Free Compleat Traveller in Black by John Brunner Page B

learn that Acromel still 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 traveller could see assorted badly with her ragged gown and bare feet. He waited. Shortly a cry rang out, man-deep, yet edged with a spoilt child’s petulance.
    “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 single room 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 traveller. “All of it is for my son.”
    The traveller nodded, but waited still. Then at last with great heaving and panting the son came into view: bulging-bellied 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 traveller, “so be it.” And he knocked his staff on the threshold and took his leave.
    That night 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 countinghouse.
    “Oh that dawn never overtook me!” he cried. “Oh that I had lasting darkness whereby to ply my trade!”
    “As you wish,” said the traveller, “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 traveller, and bailiffs came 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 hard on the bailiffs’ heels, come to 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.