Lens of the World (33 page)

In answer I leaned my face to where his hand rested on my shoulder, and I kissed it. “Though I know you are picky about the men you like,” I added.

My friend gasped, and in my weariness I had no notion whether it was the sort of gasp that indicated disgust gratification, or merely surprise. His large eyes glanced around at the grass. “Do you want to be known for a boy-lover, like I am?”

“I already am,” I said, and then the time for light talk was over for me; my dread washed back to me, blacker than Arlin’s soot stains.

“Help me, old friend.” I took his arm clumsily. “I have offended the king, and someone I know will die for it.”

Arlin cursed by the Triune, or perhaps it was a loose prayer. He gave me an awkward little hug. “Offended? Die? The redhead is headstrong, yes, but I had not thought him so—so fickle. So two-faced. When I left the procession a week ago, word was you could do no wrong.”

Arlin still was helping me stand. Now he held me at the length of his straightened arms. “Did he have you flogged, old friend? Blustering pig that he is, did he do you harm?”

Under his dirt Arlin was livid, and he showed his teeth in the grin of an angry fox.

I explained as I could. As I told Arlin about King Rudof’s command that I show discretion in my friendships, Arlin grinned warily, but with some satisfaction. When I described the novel privilege granted me, he gaped. At the mention of the Earl of Daraln, he broke in with a cry of amazement. “Nazhuret, old stumper, you have picked one dangerous friend! Daraln the sorcerer, of all living men!”

I stepped back, standing on my own, for I felt a sudden distance with Arlin. “How Powl would hate to be called that; sorcerer! Reason and restraint are everything to him.”

Arlin was quick to pick up my change. “So he is not a magician?”

I laughed. This time it hurt less. “Oh, yes, he is.” I waved the issue aside. “Arlin, child of Howdl—”

“Don’t call me that. Even in private.”

“Arlin, Powl made me what I am. I could ask for no better craftsman, either.” Now I found I could walk, if a dragging shuffle is a walk. I walked three paces left and then three paces right.

“You are very attached to him,” stated Arlin, smoothing his soiled finery, flicking one of many ashes off his sleeve.

“I love him wholeheartedly,” I answered, and at that moment it occurred to me I could not have admitted as much to Powl himself. Not easily.

Arlin’s long, lean face creased in amusement. “So you are a boy-lover after all, Zhurrie. Like me. That explains much of your behavior, from what I have seen.”

I am sure I colored, remembering one winter and a gold half royal. “I haven’t really discovered what I am… in that regard, sir. But I certainly never had love with my teacher in exactly that manner.” I did not speak convincingly, for it was a half truth at best.

“‘Sir’?” echoed Arlin, now grinning hugely.

“What would you have me call you, without endangering the life you want to lead?”

Instantly the grin faded. Arlin stepped over to where his gray mare was waiting, reins at her feet, obediently. “I meant to ask, Nazhuret. After all this, how many people know about my masquerade?” He didn’t look back at me.

As he leaned over one of the two worn cantle bags, I noted that
Arlin’s lean hips projected from his small clothes in a way that was not really masculine.
That line of him caught my eye and held it as I answered “Yourself, me, and anyone else you
have told.”

Now he did glance up. “You kept mum, though you say you thought I was dying? Dead?”

I shrugged, and the pain of it spread nausea through my insides. “I know you would not be able to continue as you are if all knew you were… a woman.” I whispered the last two words. “Not for all your spinning steel. And your dirt. And you must have lived through dangers before. I thought perhaps you might rather die.”

His eyes were startled, almost expressionless. “And you were not tempted to save me despite my own will in the matter?”

I saw she was preparing to mount again, and I answered that I hadn’t been sure that betraying her confidence would help find her.

I am sorry, my king; for some reason I have shifted gender. I mean Arlin, of course.

Since he still wore that guarded face, I added, “And, of course, it was your business, not mine.”

Arlin took his attention from checking the girth and now looked full at me, not warmly. I thought perhaps he felt that my humility rang false.

“Not your business. Well, of course, that’s so. Every man for himself.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, and as he seemed about to mount, I blurted out, “Please don’t leave me behind! I must keep up with the king!”

For a moment Arlin’s Velonyan face was not guarded, sardonic. For a moment it was distinctly a woman’s face, and full of compassion. “Zhurrie, you are killing yourself for the privilege of watching this man you love slain before you.”

“No.” I shook my head violently. In my emotion, the pain and wear of the body vanished. Almost. “I will find some way. Or I will fight beside him.”

“Against the king? Against Velonya?” Arlin leaned against her mare—his mare, I am sorry again, sir—and sighed. “If he is like you, together you will kill a regiment. But still you will die. Both of you.”

I fell onto my knees, half for supplication, half from terror of being abandoned. “Help me, Arlin. On your horse. I ask no more, but by all our childhoods, by God, by truth, by mercy, don’t leave me behind, I beg you!”

As Arlin yanked me to my feet, his lips were white. If I had been a bit lighter he would have tossed me onto the mare’s back. He got up before me and gave heels to the horse.

Between clenched teeth he said, “Actually, Nazhuret, I came pelting here for you so you might help me kill a dragon. And I think my project is far more reasonable than yours.”

I had no idea what he meant, and my outburst had used the last of my energy—and my curiosity. As the pretty mare trotted off, her hoof crashed against the tin plate of my breakfast—the one the dog ate—and bent it into scrap.

My arms were around Arlin’s waist, and as the horse floated her long trot, my hands rubbed up and down over my friend’s flat middle. More compromisingly, my face rubbed against Arlin’s—sparse bristle against smooth silk—and our lips were only inches away. The pronoun of my thoughts (and so of my narration) suffered a quick, violent reversal, and I knew all my talk of a pure-minded loyalty toward Arlin—gambler, knife fighter, and baron’s daughter—was so much horseshit. This was the only woman who had ever meant to me more than the strictly structured, limited interchange I had found with bored widows. This also was my closest peer and friend. Was her power over me merely caused by the fact she had not been a woman to me? Was I a boy-lover incontrovertibly? Born so, or corrupted by a violent past? Possibly so, but I could not be certain, for I had known so very few women, and in my station of life—fixed between the worlds of beggary, scholarship, and war—I was unlikely to prove important to many women in the future.

What matter what Arlin had been, or what I was now; she was necessary to me, and I wanted her with the longing and patient focus of a brute beast. A wolf in late winter. A buck in the fall. A goat at any season. I sat with my weight against her body, and the horse pressed us together, up and down, my thighs against hers up and down, my hands on her belly up and down. Our faces touching. In my madness I considered assaulting Arlin right on the horse’s back.

I could have done that. My education had been eclectic, and I could think of a hundred ways to restrain a person from this position without use of threats and with a hand free to deal with bothersome clothing. I spent quite some time, my head resting on Arlin’s shoulder, planning how I might overcome her natural resistance and gratify my lust without either of us having to get down from the horse.

Of course, afterward she would be free to throw a knife at me, but afterward I would most likely save her the trouble and kill myself. I had known too much of being raped. And whether I died for my efforts or was spared, Arlin certainly would carry me no farther toward the king and Powl.

And then, to top all, I was Arlin’s “ideal of the true
knight and gentleman.” I could only bow to that and behave myself.

“What are you laughing about?” asked Arlin, turning her head. Now her lips almost touched mine.

I improvised. “I wasn’t. I was groaning. My muscles hurt.”

Without preamble she said, “I was not pregnant, you know.”

I had not time to comprehend her meaning, let alone reply, when she added, “I know what was said. I have spent many evenings in taverns in and around Sordaling, engaged in salacious discussion of the history of Lady Charlan Bannering, daughter of Baron Howdl. I know every nuance of rumor.”

“Neither did your father kill you, I expect,” I said, with an attempt to match her dry, disinterested tones.

I felt her shrug. “No, but had the man really understood my nature, he’d have strangled me at birth. I merely ran away.” The horse trotted on a few paces before she spoke again. “I was almost fifteen. You, Zhurrie, were… partly… the reason.”

“I was!” I sat up straighter, and the shifting of weight slowed the mare to a walk, from which Arlin pressed her on again.

“Father always had ignored my existence, until some piece of household garbage hinted I had a lover in the city. His reaction was what one might expect. Luckily the informer did not also give a name.”

It took a few moments for me to understand that the lover so indicated was myself, at age twelve or thirteen. “It is too bad he didn’t find out my name, for I could have convinced him how innocent—”

She made a gesture toward looking over her shoulder but didn’t meet my eyes. “You would have had no opportunity. He would merely have sent rowdies to catch you in an alley and geld you. But I never told.”

“I am very grateful. Did he—beat you?”

Again her answer came slowly. “That was a long time ago, Nazhuret. I spent six months fuming and six months waiting for my imprisonment to relax, and when that failed, I spent a year and more stealing men’s clothes from visitors—anything that might come in handy. Anything that might fit. These were my first lessons in stealing. After I had escaped I studied theft in earnest.”

With another person, that phrase might have meant only that she began to steal regularly. With Arlin, I’m sure it meant she studied the matter.

“You did not think to get word to me? I could have been some help.”

This time she did turn all the way around. “Nazhuret, you could only have ruined yourself and your career.”

Her magnanimity astonished me, and the irony of the situation made me chuckle. I held my stinking peasant shirt out from my body. “Yet here I am, old comrade. Ruined anyway.” Arlin didn’t respond to my laughter, and I could not read the expression in her face. I said no more, for she had given me much to think on.

The afternoon air was warm, and my mistreated body loosened considerably. When we had stopped for luncheon and I went off to excrete, I noticed that my urine had gone the color of varnish. It burned and stank. I have seen this since, accompanying too hard use of the body, but at the time it seemed to reflect the state of my mind, suspended between lust and despair.

That afternoon I began to talk, and soon I was telling Arlin the whole history of my interaction with the king, including the surveying lens. Her attitude toward my experiment was more realistic than the king’s, and she called it a complicated way to validate the usual legal compromise.

Concerning my unwitting betrayal of my teacher, she was less cynical.
The “redhead,” she said, was thoroughly spoiled and would take all things except
obsequiousness as offense.

I remembered what impudence the king had taken from my mouth, and kept that mouth shut. All kings were spoiled, she added, not just the Velonyan one, and after a hundred percussive hoofbeats, she continued, “You cannot rely on the justice of kings, Nazhuret. Or that of nobles.”

I admitted that I had heard such sentiments before, and from a trustworthy source.

“In fact,” she said, as the mare broke into a spontaneous canter, “you cannot rely on the justice of men. There is a strong smell of the stoat in most of them.”

Still I don’t know whether she meant the sex or the race. I remembered my criminal desire of the morning and I wondered about the courtship behavior of the common stoat. I also slipped my chin off Arlin’s shoulder.

“Duke of Leoue, you said?” Once again Arlin glanced back at me. “It was he who gave you this… brief history? Then, Nazhuret, you can believe the opposite of what was said, for the man is your wholehearted enemy.”

I answered that I knew that and that the duke hadn’t pretended otherwise, but that a man might dislike Zhurrie of Sordaling and still not be a hopeless liar.

The horse clopped on, and Arlin was silent for some time. The air was filled with birdsong, and my mind drifted among illicit ideas. It seemed to me that she must know my mood, and the fact was that she had continued to allow me behind her on the horse, though by now time and sunshine had suppled my limbs and I could run again. Instead I rode locked in this embrace: a forced embrace, but a real one. Of the flesh.