Compleat Traveller in Black (9 page)

Out of time and into chaos. Almost beyond belief.

At length he bestirred himself. There was nothing else for it – so he reasoned – but to set off on his journey of obligation, and come at last not to familiar, welcome Ryovora but to this enigma wished on him by fate and boding no good whatsoever.

Anxiety carried him far and fast, and little by little it was mitigated by relief. To learn that Acromel still stood where it had, albeit altered; to find that they yet fished Lake Taxhling when the proper stars came out, and that the river Metamorphia fed it with strange unspawned creatures, greedy and unwholesome – this was reassuring, an earnest of balance continued in the cosmos.

And at these places, and many many more, he did what on this as on all his journeys was required of him.

A lonely hut stood on the shelf edge of a mountain pasture in the land called Eyneran; here, when he paused to ask a crust of bread and a sup of ewe’s milk from the flock high and distant as clouds on the steep meadow, a woman with a frightened face opened the ill-carpentered door to him, and met his request with a silent shake of the head.

She was wrinkled and worn out beyond her years; yet the hut was sound, a savory smell filled the air, and the clean floor and many copper pots the traveller could see assorted badly with her ragged gown and bare feet. He waited. Shortly a cry rang out, man-deep, yet edged with a spoilt child’s petulance.

“Mother, come here! The pot’s boiling over! What’s keeping you, you lazy slut?”

“Mintra!” whispered the woman, and a patter of feet announced the passage of a girl, some twelve years old, across the single room to tend the pot.

Another cry, still louder: “Mother, I told you to come here! Mintra can’t lift the pot when it’s full, you stupid old bag of bones!”

“We can’t give you food,” the woman said to the traveller. “All of it is for my son.”

The traveller nodded, but waited still. Then at last with great heaving and panting the son came into view: bulging-bellied in his apparel of velvet worked with gilt wire and stained with slobberings of food, so tall he nearly scraped the roof with his pate, yet so fat he breathed hard for the simple effort of standing upright. His fist, big as a ham, cracked his mother behind the ear.

“Why don’t you die, you lazy old cow, and get it over with?” he bellowed.

“It’d be a merciful relief,” the woman whimpered. “And die I would of my own free will, but that I stand alone between you and Mintra! With me gone you’d take her like a harlot, sister or no!”

“And wouldn’t she be a tasty bit for my bed?” chortled the son with an evil grin, his tongue emerging thick as an ox’s to stroke his lips lasciviously.

“As you wish,” said the traveller, “so be it.” And he knocked his staff on the threshold and took his leave.

That night plague stole silent from the mountain mist, and took the mother as the son had wished; then the girl Mintra fled on light feet down the hill trails and the fever-giddy glutton went calling her among the heedless sheep until his gross weight dislodged a rock and sent him over a precipice to feed the crows.

In the rich city Gryte a thief spoke to curse the briefness of the summer night, which had cut short his plan to break the wall of a merchant’s countinghouse.

“Oh that dawn never overtook me!” he cried. “Oh that I had lasting darkness whereby to ply my trade!”

“As you wish,” said the traveller, “so be it.” And darkness came: two thick grey cataracts that shut the light away.

Likewise in Medham was another rogue, striving to seduce a lady who feared her charms were passing with the years so that he might win to a coffer of gold secreted in her chamber. “I love you!” declared this smooth-tongued deceiver. “I’d wed you had you no more than rags and a shack!”

“As you wish, so be it,” said the traveller, and bailiffs came to advise the lady that her house and treasure were forfeit on another’s debt. Upon which the liar turned and ran, not staying to hear a city officer hard on the bailiffs’ heels, come to report the honoring of the debt a day past due.

So too in Wocrahin a swaggering bully came down the street on market day, cuffing aside children with the back of his hand and housewives with the flat of his sword. “Oh that my way were not cluttered with such riffraff!” he exclaimed, his shoulder butting the traveller in the chest.

“As you wish, so be it,” said the latter, and when the bully turned the corner the street he walked was empty under a leaden sky – and the buildings on either side, and the taverns, and the shops. Nor did he again in all eternity have to push aside the riffraff he had cursed; he was alone.

* * *

This, however, was not the sum total of the traveller’s doings as he passed from place to place within his realm. In Kanish-Kulya they had built a wall to keep Kanishmen and Kulyamen apart, and from either side, set into the masonry, grinned down the skulls of those dead in a war for which the reason had long been forgotten. In this strange and dreadful place Fegrim was pent under a volcano; shadowed by its cone the traveller halted and spoke long and seriously with that elemental, and when he was done the country for a mile on every side was dusted with cinders, little and bright as fireflies.

At Gander’s Well, branched Yorbeth brooded in the guise of a tall tree whose main root tapped a wonderful subterranean spring and whose boughs, fed with miraculous sap, sprouted leaves and fruit the like of which had not been seen under any sun before. The traveller spent an hour in the shade of that tree, and for the questions he asked was constrained to carry away a red twig and later catch a cat and perform a ceremony with these two items – a price he paid with heavy heart, for he had been told nothing of any great use in his inquiries.

Also he consulted with Farchgrind, and in Leppersley he cast the bones of a girl’s foot to read the runes they formed, and after great labor he incarcerated Wolpec in a candle over whose flame he smoked a piece of glass which thereupon showed three truths: one ineluctable, one debatable, and one incomprehensible. That was in Teq, when the end of his journey was near.

So presently he came to Barbizond, where there was always a rainbow in the sky because of the bright being Sardhin, chained inside a thundercloud with fetters of lightning. Three courses remained to him: he might free Sardhin and let him speak, and from here to the horizon nothing would be left save himself, the elemental, and that which was of its nature bright, as jewels, or fire, or the edge of a keen-bladed knife; or he might do as once he had done under similar circumstances – address himself to an enchanter and make use of powers that trespassed too far towards naked chaos to be within his own scope – or, finally, he might go forward in ignorance to the strange city and confront the challenge of fate without the armor of foreknowledge.

Some little while remained before he needed to take his irreversible decision. Coming to Barbizond, therefore, he made his way down a fine broad avenue where plane and lime trees alternated in the direction of a steel-blue temple. There stood the altar of Hnua-Threl, who was also Sardhin when he chose to be; the people invoked him with daily single combats on the temple floor. They were not a gentle folk, these inhabitants of Barbizond, but they were stately, and died – in tournaments, or by the assassin’s knife, or by their own hand – with dignity.

A death had lately occurred, that was plain, for approaching the city gate came a funeral procession: on a high-wheeled cart drawn by apes in brazen harness, the corpse wrapped in sheets of lead and gold and interwoven leaves; a band of gongmen beating a slow measure to accompany musicians whistling on bird-toned pipes no longer than a finger; eight female slaves naked to the ceaseless warm rain; and at last a straggle of mourners, conducting themselves for the most part with appropriate solemnity.

He who passed penultimately of the mourners, however, was a fat and jolly person on each of whose shoulders perched a boy-child, and the two were playing peekaboo around the brim of his enormous leather hat. The traveller stared long at him before stepping out from the shelter of the nearest tree and addressing him courteously.

“Your pardon, sir, but are you not named Eadwil?”

“I am,” the fat one said, not loath to let the funeral wend its way to the graveyard without his assistance. “Should I know you as you apparently know me?”

“Perhaps not,” said the traveller in black. “I’d not expected to see you here; you were formerly one of the chief merchant-enchanters of Ryovora.”

“A long time ago,” Eadwil answered with a deprecating smile. The children on his shoulders giggled; one of them tried to catch hold of the traveller’s staff, almost lost his balance, and righted himself with the aid of a pat from Eadwil’s broad soft hand.

“May I ask what brought about your change of residence?” the traveller murmured.

“My change of employment.” Eadwil shrugged, again nearly dislodging the more venturesome boy. “You spoke of me as a merchant-enchanter; so I was! But when the decision was taken, back in the days of my youth, to let rational thought rule Ryovora and put an end to conjurations there, certain consequences followed. For myself I have no regrets; there was a geas on me which made my feet glow red-hot when I walked, and now nothing worse attends a long tramp like today’s than an occasional blister. And these my grandsons too – hey, you little nuisances? – they’d not be here today if I’d continued to submit to the other main restriction that purchased my powers.” He rubbed the boys’ backs affectionately, and they responded by pulling his ears.

This was quite true, as the traveller was aware. Eadwil had postponed the growing of his beard until unusually late in life by making the trade on which his command of magic had been founded.

“So there came an end to my conjuring of spices and fine silks, of rare wines and exotic perfumes!” Eadwil pursed his lips. “And there were, one must confess, certain persons in Ryovora who felt the lack of these luxuries and accused us retired enchanters of – ha-hm! – betraying them. Therefore I removed to Barbizond. It’s a fair city in its way, and even though the local customs are not wholly to my taste, here they do at least have scores of enchanters of their own, so that no one plagues me to be about magical doings. … You have late news of Ryovora, sir? For it comes to my mind that I’ve heard nothing from my old home in quite a while.”

The traveller gave a wry smile. “It’s a fair span since I set foot there, too. Indeed, I was hoping you might be able to give me certain crucial information which I lack, rather than vice versa.”

Eadwil looked politely downcast at being of no help; then one of the boys grew impatient and started to fidget.

“Home?” said his grandfather, and laughed indulgently. “Very well – old Harpentile is in no state to notice that we failed to attend his burying. Good day to you, sir,” he added to the traveller. “It’s been pleasant to renew our acquaintance, and I greatly hope you’ll soon find someone who can aid in your inquiries.”

“As you wish, so be it,” said the traveller under his breath, and a vast weight seemed to recede from his heart.

II

That accomplished, there was no more to do than sit and wait until the course of fate worked itself out. The traveller took a chair at a curbside tavern; with his elbows on a green tabletop, protected from the rain by a round blue umbrella fringed with pink, he watched the passers-by and wondered in what guise his helper would appear.

As the day wasted the avenue grew ever more crowded. Horsemen in bright jerkins came by with armor clanking at their saddlebows, challengers in some tourney for the hand of an heiress; also there were pedlars, and wonder-workers possessed of a few small tricks – for which they had paid excessively, to judge by their reddened eyes, pocked cheeks, limping gait, or boy-shrill voices. … No wonder, the traveller reflected, Eadwil felt his grandsons were the better bargain.

Women too passed: high-wimpled dames attended by maids and dandling curious unnamable pets; harlots in diaphanous cloaks through which it was not quite possible to tell if they were diseased; goodwives with panniers of stinking salted fish, loaves of fresh bread, and sealed jars of pollywogs for use in the commonplace home enchantments of this city.

And children likewise: many naked, not necessarily from poverty but because skin was the best raincoat under Barbizond’s light continual shower, others in fantastical costumes to match their parents’ whims – helmets of huge eggshells, bodices of leaves glued like scales, breeches made to resemble plant stems in springtime. With spinning windmills, toy lances, tops and hoops and skipping-ropes, they darted among the adults and left a trail of joyful disorder.

There was no joy in the heart of the traveller in black – only a dulled apprehension.

The places at the tables before the tavern filled with customers, until only one was left – the second chair at the table where the traveller waited. Then, to the instant, appeared a curious bewildered figure from the direction of the southern gate: a pale-faced, wild-haired man in a russet cape, clutching a pitiful bag of belongings like a baulk of timber in an ocean of insanity. Time had etched his brow with suffering, and the traveller knew, the moment he clapped eyes on him, that this was the person he expected.

Abreast of the tavern the stranger stopped. Enviously he scanned the delicacies placed before the customers: fragrant stoups of wine, dumplings in aromatic herbal sauce, mounds of mashed fruit stuck with crisp slivers of the moonbark that only this city’s enchanters knew how to conjure safe across the freezing gulf of space. … Huddling his bag under his arm, he felt in his scrip for money, and produced one solitary copper coin.