Compleat Traveller in Black (22 page)

This time, by alternation, the youngster shook his head. Infuriated, the smith flung down his tools and bunched his fists.

“I’ll teach you and the rest of ’em to make mock of me!” he roared. “Oh that they and you and everyone could see what life is like when you lack strong black iron!”

“As you wish,” the traveller said from a smoky corner, “so be it.”

Whereat all iron in the smithy turned to crumbling rust: the anvil, the hammerheads, the tongs, the chisels and the nails, the cramps that held the massy wooden lever of the bellows, even the blank horseshoes waiting in a pile. The smith let out a great cry, and the neighbors came running. Such was their laughter that shortly the phrase “like a smith without iron” entered the common parlance of Wocrahin. Indeed, he taught them to make mock. …

But the traveller was ill pleased. This was not like his customary regulation of affairs. It was clumsy. It was more like the rough-and-ready improvisations of the times before Time.

And he could not cure himself of thinking about Stanguray.

In Teq they still gambled to the point of insanity, and might supplanted right among its decadent people.

“No, you may not waste time making mud pies!” a woman scolded her toddler son, dragging him back from a puddle where a score of children were amusing themselves. “You’re to be the greatest winner since Fellian, and support me in my old age. Ah, would I knew how to make you understand my plans for your future!”

“As you wish,” sighed the traveller, who had taken station in the square into which the lightning-struck image of Lady Luck had tumbled – where now greedy unscrupulous landlords sold lodging by the night in squalid hovels to those who imagined sleeping here would bring good fortune.

The boy’s eyes grew round and a look of horror spread across his face. He sank his teeth in his mother’s arm, deep enough to draw blood, and took screaming to his heels, to scrape a living as best he could among the other outcasts of this now dismal city. Given the schemes his mother had in mind, he was the better for his freedom.

Yet that also struck the traveller as unbefitting, and still he could not rid his mind of thoughts of Stanguray.

In Segrimond the folk no longer tended a grove of ash trees. They had been felled to make a fence and grandstand around an arena of pounded rocks, where for the entertainment of the wealthy savage beasts were matched with one another and against condemned criminals, armed or unarmed according to the gravity of their offense and the certainty of the jury which had heard the evidence. Today the arena had witnessed the demise of a girl who had charged her respectable uncle with rape.

“Now this,” said the traveller under his breath, “is not as it should be. It smacks more of chaos, this indecision, than of the proper unfolding of time. When all things have but a single nature, there will be no room for the doubt which calls for resolution in this random manner.”

He waited. In a little the dead girl’s uncle, resplendent in satin trimmed with fur, came weeping from the vantage point reserved for privileged onlookers. “Ah, if you but knew,” he cried to fawning hangers-on, “how much it cost me to accuse my darling niece!”

“So be it,” said the traveller, and by nightfall the people did indeed know what it had cost him, in bribes to perjured witnesses. On the morrow he was kicked to death by a wild onager.

Yet and still the traveller felt himself infect with the foulness of the world, and could not release his mind from thinking about Stanguray.

Like Teq, Gryte was no longer rich. On the marches of its land a new town had grown up called Amberlode, a name commemorative of the reason for its founding. To it had removed the more enterprising of the old rich families of Gryte; against it the less enterprising were mouthing curses.

But the powers on which they called were petty compared for instance to those which had carried Ys – albeit briefly – back to eternity across the frontier of time, so their impact on Amberlode was minimal. Realizing this, a man who hated his younger brother for seizing an opportunity he had rejected cried aloud, and said, “Would it were I rather than he who enjoyed that fine new house in the new city!”

“As you wish,” murmured the traveller, who had accepted the hospitality this man accorded grudgingly to travellers in order to acquire virtue against some misty hereafter.

At once the situation was reversed … but because the younger brother under whatsoever circumstances was the more intelligent and talented of the two, when it came his turn to utter curses his spells were genuinely efficacious, and the fine new house collapsed, to the vast discomfiture of its then occupants.

* * *

And that was wrong!

The realization brought the traveller up short. There should have lain neither blame nor suffering on whichever brother chose aright and made the move to Amberlode, yet here it came, and with brutal force. From as far back as he could recall it had been the traveller’s intention that the literal interpretation he placed on the wishes he granted should be a means of ensuring justice. If penalties ensued, they should be confined to those who had deserved them. What was awry?

The constellations had not yet wheeled to the configuration marking the conclusion of his journey. By rights he should have continued in prescribed sequence from one stage of it to the next, to the next, to the next …

But he found he could not. If it were true that some hitherto unencountered foe, neither human nor elemental, now ranged against him, that implied a fundamental shift in the nature of all the realities. Beyond which, it hinted at something so appalling that he might as well abandon his task at once. He had believed his assignment binding, forever and forever, within and outside time. But it must necessarily lie within the power of the One for Whom all things were neither possible nor impossible, to –

He cancelled that thought on the instant. Completion of it would of itself wipe him from the record of what was, what might be, and what was as though it had never been. His status was, as he well knew, at best precarious.

Which made him think of the rope-walking children at Stanguray.

Which made him take the most direct route thither, and immediately.

Which taught him the most painful lesson of his existence.

IV

So far as human habitation went, initially around Lake Taxhling there had been only reed huts wherein dwelt fisherfolk who well understood how to charm their way across its waters, and distinguish by simple conjuration those natural fishes that were safe to eat from those which had been transformed by the river Metamorphia and on which a geas lay.

Certain onerous duties bought them this privilege, but by and large they regarded their prime deity Frah Frah as being, if exigent, not unkind.

Time, though, wore on, and by degrees they quit performance of the rituals that had purchased their livelihood; in particular, they no longer ceremonially burned down and rebuilt their homes twice annually.

By then it was no longer so essential to judge the nature of one’s catch; the river’s power was waning. Now and then someone died through carelessness, generally a child or an oldster, but the survivors shrugged it off.

Then, as the river’s magic diminished further, certain nomads followed it downstream: traders, and pilgrims, and people who had so ill-used their former farms that the topsoil blew away; and criminal fugitives as well. Finding that on the seaward side of Lake Taxhling there was a sheer enormous drop, they decided to remain, and the original inhabitants – being peaceable – suffered them to settle.

Henceforward the reed huts were not burned, because there were none. The newcomers preferred substantial homes of timber, clay and stone. Henceforward the shrines dedicated to Frah Frah were increasingly neglected. Henceforward meat figured largely in the local diet, as fish had formerly; herds of swine were established in the nearby woodlands, and grew fat in autumn on acorns and beechmast, while sheep and goats were let loose on the more distant slopes, though the grazing was too poor for cattle. The way of life around Lake Taxhling was transformed.

There followed a succession of three relatively gentle invasions, by ambitious conquerors, each of which endowed the area with a new religion not excessively dissimilar from the old one. It was a reason for children to form gangs and stage mock battles on summer evenings, rather than a cause for adult strife, that some families adhered to Yelb the Comforter and others to Ts-graeb the Everlasting or Honest Blunk. They coexisted with fair mutual tolerance.

Altogether, even for someone like Orrish whose stock was unalloyed pre-conquest, and whose parents maintained a dignified pride in their seniority of residence, life on the banks of Taxhling was not unpleasant.

Or rather, it had not been so until lately. Oh, in his teens – he had just turned twenty – he had been mocked because he confessed to believing in the fables told to children about a town below the waterfall with which there had once been trade. But he was strong and supple and could prove his point by scaling the ruined stairs both ways, using creepers to bridge the sections where the carven steps had crumbled, thereby demonstrating that the idea was not wholly absurd.

That, therefore, was endurable. So too was the military service imposed by the region’s current overlord, Count Lashgar, on all males between eighteen and twenty-one. It was a nuisance, but it was imperative if one wished to marry, and it enabled youngsters to break free of their parents, which could not be bad. Because the count had no territorial ambitions, and spent his time poring over ancient tomes, the most dangerous duties he assigned his troops consisted in keeping track of goats on hilly pastures, and the most unpleasant in the monthly shambles. There were too many people now for fish to feed them all, so the latest invader, Count Lashgar’s grandfather, had exhibited a neat sense of household economy by decreeing that the slaughter of animals should henceforth be an army monopoly, thereby tidily combining weapons training (they were killed with sword and spear) with tax collection (there was a fixed charge based on weight and species, which might be commuted by ceding one sheep of six, one goat of seven, and one hog of eight), with religious duty (the hearts were saved to be offered on the altar of his preferred deity, Ts-graeb the Everlasting), and with – as he naïvely imagined – an increase in the fish supply. It struck him as reasonable to assume that by establishing a shambles in the shallows of the lake one could contrive to give aquatic creatures extra nourishment, thanks to its waste.

The lake being sluggish, however, the stench grew appalling; moreover, it was the only source of drinking and cooking water. His son peremptorily removed the shambles to the very edge of the plateau, and for a long while his grandson Lashgar saw no grounds for disturbing this arrangement. Now and then in the old days one had seen, on the delta below, people shaking fists and shouting insults, but they were too far away to be heard, and none of the lowlanders had the temerity to climb the ancient stairs and argue. Not since before Orrish was born had it been deemed advisable to maintain double guards along the rim of the cliffs.

Maybe if that old custom had been kept up …

Perhaps, yes, things would not have taken such a horrifying turn around Taxhling. He would naturally not have been able to do what he was doing – deserting his post by night – without silencing his co-sentry or persuading him to come along; on the other hand, the necessity would not have arisen. …

Too late for speculation. Here he was, scrambling down the cliff, repeating under cover of darkness his climb of five years ago, wincing at every pebble he dislodged, for the steps rocked and tilted and some had vanished for five or ten feet together, and he had had no chance to assess which of the nearby creepers were most securely rooted. His muscles ached abominably, and though the night was frosty rivulets of perspiration made him itch all over. However, there was no turning back. He must gain the safety of the level ground below. He must let the people of Stanguray know what enormities one of their number was perpetrating, rouse them to anger and to action!

Under his cold-numbed feet a ledge of friable rock abruptly crumbled. Against his will he cried out as he tumbled into blackness. His memory of the climb he had made when he was fifteen was not so exact that he knew how high he was, though he guessed he fell no more than twenty feet.

But he landed on a heap of boulders, frost-fractured from the cliff, and felt sinews tearing like wet rags.

How now was he to bear a warning to Stanguray?

And if not he, then who?

There was nothing else for it. Despite his agony, he must crawl onward. Even though the witch Crancina had been spawned among them, the folk of Stanguray did not deserve the fate she planned. They had at least, presumably, had the sense to drive her out, instead of – like that damned fool Count Lashgar! – welcoming her and giving in to every one of her foul demands.

V

Autumn had begun to bite when the traveller returned to Stanguray. It was a clear though moonless night. Mist writhed over the marshes. The mud was stiff with cold, and here and there a shallow puddle was sufficiently free from salt to form a skim of ice.

Despite the chill, blood-reek was dense in the air.