Read Online Lens of the World by R. A. MacAvoy - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: R. A. MacAvoy
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making dry, ripping noises in the snow. In the last light I went back to the door, hoping he had left it open. Surely he had. I had no coat, and he could not want me to die.
The door was locked. There was a blanket folded on the step, and pinned to the oak was a note, reading (not in Allec):
GO BACK TO THE CITY.
I went back to the woods instead. I peeled some pine branches and lay down on them, wrapped in the blanket. After a few hours the moon rose, just past full. It made everything bright black and white; very clear, like the clarity with which I had been dismissed.
I did not sleep that night, but I did a little in the sun the next day. Powl did not come to the observatory. I considered following him down the hill and pleading with him at whatever place he spent the rest of his time, but my obedience had been at least this perfect—I had stayed where I was put and never followed him home. I did follow his bootprints in the snow, but as the hill road met the main road, the going got drier and there was nothing to be seen. I saw no one nor any trace of hearth smoke in the sky. I returned up the hill.
That night was a little warmer, and the slush was harder to bear than the snow had been. I swept the stone step off with branches and curled up on it.
I had considered the matter endlessly. I had eaten snow and listened to my stomach and decided that Powl was right about me after all. I had failed at everything, even at this unheard-of opportunity to become—what? I didn’t even know, but unheard-of opportunity nonetheless. I was ugly, undersized, and played marbles when I should be long grown up. Worse, I had returned by special dispensation from death—yes, from death, dramatic as that sounded—to do no more than to play marbles. It was now appropriate that I freeze to death. One more night should do it; I felt dizzy enough already.
All this interior conversation was, of course, in Allec.
Sometime during the middle of the night it occurred to me that it was poor manners to freeze on Powl’s front stoop like this. It would look like an insult directed toward him, and I felt no desire to insult him worse. I staggered up, but my feet would not work. I crawled on my knees over the thawing ground and dropped myself in the shadow of the trees.
It was too wet to die there. It was unbearable. I turned back to the building, on my feet this time, and decided Powl would have to put up with finding me.
I heard him coughing. I heard the key. “I don’t think I can carry you today, Nazhuret,” he said. In Allec. I was spread out on the step of his observatory. An insult to him. How embarrassing. “It was too wet to lie out there,” I said in exculpation and then remembered I was supposed to be dead. This stymied me. When Powl began to drag me in over the threshold, I was too confused and clumsy to help.
No amount of sitting before the fire would warm me; I was lowered into a large tub, which was supposed to become part of the earth closet, and buckets of hot water were splashed over. First I roused and then I shivered and by the time I had ceased shivering, I was so sore in every muscle that I felt I had been tied to a post and beaten. This, I find, is the usual
aftereffect of near-freezing, but despite my upbringing in snowy Velonya I had never been so cold before. I was put to bed pink-fleshed and wrinkled with water, feeling bright and curious and without a trace of intelligence.
So the autumn produced my first death and the winter my second birth. All through this purgatory I thought in the Allec language, as Powl had taught me. I thought very simple, childlike things.
That day Powl sat by my bed, on the single chair the observatory possessed. He looked gray and old, leaning against the chair’s spindly arm. Occasionally he coughed.
“I was too sick to make it up the hill yesterday,” he said as I was sitting up, eating the very bad soup he had prepared for me. The stove was sending gouts
The door was locked. There was a blanket folded on the step, and pinned to the oak was a note, reading (not in Allec):
GO BACK TO THE CITY.
I went back to the woods instead. I peeled some pine branches and lay down on them, wrapped in the blanket. After a few hours the moon rose, just past full. It made everything bright black and white; very clear, like the clarity with which I had been dismissed.
I did not sleep that night, but I did a little in the sun the next day. Powl did not come to the observatory. I considered following him down the hill and pleading with him at whatever place he spent the rest of his time, but my obedience had been at least this perfect—I had stayed where I was put and never followed him home. I did follow his bootprints in the snow, but as the hill road met the main road, the going got drier and there was nothing to be seen. I saw no one nor any trace of hearth smoke in the sky. I returned up the hill.
That night was a little warmer, and the slush was harder to bear than the snow had been. I swept the stone step off with branches and curled up on it.
I had considered the matter endlessly. I had eaten snow and listened to my stomach and decided that Powl was right about me after all. I had failed at everything, even at this unheard-of opportunity to become—what? I didn’t even know, but unheard-of opportunity nonetheless. I was ugly, undersized, and played marbles when I should be long grown up. Worse, I had returned by special dispensation from death—yes, from death, dramatic as that sounded—to do no more than to play marbles. It was now appropriate that I freeze to death. One more night should do it; I felt dizzy enough already.
All this interior conversation was, of course, in Allec.
Sometime during the middle of the night it occurred to me that it was poor manners to freeze on Powl’s front stoop like this. It would look like an insult directed toward him, and I felt no desire to insult him worse. I staggered up, but my feet would not work. I crawled on my knees over the thawing ground and dropped myself in the shadow of the trees.
It was too wet to die there. It was unbearable. I turned back to the building, on my feet this time, and decided Powl would have to put up with finding me.
I heard him coughing. I heard the key. “I don’t think I can carry you today, Nazhuret,” he said. In Allec. I was spread out on the step of his observatory. An insult to him. How embarrassing. “It was too wet to lie out there,” I said in exculpation and then remembered I was supposed to be dead. This stymied me. When Powl began to drag me in over the threshold, I was too confused and clumsy to help.
No amount of sitting before the fire would warm me; I was lowered into a large tub, which was supposed to become part of the earth closet, and buckets of hot water were splashed over. First I roused and then I shivered and by the time I had ceased shivering, I was so sore in every muscle that I felt I had been tied to a post and beaten. This, I find, is the usual
aftereffect of near-freezing, but despite my upbringing in snowy Velonya I had never been so cold before. I was put to bed pink-fleshed and wrinkled with water, feeling bright and curious and without a trace of intelligence.
So the autumn produced my first death and the winter my second birth. All through this purgatory I thought in the Allec language, as Powl had taught me. I thought very simple, childlike things.
That day Powl sat by my bed, on the single chair the observatory possessed. He looked gray and old, leaning against the chair’s spindly arm. Occasionally he coughed.
“I was too sick to make it up the hill yesterday,” he said as I was sitting up, eating the very bad soup he had prepared for me. The stove was sending gouts
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