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

"Doom!" cried Jacques, and an unholy joy lit his face. "I told them so-over and again I told them! Would I could witness it, for the satisfaction of seeing how right I was!"
The traveler sighed, but there was no help for it now; his single nature bound him to unique courses of action. He said sourly, "As you wish, so be it. Go hence towards the city men call Acromel, where honey is bitter, but do not enter it. Go rather around it towards the setting sun, and you will reach a gray hill fledged with grey bushes where there are always dust-devils, which will wipe out your tracks the moment you have passed. From the brow of that hill you may behold Ys at the moment of disaster."
"Now just a moment!" exclaimed Jacques, rising. "From my boyhood up I've wandered around Ys, and I know of no such hill as you describe!"
The traveler shrugged and turned away. Jacques caught his cloak.
"Wait! What's your name, that you say such strange things and send me on such an improbable errand?"
"You may call me Mazda, or anything you choose." The black-clad traveler shook off the grip with a moue of distaste.
"Hah! That's rich!" Jacques set his hands on his hips and laughed. "But still . . . Well, sir, for the sake of wanting to see how Ys goes to its doom, I'll follow your instructions. And my thanks!"
He parodied a bow, flourishing a hat that was not on his head.
"You may not thank me more than this once," said the traveler sadly, and went his way.

III

Lord Vengis sat in the Hall of State at Ys, and gazed at the nobility assembled in his presence. He tried to ignore the sad condition of the hall. Once this had been a building to marvel at: mirrors higher than a man lined its walls, set between pilasters of marble, gilt and onyx, and the arching roof had been painted by a great master with scenes in eleven bright colors, depicting the birth of Saint Clotilda, the martyrdom of Saint Gaufroy-that one was mostly in red-and the ascension of Saint Eulogos to heaven on the back of a leaping dolphin. Moreover the floor had been carpeted with ermine and bear-pelts.
The pelts had gone. Or, to be more exact, some of them had gone away and returned-but in unusual fashion: they had been cut into coats for the nobles, and now enveloped impressive paunches and bosoms with the assistance of gilt girdles. Moreover, half of the mirrors were fly-specked, and some were cracked, while worst of all some of the slabs of marble forming the floor had been prised up to expose crude foundations of rubble-a rumor having run around as to the effectiveness of marble for sacrificial altars-and on an irregularity due to this cause, in an ill-lit corner, Lord Vengis had twisted his ankle en route to his throne.
This place was a condensation of the trouble afflicting the whole of Ys. The harbors that once swallowed the twice-daily ocean tides were blocked with stinking silt; grass grew on the stone moles, as in the wheel-ruts on the fine old roads leading away from the city-at least, according to report; none of the personages present could vouch for the assertion, all having declined to venture out of Ys since things took this turn for the worse. So also in the gardens of the great houses a plant like, but not identical with, mistletoe had spread over the handsome trees, letting fall a horrid sticky fruit on those who walked beneath; in the deep sweet-water wells servants claimed that they heard ominous voices, so that now they refused to let -down buckets for fear of drawing up those who spoke; last week's market had reduced to two old men squabbling over a cracked earthen pot and a comb of dirty wild honey.
Lord Vengis glowered at the company, and they fell silent by degrees. Their attendants moved, silent as shadows, to the double doors of entrance, closed them, barred them against all intrusion-for this was no discussion which common people were permitted to overhear.
With the clanging down of the final bar, one leapt to his feet at the end of the front rank of gilded chairs, uttering a groan and cramming his fingers into his mouth. All eyes turned.
"Fool, Bardolus!" Lord Vengis rapped. "What ails you?"
"In that mirror!" Bardolus gibbered, trying to point and finding his shaky arm disobedient to his will. "I saw in the mirror-"
"What? What?" chorused a dozen fearful voices.
Bardolus was a small man whose manner was never better than diffident; he was accounted clever, but in a sly fashion that had won him few friends and none who would trust him. He said now, mopping sweat, "I don't know. I saw something in that mirror that was not also in this hall."
Time hesitated in its course, until Lord Vengis gave a harsh laugh and slapped the arm of his throne.
"You'll have to grow accustomed to manifestations like that, Bardolus!" he gibed. "So long as the things stay in the mirror, what's to worry you? It's when they emerge into the everyday world that you must look out. Why, only the other day, when I was in my thaumaturgic cabinet testing a certain formula, I-But enough of that." He coughed, and behind his polite covering hand glanced to see whether his words had had the desired effect. They had, even though the episode to which he referred was an invention. True, he'd spent much time in his cabinet; true, he'd rehearsed many formulae; alas, nothing had so far come of his efforts, not even a harmless spectre in a mirror.
Still, that would change. One could tell by the feel of the very air. There were forces in it that no man could put a name to, and sometimes scalps prickled as they do before a thunderstorm.
"We are here for a reason you know," he said after an impressive pause. "We are agreed on the only course open to us. We admit that modern Ys stands on the shoulders of great men and women. Yet to what has their ambition led us? Unkind fate has burdened us with such difficulties as they never encountered, and we eat stale bread and rancid meat, where they gorged pies running with gravy and soft delicious fruits from the ends of the earth. We drink plain water, none too clean, where they enjoyed wine and mead, and beer like brown crystal!
"We have concluded that for all their-admitted- greatness, they are responsible, not us! We did not ask to be born at a time when our trees rot, our crops wither, our harbor is blocked. In every way they are responsible: for siting Ys where it stands, for breeding children to inherit such a miserable legacy!"
"Aye!" came a rumble of assent from around the hall.
"Some faint-hearts, some ignorant fools, have argued with us," Vengis went on, warming to a speech he had not intended to deliver. "These, of course, are base-born, lacking the insight which is the birthright of the nobility. Jacques the scrivener, for example, would have had us turn to with hoes and shovels and clear the harbor-and if hoes and shovels were lacking, with our bare hands!"
This time the response lay between a shudder and a chuckle. "What's become of Jacques, by the way?" someone asked audibly.
"Does it matter?" Vengis countered, drawing together his beetling brows. "We know we are adopting the right course. We have decided that we must employ more potent tools than crude-ah-agricultural implements to cope with so massive a disaster. We must, in short, restore all our fortunes, and the splendour of our city, and root out once for all the disaffection among the rabble spread by such as Jacques, by exploiting the mightiest means available to us. Magically, by decree of the will, by harnessing supernatural forces, we shall again make Ys the envy of the world!"
A roar of approval and a barrage of clapping. Unnoticed in the shadows, one listener alone did not applaud; instead, he stood leaning on his staff, shaking his head from side to side.
"Let us have news, then-encouraging news of our progress!" Vengis cried. "I call first on Dame Seulte, around whose home last time I rode by I could not help noticing an aura pregnant with remarkable phenomena."
Silence. At length a portly woman near the back of the hall rose-with some difficulty, for her weight- and spoke.
"Dame Seulte, as you know, is my close neighbor, and as she is not here I think perhaps I ought to mention that yesterday she was in high spirits and confident of success in her experiments. She had obtained a freewill gift of a child to offer to-well, to a creature best not named directly. When I met her, she was leading the pretty thing home on a leash of green leather. Such a sweet sight!"
"Dame Rosa!" said a young man from nearer the front, turning in his chair. "A free-will gift-are you sure?"
And his companion, a pale girl of no more than eighteen in a dress of brown velvet, said doubtfully, "My maid referred to a fire at Dame Seulte's house this morning. ..."
Vengis slapped the arm of his throne again, making a sound as sharp as a gavel's rap. He said sternly, "No defeatist talk if you please, Lady Vivette!"
"But are you sure it was a free-will gift?" persisted the young man at Vivette's side.
Dame Rosa said stiffly, "Dame Seulte had promised to raise the child as her own, and the parents were poor and hungry; they parted with it willingly."
"Then there must have been a fire at her home this morning," said the young man, and shrugged. "Our copy of the book she conjured from has a leaf that hers lacks, and on it the authorities are cited by dozens. Ingredients obtained by deception are of no avail in that ceremony."
There was a stunned pause. Dame Seulte, after all, had only been trying to manifest a comparatively straight-forward elemental.
"I have more cheerful news," said a sweet, enticing voice from the opposite side of the assembly. They turned gratefully; this was Lady Meleagra, whose eyes like sapphires, lips like rose-petals and skin like snow had broken hearts for ten of her twenty-one years. As Eadwil had once done in Ryovora-though she was unaware of that precedent-she had purchased her ability upon terms. Herself, she had not yet suffered in consequence; she was, though, constrained to impose a most regrettable proviso on anyone who craved to share the pleasures of her bedchamber. It was an efficacious precaution against undesired supernatural intervention, but it had signally reduced the number of her suitors.
"I sense a change here in Ys," she mused aloud. "A great wonder has overtaken this city. So far I do not know its precise nature, but the fact is indisputable. See!"
She extended one graceful arm, swathed in white lace so fine her skin tinted it pink, and in the central aisle dividing the company a thing appeared. It was dark, and it writhed; apart from that it had no describable attributes save two glowing eyes alive with hatred. It lasted half a minute before it slowly faded, and at its going the air was permeated by a dank steamy odor against which those foresighted enough to have brought them buried their noses in bouquets of flowers.
By degrees a clamor arose, and on all sides the nobles strove to show they had been equally successful. "Look!" cried Messer Hautnoix, and between his hands he strung a chain of gleaming bubbles from nowhere, and again, and yet a third time before the glamour faded. And: "See!" cried Dame Faussein, shaking a drum made of a gourd and capped either end with tattooed skin from a drowned sailor; this made the hall pitch-black for as long as it sounded, and all present had the eerie sense that they were adrift in an infinite void. And: "Watch!" bellowed rough old Messer d'Icque, spreading a scarlet cloth at the full stretch of both arms; on the cloth, a mouth opened and uttered five sonorous words that no one present understood.
Smiles greeted these achievements, and loud approbation gave place to a babble of inquiry as to means. "Five nights drunk under a gallows!" boasted Messer Hautnoix-"A day and a night and a day kissing the mouth of the man who bequeathed his skin!" bragged Dame Faussein-"Doing things to a goat I can't discuss with ladies present," Messer d'Icque muttered behind his hand.
"But Ub-Shebbab came to me when I did no more than call his name," said Meleagra, and at these disturbing words those closest to her chair drew as far back as they could without appearing rude.
Vengis on his high throne joined neither in the praising nor in the questioning; his heavy-jowled face remained set as stone. Had he not submitted himself to worse indignities? Had he not made pledges which in retrospect caused him to quail? And what had derived from his struggles? Nothing! Not even a pretty trick-siness like Messer Hautnoix's shining bubbles!
He thumped on his chair-side again, and cut through the chatter with a furious roar.
"Enough! Enough! Are you children early out of school, that you disgrace our meeting with mere gossip? How far do these cantrips advance us to our goal? That's the question!"