Compleat Traveller in Black (28 page)

But the traveller was paying no attention. Gazing at the lamp-chimney, which as predicted was on the instant blearing over, he was uttering sad words within his head:

“Ah, Wolpec, Wolpec! Has it come to this?”

Once this pallid thing of grimy smoke had been an elemental he – even he – was now and then compelled to consult. There were conditions attached to such inquiry, by which he – even he – was forced to abide. Here, now, on the chimney of a common lamp, there writhed blurred characters such as formerly had expressed transcendent truths … but who alive could certify the meaning of such messages? Those tongues had been forgotten everywhere!

Reacting to the concentration of his gaze, the woman ventured, “Sir, you’re not by any chance skilled in the repairing of lamps …?”

Then, registering the fierceness of his expression, she lapsed into a puzzled silence.

Some of the old laws, it appeared, still stood, but the under-structure of them must have cracked, as after an earthquake a building may retain its general shape, yet lack huge plates of stucco from its façade and be unsafe to walk the stairways of. For this lamp was showing three truths in the ancient manner, without the ancient and obligatory rites. …

Of three, the first incomprehensible, in a variety of writing that creatures not quite manlike had employed to record dealings in imponderables. It had been hazarded that the records concerned a trade in souls, but that was barely an approximation. In any case, being an invention of chaos, the symbols had any value anyone cared to assign them.

And they were fading, and it was time to ask again.

“How come you to this pass?” the traveller thought.

Now, the truth debatable, in a single hieroglyph such as might have been seen on the high pillars of Etnum-Yuzup before that metropolis dissolved into dust with thunderclaps. The Grand Five Weavers had grown self-indulgent, and no longer observed the instructions they had issued to themselves in the days of the foundation of their city. This might be read plainly; the traveller read it.

One would cease
.

Now for the final truth, the ineluctable … but the question must be aptly posed. Indeed, the traveller realized, it had better not be a question but a statement, a truth of comparable import. Within his head he framed it: “I have many names, but a single nature.”

The weakening elemental understood, and on the glass appeared the characters of a poem by Shen-i-ya Eng-t’an Zwu, who sat for a thousand years beneath an elm while none could tell whether he lived or died, so perfectly was he attuned to the world around.

Smoke

fades into the air

is no more seen

The candle-dousing winds of ages seemed to sough in the chimney of the cottage.

“Sir,” the woman ventured anxiously, “you should not bother so much with our trifling problem.”

“Is it not in fact a great matter for you, lacking a lamp?” The traveller did not raise his head.

The woman sighed. “Well, I must confess it is, sir. For the little one is yet too young to venture round our fields by touch, knowing the places where a hen may stray to roost or where a lamb may catch its fleece in thorns, and so dreadful is the cold once darkness falls that Yarn dare not set foot beyond the threshold lest his coughing make him tumble in a faint. … Yes, sir, it’s true: I’d set my heart on owning a good bright clear new lamp!”

“As you wish,” said the traveller, not without sorrow, “so be it.”

He blew out the flame. When he cleaned the glass and lit the lamp anew, it shed a pure and grateful yellow light.

Wolpec was little, though wise; candles had sufficed to pen him. Fegrim was vast, and underlay a mountain. But the traveller had seen among the snag-toothed peaks of Kanish-Kulya how his volcano slumbered now beneath a cap of white, where once it had spluttered smoke a mile high. No ripples stirred the pool of Horimos; as for the river Metamorphia, no trace was left at all of anything whose nature had been changed by it. Housewives rinsed their laundry in the spring at Geirion, and the eldritch song that Jorkas had been used to sing was turned a lullaby with nonsense words to soothe asleep contented babes in wicker cradles. Yorbeth was gone – Litorgos – Tarambole … Even the names of the greatest ones: Tuprid and Caschalanva, Quorril and Lry – were one to speak them, folk would answer, “Who?”

They had retreated to fret powerless among the stars, and sometimes hurl futile spears of flame across the night … at which sight lovers, hand in hand, would cry, “Look, there’s a star to wish on! Wish for early marriage and long happiness!” And kiss, and forget it in a moment.

Except here, and that was very strange. Disquieting! It was indeed in Cleftor country as had been described: as though the black of night could filter through the walls and dull the fire. Flames here were sullen red, and their heat was muted. This was not true of the new lamp, but there were good grounds for that.

It would be politic, the traveller reasoned, to behold the dawn.

Therefore, dissolving one of the forces that curdled the light-beams of his staff, he picked his way silently across the hut’s floor, abandoning to Nelva the fleece he’d been allotted for a coverlet. Outside, the last hour of the night was oppressive with mephitic stench, as though every home in the valley had kept a fire ablaze nightlong against the mantle of blackness, and their smokes had come together in a foul miasma. Even the blade of light from his staff was foreshortened a pace or two ahead of his toes.

The trade of lamp-maker hereabouts must indeed be a profitable pursuit.

What this blackness was not was easy to define. It wasn’t smoke, although much of that now mingled in it. It wasn’t fog, clammy and opaque yet cleanly, being drops of water fine-divided. It wasn’t cloud, which is of the same substance if more rarefied. It was – well, it was an inversion of brightness.

When dawn came, belatedly by the traveller’s calculation, it behaved, moreover, in a peculiar fashion. Rather than thinning and being dispelled, as night ought to be by the rising sun, it drew in on itself, laying the countryside bare yard by yard from below, as though one could make thick tar flow uphill. And uphill was its direction, out of the vale and towards the ragged pinnacles of Cleftor Heights. There, at some point almost beyond the range of vision, it gathered itself as it were into a ball, into a spiralling cone, into a wisp … and nothing.

Yet it had left, over every inch of ground where it had lain, a brooding dismal aura of foreboding.

Going by ordinary ways, he later came on children turned out of the house to play, who were listlessly tossing pebbles at a target scratched on a tree-bole, and seemingly cared little whether they hit it or not; at least, none among them was keeping score.

“Who rules these lands?” the traveller inquired, and one among the children answered him.

“I think they call him Garch, sir. Would you that I run home and ask my mother? She would know.”

“Thank you; the name’s enough,” the traveller said.

IV

At the full moon Garch Thegn of Cleftor Heights adhered to certain customs that differed markedly from the common run of his daily business. One day before the plenilune he scarcely spoke, but locked himself away in private rooms to pore over thick tomes and crumbling scrolls; one day after, it was never sure – even to his chief counsellors and stewards, even to his sister Lady Scail – whether he would be fit to resume his normal court, in his great hall tiled with chrysoberyl slabs.

Yet and withal his was a domain envied far and wide, for by all criteria it was improbable. Though most of it was rocky and its soil was thin, its kine were famed for their fatness and the richness of their milk. Though their roots were shallow, often planted in mere crevices, never a hedge but yielded nuts, or fruit to be preserved by boiling down in honey. Though it was unpopulous, with villages few and far between, its folk were tall and strong and raised healthy children; what was more, garments elsewhere reserved to the grandest ladies might here be seen gracing a farmer’s wife driving her trap to market, or her daughter on a high day bound for the wife-taking dance. Velvet and colored suede, satin and crimson plush, were donned as casually as homespun, and only at the very fringes of the Garch estates – as for example hard by Rotten Tor – did families lack for pewter spoons and china dishes to entertain the company at table.

Paradoxically, with all this the folk of the district were misliked. It was said they were overly cunning; it was said that doing business with them was like trying to stand an eel on its tail. It was further hinted that it was best not to let one’s daughter marry thither, no matter how prosperous the man, for in a short while her only care for her family would be to take what advantage she could of them, and she’d have become like her neighbors, purse-mouthed, hard-eyed, and far too fond of coin.

Despite such talk, however, visitors came frequently to Garch’s mansion, for purposes of trade. Notable among these, and arriving typically in the second quarter of the moon, were persons of a particular sort, who brought not conventional goods, but ideas, and treasures, and relics – it being at this specific time of the month that the thegn was readiest to receive them.

Few, nonetheless, passed the fierce initial scrutiny of his counsellors; penalties for wasting the thegn’s time were severe, and all supplicants for audience must be grilled beforehand by these three. Each morning they assembled in an anteroom beside the great hall, with a scribe and a paymaster carrying a chest of coins, and confronted everyone who had come intending to trade. Often the business was quick and simple, concerning regular goods that might swiftly be bargained for, such as tapestry, or unguents, or fine handicrafts. Similarly, there were those who offered services, skill in carving or tailoring or cobblery, and were desirous to display the shield of warrant of their lord over their place of business; these were invariably permitted to undertake a trial venture for a small fixed fee – or, if they failed a first time, for no fee at all – then engaged on contract if their talents proved adequate. One of this class had, years ago, been Master Buldebrime, and now he supplied the lamps and candles for the mansion, toiling monthly uphill from the town with a selection of his choicest products.

In such cases the proceedings went slowly and involved advance interrogation, and it was the hardiest and most venturesome of the visitors who survived such preliminaries. A few aspirants, though, were invariably on hand.

Garch’s trusted counsellors were three, as aforesaid. In a high-backed chair of horse-bones pinned with bronze and padded with bags of chicken-down, the old crone Roiga sat to the left. To the right sat Garch’s sister Scail, on lacquered ivory made soft with sheep-fleece. And in the center, scorning luxury, presided one-eyed Runch on a common counting-house stool. He wore green; Roiga, brown; the Lady Scail affected purple. All else in the room was sterile grey, even the table behind which they sat.

“Admit the first,” said Runch in a barking voice, and alert servants ushered in a man who wore the garb of the Shebyas, itinerant traders whose ancestral home on the Isle of Sheb had long gone back to yellow jungle; no one was certain why, but enchantment was suspected. Doffing his cap, he placed on the table an object in a small pink sack.

“Your honor, I bring a rare relic, from a city sunken in the depths of Lake Taxhling. Had I but gold to finance such an expedition, I’d hire divers-of whom there are as you are doubtless aware a plenitude in that region where they gather mussel pearls-and rake the bottom mud to haul up beyond a peradventure many other potent articles.” He coughed behind his hand and dropped his voice. “It would of course be superfluous to mention that knowledge of an extraordinary kind was available to the inhabitants of that city, which I’m sure you will concede it’s better not to name.”

Runch looked over the relic, which was a corroded axe blade. He said, pushing it aside, “You cannot name the city because it isn’t there and never was; Taxhling was ever bordered by villages too small to deserve the epithet of town. Besides, all magic departed from it following an earthquake in the distant past. What you brought is part of the cargo of a boat capsized by a storm. Go away.”

“But, your honor – your grace – your highness!” the man expostulated. The crone Roiga snapped bony fingers, and an attendant hurried him away.

“Next,” she said in a voice like dry leaves rustling.

A man entered who swept the floor with a blue cloak as he bowed. “I, sir and ladies,” he announced, “acquired a book at Pratchelberg. Lacking the skill to read the ancient language that it’s couched in, I thought to bring it to your thegn, as being the most renowned, the most expert, the most –”

“Save your breath,” murmured the Lady Scail, having turned a mere half dozen of the pages. “This text’s corrupt – it looks as though the scribe was drunk – and anyway my brother has a better copy.”

Protesting quite as loudly as his forerunner, the man in the blue cloak made a forced departure. To the music of his wails a third supplicant approached, offering a blue furry ball.

“This unique article,” he declared, “speaks when it’s gently squeezed, crying out in a small shrill voice. By repute it grew on the branches of Yorbeth, and I laid out half my lifetime savings so that it might be brought to your thegn.”