The Compleat Traveller in Black

by John Brunner

  To make way for a new beginning? Possibly. If not, then – in the very strictest sense – no matter, never mind …

  Until then, however, the elementals did still exist and fretted away with their enfeebled force, like Fegrim vainly beating at the cap of cold lava which closed the crater of his now-extinct volcano. Not a few had discovered that human practitioners of magic were, without having chosen to be, their allies. But there was a penalty attached to such collaboration, and the most minor of them had paid it long ago; they were reduced to activating hearth-charms. No doubt this was the fate that had overtaken Litorgos – no doubt it was he who drew the blood from the foul water, though he was in no position to benefit thereby. Blood had its place in magic, but it could never free an elemental.

  But the traveller did not want so much as to think about Litorgos, or Stanguray, until the remainder of his business was completed. Nonetheless he did wish – and withal wished he could grant himself that wish, as he must grant those of others – that he could whirl the planets around to the conformation which would mark the conclusion of his journey, and thereby enable a return to that place which, with every pace he took, seemed more and more likely to become the focus of terrible and inexplicable events.

  Making haste was pointless, though. The orderly succession of time which he himself had been responsible for, as river-silt had created land at Stanguray, now held him tight in its grip. Some relief from his apprehension might be obtained, however, by overoccupying himself. Accordingly on this journey he made a point of visiting not only those places familiar to him from aforetime – and sometimes from before time – but also newer locations.

  One such was in the forest near to Clurm. Here in the shadow of great oaks a former petty lord, who held his birthright to have been usurped, planned with a group of fanatical followers to establish such a city as would lure anyone to remove thither at its mere description. Now they shivered in tents and ate wild game, half raw, and nuts and mushrooms; but this new city was to have towers that combed the clouds, and streets wide enough for a hundred to march abreast, and brothels with the fairest of women to attract spirited youths, and a treasury overflowing with gold and gems to pay their fee, and an army would be forged from them to overthrow the usurper, and magicians would be hired to render them unquestioningly loyal, and all in the upshot would be as this wild dreamer pictured it.

  Except that after a year of exile his little band had not erected so much as a log cabin, deeming manual labor beneath their dignity.

  “But the new Clurm will be of such magnificence!” asserted the lordling, seated as ever closest to the warmth of their tiny camp-fire; they dared not build a larger one, for fear of being spotted by the usurper’s forces, who roved free in the countryside while they hid among trees, being less beloved of the common folk. “It will be … it will be … Oh, I can see it now in my mind’s eye! Would you too could see its wonders! Would I could make you believe in its existence!”

  Standing apart among underbrush, and leaning on his staff, the traveller said, “As you wish, so be it.”

  Next morning the inevitable happened. The band awoke convinced that their city was real, for they imagined they saw it all about them. Joyful, bent on their leader’s errand, they set out towards all points of the compass and, just as he had predicted, returned with many eager young recruits.

  Who thereupon, not finding any city grand or otherwise, set about those who had enticed them hither, beat them with cudgels, bound them hand and foot, and committed them for lunatics. The lordling was not exempted from this treatment.

  But the traveller, departing, found himself unable to avoid thinking about Stanguray.

  Therefore he turned aside from the road which led to Wocrahin, and made his way to a green thicket in the midst of a perfectly circular expanse of hard clay, which neither rain nor thawing after snow could turn to mud. Here was imprisoned Tarambole, with sway over dryness, as Karth formerly over cold in the land called Eyneran: a being to whom had not been imparted the gift of telling lies.

  Within the thicket, concealed from sight of passers-by – which was as well, since lately the people of the region had taken much against magic – the traveller resigned himself to the performance of a ceremony none but he and Tarambole recalled. His actions gained him the answer to a single question, and it was not what he had looked forward to.

  No, it was not, so Tarambole declared, a powerful and unsuspected elemental that drew his mind back, and back, and back again to thoughts of Stanguray.

  “Would that I might consult with Wolpec,” sighed the traveller. But he knew not where that strange coy harmless spirit bided now; he had yielded too early to the blandishments of humans, and by his own volition had wasted his power to the point where it was needless to imprison him. He chose his own captivity. Much the same might be said for Farchgrind, who once or twice had provided intelligence for the traveller, and indeed for countless others.

  There remained, of course, those whom he had only banished: Tuprid and Caschalanva, Quorril and Lry. … Oh, indubitably they would know what was happening! It was not out of the question that they themselves had set this train of events in motion. But to summon them, the most ancient and powerful of his enemies, when he was in this plight, weakened by puzzlement …

  Had they set out to undermine him, knowing they could not match him in fair fight?

  Yet Tarambole who could not lie had said: his disquiet was not due to the opposition of an elemental.

  The gravely disturbing suspicion burgeoned in the traveller’s mind that for the first (and the next word might be taken literally in both its senses) time a new enemy had arrayed against him.

  New.

  Not an opponent such as he had vanquished over and over, but something original, foreign to his vast experience. And if it were not the Four Great Ones who had contrived so potent a device …

  Then only one explanation seemed conceivable, and if it were correct, then he was doomed.

  But his nature remained single, and it was not in him to rail against necessity. Necessarily he must continue on his way. He retrieved his staff and with its tip scattered the somewhat repulsive residue of what he had been obliged to use in conjuring Tarambole, and headed once more towards Wocrahin.

  * * *

  Where, in a tumbledown alley, a smith whose forge blazed and roared and stank yelled curses at his neighbors as he hammered bar iron into complex shapes. His only audience was his son, a boy aged ten, stepping on and off the treadle of the huge leather bellows that blew his fire.

  “Hah! They want me out of here because they don’t like the noise, they don’t like the smell, they don’t like me – That’s what it boils down to, they don’t like me because my occupation’s not genteel! But my father lived here, and my grandad too, and I have clear title to the house. And they buy my wares, don’t they? Boy, answer when you’re spoken to!”

  But the boy had been at his work three years, and the racket had made him deaf and inhalation of foul smokes had harmed his brain, so he could only nod or shake his head by way of reply. This his father had failed to register, being taken up with grievances as much imaginary as real.

  Fortuitously this time the boy did the proper thing: he nodded. Thus assuaged, the smith resumed his complaining.

  “If they don’t care to live hard by a forge, let ’em buy new homes outside the town – or, better yet, let ’em club together and buy me a house in the country, with a stream beside to lift and drop a trip-hammer! Let ’em turn their hands to helping me, as I do them! After all, a forge must be sited somewhere, right? They should see what it’s like to live without iron, shouldn’t they, boy?”

  This time, by alternation, the youngster shook his head. Infuriated, the smith flung down his tools and bunched his fists.

  “I’ll teach you and the rest of ’em to make mock of me!” he roared. “Oh that they and you and everyone could see what life is like when you lack strong black iron!”

  “
As you wish,” the traveller said from a smoky corner, “so be it.”

  Whereat all iron in the smithy turned to crumbling rust: the anvil, the hammerheads, the tongs, the chisels and the nails, the cramps that held the massy wooden lever of the bellows, even the blank horseshoes waiting in a pile. The smith let out a great cry, and the neighbors came running. Such was their laughter that shortly the phrase “like a smith without iron” entered the common parlance of Wocrahin. Indeed, he taught them to make mock. …

  But the traveller was ill pleased. This was not like his customary regulation of affairs. It was clumsy. It was more like the rough-and-ready improvisations of the times before Time.

  And he could not cure himself of thinking about Stanguray.

  In Teq they still gambled to the point of insanity, and might supplanted right among its decadent people.

  “No, you may not waste time making mud pies!” a woman scolded her toddler son, dragging him back from a puddle where a score of children were amusing themselves. “You’re to be the greatest winner since Fellian, and support me in my old age. Ah, would I knew how to make you understand my plans for your future!”

  “As you wish,” sighed the traveller, who had taken station in the square into which the lightning-struck image of Lady Luck had tumbled – where now greedy unscrupulous landlords sold lodging by the night in squalid hovels to those who imagined sleeping here would bring good fortune.

  The boy’s eyes grew round and a look of horror spread across his face. He sank his teeth in his mother’s arm, deep enough to draw blood, and took screaming to his heels, to scrape a living as best he could among the other outcasts of this now dismal city. Given the schemes his mother had in mind, he was the better for his freedom.

  Yet that also struck the traveller as unbefitting, and still he could not rid his mind of thoughts of Stanguray.

  In Segrimond the folk no longer tended a grove of ash trees. They had been felled to make a fence and grandstand around an arena of pounded rocks, where for the entertainment of the wealthy savage beasts were matched with one another and against condemned criminals, armed or unarmed according to the gravity of their offense and the certainty of the jury which had heard the evidence. Today the arena had witnessed the demise of a girl who had charged her respectable uncle with rape.

  “Now this,” said the traveller under his breath, “is not as it should be. It smacks more of chaos, this indecision, than of the proper unfolding of time. When all things have but a single nature, there will be no room for the doubt which calls for resolution in this random manner.”

  He waited. In a little the dead girl’s uncle, resplendent in satin trimmed with fur, came weeping from the vantage point reserved for privileged onlookers. “Ah, if you but knew,” he cried to fawning hangers-on, “how much it cost me to accuse my darling niece!”

  “So be it,” said the traveller, and by nightfall the people did indeed know what it had cost him, in bribes to perjured witnesses. On the morrow he was kicked to death by a wild onager.

  Yet and still the traveller felt himself infect with the foulness of the world, and could not release his mind from thinking about Stanguray.

  Like Teq, Gryte was no longer rich. On the marches of its land a new town had grown up called Amberlode, a name commemorative of the reason for its founding. To it had removed the more enterprising of the old rich families of Gryte; against it the less enterprising were mouthing curses.

  But the powers on which they called were petty compared for instance to those which had carried Ys – albeit briefly – back to eternity across the frontier of time, so their impact on Amberlode was minimal. Realizing this, a man who hated his younger brother for seizing an opportunity he had rejected cried aloud, and said, “Would it were I rather than he who enjoyed that fine new house in the new city!”

  “As you wish,” murmured the traveller, who had accepted the hospitality this man accorded grudgingly to travellers in order to acquire virtue against some misty hereafter.

  At once the situation was reversed … but because the younger brother under whatsoever circumstances was the more intelligent and talented of the two, when it came his turn to utter curses his spells were genuinely efficacious, and the fine new house collapsed, to the vast discomfiture of its then occupants.

  * * *

  And that was wrong!

  The realization brought the traveller up short. There should have lain neither blame nor suffering on whichever brother chose aright and made the move to Amberlode, yet here it came, and with brutal force. From as far back as he could recall it had been the traveller’s intention that the literal interpretation he placed on the wishes he granted should be a means of ensuring justice. If penalties ensued, they should be confined to those who had deserved them. What was awry?

  The constellations had not yet wheeled to the configuration marking the conclusion of his journey. By rights he should have continued in prescribed sequence from one stage of it to the next, to the next, to the next …

  But he found he could not. If it were true that some hitherto unencountered foe, neither human nor elemental, now ranged against him, that implied a fundamental shift in the nature of all the realities. Beyond which, it hinted at something so appalling that he might as well abandon his task at once. He had believed his assignment binding, forever and forever, within and outside time. But it must necessarily lie within the power of the One for Whom all things were neither possible nor impossible, to –

  He cancelled that thought on the instant. Completion of it would of itself wipe him from the record of what was, what might be, and what was as though it had never been. His status was, as he well knew, at best precarious.

  Which made him think of the rope-walking children at Stanguray.

  Which made him take the most direct route thither, and immediately.

  Which taught him the most painful lesson of his existence.

  IV

  So far as human habitation went, initially around Lake Taxhling there had been only reed huts wherein dwelt fisherfolk who well understood how to charm their way across its waters, and distinguish by simple conjuration those natural fishes that were safe to eat from those which had been transformed by the river Metamorphia and on which a geas lay.

  Certain onerous duties bought them this privilege, but by and large they regarded their prime deity Frah Frah as being, if exigent, not unkind.

  Time, though, wore on, and by degrees they quit performance of the rituals that had purchased their livelihood; in particular, they no longer ceremonially burned down and rebuilt their homes twice annually.

  By then it was no longer so essential to judge the nature of one’s catch; the river’s power was waning. Now and then someone died through carelessness, generally a child or an oldster, but the survivors shrugged it off.

  Then, as the river’s magic diminished further, certain nomads followed it downstream: traders, and pilgrims, and people who had so ill-used their former farms that the topsoil blew away; and criminal fugitives as well. Finding that on the seaward side of Lake Taxhling there was a sheer enormous drop, they decided to remain, and the original inhabitants – being peaceable – suffered them to settle.

  Henceforward the reed huts were not burned, because there were none. The newcomers preferred substantial homes of timber, clay and stone. Henceforward the shrines dedicated to Frah Frah were increasingly neglected. Henceforward meat figured largely in the local diet, as fish had formerly; herds of swine were established in the nearby woodlands, and grew fat in autumn on acorns and beechmast, while sheep and goats were let loose on the more distant slopes, though the grazing was too poor for cattle. The way of life around Lake Taxhling was transformed.

  There followed a succession of three relatively gentle invasions, by ambitious conquerors, each of which endowed the area with a new religion not excessively dissimilar from the old one. It was a reason for children to form gangs and stage mock battles on summer evenings, rather than a cause for adult strife,
that some families adhered to Yelb the Comforter and others to Ts-graeb the Everlasting or Honest Blunk. They coexisted with fair mutual tolerance.

  Altogether, even for someone like Orrish whose stock was unalloyed pre-conquest, and whose parents maintained a dignified pride in their seniority of residence, life on the banks of Taxhling was not unpleasant.

  Or rather, it had not been so until lately. Oh, in his teens – he had just turned twenty – he had been mocked because he confessed to believing in the fables told to children about a town below the waterfall with which there had once been trade. But he was strong and supple and could prove his point by scaling the ruined stairs both ways, using creepers to bridge the sections where the carven steps had crumbled, thereby demonstrating that the idea was not wholly absurd.

  That, therefore, was endurable. So too was the military service imposed by the region’s current overlord, Count Lashgar, on all males between eighteen and twenty-one. It was a nuisance, but it was imperative if one wished to marry, and it enabled youngsters to break free of their parents, which could not be bad. Because the count had no territorial ambitions, and spent his time poring over ancient tomes, the most dangerous duties he assigned his troops consisted in keeping track of goats on hilly pastures, and the most unpleasant in the monthly shambles. There were too many people now for fish to feed them all, so the latest invader, Count Lashgar’s grandfather, had exhibited a neat sense of household economy by decreeing that the slaughter of animals should henceforth be an army monopoly, thereby tidily combining weapons training (they were killed with sword and spear) with tax collection (there was a fixed charge based on weight and species, which might be commuted by ceding one sheep of six, one goat of seven, and one hog of eight), with religious duty (the hearts were saved to be offered on the altar of his preferred deity, Ts-graeb the Everlasting), and with – as he naïvely imagined – an increase in the fish supply. It struck him as reasonable to assume that by establishing a shambles in the shallows of the lake one could contrive to give aquatic creatures extra nourishment, thanks to its waste.