Rhalina signed to the warriors to open the great gates. They creaked back a fraction and a slim, bedraggled fellow entered. He was dressed in unfamiliar garb and had a sack over his back, a hat on his head whose wide brim was weighed down by water and hung about his face. His long hair was as wet as the rest of him. He was relatively young, relatively good looking and, in spite of his sodden appearance, there was just a trace of amused disdain in his intelligent eyes. He bowed to Rhalina.
'Jhary-a-Conel at your service, ma'am.'
'How came you to keep your hat while swimming so far through the sea?' Beldan asked. 'And your sack, for that matter?'
Jhary-a-Conel acknowledged the question with a wink. 'I never lose my hat and I rarely lose my sack. A traveller of my sort learns to hold on to his few possessions - no matter what circumstances he finds himself in.'
'You are just that?' Corum asked. 'A traveller?'
Jhary-a-Conel showed some impatience. 'Your hospitality reminds me somewhat of that I experienced some time since at a place called Kalenwyr.
'You have come from Kalenwyr?'
'I have been to Kalenwyr. But I see I cannot shame you, even by that comparison…'
'I am sorry,' said Rhalina. 'Come. There is food already on the table. I'll have servants bring you a change of clothing and towels and so forth.'
They returned to the main hall. Jhary-a-Conel looked about him. 'Comfortable,' he said.
They sat in their chairs and watched him as he casually stripped off his wet clothes and stood at last naked before them. He scratched his nose. A servant brought him towels and he began busily to dry himself. But the new clothes he refused. Instead he wrapped himself in another towel and seated himself at the table, helping himself to food and wine. 'I'll take my own clothes when they're dry,' he informed the servants. 'I have a stupid habit concerning clothes not of my particular choosing. Take care when you dry the hat. The brim must be tilted just so.'
These instructions done, he turned to Corum with a bright smile. 'And what name is it in this particular time and place, my friend?'
Corum frowned. 'I fail to understand you.'
'Your name is all I asked. Yours changes as does mine. The difference is sometimes that you do not know that and I do - or vice versa. And sometimes we are the same creature - or, at least, aspects of the same creature.'
Corum. shook his head. The man sounded mad.
'For instance,' continued Jhary as he ate heartily through a piled plate of seafood, 'I have been called Timeras and Shalenak. Sometimes I am the hero, but more often than not I am the companion to a hero.'
'Your words make little sense, sir,' Rhalina said gently. 'I do not think Prince Corum understands them. Neither do we.'
Jhary grinned. 'Ah, then this is one of those times when the hero is aware of only one existence. For the best, I suppose, for it is often unpleasant to remember too many incarnations - particularly when they coexist. I recognize Prince Corum for an old friend, but he does not recognize. me. It matters not.' He finished his food, readjusted the towel about his waist and leaned back.
'So you'd offer us a riddle and then will not give us the answer,' Beldan said.
'I will explain,' Jhary told him, 'for I do not deliberately jest with you. I am a traveller of an unusual kind. It seems to be my destiny to move through all times and all planes. I do not remember being born and I do not expect to die - in the accepted sense. I am sometimes called Timeras and, if I am "of" anywhere, then I suppose I am of Tanelorn.'
'But Tanelorn is a myth,' said Beldan.
'All places are a myth somewhere else - but Tanelorn is more constant than most. She can be found, if sought, from anywhere in the multiverse.'
'Have you no profession?' Corum asked him.
'Well, I have made some poetry and plays in my time, but my main profession could be that I am a friend of heroes. I have travelled - under several names, of course, and in several guises - with Rackhir the Red Archer to Xerlerenes where the ships of the Boatman sail the skies as your ships sail the sea - with Elric of Melnibone to the Court of the Dead God - with Asquiol of Pompeii into the deeper reaches of the multiverse where space is measured not in terms of miles but in terms of galaxies - with Hawkmoon of Kцln to Londra where the folk wear jewelled masks fashioned into the faces of beasts. I have seen the future and the past. I have seen a variety of planetary systems and I have learned that time does not exist and that space is an illusion.'
'And the gods?' Corum asked him eagerly.
'I think we create them, but I am not sure. Where primitives invent crude gods to explain the thunder, more sophisticated peoples create more elaborate gods to explain the abstractions which puzzle them. It has often been noted that gods could not exist without mortals and mortals could not exist without gods.'
'Yet gods, it appears,' said Corum, 'can affect our destinies.'
'And we can affect theirs, can we not?'
Beldan murmured to Corum: 'Your own experiences are proof of that, Prince Corum.'
'So you can wander at will amongst the Fifteen Planes,' Corum said softly. 'As some Vadhagh once could.'
Jhary smiled. 'I can wander nowhere "at will" - or to very few places. I can sometimes return to Tanelorn, if I wish, but normally I am hurled from one existence to another without, apparently, rhyme or reason. I usually find that I am made to fulfil my role wherever I land up - which is to be a companion to champions, the friend of heroes. That is why I recognized you at once for what you are - the Champion Eternal. I have known him in many forms, but he has not always known me. Perhaps, in my own periods of amnesia, I have not always known him.'
'And are you never a hero yourself'?'
'I have been heroic, I suppose, as some would see it. Perhaps I have even been a hero of sorts. And, there again, it in sometimes my fate to be one aspect of a particular hero - a part of another man or group of other men who together make up a single great hero. The stuff of our identities is blown by a variety of winds - all of them whimsical - about the multiverse. There is even a theory I have heard that all mortals are aspects of one single cosmic identity and some believe that even the gods are part of that identity, that all the planes of existence, all the ages which come and go, all the manifestations of space which emerge and vanish, are merely ideas in this cosmic mind, different fragments of its personality. Such speculation leads us nowhere and everywhere, but it makes no difference to our understanding of our immediate problems.'
'I'd agree with that,' Corum told him feelingly. 'And now, will you explain in more detail how you came to Moidel?'
'I will explain what I can, friend Corum. It happened that I found myself at a grim place called Kalenwyr. How I came there I do not quite remember, but then I am used to that. This Kalenwyr - all granite and gloom - was not to my taste. I was there but a few hours before I came under suspicion of the inhabitants and, by means of a certain amount of climbing about on roofs, the theft of a chariot, the purloining of a boat on a near-by river, escaped them and reached the sea. Feeling it unsafe to land, I sailed along the coast. A mist closed in, the sea acted as if a storm had blown up and suddenly my boat and myself were mixed up with a motley mixture of fish, snapping monsters, men and creatures I would be hard put to describe. I managed to cling to the strands of the gigantic net which had trapped me and the rest as we were dragged along at great speed. How I found breath sometimes I do not remember. Then, at last, the net was upended and we were all released. My companions went their different ways and I was left alone in the water. I saw this island and your castle and I found a piece of driftwood which aided me to swim here…'
'Kalenwyr!' Baldan said. 'In Kalenwyr did you hear of a man called Glandyth-a-Krae?'