by John Brunner
“It’s nonsense!” roundly declared Achoreus, who was seated beside Fellian as a mark of special favor. “As you rightly said, sir, it’s absurd to expect someone of your standing to wager with a penniless nobody. Moreover, the bet he named is by definition incapable of settlement!”
But his brow was pearled with sweat, and when he had repeated his assertion for the third time his voice was harsh with a hoarseness no amount of wine could allay.
“And how say you, Torquaida?” demanded Fellian, hungry for reassurance – though not for food; course after course was being removed from his place untouched.
“There is no need to worry,” the elderly treasurer wheezed. “Like you or dislike you, Lords Yuckin and Nusk would have to concede the propriety of declining such a wager. Short of compelling someone to look directly at the statue, there’s no way of deciding the matter – and anyone we chose might lie when he reported.”
“Is that not precisely what I’ve just been saying?” crowed Achoreus.
Even that, however, did not ease Fellian’s mind. “Would I might know the outcome anyway,” he grumbled. “No matter how right I was when I declined the fellow’s terms!”
At that the black-clad traveller, standing apart in the dark of an embrasure, gave a sad and secret smile.
“As you wish,” he murmured, “so be it. Indeed you chose aright when gambling against me, Fellian – and there are and have been few in all the cosmos who can make that claim. Yet in the very instant when you won, you lost beyond all hope.”
The question settled now, he went away.
Shortly, they cleared the dishes from the hall, bringing in their place the hand-carved dominoes required for the game shen fu, the lacquered plaques destined for match-me-mine and mark-me-well, the tumbling gilded cages full of colored balls known as the Lady’s Knucklebones, the gaming-wheels – those with four, those with nine, and those with thirty-three divisions – blind songbirds trained to pick out one among three disparately dyed grains of corn, jumping beans, silver-harnessed fleas, baby toads steeped in strong liquor, and all the other appurtenances on which the lords of Teq were accustomed to place their bets. Additionally, from among their respective trains they marshalled their current champions at wrestling, boxing with cestae, and gladiatorial combat, not to mention tumblers, leapers, imbeciles armed with brushes full of paint, dice-throwing monkeys, and whatever else they had lately stumbled across upon the outcome of whose acts a wager might be made.
It was the practice for one of the challengers to name the first game, and of the challenged to declare the stakes. Thus, in strict accordance with protocol, Lord Yuckin as the last to lose to Lord Fellian cleared his throat and began with a single hand of shen fu, to which Fellian consented, and won a basket of desert-hoppers – a typical low stake for the early hours.
Then Lord Nusk bet on a jumping toad, and won a purse of coins from Barbizond, to which Lord Fellian replied with a spin of the four-part wheel and won a bag of sapphires. He nudged his companions and whispered that the old fool on the gallery must have been wrong.
Thus too he won the next five bouts, on toads again, on fleas, on two hands of shen fu, and lastly on the pecking birds. After that he lost a spin on the nine-part wheel and had to concede to Yuckin a chased and jewelled sword that Torquaida dismissed as pretty but not practical, its blade being inferior: no great loss.
“Now, I think,” murmured the pleased Lord Fellian, and on Lord Nusk naming shen fu as the next bout, declared his stake: fifty male servants on this single hand.
The impact was all he could have wished. Though they might scornfully disclaim involvement with such mundane matters, none knew better than the lords of Teq how many were kept employed to ensure their affluence, through what different and varied skills. To bet one servant was occasionally a gesture of last resort after a bad night; to risk fifty at one go was unprecedented.
Captain Achoreus chortled at the dismay that overcame the visiting lords, and nudged Torquaida in his skinny ribs. “The greatest winner!” he murmured, and signalled for another mug of wine.
Yet, when the dominoes were dealt, the Star of Eve fell to Lord Nusk, and only the Inmost Planet to Lord Fellian.
Nusk, who was a fat man with a round bald pate fringed with black, grinned enormously and rubbed his paunch. Scowling, Fellian trembled and made challenge to Lord Yuckin at the same game.
Yuckin, old and gaunt, eyes blank behind lenses of grey crystal, named as much gold as a particular man might carry, and won, and challenged back, and Lord Fellian staked the other fifty servants.
Whereupon he displayed the chief prize of shen fu, the Crown of Stars, and mocked Lord Yuckin’s petty deal of Planets Conjoined.
A few minutes later, on a hopping toad, he won back from Lord Nusk the former fifty servants, and again from Yuckin a fresh batch, including three skilled armorers that lord could ill afford to lose, and beyond that a farm in the Dale of Vezby, and a whole year’s vintage of sparkling wine, and three trade-galleys with their crews; and then from Nusk the High Manor of Coper’s Tor, with the right to make a celebrated ewe’s-milk cheese according to a secret recipe; then lost for five short minutes the Marches of Gowth with all four fortresses and the Shrine of Fire, but won them back on a spin of the four-part wheel and along with them the Estate of Brywood, the Peak of Brend, and the territory from Haggler’s Mound to Cape Dismay.
Securely positioned now, he commenced the calculated process of attrition that he had long dreamed of, the process which ultimately would reduce his rivals to penury: a cook who knew how to make sorbets without ice, a gardener who could raise strawberries in winter, a boy skilled at charming game from barren ground by playing a whistle, an eight-foot-tall swordsman, champion of the last public games …
Torquaida might have been forgiven for growing harried trying to keep track of the winnings and match what was in hand against what remained to the rival lords. By a supreme effort he stayed in control, always remembering to send a clerk to warn Lord Fellian when a stake was unworthy, to say for example that this concubine was scarred from the smallpox, or that guardsman had a palsy and his shield-arm shook, or a certain chest of coins bore a geas, and touched without the proper spell would turn to pebbles.
Lord Fellian granted him free of feoff the Estate of Brywood as reward for his valuable support, and laughed joyously nightlong at the discomfiture of his opponents.
VIII
Far below the banquet-hall, cast back by its high and vaulted roof, that ringing laughter reached the ears of those miserable deportees from Wantwich who were still awake. Some were asleep – on straw if they were lucky, on hard flags if they were not … but at least asleep.
One who was wakeful even on a mattress of eider feathers, draped in a diaphanous gown of finest lawn embroidered with seed pearls, was the girl Viola, surrounded by other female pleasure-objects destined for Lord Fellian’s delight. At a footstep on the floor beside her couch, she started and peered into obscurity, seeing only a black form outlined on greater blackness.
“Is someone there?” she whimpered.
“I,” said the traveller.
“How – how did you get in?” Viola sat up. “I tried the doors, and the windows too, and all are locked!”
The traveller forbore to explain.
After a moment, Viola began to weep. “Go away!” she commanded. “I never want to see you again! You did this awful thing to me, and I hate you!”
“On the contrary. You did it to yourself.”
“I never asked to be locked up here, waiting for some gross old lecher!”
“Ah, but you’ve been reunited with your man Leluak, and that’s what you said you wanted. You are both under the same roof; when Lord Fellian tires of you, you will be cast forth together to share the same dank alleyway and the same fevers, chills, and pestilences. This in essence constitutes reunion.”
“I should have thought longer before choosing,” Viola said after a pause for reflection. The traveller
nodded. At least, then, this cruel experience had battered some sense into her pretty head.
“You had, I believe,” he said, “encountered Achoreus before the attack he supervised on Wantwich.”
“I did so. I companioned him when he joined us for the spring dance.”
“Out of courtesy?”
“Of course.” In the dark, the girl bridled.
“Or was it because he was a stranger, and good-looking, and every other girl in the village would have changed places with you?”
“A little of that too,” she admitted meekly.
“And is it not true, my child, that you were more concerned to regain the handsomest, most eligible bachelor in Wantwich, for whom you had competed against all the other girls less attractive than yourself, than you were to right the wrong done to your family and friends upon the day of your projected wedding?”
“I must have been!” Viola moaned. “Would that overhasty wish of mine could be undone!”
“The second time a person calls on me,” said the traveller, “I may choose whether or not to grant the request. In this case, I choose not.”
“Have pity!” she cried, and caught his arm.
“Do you truly wish to find yourself once more upon the green at Wantwich – alone except for dotard Granny Anderland?”
There was an awful silence, which she eventually broke with a sob.
“However,” the traveller resumed, when he judged she had suffered long enough to imprint the moral on her memory, “you may rest easy. All is due to reach a satisfactory outcome. Though if I were to tell you the name of your savior, you’d not believe it. …”
He tapped his staff against the bed she sat on, and concluded, “Sleep, child. Wake at dawn.”
* * *
Dazed with elation, when the returning sun began to gild the turrets of Teq with the promise of a new day, Lord Fellian struggled to the high gallery of his tower in order to witness the departure of his defeated rivals. On their own! No one in the history of the city had won so fantastic a victory in a single night! Stripped even of their closest body-slaves, Lords Yuckin and Nusk were creeping into the morning twilight like whipped dogs. It had been more by grace than necessity that they had been permitted to keep clothing.
Fellian leaned drunkenly over the parapet and whooped like a falconer sighting quarry; when the cowed face of Lord Yuckin tilted upward to see what the noise was, he spilled on it the contents of his latest beaker of wine.
“So much for that old fool who wanted to bet that Lady Luck’s visage was turned away from me!” he bellowed, and laughed until the racket of his boasting was reflected from the nearby rooftops.
“Are you sure?”
To the edge of his politely voiced question the traveller appended the faint swish of his cloak as he advanced across the inlaid floor.
“Why, you …!” Lord Fellian gasped and made to draw back, but the parapet was hard against his spine and there was no way to retreat save over its top and into air. “Guards! Guards!”
“None of them has followed you up here,” said the traveller gravely. “They are persuaded that upon a winner like yourself – if there has ever been one – Lady Luck smiles so long and so favorably that no harm can possibly assail you.”
“Ah-hah!” Fellian began to recover his composure. “I conclude from that statement that you admit you would have lost your bet with me, had I been fool enough to take it on!”
“Why, no,” said the traveller, and his expression showed regret, for it had always seemed a shame to him that a person of intelligence – and Fellian was far from stupid – should be seduced into a self-defeating course of action. “I would have won.”
“What? You’re insane!” gasped Fellian. “Prove your claim!”
“I shall,” said the traveller, and with his staff he smote the wall that screened this gallery from sight of the tallest tower in Teq. A slice fell away like a wedge cut from a cheese. Beyond, there where Fellian’s reflex gaze darted before he could check himself, Lady Luck’s pinnacle loomed on the easterly blueness of the dawn.
A scream died stillborn in his throat. He stared and stared, and after a while he said, “But … but there’s only a stump!”
And it was true: against the sky, instead of the celebrated statue, nothing but a jagged pediment upreared.
He began to giggle. “Why, you’d have lost after all! Your wager was not that Lady Luck had ceased to smile on me, which would be a fair victory. You said her face was turned away from my throne!”
“True.”
“How can you utter such nonsense?”
The traveller gestured with his staff. “Go nearer; examine the chunks of stone I have broken from the wall.”
Hesitant, yet ashamed to appear frightened, Fellian obeyed. His fingertips fumbled across rough plaster while he coughed at the dust he was stirring up, and found smooth chased stones not conformable to the flat surface of the broken wall. A knot of hair-ribbon interpreted in sculpture; the slope of a gown, petrified, slanting over shoulder blades of granite …
“There was a storm,” said the traveller didactically. “You will recall the one because it brought part of your wall down. During it, lightning-struck, the figure tumbled and landed in the street. It has always been the custom, has it not, that anyone who looked on Lady Luck should die? Save the breath you’d waste for an answer; I know your agents dump those whom you dislike in the market-square, claiming it was for that reason they expired.
“Accordingly, none recognized the fragments. When you commanded masons to repair your wall, which as I said had also suffered in the storm, they gathered up whatever they could find, and into the gap they set the broken pieces of the statue, in such fashion that the back of its head was just behind your throne.”
“But that’s not fair!” shrieked Fellian. “You knew this all the time, didn’t you?”
“Who are you to talk of ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’?” snapped the traveller. “Did not I hear you yesterday promising to reward Achoreus by increasing his stake on a bet that your privy intelligence informed you he had won already? Be silent! I am not here to argue, but to inflict on you your just deserts! Now look upon the face, at last, of Lady Luck!”
He reached out with his staff. As effortlessly as though he rolled an empty wine-jar, he turned the stone head over, and before Fellian could snatch his gaze away he saw what he had most dreaded all his life.
With one eye socket vacant and the other masked, she was not smiling. Not on him and not on anyone. She was grinning, and in that look he read inconceivable malevolence.
“Your long-vanished ancestors who carved her image,” said the traveller, “understood the nature of luck better than you ever did or will. No wonder your masons felt this face was safer hidden in a solid wall.”
Fellian tried to answer. He could not. In compliance with the most ancient custom of his city, hands clawing at the air as though he could cram it by fistfuls into his choking lungs, the greatest winner among all the lords of Teq departed into nowhere.
Sighing, more than a little sorrowful, the traveller went his way.
A while later, when they came upon the corpse, those who had pledged themselves to Fellian’s service began to quarrel about partitioning what he had left behind: in sum, the total wealth of Teq and its environs.
“I will have the treasury!” Torquaida cried. “It’s no more than my due!” But a young and vigorous clerk from the countinghouse struck him down with a gold candlestick. His old pate cracked four ways, like the shell of an egg.
“If I can have nothing more, I’ll take the booty Lord Fellian cheated me of!” vowed Achoreus, and set off in search of the girl Viola. But he tripped on a slippery marble step at the entrance of the women’s quarters, and by the time he recovered from his bang on the head she was awake and away.
By contrast, though, on learning that after all his lord had been a loser in the game of life, the groom who tended Western Wind made haste to saddle up his cha
rge.
“At least this recompense is due to me,” he sighed, opening the door of the stable. Outside he found the girl whose hair was turning grey at twenty, pleading for a chance of escape. He hoisted her to his saddlebow and let the stallion prove his mettle on the open road.
Later, in Barbizond, they offered him to cover mares in heat, and from the foals which resulted built up a livery stable of their own.
Likewise the falconer, on being told the news, gathered his prize merlin and went out into the countryside to get what living he could. He lost the merlin by flying her at an eagle that was trying to steal a baby, a match the eagle was foredoomed to win. But the child, who survived unhurt, was the only son of a wealthy landowner, and in gratitude he made the falconer bailiff of his estates.
Also the cook gathered up a brand from beneath his cauldron and went forth by a secret tunnel leading from the back of his ox-roasting hearth. There he turned his ankle on a square object lying in the dust of the passageway, and the light of the brand showed that it was the lost Book of Knightly Vigor, from which – legend claimed – the Count of Hyfel, founder of Teq, had gained the amorous skill to woo and wed his twenty-seven brides. With recipes from it he opened a cookshop, and defeated lovers from a score of cities trudged over hill and dale to sample his unique concoctions.
Amid all this coming and going, however, the captives from Wantwich were content to find their way to freedom in the morning sun.
IX
On returning home, the villagers were a trifle puzzled to discover that the pond beside the green, which for as long as anybody could recall had been placid, now roiled unaccountably. However, as their repairs proceeded – new roofs and shutters, new gates and fences, to replace those broken by the troops from Teq – that disturbance ceased. Before the new beer was brewed, before new barrels were coopered, before a new fiddle had been made and strung for Jarge, the water had resumed its normal state.