The Compleat Traveller in Black

by John Brunner

  Shortly they grew aware of a third.

  VIII

  “It is not given to many to enjoy their heart’s desire,” murmured the traveller. “Did you enjoy it?”

  “I …” Not knowing quite whether he was speaking, nor whether he was speaking to somebody, Orrish licked his lips. “I guess I’m glad to have made the proper offering to Frah Frah. But as for what tomorrow will bring …”He shrugged. “All I know is, things can never be the same.”

  “Interesting,” said the traveller. “One might say the same about chaos – not that anyone existing in it would think it worth making so trite an observation – yet here we are at a point where its forces wane so much mere laughter serves to defeat them. … If it’s any comfort, in times to come you will be remembered, and even honored, as the one who gave the witch the lie direct. As for you, Jospil, even though you are not likely to be revered, you may henceforth pride yourself on having broken free of Crancina’s tyranny, to make your own way in the world against all odds.”

  “If that be so,” answered the hunchback curtly, “I reckon little of it. How much of a witch was my sister before you came to Stanguray?”

  The traveller was discreetly silent for a while, then said at last, “I should like you to know: it is an earnest of the fulfillment of my task that you relish my aid so much less than what you have accomplished on your own.”

  “I am not one to ponder riddles,” Jospil sighed. “I care only for straight answers to straight questions. What happened to Crancina, that she made me quit our home in search of employment with Count Lashgar?”

  “She had made a wish, and I was bound to grant it.”

  “A wish?” Jospil’s eyes grew round. “Of course! I’d nearly forgotten! To know what use might be made of all the blood being spilled up here!”

  “Your recollection is exact.”

  “And she discovered, or worked out, that it could be used to revive those strange and antique idols from the lakebed. … How?”

  “Yes, how?” chimed in Orrish. “And to what end?”

  “Jospil knows the answer to half that question,” said the traveller with a wry smile.

  “You mean …?” The hunchback bit his thumb, puzzled. “Ah! We only spoke of part of her wish. Her greater ambition was to be in charge.”

  “As you say.”

  “But if part was granted, why was the other part not? Why is she not in charge completely and of everything, which I’m sure would be ideally to her taste?”

  “Because you also made a wish. And, as it so happens, when I’m obliged to grant two wishes that conflict, the outcome tends to be biased in favor of whichever party cares less for himself, or herself.”

  He added sternly, “But in your case, boy, it was a close call!”

  Jospil gave his sly frog’s grin. “Well, at least I have a trade now” – he slapped the traveller with his bauble – “and there will be great dispersion from Taxhling, in all directions. From Lashgar’s wardrobe mistress I’ve learned that a comedian at court may be a personage of influence; certainly my involuntary benefactor was, who served Count Lashgar’s father till he was beheaded.”

  “You’re prepared to run that risk?” Orrish demanded, aghast.

  “Why not?” Jospil said, spreading his hands. “It’s better than some dangers that we take for granted. They say a moment of glory may redeem an age of suffering. … But one more thing, sir, if I may trespass on your patience. What did my sister hope to achieve, if not to make herself immortal?”

  “To re-enact on a far grander scale a certain ceremony involving a homunculus.”

  Jospil blinked. “That means nothing to me!” he objected. “Nor would it have done to her when you called at our cook-shop. But for your intrusion, we might still be there and –”

  “And she would still be pronouncing her sweet-water cantrip at every dark of the moon.”

  “Exactly!” Jospil rose awkwardly to his feet. “Sir, I hold you entirely to blame for the plight we’re all cast into!”

  “Even though you so much desired to be rid of your half-sister’s tyranny, and you are?”

  “Yes – yes!”

  “Ah, well” – with a sigh. “I deserve these reproaches, I admit. Since but for me Crancina would never have known how reviving the strange creations of Metamorphia and imbuing them with blood could make her mistress of the world.”

  Orrish’s jaw dropped; a second later Jospil clutched the hem of the traveller’s cloak.

  “She could have done that?”

  “Beyond a peradventure. What magic is left nowadays is by and large residual, but the bed of Lake Taxhling was the repository of an enchantment such as few contemporary wizards would dare risk.”

  “I could have been half-brother to the ruler of the world?” Jospil whispered, having paid no attention to the previous remark.

  “Indeed you could,” the traveller said calmly, “if you had genuinely believed that ‘a moment of glory redeems an age of suffering’ – and, I assure you, had she achieved her aim she would have understood how to cause suffering.”

  Frowning terribly, Jospil fell silent to reflect on lost opportunities, and Orrish ventured, “Sir, will you stay with us to rectify the consequences of your actions?”

  There was a long dead pause; the traveller hunched gradually further and further into the concealment of his hood and cloak.

  Finally he said, as from a vast distance, “The consequences of my actions? Yes!

  “But never the consequences of yours.”

  * * *

  There followed a sudden sense of absence, and in a while Jospil and Orrish felt impelled to join the rest of the people, shoring up houses rendered unstable by the earthquake.

  Which, of course, was all that had really happened … wasn’t it?

  IX

  “Litorgos!” said the traveller in the privacy of his mind, as he stood on a rocky outcrop overlooking the salt-and-silt delta being transformed by the outgush of water from on high. Already the pillars of Stanguray were tilting at mad angles; marble slabs and tiled façades were splashing into the swollen river. “Litorgos, you came closer to deceiving me than any elemental in uncounted aeons!”

  Faint as wind soughing in dry branches, the answer came as though from far away.

  “But you knew. You knew very well.”

  And that was true. Silent awhile, the traveller reflected on the charge. Yes indeed: he had known, though he had not paid attention to the knowledge, that when he granted Crancina her wish he was opening the bonds which held Litorgos. For the sole and unique fashion in which the blood spilled into Lake Taxhling might be turned to the purpose Crancina had in view was through the intervention of an elemental. So much blood had been spilled the world over, another few thousand gallons of it was trivial, except …

  And therefore Tarambole had told the truth. It was not an elemental working against the traveller that called him back to Stanguray.

  It was an elemental working with him.

  For otherwise the wish could never have been granted.

  “There was a time,” the traveller said in this confessional, “when I was ready to believe that the One Who –”

  “She does not change Her mind,” came the sharp retort.

  “She has not done so,” the traveller corrected. “But as the One to Whom all things are neither impossible nor possible …”

  “Then if that may prove to be the case, reward me right away, before the unthinkable occurs!”

  “Reward you? For deceiving me?”

  “For working with you, instead of against you!”

  The traveller considered for a little; then he said, “I find that while I am not constrained to grant the wish of an elemental, I have done it in the past and am therefore not debarred from doing so. Besides, I am inclined to favor you, inasmuch as you foresaw the need for the citizens of Stanguray to evacuate their homes and contrived that they should do so before the flood came pouring down from Taxhling. I will
not ask what horrid apparitions you employed to drive them out. … What, then, is your wish?”

  “I would cease!”

  The fury behind the message made the plateau tremble one more time, and people striving with ropes and beams to buttress half-wrecked houses redoubled their efforts.

  “Once I and all my kind were free and had the cosmos for a playground! Once we could roam at large, tossing stars about as humans toss a ball, breaking the chain of time or making it crack like a whip! Then we were caught and bound, and pent as you pent me, and I know, in the very core and center of my being, that this imprisonment will never cease.

  “So let me cease!”

  For a long, long moment the traveller remained impassive, marvelling at what a change Litorgos had just wrought. Now the balance had been tipped; now the triumph he looked forward to was certain – always excepting the intervention of the Four Great Ones whom he could only banish, and who might return.

  But who would be insane enough to open a road for Tuprid and Caschalanva, Quorril and Lry? Even if anyone remembered their existence?

  With a great sigh of contentment the traveller declared aloud, “In eternity the vagaries of chaos permit even death to be reversed. In time the certainties of reason insist that even elementals may be – dead.”

  For another hour the flood continued to wash away both salt and silt from the area where Litorgos had been and was no longer.

  Later, the settlements which had surrounded Lake Taxhling were overthrown by further earth-movements, and at last there was a vast slumping of the escarpment, such that half the old delta was hidden under scree and mud.

  And in due time, when new folk came and settled thereabouts, ignorant of what cities had stood on the same site before – though not wholly the same, for the coastline also changed – it was held to be a pleasant and fortunate ground, where generations prospered who knew nothing about magic, or elemental spirits, or rivers running stinking-red with blood.

  FIVE

  Dread Empire

  Lo! thy dread empire. Chaos, is restored;

  Light dies before thy uncreating word…

  –Pope: The Dunciad

  I

  “Good morrow, sir,” the folk said civilly to the person in black who stood leaning on a staff – of unusual substance – watching them fetch and carry water from Gander’s Well. He answered in turn, but absently, preoccupied, and none of them marked him so closely as to recognize him again. It was plain he was concerned with private thoughts.

  Indeed, so absorbed was he that the sun dipped down and the boys and goodwives whose chore it was to collect water had gone home to their well-earned supper before he stirred a pace from where he had wasted the day. Then it was to address a man, muffled up against the evening cool, who came to scrape flakes of punk from a rotten tree-stump not a great distance from the wellmouth, and dropped them as he gathered them into a pottery jar.

  Seeing him then spark and apply a fizzling wick of braided withes, taken from a pouch slung to a baldric that also supported a torch of rushes soaked in tar, the traveller said, “You go a journey, sir, I take it!”

  “Why, yes,” the man said, glancing up. “I’m called to see my sister, who’s in labor with a nephew for me, or a niece. Her man’s abroad, and someone answerable must be by to take her other bairns in charge.”

  “And this is what you’ll use for tinder?” said the traveller, pointing at the tree-stump with his staff.

  “None better can be found in this vicinity,” the man replied. “All who must go a trip by night make use of it. It carries fire through most amazing storms. In fact, it’s said” – but here he coughed, as though by way of apology for seeming to give credence to a superstition – “there’s some bright spirit in it, that fosters sparks against all odds. If you, sir, whom I judge to be a stranger, think of continuing your walk by night, I counsel you should avail yourself of some. More than once friends of mine have been grateful for the means to light a torch, thinking to finish a journey in daylight and then coming on a washed-out bridge or flooded ford!”

  “How far away, then, can your sister live? An hour or more remains till sunset, let alone full dark.”

  “Hmph!” said the man, straightening as he capped his tinder-jar and tossed aside his wick of withes, to sputter out on ground made wet by daylong spillage. “ ’Tis plain you really are a stranger, sir! Although my sister lives a scant league from this spot, needs must I go by Cleftor Heights, and there the dark falls fast, believe you me. Indeed, if you’ll forgive me, I must make haste, even with this to save me in the pitch black.”

  “One final question,” said the traveller, and gestured with his staff. “I’ve seen folk tramping weary miles from town to fill yoked pails of water at this well. Is it regarded as especially sweet?”

  The man chuckled. “Why, sir,” he returned, “as to drinking straight, not especially. But, see you, the season’s on us to brew ale and beer, and – for what reason I know not – if you brew with water from Gander’s Well, you remain lively and jolly all evening long, and the morning after your head’s clear and your belly calm. Make sure that in the taverns of the town they offer you nothing worse; sometimes they’ll try and palm off on a stranger what they will not drink themselves.”

  “Thanks for your counsel,” said the traveller in black.

  When he was alone, he sorrowfully shook his head. Once on this site Yorbeth had brooded in his guise of a tree, its longest taproot fed from a miraculous spring. Then that sad greedy fool of a packman …

  But he was mortal, which the elemental had not been, and what was left? This stump, yielding tinder for overnight wayfarers, and a well whose chief renown was for the brewing of beer!

  * * *

  Yet it was not entirely to be wondered at. The news was of a piece with all the rest of what he’d learned during this latest of so many journeys undertaken in accordance with the obligations that bound him. Latest? Not impossibly, he was beginning to believe, the last.

  Long ago it had made small difference that this journey was this journey, not the one before or after. In chaos, randomness was so extreme that the very contrasts made for a sense of uniformity. Now there were actual changes: the vanishing of Yorbeth not the greatest.

  Back beyond Leppersley, for instance, Farchgrind was a household pet! The people heard him still, but conjured him to entertain their friends, and scoffed when he made his wheedling promises. Laprivan of the Yellow Eyes had spent his substance, whatever the nature of it might have been, and wearied of his struggle against the past. Footprints left by those who plodded up his hill endured until the next high wind or fall of rain.

  And Barbizond had followed Ryovora, despite Sardhin. The advance of rationality had worn him down – that bright being in his rainbow-gleaming cloud. It was still claimed that a knife from Barbizond would keep its edge forever, but the only person who had mentioned the belief to the traveller this trip had been a sober landholder in Kanish-Kulya, and he’d employed the same diffident tone as the man just departed, the one who’d been embarrassed at reference to a spirit in the punk which carried fire so well.

  That farmer was an earthy man leading a placid life, a little puzzled now and then when one of his fat and cheery plough – boys brought some improbable growth to show him: a bunch of grapes that shone like polished metal, a turnip which, split apart, revealed the chambers of a human heart …

  But his wine was plentiful and sweet, and there was never a lack of roasts to grace the spit in his kitchen, so he bothered his head not at all with traces of another age. Even the ancestry of his daughter-in-law was a source of kindly jokes around his table. Time was when any good Kanish family like his would have banished Kulyan girls to the goose-run, be they never so beautiful – or perhaps honored their good looks by gang rape, if there were drunken men about.

  Now, regal in a gown of peach-colored silk, a Kulyan lady nightly shared his dinners, his heir fondly touching her goblet with his own to drink toast a
fter toast to their three handsome boys asleep upstairs. With grandchildren growing apace, who should care when the blade of a harrow caught in the eye socket of some moldering skull? That war was over; the armistice continued.

  Likewise in Teq they made a mock of Lady Luck; her offering was a gobbet of spittle, launched at the floor when one of the company voiced hopes for an overbold project.

  Yet the rule bound him, and the traveller’s nature was not such that he should complain. Forth he went on paths grown unfamiliar, and spoke with many people in many places, as for example in Wocrahin, where once –

  Memory! Memory! He had never foreseen that that intangible, binding the fluid nature of eternity into the sequential tidiness of time, would also hamper the will like age itself. Almost, he began to envy those who could die. …

  No matter. In Wocrahin a man sat gobbling lamprey pie in a splendid banquet hall: gross in a purple velvet suit ornate with gravy-stains. Chomping words around a mouthful of the fish and crust, he forced out, “‘Fonly w’were freah y’muzzer!”

  “Ah, yes!” sighed his wife, accustomed to interpreting such talk: fat as a prize breeding-sow, though childless, her vast bosom exposed almost to the bulging nipples above a gown encrusted with seed pearls, her head seeming to be depressed into her neck by the weight of the gem-crusted tiara she had put on, though they had no company at dinner apart from thirty scrag-lean servants ranged around the hall.

  “If only we were free of my mother!” she assented when she had rinsed her gullet with a swig of wine. “Ah, how finely we would live were we rid of her! The old bag eats us out of house and home!”

  “Sh’yeats zazouter ’ousernome!” concurred the man.

  The tall windows of the banquet-hall stood open to the warm spring night. Beyond them, watching the line of mendicants who daily came – more from habit than from hope – to beg the cook for scraps, the traveller in black both heard the exchange and also saw the lady’s mother, in draggled rags, pleading for a share of the beggars’ crumbs at the barred grille of the cellar where she was shut up.