Compleat Traveller in Black (14 page)

“Oh, misery me!” moaned Jacques, burying his head in his hands. “Would that I had never come to this pass! Would that what I’ve done could be undone!”

“As you wish, so be it,” said the traveller, and cheered up, for that put a very satisfactory end to this momentary aberration in the smooth progress of the cosmos. He tapped three times on the rock that had been Jacques’s seat, and under his breath he said, “Laprivan! Laprivan of the Yellow Eyes!”

Jacques screamed.

Below in the valley, the column of determinedly advancing men and women bound to wreak vengeance on Jacques hesitated, halted, and broke ranks in disorder that increased to panic. For out of the side of the hill Laprivan was peering, and what was behind his eyes belonged to the age when chaos was the All.

Some small power remained to him so long as he survived, and he applied it to this single and unique purpose: to wipe clean the slate of yesterday.

So he looked down on Ys, and saw there what was to him an abomination, the shadow of the past given substance. He reached out one of his arms, and erased – and erased – and erased. …

Honorius, sowing contagious fever on the streets, was not.

Thirty sated children, smeared with blood on faces and fingers, were not.

Bardolus’s mother, chuckling over the fate of her son, was not.

Shaping a noose from every rope in a cord-seller’s shop, the first of the line of the Hautnoix was not.

Brandishing his brutal trophies, the adulterous d’Icque was not.

Three who had come forth from a vault were not.

Stripped of its food, its draperies, its gold and silver and precious works of art, the house of Meleagra was silent.

And those who had come to regulate accounts with the decadent lordling Vengis took their leave.

Also many who had come forth from graves and sepulchers, from hollow walls and wayside ditches, from dungeons and the beds of rivers and the depths of wells … were not.

“So!” said the traveller in black, when he had restored Laprivan to his captivity. “You have a reprieve, Jacques. Are you glad of that?”

The tawny-bearded man mouthed an affirmative.

“And will you learn a lesson from it?”

“I’ll try – as heaven is my witness, I will try!”

“Fairly said,” the traveller declared. “Go, then, to join those hiding in the valley. Approach them as a friend, not showing you’re aware why they set forth bearing bludgeons. Say to them that the rule of chaos over Ys is ended, and so is Ys; they must return home for the last time and gather their belongings before they and all its people scatter to the corners of the world.”

“But – but is this our world?” Jacques whimpered. “On the way to Barbizond I saw … and now here …”

“Ah, you’ll suffer no more of that kind of thing. It belongs to yesterday, and with other traces of yesterday Laprivan has wiped it out.” The traveller allowed himself a smile. “And do not lament excessively for Ys. For cities, as for men, there comes a time. … Besides, there is a prophecy: a prince shall seek a name for his new capital, and he’ll be told of Ys, and out of envy for its greatness he will say, ‘I name my city Parys,
equal to Ys!
’ ”

“I have little faith in prophecies as a rule,” said Jacques, staring. “But in this extraordinary place … Well, no matter. Sir, I take my leave, and – and I thank you. You have held up an honest mirror to me, and I cannot resent it.”

“Go now,” the traveller adjured. “And be quick.”

He waited long on the brow of the hill while the last daylight dwindled away and the stars wheeled gradually to the conformation marking midnight. It became more and more difficult to see Ys; the towers melted into mist, the walls and gates were shadow-dark among shadows. For a while torches glimmered; then even they failed to be discerned, and when dawn broke there was neither the city, nor the traveller in black, for anybody to behold.

THREE

The Wager Lost by Winning

What stake will you adventure on this Game? (quoth Arundel)
.

Why, Sir, though I be naked and penniless, yet stand I in possession of my Head (saith Amalthea).

That prize I in no wise, quoth Arundel. I had liefer win a Cooking Pot than such a Numskull. Wager me in place of it that Treasure, which though you lose it to me shall be yours again when I have done.

–Fortunes and Misfortunes of Amalthea

I

Down the slope of a pleasant vale an army marched in good order: colors at the head fluttering in the warm summer breeze, drummers beating a lively stroke for the men behind perspiring in their brass-plated cuirasses and high-thonged boots. Each of the footmen wore a baldric with an axe and a shortsword in leather frogs, and carried a spear and a wide square shield. Each of the officers rode a horse draped in fine light mail, wore a shirt and breeches of velvet sewn with little steel plates, and carried a longs word in a decorated sheath. Sunlight glinted on pommels bright with enamel and gilt.

Leaning on his staff, the traveller in black stood in the shade of a chestnut tree and contemplated them as they filed by. Directly he clapped eyes on them, the banners had told him whence they hailed; no city but Teq employed those three special hues in its flag – gold, and silver, and the red of new-spilled blood. They symbolized the moral of a proverb which the traveller knew well, and held barbarous, to the effect that anything worth owning must be bought by the expenditure of human life.

In accordance with that precept, the lords of Teq, before they inherited their fathers’ estates, must kill all challengers, and did so by any means to hand, whether cleanly by the sword or subtly by drugs and venom. Consequently some persons had come to rule in Teq who were less than fit – great only in their commitment to greed.

“That,” said the traveller to the leaves on the chestnut tree, “is a highly disturbing spectacle!”

Nonetheless he stood as and where he was, neither concealed nor conspicuous, and as ever allowed events to pursue their natural course. Few of the rank-and-file soldiery noticed him as they strode along, being preoccupied with the warmth of the day and the weight of their equipment, but two or three of the officers favored him with inquisitive glances. However, they paid no special attention to the sight of this little man in a black cloak, and likely, a mile or two beyond, the recollection of him would be dismissed altogether from their minds.

That was customary, and to be expected. Few folk recognized the traveller in black nowadays, unless they were enchanters of great skill and could detect the uniqueness of one who had many names but a single nature, or perhaps if they were learned in curious arts and aware of the significance of the conjunction of the four planets presently ornamenting the southern sky in a highly specific pattern.

But there had been changes, and those who recognized him now were exceptional.

The journeys the traveller had made had long surpassed the possibility of being counted. Most of them, moreover, were indistinguishable – not because the same events transpired during each or all, but because they were so unalike as to be similar. A little by a little earnests of his eventual triumph were being borne upon him. Perhaps the loss of Ryovora into time had marked the pivotal moment; however that might be, the fact was incontestable. Soon, as the black-garbed traveller counted soonness, all things would have but one nature. He would be unique no more, and time would have a stop. Whereupon …

Release.

Watching the purposeful progress of the army, the traveller considered that notion with faint surprise. It had never previously crossed his mind. But, clearly, it would be a wise and kindly provision by the One who had assigned him his mission if his single nature should include the capacity of growing weary, so that in his instant of accomplishment he might surrender to oblivion with good grace.

That climax, though, still needed to be worked towards. He waited while the rear-guard of the army passed, slow commissary wagons drawn by mules, bumping on the rough track; then, when the drumbeats died in the distance, their last faint reverberation given back by the hills like the failing pulse of a sick giant, he stirred himself to continue on his way.

It was not until he came, somewhat later, to Erminvale that he realized, weary or no, he must yet contend with vastly subtle forces ranged against him.

For a little while, indeed, he could almost convince himself that this was to be the last of his journeys, and that his next return would find the places he had known tight in the clutch of time. The borderland between rationality and chaos seemed to be shrinking apace as the harsh constraint of logic settled on this corner of the All. Reason is the stepchild of memory, and memory exists in time, not the arbitrary randomness of eternity.

Thus, beyond Leppersley the folk remembered Farchgrind, and that being’s chiefest attribute had been that no one should recall his deceits, but fall prey to them again and again. Yet where once there had been a monstrous pile of follies, each a memento to some new-hatched prank – “Build thus and worship me, and I will give you more wealth than you can carry!” or: “Build thus and worship me, and I will restore you the health and vigor of a man of twenty!” (the wealth of course being ore by the ton load and the health that of a paralyzed cripple) – there were sober families in small neat timber houses, framed with beams pilfered from the ancient temples, who said, “Yes, we hear Farchgrind if he speaks to us, but we recall what became of Grandfather when he believed what he was told, and we carry on about our daily business.”

The traveller talked with Farchgrind almost in sorrow, mentioning this skepticism that had overtaken humankind, and accepted without contradiction the retort.

“You too,” said the elemental, “are part of the way things are, and I – I am only part of the way things were!”

Similarly, though there were hoofmarks on the road which Jorkas had patrolled, they were not his; some common carthorse had indented them, and rain tonight or tomorrow would make the mud a palimpsest for another horse to print anew. Moreover, at black Acromel that tall tower like a pillar of onyx crowned with agate where once dukes had made sacrifice to the Quadruple God was broken off short, snapped like a dry stick. In among the ruins fools made ineffectual attempts to revive a dying cult, but their folly was footling compared to the grand insanities of the enchanter Manuus who once had taken a hand in the affairs of this city, or even of the petty tyrant Vengis, whose laziness and greed brought doom on his fellows and himself.

“Ah, if only I could find the key to this mystery!” said one of them, who had bidden the traveller to share the warmth of a fire fed with leather-bound manuscripts from the ducal library. “Then should I have men come to me and bow the knee, offer fine robes to bar the cold instead of shabby rags, savory dishes instead of this spitted rat I’m toasting on a twig, and nubile virgins from the grandest families to pleasure me, instead of that old hag I was stupid enough to take to wife!”

“As you wish, so be it,” said the traveller, and knocked his staff on the altar-slab the fool was using as a hearth.

In the chill dawn that followed, his wife went running to her neighbors to report a miracle: her husband was struck to stone, unmoving yet undead. And, because no other comparable wonder had occurred since the departure of the Quadruple God, all transpired as he had wished. His companions set him up on the stump of the great black tower and wrapped their smartest robes about him; they burned expensive delicacies on a brazier, that the scent might waft to his nostrils; and sought beautiful girls that their throats might be cut and their corpses hung before him on chain-stranded gallows – all this in strict conformance with most ancient custom.

But after a while, when their adulation failed to bring about the favors which they begged, they forgot him and left him helpless to watch the robes fade and the fire die in ashes and the girls’ bodies feed the maggots until nothing was left save bare white bones.

Likewise, a packman met at Gander’s Well complained in the shade of brooding Yorbeth whose taproot fed his branches with marvellous sap from that unseen spring, and said, “Oh, but my lot is cruel hard! See you, each year when the snows melt, I come hither and with the proper precautions contrive to pluck leaves and fruit from these long boughs. Such growths no sun ever shone upon before! See here, a fuzzy ball that cries in a faint voice when you close your hands on it! And here too: a leaf transparent as crystal, that shows when you peer through it a scene no man can swear to identifying! Things of this nature are in great demand by wealthy enchanters.

“But what irks me” – and he leaned forward, grimacing – “is a matter of simple injustice. Do those enchanters plod the rocky road to Gander’s Well? Do they risk death or worse to garner the contents of a heavy pack? Why, no! That’s left to me! And what I get I must dispose of for a pittance to strangers who doubtless half the time botch the conjurations they plan to build on what I bring them! Would that I knew beyond a peradventure what marvels can be wrought by using the means that I make marketable!”