Lens of the World (23 page)

I had decided I would paint stripes on his horse with jeweler’s rouge. Pink stripes. That would be offensive enough. But I would have to find the horse, and I still might lose my head to the picket sentry. While I was assessing the dangers, I came around the bottom of a hill, heard voices, and saw fires.

I stood startled. I could not have come so far so soon. Could the Velonyans have walked into the night and beyond? Even so, they would not be camped here, in front of me.

I heard a sound from the top of the hill beside me, only a few yards away. A man scratching himself through layers of clothing. Though reflex I ducked down and noted movement on another of the down ripples. There were sentries, but they
 

were prone in the grass, it seemed. This was a very odd way to keep watch, unless one were as interested in concealing oneself as in spying out others.

The camp was in a natural declivity, and the dozen small fires would not be visible from any distance. I lay down myself in the grass and pressed forward.

There was no picket line; the horses were scattered like the men and the little lumps that were tents. No pavilion at all. By the side of one fire a banner stake had been driven into the earth, but it was bare save for a lump at the top. As a breath of
 
wind caught the fire, it illuminated briefly a long white thing with what appeared to be snakes dangling: a horse’s skull with whips thrust through the eyeholes. And the voices I heard were speaking Rayzhia.

I was filled with a horror that was near to despair as I realized where my curiosity had brought me, and my mind filled with images of a burned village, and a sunken grave, beast-robbed. I lay motionless, and at times the fires would flare, showing me faces no different from many of those who had drunk and traded at the tables of the Yellow Coach. I had worked for men like these. Their accent was familiar to me, though I could not understand the words, and so were their faces. Perhaps I did know them.

The Red Whips. Children’s nightmares. Brutes. Perfect fighters. The force that had broken the back of Velonyan settlement in the South. I had imagined them to be something other in nature than the everyday people of the southern territories. But why did I imagine that, knowing the truth about Zaquash avengers as well as I did?

Either the wind changed or my ears did, for I could hear
conversations where there had been only murmurs a moment before. “By his red hair,” was
said and repeated; another man elaborated “red hair”; and in the first third of the
company, “always.”

“I will know Rudof by his royal armor,” announced one man, and another answered, “He may not be wearing his royal armor, but he will be wearing his royal red hair!” That met with laughter, but the first man topped this with, “After tomorrow he will not be wearing that either. The old horse will have both.” He lifted his arm and pointed at the staff and the skull. “And enough gold to break a leather saddlebag.”

I found myself in a trembling sweat. I tried to push backward in the grass and I was not in full control of my limbs. I called up the black wolf of Gelley in self-defense while they continued to plan the assassination of the king.

A voice of greater command than the others adjured them to forget plunder. They were to slice in, kill the Velonyan king, and be off before the heavy horses could be brought forward. That was what they would be paid for. Stopping to plunder a troop three times their size would only get them killed for nothing.

Puzzlement replaced terror in my mind, for what pay have the Red Whips other than plunder itself? I listened until the last of the conversationalists went to sleep, and then I began to back away through the grass. I had gone halfway around the hill when movement close by brought me flat again. It was a change of guard, and the new one came within thirty feet of me as he took the easiest way up the watch hill.

It took me another hour to retreat from the camp far enough to cross the road unseen and put a few ranked hills between myself and the open. After this I ran, and I did not stop to breathe until I saw the red remains of King Rudof’s own fires winking before me.

There was nothing furtive or disguised about this camp. It stretched along the road for half a mile, and the great wagons had been left right in the hard-packed roadway, where their long eight-horse tongues lay end-propped on blocks.

The dozen or so peaked pavilions were as much portable houses as tents, with roofs of wood and canvas and walls of quilted felt, each panel painted with the arms of the marshal whose headquarters it was. The knights had their own small tents, and even some of the foot soldiers slept under shelters like folded sheets of paper, hung from two poles. Even the latrines were modestly draped. The fires were large and decorated with pots, though most of the fires had burned to red cinders by this late hour.

In the center of the circle of pavilions lay one identical to them but sporting an overly long central pole, upon which hung a flag I did not have to see in detail to understand.

I saw all this in a moment, for my school years had prepared me to identify the parts of a Velonyan military encampment. It was the sort of place I had expected to spend most of my life.

How the sentries could have missed me I do not know, for I was running with all thought to speed and none to secrecy, but I was at the first horse picket without challenge and then I was under it and amid the sleeping foot soldiers, a three-quarter-

size, flaxen-haired peasant running with his clogs in his hand and a large pack bouncing on his back and shouting, “Alarm! Alarm! Wake up! Wake the king!”

Some of the men slept lightly and some I had to jump over. My shouts were not as loud as I would have liked, because I had used up all my wind on the road, but they were enough. I set up a buzz of voices that followed me across a company of thirty bivouacked men.

Ahead was the closest pavilion, and in the light of the old moon, newly risen, I could see the outline of a red lion, sword-girt. That was Garman of Hight. The thought flashed through my heated mind that Powl had called the man a pederast. I passed to the left of the great tent, and the doorguard reached out to grab at me like a man after a bothersome cat. He chased a few feet and halted, cursing.

Here I was at last, in the clear space before the leather and brass door of the king of Velonya and all Zaquashian territories. Four guards stood at the circumference of the pavilion, fully armed and ready for me, their swords in their hands. A ring of late- or early-wakeful men surrounded the cooking fire, their faces glowing orange in its light. They, too, had heard me coming. I came to a halt, swaying, and my legs almost decided to let go. “Red Whips west of here!” I announced as the lounging men walked toward me. “Attacking in the morning! Rouse the king!”

Another man began to shout, much louder than I. At first I thought he was echoing my words. “Alarm! Alarm, men! An attack upon the king! Assassin! Slay that man!”

I spun in place, my exhaustion forgotten. In the doorway of another pavilion, outlined by lamps from within, stood a man in light field armor, and he was pointing at me with his sword.

The king’s guard did not obey, but instead moved into a defensive stance between myself and the leather tent flap. The men at the fire were mostly unarmed, and they approached me warily, but the sentry of the lit pavilion came forward willingly enough, his rapier ringing out of its scabbard, and others in a pack joined him from behind the bulk of the tent, half dressed but armed well enough.

My pack is made to slide off in an instant, and I leaped backward over it to make it a burden to my attacker instead of to me. I wanted my hedger but had no time to stoop for it. I threw one of my clogs and hit him over the eyes.

A man in a black-and-yellow house uniform shoved past the stunned sentry. His rapier was needle-fine and well made, like a sliver of light in the darkness. At the same time around the sentry’s other side came a man in underwear, trying to spark a flint on his harquebus. I darted toward him, as he was less ready, and used an elbow in his armpit to knock him into the fellow with the nasty blade.

There were many more of them, now, mostly in the black and yellow (I couldn’t immediately remember what marshal owned those colors; I couldn’t immediately think at all) but some in royal blue and white and many in white linen and bare skin. I remember that I ducked a sweep that would have taken my head and flinched away from another that wanted my stomach, and then I had the chance to bend to my pack, and my hedger was in my hand.

The beautiful rapier was back in action, and the man who wielded it called for room to use it. He got his way, for the mass of soldiers edged back to circle us as he sent that long needle past the end of my short hedger and at my throat.

I moved my throat to the side and felt only the vibration of the slender blade against the skin, and when that blade was at full thrust, I broke it at the base with the hook of my weapon, as once Powl had broken my own rapier blade. The soldier was as astonished as I had been, but immediately the circle that had formed collapsed toward me. I knew I would have to kill a Velonyan soldier to live a moment longer, and even so it probably would be a short moment.

But the squeeze of attackers backed off again, and all glances darted nervously in one direction. There was shouting again, but not in the bass voice this time. Perhaps it had been going on a while. This voice commanded all of us to halt, and as all the rest did, I felt it advisable to do so likewise. It gave me added moments to live.

I heard the words “Let me see him!” and the circle around
me began to open. Then the large man from the doorway bellowed, “No! Assassin! Guard the
king!”

“Field Marshal, it is mine to say!”The circle loosened
and very reluctantly the guards in blue and white let themselves be shoved aside, and there in his
underwear, with his hair in his face, I beheld Rudof, king of Velonya and Satt and Ekesh and
Morquenie and the southern territories.

Like the real assassins, I was prepared to know him by his red hair, but I had assumed the red hair of Rudof to be a dignified auburn. Our portrait of the crown prince in Sordaling School’s refectory was painted so. Even under moonlight I could see that the king had a head of hair the color of a very bright carrot, orange red and hanging in uneven curls around
 

his face, and that he was inclined to a different tone of red across his youthful cheeks. In my surprise I was silent. I stood and panted and forgot to bow.

“A peasant boy with a brush chopper in his hand,” said Rudof, and he looked pointedly over the company at the man with the bass voice. “Quite right to send the entire camp down on him, Field Marshal.”

I looked and knew the man for Helt Markins, duke of Leoue. Field marshal of the Velonyan Army. Black and yellow.

The duke cleared his throat. “A chopper is as good a weapon for an assassin as a sword, sir. Better,” he said. “And look: This is not merely a peasant, but a Rezhmian peasant.”

“What did you expect in these environs, Markins? A Vesting peasant?” The king gestured to his guards. “Try not to hurt him. Tie him and we’ll question him in the morning.” He turned and lifted the leather flap again.

I found my voice finally. “Sir! My king! There are a hundred
Rezhmian assassins after—” I got no farther, for the king’s guards were obedient
to his word, and the four marched toward me together, eyeing my hedger, their hands on their
swords.

I could not begin killing the king’s own men, not if I wanted to be believed. I threw my blade down at their feet, and the one who bent to pick it up I kicked hard in the head. He hit the ground like wet clothes falling off a clothesline. I leaped over him to be on the man behind him before he could grab me. I took him down behind the knee, and at that moment the third guard took me behind the elbows, and I let him have the point of an elbow very hard in the bottom ribs and spun him out by his other arm, keeping the last man away with the bulk of this fellow. All the while, I heard King Rudof calling encouragement. To whom, I could not tell.

And then in that night of voices one last voice was raised, and this one was not strange to me. “Sir, that is no assassin nor peasant boy! That is Nazhuret of Sordaling, and you have no more loyal knight in Velonya!”

I turned to gape at Arlin, standing at the edge of the fire, fully dressed in his silver velvets, every inch a gentleman and every inch a civilian. One of the guards took that moment to try to tackle me, and without engaging my overwhelmed brain, my body tripped him and threw him in an arc that ended at Arlin’s feet.

“Enough,” said the king. Alone he came forward and next to me. He was tall and lightly built. His eyes were pale in the firelight. “You don’t talk like a Rezhmian. Nor a peasant. You don’t fight like any peasant, nor any soldier either—not one I’ve ever seen.

“Nazhuret of Sordaling you are called? Never heard it before. The only man I know who can call himself ‘of Sordaling’ that I know of is Lord Howdl. Son of his?”

With more force than was perhaps necessary I disclaimed all relationship with Baron Howdl. I heard Arlin snicker; Howdl is famous among boys at the school.

“Nazhuret of the Royal School at Sordaling, sir. That is what the gentleman meant. And I’m not even that anymore. But let us not stop here longer like fools discussing my accent and my education when there are a good hundred Red Whip riders intending to surprise your troop this morning and murder you.”