The Compleat Traveller in Black

by John Brunner

  “Is it no better than at Stanguray?”

  “Perhaps by a whisker, now I’ve acquired these clothes and wand.” Jospil struck the traveller with the latter, scowling. “But they made me out to be Crancina’s familiar at first, and wanted to feed me on hot coals and aqua regia. Besides, they have no sense of humor, these people. If they did, would they not long ago have laughed Crancina out of countenance?”

  “You are absolutely correct,” the traveller agreed solemnly. “And therein lies the key to fulfillment of a wish you made in my hearing. Do you recall it?”

  The hunchback gave a crooked shrug. “It would have been the same as what I say to everybody, except of course my sister: that one day I should find a means of freeing myself from her.”

  “And making your way in the world against all odds.”

  “I’ve said that over and over, and doubtless to you.”

  “Meaning it?”

  Jospil’s eyes flashed fire. “Every word!”

  “Today, then, is your chance to make the most of your jester’s role and achieve your ambition simultaneously.”

  Jospil blinked. “You speak so strangely,” he muttered. “Yet you came to the cookshop like anybody, and you were politer to my sister than she deserved, and – yes, it was precisely from the morning of your visit that she took these crazy notions into her head, and … I don’t know what to make of you, I swear I don’t.”

  “Count yourself fortunate,” the traveller said dryly, “that you are not called on so to do. But remember that there is magic abroad today, if not the kind Count Lashgar is expecting, and that you are a crux and focus of it. Sir Jester, I bid you good morning!”

  And with a deep-dipping bow, and an inclination of his staff, and a great flapping swirl of his black cape, the traveller was gone about his business.

  VII

  How it was that he was back at his guardpost in time to reclaim his spear and shield and greet his dawn relief before his absence was noted, Orrish could afterwards never quite recall – nor what had become of his mysterious companion once they were on the plateau.

  But he did remember one thing with perfect clarity. He had been promised the chance to give the witch the lie direct. Anxious, he awaited his opportunity. There seemed small chance of it happening today, though, for immediately on returning to barracks he had been cornered by a sergeant with a squad lacking one man, and sent to collect the night’s trapped animals and bring them to the lakeside to have their life’s blood let. In all their various tones they squeaked and growled and whimpered, and their cries made a hideous cacophony along with the bleating and grunting of the few remaining domestic animals, pent in folds of hurdles within scent of the bloody water. At this rate of slaughter, though there would be more pickled meat than they had barrels to hold, and more smoked meat than hooks to hang it on, which would see the community through the winter, there would be no breeding stock to start anew next summer. Orrish shook his head dolefully, detesting the assignment he had been given almost as much as he loathed the notion of kidnapping and killing the folk of Stanguray.

  That at least, if the traveller in black was to be trusted, was no longer a possibility.

  But where was the traveller? Orrish scanned the vicinity with worried eyes. Like all those who came of the ancient Taxhling stock, he had been raised to distrust magic and its practitioners, and the way his leg had been healed left no room for doubt that the man in the black cloak trafficked in such arts. Was he – like the witch Crancina – deceitful and self-serving …?

  Orrish started a little. How did he know the witch was defrauding the people? Why, because the traveller had told him so. Maybe he should believe what the rest of his people believed, rather than taking the word of a stranger?

  Biting his lip in terrible confusion, he was distracted by a shout from the sergeant, calling the soldiers to attention at the appearance of Count Lashgar. Numbly obeying, Orrish wished desperately that the traveller would come back; everything had seemed so simple in his company.

  Along with the other young conscripts, he awaited the order to butcher the pitiable beasts.

  * * *

  There were obligatory cheers and shouts; they did not last long, however, because everybody was too eager to hear what Crancina proposed to do today. Graciously bowing from side to side as he took station on a grassy promontory at the waterside, Lashgar addressed his subjects in a surprisingly powerful voice for so slim and short a man.

  “We are promised marvels!” he declared. “You want to see them as much as I do! Therefore I’ll waste no time on speechifying, but let Mistress Crancina have her way!”

  Everybody brightened at the brevity of his introduction. And then quietened, and shivered. Even while Lashgar was speaking, Crancina had thrown aside her sheepskin cape and begun to make passes in the air, muttering to herself the while. The words could not be made out even at close quarters, yet there was such a resonance to them that if one caught their slightest echo it could send a tremor down the spine.

  Now and then she felt in a pouch hung at her girdle and tossed a pinch of powder into the water, rather as though she were seasoning a soup.

  Along with all the rest, the traveller was mightily impressed. This was the first occasion, in more of his visits to this world than he cared to try and count, when he had witnessed a genuinely new magic rite. Even though the change might be classed as more quantitative than qualitative, the purpose Crancina was putting her work to was radically different from anything he could recall.

  Now and then in the past he had wondered whether cookery, where the practitioner might begin with something not only unpalatable but actually poisonous, and conclude with something not only digestible but delicious, might not be the ultimate destiny of temperaments which in earlier ages would have been tempted to meddle in magic. He made a firm resolve to keep a careful eye on cooks in future.

  For this recipe, at least, was working fine.

  Much like milk being curdled by rennet, the water of Lake Taxhling was solidifying. Instead of the random patterns due to wind and wave, shapes were discernible on the surface, and though they jostled and shifted, they did not break up any longer. The onlookers oohed and aahed, while Count Lashgar, barely disguising his incredulity, tried not to jump up and down for joy.

  The shapes were not altogether comfortable to look on; however, they were visible, and little by little they were beginning to stand up above the surface, first as shallowly as ripples, then with more and more protuberance. Also they enlarged. Somewhat separated from each other, they numbered a thousand or two, and their forms were strange beyond description. If this one was reminiscent of a claw-tipped fern-frond, its neighbor hinted at a dishmop with a crown of flexing tentacles; if another called to mind a hog’s skull with extra holes in it, the next resembled a giant mouse with twenty legs.

  The only thing they had in common, bar their present almost stillness, was their coloration. They were the grey of common pumice stone, and bobbed on the now-oily surface of the lake, which had congealed to form them, with a motion as sluggish as though time for them had slowed to a twentieth of its regular rate.

  “Magic!” murmured the crowd, delighted. “Magic indeed!”

  “But she is a liar – she is!” came a sudden cry from the direction of the stock-pens, where soldiers were dutifully readying the last of the animals to be killed. “The witch Crancina is a liar!”

  Everyone reacted, especially Lashgar and Crancina herself. The count shouted an order to a sergeant to quiet the man who had called out, while she shot one nervous glance in that direction and kept on with her recital of cantrips, faster and faster. The images forming on the lake wavered, but grew firm again.

  “Silence that man!” the sergeant bellowed, and two of his companions tried to pinion Orrish by the arms. He shoved his shield in the face of one, breaking his nose, and winded the other with the butt end of his spear, on his way to the nearest point of vantage, the shambles stone – formerly a
t the far end of the lake near the waterfall, but lately brought back to this spot in the interests of conserving the spilled blood. It was a block of basalt with runnels cut in the upper face for the blood to drain down. Taking stance on it, Orrish waved his spear aloft.

  “How did she expect to get away with it?” he roared. “We know what these apparitions are!”

  They wavered again, but remained solid, and now were stock-still, as rigid as glass, and as brittle.

  Suddenly, tentatively, a few of the watchers – mostly elderly – nodded. Realizing they were not alone, they drew themselves proudly upright and did it again more vigorously.

  “And we know they have nothing to do with immortality!” Orrish yelled at the top of his lungs. “Get away!” – kicking out at the sergeant who was trying to snare him by the ankles. “I don’t mean you, or your blockhead of a master, the count! I mean us, whose families have lived here long enough not to be cheated by the witch! Look at her! Look! Can’t you read fear and terror in her face?”

  Crancina was shouting wildly, but the wind had risen in the past minute or two, and her words were carried away. Beside her, paling, Count Lashgar was signalling his bodyguard to close in; the priests of Blunk and Yelb and Ts-graeb were likewise huddling together for comfort.

  Meantime the images formed from the lake remained un-moving.

  “And for the benefit of those of you who weren’t lucky enough to be brought up like me in a household where they still know about this kind of thing,” Orrish blasted, “I’ll explain! In the distant and barbaric past our superstitious ancestors imagined that the weird objects which drifted down the river – those which had been of a sinking nature floated, obviously! – all these objects were divine and deserving of worship. So they set up shrines, and made offerings, and called on them when reciting hearth-spells, and the rest of it. There were even fights over the respective merits of this, that or the other idol.

  “But at last a teacher arose among us, endowed with better sense, who asked why we had so many petty deities when we could devise one with all their best attributes and none of their worst. The people marvelled and wondered and agreed, and that was how we came to worship Frah Frah! And when everybody had consented to the change, the old gods were carried to the lake and thrown back in, to lie on the bottom until the end of the world. And so they would have done, but for Crancina! Now ask her what they have to do with immortality for us, or even her and Lashgar!”

  “This is all falsehood!” Crancina gasped. “I know nothing of your city’s former gods!”

  “But do you know anything of immortality?” demanded Lashgar. Seizing a sword from the nearest of his guardsmen, he levelled its point at her breast.

  “Of course she doesn’t!” came a crowing voice. “She’s fit to run a cookshop, and no more, and that’s what she used to do in Stanguray. Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-haw!”

  And Jospil in his jester’s guise frog-hopped towards his half-sister with a donkey-loud bray of laughter.

  Startled, about to launch another broadside of invective, Orrish high on the slaughter stone checked, and glanced at Jospil, and against all best intentions had to grin. The grin turned to a chuckle; the chuckle became a roar of merriment, and he had to lean on his spear for support as he rocked back and forth with tears streaming from his eyes. So contagious was his hilarity that, without knowing what was funny, small children echoed it; tending them, their parents could not help but giggle, at the least, and that also spread. While Lashgar and Crancina and the more pompous of the attendant priests – of whichever denomination – looked scandalized and shouted orders which went disregarded by their subordinates, the entire crowd was caught up in a monstrous eruption of mirth. The eldest of the onlookers, hobbling and toothless, who were as much at a loss about the proceedings as the babes in arms, cackled along with the rest, until the welkin threatened to ring with the sound.

  And it did.

  Echoed, re-echoed, amplified, the laughter started to resonate. A sort of buzzing filled the air, making it feel denser than normal. The vibrations fed on one another; they became painful to the ears; they set the teeth on edge; they shrilled and rasped and ground. Here and there amid the throng people looked frightened and cast about for a way to escape. But there was none. The whole huge bowl-like plateau round Lake Taxhling had become a valley of echoes, where sound instead of dying away increased in volume, and intensity, and harshness.

  Meantime the accidental creations of the river once known as Metamorphia, conjured back to the surface after so many centuries, remained utterly still … until they began to tremble under the impact of the noise.

  Suddenly a thing like a walrus with a flower for a head cracked sharply across. A sprinkling of fine powder wafted into the air, dancing in time with the vibrations.

  Then a curiously convoluted object, half slender and half bulky, as though a giant dragonfly had miscegenated with a carthorse, shattered into tiny fragments. At once there was a rush into the vacancy from either side. Something not unlike a monstrous fist, with lamellar excrescences, collided with a great hollow structure and reduced it to tinkling shards.

  The laughter took on a rhythmical pattern. Now it could be discerned that whenever it reached a certain pitch of intensity another of the objects Crancina had conjured forth broke apart; each such breaking entailed another, and then others. The watchers, who for a moment had been frightened, found this also very amusing, and their mirth redoubled until all were gasping for breath.

  Into dust vanished the last relics of articles cast long ago from the citadel of Acromel; into sparkling crystals and jagged fragments dissolved what had once been sacrifices, and weapons, and the bodies of sad drunken fools, and those of condemned criminals, and the carcasses of careless animals, and the husks of insects, and luck offerings, and deodands, and stolen treasure abandoned by its thieves, and fish which had swum from higher reaches of the river, and all sorts of casual rubbish, and leaves and twigs and branches tossed into the water by children at their play, and accidental conformations created by the perversity of the river itself out of lumps of mud that tumbled from its banks.

  Instead of a horde of weird fantastical solid objects there was for a moment a silvery shimmering expanse. Precisely then the laughter reached its peak, and the final gust was like a blow from a gigantic hammer, descending so fast that the very air grew solid at the impact.

  So powerful was the impact, it made the plateau split.

  Those who were closest to the cliff-edge fled from it, shouting, all thought of merriment forgotten. The earth trembled underfoot, and a jagged cleft appeared across the bed of the lake, beginning where the waterfall tumbled down the escarpment.

  In one – two – three violent shifts of colossal mass, Lake Taxhling disappeared: first in a torrent, carving a gash down the face of the steep rocks a dozen times as wide as formerly; then in a steady flood as more and more of the cliff-rim fell away and the water could spill over as from a tilted basin; lastly as a dribbling ooze, which bared the mud of its bottom. …

  And in the middle of the new flat bare expanse, a statue: a little awry from the vertical, and draped moreover with garlands of grey-green weed, but the solitary item not affected by the pounding laughter that had smashed all of Crancina’s evocations into rubble, and intact enough after its long submersion to be instantly identifiable.

  The first to recognize it was Orrish, regaining his feet after being knocked down by the earth-tremors. For a long moment he gazed at it in disbelief. Then, in sudden frantic haste, he clawed open the belt holding up his leather breeches, and produced the amulet he secretly wore.

  Holding it aloft, he shouted, “Frah Frah! Have we not at last given you the offering you most desire? Laughter has been scant since you departed! And there’s a bigger joke than all the rest!”

  Raising his spear, he pointed at Lashgar and Crancina and those who had taken station nearest them. The pattern of the rifts breaching the lake floor was such that the little pr
omontory they stood upon was isolated between two crevasses. As though the spear had been a magic wand, the promontory’s surface tipped, and with a sighing noise subsided. The count, and the witch, and the priests, and the idols, and all their hangers-on, were abruptly floundering waist-deep in the foulest possible kind of muck. With every desperate attempt to scramble free they sprayed more of it over themselves and one another, until they were all unrecognizable.

  * * *

  “A satisfactory outcome after all,” the traveller said, putting by the staff that had dislodged the promontory. “But it was a narrow squeak. Still, this time the amusement I hear is unforced.”

  There had been one person agile enough to escape the general muddying of the count’s party, and now in his gaudy garb of red and yellow he was leaping up and down on safe dry land, waving his bladder-tipped stick as to conduct the chorus of laughter emanating from the crowd.

  One final touch …

  The traveller waited for precisely the correct instant; then, with a tap of his staff on the ground, he ensured that just as Jospil pointed towards it, the statue of Frah Frah tilted forward, overbalanced, fell smack on its face, and disappeared into the yielding mud, over which already the clear stream of the river was coursing in search of its future channel.

  At that, which might be seen as ominous, the laughter faded, but the people dispersed good-humoredly enough despite the problem – to be solved on the morrow – of what those formerly dependent on the lake would do to earn their living now. A few daring boys hurled lumps of mud at Lashgar and Crancina and the priests, but the pastime staled rapidly and they too made off.

  Apart from those stuck in the mud, after a few minutes the only ones left were Jospil and Orrish. Unaccountably despondent, gripped by a sense of anticlimax, they sat side by side on a rock, shivering in the bitter wind, watching those who were entrapped and wondering why their struggles did not seem so funny anymore.