I know, thought Rumata. I know about all this. And how you yelled in Don Reba’s office, how you begged and groveled at his feet: “Give it back, don’t do it!” It was too late. Your meat grinder had started turning.
Father Cabani grabbed the stein and put it to his hairy maw. Gulping down the poisonous brew, he roared like the boar Y, then he shoved the stein onto the table and started to chew on a piece of turnip. Tears crept down his cheeks.
“Flammable water!” he finally announced in a strangled voice. “For kindling fires and merry magic tricks. What does it matter that it’s flammable if you can drink it? Mix it with beer—what a beer you get! I won’t allow it! I’ll drink it myself… and I drink it. All day long I drink it. All night long. I’m all swollen. I fall down all the time. The other day, Don Rumata, you won’t believe it, I was near a mirror—and I got scared. I look—Lord help me!—where’s Father Cabani? A sea creature like an octopus—with colored spots all over. First red spots. Then blue spots. That’s what comes of inventing water for magic tricks.”
Father Cabani tried to spit on the floor but hit the table instead, then shuffled his feet beneath the bench out of habit, as if rubbing it into the dirt. He suddenly asked, “What day is it today?”
“The eve of Cata the Pious,” said Rumata.
“And why is there no sun?”
“Because it’s night.”
“Night again,” Father Cabani said dejectedly, and fell face-first into the table scraps.
Rumata looked at him for a while, whistling through his teeth. Then he stood up from the table and went into the pantry. There, between the heap of turnips and the heap of sawdust, gleamed the glass tubes of Father Cabani’s massive brewing apparatus—an amazing creation of a born engineer, natural chemist, and master glassblower. Rumata circled the “infernal machine” twice, then felt for a crowbar in the dark and swung hard at it, aiming nowhere in particular. Clanking, jingling, gurgling sounds filled the pantry. The nauseating smell of sour home brew assaulted his nostrils.
Broken glass crunching beneath his heels, Rumata made his way into a far corner and turned on an electric lamp. There, underneath a pile of trash, was the compact field synthesizer Midas in its strong silicate safe. Rumata cleared away the trash, entered in the code, and lifted the lid of the safe. Even in the white electric light, the synthesizer looked peculiar in the midst of the scattered junk. Rumata dumped a few shovels of sawdust into the receiving funnel, and the synthesizer began to hum quietly, its display panel turning on automatically. Rumata shoved a rusty bucket underneath the output chute with the toe of his boot. And immediately—clink, clink, clink!—gold disks with the aristocratic profile of Pitz the Sixth, King of Arkanar, started pouring onto its battered tin bottom.
Rumata carried Father Cabani to a squeaky bunk, pulled his shoes off, and covered him with the hairless hide of some long-extinct animal. During this process, Father Cabani woke up for a minute. He could neither move nor think. He merely sang a couple of verses from the forbidden love song “I’m Like a Scarlet Flower in Your Little Hand,” after which he started snoring loudly.
Rumata cleared the table, swept the floor, and cleaned the glass in the only window, which had turned black from dirt and the chemical experiments Father Cabani was performing on the windowsill. He found a full barrel of alcohol behind the rusty stove and emptied it into a rat hole. Then he watered the Hamaharian stallion, poured him some oats from his saddlebag, washed up, and sat down to wait, gazing at the oil lamp’s smoking flame. He had lived this strange double life for five years and thought he was completely used to it, but from time to time, like right now, for example, it would suddenly occur to him that there was no organized brutality and approaching gray threat, only a performance of a bizarre theatrical production with him, Rumata, in the lead. That at any moment now, after a particularly felicitous line, there would be a burst of applause, and fans from the Institute of Experimental History would shout admiringly from their boxes, “Not bad, Anton! Not bad! Good job, Toshka!” He even looked around to check—but there was no crowded hall, only blackened mossy walls made from bare logs and caked in layers of soot.
In the yard, the Hamaharian stallion neighed quietly and beat his hooves against the ground. Rumata heard a steady low hum, achingly familiar but here utterly improbable. He listened hard, his mouth half-open. The hum stopped, and the flame above the lamp flickered then shone brighter. Rumata started to get up, and at that moment a man stepped into the room out of the darkness of the night: Don Condor, Chief Justice and Keeper of the Great Seals of the Mercantile Republic of Soan, Vice President of the Conference of the Twelve Merchants, and Knight of the Imperial Order of the Hand of Mercy.
Rumata jumped up, nearly knocking over the bench. He was ready to rush toward him, hug him, kiss him on both cheeks—but his legs observed the proper etiquette in spite of himself and bent at the knees. His spurs jingled solemnly, his right hand swept out an arc starting at his heart and ending at his side, and his head bent down so that his chin sank into the foamy lace ruff. Don Condor ripped off his plumed velvet beret, hastily waved it in Rumata’s direction, as if he were chasing off mosquitoes, flung it on the table, and undid the clasps of his cloak at his neck with both hands. His cloak was still slowly falling behind his back and he was already sitting on the bench with legs apart, his left hand on his hip and his right hand grasping the hilt of a gilded sword that he had stuck into the rotten floorboards. He was small and skinny, with large protuberant eyes in a pale, narrow face. He wore his black hair the same way as Rumata—gathered by a massive gold circlet with a large green stone above the bridge of his nose.
“Are you alone, Don Rumata?” he asked curtly.
“Yes, noble don,” Rumata answered sadly.
Father Cabani suddenly said loudly and soberly, “Noble Don Reba! You’re a hyena, that’s all.”
Don Condor didn’t turn around. “I flew here,” he said.
“Let us hope,” said Rumata, “that nobody saw you.”
“One legend more, one legend less,” Don Condor said irritably. “I don’t have time to travel on horseback. Whatever happened to Budach? Where did he go? Do sit down, Don Rumata, I beg you! My neck hurts.”
Rumata obediently sat on the bench. “Budach has disappeared,” he said. “I waited for him in the Territory of Heavy Swords. But only a one-eyed ragamuffin showed up, who gave the password and handed me a bag of books. I waited for another two days, then got in touch with Don Gug, who informed me that he had accompanied Budach all the way to the border, and that from then on Budach was escorted by a certain noble don who can be trusted because he gambled away body and soul to Don Gug at cards. Therefore Budach must have disappeared somewhere in Arkanar. That’s all that I know.”
“It’s not a whole lot,” said Don Condor.
“Budach is not the point,” Rumata objected. “If he’s alive, I’ll find him and save him. I know how to do that. That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I want to once again draw your attention to the fact that the situation in Arkanar is not within the scope of basis theory.”
A sour expression appeared on Don Condor’s face. “No, you have to hear me out,” Rumata said firmly. “I have the feeling that I’ll never explain myself over the radio. Everything in Arkanar has changed! Some new, systematic factor has appeared. And it looks like Don Reba is intentionally inciting all the grayness in the kingdom against learned people. Everything that’s even slightly above the average gray level is now in danger. Hear me out, Don Condor—these aren’t emotions, these are facts! If you’re smart, educated, a skeptic, if you say anything unusual—even if you simply don’t drink wine!—you’re in danger. Any shopkeeper has the right to hound you, even until death. Hundreds and thousands of people are declared outside the law. They are caught by troopers and strung up along the roads. Naked, upside down. Yesterday, they beat an old man with their boots after learning that he was literate. I hear they trampled him for two hours, the morons, with their sweaty animal mugs…” Rumata regained control of himself and ended calmly: “In short, there will soon be no literate people left in Arkanar. Like in the Region of the Holy Order after the Barkan slaughter.”