Compleat Traveller in Black (21 page)

“I deduce you are Crancina’s brother,” the traveller said after a pause.

“How so?” The boy blinked.

“You spoke of what Granny left to ‘us,’ as though you shared her.”

A grimace. “In fact, half-brother. I often wonder whether it was Granny’s curse that twisted me, for I know she disapproved of Mother’s second marriage … However that may be!” His tone took on a sudden urgency. “Will you not instruct me to deliver you something, if only a hunk of bread? For I should by now have served her the choicest of last night’s catch, rich with oil and fragrant with herbs, and grilled to perfection on the most odoriferous of our scant supply of logs. Any moment she will tongue-lash me until it stings like a physical castigation – at which, I may say, she is equally adept! Would you inspect my bruises?”

“There seems to be little love lost between you,” the traveller observed.

“Love?” The hunchback cackled. “She wouldn’t know the meaning of the word! So long as my father survived, and before our mother became bedridden, I made the most of life despite my deformity. Now she’s my sole commander, mine’s a weary lot! I wish with all my heart that someday I may find means to break free of her tyranny and make my own way in the world, against all odds!”

Prompt to his prediction Crancina shouted, “Jospil, why have you not set my breakfast on the embers? Costly wood is going up in smoke and all the customers are served!”

Her shrill reprimand drowned out the traveller’s reflexive murmur: “As you wish, so be it.”

Cringing, the boy regained the floor and scurried towards her. “Not so, sister!” he pleaded. “One remains unfed, and I did but inquire what he would order.”

Abruptly noticing the traveller, Crancina changed her tone to one of wheedling deference. “Sir, what’s your pleasure? Boy, make him room and bring clean dishes and a mug – at once!”

“Oh, I’ll not trouble you to cook for me,” the traveller answered. “Your brother has explained how casting your spell fatigues you, and you must need sustenance yourself. I’ll take a bit of fish from pickle, bread, and beer.”

“You’re courteous, sir,” Crancina sighed, sinking on a nearby bench. “Yes, in truth these foul-water days do take it out of me. In sum, they’re a cursed nuisance! Over and over I’ve proposed that a band of well-armed men be sent out, to trace the trouble to its source, but it’s on the high plateau, and these fainthearts hold that to be a place of sorcerers none can oppose. Monsters too, if you believe them.”

“Maybe it’s the one slaughtering the other,” Jospil offered as he set mug and platter before the traveller. “There must come an end of that, when all expire!”

“It’s not a joking matter!” snapped Crancina, raising her fist – and then reluctantly unballing it, as though belatedly aware she was being watched by a stranger. But she continued, “By all the powers, I wish I knew what use there is in spilling so much blood! Maybe then I could turn it to my own account for a change, instead of having to pander to the wants of these cajoling idiots, fool enough –
you
heard the girl, sir, I’ll warrant! – fool enough to eat salt eels for breakfast when their noses must advise ’em there’ll be nothing sweet to quench their thirst. Would you not imagine they could keep a day or two’s supply that’s fit to drink? If they can’t afford a coopered barrel, surely there are enough old marble urns to be had for the trouble of dragging them to the surface. But they can’t or won’t be bothered. They’re so accustomed to leaning out the window and dipping in the stream – and sending their ordures the same way, to the discomfort of us who live the closest to the sea – they regard it as a cycle in the natural order, never to be resisted, which if it does come right one day will do so of itself.”

“They pay you for performing your spell,” the traveller said, munching a mouthful of the pickled fish and finding it savory. “There’s a compensation.”

“I admit it,” said Crancina. “In time I may grow rich, as wealth is counted in this miserable place. Already two widowers and a middle-aged bachelor are suing for my hand, plus, of course, half a share in this cookshop. … But that is not what I want!” – with sudden fierceness. “I’m accustomed to being in charge, and I want that with all my heart and soul, and I’m seeking a way of securing my fate whether or not this dismal half-ruined town crumbles into the sea!”

So long ago there was not means to measure it, the traveller had accepted obligations pertaining to his sundry and various journeys through the land.

The enforced granting of certain wishes formed an essential element of the conditions circumscribing him … though it was true that the consequences of former wishes were gradually limiting the previous total of possibilities. Some now were categorically unimplementable.

But even as he muttered formal confirmation – “As you wish, so be it!” – he knew one thing beyond a peradventure.

This was not one of those.

III

Once it had been permitted him to hasten the seasons of the year and even alter their sequence. But that power belonged to the ages when the elementals roamed at large, their random frenzy entraining far worse divagations from the course of nature. Tamed and pent – like Litorgos under the delta of the river that no longer merited the name of Metamorphia – they were little able to affect the world. Events were tending, in the prescribed manner, towards that end which Manuus the enchanter had once defined as “desirable, perhaps, but appallingly dull.” The day would break when all things would have but one nature, and time would have a stop, for the last vestige of the chaos existing in eternity would have been eliminated.

To make way for a new beginning? Possibly. If not, then – in the very strictest sense –
no matter, never mind …

Until then, however, the elementals did still exist and fretted away with their enfeebled force, like Fegrim vainly beating at the cap of cold lava which closed the crater of his now-extinct volcano. Not a few had discovered that human practitioners of magic were, without having chosen to be, their allies. But there was a penalty attached to such collaboration, and the most minor of them had paid it long ago; they were reduced to activating hearth-charms. No doubt this was the fate that had overtaken Litorgos – no doubt it was he who drew the blood from the foul water, though he was in no position to benefit thereby. Blood had its place in magic, but it could never free an elemental.

But the traveller did not want so much as to think about Litorgos, or Stanguray, until the remainder of his business was completed. Nonetheless he did wish – and withal wished he could grant himself that wish, as he must grant those of others – that he could whirl the planets around to the conformation which would mark the conclusion of his journey, and thereby enable a return to that place which, with every pace he took, seemed more and more likely to become the focus of terrible and inexplicable events.

Making haste was pointless, though. The orderly succession of time which he himself had been responsible for, as river-silt had created land at Stanguray, now held him tight in its grip. Some relief from his apprehension might be obtained, however, by overoccupying himself. Accordingly on this journey he made a point of visiting not only those places familiar to him from aforetime – and sometimes from before time – but also newer locations.

One such was in the forest near to Clurm. Here in the shadow of great oaks a former petty lord, who held his birthright to have been usurped, planned with a group of fanatical followers to establish such a city as would lure anyone to remove thither at its mere description. Now they shivered in tents and ate wild game, half raw, and nuts and mushrooms; but this new city was to have towers that combed the clouds, and streets wide enough for a hundred to march abreast, and brothels with the fairest of women to attract spirited youths, and a treasury overflowing with gold and gems to pay their fee, and an army would be forged from them to overthrow the usurper, and magicians would be hired to render them unquestioningly loyal, and all in the upshot would be as this wild dreamer pictured it.

Except that after a year of exile his little band had not erected so much as a log cabin, deeming manual labor beneath their dignity.

“But the new Clurm will be of such magnificence!” asserted the lordling, seated as ever closest to the warmth of their tiny camp-fire; they dared not build a larger one, for fear of being spotted by the usurper’s forces, who roved free in the countryside while they hid among trees, being less beloved of the common folk. “It will be … it will be … Oh, I can see it now in my mind’s eye! Would you too could see its wonders! Would I could make you believe in its existence!”

Standing apart among underbrush, and leaning on his staff, the traveller said, “As you wish, so be it.”

Next morning the inevitable happened. The band awoke convinced that their city was real, for they imagined they saw it all about them. Joyful, bent on their leader’s errand, they set out towards all points of the compass and, just as he had predicted, returned with many eager young recruits.

Who thereupon, not finding any city grand or otherwise, set about those who had enticed them hither, beat them with cudgels, bound them hand and foot, and committed them for lunatics. The lordling was not exempted from this treatment.

But the traveller, departing, found himself unable to avoid thinking about Stanguray.

Therefore he turned aside from the road which led to Wocrahin, and made his way to a green thicket in the midst of a perfectly circular expanse of hard clay, which neither rain nor thawing after snow could turn to mud. Here was imprisoned Tarambole, with sway over dryness, as Karth formerly over cold in the land called Eyneran: a being to whom had not been imparted the gift of telling lies.

Within the thicket, concealed from sight of passers-by – which was as well, since lately the people of the region had taken much against magic – the traveller resigned himself to the performance of a ceremony none but he and Tarambole recalled. His actions gained him the answer to a single question, and it was not what he had looked forward to.

No, it was not, so Tarambole declared, a powerful and unsuspected elemental that drew his mind back, and back, and back again to thoughts of Stanguray.

“Would that I might consult with Wolpec,” sighed the traveller. But he knew not where that strange coy harmless spirit bided now; he had yielded too early to the blandishments of humans, and by his own volition had wasted his power to the point where it was needless to imprison him. He chose his own captivity. Much the same might be said for Farchgrind, who once or twice had provided intelligence for the traveller, and indeed for countless others.

There remained, of course, those whom he had only banished: Tuprid and Caschalanva, Quorril and Lry. … Oh, indubitably they would know what was happening! It was not out of the question that they themselves had set this train of events in motion. But to summon them, the most ancient and powerful of his enemies, when he was in this plight, weakened by puzzlement …

Had they set out to undermine him, knowing they could not match him in fair fight?

Yet Tarambole who could not lie had said: his disquiet was not due to the opposition of an elemental.

The gravely disturbing suspicion burgeoned in the traveller’s mind that for the first (and the next word might be taken literally in both its senses)
time
a new enemy had arrayed against him.

New.

Not an opponent such as he had vanquished over and over, but something original, foreign to his vast experience. And if it were not the Four Great Ones who had contrived so potent a device …

Then only one explanation seemed conceivable, and if it were correct, then he was doomed.

But his nature remained single, and it was not in him to rail against necessity. Necessarily he must continue on his way. He retrieved his staff and with its tip scattered the somewhat repulsive residue of what he had been obliged to use in conjuring Tarambole, and headed once more towards Wocrahin.

* * *

Where, in a tumbledown alley, a smith whose forge blazed and roared and stank yelled curses at his neighbors as he hammered bar iron into complex shapes. His only audience was his son, a boy aged ten, stepping on and off the treadle of the huge leather bellows that blew his fire.

“Hah! They want me out of here because they don’t like the noise, they don’t like the smell, they don’t like me – That’s what it boils down to, they don’t like me because my occupation’s not genteel! But my father lived here, and my grandad too, and I have clear title to the house. And they buy my wares, don’t they? Boy, answer when you’re spoken to!”

But the boy had been at his work three years, and the racket had made him deaf and inhalation of foul smokes had harmed his brain, so he could only nod or shake his head by way of reply. This his father had failed to register, being taken up with grievances as much imaginary as real.

Fortuitously this time the boy did the proper thing: he nodded. Thus assuaged, the smith resumed his complaining.

“If they don’t care to live hard by a forge, let ’em buy new homes outside the town – or, better yet, let ’em club together and buy me a house in the country, with a stream beside to lift and drop a trip-hammer! Let ’em turn their hands to helping me, as I do them! After all, a forge must be sited somewhere, right? They should see what it’s like to live without iron, shouldn’t they, boy?”