The Belly of the Wolf - R A MacAvoy, ebook
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The Belly of the Wolf
Lens Of The World, Book 3
R.A. MacAvoy
1994
ISBN: 0-380-71018-8
Praise for R. A. MacAVOY’s
LENS OF THE WORLD
Trilogy:
“SHEER ENTERTAINMENT ... THE ART OF STORYTELLING AT ITS BEST”
Orson Scott Card,
Fantasy & Science Fiction
“A STORY TOLD FLAWLESSLY, in prose that is still more flawless, and laid in a world that
reminds one of a cut gem.”
Chicago Sun-Times
“Skillfully plays with some of the best known conventions of heroic fantasy ... MacAvoy succeeds in
putting a fresh spin on all these familiar elements, bringing to her tale a sense of beauty and truth that lifts
LENS OF THE WORLD
well above the standard fantasy fare.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“A WORK OF SOARING IMAGINATION ... MacAvoy has always been a good writer; with this
she becomes an
outstanding
one.”
Morgan Llywelyn, author of
Lion of Ireland
“TRULY A WRITER OF TALENT AND PROMISE”
Washington Post Book World
“FASCINATING ... MacAvoy mingles past eras with a fantasist’s imagination and a historian’s
mastery of the telling detail.”
Locus
“PROVOCATIVE, COMPLEX ... Where most fantasy adventures deal out magic in bold strokes,
MacAvoy’s novels exhibit a more elusive quality.”
Library Journal
“COLORFUL, INVENTIVE, RICH IN DETAIL AND WELL-WRITTEN”
James P. Blaylock, author of
The Stone Giant
“GRACEFUL, UNDERSTATED AND VIVID. Anyone who doubts that fantasy can be literary,
artistic, thoughtful and genuinely moving need only follow Nazhuret’s adventures to learn otherwise.”
Publishers Weekly.
“ROBERTA MacAVOY IS ONE OF THE BEST AND MOST INNOVATIVE WRITERS TO
COME OUT OF THE 80s ... The reader remains engrossed from the first few pages”
OtherReahns
“Its style, quite unlike that of the usual fantasy, rivets attention, and the story is one which remains in
the mind.”
Andre Norton, author of
Mirror of Destiny
“MacAVOY HAS JUST ABOUT EVERY SKILL OF THE ACCOMPLISHED FANTASIST
AT HER COMMAND AND DISPLAYS THEM ALL”
Booklist
“AN APPEALING AND GRATIFYING TRILOGY ... Quiet, unpretentious, vivid”
Kirkus Reviews
“HER WRITING IS AS FINELY HONED AS EVER ... I eagerly await Ms. MacAvoy’s next.”
The New York Times Book Review
At that time we were living in Canton, my daugh-ter and I, in what is said to be the largest port in the
world. The Carttoners justify this, claim by equating the Harbor with the entire country. Considering the
shape of the land and water (mostly water) that makes up Canton, I will give them no argument. We
were residing at the medical college, where I was translating manuscripts and she was pretending not to
teach, when I read, in a newspaper that King Ru-dof of Velonya was dead.
I remember I was in a coffee shop, and the paper I was reading (I have good vision for my age) was
not mine, but belonged to my neighbor to the left. There was some small disagreement about the
pos-session of the paper, which in my astonishment and shock I did not notice. When I became aware of
my-self again, I was holding the owner, of the paper with his hand locked behind his back in violation of
both his rights and his dignity. I remedied both of these slights with money, for the Cantoners have a very
commercial sense of honor, and I took the paper out-side.
I sat on a box, I think, and I am fairly certain there was a ship unloading only a hundred feet away,
across the stone paving of Wharf Promenade. There were cries in the air: sailors’ or birds’, I don’t
re-member.
It was as though this news had ripped me out from the fabric of my life and set me down once more
in a place of perfect quiet, perfect misery—ears ringing, sun too bright. I knew this place well since
Arlin’s death.
The article itself was short. It said the king had died in the capital, in his bed. In his bed, it said. I
could see that bed behind my closed eyes: his fath-er’s bed and his father’s before that, too narrow and
short for a man of Rudof s build and habits. I had been allowed to visit him of a morning in his royal rat’s
nest, where half the covers were in a ball and the other half on the floor. He was a man who threw darts
at the bedposts to punctuate
his
conversation. Whose feet poked holes in linen sheets.
My king, my fellow student, closer than brother. I felt the back of my head strike the bricks of the
wall, for I was rocking in place like a child with fe-ver. Huge man, quick and fiery, he had held my life in
his hands, forfeit by law again and again, and he had let me fly free—he who could never himself be free.
Words like these tumbled around my head, but they were only words, not real feeling. Not yet.
Dr. Keighl found me there, I don’t know how long after. “I see I can bring you no news,” he said.
I answered him. “You can tell me if it’s true.”
The doctor sat down beside me on the crate, all in his frock coat and gabardine trousers. Even at the
time I knew it a great condescension on his part “In over a year of running argument, Professor
Na-zhuret, we have not been able to agree upon the na-ture of truth. What now do you expect of me? I
will say I have heard it from sources other than this poor sheet.”
He called me “professor” because the university here had deigned to grant me an honorary degree of
Master of Arts some years since. I had no say in the matter.
Knowing better, I had to ask, “Then, there is no chance ... ?”
“There is always a chance.”
I had asked for a platitude and had gotten one. “The news must be two weeks old, at least,” I
thought aloud, and Keighl answered, “Three, I am told. The Velonyan government concealed the death
for over a day, and then the winter winds make shipping slow.”
It took some moments for his words to form meaning in my brain. I heard the gulls; they were very
loud. “The government concealed the death?’ I looked into the doctor’s eyes, trying to be calm, to see
clearly. “Does rumor say who killed him?”
With this, Doctor Keighl’s figure seemed to open up, to gain movement and life, as though I had
served up for him what was the real meat of the conversation.
“Of course, it is bandied about that the Old Ve-lonyan faction did it.”
“How? The paper gave no hint.”
“Poison,” said the doctor diffidently.
Poison could be a rending agony, or a mere falling asleep. Which had occurred meant a lot to me. I
asked him what poison, and the question caused surprise. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “But I would bet
money that it was the queen’s party that did it.”
I sighed, thinking that Navvie must be told. I hoped she did not know already, had not heard
off-handedly, as I had. “Isn’t it curious,” I said to the doctor, since he seemed so interested in the matter,
“that it should be called the Old Velonyan Party, when the queen is not a Velonyan of any sort, old or
new.”
Then, with great sobriety, Doctor Keighl asked me what I planned to do in response to this atrocious
deed. I glared at him in alarm. “Do! What on earth can I do, my dear doctor? Throw the government of
Velonya into prison as a whole? Cut them to ribbons individually? What?”
The look of expectation on his moderate, oval Cantoner face did not fade. “I don’t know. But I have
heard about you. So much about you.”
I was looking at my hands, which were clasped in front of me. Smaller hands than average, with skin
slightly loosened by fifty-live years of life. I showed him those hands, as though they would communi-cate
something to the man, and then I gave up on self composure and ran off to find my daughter.
Canton is an easy town to run in, as all the streets are even and wide. There is poverty here, but not
as much
as
elsewhere. There is aristocracy here, but it does not get in the burghers’ way. Most notably,
Canton is dean. Though the colors of its flag stand for water, its true banner should represent a
win-dowbox of flowers. When its citizens curse (as they cursed me smashing through them along the
streets), they do it with moderation and without originality. I passed along Provot Street, which was all
ware-houses, and across the Mariner’s Park and the Old Mariner’s Shelter, where one fellow passed a
witty comment concerning the sight of a man my age pumping his short legs so energetically. (He, like me,
a foreigner. )
The university has a large brick gate with no wall but only a short hedge surrounding it. Because the
gate was clogged with dons in uniform, I did not attempt it but leaped the roses. Here the response was
more outraged and less witty, because univer-sity instructors tend to regard their institution with the
sobriety others reserve for cemeteries. I seem to be making this whole incident into a joke, and I can-not
say why. By this time I was in pain enough,
The lecture halls were closed for the midday meal, so I ran on to the herb museum, where Nahvah
had employment “arranging” the exhibits. In truth, her job was to take a large library of specimens, which
over the years had been labeled and glassed by the methods of superstition and pure chance, and to
match the correct plant to its Allec and vernacular names. Among my daughter’s gifts is a power of
memory.
She was not in the display hall; few students were. I found her in the less impressive but more useful
drying houses on the building’s flat roof. She was seated on a simple wooden chair, her hands in her lap
and her feet folded under her skirts. I had not succeeded in finding her first.
“I am so sorry, Papa,” she
said. By
her voice she had been crying. She was not crying now. “I know
how you must hurt.”
The smell of the fresh herbs around us was intox-icating. There was anise and coriander seed, giving
a festive, sweet-biscuit note to the air, and beneath that odor something of the feeling of the forest floor in
autumn. I knelt beside the chair to look at her closely. “But you, little academician. You are all right?”
Navvie’s hair is black and thick and her eyelashes so profuse as to make her eyes seem smudged.
Set within these ovals of darkness are eyes of a blue as pale as my own. Her glance is like clear sky
glimpsed through black weather. My own mother I saw only once that I remember, and that time was in
a dream of some sort. Yet Nahvah looks remark-ably like that dream-image, even to her littleness.
“I am reasonably all right,” she said. “But—
though he was your friend, Papa, he was my own godfather. I knew him all my life.”
Godfathers can be important relations, or trivial ones. Rudof took his godfatherhood very seriously.
We had many arguments over the matter of gifts. Sometimes I won, but there was a closet of rich dresses
at the statehouse in Velonya that Navvie wore only to visit the king. They embarrassed her. She would
not have to wear them again.
I sat at her feet, my chin on my knees, slightly faint from the odor of the herbs and the exhaustion of
sorrow. From this level I could see that Navvie was wearing her pistol in her waistband. Usually she
stuffed it in her purse.
“He told me to call him ‘uncle.’ I was six years old, but already I knew that was dangerous, because
the other children in the court grew jealous.”
“Children were not exactly the problem, but you were right, dear. It was dangerous.”
“So I never called him that when there were other people in the room, and he didn’t correct me. So
he must have known, too. That it wasn’t a good idea. After a year or so, I pretended to forget.”
“So did he,” I answered her, though Rudof had never told me of this. “But he would have liked to
have a daughter. Or a son that loved him.”
Navvie sighed and her hand sought out the pis-tol’s butt. “I think he was easier to love as a
godfa-ther than, he would have been as a father. So. What are we to do now?”
It was Arlin’s gift to change mood so smoothly from the painful to the practical that my mind would
stumble, trying to keep up. Navvie has taken
,
on a lot of her mother’s traits, now that she is grown. I
still—stumble to keep up.—
I pointed at the pistol. “Do you think Rudofs death affects our security, girl? Down here in Can-ton?”
“There is no security,” she replied, quoting Powl, whom she can barely remember. “Not anywhere
on this earth. But I am carrying this because the new barrel is promised for today. I am to be at the
smith’s this afternoon.”
As I stood up I slipped the pistol away from her and looked it over. “Were you planning to exchange
the barrels with a shot in the chamber?”
Navvie put out her hand and I gave the thing back to her. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Navvie. If
the day feels like that to you, keep the pistol loaded. My own feelings are too discorded for use.”
—
We took our midday at one of Canton’s coffee and pastry shops, which are far superior to the inns
of my home, except that they serve a bad beer., Until Navvie mentioned the fact, I did not notice I had
not eaten my dinner at all. I remember being amazed at this, and wondering whether somehow the waiter
had changed my plate for a joke. I wrapped the pie in a clean handkerchief, and if I recall correctly,
threw it out two days later when I encountered it in my coat pocket.
The day’s inertia took us to the smithy afterward. Gunsmithery is another aspect in which Canton
leaves the North behind.
I am old enough to have no feeling for guns. The two-man harquebus of my youth was as like to
blow off the head of the wielder as that of his opponent. And also, back at Sordaling School, we were
taught a gun was no weapon for an officer, let alone gentry or knight. But the rough tools of my youth
bear little resemblance to Navvie’s pistols.
She has had always an affinity for powder-weapons, which she got neither from Arlin nor my-self.
Perhaps it is her slightness and lack of reach that makes a, pistol more appealing to Navvie than a sword,
or brawling hand-to-hand. Perhaps the noise, speed, and violence of the things make a bal-ance with the
labor and compassion she exerts in her medical work. She herself says it is only the future catching up
with us, and I try to catch up with Nav-vie as she studies with one gunmaker after another. Four
countries’ worth, so far.
The state of the craft in Canton was formidable. From J. Sninden of the Parade Wharf came the first
pistols of standardized bore caliber, and the first presses that created leads that would fit them.
It was to Sninden’s we went now, but what Nav-vie had in mind was
,
a few steps in advance of the
common pistol.
She had seen a weapon in Bologhini that could be loaded, like a fine cannon, from the rear of the
bar—rel. This would add rapidity to the firing and make it possible for the user to see his packing
directly, we were told. It did not work; in fact, the barrel-slide flew farther than the bullet and in a very
dif-ferent direction. Nonetheless, the idea stole my daughter’s fancy, and she had been thinking about it
for two years. In an attempt to prolong her life, so had I.
The workshop smelled so of burned powder that it reminded me of a battlefield, and the tragedy of
the day made that association more vivid. Navvie had never seen a battlefield, though, and she had the
resilience of youth, so she strode across the room with anticipation, kicking her long skirts with every
step.
“Jonshen, did you do it? Is it ready?”
Jonshen Sninden is half-deaf, for obvious reasons, but like many another he could hear what he
wanted to hear. He came out of the back room, his hands blackened and his leather apron brightened
with shavings of steel.
“I didn’t know if you’d be here, little girl,” he said, and then he saw me and bowed, touching his
forehead as though I were somebody. “Yes, I have a barrel to try, and it fits your daddy’s slug-casket.
No more than that can I say.”
My “slug-casket” was simply a barrel within the barrel to direct the explosion forward and away
from the opening on the top and back, so near to the shooter’s (my daughter’s) face. It held the powder
and the wad and was topped with the pellet. It was to be made of steel, but I had no tools that would
bore steel and no fire to melt steel, so the experi-mental type was of brass. Despite the fact that the
presence of the casing meant the volume of powder and weight of shot had to be small, my own
hand-iwork terrified me, and I was glad to see that Snin-den had set up a vise to hold the butt of the
pistol, and a target backed by a sandbox to receive the pel-let. At my encouragement, he added bags of
sand around the barrel and a string, the latter to pull the trigger at a distance. I think both Sninden and
Nav-vie thought me a spoilsport.
We stood in the doorway to the room behind, and had I my way, we would have closed the door
and run the string through the keyhole.
Sninden offered the pull to Navvie, as she was instigator of this experiment, but she told him she was
not attached to the moment, and I heard foot-steps coming up the stairs behind us as he pulled the string.
The reverberation was sharper than I expected, and accompanied by the thunk of the lead into the
target and a short screech from the tall, well-dressed man behind us. He recovered himself. “Doctor
Na-zhuret?”
The gunsmith and my daughter deserted me. “Mr. Kavenen,” I said, to be difficult. “The doc-torate is
honorary.”
He had recovered himself. He sniffed around ap-preciatively as he crossed the room to me.
“Powder. What a masculine smell. Well, need we be strangers to honor, Mister Doctor Nazhuret
Kavenen?” He was very tall, and enjoyed standing close.
Feeling even more difficult now, I wanted to tell him that only the name Timet went with the name
Kavenen, whereas “Nazhuret” was fitted with the suffix “aid’Nahvah: aminsanaur.” I escaped making
myself such a fool, for I recognized the gentleman. He was Lord Damish: aristocrat functionary of the
burgher-driven Cantoner Council. I had hung over that council in the visitor’s gallery, where every
hu-man being had the right to watch proceedings, and heard the seventy-six councilors in their flat,
Can-toner voices debate their infinite question of tariffs. The house of Damish is like the skin of the
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