The Compleat Traveller in Black

by John Brunner

  From the street below came a howl as of maddened beasts, and the sergeant flinched visibly. But he continued in his best official manner.

  “Then, your lordship, at dusk reports came of strangers in the city, and we called out the patrols for fear of infiltration by some jealous invader. Myself, I’ve stopped twenty-one persons, and all spoke with the accent of our city and gave names concordant with our nomenclature. But it seems to me I’ve seen such names on gravestones before now – some, indeed, earlier today, when I answered the complaint at the cathedral. And what brings me to you now, begging your indulgence, is the curious business of the man and the two wives.”

  “What’s that?” whispered Vengis, sweat pearling on his face.

  “Well, sir, there was this man, one whom I’d challenged, walking with a girl of fifteen-odd. Comes up from nowhere a woman aged as he was – forty, maybe – and says she is his wife and what’s this hussy doing with her husband? So then the little girl says they were married legally and then follows insults and hair pulling and at the last we must clap ’em in the jail to cool their heels. Which is – uh – difficult. For every cell, they promise me, is full, and that’s more than I can understand. This morning the turnkey’s records say there were one hundred and one places vacant for new prisoners.”

  Vengis’s voice had failed him. He chewed his nails and stared with burning eyes at the sergeant.

  “What shall I do, your lordship?” the man asked finally.

  “I … I …” Vengis spun around and strode to a window overlooking the main square. He thrust wide the casement and leaned out. By the last dim light of the dying day he could see a myriad people gathering. Some were colorful and substantial, but these were few. Most were gray as the stones they trod, and trailed curious wispy streamers behind them, like cobwebs. But all alike exhibited an air of bewilderment, as though they were lost in the mazes of time and eternity, and could not find a way back to the present moment.

  Vengis began to babble incoherently.

  There came a thundering knock at the door, and a cavernous groaning voice said, “Open! Open in the name of the Lord of Ys!”

  Shrugging, the sergeant made to obey, but Vengis ran after him, clawing at his arm. “Don’t! Don’t let them in!” he wailed.

  “But, your lordship,” said the sergeant firmly, “it is in your name that he seeks entry, so it must be a matter of importance. Besides, with your permission, I’m expecting more reports from my patrols.”

  Vengis searched the room with feverish eyes. In the far corner he espied a closet large enough to hold a man; he dashed to it, and slammed the door with him inside.

  The sergeant, astonished, went nonetheless to answer the knock, and fell back in dismay before the apparition that confronted him. Gaunt, tall, with a second mouth gaping redly in his throat, here was the figure of legendary Lord Gazemon who had laid the foundation stone of Ys with his own two hands.

  Now those hands held a broadsword; now he advanced with slow terrible steps upon the closet in which Vengis thought to secrete himself, and battered down the planks of its door to hale that miserable successor of his into the wan torchlight.

  “You know me!” croaked the city’s founder.

  Gulping, moaning, Vengis contrived a nod, and the huge specter shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. “Oh, to what a dwarfish stature have shrunk these weaklings of today!” he bellowed. The sergeant, cowering behind an oaken table, could not tell by which mouth Gazemon spoke – his natural one, or the second that had let out his life.

  Again the door rattled to an imperious knock, and he scuttled to answer before Gazemon could so order him. With trembling hands he admitted those who stood without: Lorin, who had slain Gazemon by treachery and usurped his throne; Angus, who had reclaimed that throne into the rightful line of descent; then Caed; then Dame Degrance who passed for a man and ruled like one until the physicians at her deathbed unmasked her sex; then Walter of Meux; then Auberon; then Lams, and the first Vengis who was a stout and brave leader for the one short year he survived, and others and others to the latest who had sat the chair below prior to the advent of the incumbent lord.

  With axes, maces, swords, with pens and scrolls and money-changers’ scales according to the form of power by which they had made Ys great, they gathered around the hapless target of their contempt.

  “We have walked abroad in the city since we were called from rest,” Gazemon rumbled, his grip still fast on Vengis’s shoulder. “We have seen stagnant puddles in the streets, shutters dangling by one hinge from the cracked walls of once-splendid houses; we have been followed by beggars and starving children in Ys which we devoted our lives to, making it a city that the world should envy! You have given our golden towers to tarnish, our iron doors to rust; you have abandoned our fine harbor to the mud and our fat grainfields to the weeds; you have squandered our treasury on baubles, forgetful that we paid for it with blood. How say you all, you who listen here? It is not time that we held an accounting?”

  “Aye, time,” they said as one, and hearing the menace in their voices Vengis rolled his eyeballs upward in their sockets and let go his hold on life.

  VII

  “Oh, there you are!”

  Perched on a grey rock atop a grey hill, Jacques the scrivener forwent his gazing at sunset-gilded Ys in favor of a scowl directed at the traveller in black who had come to join him. There were no footprints to show by what path he had arrived; still, where Laprivan wiped away the past that was no wonder.

  “I’ve sat here long enough, in all conscience,” Jacques complained. “This wind is cold! And, for all you promised I should witness the doom of Ys, I see nothing but what I’ve always seen when looking on the city from afar. When will this doom befall? Tell me that!”

  The traveller sighed. Now the course of events was grinding to its inexorable conclusion, he felt downcast, despite there never having been an alternative. He did not much care for Jacques, regarding him as pompous and self-opinionated, but even so …

  “The doom is already in train.”

  Jacques leapt down from his rock and stamped his foot. “You mean I’ve missed it?”

  “That, no,” said the traveller. He raised his staff and pointed across the twilight grey of the valley. “Do you not see, there by the gates, a certain number of persons making in this direction?”

  “Why … yes, I believe I do.” Jacques peered hard. “But from this distance I cannot discern who they are.”

  “I can,” murmured the traveller. “They are those who are determined that Jacques the scrivener shall not be denied participation in the doom of Ys.”

  “What?” Turned sidewise in the gloaming, Jacques’s face was ghastly pale. “Why me? What do they want with me?”

  “A reckoning.”

  “But …!” Jacques shifted from foot to foot, as though minded to flee. “Explain! Pray explain!”

  “So I will,” the traveller conceded wearily, and took a comfortable grip to lean on his staff. “First you must understand that the would-be enchanters of Ys have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and – as they desired – have called back those who created the city and maintained it in times past. And they found, as was inevitable, that these ancestors were human beings, with human faults and failings, and not infrequently with remarkable outstanding faults, because this is the way with persons who are remarkable and outstanding in other areas of their lives.”

  “But – but I counselled against this foolishness!” stammered Jacques.

  “No,” corrected the one in black. “You did not counsel. You said: you are pigheaded idiots not to see that I am absolutely and unalterably right while everybody else is wrong. And when they would not listen to such dogmatic bragging – as who would? – you washed your hands of them and wished them a dreadful doom.”

  “Did I wish them any more than they deserved?” Jacques was trying to keep up a front of bravado, but a whine had crept into his voice and he had to link his fingers to stop
his hands from shaking.

  “Debate the matter with those who are coming to find you,” proposed the traveller sardonically. “Their conviction is at variance with yours. They hold that by making people disgusted with the views you subscribed to, you prevented rational thought from regaining its mastery of Ys. Where you should have reasoned, you flung insults; where you should have argued soberly and with purpose, you castigated honest men with doubts, calling them purblind fools. This is what they say. Whether your belief or theirs is closer to the truth, I leave for you and them to riddle out. I must, though, in all honesty observe that you’re outnumbered.”

  Jacques stared again at the column of people winding this way from the city gate, and now could see them in detail. At the head of the line was a blacksmith with a hammer on his shoulder; behind him, a ditcher followed with a mattock, then a gardener with a sickle and two coopers with heavy barrel-staves. And those behind still bore each their handiest weapon, down to a red-handed goodwife wielding the stick from her butter-churn.

  He glanced wildly around for a way of escape, teeth chattering. “I must run!” he blurted. “I must hide!”

  “It would be of little help,” the traveller said. “Those people yonder are determined; though you hid in the pit of Fegrim’s volcano, they would still track you down.”

  “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 pla
nets 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.