Compleat Traveller in Black (18 page)

“Turn her free! Luck has smiled her way today!”

“Not so,” contradicted the traveller.

“What? You gainsay me – you gainsay
Fellian
?” The lord was popeyed with horror.

“Say rather I see two sides of this good fortune,” the other murmured. “Is it not great luck for an idiot to be fed, housed, and clothed by a rich lord? Is this not worth more to her than to be given some pretty baubles and left to fend alone? Where is the benefit if next week she starves?”

Fellian began to redden as the validity of the point sank in, and he glared fiercely at someone to his right whom he suspected of being about to giggle.

“You chop logic, do you?” he grunted. “You’re a schoolman, no doubt, of the kind we take to gaze on Lady Luck, who thereupon die horribly!”

“Which event,” the traveller remarked mildly, “puts a term to the possibility of persuading them to share your views. The dead are not the easiest persons to convert; their attitudes tend to be somewhat rigid …” He shifted his staff from one hand to the other, and continued.

“Let me see if I understand these views of yours. You maintain, I believe, that life is one long gamble?”

“Of course it is!” barked Fellian.

“In that case, why should one wish to make more wagers? Is not any other, compared to the wager that embraces the whole of life, too trivial to be worth attention?”

“On the contrary. It is the gamble of life that must prove ultimately trivial, since none of us can win at it forever. …” Fellian sounded uncomfortable at making the admission, and proceeded rapidly to a more agreeable aspect of the subject. “What lends spice to the period of awaiting the inevitable is winning other wagers. And in myself I constitute an irrefutable proof of the correctness of my opinion. You see me sitting here – is it not plain by that token that I’m as much a winner in the game of life as anyone can hope to be? I staked my very survival on the right to be a Lord of Teq, and my present eminence proves that the Lady on the tower smiles my way!”

The traveller cocked his head sardonically. He said, “Call yourself a great gambler, a great winner, whatever you like. But I can name a bet you’ll not accept.”

“What?” Fellian howled, and all around there were cries of shocked dismay. “You think you can insult a Lord of Teq with impunity? Guards, seize and bind him! He has offered me a mortal affront, and he must pay for it.”

“How have I affronted you – how? To say that I can name a bet you will not accept is not to insult you, unless you can but will not match my stakes!” The traveller fixed Fellian with a piercing stare.

“Am I to bet with a nobody? I bet only against my peers! It takes uncounted wealth to bet with me!” Fellian snorted. “Why, were I to treat you seriously, any bumpkin could come to me and say, I wager my rags and clogs, all I possess, against all that you possess – and that’s a match!’”

“But there is one thing any man may bet against any other,” said the traveller. “For no man can have more than one of it.”

There was silence for the space of several heartbeats. “My lord,” Torquaida said at last in a rusty voice, “he means life.”

Fellian went pale and licked his lips. He blustered, “Even so! A life that may have fifty years to run, like mine, against one which may snuff out tomorrow, or next week?”

“Regrettably,” Torquaida creaked, “that is fair stakes. However” – and he gave a tiny dry smile and wheezing chuckle – “it’s over-soon to name the stakes before one knows the bet, is it not?”

Fellian flashed him a grateful grin; this was the outlet he had failed to spot himself. He said loudly, “Yes, a crucial point! What bet is this that you seek to make with me, old man?”

“I bet you,” said the traveller amid a general hush, “that the face of Lady Luck is turned away from your throne.”

There was an instant of appalled shock. But with great effort Fellian forced a booming laugh.

“Why, that wager’s lost already!” he exclaimed. “I’ve said as much already: it’s proof of the Lady’s favor that I enjoy unparalleled riches.”

“They are what you awoke to today,” the traveller said. “Tomorrow is yet to eventuate.”

“Why stop at tomorrow?” Fellian countered. “Next week, next month, next year if you like, when I have won still more bets against Yuckin and Nusk, we’ll hoist you on a tall pole that you may look on the Lady directly and see that she does smile towards me. Meantime, enjoy the hospitality of my dungeons. Ho, guards!”

“Thank you, I am in no need of lodging,” said the traveller. “Moreover, a week is too long. Less than a day will suffice. I will see you again tomorrow; let us say at dawn. For now, farewell.”

“Seize him!” Fellian bellowed, and two soldiers who had remained behind, on Achoreus’s signal, when the party of captives was led away, darted in the direction of the traveller. But they went crashing against one another, as though they had sought to arrest an armful of air.

VII

In the great cavelike kitchens of the palace, a cook sweated with ladle and tongs at a cauldron of half a hogshead capacity. The fire roaring beneath scorched his skin, the smoke blinded his eyes with tears.

From the dark corner of the hearth a voice inquired for whom the savory-smelling broth was being prepared.

“Why, for Lord Fellian,” sighed the cook.

“But no man can engulf such a deal of soup. Will he have guests?”

“Yes, so he will.” The cook grimaced. “They’ll eat two ladlefuls apiece, or maybe three.”

“And you then will enjoy what is left over?”

“I, sir?” – with a rueful chuckle. “No, on my soul, I wouldn’t dare. What my lord leaves in the dish goes to his hounds! Tonight as ever I shall sup off a dry crust, with cheese or moldy bacon-rind. Still, hounds have no taste for wine, so if I’m quick I may claim the goblet-dregs from the high table, and liquor will soothe my grumbling belly long enough to let me sleep.”

Among the fierce ammonia stench of guano, a falconer worked by an unglazed window, tooling with gnarled yet delicate hands a design of rhythmical gold leaf on the hood and jesses of a peregrine.

“This leather is beautiful,” said a soft voice from over his shoulder. “But doubtless you put on far finer array when you sally forth of an evening to enjoy yourself at a tavern?”

“I, sir?” grunted the falconer, not turning around; the light was wasting, and he was forbidden the extravagance of lamps or candles. “Why, no. I’m in the service of Lord Fellian, and have no time to amuse myself. And had I time, I’d be constrained to wear what you see upon me now – old canvas breeches bound with fraying rope. Besides, with what would I purchase a mug of ale? A scoop of fewmets?”

In the stables, a groom passed a soft cloth caressingly over the fitments of a stall; they were of ivory and jacinth, while the manger was filled with new sweet hay, fine oats fit to have baked bread, and warm-scented bran.

“Palatial,” said a voice from behind the partition. “This is truly for a horse?”

“Aye,” muttered the groom, declining to be distracted from his work. “For Western Wind, Lord Fellian’s favourite steed.”

“By comparison, then, I judge you must take your repose on high pillows stuffed with swansdown, beneath a coverlet of silk, or furs for winter.”

“I sleep on straw, sir – do not jest with me! And if I have time to gather clay to stop the chinks in my hovel against the cold of night, I count myself well off.”

Beside a marble bath, which ran scented water from a gargoyle’s mouth, a slender girl measured out grains of rare restorative spices onto a sponge, a loofah, and the bristles of a brush made from the hide of a wild boar.

“With such precautions,” a voice said from beyond a curl of rising steam, “your beauty will surely be preserved far past the ordinary span.”

“Think you I’d dare to waste one speck of this precious essence on my own skin?” the girl retorted, tossing back a tress of hair within which – though she could be at most aged twenty – there glinted a betraying thread of silver. “I’d be lucky, when they detected me, to be thrown over the sill of that window! Beneath it there is at least a kitchen midden to afford me a soft landing. No, my entire fortune is my youth, and it takes the powers of an elemental and the imagination of a genius to spread youth thin enough to satisfy Lord Fellian from spring to autumn.”

“Why then do you continue in his service?”

“Because he is a winner in the game of life.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Why,” sighed the girl, “everyone says so.”

In the high-vaulted banquet-hall, as the sun went down, the rival lords Yuckin and Nusk came to feast with their respective retinues at the expense of the current greatest winner prior to the onset of the night’s gambling. They had come to his palace too often of late; there was no friendly chat between them. Gloomily – though displaying fair appetite, because their own kitchens did not furnish such delicacies – they sat apart, growing angrier and angrier as platters of gold succeeded those of silver, goblets of crystal replaced those of enamelled pottery … and often recognizing items they had owned and lost.

Lord Fellian should have been in high spirits at the downcast mood of his adversaries. Instead, he too appeared depressed and anxious, and the talk at his long table was all of the strange intruder in a black cloak who had proposed so disturbing a bet.

“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.