Lens of the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

bank of it. I remember the day we played colt games by this water, and His Royal Majesty went in, rearmost foremost, and seven members of the Privy Guard were dissuaded only with difficulty from filleting His  
    Majesty’s wrestling partner like a trout. Doesn’t this water appear to be scarcely shin-deep, though we both have reason to know it is deep enough to float a sizable monarch?
    Not even the bulk and bustling of a submerged king could muddy this pool, which rises from unknown depths and issues out through a marble dolphin mouth at your left hand and settles there back again, unnoticed amid the reeds to your right, far enough from the kitchens and offices to take no stain from them. I could count the red pebbles on the bottom and the blue ones and the white even as we hauled you out, dripping.
    Look into this depth, so much clearer than air and so much colder and heavier, and keep it in your mind as you read of my first day of return, after my death at Powl’s hand. For I was sunk deeper and more silently into the confines of my body and into the airs of the world that day than the blind, translucent fish are sunk in the water of this pool.
    The bench he laid me on was rough and porous. The wood had absorbed the wet and the smells of night, and now it issued them against my face, and the touch against my broken skin was full of sparks. The wall of bricks glowed with the terrible colors of its kilning: flame-red, blood-black, and the yellow of sulfur.
    The fortressed door stood open again and yellow light poured in, along with the endless song of a bird. I sat up and stood up and Powl came with me. He led me through the blossoms, traps, and snarls of the September grass, which might otherwise have held me for all this second life (I was so bemused), and he sat me in the green glow of a maple tree.
    “If finally I am damned,” he said, “it will be for this, lad. Forgive me.”
    His words were lightly spoken, but I considered them for a ridiculously long time. At last I answered him, “It was not murder, but a fair duel. I had the better weapon, the longer reach. And a lifetime of training.”
    He smiled. His teeth were white and even and did not quite meet.
“No, Nazhuret. Between you and me could be no fair duel. But I did not mean damned for that,
but rather for dragging you back again, to this”—he touched my head in two
places—“to where your skin is split and there is at the back of your head a lump that
you will feel soon, and to where you were thirsty and I presume still are, and… and all that
is to come.”
    In my mind the constellations wheeled slowly. No intelligence, mind you, but very many stars. “You could not drag me. I came,” I told him, and I was very sure of myself.
    His pale, ironical eyes, colorless themselves, caught the sun. “Back to a world that is full of pain and confusion? Yes, so you did. Do you know why?”
    I shook my head, and he was right: It was going to hurt soon. “No,” I said, “you have to tell me why.”
    Fowl leaned forward, into shadow. He pointed a neat and delicate finger at me. “Because, Nazhuret. Because the world is full of pain and confusion. That is why I called you. That is why you came.” Then he rose and lifted me by the back of the collar and marched me back through the door of oak, where I was given water and strong coffee with cardamom and the end of a very fine cheese. I slept and dreamed not at all, and when I awoke, the coat of boiled wool was over my shoulders, the moon was streaming blue through the high windows, the door was cracked open, and the fine gentleman was gone.
    I went out to relieve myself, ate the rest of the cheese, played with the disks of glass, worked the mechanisms of bone, and ascertained that the torturer’s rack was actually a gear and wheelwork that somehow connected with the wooden crenellations edging the dome roof. I climbed the platform and peered up at the slot in the roof through which the hinder stars of