The creature shivered. It would stay where it was.
Peet made camp with more than an hour of daylight left in the sky. For one thing, he found a good spot—by a little stream, in the middle of thick brush through which nothing could come silently. For another, he wanted time to find lenses which really suited him.
That took most of the time till sunset. A lot of the lenses were like the first one he’d tried: better than nothing, but not as good as the ones that had broken. Peet clenched his fists. For all he knew, a dozen lenses perfect for him still lay in that third room of the shop. He laughed mirthlessly. Going into Uvalde once had been quite bad enough. Going back . . .
A few minutes later, he picked up a concave lens thicker than any he’d tried so far. He held it up to his right eye, and yelled out loud when everything in the world abruptly became so sharp-edged that each blade of grass, each ripple on the stream might have been individually carved out.
“So that’s what I need,” he breathed, and set about finding another fat lens. Most, he discovered, were off in a corner of one tray. A bit of experiment let him pick one from among them.
He put the two lenses he had chosen in front of his eyes, looked around. “Better than the ones I had,” he said, awed. Even the first stars of evening seemed almost clear enough to reach out and touch.
He got the glasses frames out of Snowdrop’s saddlebags. The first thing he saw was that not all of them would fit the lenses he needed. Then he noticed that all of them were steel or plastic; none was gold. He remembered the gaps in the wall of frames. What the looters had been after there was plain enough now.
He picked a steel pair; several of the plastic ones were already cracked. Then he had to figure out how to get the lenses into the frames. Most people, even after realizing how the tiny screws worked, would have had a tough time manipulating them. Peet found it easy to slip the blade of his dagger into each screw’s narrow groove, even though he had to hold the frame so close to his eyes that it kept hitting his nose.
For once, he thought, his shortsightedness actually gave him an edge. “Yeah, for once,” he answered himself. Once in a lifetime wasn’t worth it.
He tightened the last screw, cleaned the lenses with a scrap of cloth, set the glasses on his nose. The right earpiece was tight. He hardly noticed. He’d fix it later, if he remembered to. It was still better and lighter than the frame he’d made for himself. And he could see again.
He sorted through the rest of the lenses he’d brought out of Uvalde, searching for the ones most like those he was wearing. He carefully wrapped the potential spares in cloth. With luck, they would last him a lifetime and keep him from depending on the vagaries of traders-—or on desperate adventures like the one he’d just gone through.
Was going through, Peet corrected himself. If he started thinking of himself as already safe and back at his yurt, odds were he’d never get there.
“Now I can even tell what to be wary of,” he said. But not for much longer—it was almost full dark now. Peet took off his glasses, rolled himself in his blanket, and slept.
That tiny dot on the horizon had to be Clan Staiklee’s rearguard rider. Peet had been following the track of the clan’s herds and yurts a day and a half now: about time he caught up. He clucked at Snowdrop. The horse began to trot.
As Peet drew closer, the way the rider sat his horse began to look familiar. Whoever he was, he wasn’t doing much in the way of rearguarding, just riding along without a care in the world. That also seemed familiar to Peet. “Yaah, Mikk!” he tightbeamed. “What would you do if I was really trouble?”
He had the satisfaction of watching Mikk Staiklee almost jump out of his skin. “Peet!” Mikk beamed back as soon as he had enough composure to think straight. “I was afraid you’d be buzzards’ meat by now, headin’ out like that without bein’ able to see where you were goin’.”
“Not me,” Peet answered. He went on, “Sun and Wind, that shirt you’re wearing is an ugly shade of yellow. You piss on it, or what?”
Mikk looked down at himself, then his head snapped toward Peet. “You even got yourself new glasses. Sun and Wind.” He shook his head in wonder. Peet could see him shake his head in wonder, and that was the most wonderful thing of all.
Peet caught up with Mikk, rode past him. “I’m heading on to the yurts,” he told him. “My belly’s growling like a prairiecat in heat.”
“Want me to beam ahead an let ’em know you’re on your way?”
“Thanks, no. Let’s let it be a surprise.”
“Fair enough. I’d say you’ve earned the right.” Mikk waved Peet on.
He was within fifty yards of the yurts before anyone noticed him. But when the beamed and shouted cry “Peet’s back!” went up, the commotion that followed was plenty hectic enough to keep from disappointing him.
Drivers jerked on their reins to bring the yurts to a halt. Men, women, and children came spilling out and crowded around Peet, pounding him on the back and pulling him off Snowdrop as if they were dragging down prey. And so in a way they were, for his return was news, something they all needed as much as fresh game.
He started to tell his story several times, only to be interrupted by greetings from people just fighting their way through the crowd to him. One of those people was Ann. That greeting was more thorough, that interruption lasted longer than any that had gone before. The rest of the clan watched and leered and whooped.
Peet finally, reluctantly, let Ann draw her lips away from his. Her eyes shone—that he could see how her eyes shone gave him a pleasure different from but hardly less than her kisses. She studied his face, studied the look of the new glasses. “I like these better than the ones you used to have,” she said. “They let me see more of you. Do they do as much to help you
see?”
“More,” he answered. “Now I can tell better than ever how beautiful you are.” Watching her cheeks flush let him have that strange double pleasure again: knowing he had pleased her and seeing he had pleased her.
“I was afraid you would be—” Ann thought better of that beginning, tried another: “Going off like that by yourself was dangerous, Peet, with your eyes the way they are. I’d love you whether you could see past the end of your nose or not.”
“I know you would,” Peet said, but he remembered how pity had been mixed with that love. He went on, “But to everyone else in the clan, without glasses I would’ve just been a buffoon the rest of my days, always falling over my own feet or bumping into things. I didn’t want that—those last few weeks were nothin’ but torment to me. So I decided I had to go and fix things up If I could. Sun and Wind, Ann”—he paused to grin at her—“I just purely got tired of makin’ a spectacle of myself.”
Damnation
by Sharon Green
SHARON GREEN has a business card that says: “Novelist, Student of Chaos, Supporter of Barbarians and Chocolate Chip Cookies.” Believe it. She is the author of the well-known Trevillian series.
How small is the difficulty in remembering back to the time I was no more than a babe, the time 1 first became truly aware of those around me. We who were very young were taken for the first time to hear the words of Mr. Skeel, the leader of our community, who spoke to us rather than to the adults about us. I myself found the occasion less than impressive or frightening despite the presence of so many large people around me, a reaction shared by none of my age group except for Pember.
Pember was the son of Mr. Skeel, and although 1 had never been quite so close to him before, I had seen him running about among the houses, making a great nuisance of himself wherever he went. He once took the carved stick Arris’s father had made for him and simply walked away with it, and when Arris went crying to his father, he had been told the stick must be considered a gift to Pember. The boy was the son of Mr. Skeel, after all, and was not to be denied anything he wished. Arris had done no more than snuffle over the loss, but as Pember stood himself beside me that day, I knew I would have done a good deal more.