Free Lens of the World by R. A. MacAvoy Page A

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called the Midnight Candle and that Powl cataloged as 1904D. (I did not know what the
“D” stood for.) The various colorations of the stars intrigued me; why some should be
distinctly red and others flickering blue while most were so chaste a silver…
    I remembered how when serving in the horse-ménage at school, I was taught to heat the coal forge until the flame, viewed from the side, was blue and the shoes heated to dull cherry. I asked Powl whether the colors of the stars could have anything to do with their heat (I was not so ignorant as not to know the stars were hot), and he had no answer for me.
    I also tracked the four planets through their orbits with the same scrupulous, star fancier’s care. It had been done already by Adlar and years earlier on other, smaller instruments, but I seemed to feel the great bodies needed my own verification before they could be quite predictable.
    Also this spring I studied animal movement, spying on the hunting badgers through the frost. Powl stepped up my program of martial exercise, not so much because he seemed to think it an important study but because it was springtime and the sweat was appropriate. He took to jumping out at me from hidden places both at home and in the neighboring woods. I found this habit of his very irritating and for a while it destroyed my serenity completely as I saw my enemy behind every tree and under each shadow. Once I remember, in a brake of dead ferns, spinning at some intimation of assault and punching a two-point buck deer between the eyes.
    I hurt my hand, but I knocked the creature cold.
    Sometime while I was so occupied, perhaps as the narcissi were blooming on the acid mulch of the forest floor, Velonya declared war against the Falink Islands, in retaliation for their multiplying raids against our coast. Also at this time King Ethelbhel died, some said after hearing of the destruction of the flagship test completely within sight of the city of Vesinglon. Of the passage of both these events I was ignorant for over a year.
     
    In these years half my study was stillness, but the complementary half was movement. I cannot teach or even describe the art of movement to you, sir, though I have sat here on a hard seat for the better part of an hour, ruining good paper in the effort. At Sordaling I was taught, “The world strikes back against every blow, and strikes exactly as hard as the blow delivered,” but that is not the art of movement but only the science of it; the art I learned from the sly feet and clever elbows of my teacher, Powl. This was also how I learned much about the grass, for sometimes it was more inviting to lie flat and investigate the ragged croppings of the deer than to get up and be knocked down again.
    If I give the impression that Powl taught me personal combat by beating me repeatedly, I do him wrong. He disapproved of such teaching, and knocked me down not out of punishment but by way of illustration. Unfortunately, there was so very much to illustrate. By the second year of my instruction I had been rolled over him, thrown under him, tripped, eluded, and simply lost so many dozens of times that upside down was as natural to me as walking. I began to move like a baby monkey, which was perhaps appropriate to my stature and face.
    I was also as owlish as a baby monkey, from long unsociability, and in certain things as timid as I imagine a baby monkey to be.
    At this time we were speaking in a language the source and name of which I was not told It was highly inflected and long in the vowels, with unpredictable diphthong combinations. Powl said it would someday be an important tongue to me and that its power to influence human thought was almost magical. (Almost magical is as close as that old magician ever admitted.)
    I will always think of this as a lonely language, partly because I was so alone when it made up my days.
    As summer ripened and I graduated from mirrors to prisms and spherical lens grinding and from