Compleat Traveller in Black (5 page)

Petrovic, a dry little man with a withered face like an old apple, coughed apologetically and said, “There are omens. I have cast runes to ascertain their meaning. They have no known significance. But in my demesne milk has soured in the pan four mornings running.”

“And Ruman?”

Ruman was a man bodied like an oak tree, whose thick gnarled hands were twisting restlessly in his lap. He said, “I have slaughtered an ox and an ass to divine what may be read in their entrails. I agree with Petrovic; these omens have no discernible significance. But two springs under the wall of the city, which have not failed in more centuries than I can discover, are dry this morning.”

“And Gostala?”

Gostala was a woman with a queenly bosom and a queenly diadem of white hair plaited around her head. She said, “I have watched the flight of birds each dawn for seven days, and also at sunset. The results are confused. But a two-headed lamb has been born in the village of Dunwray.”

“And Eadwil?”

Eadwil was hardly more than a boy. His chin was innocent of a beard and when he spoke his voice was like a reed pipe; still, they must respect his precocious wisdom. He said, “I have analyzed the respective positions of the stars and planets, and am driven to the hypotheses that
either
we know nothing at all of their effects
or
some undetected celestial body is influencing events – perhaps a comet. But yesterday lightning struck three times out of a clear sky, and – and, Margrave, I’m frightened!”

The margrave made a comforting gesture in the air. It didn’t help much. He said, “This, though, cannot be the whole story. I move that we – here, now, in full council – ask Him Who Must Know.”

Eadwil rose to his feet. On his youthful lips trembled a sob, which he stoutly repressed.

“I request your permission to withdraw, then. It is well known how He Who Must Know deals with those – uh – in my condition.”

The margrave nodded approval of the discreet reference. Eadwil owed some of his precocity to the postponement of a major upheaval in his physiology, and the elemental they were considering found virgins vulnerable to his powers.

“Agreed,” he said, and Eadwil departed, sighing with relief.

Before they could proceed with the business in hand, however, there was a rustling sound from far down the table, and a voice spoke like the soughing of wind in bare winter woods.

“Margrave, I suggest otherwise.”

The margrave shifted uncomfortably in his chair. That was

Tyllwin who spoke, a figure as gaunt as a scarecrow and as thin as a rake, who sat among them by courtesy because no one knew where he had come from or how old he was, but everybody knew he had many and peculiar powers which had never been put to use. Just as well, maybe. Whenever he spoke, untoward events ensued. The margrave saw with alarm that blossoms on several nearby trees were withering.

“Speak, Tyllwin,” he muttered, and braced himself.

Tyllwin chuckled, a scratching noise, and the flowers on the whole of one tree turned to fruit and rotted where they hung. His nearest neighbors hastily left their seats and moved towards the margrave’s end of the table.

Tyllwin’s huge round head, like a turnip ghost’s, turned to watch them, and a smile curved his dusty lips. He said, “Is it not certain, lords of Ryovora, that these things foreshadow an important event?”

The rotten fruits fell with a succession of squelching sounds, and ants hurried from among the roots of the trees to investigate. The company hardly dared do more than nod.

“Therefore,” said Tyllwin, “I suggest we investigate the commotion which is shortly to take place at the main gate.”

He fell silent. A few dead leaves blew across the table. Most of them clustered before his place, and he touched them with a bony hand, whereat they dissolved. The watchers trembled.

Still, the margrave was relieved to find that nothing more outrageous was going to follow Tyllwin’s unexpected loquacity. He said, “What is the opinion of the council?”

Ruman spoke up, with a glance towards Tyllwin that lasted half a second after meeting Tyllwin’s eyes. He said, “I have not scried any such commotion.”

“But you have not scried since yesterday,” countered Gostala with feminine practicality.

“True, true. Then I am with Tyllwin.”

“Petrovic?” inquired the margrave.

“I am aware,” that dried-up individual said in a doubtful tone, “that the people believe all our troubles would be at an end if we had a god, as other cities do. I hope that in this instance they are wrong; they usually are. Having heard from our neighbors at Acromel how severely they suffer from their deity –”

“This strays far from the point,” Gostala interrupted, tapping the table with a thumb-bone which had once been the property of a man fortunate enough – or unfortunate enough – to be her lover. “I say we do not know. Let us therefore expect both nothing and everything.”

“Rational and well spoken!” approved the margrave. “Those in favor …?”

All present laid their right hands on the table, except Tuc, who had left his in the mouth of a dragon beyond an interesting sea of fire far to the north. Even Tyllwin moved with the rest, causing yet more leaves to wither and tremble on the tree that had suffered most since he broke from his impassivity.

“Agreed, then,” said the margrave. “Let us go thither.”

The company rose with a bustle and began to adjourn to the main gate. The margrave, however, delayed a moment, contemplating Tyllwin, who had not vacated his place.

When the others were at a distance he judged safe, he addressed the round-headed enchanter in a low voice.

“Tyllwin, what is your opinion of a god?”

Tyllwin uttered a creaking laugh. “I have been asked that before,” he said. “And I will answer as I did then: I do not know what a god is, and I doubt that many men do, either.”

A branch on the tree overhanging him split with a warning cry, so that the margrave flung up his hand reflexively before his face. When he looked again, Tyllwin was gone.

The commotion at the gate, foreseen by Tyllwin and by no other of the council members, had already begun when the stately procession entered the avenue leading thither. Each enchanter had come after his or her own style: Petrovic walking with his staff called Nitra, from which voices could sometimes be heard when the moon was full; Gostala riding on a creature she had summoned out of the deep water which was its natural element, that cried aloud in heartrending agony at every step; Ruman on the shoulders of a giant ape fettered with brass; Eadwil on his own young legs although his feet flashed red-hot at every tenth pace – this was to do with a geas about which no one ever inquired closely. The air about them crackled with strife between protective conjurations and the tense oppressive aura that enshrouded Ryovora.

In the wide street before the gatehouse a crowd had gathered, laughing, shouting, exclaiming with wonderment. At its center, a man wearing outlandish attire, his face in a perpetual frown of puzzlement, was vainly trying to contend with a hundred questions simultaneously.

The crowd parted to let the nobles approach him, and at once closed in again, like water around a slow-moving boat.

The margrave came up behind the rest, panting somewhat, for he was growing fat, and looked the stranger over with dismay, while the people’s voices rose to a roar and then sank again into a muttering buzz. At last, having cast a beseeching glance at his companions and received no offers of assistance, he was compelled to address the newcomer.

“Sir, who are you and what do you want?”

In the terribly patient tone of one dealing with lunatics, the stranger said, “My name is Bernard Brown, and all I want is to go home.”

“That is easy enough to arrange,” said the margrave in relief – though had he paused to reflect that Tyllwin was concerned with this man’s arrival, he would not so soon have been optimistic. He rounded on Petrovic. “Will you oblige?”

Petrovic looked up in the air and down at the ground. He scratched a number of ideograms in the dust with his staff Nitra, then hastily scuffed them over with his sandal. He said flatly, “No.”

“Well, if you won’t you won’t,” sighed the margrave. He appealed next to Gostala, who merely shook her regal head and went on scrutinizing Bernard Brown.

“Eadwil!” cried the margrave.

The boy, whose face had turned perfectly pale, stammered a few incomprehensible words and burst into tears.

“See? They can’t! What did I tell you?” bellowed a voice from the crowd, and the margrave shot a glance at the speaker as sharp as a spear.

“Come forth!” he commanded, and with the aid of a number of bystanders the fellow pushed and shoved until he stood before his ruler. He was an insolent-faced churl with a shock of corn-colored hair, and wore a leather apron with large pockets in which reposed the tools of his trade. He appeared to be some kind of worker in metal.

“You are …” said the margrave, and ran through a short formula in his mind. “You are Brim, a locksmith. What did you mean by what you just said?”

“What my words meant and neither more nor less,” the locksmith retorted, seeming amused. “Why, anyone can
see
he’s not to be pushed around by ordinary folk!”

“Explain further,” the margrave commanded.

“Why, ’tis simple as your mind …
sir.
” Brim thrust an errant lock of hair back into place with one blunt thumb. “I see it plain, and so do all of us. Here we’ve been saying these years past that what’s amiss with Ryovora is, we haven’t got a god like all those towns around the world every wherever. And now, today, what do the omens say? Can all your magicking unriddle them?”

He thrust a stubby finger at the margrave’s chest. The latter recoiled and looked at him distastefully. But he was by temperament an honest man, so he had to admit that although the noble enchanters had speculated long and long about the recent omens they had failed to arrive at any conclusion.

“There, mates! What did I tell you?” thundered Brim, whirling to face the crowd. There was an answering yell, and in a moment the situation had turned topsy-turvy. The throng had closed in on Bernard Brown, unmindful that they trod on noble toes, and had seized him and gone chairing him down the avenue, while men, women and children ran and skipped behind him, singing a rhythmic song and laughing like hyenas.

“Well!” said the margrave in vexation. “This is a most improper and irregular state of affairs!”

VI

The margrave had cause to repeat those words, with still greater emphasis and an even more somber expression, the following morning. He sat once more at the head of the long table in the Moth Garden, for the air had become if anything more oppressive than yesterday; moreover, reports of omens seemed to have doubled in number.

“This is extremely aggravating!” said the margrave testily. “Virtually the entire populace is firmly convinced this stranger is a god, simply because they can’t make head or tail of what he says. Accordingly they have turned me out of my own palace – I spent an uncomfortable night here in the Moth Garden! – and are at work converting it into a temple for this
character
without so much as a by-your-leave!”

Eadwil suppressed an inappropriate smile. “Moreover,” he supplied, “all those persons who have voyaged extensively are being interrogated concerning the correct manner in which to pay homage to a new deity. Brim the locksmith, around whom this ferment seems to be most turbulent, has travelled to Acromel and is vociferous for human sacrifice; there is a group of women who in their youth were captives in Barbizond and wish to hold daily single combats before the altar; a man who formerly fished Lake Taxhling declares that the sole method of adopting the god is to burn down the city twice a year and rebuild it, as the fisherfolk do with their reed-hut villages. …”

Petrovic shook his withered head and opined, “No good will come of this.”

“Has anyone knowledge of Tyllwin’s whereabouts?” inquired the margrave, for the gaunt one’s place was empty today.

A shudder went down the table, and those in earshot shook their heads, not without exclamations of relief.

“Well, then, let us proceed to a course of action,” said the margrave. He shifted in his chair; his night in the open, although the weather was warm, had left him feeling bruised all over.

“The first point to establish,” said Gostala sensibly, “is whether this Bernard Brown is indeed a god. If not – well!”

“Agreed!” came a chorus in reply.

Snorting, Ruman thumped the table with a hamlike fist. “And how, pray, do we set about that?” he demanded with honey-sweet sarcasm. “For we have all previously confessed that we do not know what a god is. Was that not the reason why we never acquired one in the old days?”

“I fear very much,” said the margrave heavily, “that the days of ordered rationality in Ryovora may be finished. It would appear that the populace are already treating Bernard Brown in all the ways they think it proper to honor a god; unless, then, we arrive at disproofs adequate to disabuse them, life in our city is doomed to become insufferable.”

“Hah!” said Gostala without mirth.

“I have a suggestion,” ventured Eadwil.
“A
god is presumed to have knowledge and power beyond what mere humans may command. Let us therefore interrogate Bernard Brown concerning the most recondite and esoteric of our arts. If he fails to answer well, let us challenge him before the multitude, so that it may be seen his talents are negligible compared to ours.”