Lens of the World (14 page)

Already I was less bothered by the nearness of humanity and by its odors. The cider, atop the mass of lamb, soup, marrows, and pastry, made me very warm, and the company’s laughter had softened my mood further. Without becoming talkative, I had come to be at ease and to wonder at this strange unity that was a family household.

To most men I suppose there is nothing to wonder at:

People live in households, in family. But I had lived first in some sort of castle, then in a school, and lastly in an observatory, and to me this was exotic. Attractive. The red cushions, the little wooden man, the beeswax shining by firelight. Even with Mother glaring in the corner.

Until that glance, without squinting, that no one in the room could see except myself.

In my hand my glass slipped, but I did not drop it. I had to pretend to my host that I had not heard his last remark, for certainly I had made no sense of it, and then I excused myself shortly, as though I had the usual evening errand. I had left my pack outside the back door, and I scooped up the pack and walked out the rutted path, the farm dogs following but offering no obstacle. As it was a night of no moon, I didn’t go far but spread my blankets within distant sight of their houselamps, and I watched them all go off, one by one, with the one in the kitchen being last.

The air was sweet and my privacy sweeter. If Master Grofe and his men had seen the look his daughter had granted me, and had they further known the effect it had had on me, body and mind, I was firmly convinced they all would have risen up and slain me.

The troop on horseback that descended on the Grofes’ came along the road a quarter mile from my bed under a walnut tree, so I became aware of them only as a shudder in the earth and a dream of the chestnut horse’s ineluctably muddy progress. I was awake but unprepared when I heard Jannie’s scream, and then I was running for the roadway. I am no great runner, because of the length of my legs, but I can go on, barefoot or no, and barefoot was how I chased the six men who rode from Grofe’s farmstead, I reached the road before they did and hid beside a hedge, knowing a horse’s night vision exceeded even mine.

I had no thought that the Grofes had taken it into their heads on impulse to flee their homes in the middle of the night. I doubted very much that they owned as many as six riding horses: luxuries on a farm. These riders had to be those notorious things, Zaquash avengers: ill-content young trouble makers who strike at the well-to-do landowner of Velonyan blood. I remembered Master Grofe’s lack of accent, and his unusual education, and it became obvious to me. Also obvious, by the lumpy appearance of one man in the middle of the riot, they had raided Jannie Grofe herself. As I became aware of the position of that rider, I sprang across the road, close enough to startle the horses. The men were wearing bag masks, the trademark of the Zaquash avenger. The man holding the girl, however, rode not the Zaquash flat pad, but the old Velonyan saddle, cross-pommeled and long in the stirrup. The horse was tall and the road high-crowned, so the only part of the fellow I could reach was his straight knee, which I hit with the heel of my hand as heavily as I could. I thought to make him drop the reins so I could take control of the horse. Howling, he dropped the girl instead. As I was standing below, I caught Jannie, threw her over my right shoulder, and ran.

Four of them followed us, thrashing over high crop and stubble fields, and though the riders could not see us, the horses could, and they knew what they were chasing. As once before in my life, I made for the line of darkness that was trees.

Jannie was shouting for me to put her down. I don’t know if she even knew who had her, though later she said she had known, but I had not the time to follow her dictate, even if her legs had not been tied together.

Very soon I could see the animal’s noses out of the comer of my eye, growing larger and closer, and I gave up this rabbit game. I threw Jannie sideways as far as I could and bounced out of the path of the leadmost horse.

It was startled, and it plunged forward. As the near front hoof circled up in the canter, I caught it and helped it further up and out. The horse fell away from me, and I nearly took the force of its rear legs’ convulsive kicks as it toppled into the next two beasts behind it. I did nothing more heroic after that; I hefted Jannie Grofe in my arms and pounded on.

We made the wood line and the creek it concealed, where horses could not follow. We were very quiet, and I untied her with my hands and teeth. After a while we heard the raiders give up, cursing, and depart the way they’d come.

Jannie took a large splinter out of my instep, where I had trodden a branch end-on. She was very collected. More than averagely pretty, for a sixteen-year-old. We walked the fields home cautiously, hand in hand, and in my young pride I refrained from limping.

I learned more of human nature that early morning, which is to say, I became more confused. The victor’s welcome I received from the Grofe household (and that in truth I had expected to receive) was cut through by a strain of its own opposite. The old wife who embraced her lost daughter cuffed her also, without explanation and at regular intervals. She demanded of me what my whole role in the damned business was, as though both Jannie and I hadn’t related it in detail already, and turned her back to rail at Grofe once more before I could reply.

Grofe himself was less accusatory and less distraught, but again and again he made me repeat that I had not known the raiders, their horses, their words, the place from which they had come, or the place to which they vanished. More than once he asked me about a small box, not much larger than a loaf of bread, I had not noticed such a thing, but he didn’t want to hear that.

Their disbelief was understandable, for the story told by Jannie was one of great drama, with massive struggle against armed men and the tossing of a horse and rider over my shoulder. I tried to reduce the narrative to human proportions, but the hired man, whose name I now remember to be Quaven, stared and glared at me in the light of the single lamp, with black shadows of the black chair backs climbing up and down the walls. Mistress Grofe had woken first at the sound of the approaching horses, but (she repeated more than once) had not been able to rouse her old man. One raider had broken the front window, crawled in through the mess of slats and panes, and had drawn the bolt for the rest of them, and by the time the elder son had reached the bottom of the stairs, they were standing in possession with torches, swords, and a primed harquebus pointed right up the stairway.

They grabbed the boy and began ransacking the house for valuables,
and when that proved time-consuming, dragged the girl from her bedchamber instead and offered to
trade her person for the proceeds of the early barley crop. It was not “all your gold”
or “your silverware and jewelry.” I inquired after this, since it seemed to speak close
knowledge of the farmstead or at least of the area. Grofe repeated that it had been the proceeds of
the early barley crop they demanded, and that is what he gave them, in a box not much larger than a
loaf of bread.

And still they took her, tying her hand and foot, and they rode off with Jannie, the harquebus, the box, and all.

Grofe sat at the black table, with one hand clutching at the hair of his forehead and the other making angry flat thumps against the wood. With every thump the smell of beeswax rose and mingled with the smell of the smoky lamp.

“We can go after them, Daddy,” said the younger boy, a child of perhaps thirteen who was already taller than I. Grofe looked up absently and continued to thump.

“Do you have horses?” I had to ask. “I mean, not like the chestnut, but road horses.” If they had horses, they should already be on the road and riding, instead of damaging the woodwork and burning oil.

“A few saddle mounts,” answered Grofe, shooting me one of his untrusting glances. “Not fast, but good for a long way. But it wouldn’t do to go haring off, not knowing after who or where.”

I remembered the sound of their retreating hooves. “They went north, on the plain road, with one horse lame and a man with a broken leg.”

“So you say.” Quaven did not bother to conceal his suspicions of me.

“The road is dry already,” answered Grofe. “They’d make sure of that before riding out on us.”

“Not so dry as that, only two days after a rain. There’s a heavy night dew this season; I have cause to know that.”

They all stared at me, even Jannie.

“I can track for you,” I told him, all the while knowing Powl would call this a mistake.

Quaven had fetched me my boots, for I didn’t want to do any more treading on my bare, wounded foot, and the rest of my gear was spilled out on the kitchen table as security (I suppose) for my good behavior. I could not ride and track, so I had to trot before them, while Grofe, Quaven, and the elder boy used my white, moonlit head as a beacon.

The farmer had heard my name as Zural, which would be at least a good Zaquash sort of name, and I let him call me this. Now, finally, he asked me what I did for myself and I told him I was an optician. He let that be, though I imagine he thought it to be some minor territorial religious sect.

The place where the riders had left the road after me was unmistakable, as was the place where they had scrambled back on. One horse stepped unevenly, while another, with larger feet, wandered from one side of the road to the other, seeming to be imperfectly controlled.

A few miles on, they turned right into the forest, on a path that was between a cow trail and a wagon road.

“Commerey,” stated Grofe.

The tracks in this damp wood were unmistakable, and with my attention relaxed, my mind became aware of how weary I was, having walked all the previous day, then sprinted, then run with a heavy weight. A soft, heavy weight, very pretty, and of a certain shape. Only sixteen.

My foot slipped in the muck, and in the sudden awakening I remembered who was behind me and that they did not trust me.

The land opened again, and ahead was heard a wailing and a weeping that announced itself to be no trivial matter. “Commerey,” said Grofe again. He quickened his horse and trotted by me, followed by the others. When I caught up with them they were on the large porch of a house built to their own plan, and another man was hammering his fist on the wall
 

harder than Grofe had pounded the table, while a woman more generously built than Mistress Grofe hung over the rail, weeping. Small children hung upon her or huddled on the steps.

Grofe was striding back and forth, adding his anger to theirs.

“You’s avengers got their boy. Killed him as he stood,” said Quaven to me. This insistent, deliberate connection of myself with the thieves and murderers, added to my tiredness and my sore foot, caused me a moment of blind anger, and I had to catch myself with my hand already launched. All I could do was make myself miss his face entirely, so only the wind made him blink, and then I held guard for another half second, until I was certain I had myself in rein.

I don’t think he was sure what had happened, but his brown, Zaquash face set in belligerent wrinkles. “I wouldn’t try that against a man, you great monkey,” he said, as though I had only raised a fist to him. Perhaps that was all he saw.

There had been four of them—I could account for the other two—and they had been angry. They had taken two silver candlesticks and a naming bowl, and the life of an eighteen-year-old boy, though he had not opposed them in any manner. None of the Commereys had.

“I can tell you why them’s hot about,” said Quaven, speaking loudly into Master Commerey’s grief. “It was ’cause this fellow ’mong us.”

Briefly Grofe described my part in the business, leaving out the episode of tossing the horse over my shoulder. I climbed the stairs, stepping around the children, and allowed Commerey to peer out at me through blank eyes, and through the door I saw the body of the boy laid out on two chairs, with a basin and rags below him and one candle for light.

“You can track them?” he asked me, and I could only say that I had so far.

He was a big man, square-faced, with less Zaquash about him than Quaven but more than Grofe. “Then track for me, too,” he said.

At about dawn Commerey called my attention to a hemispherical stone, knee-high, set into the earth beside the roadway. “Ekish Territory line marker,” he said. The other riders at my back grunted as though he had said something of real meaning.

I sat down on the meaningful stone. “Territory line marker? How does that affect our chase?” I asked the big man. “We had no legal authority before, so we haven’t less now.” Commerey got down from his horse and stood beside me. He looked down sharply.

“More tired you get, less you sound like a local man, Zural. Where you come from?”

I felt chastened and foolish as well as bone-weary. The farmer was right, so I dropped the accent entirely. I told him I had been raised in Sordaling City, and when that didn’t suffice, that I had been raised as a servant at the Royal Military School. There was no lie in that, and it was enough.

Grofe answered my question. “Beyond this marker, lad, Satt Territory gives way to Ekesh. It was Ekesh avengers struck us, so we’re going in the right direction, that’s all.”

“How do you know they were Ekesh, Master Grofe?” I asked him. Grofe spoke with energy, but his back was wilted and his hands heavy on his horse’s withers.