Authors: R. A. MacAvoy
I wondered if our eccentric, metaphysical undertaking (he had taught
me the word “metaphysical,” along with many others equally impressive) had lost savor
for him and he was now using me for the sake of his own regular workouts only. I wondered, as I went
through my day’s schedule of stove, study, combat, delicate optical equipment,
brick-beholding, stove again, dinner, wood-gathering, and laundry, whether I still was the Nazhuret
returned from the dead or an unpaid servant of less than average mentality.
I felt a fool, and I felt totally in the power of Powl.
Who was he? I had always wondered what history was hidden behind the simple syllable, that very common name. Though in the beginning I had considered him too polite (and too tastefully dressed) to be of higher class than gentry, in this year his natural arrogance had time to shine through the overlay, and I was firmly convinced my teacher was of noble or royal birth. His scorn of anything smacking of birth privilege only gave evidence toward this, for no one can be as contemptuous of the aristocracy as an aristocrat.
Perhaps I thought this way merely to maintain my own self-respect. If I were to be as thoroughly bested by anyone as I was daily bested by Powl, let him be an opponent of the very highest rank. Let him be a baron, a viscount, an earl…
(At this time I had no politics and fair manners. I still have no acceptable politics, but my king knows I have no manners either and can be equally abrupt to the gold cloak and the woolly shirt. Now I don’t care who knocks me down.)
Either Powl had an income enough to support his high dress and moderate appetite as well as my enormous appetite and rough weave, or we were supporting us both on the lenses I made. I had no experience with the standard of lens grinding in the city, but I suspected my wares wouldn’t run to tailored shoulders with gold piping, or three-inch lacquered heels.
A burgher might easily have supported me as I was, but what burgher would show so little interest in his business as to spend half his waking hours as Powl did? And how would a Sordaling burgher come to be far and away the best man in hand-to-hand combat I had ever encountered, or the smoothest saber fencer, deadly with the Felink tribesman’s dowhee (which resembles a hedge trimmer remarkably), and a rapacious scholar besides?
And lastly, what man of any rank could spend so long in communion with another as Powl did with me—to give so much in instruction and so little of himself?
I would go, in the afternoons, along the paths of the woods toward where people lived. The observatory was not in a complete wilderness, certainly; it was only a few hours’ walk from the city. There were two households and one cemetery in easy reach. I would prowl the frozen forest mulch in rag-wrapped feet or slog amid the thaw in my clogs until I found myself close enough to a human residence to spy easily, and then I would squat down and peer like an owl.
One place belonged to a turner, and when the weather was passable he would haul his lathe outside and cut his chair legs in the sunshine. I found this activity very entertaining, much like lens grinding and much different. He tied and piled his product under the steep eaves of the house, like cordwood, and once a week a van of one heavy horse came along the road and hauled it all away.
The turner made only one style of leg. I know, for in dry times under the full moon I stole in and examined it closely. It was a leg of three large swellings and three small ones, with a knob for the foot and a square area in the middle for the supporting dowels.
The turner lived alone. He moved oddly on his own legs, like a man in pain.
The other household was larger and contained a market gardener and his family. There was much more happening here: boys and girls chopping sticks, women hanging linen and wool on the line, the gardener himself bobbing in his fields like a
log in fast water. Stiff. All of them stiff. But there was a dog at the house as well, a hairy dog of the loud and incorruptible kind, and so my visits were more covert.
One wet afternoon I met the wife in the woods. She was leaning against the bole of a tree, with a sack and a handful of acorns. Her cheeks were weather-red and her headscarf was tied under her chin, giving an impression of roundness to her face. From my direction she was hidden by the tree, so we came upon one another without warning.
The acorns went up in the air and she cried out. “Who are you? How did you get here?” she asked me. I, equally startled, sprang back like a cat with its tail afire. I stuttered an apology, which she could not understand, as it was in a foreign language, tried again and came out with Allec, and then I ran and she ran, in opposite directions. Halfway back to the observatory, it came to me that they might put the dog on my track, so I diverted like a fox, soaking my feet in a stream much deeper than my clogs.
I knew then that I had lost my credentials as a human.
The cemetery was safer, even the small chapel being abandoned at this time of year, and it had enough of the flavor of settlement that I felt a satisfaction in my visits, and the dead didn’t care what I said, or in what language.
Through an extended study of the headstones and markers, I realized the extent of the influenza epidemic that had touched both Powl and myself in the previous winter. There were dozens of graves bearing death dates from the first month of this year, most of them of people under twenty or over fifty years of age.
I imagine many of these victims had to wait for spring to be planted, for there can only be a certain number of graves predug before the frost, and no one expects an epidemic. This year the sexton had learned his lesson, and there were rows of empty holes and no one dying.
I took to doing my day’s sitting in the chapel, finishing with a short intercession for the dead (my hosts, as it were) to God the Father, God the Mother, and the God Who Is in Us All, but my notion of deity had changed so in the past year that I think this was more a social than a religious exercise. I also meditated in the empty graves, which seemed much more meaningful (like the empty belly of the wolf). The chill I received in my knees from this particular activity still bothers me in some weathers.
Powl found me there once, sitting in an open grave. What could he say? He had never forbidden me to sit in graves. He led me home, for the weather had unexpectedly cleared and he wanted spend the night correcting Adlar’s charts for the November sky.
Winter is the time when people go mad, drink themselves to death, or kill other people. This winter was the time I tried to seduce Powl.
I had had no experience with women, except that wary and childish summer with Lady Charlan so many years ago, and I did not connect such tentative feelings with the physical brutality I had suffered even earlier in my childhood, at the hands of the schoolmasters. My obsession with Powl had some of the feelings of passive disgrace I remembered from my days of being boy-raped, combined with a large share of the entrancement of my puppy love. I analyzed my feelings only when I could not avoid doing so—perhaps three or four times a day. They were, however, very compelling.
From this vantage point, I think the best explanation is that I did not have enough to live on. Though I had conversation and human touch in abundance for six hours each day, that was not enough for the body and brain of twenty years. Perhaps no amount is enough for twenty years. I was in superb health, save the one bout of influenza, and I had nothing to do with eighteen hours of the day but expect the arrival of Powl for the other six.
(Or perhaps all this argument is merely to excuse a part of myself with which I am not now very comfortable. I will try, at least, to be honest.)
I never sat down and admitted to myself that I wanted to encourage Powl to have sexual intercourse with me, no more than any farm girl might when trying to catch the eye of the landlord’s son. But my actions were on purpose, as hers are.
I was not aggressive, but instead more docile, tending to go limp in practice, letting his weight rest upon me, trying to fulfill his commands before they were asked. I ceased looking at him directly. I froze under his touch.
Alone, the awfulness of what I was doing (considering my past experience with buggery) would overwhelm me, but the awfulness was part of the attraction. Horror wipes away boredom very effectively.
Powl pretended to be oblivious to all these games for about a week, and then one morning, on the icy turf, when I pulled such a slack, clinging stunt, he threw me away from him, quite forcefully. He went into the observatory and came back with his boiled-wool coat, holding out a gold half regal.
“Here,” he said, dropping it into my hand. “Go visit a whorehouse. Make sure she’s healthy. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
I stared at the coin for an hour, and then I buried it under an oak tree. That simply was my spell of randiness broken.
It cannot have been too long after this that the soldier came to the observatory, and my shyness was overcome by necessity.
He was not by any means the first visitor since my residence. Locals passed by the squat building every few weeks, and once a man tethered three goats in the field, without any regard for the rights of the property owner. Boys had come climbing once or twice, and there was a day when I stood below the roof slot by the eyepiece of the telescope, ready to catch young mischief as he fell and either save his life or kill him, depending on whether he had damaged the works, so much had I identified myself with Powl and his interests. But the boy never made it higher than the clerestories, which were too narrow to permit the passage of a good-sized body. I never exchanged a word with the passersby. I imagine they were ignorant of my existence.
This fellow was different. He came out of the trees, followed a shadow to the brick wall, and circumambulated the observatory, hunched over and pausing at times to listen.
I had been sitting on the root of a tree at the time, doing my daily self-collection, and so I heard him come from a distance away, and I watched him.
I called him a soldier before, but he was not a man-at-arms as I was, or was to have been. He was instead (I know in retrospect) that unfortunate thing called a campaign recruit, enlisted out of some furrow or gutter for the duration of the Felink excursion and cashiered afterward. By this method many wolves are made out of harmless vagabonds, and this one still wore his russet army jacket, over the white canvas breeches of a kitchen man. He had one woolen stocking but two shoes. He had some excuse for a sword. Like the turner and the gardener, he moved as though it hurt.
Finishing his circuit, he came to the oak door and peered within. Quiet to his eye and quiet to his ear. He pushed the door, which was, of course, unlocked, and went in. I followed him, not very closely, leaving my high clogs at the door. I found him at the grinding bench, dropping all the lenses and blanks into a sack.
I was far less afraid than I had been in my meeting with the farm wife. I paused to adjust my languages and said, “You will scratch them like that, and they will be worthless.”
His sword was a saber, and he drew it out of its cheap board scabbard with both hands, cocked it back over one shoulder, and swung to split me in half at the neck.
I suspected the man was sick, for his movements were lackluster though his face was a grin of hostility. I ducked under the blow, watching him, and as the weapon continued under its own impetus, wrapping his arms to the right, I simply pinned them there and rapped him smartly over the nose.
I picked up the sword as he dropped it.
Fury became fear in his face and he scrabbled for the door, leaving the sack behind. I thought to let him go, but on impulse tried a casual foot trip, which took him down on the flagstones. Holding to his regulation collar and the slack of his liveried breeches, I slid the man over the floor on his knees and locked him in the room with the experimental earth closet, to wait for Powl’s judgment. If he dug his way out, he would save me much labor.
He did not attempt to dig, but bawled and cursed me all night long.
Before producing him for my teacher the next morning, I warned Powl that the man was likely sick and possibly contagious. Powl rounded his wide-apart eyes and went to see for himself. He crawled up the wall (much more proficiently than any invading boy) and peered through the tiny window.
“He doesn’t look sick to me,” Powl said, coming back to earth. “But he has pissed in the corner. What an absurdity, with the facility in the middle of the floor as it is. “I’m something of an amateur of medicine, Nazhuret. Let us look at your sick soldier.” So bright and interested did Powl look that I swelled with pride at having for once been able to give him something he did not already have; an experimental subject.
Now that I examine the matter, I realize he had even that.
I unlocked the door and was forced to knock the man down again as he broke past me for the opening. I brought him forward in a simple hammerlock, and Powl, without a word, examined his ears, gums, and eyelids.
“Why did you think he is sick?” Powl asked me in our current language, as pleasantly as any doctor called by a father to his child’s bedside.
“He staggers, of course. He has no balance; he can scarcely stand without help, and then he is confused.”
Powl stepped back, appraisingly. “Let him go,” he said.