"Brunner,.John.-.Traveler.In.Black.V1 (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brunner John)

Another city had arisen in the borderland of chaos, and it was stamped all over with the betraying mark of Time.
How was it possible? Carried in some eddy whose flow ran counter to the universal trend, so that from reason and logic it receded to the random reign of chance? Presumably. Yet the means whereby such an eddy might be created seemed inconceivable. Some great enchantment would be required, and in the grip of Time enchantment was impossible.
"A contradiction in terms!" exclaimed the traveler, speaking aloud again to distract his mind from the third and least palatable reason for regretting the loss of Ryovora. It was known to him that when he had accomplished his task all things would have but one nature; then they would be subsumed into the Original All, and time would have a stop. Beyond which point . . .
He glanced around him at the hillside. As ever, among the sparse-leaved grey bushes, dust-devils were sifting their substance, fine as ashes, over the footprints he had left on the path. Raising his staff, he tapped with it on a rock: once, twice, and again.
At the third tap the elemental Laprivan of the Yellow Eyes heaved in his underground prison and cracks appeared in the road. From these his voice boomed, monstrous, making the welkin echo.
"Leave me be!"
"What do you know of the city which stands yonder?" said the traveler in black.
"Nothing," responded Laprivan with sullenness.
"Nothing? You say so to spare yourself the pain of memory! Shall I send you where Ryovora has gone, into the domain of Time? There memories cannot be expunged by whirling dust!"
The whole hill shuddered, and an avalanche of pale rock rattled on its further side. The sourceless voice moaned, "What should I know of the city yonder? No man has come from it and passed this way."
"Bad," said the traveler thoughtfully. "Very bad."
After that he was silent for a long while, until at last the elemental pleaded, "Leave me be! Leave me to wipe clean the slate of yesterday!"
"As you wish, so be it," said the traveler absently, and tapped with his staff again. The cracks in the ground closed; the dust-devils resumed their revolutions.
Ignoring all this, the traveler gazed over the green and gracious meadows of the valley. There the strange city lay in noon-tide sunlight like a worn-out toy cast aside by a giant-child. The heedless ruin of Time was everywhere about it, toothmarks of the greatest leveler on brick and stone and metal. It had been fair and rich, that was plain; its gates were of oak and bronze-but the bronze was corroded green; its towers were of silver and orichalcum-but their bright sheen was overlaid with a dull mist like the foul breath of a swamp; its streets were broad and paved with marble-but the flags lifted to the roots of wild plants, and here and there one found holes filled by the rain and noxious with algae and insect-larvae.
Out of Time and into chaos. Almost beyond belief.
At length he stirred himself. There was nothing else for it-so he reasoned-but to set off on his journey of obligation, and come at last not to familiar, welcome Ryovora, but to this enigma wished on him by fate and boding no good whatever.
Anxiety carried him far and fast, and little by little it was mitigated by relief. To learn that Acromel stood where it had, albeit altered; to find that they yet fished Lake Taxhling when the proper stars came out, and that the river Metamorphia fed it with strange unspawned creatures, greedy and unwholesome-this was reassuring, an earnest of balance continued in the cosmos.
And at these places, and many many more, he did what on this as on all his journeys was required of him.
A lonely hut stood on the shelf-edge of a mountain pasture in the land called Eyneran; here when he paused to ask a crust of bread and a sup of ewe's milk from the flock.high and distant as clouds on the steep meadow, a woman with a frightened face opened the ill-carpentered door to him, and met his request with a silent shake of the head.
She was wrinkled and worn out beyond her years; yet the hut was sound, a savory smell filled the air, and the clean floor and many copper pots the traveler could see assorted badly with her ragged gown and bare feet. He waited. Shortly a cry-man-deep, yet edged with a child's petulance-rang out.
"Mother, come here! The pot's boiling over! What's keeping you, you lazy slut?"
"Mintra!" whispered the woman, and a patter of feet announced the passage of a girl, some twelve years old, across the floor to tend the pot.
Another cry, still louder: "Mother, I told you to come here! Mintra can't lift the pot when it's full, you stupid old bag of bones!"
"We can't give you food," the woman said to the traveler. "All of it is for my son."
The traveler nodded, but waited still. Then at last with great heaving and panting the son came into view: gross-bulging in his apparel of velvet worked with gilt wire and stained with slobberings of food, so tall he nearly scraped the roof with his pate, yet so fat he breathed hard for the simple effort of standing upright.
His fist, big as a ham, cracked his mother behind the ear.
"Why don't you die, you lazy old cow, and get it over with?" he bellowed.
"It'd be a merciful relief," the woman whimpered. "And die I would of my own free will, but that I stand alone between you and Mintra! With me gone you'd take her like a harlot, sister or no!"
"And wouldn't she be a tasty bit for my bed?" chortled the son with an evil grin, his tongue emerging thick as an ox's to stroke his lips lasciviously.
"As you wish," said the traveler, "so be it." And he knocked his staff on the threshold and took his leave.
That night the plague stole silent from the mountain mist, and took the mother as the son had wished; then the girl Mintra fled on light feet down the hill-trails and the fever-giddy glutton went calling her among the heedless sheep until his gross weight dislodged a rock and sent him over a precipice to feed the crows.

In the rich city Gryte a thief spoke to curse the briefness of the summer night, which had cut short his plan to break the wall of a merchant's counting-house.
"Oh that dawn never overtook me!" he cried. "Oh that I had lasting darkness whereby to ply my trade!"
"As you wish," said the traveler, "so be it." And darkness came: two thick grey cataracts that shut the light away.
Likewise in Medham was another rogue, striving to seduce a lady who feared her charms were passing with the years so that he might win to a coffer of gold secreted in her chamber. "I love you!" declared this smooth-tongued deceiver. "I'd wed you had you no more than rags and a shack!"
"As you wish, so be it," said the traveler, and bailiffs came down the street to advise the lady that her house and treasure were forfeit on another's debt. Upon which the liar turned and ran, not staying to hear a city officer who followed hard on the bailiffs' heels report the honoring of the debt a day past due.
So too in Wocrahin a swaggering bully came down the street on market-day, cuffing aside children with the back of his hand and housewives with the flat of his sword. "Oh that my way were not cluttered with such riffraff!" he exclaimed, his shoulder butting into the traveler's chest.
"As you wish, so be it," said the traveler, and when the bully turned the corner the street he walked was empty under a leaden sky-and the buildings on either side, and the taverns, and the shops. Nor did he again in all eternity have to push aside the riffraff he had cursed; he was alone.

This, however, was not the sum total of the traveler's doings as he passed from place to place within his realm. In Kanish-Kulya they had built a wall to keep Kanishmen and Kulyamen apart, and from either side, set into the masonry, grinned down the skulls of those dead in a war for which the reason had long been forgotten. In this strange and dreadful place Fegrim was pent under a volcano; shadowed by its cone the traveler halted and spoke long and seriously with that elemental, and when he was done the country for a mile on every side was dusted with cinders, little and bright as fireflies.
At Gander's Well, branched Yorbeth brooded in the guise of a tall tree whose main root tapped a wonderful subterranean spring and whose boughs, fed with miraculous sap, sprouted leaves and fruit the like of which had not been seen under any sun before. The traveler spent an hour in the shade of that tree, and for the questions he asked was constrained to carry away a red twig and later catch a cat and perform a ceremony with these two items-a price he paid with heavy heart, for he had been told nothing of any great use in his inquiries.
Also he consulted with Farchgrind, and in Leppersley he cast the bones of a girl's foot to read the runes they formed, and after great labor he incarcerated Wolpec in a candle over whose flame he smoked a piece of glass which thereupon showed three truths: one ineluctable, one debatable and one incomprehensible. That was in Teq, when the end of his journey was near.
So presently he came to Barbizond, where there was always a rainbow in the sky because of the bright being Sardhin, chained inside a thundercloud with fetters of lightning. Three courses remained to him: he might free Sardhin and let him speak, and from here to the horizon nothing would be left save himself, the elemental, and that which was of its nature bright, as jewels, or fire, or the edge of a keen-bladed knife; or he might do as once he had done under similar circumstances-address himself to an enchanter and make use of powers that trespassed too far towards naked chaos to be within his own scope--or, finally, he might go forward in ignorance to the strange city and confront the challenge of fate without the armor of foreknowledge.
Some little while remained to him before he needed to take his irreversible decision. Coming to Barbizond, therefore, he made his way down a fine broad avenue where plane and lime trees alternated in the direction of a steel-blue temple. There stood the altar of Hnua-Threl, who was also Sardhin when he chose to be; the people invoked him with daily single combats on the temple floor. They were not a gentle folk, these inhabitants of Barbizond, but they were stately, and died-in tournaments, or by the assassin's knife, or by their own hand-with dignity.
A death had lately occurred, that was plain, for approaching the city gate came a funeral procession: on a high-wheeled cart drawn by apes in brazen harness, the corpse wrapped in sheets of lead, gold and woven leaves; a band of gongmen beating a slow measure to accompany musicians whistling on bird-toned pipes no longer than a finger; eight female slaves naked to the ceaseless warm rain; and last a straggle of mourners, conducting themselves for the most part with appropriate solemnity.
He who passed penultimately of the mourners, however, was a fat and jolly person on each of whose shoulders perched a boy-child, and the two were playing peekaboo around the brim of his enormous leather hat. The traveler stared long at him before stepping out from the shelter of the nearest tree and addressing him courteously.
"Your pardon, sir, but are you not named Eadwil?"
"I am," the fat one answered, not loath to halt and let the funeral wend its way to the graveyard without his assistance. "Should I know you, sir?"
"Perhaps not," said the traveler in black. "Though I know you. I'd not expected to see you here; you were formerly one of the chief merchant enchanters of Ryovora."