The Redemption of Althalus

by Eddings, Leigh;Eddings, David

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I had to go through Arum to get back to Hule, but that didn’t bother me too much, since I’ve always gotten along fairly well with the Arums. Well, I was sort of plodding my way up into the foothills of southern Arum late that summer, and when I happened to pass a wayside tavern, I decided to stop in for a cup or two of good, rich mead. The lowlanders evidently didn’t know how to brew mead, because all I’d been able to get down there had been wine, and wine leaves a sour taste in my mouth—almost as sour as the taste of all the things that’d gone wrong for me down there.”

  “You are going to get to the point here eventually, aren’t you, Althalus?” Dweia interjected.

  “It’s my story, Em,” he replied complacently, “so I’ll tell it the way it’s supposed to be told. You don’t have to listen, if you don’t want to.”

  “Get on with it, Althalus,” she said impatiently.

  “Anything you say, Em,” he replied blandly. “Well, Gher, as it so happened, there was a half-drunk loafer in the tavern who was babbling on and on about some Clan Chief who was supposed to be the richest man in Arum. I didn’t really pay all that much attention to his story, because at any given time there are probably forty or fifty ‘richest men in Arum’ floating around.”

  “The subject does come up fairly often,” Eliar conceded.

  “I’ll be the first to admit that I find the subject of money fairly interesting,” Althalus admitted, “but on this particular occasion, I was a bit more interested in the wolf-skin tunic that tavern loafer was wearing. Now, back in those days, it wasn’t really unusual to see people wearing clothes made out of the skins of wild animals, but this particular tunic was just a bit odd. Whoever had made it in the first place had left the ears on the wolf skin, and they stuck up from the hood of the tunic in a perky sort of way that looked kind of dashing—even elegant. Well, the fellow who was wearing it was a fairly typical Arum tavern loafer—drunk, stupid, and none too clean. The front of that fine tunic was all spotted with gravy he’d spilled on it, and it obviously hadn’t had a good brushing since the day he’d first put it on. It was clearly much too fine a garment for a man like that to be wearing, so I decided that maybe I should do something about that.”

  “And I’ll bet I know exactly what you had in mind.” Gher chuckled.

  “Don’t get ahead of the story, Gher,” Althalus chided. “Well, as I said before, the fellow in the tunic was already half-drunk to start with, so I bought him enough good, rich mead to push him on along the rest of the way, and by the time it got dark outside, he was far gone. I decided that we might as well get on with this, so I suggested that we might step outside for a breath of fresh air to clear our heads. He thought that was a wonderful idea, and so we went outside. He stumbled along until we got out a ways from the tavern. I took a quick look around to make sure nobody was watching, and then I whanged him on the head a couple of times with the hilt of my sword. He went down as if somebody had just cut the ground out from under him.”

  Gher laughed delightedly. “This is a real good story, Althalus,” he said enthusiastically. “What happened then?”

  “Those of us in the profession call it ‘the transfer of ownership.’ First I peeled my fine new tunic off him, and then I took his purse. The purse wasn’t really very heavy, but mine was quite a bit lighter. Then I took a good look at his shoes. They weren’t new, by any stretch of the imagination, but mine were so badly worn that if I’d held them up, daylight would’ve shown through. After I’d gathered up all my new possessions, the sour taste of civilization began to fade from my mouth.”

  “Whatever happened to that tunic?” Gher asked.

  Althalus sighed. “I had to throw it away,” he said sadly. “As I went on farther up into Arum, I came across other people who told me stories about that same rich Clan Chief.”

  “The story isn’t over yet, is it?” Gher asked eagerly. “I really like stories that keep on going like this one does.”

  “Most younger people prefer those stories,” Althalus agreed, “and some who aren’t so young. Some stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Other stories never end, maybe because they’re alive.”

  “Those are the kind I like,” Gher declared. “What happened next?”

  “Well, what happened might have been a coincidence, but when Emmy’s around, the word ‘coincidence’ almost never describes what’s really happening. As it turned out, that rich Clan Chief the former owner of my tunic had been talking about just happened to be the Chief of Albron’s clan back then. His name was Gosti Big Belly, and he had a toll bridge that was almost like a gold mine—or so the fellows in a little village tavern told me.”

  “Have you ever heard about this Gosti fellow, Eliar?” Gher asked curiously. “Since he was the Chief of your clan back then, you’ve probably heard stories about him.”

  “Oh, yes,” Eliar said. “The one everybody tells the most often is probably the one Althalus is telling you right now. All of our stories call Althalus a scoundrel. His version might be a little different, though.”

  “Well, now,” Althalus said, picking up his story again, “every place I turned in Arum, somebody was telling me about how fabulously rich this Gosti was, and it was in that little village tavern that I finally decided that it might be worth my while to pay a call on this rich fat man to see if there was any truth to those stories.”

  “And then to rob him?” Gher demanded enthusiastically.

  “If the opportunity arose, probably so. Anyway, I went to Gosti’s fort and talked my way inside. This was a very long time ago, and things were a little crude back then. Albron’s hall is pretty much a castle, with stone walls and marble floors. Gosti Big Belly lived in a log fort with dirt floors, and he kept pigs in his dining room.”

  Andine made a gagging sound.

  “There was a certain practicality there, Andine,” Althalus explained. “If you’ve got pigs in the dining room, you don’t have to keep carrying scraps out to the garbage heap.”

  “Will you stop that?” Andine scolded him.

  “Sorry,” Althalus said. “Anyway, I spent all that winter telling Gosti stories and jokes and eating at his table—and locating his strong room and examining the lock, of course.”

  “Naturally,” Gher said with a knowing little smirk.

  “Well, when spring arrived and melted all the snow off the passes, I decided that it was time to say good-bye to Gosti and his pet pigs, so late one night I visited his strong room and got the shock of my life. As it turned out, all the talk about unlimited wealth was just that: talk. There wasn’t any gold in the strong room—only copper pennies and a few tarnished brass coins. I’d just wasted a whole winter, and I was going to come away with very little to show for it. Anyway, I took as much of Gosti’s brass and copper as I could conveniently carry and left the place before dawn.”

  “What did this have to do with throwing away your tunic?”

  “I was just getting to that, Gher. Gosti was really nothing but the fat Chief of a very minor clan, and he desperately yearned for fame and recognition. I gave him exactly what he wanted. He sent out word that a master thief had just robbed his strong room and carried off a dozen bags of gold. He offered a reward for my capture, and the description he circulated all over Arum described my fine tunic right down to the last whisker. I didn’t have any choice at that point. I had to get rid of that tunic.”

  “Tragic,” Leitha murmured.

  “That story didn’t turn out too happy,” Gher objected.

  “Not every story has a happy ending, my boy,” Althalus said philosophically, “and this is one of them.”

  “Why don’t we just fix it so that it turns out the way it should?”

  “I suppose I could change a few things the next time I tell it to make it come out a little better,” Althalus conceded.

  “That wasn’t what I meant, Althalus. I wasn’t talking about just changing the story. I was talking about changing the things that happen
ed back then so that the story—and the things the story tells about—come out the way we want them to.” Then Gher frowned slightly. “You hadn’t met Ghend yet when all this happened, had you?”

  “No. I didn’t meet Ghend until I finally got away from Arum and went to Nabjor’s camp in Hule. I didn’t even know about Ghend back then, but I guess he knew about me. When he came into Nabjor’s camp, he told me that he’d been following me for months. What’s Ghend got to do with this, though?”

  “You said he was following you?”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “Then my idea might work after all. As long as he’s right there following after you, maybe we could use him to make the story better.”

  “Gher,” Bheid said with a pained expression, “I wish you’d make up your mind. Are you talking about ‘story’ or ‘reality’ here?”

  “Aren’t they the same thing, Mister Bheid? A really good storyteller always changes his story to make it better, and since we’ve got those doors right here in the House, we can do the same thing to reality, can’t we?”

  “You can’t go back and change the past, Gher,” Andine objected.

  “Why not? Ghend’s been doing it right from the start, hasn’t he? Why should he have all the fun?” Gher scratched thoughtfully at his tousled hair. “Let me work on this a little bit, Althalus,” he said. “I’ve got a sort of hunch that we’Il be able to fix things so that you’ll get to keep that tunic you liked so much, and maybe if I think real hard, we might be able to have something pretty awful happen to Ghend at the same time.”

  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” Eliar said with a great yawn, “but I’m just about ready for bed.”

  “Why don’t we all go to bed now,” Dweia agreed, “before Althalus launches into another story.”

  Althalus slept very well that night, but Gher’s eyes were puffy as he sat down to breakfast, and he was yawning.

  “Are you all right?” Dweia asked him.

  “I didn’t sleep too good, Emmy,” he replied. “It’s real hard to get to sleep when you’ve got a lot on your mind.”

  “You need your sleep, Gher,” she scolded.

  “I’ll be able to catch up once I’ve straightened out a few kinks in the thing I’m working on.”

  “What’s bothering you so much, Gher?” Andine asked the boy.

  “Well, it all started with that wolf-skin tunic Althalus was telling us about last night. He had to throw it away after he robbed the fat man, because the fat man was describing it to everybody he met. If we want to fix it so that Althalus doesn’t have to throw it away, then we have to come up with some way to make sure that the fat man didn’t talk about it.”

  “That might have taken a bit of doing, Gher,” Althalus said dubiously. “Gosti didn’t care anything about the money, because it was almost worthless. All he was really doing was bragging because I’d taken the trouble to rob him.”

  “Oh, I saw that right off, Althalus,” the boy replied, “and I’d already come up with a way to get around that. All you’d really need is somebody to help with the robbery.”

  “I didn’t really know anybody that well in Arum back in those days, Gher, and you don’t just pick up a perfect stranger to be your accomplice.”

  “But there was somebody you met later who’d have fit right in. You keep forgetting about the doors, Althalus.”

  “All right, who was it that I met later who’d have made a good accomplice?”

  “I was sort of thinking of Ghend. He knew you, even if you didn’t know him. He wanted to get on your good side so that he could persuade you to go steal the Book for him, so he’d almost have to go along with you if you suggested that he should join you when you went to rob the fat man, wouldn’t he?”

  “Maybe so, but I didn’t even so much as see him back then.”

  “Couldn’t we fix that with one of those dream things? That was my first idea. I thought that he was probably sneaking around behind you everywhere you went, and we could use Emmy’s window to find just the right time to do it. Let’s say you went into one of those taverns when people were talking about the fat man, and maybe Ghend’s outside listening. Then Emmy does the dream thing, and Ghend’s not outside anymore; he’s inside the tavern instead. Every thief in the world knows another thief almost as soon as he lays eyes on him, doesn’t he?”

  “I’ve never had much trouble picking out other businessmen.”

  “There you have it, then. After you two hear about that rich fat man, you take Ghend aside and suggest that maybe you two ought to go visit that Big Belly fellow. Ghend’s stuck right there. He wouldn’t dare to say no, because then you might say no when he talked about the Book later on.”

  “I love the way this boy’s mind works,” Leitha said. “It’d be perfect. Ghend wouldn’t have any choice but to go along with your scheme.”

  “I didn’t really need any help, Gher,” Althalus objected.

  “Not with the robbery, maybe, but it wasn’t the robbery that caused the problem. It was getting away that fixed it so that you had to throw your tunic away, wasn’t it?”

  “How would having Ghend as my partner change that?”

  “If you did it right, you wouldn’t have to even try to get away. Let’s say that you and Ghend steal a bunch of gold out of that storeroom.”

  “But there wasn’t any gold, Gher. I told you that.”

  “We could fix that in a minute. We’ve still got some of those kegs that we used to hire the Arums with up in Emmy’s tower, haven’t we? We sneak one of the kegs into that storeroom, see, and then you and Ghend break in and steal it. The fat man doesn’t even know it’s there, but that won’t make any difference, because he’s not the one you’re swindling. It’s Ghend you’re after. After you two steal that keg of gold, you divide it up, see, and then you tell Ghend that it might confuse people if each of you ran off in a different direction. Then you jump on your horse and ride off one way, and Ghend rides off in another. As soon as you’re out of sight, you give your share of the gold to Eliar to bring back here, and then you double back to Gosti’s place and act like you never went anywhere at all. Then you go wake up Gosti and tell him that you saw Ghend break into that storeroom to steal stuff. Now, Gosti doesn’t know about the gold we snuck into his storeroom, so he thinks that all there is in there is pennies. He wants people to think he’s rich, though, so he makes a big fuss about how mad he is that Ghend robbed him, and he describes Ghend to everybody he meets instead of describing you. So it’s Ghend who’s out there running for his life, and you’re still loafing around in Gosti’s place like you hadn’t done anything at all. You sit in front of the fireplace eating chicken and telling stories like you did all winter long while everybody in Arum’s chasing Ghend as hard as they can because they think he’s got a lot of gold they’d like to steal from him. Then after a week or so, you tell Gosti you’ve got some business you have to take care of, so you tell him goodbye and ride on up to Hule to meet up with Ghend like you two planned in the beginning. This time, though, you’ve still got that tunic you liked so much. When you get to Hule, you tell Ghend that you got away easy, and when he tells you about what a bad time he had, you put on a long face and go ‘tsk, tsk, tsk.’ He doesn’t know that you fooled him, so he still thinks you’re his friend. Then when he hires you to go steal the Book for him, you make him pay you with his share of all that gold you two stole from Gosti’s place—only you didn’t really steal it, because we’re the ones who put it in that storeroom to begin with. Wouldn’t that sort of work?”

  “Could you follow any of that?” Andine asked Althalus with a baffled expression on her face.

  “Most of it, yes,” he replied. “There are a couple of twists and turns that I haven’t quite figured out yet, but I caught the broad outline.” He looked at Dweia. “Could we actually do that, Em?” he asked her. “The notion of bamboozling Ghend that way lights a warm little fire in my heart.”

  “It’s not impossible,”
she replied. “It doesn’t make very much sense, but we could do it.”

  “Dweia!” Bheid exclaimed. “That’s tampering with reality. If you change the past, who knows what’s going to happen to the present?”

  “We’ve already seen what this now looks like, Bheid,” Gher said, “and there’s a lot of stuff about it that we don’t like very much. Wouldn’t it be funner to make up a different now? If we keep tinkering with way back then, sooner or later we’re bound to come up with a new now that suits us right down to the ground and puts Ghend’s nose out of joint at the same time. That’s what Ghend’s been doing with his dream things, isn’t it? He tries to make now come out the way he wants it to. All we’d be doing would be changing back then enough to make now come out the way we want it to instead of Ghend’s way. And if we do it like this, Althalus gets to keep that tunic he liked so much.”

  “But if we keep tinkering with the past, nothing’s ever permanent.”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure, Bheid?” Leitha asked him. “Permanence is so boring sometimes, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be funner to live in a world Gher can change any time he wants to?”

  “Funner?” he asked.

  “Isn’t it logical to believe that language would change as well as circumstances? Welcome to the world of Gher, Exarch Bheid.”

  “I think that’s about enough of that, Leitha,” Dweia said absently. Althalus noticed that she was looking at Gher in a peculiar sort of way, however.

  The following day after supper, Dweia pushed her plate back and looked around the table. “There’s something I’ve been considering for most of the day,” she told them, “and I think maybe we should all take a look at it.”

  “Is Ghend up to something else?” Eliar asked.

  “Not as far as I know. Of course, with Ghend you can never be sure. This has to do with variations. A rather peculiar idea came to me while we were all listening to Althalus and Gher trying to tamper with reality.”

  “We were only fooling around, Em,” Althalus told her. “We weren’t really serious about it.”