Compleat Traveller in Black (13 page)

“Mistress, what shall we do? They are in every room – five hundred of them at the least count! And all, all have claimed the right to what you have, for they say they are your ancestors and this is their home too!”

“My ancestors,” whispered Meleagra. Her gaze, drawn as by a magnet, fixed on him who had taken her seat at the head of the table, and a silence overcame the entire company.

The one at whom she stared was a cross-eyed, ill-favored fellow in a dirty doublet, unshaven and with black around his nails. He gave her a smile that displayed gapped yellow teeth, and spoke in a soft voice with a peasant’s accent.

“Ah, Meleagra, sure and you set a fine table! This meal which you account an everyday affair matches the grandest feasts we held in times gone by!”

“Who – who are you?” Meleagra choked out.

“You know me not?” The fellow cocked an eyebrow traversed by a scar. “Why, Damien, o’course, who built this house and founded the family’s fortune in the earliest age of Ys. And at my side Cosimo, my firstborn here – though I had by-blows aplenty in another town! And Syriax his wife and their children Ruslan, Roland, and Igraine; their children Mark, Valetta, Corin, Ludwig, Matthaus, Letty, Seamus; theirs, Orlando, Hugo, Dianne, twins Nathaniel and Enoch –”

“Stop! Stop!” Meleagra pressed her hands to her temples; the room seemed to be spinning, and from every side gross faces leered at her, or thin drawn faces gazed with stony regard, or dull faces moped, or …

“There is no more food!” the steward shouted. “We have killed all the poultry, the larder’s bare, the wine casks are drained, the last carp is gone from the pond, the beer-barrels are exhausted and even the
well
is dry!”

“You’ve done this to me?” Meleagra whispered to her remotest ancestor Damien. “But I gave you breath and life, and this new opportunity – I invited you here!”

“Is that,” said Damien with contempt, “the only act of any importance you can boast of? Did we your ancestors not erect this house, construct this city, its fair avenues and fine harbors and full stores? Have you done nothing save parasitize upon our leavings? I read in your eyes that that is so! Here we are alive, who died before you saw the light – do you still call yourself the mistress of this house? Hah! You are a thing not worth the thinking of, less than dust, for dust can be seen to dance in sunbeams. You are the flame of a candle guttering out. So
-poof!
”

He blew at the candle closest to him on the great table, and with the extinction of its flame there was no such person as Meleagra – never had been-never could be.

VI

Long hours Vengis had paced in the high room above the Hall of State, pondering the day’s events and screwing himself to the point where he would again resume his conjurations. The day wasted; shadows lengthened; evening cold began to permeate the building, and he called for fire and flambeaux.

He was afraid.

He had seen in the eyes of the traveller in black a warning which his pride forbade him to heed; he was ashamed because he was afraid, yet shame could not break fear’s grip. He wished to do as his colleagues were doing – what if he alone remained untalented in sorcery when blockheads like Bardolus or half-grown chits like Vivette boasted powers unnamable?

Nonetheless, he dithered and delayed, and had not yet cast a rune nor recited the first line of a single formula when the sergeant of the guard came stiffly to report a disturbance in the town.

“Be more precise!” rapped Vengis. “What manner of disturbance?”

“Why, sir” – and the sergeant rubbed his chin dolefully – “some hours agone there were complaints of desecration in the graveyard by the cathedral, the curate saying that a vault was open and the bones removed. But seeing as we’ve had call for similar extraordinary materials that your lordship required, I decided best not to say anything. Now, though, the affair has ramified. For example, the side wall of this building here is cracked where they entombed alive a woman named Igraine – you’ve seen the plaque – accused of commerce with a familiar spirit in the guise of a cat.”

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.”