Lens of the World (37 page)

“That is Arlin. A good friend of mine from Sordaling,” I said.

“I am glad to have your acquaintance, madam,” Powl said, and bowed gracefully.

Arlin started and snorted and croaked a laugh, “You’re right, Zhurrie. He is a magician.”

“I never told her to call you that!” I blurted to Powl, but he was down on one knee and into the remains of the beast again.

Arlin came close, the mare’s head bending with hers. “The villagers believed it a dragon. Zhu—Nazhuret killed it for them last night. He didn’t want to waste the time from coming here, but I kidnapped him and he did it.”

“An appropriate action,” muttered Powl, who was regarding the foot with delight.

I was made furious by the ease with which Powl had been able to distract her from the need of the moment. Her distraction distracted me. “It’s your pig as much as mine, fellow. I remember prying your rapier out of its snout.” Powl regarded none of this bickering, and I took advantage of his absorption to look around me.

The garden was simple, largely lawn and roses, and scattered here and there were wooden implements, wheels, and platforms that might be children’s toys and might be the instruments of Powl’s own playtimes. “In the past winter I have seen some things,” I found myself saying, “that might change your ideas of what is real. What is possible.”

Powl chuckled, weighing a tush in his hand. “I change those ideas daily, Nazhuret. Probably I don’t believe at all what I did when we parted company.”

My gaze rested on a particular wood and wheeled contraption that was clearly a child’s wagon. It had dried flower heads scattered within it. It made me catch my breath.

Powl noted, without lifting his head, “No, lad. That belongs to the housekeeper’s brat. I have no hidden family. And we are alone here today. Not even servants,” he said, and as he spoke I heard hooves on the road, followed by the blare of a comet.

I drew my dowhee and stepped forward off the stones.

“Put that thing away, Nazhuret, or I’ll send you off the place,” Powl said in his most headmasterly tones. I merely shook my head and caused him to sigh.

“Think of your friend. Is she to perish because you cannot control your temper?”

I looked at Arlin, who had been turning her head from Powl to myself and back again. Immediately she stalked away, the reins in her hand. “Don’t think to use me, Daraln,” she said, and her arrogance more than matched his. “I’m no part of this and in no danger.”

Powl sighed again, and with audible restraint he said, “Nazhuret, I have an idea of what is to happen here, and it doesn’t include your attacking the King of Velonya with a gardening tool. You must trust me, because I am trying to save my life, among other things.”

I dropped my arm, glared, tried to speak, and only began to cry. Weeping out of fear: I had never heard of such a thing before. I lifted brimming eyes to see that Powl was not looking at me, nor at anything. He was, in fact, standing upright and open-eyed in the belly of the wolf. I put the dowhee on the ground and sat beside it.

Soon I could feel the beat of hooves through the sun-warmed earth, and immediately after that came a pattern of black and white stripes flashing vertically through the scrolls of the gate: legs of horses milling. That pattern resolved into a frieze of sky blue and white, and far away the gate began to open.

There were other vertical stripes at the edge of my vision.

Arlin stood with legs braced beside me, somewhat to the front.

“You said you were not part of this,” I reminded her without looking up. “I’m not a tool to be used against you, Nazhuret,” she said calmly, bitterly. “Not even by a magician.”

“Then you prove a better friend than I ever did,” I answered in much the same tones.

The first guardsmen stepped through the gate, walking in the four-abreast formation that meant they were encircling the king, and as I saw them I stood up, and without will in the matter I found myself also in the belly of the black wolf and very calm.

Arlin’s hand was at her sword hilt, and a lark was singing, very sweetly, high up. “Will you be guided by me, old friend?” I asked, and she answered doubtingly, “In this I will.”

“Then offer the king no violence. Powl does have a plan.”

Arlin gave a gasp as though hope had hit her, unexpected and unwelcome. I saw a scattering of black and yellows among the king’s guard and knew that Leoue was with the king.

Perhaps twenty men entered Daraln, none on horseback. As they strode closer I saw the head of the king, flaming against the green hedge, and then the black smudge that was the duke. Leoue was dressed civilly, but the king had donned the blue and white of a cavalry captain: one of those uniforms he was privileged to, and very simple. It came to me then that a captain’s uniform included a saber, whereas that of a commander, or any court official, would be completed with a rapier. It was better to be a cavalry captain if you wanted to cut someone’s head off.

Seeing King Rudof approach so dressed, it seemed to me he had wrapped himself up in his own flag to do murder.

As they came within sixty feet I could see the king’s face, and it was a strange color, dark and cloudy—more gray than red. The duke raised his hand and I saw his dark eyes intent on me. He called one word and pointed, and the half dozen black and yellow bees in the garden came buzzing toward me, drawing their swords. “No,” I said to Arlin, for I had heard the slick of her rapier against leather.

Out of the comer of my eye I saw very clearly the green calyx snap back from a pink rose blossom.

The soldiers had not closed half the distance between us when the king bellowed the words, “Desist, you rioting hounds!” and in that short phrase was rage uncontrolled. The men glanced back over their shoulders, not willingly, and they shuffled still, watching the face of their own lord, not that of the king.

Arlin whined in her throat, like a frightened hound herself.

For a moment the king turned his face to and his anger on the duke, who replied (for all the world to hear), “Sire. Sir. I have told you what—who—that ruffian is!”

“You have shared your ideas with me, yes. And I have commanded you to let him be. Now it will be as I first said. I want all the guards out of here.”

The guards’ captain did not question. In a moment all the men in blue and white were not walking but running back for the gate. Less promptly, the bumblebees followed.

The captain had taken his king’s instructions literally. The guards left but he remained, a shadow of blue behind blue.

King Rudof watched them go and squinted to see the gate close. Then he continued walking toward Powl.

The Duke of Leoue showed his teeth and clenched his fingers in his curling, grizzled beard. He shook his head in frustration, but then that expression faded. He gazed down the length of the drive and then at the entryway, glinting with little panes of glass, and ran to catch up with his king.

When they were a few yards away Powl stepped down off the stones and bowed to the king. It was not an impertinent bow, but neither was it the sort by which a man donates his head to the ax. King Rudof stood in front of Powl, half a head taller, with his hand on the hilt of his saber and then with his saber in his hand.

“I can’t… I can’t…” Arlin said
this much and then rushed from my side. I knew the unspoken word was “watch.”

Powl’s shoes shone like dew among the grass.

He looked into the king’s eyes and was very poised, very alert, whether to dodge or to die I had no idea. He said nothing, and he did not move.

King Rudof was equally intent, but across his face moved storms of changing expression. He had claimed to be able to read me, but I could not return that skill confidently. All I could perceive, as his saber went up and slowly up for a sideways slash, was that the king had no fears this victim would offer violence in return. And yet the king’s face was slick with fear. The saber caught the sunlight and seemed to be shuddering in place.

The falling of this terrible balance I knew only when Powl’s face went from cold calm to deep concern, and yet I knew I was seeing the king’s expression reflected in Powl’s subtle mirror. Powl Inpres leaned toward the king and lifted his right hand gently as the saber fell out of the king’s hand, to disappear in the grass.

“Daraln!” cried King Rudof. “How could you do it? How could you reject me so, after all the years? There was no one left of my youth but you. The grief of it!” And in a moment he was sobbing in Powl’s arms, sobbing and slumped, bent far over, like a tall child with a short nanny.

With the inevitable human reflex, Powl was slapping his hand against the young king’s back, between the shoulder blades, and I was reminded how that hand, using only a slap, had knocked a brigand unconscious—and of how an unknown hand had pounded me in that same silly fashion when I was sick and miserable, though not so desolate as King Rudof was now.

I watched with complete absorption, untouched as yet by any feeling of relief or gladness, and I noticed that the king’s face was turned toward the flagstones of the entryway and the bloody pile on it (with the impossible foot sticking up, and the horn). He stiffened under Fowl’s rhythm, and then, as though neither threat nor tears had happened, he asked, “What on earth is that?”

Powl began to release him, and he turned his bland face to follow the king’s glance. “A rat my cat left at the door just now. It will prove interesting, don’t you think?”

Behind them, where I could not see, I heard the duke cursing in despair.

Powl took King Rudof’s shoulders in his hands and stood him entirely on his feet again. “I had to deny you, Rudof. For Velonya I had to. Should I be playing experiments on the mind that governs the nation? Do you have time to waste cataloging obscure mammals, like this fellow does? Can you afford to dress in rags?”

Wiping his eyes, King Rudof laughed once. “You misspoke. The king does not govern the nation. You taught me that yourself.”

Powl shrugged. “He does if he is not careful. You, I know, will be a good king, Rudof.” Powl gestured with an open hand toward me. “My madman, here, would not be. Not in any world like this one.”

The king turned his grieving eyes on me and I started in place, for I had forgotten my own existence. He cleared his throat. “You love your madman, Daraln. You gave him the best and highest and only gave the rest to me.”

I did understand King Rudof, and I would have given him my rags, my dowhee, and all my art to assuage the pain I had caused him.

“‘Best and highest’ are traps, sir,” said Powl, with a shade of his usual manner, which softened again as he added, “I love you, Rudof. I have since you were born.”

“My king!” It was Leoue, shouldering his way past the captain of guards to glare with face twisted from Powl to myself and back. “You have permitted him to bewitch you once again! It is his ‘best and highest’ skill, if you like those words.” He pointed not at Powl but at me.

“That creature is walking evidence of his treachery—issued by a traitor tool, out of a woman enemy to our very blood, and nurtured in treason and dishonorable arts by Daraln. He is named King of Hell with good reason!”

I could not understand this talk of blood and tools and nurturance. I found myself walking, bare-handed, from Powl’s side toward the duke.

“What he is telling you very poetically, Nazhuret,” my teacher called from behind me, “is that you are the child of Eydl, Duke of Norwess, and of his noble Rezhmian wife, Nahvah, and that your maternal uncle and name-father was Nazhuret, poet, scientist, and warrior; cousin to the Sanaur.”

In my mind came these things: the picture of a blond noble on a heavy
charger, in heavy armor, to which Powl had called my attention “for the quality of the
print”; the words “and my nurse wept openly, so perhaps it was more than romance at a
distance”; the tiny lady with a dress of clouds who might or might not have existed and whose
baby pissed on me.

These visions took no time.

It was Rudof who next spoke. “So all that is true, Powl? About the boy? I heard it from Leoue, but he is a dog with one bone on the subject of mixed blood.”

Powl sighed, and I stared at him. “He is not a boy, sir. He is your age exactly. I have known him for who he is almost four years now. Since he… came into the observatory on the hill one day. I knew what secret, southern name they had given the child who vanished, and when I saw Nazhuret, there was that in his face, in the flavor of his thought, in his incurable innocent bluntness, that brought my old friend to me in the flesh.”

“You did call me,” I said to Powl. Out of all that wild tale, that was all I could pick out for meaning. That I, too, Powl had known from birth. Perhaps cared for. “I didn’t come to you by accident.” He opened his mouth, but said nothing for a long while. At last he smiled and shook his head, but not as for a negation.

Again to Powl only, I said, “I knew most of that: not about the duke and the poet, but the essential part. That I was half and half. In fact, it’s rarely out of my mind.”

I was standing an arm’s length from King Rudof, my back to him, and once again I was behaving as though the king were nobody. His lean, ruddy hand came to rest on my shoulder, and the duke stepped over the grass. “No, sir. Don’t touch him. Remember that your father had his father slain!”