Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

We cut off down a regular strip of open ground kept clear as a road. There weren’t any official roads in the caravansary, of course, just a sizable expanse of flat ground mashed into dust and fenced off for the season into rentable plots by local entrepreneurs. The irregular roads tended to converge at the various wells, though, and off ahead of us I could see the tall water-barrel winch poles atop one of them as we approached. Unexpectedly, the traffic, which had begun to thin a bit as we got away from the mess at the gate, started to coagulate once again. I wondered just what was going on around the city today - a contagious case of bad luck? We broke through the crush of people and came face-to-face with yet another woeful situation.

Ahead of us, two guys in travelers’ robes were standing nose to nose, waving their arms around and yelling in each other’s face. Behind them was another learned-looking fellow with a long beard; he was rubbing his chin with one hand and casting a sage eye over the proceedings with the air of someone who was about to make a pronouncement. An ox stood next to one shouting man, pawing the ground nervously with its right front hoof. There was blood on the ox’s left horn. As a sort of centerpiece to the scene, a bloody sheep lay on the ground between the two men who were going at it. The sheep wasn’t moving, but if the two men were any good at sympathetic magic, I expected it to leap up and break into a jig any second from the level of emoting going on. Instead, the man who I figured for the owner of the sheep made a grab for the tether dangling from the neck of the ox. The ox, already spooked by the excitement, danced back out of reach. Unfortunately for the ox, it had neglected to look over its shoulder first, and so it backed into the low crumbling wall around the water well itself. The wall crumbled further under the force of the ox’s hurled mass; the ox, its hind legs knocked out from under it, sat down hard on the remains of the wall; and with a crunch and a small rumble a stretch of wall centered on the ox disintegrated entirely, propelling the ox, still in motion, backward into the well. The crowd heard one frenzied ox-bellow, the ox’s head and horns disappeared from sight, and then the crowd fell silent. The two guys froze, their arms in mid-wave, their mouths open in identical circles. In the midst of the sudden silence we heard a loud PLOP of displaced water. That cut things loose again. The two original guys were joined by a third, apparently the owner of the well, and then the crowd joined in too with a general shouting and arm-waggling. The original sage had been supplemented by two others, and the three of them had their heads together in scholarly consultation, trading citations of tractate and verse in their own rapid crossfire.

As we tried to edge around the commotion, one of the people who was trying unsuccessfully to grab hold of the ox’s tether or otherwise drag it out of the well clutched at his chest with a look of horror, pulled out an obviously empty drawstring bag suspended by a thong from around his neck, and began hollering, “My jewels! This well has swallowed my jewels!” He swung around to join the owners of the ox, the sheep, and the well in their grievances, elbowing the man next to him in the back. The man thus elbowed, who had been pulling hard on the dangling tether of the ox, overbalanced and went headfirst over the wall into the well. Ox and man bellowed in unison. I turned my head; I’d seen more than enough.

My companion was regarding me with a clear look of admiration. “Which one was you?” she said. “I was watching you the whole time, but I couldn’t even pick up a flicker. It was the ox - you caused it to back into the well, yes? Or did you start the entire thing? Was it the sheep?” She shook her head in amazement. “Such a stylish example of your philosophy, too - a small nudge here, a small kick there, and then the momentum of the avalanche. I hadn’t been certain before, in the other incident with the displaced stone in that gate, even though it seemed to have the touch of your personality, but now there’s no doubt about that either, is there?”

I did my best to show her an inscrutable smile. I thought I’d just learned something valuable. Not reassuring , necessarily, and probably not useful, either, but it did begin to add some depth to my knowledge of the person I was supposed to be impersonating. “A bit flamboyant, perhaps, if indeed it was me,” I said.

She cast me another sidelong glance. “I think I like you more this way. Your arrogance was always one of your most obnoxious points. I never thought you could change, but perhaps your time spent slumming with these mortals has done you some good after all.”

“Don’t take it to the bank,” I said. Behind us now, the crowd fell silent again for an instant, then resumed with increased vigor. I didn’t want to look. She led me around another corner, though, and down past a camel corral on our left and a maze of tents on our right. We went around the back of a medium-sized tent and she pulled aside the door-flap, then indicated the interior with an open hand.

“You told me I was slumming?” I said.

Her mouth pursed as her mood regressed to its earlier state, and one corner of her lip curled down in a small snarl. “Just go in the tent,” she told me.

I brushed past her. A few small incense burners were scattered here and there on low tables and next to cushions, and the canvas walls transmitted additional light from the outside, so I had no trouble seeing the figure of a man perched comfortably on a large pillow at the far end of the tent, his legs crossed, a puffing hookah at his side; no, I had no trouble at all. The trouble was with the interpretation of what I saw. I’d never seen her before, but I’d sure seen him . He was the guy I knew as Gashanatantra.

“Why doesn’t this surprise me?” Max muttered.

“Rest assured,” said Shaa, “something will come of it. “

“Something? You mean something good?” said Jurtan Mont.

“Good, bad, the difference is primarily a referential one,” Shaa told him. “Events are Max’s basic philosophy, stirring them up and then improvisationally molding the flow. To channel a current, one needs motion, not merely a stagnant pool.” Shaa indicated the rolling surface of the River Oolvaan visible past the gunwale and the other moored barges, and then smoothly pointed a finger at a passing vessel easing downstream with the swell.

“Are you going on with that philosophy bit again?” said Max. “You’ve been trying to hook me with that line for the last ten years.”

“If the line fits,” Shaa said blandly, “one could do worse than hang from it.”

Max snorted. His perch atop the aft deck cabin of Haalsen Groot’s barge let him see over the top of the usual wharf-side clutter of crates and the rising form of the winch-driven crane, its reconstruction lagging typically behind schedule. Many people were visible to his gaze but the Creeping Sword had not yet been one of them unless he’d strolled by in disguise, and why would he want to do that? The Sword was several hours overdue. Even if he didn’t know his own name, forcing them all to resort to that cheesy nom de plume when they needed to refer to him, one thing he had proven himself to be was relatively punctual. Although Max’s own timeliness was often a matter of relativity itself, he was willing to appreciate it in others.

“Are you perhaps considering a visit to his office?” Shaa continued, after a moment for mutual contemplation.

“I’ll go through the motions,” Max said. “Of course I’ll go through the motions, but he won’t be there. I only hope that whatever he’s gotten himself into is going to help us out in the long run. I just wish I knew when he was going to pop up again; having him on the loose makes me nervous.”