The fellow who did so, by name Swind, having learned his error, still carried the infant to the adjacent village of Ratgrad.
“Ho, Swind: Could you not have left that thing where it was? Where is your charity? No doubt some passing hungry gib or ghoul would have welcomed it.”
“Tush,” said Swind sullenly, dumping the crying boy in the dirt. “In the era of sun’s death, life is ever valuable and must be preserved — so that it may also be punished for the insolence of persisting.”
Accordingly Swind and his wife, Slannt, were given the child to raise, which they did following the village tradition. They starved the boy and rained constant blows upon him, these actions ornamented by witty verbal abuse in the village mode. Despite such care, he grew to the age of eighteen. He was well-made and handsome, with a tawny skin, large dark eyes, and his hair still golden under the filth Slannt and others diligently rubbed in it.
His given name was Blurkel. But by the time of his seventh year, he thought nevertheless that he had recalled his
Ratgrad was married to another local village, the equally charmless Plodge. Once every month, the denizens of both villages would meet on a bare rock, known either as Ratplod or Plodrat Spike. There they would sit about a large fire and drink fermented erb berries, next singing various unharmonious songs, and telling stories of the most uninspiring kind.
Fell the day of the festival.
To the Spike trooped all Ratgrad, Evillo perforce going with them.
The celebration proceeded as it always did, becoming more loathesome by the minute. By the hour that the old sun began to crawl to its lair in the west, the Spike and its surrounding shrubland rang to uncouth carroling and eructations.
Evillo, to escape the attentions of certain unpalatable village maidens, had climbed up a tall lone daobado that spread its bronzy limbs behind the rock. From here, suddenly he beheld a solitary figure walking towards the Spike. Evillo stared with all the power of his dark eyes, thinking perhaps that he imagined what he saw; visitors were infrequent thereabouts. But curiously, as a sunfall red as an over-aged wine of Tanvilkat obscured the scene, the figure grew ever more apparent. It had the shape of a man, but was closely robed and hooded.
Something thundered in Evillo’s ears: his heart.
Just then, the village look-out, who was that evening the master-hacker Fawp, also noted an arrival and let out a yowl.
Startled silence beset the revellers. Many jumped drunkenly to their feet, and every eye fixed upon the grey- cloaked stranger.
“Stay,’” bellowed Fawp, who had drawn his cleaver. “Proclaim your type and intention.”
“Also be aware,” added Glak, the carcass-heaver, “while we slay enemies instanter, friends who visit us are required to present a gift.”
The mysterious figure had drawn near and now spoke in a low and sonorous tone.
“I am neither enemy nor friend. But I will present a gift.”
Stupid greed overcame the stupid bravado of the villagers. They pressed forward and now clustered about the stranger as he entered the sphere of firelight.
Up in the tree, Evillo watched, half waiting for some magic sloughing of disguise, revealing the man to be a frit or other fiend. But the hooded figure did not metamorph into anything else. He came to the fireside and rested himself on a large flat stone. And precisely then, through the mesh of the hood which concealed his face, Evillo fancied that he glimpsed two human eyes that glowed with a mental ability far beyond the average. For a moment, they met his own, and then passed on.
“Be seated,” said the stranger to the villagers, and such was his authority that each of them at once obeyed. “The gift I offer is modest, but you shall have it. Know then, I am Canja Veck the Fabler. He who is compelled, by a nameless but omnipotent force, to travel the dying earth, and there to recount its stories to any that will hear.”
It was as if the mindless, drunken clamour had never been. As if the sinking sun had wiped all trace of it away with the last swipe of a wine-soaked sponge. In utter stillness, eyes wide and lips parted, the village folk sat waiting like ensorcelled children. And Evillo with them; he more than all.
For every hour of that night of ever-unmooned nights, the Fabler told his tales.
They were by turns swift and fearful, glamorous and enmarvelled, mystic, ribald, hilarious, and of a shocking horror. Canja Veck so controlled his captive audience that none moved more than a muscle, gave no sign of life beyond a blink, a gasp, a sigh or flash of laughter. Drink untasted, fire smouldering low, so they sat. While for Evillo, it was as if at last he had found true reality, the world itself, and it was nothing like the cramped cell he had, from two years old, been forced to occupy.
As he outlined the histories of his heroes and heroines, Canja Veck described also the varieties of place that formed a backdrop. Of Ascolais he spoke, and the white, half-ruined city of Kaiin, of Saponid lands, whose golden- eyed peoples dwelled beyond high Fer Aquila. He suggested the oblique Land of the Falling Wall, and wild Kauchique, and such antique metropoli as doomed Olek’hnit, and such occluded and occult regions as the Cobalt Mountains, and that fearsome forest the Lig Thig or Great Erm. He indicated the demonic realm of Jeldred, created only to house evil, which surely it did; Embelyon too, an alter-world the unseeable magician Pandelume had made to conceal himself, whose skies were fluctuant rainbows. And he told of Almery in the south, from whence stalked — less a hero than the transverse of all heroism — Cugel, the self-styled Clever, an arresting person, long of leg, deft of hand, light of finger, blessed by the luck of fiends — and the
At last, the black of night grew threadbare in the east. The red sun pulled itself from sleep and glared upon the world that it must still serve, though itself of more than pensionable age.
The spellbound villagers slipped from their enchantment.
They stared eastward to gauge, in the manner of the time, how the solar disc fared. Seeing that it still burned, they looked around again to the rock where Canja Veck had been seated. But he was gone.
Only Evillo, who had not bothered with the sun, had seen him rise up, shake the dew from his robe, and move silently away. Only Evillo, sliding down the daobado, had dared pursue this mage among storytellers away from the rock, the villages, and, without a backward glance, down into the cliffy forests above the Derna.
About Midday, Evillo caught up to Canja Veck, who had paused on a wooded spur. Far below, the river was now visible, splashing like a hurried serpent through the ravine.
“Mighty sir—”
Canja Veck did not turn.
“Sir — great magician—”
To this, Canja Veck responded. “My title is Fabler.”
“Mighty Fabler—” but here Evillo, steeped so long in village concepts, could think of no means to convey his wants. Instead, in embarrassed banality he asked, “But are you not hungry, sir? Have you eaten today?”
“No,” replied Canja Veck gravely, “but I have eaten tomorrow, that tomorrow when the sun goes black.
