The Redemption of Althalus Read online

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you here before,” one of the men said to Althalus.

  “I’m from out of town,” Althalus replied.

  “Oh? Where from?”

  “Up in the mountains. I came down to look at civilization.”

  “Well, what do you think of our city?”

  “Very impressive. I’m almost as impressed with your city as some of the town’s rich men seem to be with themselves.”

  One of the fishermen laughed cynically. “You passed near the forum, I take it.”

  “If that’s the place where all the fancy buildings are, yes I did. And if you want it, you can take as much of my share of it as you desire.”

  “You didn’t care for our wealthy?”

  “Apparently not as much as they did, that’s for certain. People like us should avoid the rich if we possibly can. Sooner or later, we’ll probably be bad for their eyes.”

  “How’s that?” another fisherman asked.

  “Well, all those fellows in the forum—the ones who wear fancy nightgowns in the street—kept looking down their noses at me. If a man spends all his time doing that, sooner or later it’s going to make him cross-eyed.”

  The fishermen all laughed, and the atmosphere in the tavern became relaxed and friendly. Althalus had skillfully introduced the topic dearest to his heart, and they all spent the rest of the afternoon talking about the well-to-do of Deika. By evening, Althalus had committed several names to memory. He spent another few days narrowing down his list, and he ultimately settled on a very wealthy salt merchant named Kweso. Then he went to the central marketplace, visited the marble-lined public baths, and then dipped into his purse to buy some clothing that more closely fit into the current fashion of Deika. The key word for a thief who’s selecting a costume for business purposes is “nondescript,” for fairly obvious reasons. Then Althalus went to the rich men’s part of town and spent several more days—and nights—watching merchant Kweso’s walled-in house. Kweso himself was a plump, rosy-cheeked bald man who had a sort of friendly smile. On a number of occasions Althalus even managed to get close enough to him to be able to hear him talking. He actually grew to be rather fond of the chubby little fellow, but that’s not unusual, really. When you get right down to it, a wolf is probably quite fond of deer.

  Althalus managed to pick up the name of one of Kweso’s neighbors, and with a suitably businesslike manner, he went in through the salt merchant’s gate one morning, walked up to his door, and knocked. After a moment or two, a servant opened the door. “Yes?” the servant asked.

  “I’d like to speak with Gentleman Melgor,” Althalus said politely. “It’s on business.”

  “I’m afraid you have the wrong house, sir,” the servant said. “Gentleman Melgor’s house is the one two doors down.”

  Althalus smacked his forehead with his open hand. “How stupid of me,” he apologized. “I’m very sorry to have disturbed you.” His eyes, however, were very busy. Kweso’s door latch wasn’t very complicated, and his entryway had several doors leading off it. He lowered his voice. “I hope my pounding didn’t wake your master,” he said.

  The servant smiled briefly. “I rather doubt it,” he said. “The master’s bedroom is upstairs at the back of the house. He usually gets out of bed about this time in the morning anyway, so he’s probably already awake.”

  “That’s a blessing,” Althalus said, his eyes still busy. “You said that Melgor’s house is two doors down?”

  “Yes.” The servant leaned out through the doorway and pointed. “It’s that way—the house with the blue door. You can’t miss it.”

  “My thanks, friend, and I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” Then Althalus turned and went back out to the street. He was grinning broadly. His luck was still holding him cuddled to her breast. The “wrong house” ploy had given him even more information than he’d expected. His luck had encouraged that servant to tell him all sorts of things. It was still quite early in the morning, and if this was Kweso’s normal time to rise, that was a fair indication that he went to bed early as well. He’d be sound asleep by midnight. The garden around his house was mature, with large trees and broad flowering bushes that would provide cover. Getting inside the house would be no problem, and now Althalus knew where Kweso’s bedroom was. All that was left to do was to slip into the house in the middle of the night, go directly to Kweso’s bedroom, wake him, and lay a bronze knife against his throat to persuade him to cooperate. The whole affair could be settled in short order.

  Unfortunately, however, it didn’t turn out that way at all. The salt merchant’s chubby, good-natured face obviously concealed a much sharper mind than Althalus expected. Not long after midnight, the clever thief scaled the merchant’s outer wall, crept through the garden, and quietly entered the house. He stopped in the entryway to listen. Except for a few snores coming from the servants’ quarters, the house was silent. As quietly as a shadow, Althalus went to the foot of the stairs and started up.

  It was at that point that Kweso’s house became very noisy. The three dogs were almost as large as ponies, and their deep-throated barking seemed to shake the walls.

  Althalus immediately changed his plans. The open air of the nighttime streets suddenly seemed enormously attractive.

  The dogs at the foot of the stairs seemed to have other plans, however. They started up, snarling and displaying shockingly large fangs.

  There were shouts coming from upstairs, and somebody was lighting candles.

  Althalus waited tensely until the dogs had almost reached him. Then, with an acrobatic skill he didn’t even know he had, he jumped high over the top of the dogs, tumbled on down to the foot of the stairs, sprang to his feet, and ran back outside.

  As he raced across the garden with the dogs snapping at his heels, he heard a buzzing sound zip past his left ear. Somebody in the house, either the deceptively moon-faced Kweso himself or one of his meek-looking servants, seemed to be a very proficient archer.

  Althalus scrambled up the wall as the dogs snapped at his heels and more arrows bounced off the stones, spraying his face with chips and fragments.

  He rolled over the top of the wall and dropped into the street, running almost before his feet hit the paving stones. Things had not turned out the way he’d planned. His tumble down the stairs had left scrapes and bruises in all sorts of places, and he’d managed to severely twist one of his ankles in his drop to the street. He limped on, filling the air around him with curses.

  Then somebody in Kweso’s house opened the front gate, and the dogs came rushing out.

  Now that, Althalus felt, was going just a little too far. He’d admitted his defeat by running away, but Kweso evidently wasn’t satisfied with victory and wanted blood as well.

  It took some dodging around and clambering over several walls, but the thief eventually shook off the pursuing dogs. Then he went across town to put himself a long way from all the excitement and sat down on a conveniently placed public bench to think things over. Civilized men were obviously not as docile as they appeared on the surface, and Althalus decided then and there that he’d seen as much of the city of Deika as he really wanted to see. What puzzled him the most, though, was how his luck had failed to warn him about those dogs. Could it be that she’d been asleep? He’d have to speak with her about that.

  He was in a foul humor as he waited in the shadows near a tavern in the better part of town, so he was rather abrupt when a couple of well-dressed patrons of the tavern came reeling out into the street. He very firmly persuaded the both of them to take a little nap by rapping them smartly across the backs of their heads with the heavy hilt of his short-bladed bronze sword. Then he transferred the ownership of the contents of their purses, as well as a few rings and a fairly nice bracelet, and left them slumbering peacefully in the gutter near the tavern.

  Waylaying drunken men in the street wasn’t really his style, but Althalus needed some traveling money. The two men had been the first to c
ome along, and the process was fairly routine, so there wasn’t much danger involved. Althalus decided that it might be best to avoid taking any chances until after he’d had a long talk with his luck.

  As he went toward the main gate of town, he hefted the two purses he’d just stolen. They seemed fairly heavy, and that persuaded him to take a step he normally wouldn’t even have considered. He left the city of Deika, limped on until shortly after dawn, and then stopped at a substantial-looking farmhouse, where he bought—and actually paid for—a horse. It went against all his principles, but until he’d had that chat with his luck, he decided not to take any chances.

  He mounted his new horse, and without so much as a backward glance, he rode on toward the west. The sooner he left Equero and the Deikan Empire behind, the better. He absently wondered as he rode if geography might play some part in a man’s luck. Could it possibly be that his luck just didn’t work in some places? That was a very troubling thought, and Althalus brooded sourly about it as he rode west.

  He reached the city of Kanthon in Treborea two days later, and he paused before entering the gates to make sure that the fabled—and evidently interminable—war between Kanthon and Osthos had not recently boiled to the surface. Since he saw no siege engines in place, he rode on in.

  The forum of Kanthon rather closely resembled the forum he’d seen in Deika, but the wealthy men who came there to listen to speeches seemed not to be burdened with the same notions of their own superiority as the aristocrats of Equero were, so Althalus found that he was not offended by their very existence. He even went into the forum once to listen to speeches. The speeches, however, were mostly denunciations of the city-state of Osthos in southern Treborea or complaints about a recent raise in taxes, so they weren’t really very interesting.

  Then he went looking for a tavern in one of the more modest neighborhoods, and he no sooner entered a somewhat run-down establishment than he became convinced that his luck was once again on the rise. Two of the patrons were involved in a heated argument about just who was the richest man in Kanthon.

  “Omeso’s got it all over Weikor,” one of them asserted loudly. “He’s got so much money that he can’t even count it.”

  “Well, of course he has, you fool. Omeso can’t count past ten unless he takes his shoes off. He inherited all his money from his uncle, and he’s never earned so much as a penny on his own. Weikor worked his way up from the bottom, so he knows how to earn money instead of having it handed to him on a platter. Omeso’s money flows out as fast as he can spend it, but Weikor’s money keeps coming in. Ten years from now, Weikor’s going to own Omeso—though why anybody would want him is beyond me.”

  Althalus turned and left without so much as ordering a drink. He’d picked up exactly the information he wanted; clearly his luck was smiling down on him again. Maybe geography did play a part in fortune’s decisions.

  He nosed around Kanthon for the next couple of days, asking questions about Omeso and Weikor, and he ultimately promoted Omeso to the head of his list, largely because of Weikor’s reputation as a man well able to protect his hard-earned money. Althalus definitely didn’t want to encounter any more large, hungry dogs while he was working.

  The “wrong house” ploy gave him the opportunity to examine the latch on Omeso’s front door, and a few evenings spent following his quarry revealed that Omeso almost never went home before dawn and that by then he was so far gone in drink that he probably wouldn’t have noticed if his house happened to be on fire. His servants, of course, were well aware of his habits, so they also spent their nights out on the town. By the time the sun went down, Omeso’s house was almost always empty.

  And so, shortly before midnight on a warm summer evening, Althalus quietly entered the house and began his search.

  He almost immediately saw something that didn’t ring at all true. Omeso’s house was splendid enough on the outside, but the interior was furnished with tattered, broken-down chairs and tables that would have shamed a pauper. The draperies were in rags, the carpets were threadbare, and the best candlestick in the entire house was made of tarnished brass. The furnishings cried louder than words that this was not the house of a rich man. Omeso had evidently already spent his inheritance.

  Althalus doggedly continued his search, and after he’d meticulously covered every room, he gave up. There wasn’t anything in the entire house that was worth stealing. He left in disgust.

  He still had money in his purse, so he lingered in Kanthon for a few more days, and then, quite by accident, he entered a tavern frequented by artisans. As was usually the case down in the lowlands, the tavern did not offer mead, so Althalus had to settle for sour wine again. He looked around the tavern. Artisans were the sort of people who had many opportunities to look inside the houses of rich people. He addressed the other patrons. “Maybe one of you gentlemen could clear something up for me. I happened to go into the house of a man named Omeso on business the other day. Everybody in town was telling me how rich he is, but once I got past his front door, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There were chairs in that man’s house that only had three legs, and the tables all looked so wobbly that a good sneeze would knock them over.”

  “That’s the latest fashion here in Kanthon, friend,” a mud-smeared potter told him. “I can’t sell a good pot or jug or bottle anymore, because everybody wants ones that are chipped and battered and have the handles broken off.”

  “If you think that’s odd,” a wood carver said, “you should see what goes on in my shop. I used to have a scrap heap where I threw broken furniture, but since the new tax law went into effect, I can’t give new furniture away, but our local gentry will pay almost anything for a brokendown old chair.”

  “I don’t understand,” Althalus confessed.

  “It’s not really too complicated, stranger,” a baker put in. “Our old Aryo used to run his government on the proceeds of the tax on bread. Anybody who ate helped support the government. But our old Aryo died last year, and his son, the man who sits on the throne now, is a very educated young man. His teachers were all philosophers with strange ideas. They persuaded him that a tax on profit had more justice than one on bread, since the poor people have to buy most of the bread, while the rich people make most of the profit.”

  “What has that got to do with shabby furniture?” Althalus asked with a puzzled frown.

  “The furniture’s all for show, friend,” a mortar-spattered stonemason told him. “Our rich men are all trying to convince the tax collectors that they haven’t got anything at all. The tax collectors don’t believe them, of course, so they conduct little surprise searches. If a rich man in Kanthon’s stupid enough to have even one piece of fine furniture in his home, the tax collectors immediately send in the wrecking crews to dismantle the floors of the house.”

  “The floors? Why are they tearing up floors?”

  “Because that’s a favorite place to hide money. Folks pry up a couple of flagstones, you see, and then they dig a hole and line it with bricks. All the money they pretend they don’t have goes into the hole. Then they cement the flagstones back down. Right at first, their work was so shabby that even a fool could see it the moment he entered the room. Now, though, I’m making more money teaching people how to mix good mortar than I ever did laying stone-block walls. Here just recently, I even had to build my own hidey-hole under my own floor, I’m making so much.”

  “Why didn’t your rich men hire professionals to do the work for them?”

  “Oh, they did, right at first, but the tax collectors came around and started offering us rewards to point out any new flagstone work here in town.” The mason laughed cynically. “It was sort of our patriotic duty, after all, and the rewards were nice and substantial. The rich men of Kanthon are all amateur stonemasons now, but oddly enough, not a single one of my pupils has a name that I can recognize. They all seem to have names connected to honest trades, for some strange reason. I guess they’re afraid that I might turn t
hem in to the tax collectors if they give me their real names.”

  Althalus thought long and hard about that bit of information. The tax law of the philosophical new Aryo of Kanthon had more or less put him out of business. If a man was clever enough to hide his money from the tax collectors and their well-equipped demolition crews, what chance did an honest thief have? He could get into their houses easily enough, but the prospect of walking around all that shabby furniture while knowing that his feet might be within inches of hidden wealth made him go cold all over. Moreover, the houses of the wealthy men here were snuggled together so closely that a single startled shout would wake the whole neighborhood. Stealth wouldn’t work, and the threat of violence probably wouldn’t either. The knowledge that the wealth was so close and yet so far away gnawed at him. He decided that he’d better leave very soon, before temptation persuaded him to stay. Kanthon, as it turned out, was even worse than Deika.

  He left Kanthon the very next morning and continued his westward trek, riding across the rich grain fields of Treborea toward Perquaine in a distinctly sour frame of mind. There was wealth beyond counting down here in civilization, but those who had been cunning enough to accumulate it were also, it appeared, cunning enough to devise ways to keep it. Althalus began to grow homesick for the frontier and to devoutly wish that he’d never heard the word “civilization.”

  He crossed the river into Perquaine, the fabled farmland of the plains country where the earth was so fertile that it didn’t even have to be planted, according to the rumors. All a farmer of Perquaine had to do each spring was put on his finest clothes, go out into his fields, and say, “Wheat, please,” or, “Barley, if it’s not too much trouble,” and then return home and go back to bed. Althalus was fairly sure that the rumors were exaggerations, but he knew nothing about farming, so for all he knew there might even be a grain of truth to them.