—but my first glimpse of the market in the foreign quarter of Warvala was more than adventuresome. It was the most important event that had happened to me since meeting Powl.

In the foreign quarter were merchants of other territories, and a few daughter shops of Vesinglon itself, as well as a scattering of Falinks selling bright cloth and touristware, but the largest single group were the émigrés from the South, from the city of Bologhini down in the plains, where it is too dry to snow, and from Rezhmia itself. In the broad, clattering square of the market I encountered my first real Rezhmians.

I knew what they looked like from pictures, and because there is a trace of Rezhmian blood—or more than a trace—running through every Zaquash peasant. And in first glimpse I saw only echoes of that picture of the light-armored noble Powl had showed me in the library at Sordaling: slight, moon-faced, dark of hair and complexion, and delicate-boned, like a child in adult’s clothing.

But not all the émigrés were wearing the styles of Rezhmia, for the waist-length free hair, the bright cottons and silks, and the slippers of molded felt are not convenient clothing in a windy winter with snow up to the ankles. I came around the corner of a saponier—and I remember that in the glass window was a bar of soap into which had been imprinted tiny violets, which still retained a hint of color against the white soap, laid on a scarf of purple gauze—and there was a young man loading barrels onto a cart, and he wore my face.

He was darker. He had brown eyes, I believe, but the resemblance was overwhelming, down to the attentive set of his ears, which were bluish-red from their exposure to cold. Retroactively, all the other images of the people of Rezhmia in my mind (and I had called them monkeylike to Powl) slid over his and were made real, and I knew my own origins.

He smiled at me, companionably. I returned his salute as best I could and walked on. A minute later I was back and said, “Excuse me, sir, but are you… were you born in this area?”

“I know where things are, if that’s the help you need,” he said in an accent heavier than any I had yet heard. I shook my head. “Are you, by any chance, Rezhmian by birth? I ask not out of idle curiosity, but…”

As I spoke, his bluff friendliness vanished, to be replaced by offense, which in turn gave way to his own curiosity. He loaded one more empty barrel and sat down on the cart. “I was born three blocks from here. My father is Rezhmian, of course. Why?”

I was too shocked and too sober to say anything but the truth. “Because you look like me, I think.”

Evidently this hadn’t struck him, or was less a matter of note to him, but he gazed at me critically for a bit and replied, “Except for the yellow hair and a certain spread of shoulder, yes, I do. Why not? Are we related? Who are your people?”

I answered that I did not know. That I hadn’t known I was part Rezhmian until that very moment.

The boy or man startled at this admission, and I saw a quick growth of contempt in his eyes. He turned from me and picked up another barrel. “If you don’t know your father, it doesn’t matter if you’re Rezhmian or not,” he said.

This statement did not sting me at all, for I certainly did not want to be Rezhmian. “I have much better than family, as a matter of fact,” I answered. “I have myself.” Though I was not offended, I picked the fellow up and rolled him over on the street. It seemed to be expected of me.

He looked up past the foot that was holding his face down and made the three-finger signal for yield. “Enough. Let me up. Only don’t go blabbing… that around town or you’ll get worse answer than mine.” He stood up. Because the street was frozen, he had acquired very little dirt, and this he allowed me to help brush off. “You ought to know,” he said somewhat sullenly, somewhat shamefacedly, “that when you’re half-breed especially, family becomes important, because so many babies of mixed parentage are children of… of—”

“Prostitutes,” I finished for him. “I imagine so. But in my case I don’t think that was likely.”

No. It was more likely, given my age and upbringing, that my mother was the victim of rape.

Almost certainly it had been my mother’s birth that had gotten me into the Royal School at Sordaling, for few men would feel such an obligation to a by-blow by a foreign woman, paid or not. Perhaps my mother was a young noblewoman or gentrywoman seduced by a member of a diplomatic embassy, or by a rich merchant in the foreign quarter of some Velonyan city, but I doubted that. The appearance of a Rezhmian is not prepossessing to gently raised Velonyan females. I thought it rather more likely that she had been one of the numerous wives who had followed the king’s last incursion south, thinking it a lark and themselves above all harm, and who had found themselves amid an alien army without protection.

That seemed to explain everything: my family’s lack of interest in me; my admission to the school (both by virtue of the woman’s blood and her husband’s); and my face, hitherto thought by myself to be unique. It only required that I be a few years older than I thought I had been.

Powl had known. Probably from that first odd look he had given me as I entered the room. Certainly from the moment I gave him my name, which he had pronounced quite correctly and I never had. “Nazhuret,” I had now learned, was a Rezhmian name, not too common, originally of the God of the Underworld and now occasionally bestowed upon boy babies.

What had Powl called me at first? “The King of the Dead,”
his words had been. In a way he made me so, but that had always been my name. My teacher had been
discreet. Had he thought the information of my birth would drive me to despair, or had he simply
thought it in bad taste?

Not the latter, for he had spoken of our hereditary enemies as a very civilized and interesting people, and he had taught me their language with enthusiasm.

It would be significant to me, he had said. He had expected me to come this way. Perhaps coming home. Perhaps his silence had been only one of his dry jokes, and now I had hit the punchline. Or perhaps he had kept quiet because he thought telling me my origins was one more item that was not his business.

I end this long discursion and return to Warvala in winter.

I had a reasonable success as a translator, especially when there were to be records kept of the interchange. There was more demand for such skill than I would have thought, for few Northerners bothered to learn the language, and most of the émigrés were not lettered people. My accent was a matter of amusement, for as it turned out my Rayzhia was courtly, of the South (trust Powl to make sure of that), and very few of the traders of Warvala spoke its like. Neither, however, did they object to having a functionary with such elegant drawling vowels, even if he did have hair like a dandelion.

Yule came and went. I spent the holiday alone, but then we had never marked it out at the observatory, either. I was invited to the Deepyear celebrations of Pasten’s silk warehouse, however, and danced the fire dance and the sword dance and drank spirits of cherry, a southern specialty, very soft on the tongue and deadly the next day.

I had so much money I bought lens blanks by the dozen and ground them into spectacles for old men and women who otherwise would have squinted the rest of their lives away.

One of these, a goodwife born in Bologhini and possessing no Velonyan, rewarded me by instruction in all that an educated boy must know, which I had obviously missed by being brought up by the savages of the northern forests. She taught me the proper address to court a girl of rank above, equal to, or below myself. (Certainly there were few in the latter category.) She taught me how to bow, and the techniques of disciplining the mind, which must be learned in various stages to distract the chittering rats that are our thoughts. In turn I told her my history of the black wolf of Gelley, which Powl had
 

set upon me and which likely would pursue me for the rest of my life, and she retracted everything she had said concerning my education, for this teacher, she stated, had been a master of the mind.

The library let me go in midwinter, for the janitor’s son had come up from the country and it was thought proper he have the job. I did not repine, for they left me my reading privileges, and I found new work keeping order in the Yellow Coach, a large tavern in the foreign quarter, I made conversation in two languages and was very polite in showing the door to the overly enthused. It was light work.

It was an evening in early spring, and I was hovering over the table of my sometimes patron, the silk merchant, who was having difficulties with the emissary from Sordaling Tailories. This man made a practice of being rude, whether only to Rezhmians or in general I had not the opportunity to discover. Pasten knew the man was being rude—his Vesting was not bad—but in translation I turned the Tailories man’s demands into polite circumlocutions and thus Pasten was able to pretend they had not been said.

There was some dust of snow on the ground still, but the smell of the day’s air had left no doubt in mind that the season had changed.

Like all changes of season, this had put me out of context with the affairs of my life. Change was everywhere, and anything had a chance of happening. What did happen was that Arlin walked into the door of the Yellow Coach, complete with his velvets, his dirt, and his jeweled rapier.

The outfit was silver in color, which went well with his dark hair and fair skin and hardly seemed grubby at all. He even had a cape of fur over his shoulders, and his face was weather-scrubbed, if not by water.

I gave him a wave of recognition and he stared at me blankly for some moments before sinking into a chair. I concluded my business as quickly as I could and sat down beside him. My friend the bartender sent over the boy with two glasses of hot ale.