Compleat Traveller in Black (10 page)

Hesitant, he approached the traveller in black. “Sir, by your leave,” he muttered, “will this purchase anything at your tavern here?” And proffered the coin on a trembling palm.

Taking it, the traveller turned it over, and was at pains to conceal the shock he felt on seeing the name inscribed on its reverse.

Ys!

A city in the realm of time so great and famous that rumors of it had crossed the tenuous border of chaos, running ahead of those who bore its news until the stories were magnified beyond believing, until true prophecies arose caused by the recirculation of those rumors through one corner of eternity and back to time ahead of reality.

Hmm …!

“No?” said the stranger sadly, seeing how long the black-clad one spent staring at his only money.

“Why –!” the latter exclaimed, and rubbed the coin with his fingertips, very lightly. “I should say so, friend! Is it not good gold, that passes anywhere?”

“Gold?” The stranger snatched it back, almost dropping his shabby bag in his agitation, and scrutinized it incredulously. Through the coppery tarnish gleamed the dull warm yellow of precious metal.

Without more ado he slumped into the vacant chair beside the traveller. A waggle-hipped servant-girl came promptly to his signal. “Food and drink!” he snapped, letting the miraculous coin ring on the table. “I starve and I’m clemmed with thirst – therefore be quick!”

Eyes twinkling, the traveller regarded his new acquaintance. “And how are you called, sir?” he demanded.

“Jacques of Ys is my name,” the other sighed. “Though truth to tell I’m not overmuch inclined to add my origin to my name any longer.”

“Why so?”

“Would you wish to be shamed by connection with a cityful of fools?”

“Considering the matter with due reflection,” said the traveller, “I think – no.”

“Well, then!” Jacques ran his long bony fingers through his already tousled hair; the rain had been trying to slick it down, but half an ocean would have been unequal to the task. He was a gaunt man, neither old nor young, with burning grey eyes and a bush of tawny beard.

“So in what way are the folk of Ys so foolish?” probed the traveller.

“Oh, once they were a great people,” grunted Jacques. “And that’s where the trouble started, I suppose. Once we had a fleet – and not on any landlocked lake, either, but on Oceanus itself, mother of storms and gulls. Also we had an army to guard our trade routes, skillful money-changers, wise counselors. … Ah, Ys was among the noblest cities of the world!”

“I believe I’ve heard so,” the traveller agreed.

“Then, sir, your news is stale!” Jacques thumped the table.

“Listen! There came changes – in the times, in the weather, in the currents of the sea. To be expected,
I
said, for did not Heraclitus teach us ‘all things flow’? But soft living and much ease had stolen the brains out of the people’s heads! Faced with the silting up of our great estuary, did they turn to it and build dredgers? They did not! Faced with a landslide that closed our chief silk-road, did they send scouts to spy out other routes? They did not! Faced with long winters that killed our autumn wheat in the ground, did they sow barley or the hardy northern oat? They did not!”

“Then what did they do?” the traveller inquired. “If anything.”

“Fell first to moaning and wringing their hands, and lamenting their sad fate by night and day; then, when this proved unfruitful and incapable of filling the granaries, turned to a crowning imbecility and invoked the aid of magic. I see you scowl, sir, and well you may, for all the world knows that magic is a vain and ridiculous snare laid by evil demons in the path of humankind.”

This was a stubborn unobservant fellow, clearly; with his hand closed around a coin that veritable magic – and no petty domestic hearth-spell, either – had turned from copper to gold, he could still make such a blunt assertion. He would not care for this domain in which he now found himself. … Still, there was no help for that.

“And to what purpose tended their research in – ah –
magic?
” the traveller asked.

“To bring back the great days of the past if you please,” said Jacques with majestic scorn, and on the last word crammed his mouth full from a dish the serving-girl placed before him.

While he assuaged his hunger, his companion contemplated these new data. Yes, such an event as Jacques had outlined would account for the paradox of Ys reversing the cosmic trend and exchanging time for eternity and its attendant confusions. But there must have been a great and terrible lust in the minds of very many people for the change to come about; there must have been public foolishness on a scale unparalleled throughout the All. Thinking on this, the traveller felt his face grow grim.

Reaching for his staff, he made to depart, and Jacques glanced up with his cheeks bulging. Having swallowed frantically, he spoke. “Sir, did I intrude on your meditations? Your pardon if –”

“No, no! You merely recalled me to some unfinished business. You are correct in your description of the folk of Ys. They are fools indeed. So do not – if you will take my advice – return there.”

“Where else am I to go, then?” countered Jacques, and for a second despair looked out from behind his eyes. “I set off thinking no place could be worse than my hometown had now become – yet on this brief journey I’ve seen horrors and marvels that make me question my good sense. I met a creature on the road that was neither man nor beast, but a blending; I saw a shining sprite washing feet like alabaster in a cloud rimmed with rainbows; and once when I bent to drink from a stream I saw pictures in the water which … No, I dare not say what I thought I saw.”

“That would be the brook called Geirion,” said the traveller, and appended a crooked smile. “Don’t worry – things seen therein can never become real. The folk round about visit it to rid themselves of baseless fears.”

Jacques glanced over his shoulder at the motley crowd of passersby and shivered with dismay. “Nonetheless, sir, I’m not minded to remain in this peculiar city!”

“It would be more comfortable for you to adapt to the local customs than go home,” the traveller warned. “A certain rather spectacular doom is apt to overtake Ys, if things are as you say.”

“Doom!” cried Jacques, and an unholy joy lit his face. “I told them so – over and again I told them! Would I could witness it, for the satisfaction of seeing how right I was!”

The traveller sighed, but there was no help for it now; his single nature bound him to single courses of action. He said sourly, “As you wish, so be it. Go hence towards the city men call Acromel, the place where honey is bitter, but do not enter it. Go rather around it towards the setting sun, and you will reach a grey hill fledged with grey bushes where there are always dust devils, which will wipe out your tracks the moment you have passed. From the top of that hill you may behold Ys at the moment of disaster.”

“Now just a moment!” Jacques exclaimed, rising. “From my boyhood up I’ve wandered around Ys, and I know of no such hill as you describe!”

The traveller shrugged and turned away. Jacques caught his cloak.

“Wait! What’s your name, that you say such strange things and send me on such an improbable errand?”

“You may call me anything you choose,” the traveller said, shaking off the other’s grip with a moue of distaste.

“Hah! That’s rich!” Jacques set his hands on his hips and laughed. “But still … Well, sir, for the sake of wanting to see how Ys goes to its doom, I’ll follow your instructions. And my thanks!”

He parodied a bow, flourishing a hat that was not on his head.

“You may not thank me more than this once,” said the traveller sadly, and went his way.

III

Lord Vengis sat in the Hall of State at Ys and surveyed the nobility assembled in his presence. He tried to ignore the sad condition of his surroundings. Once this had been a building to marvel at: mirrors higher than a man lined its walls, set between pilasters of marble, gilt, and onyx, while the arching roof had been painted by a great master with scenes in eleven bright colors, depicting the birth of Saint Clotilda, the martyrdom of Saint Gaufroy – that one was mostly in red – and the ascension of Saint Eulogos to heaven on the back of a leaping dolphin. Moreover the floor had been carpeted with ermine and bear pelts.

The pelts had gone. Or, to be more exact, some of them had gone away and returned – but in unusual fashion: they had been cut into coats for the nobles, and now enveloped impressive paunches and bosoms with the assistance of gilt girdles. Moreover, half the mirrors were fly-specked and not a few were cracked, while worst of all some of the slabs of marble forming the floor had been prized up to expose crude foundations of rubble – a rumor having run around as to the efficacy of marble for sacrificial altars – and on an irregularity due to this cause, in an ill-lit corner, Lord Vengis had twisted his ankle en route to his throne.

This hall was a condensation of the trouble afflicting the whole of Ys. The harbors that once had swallowed the twice-daily ocean tides were blocked with stinking silt; grass grew on the stone moles, as in the wheel-ruts on the fine old roads leading away from the city – at least, according to report; none of the personages present could vouch for the assertion, all having declined to venture out of Ys since things took this turn for the worse. So also in the gardens of the great houses a plant like, but not identical with, mistletoe had spread over the handsome trees, letting fall a horrid sticky fruit on those who walked beneath; in the deep sweet-water wells servants claimed that they heard ominous voices, so that now they refused to let down buckets for fear of drawing up those who spoke; last week’s market had reduced to two old men squabbling over a cracked earthen pot and a comb of dirty wild honey. …

Lord Vengis glowered at the company, and they fell silent by degrees. Their attendants moved, silent as shadows – which some of them were – to the double doors of entrance, closed them, barred them against all intrusion with the necessary charms, for this was no discussion that the common people might be permitted to overhear.

With the clanging down of the final bar, one leapt to his feet at the end of the front rank of gilded chairs, uttering a groan and cramming his fingers in his mouth. All eyes turned.

“Fool, Bardolus!” Lord Vengis rapped. “What ails you?”

“In that mirror!” Bardolus gibbered, trying to point and finding his shaky arm disobedient to his will. “I saw in the mirror –”

“What? What?” chorused a dozen fearful voices.

Bardolus was a small man whose manner was never better than diffident; he was accounted clever, but in a sly fashion that had won him few friends and none that would trust him. He said now, mopping sweat, “I don’t know. I saw something in the mirror that was not also in this hall.”

Time hesitated in its course, until Lord Vengis gave a harsh laugh and slapped the arm of his throne.

“You’ll have to grow accustomed to manifestations like that!” he gibed. “So long as the
things
stay behind the mirror, what’s to worry you? It’s when they emerge into the everyday world that you must look out. Why, only the other day, when I was in my thaumaturgical cabinet testing a certain formula – But enough of that.” He coughed, and behind his polite covering hand glanced to see whether his words had had the desired effect. They had, even though the episode to which he referred was an invention. True, he had spent much time in his cabinet; true, he had rehearsed many formulae; alas, nothing so far had come of his efforts, not even a harmless specter in a mirror.

Still, that would change. One could tell by the very feel of the air. There were forces in it that no man could put a name to, and sometimes scalps prickled as before a thunderstorm.

“We are here for a reason you know,” he said after an impressive pause. “We are agreed on the sole course open to us. We admit that modern Ys stands on the shoulders of great men and women. Yet to what has their ambition led us? Unkind fate has burdened us with such difficulties as they never encountered. We eat stale bread and rancid meat where they gorged pies running with gravy and soft delicious fruits from the ends of the earth. We drink brackish water, none too clean, where they enjoyed wine and mead, and beer like brown crystal!

“We have concluded that for all their – admitted-greatness,
they
are responsible, not us! We did not ask to be born at a time when our trees rot, our crops wither, our harbor is blocked. In every way they are responsible: for siting Ys where it stands, for breeding children to inherit such a miserable legacy!”

“Aye!” came a rumble of assent from around the hall.

“Some fainthearts, some ignorant fools, have argued against us,” Vengis went on, warming to a speech he had not intended to deliver. “These, of course, were baseborn, lacking the insight which is the birthright of nobility. Jacques the scrivener, for example, would have had us turn to with hoes and shovels and clear the harbor – and if hoes and shovels lacked, with our
bare hands!”

This time the response lay between a shudder and a chuckle.

“What’s become of Jacques, by the way?” someone asked audibly.

“Does it matter?” Vengis countered, drawing his beetling brows together. “We know we are adopting the right course. We have decided that we must employ more potent tools than crude – ah – agricultural implements to cope with so massive a disaster. We must, in short, restore all our fortunes, and the splendor of our city,
and
root out once for all the disaffection among the rabble spread by such as Jacques, by exploiting the mightiest means available to us. Magically, by decree of the will, by harnessing supernatural forces, we shall again make Ys the envy of the world!”