Lens of the World (12 page)

“Of course not,” said Powl. “I would have been insupportable. You were just an ignorant boy.”

After that he took a long nap.

That summer, Powl taught me to hunt. By “hunting” I do not mean the sport of venery, but rather the job of putting meat in one’s mouth: snaring rabbits, for example. Venery is a grand passion among the great. Snaring rabbits is mostly against the law, but beggars will always do it, as it is preferable to starvation.

Powl had no particular feeling for the chase, but he was remarkably efficient at it. His skill with twine and with the small, light bow was hardly credible; it made me doubt for the first time that the man was mansion-born. It would have been simpler for me had I been brought up in the country, or had the man not first taught me for three years to observe the forest world harmlessly. The shock I received each time a rabbit screamed, lung-pierced, tended to depress my appetite.

In the warm weather we went on a vacation, or at least for me it seemed a vacation. We bivouacked for weeks unbroken, carrying only sticks, sacks, and dowhees, looking like peasants except that Powl wore neat doeskin breeches that kept out every sort of thorn. Our walking sticks were of imported tropical grasswood, which around Sordaling City was the latest rage among laborers in easy circumstances, its gold-and black-mottled weightlessness being much admired. Ours were slightly heavier than the usual because they had had the walls within the length hollowed out, and within them rested slim little bows made of foil-blade billets: Powl’s invention. These were lighter and more concealable than wood, and needed
 

only to be kept oiled. It amused him sardonically that it was considered a freeman’s right to carry a sword to pierce men, whereas for carrying a bow to pierce the beasts of the field a man could forfeit both hands.

One art Powl never mastered nor tried to master was that of cooking, so I slit, gutted, butchered, and roasted the victims of our morning’s or night’s effort while Powl lectured me on the subject of national politics.

On this subject I was as ignorant and as fascinated as is a well-raised maiden about copulation. I had felt myself more informed of events at school than I did now, years later, but after Powl opened up the court world to me, I saw I had always been a chick in the egg.

He had a story about each of the (then) four dukes: Garmen of Hight, who kept a small army of pretty boys at his side; Andermit, with his palace where all furniture was red and white; Shandaff, who was not enough of a peasant at heart to be an effective noble; and Leoue of the bee colors: yellow and black. The Duke of Leoue had been King Ethelbhel’s field marshal and now was that of his son. Leoue always was first in the reckoning.

My teacher spoke no direct criticism of most men, and very little praise of any sort, unless there is criticism inherent in reporting that a man favors small children, or has execrable taste in domestic design.

I knew already that Leoue had a reputation for using his men’s lives rather liberally, and I asked whether Powl considered him a good and just commander. In reply he told me, at unnecessary length, how Eydl, late Duke of Norwess, and he had despised one another so thoroughly that their anger had spiced the court for twenty years.

I realized I had once again asked the wrong sort of question, the sort that only leads to others.

About the late king, Powl spoke more directly and with more respect. King Ethelbhel had been a magnetic leader, with high ideals and a great concern for the position of his country amid the civilized nations. His love for Velonya was jealous, like a man’s love may be for a beautiful wife. Perhaps Powl implied that like that sort of love, Ethelbhel’s jealousy caused his inamorata difficulties, or perhaps I only imagined he implied that.

Ethelbhel had had more touch of the student than was usual among Velonya’s monarchs, and he had both endowed universities and sprinkled his own court with scholars. His favorite study, however, was Old Velonyan history, and he was firmly contemptuous of both science and foreign influence. Actually, he had drawn little distinction between the two.

King Ethelbhel would have liked to conquer for the sake of Velonyan grandeur, but as Felinka was savage and Rezhmia a source of contagion, he could not have loved what he had conquered, and Powl suggested that was why his campaigns usually had failed.

I let Powl nibble his grouse breast clean before I suggested that it was simpler to admit that the Rezhmian Red Whips and the Rezhmian leadership might have been better at the time than ours. I knew little enough about the Felink campaign, except it had lost us many ships and men, but I had studied the southern fiasco.

“Perhaps,” said my teacher, wiping his lips on the napkin he carried, a magical napkin that never seemed to get soiled, however often used, “though you expose your ignorance in speaking of the Red Whips as being in any sense obedient to
 

Rezhmia. But still I think the personal analysis is meaningful. In the new king, Rudof, we have in a way the blossoming of Ethelbhel’s intellectual striving.” He folded the napkin, although he would use it again in only ten seconds.

“Velonya has never had a ruler as broadly educated as this young man. He can read fair Allec, and at court he keeps (so I have heard) a Rezhmian translator. He acted very cleverly in the matter of closing the sea war with Felink, though a lesser man might have dug in his heels out of wounded pride. Rudof does not curl up like a bug dislodged when his ideas are challenged.”

This was slippery: implicit criticism of the old king in the form of faint praise of the new. I grinned behind my roasted parsnips, more certain than ever that Powl had cut his teeth on state documents. “What a fine monarch, Powl,” I said, straight-faced. “You yourself might have had charge of his education!”

Powl’s gray eyes, flat as a fish’s, looked at me. “Yes, Nazhuret, you have discovered me. Every afternoon when I leave you, I hotfoot it west to the city of Vesinglon and review with the king his multiplication tables. It is the reward of my life.”

As I had predicted, he now unfolded his napkin and used it again. “And I do not mean to paint you too rosy a picture of the new king. Like his father, he is a man with a temper, and being the only son, he has been terribly spoiled. Cross his will at your peril.”

I denied any intention of crossing the will of the King of Velonya, and I took a second helping of boiled vegetables.

The new king, I now learned, did not get along with his wife, Chelemut of Low Canton. Between them it was not merely the lack of sympathy common to youngsters who were wed sight unseen. They really could not get along together, according to Powl, and had not had a moment’s communal peace since their wedding six years before. Powl insisted that the situation was beyond remedy, for one could not mix the swarthy pride of Merecanton with Velonya’s redheaded temperament. He chewed his dinner thoughtfully and gazed at the fire, as though he knew a lot about Low Canton. Or about temperament.

But now there was a son and heir, a crawling mite named Eylvie after his grandfather, and Rudof’s chain might be loosed.

I mentioned my old black letter, Baron Howdl, hoping for the truth
finally about the disappearance of his daughter, or at least for some nasty gossip to validate my
dislike of the man, but Powl only sighed and tossed into my plate all the bones for picking and the
roots he had found not worth his while. (This was our habit, at my instigation. I hated to see food
wasted when I was hungry. I was always hungry.) “No, Nazhuret, I have not bothered myself with
barons,” he said.

More than once, on that summer holiday, Powl reminded me that our ignorant insularity regarding the Rezhmian people was more than equaled by their passionate dislike of us, on no better grounds. And about the Felink he said that it was unlikely any treaty between our peoples would be a lasting success, because we had never tried to understand the way they thought, nor had they tried to understand what six months of snow do to a people. He walked on, laughing at the thought. Powl had a rich laugh, slightly edged in effect. “If you thought that Zaquash was an odd way of speaking, lad, you ought to investigate the Felink tongue.”

As on this trip we had drifted back to our birth language, I suggested that we do that, but Powl only shook his head. “I haven’t the skill for it,” he said, but I knew he was lying, and under the late summer sun I felt cold all through.

When we returned to the observatory, Powl was bronzed and I had stripes of red and brown all over my face. (It is my curse to spend all summer sunburned and all winter snow-burned, my king, thus adding an unusually garish coloring to my unusual appearance.) I spent all of one day on a thorough clothes-washing and then moped through a day of heavy rain, perfecting my calligraphy.

Next day was cool and breezy, with a very bright smell in the air. Powl came up the hill rather late and set me one of my tasks of contemplation.

This time I was to understand how grief comes to the freeman as well as to the slave. I nodded, and politely I went out into the oak copse, which was not as green as it had been, and I sat with my back against a tree, though I could hear everything Powl was doing in the observatory, and when he left, my ears followed him down the hill.
 

After he was gone, I came in and was not surprised to find the tables of the observatory bare, except for my winter shirts and trousers; my walking stick; my out-of-fashion gentry clothes; my dowhee; and the sword I broke three years before, now rebladed.

There was a letter:

My dear Nazhuret,

Please lock the place and leave the keys on the root where you have so often sat outside. I will fetch them before they have a chance to rust away, but I will not be back here soon. Live carefully, my son. You have been the best thing in my life.

Powl

Obedient to the last, I left the key on the oak root. I also left him my bag of marbles, for it was all the gift I could make. As I started away, now red-nosed as well as burned red, I remembered that there was a half regal buried under that same oak root and that Powl had left me no money. I dug it out of the soaked earth and then, remembering my teacher more clearly, I placed it on the bag of marbles.

After I wrote those previous words, sir, I crawled out the window and
ran away. I don’t know why it is that when one (read “I”) dredges up some old and
private loss it is exactly those persons he feels closest to whose presence he cannot bear. After
scratching down the substance of Powl’s dismissal of me—sweetly worded but still a
dismissal—I left a message of five words on a scrap of paper and took myself to a
stranger’s grainfield under a high, gray, dribbling sky, where I gathered in the amaranth crop
as though my future depended on it. The poor tiller must have thought I was desperate for
coppers.

When I came home again I had determined to write no more in this history. I had good excuses: I was occupied, the story was well finished where I had left it, my king already had heard the rest anyway, it became unacceptably ambiguous from this point…

A hundred good excuses.

Today came the first snow, and my spell of temperament has cooled with it. I am ready to continue.

Never before the day I left the observatory had I been free of command: not at school and not with Powl. But in the last six months of my training, control had so softly drifted from my teacher to myself that I suffered now no uncertainty, no panic, no decay into playing marbles and talking to myself. I slept in the woods and continued to head south, the direction in which I had been going on a day’s promenade three years before.

I was alone, though—as alone and untouchable as a bubble in glass—and I was unhappy. To say true, I grieved. I remember that wet maple autumn as particularly glorious: bright conflagration, with the gold leaves and the leaves of that bluish red that is the color glass turns when gold is added to it. The time was as quiet as glass, too—as though I had put a glass cup over each ear and heard only the noise of my own blood.

For two days I did not hunt—finding it a harder thing to release the bowstring for my own belly alone than I did when I was feeding my teacher as well—but in our northern woods there is nothing in the autumn but meat and perhaps cattails, if one can find them, so in the end I was forced to hear a rabbit scream for me alone.

It rained a very chilly rain and I cut pine boughs and heaped them in order like shingles, as Powl had taught me. I got wet anyway. The little vine maples under the trees made red stripes, their layers as cleanly horizontal as so many small horizons, and among them wandered fogs like little living things. Like slow birds, perhaps. Many times in those first days I found myself with legs tucked in and hands hid in my woolen shirt, lost in the black wolf of Gelley. It was not by my will that I sat like that, taut and empty, any more than a sick man babbles by will or an old man talks to himself. My self-collection began to stretch a shadow over me, and I wondered if I should not fight it, as Powl had had me fight most of my natural inclinations.

He was not there to ask.

I skirted a number of villages as a wild beast might have done, though the smell of bread in the air drove me mad. I was not finished with grieving, not finished with staring at nothing, and I had nothing to say to any human being.

On the third day the rain and mist let up. I was walking through very low country, where the road was crossed by waterways as often as by deerpaths. The mud envied me my clogs and strove mightily to remove them with my every step.