Authors: R. A. MacAvoy
parents could not stand the sight of me and so stored me away at Sordaling until the time I might grow into (or perhaps out of) my features. It was as useful a daydream as that common one of being switched in the cradle.
When visitors of some grandeur toured the school, I watched carefully to see whether they were looking at me out of the corner of their eye. Often they were, of course. It was hard not to look at something so exceptional.
Later, when my unremembered uncle stopped paying, this fantasy of birth became harder to maintain.
By all rights the bursar should have sent me home when I was ten and the tuition did not appear, but the death of the headmaster, combined with my own ignorance, meant they had no idea where to send me. Six years had passed since my arrival at school, and my tenure was longer than that of many young masters, trainers, and deans. All were very used to my presence, and I had drifted into the role of school orderly before anyone could decide how to show me the door.
The next year the money resumed, along with a lump of delinquent tuition, so I was paid for a whole year’s worth of cleaning and carrying and sitting up with young fellows whose crying awoke the dorms.
With this money I began to swagger a bit myself, and visited both the bakeries of King Gutuf’s Street and the entertainments of Fountain Park. I was very fond of the swanboat ride down the slanting canal shunt, which has in the past few years (I find) been dismantled and replaced with a mill. I was also very fond of Charlan, daughter of Baron Howdl, whose honors surround Sordaling and who owns a number of the commercial buildings as well. Charlan did not act like a baron’s daughter. She scarcely acted like a girl at all, but I rode the swanboats with her and tossed old bread to the real birds.
For a fee of a tuppence I taught little town-boys how to spring over the old broadsword and the bonfire (which activity is considered very dashing and auspicious among their set), and I taught basic rapier work to Charlan free.
Unlike many students, I did not fight with the townies. I was too jaded with sparring in the halls to do it for sport, and the satisfaction of flattening ten burghers’ sons would not have been worth the inconvenience of a single split lip.
But the money I had been given ran out, and Lady Charlan was deemed too old at twelve to be a boy-daughter anymore and was locked away. I moped around the river for a few weeks until Howdl’s old nurse took pity and told me how things were. I spent another week dreaming mad escapes in which I would spring the girl from her father and her fate and we would take to the woods together and live—I don’t know how. As brigands, I suppose. Luckily I did not have much free time for mad dreaming and so never attempted to carry out the scheme.
I returned to the more sedate life of the school and when, two years later, the money stopped again, there was no talk of sending me away. I was recognized as a son of Sordaling School itself: part master, part servant, part imp.
Remember the school with me, sir, as the bricks glow in evening sunlight, or the snow of the drill field lies etched with diagrams of war. The buildings are solid and they loom with a certain presence. The quadrangles are restful, arbored, and well planted, regularly mowed by junior boys and sheep.
All my duty at school was reasonable and regular, though not exciting, and the food was good. I’m sure I would have grown tall on the meals dished into our tin plates if I had that growth within me. Most of the masters were very companionable, at least to me. I learned two languages; a simplistic geography; a minimal art of courtesy (which I have now lost again, my king is well aware); skill with the broadsword, the rapier, and the spear; the cleaning and maintenance of the powder catapult and harquebus; practical horse ménage; the making of beds; the sanitation of latrines; wrestling and pinching and threatening other boys to good effect; and a hundred other martial skills, which I will never use. I also developed a manuscript hand that is better than I deserve and an accent in speech purely Old Vesting, owing nothing to the Zaqueshlon influence, which has sullied the pronunciation of most of the people of Velonya.
(Or should it be said that your Vestingish ancestors, sir, have imperfectly imposed their language upon a people largely Zaquash by birth? And does it matter which of these explanations is true, or both? The accent has served me well, and I digress again.)
In short, I had the education of the usual rural lord. I was no lord, however, and had only my acceptance long ago into Sordaling School to testify that my birth was more or less gentle. My destiny was the common one—to be remitted as knight-contract into the forces of whatever school donor came to the school to recruit and who fancied me.
I was eligible for such remission when I turned fifteen, but at that time I looked twelve, and as I felt a great reluctance to enter into the service of Baron Howdl, Sordaling’s most intimate neighbor and patron, I stood at attention with the younger boys and no master betrayed me.
Howdl was a handsome man—though he had not so good a face as his daughter—and he sat a fine figure on a horse, but he was a black and surly employer who refused to follow the government of Velonya into the modern age and who made himself tyrant to his dependents. Though his honors were all near Sordaling and therefore secure both from Rezhmian incursion and the coast raids of the Falinkas, he was always recruiting, because he could not hold on to his men. I disliked the thought of owing allegiance to such a man and feared he would someday find out how I had aided his daughter to misbehave.
Howdl was either fooled by my tactics of concealment or, as is more likely, found that my personal inadequacies overcame the good reports of my instructors. He did not look at me more than once.
The following summer a rumor came that he had killed his daughter in a fit of rage. Grief and fury nearly led me to challenge the man when I heard that, but he would merely have had me thrown into prison for my temerity, and I’d be digging the baron’s own fields in a checkered burlap coat with a chain around my leg. Besides, it was only a rumor. Another rumor had it that she was not dead, but had been spirited away to deliver a bastard baby. A third had it that he had killed her because of the bastard. I did not know which of these was more probable; it had been three years since I had seen her, and the years between thirteen and sixteen are very long. Whatever had happened to take Lady Charlan out of our sight, it made me very grateful to have escaped Howdl’s winnowing and more resolved against falling into any lord’s power at all.
After this event, Headmaster Greve, who was a kindly man and much more lenient than the headmaster who had originally admitted me, made me sure to know that I could not stay on as student past my twentieth birthday. Nor could I hope to change my role into that of skills master, because all masters at Sordaling School had proven themselves either in war service or state work (or were placed there as a cheap and honorable retirement by one of the noble donors, but the headmaster never admitted as much aloud). Nor would any of the deans or masters hire me on in any capacity of service, for the graduates of Sordaling School were not to be common servants, or at least not within sight of the present students. In short, I must be gone.
From the ages of sixteen to nineteen, I lived unhappily in the knowledge that I would have to take employment somewhere. I suffered anxiety that I would never be picked, and would leave the school trotting on shank’s mare, with sixpence and references, unemployable at my own trade and fated to become a drudge somewhere far from home. I had frequent bad dreams to this effect.
Each time the school was winnowed, however, I did my panicked best to be invisible.
The Earl of Docot Dom came with his ranks greatly reduced from his unwise incursion against the Red Whips in the South of the Zaquashlon territories, and he took three fourths of the eligible young men back with him, amid excitements and toasts and gold gratuities all around.
He did not take me.
Baron General Hydeis came the next spring, to take twenty good, reliable men-at-arms of no particular gentility, to be coastal sheriffs in the West. Though this position was all I could hope for, and though I was field-ranked third out of a school of two hundred, still I played the blinking fool in front of the man and was not chosen.
For this bit of clownishness, Rapiermaster Garot, my longtime patron and personal friend, knocked me backward over the bricks of the dormitory court. I deserved the blow, but at the next recruitment I made no better impression.
It was not fear of battle that drove me to behave so badly, though I have a strong dislike of battle. It was not dissatisfaction with the status of a knight-contract, for that estate carried with it many times the power and honor I had ever known and could lead to high advancement. Nor did I cherish dreams of personal liberty. I had never considered the possibility of such liberty.
My panic came from an utter inability to decide—to give myself over to any one person. I had been everyone’s for so long.
Perhaps I was too much a child, kept so by living among youngsters, and at the place where I had been living since the age of four. Perhaps it was that my own odd face had driven me foolish. Perhaps I was waiting for Powl. But that is all to say the same thing, for who but a fool and a child would have been of any use to Powl?
To encapsulate years as tightly as I have been doing here is by necessity to lie. To speak of a year’s events in any manner is its own sort of untruth, for a year has no more unity than the broken nib at the left corner of the table; the sound of thunder; and the flight of the bird outside the window, which has just now stolen my eye from the paper. It is a thrasher, I think. (They are all over here in early autumn.) The nib is stained a thin black, which has dribbled onto the porous wood of the tabletop. The thunder is only in my memory. What is the set, pattern, or entirety of these three things that I should speak of them together, or of the events of my early life, for that matter? Perhaps you know, sir, for you have eyes to see me, and mine exist only to look outward from myself.
I awoke before dawn for the whole week before Baron Howdl’s next winnowing. It had been explained already that my name had been brought up before his sergeant-steward, and that gentleman was interested in a contract. Allegiance and obedience for five years, renewable at the discretion of the noble or his representative. Three years was the standard first graduate’s contract, but at nineteen I was already as old as many who were entering their second contract.
I have a memory of the stripe of violet that opened the sky that day, broken by the bulk of the square clock tower and the peak of the headmaster’s house, as I saw it from the dormitory window. This memory may well be overpainted by visions come before or since. It may be totally false, for the mind creates with as much talent as the eyes perceive, but still—I have it. (The dewy, young-girl colors of dawn make an ugly picture against the mustard-yellow squareness of Sordaling School, even in the frame of recollection.)
On the day before Howdl’s descent upon my life I awoke from a very strong dream, which I remember with more assurance than I do the skyline. I was walking in a woods, which was odd enough for one of my background, and had managed to lose the path entirely. It was midday, and I found myself climbing a round, bare-topped hill. Near the top of it was a hole—a cave entrance—and out of this entrance a cool wind was blowing.
I knew I had to go into this cave. I also knew I would be killed within. I entered darkness, very cold.
Once I had kicked myself awake, I felt no need to delve for the meaning of the dream. It echoed my waking feelings perfectly. I was left with a chill of dread that the late-summer morning could not overcome.
I hung from the second-story window, swung sideways onto the sharp-peaked little snow roof of the main entrance, and slid down to stand before the locked dormitory door.
This was my method for leaving my quarters too early or too late. (It was more difficult to return.) Though my body now is in most ways a more serviceable tool than the frame of that Nazhuret, still I think if I tried such a stunt immediately after
springing out of bed in the morning, they would have to carry me back into it. The difference between nineteen years and forty.
I went barefoot to the practice field: six enclosed acres of coarse grass, chewed earth, and horse droppings, where a few unkempt sheep wandered, badly shorn and painted in unsheeplike colors each year by teams of students. Three of them were indigo-stained, my own victims, for indigo was the team color of my dormitory and I had a pronounced talent for sheep-catching. The more sheep colored after one’s team color, the greater the prestige of the dormitory.
This summer had been a good one. We had three indigo sheep for North House and I still bore as much of the pigment as any woolly creature. I drifted over the field that morning in such early light I could not tell Indigo-North from Madder-East, and I said good-bye to the scene of a life’s play, like a wistful ghost in theater.
I touched the armory and the better-kept drill field in the same manner, but by the time I reached the refectory, I was little ghostlike enough to strike a conversation with the night scullery and cadge a piece of cheese. He, like everyone in the school except the self-involved freshers, knew that Zhurrie the Goblin’s future had been disposed of, and so sympathetic he was, he probably would have given me a whole beef joint on request.