The Magician of Karakosk, and Other Stories

by Peter S. Beagle

  Gol’s bit came last, the abdication speech that I had managed to work into the scene just before King Vilnanash’s long-overdue suicide. Amazingly, the house quieted somewhat for that one moment, and I was able to deliver the lines with some attempt at interpretation, at nuance. They were actually listening, if you’ll believe it; they were so still that I was able to hear Lisonje’s urgent whisper behind the backdrop, “Dardis—die as close to the wings as you can! I’ll drag you off, and we’ll make a run for it. Fall toward the wings, Dardis!”

  It was quite sweet of her, but really—King Vilnanash the Accursed to die up left? Not possible, not remotely possible, not even in such extraordinary circumstances. My ministers filed offstage, sniveling and honking in an attempt to portray loyal grief, and I spoke my last rhymed couplet (its moral: don’t irritate the gods, even if you don’t know you’re doing it), drew forth my bejeweled royal dagger with its collapsible blade, smote myself fatally, and died center stage, sprawled across the apron—center stage, where I bloody well belonged. And the house went wild.

  If I choose to believe—quietly, only quietly, to myself—that some little scrap of that mad roaring and cheering was actually in tribute to my performance… well, well, what of it? It harms no one, comforts me, and makes no difference at all to the tale. Granted, the body of the roar was composed of assorted war cries and screams for vengeance, as half the audience fell upon the other half—no, the fractions were more complex, more like thirds and fourths and eighths, and all going murderously at one another with whatever weapons they had smuggled in under their cloaks. Cudgels it was, mostly, but I saw dirks—yes, and bungstarters, hayforks and butchers’ cleavers too, if you can credit it. Something for everyone, you might say.

  Of course, any sort of bow was definitely out of the question. I leaped to my feet and shouted, “Mudbaths all around!” which is still our particular cant for abandon ship, head for the hills. To the rest of my troupe the rioting must have looked insanely random—assault for the blind joy of assault—but Lisonje and I at least knew better. I also knew much better than to linger onstage, but I did anyway, watching the last of Davao’s weedy crew being run over and kicked aside, mostly by spectators making for the doors, while his brothers’s gangs hurtled together almost under my nose, yelling their squalid slogans, smashing the seats with one another’s heads, trampling panicky innocents, and generally doing the berserk best they could to reduce our poor theatre to matchwood. I could hear both Gol and Javeri above the bedlam, bellowing furiously at their minions to stop murdering each other and concentrate on the Jiril’s retinue. They might as well have been pleading with walk-ons not to fatten their roles by strutting and jigging and inventing their own lines. I know the feeling.

  Torleg, on the other hand, had his forces under absolute control. I would have expected no less; still, it was undeniably chilling to see those bullies in his neat maroon livery moving through such chaos with such dispassionate brutality. They never lost sight of their goal, which was to isolate the Jiril, and that they achieved easily, since the old man had obviously no intention of offering any resistance. He himself had hardly stirred since the outbreak began, watching placidly under puffy eyelids as Torleg’s men steadily hammered their way toward him. The Jirelle was seriously put out with her sons, and was letting them know it above the commotion; but Firial, ignored as always, just went on with her beadwork. I thought she must be frozen with panic, not to take advantage of the tumult around her to escape with Deh’kai; but then she looked up and saw me across a welter of sprawled bodies and shattered sweets carts. She winked. I will be swearing after my burial that she winked.

  Lisonje was hauling at my arm, trying to drag me off the stage, as she will do when she thinks I am letting my curtain speech ramble. I was yielding, touched by her obvious concern, and realizing also that she might well have snatched the good makeup towels after all, when Torleg shouted a command and his followers halted instantly, with the Jiril and his group completely surrounded. Torleg came forward, smiling. He said, “Well, Father.”

  “Well, boy,” the Jiril answered. Have I mentioned that his voice had a distinct hoarse whistle to it, and a twangy hill accent that he took great care never to lose? It added greatly to a general bumpkinish air, which was dangerously deceptive. “You’ve been busy children, all of you. Not a bad job.”

  “Praise from such a father is praise indeed.” Torleg’s words were notably muffled by the creamy richness of his self-satisfaction. You can go mad trying to break overpraised actors of just that sound. He spread his hands graciously now, saying, “I hope you won’t take any of this as a reflection on your rule in Derridow, Father. It’s just that my friends and I rather think it’s come time for you and Mother to start taking life a bit easier. Enjoying yourselves.”

  “I was enjoying myself very nicely as I was,” the Jiril said, gruffly imperturbable as ever. “Almost as much as you and your brothers will soon be enjoying my prison. I think I might mew you all up in the same cell, and take a few bets on who survives the first night. My money’s on you, boy, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  Torleg laughed outright and shook his head. “I think not, sir. My beloved sibs, yes, quite possibly, but you and Mother—oh, and, of course, sweet, retiring Firial—will be given safe conduct and first-class transportation as far as Leishai, where you will choose to take ship for the gracious isle of Lang-y-fydyss, there to spend your declining years in simple peace and beauty. I promise faithfully to visit once a year. At least.”

  Those who could flee, on both sides of the proscenium, had done so long since: our devastated theatre—chairs and benches in bloodstained splinters, carpeting torn up, hangings torn down, torches trodden underfoot, nothing but the stage itself ironically untouched—was empty of all but assorted clumps of battered insurgents, outnumbered and efficiently surrounded by Torleg’s men. Gol, Javeri, and Davao themselves were already in chains, their faces bleeding. Lisonje had left off tugging at me, and was standing as helplessly ensorcelled as I by a performance so surpassing our own. No, perhaps not quite as spellbound—I must grudgingly admit that it was her sharp elbow that called to my notice the utterly unremarkable men in nobody’s livery drifting blandly through the ruins, looking like nothing so much as a rather bemused cleanup squad. Indeed, a few of them carried pails and brooms, as I recall. Torleg might have recognized them as the Jiril’s legendary Nameless Ones—word has it that their crest reads never seen, always near—but he was too busy trying to astound his father with his cleverness. Aye, I know that feeling, too.

  He was still keeping up his air of lightly mocking triumph, but the Jiril’s plain indifference had by now provoked him to proclaim, “Actually, the whole plan was just a slight modification of your own insurrection, all those years ago. I was a bit fearful you might notice the resemblance.”

  “Insurrection?” the Jiril rasped. “What bloody insurrection? I was acclaimed rightful Jiril the first day I set foot in this city, and well you and your wretched brothers know it. And I am Jiril here still, boy, as you’re a moment or two from finding out.” There was that in his voice would have told me, even without seeing the Nameless Ones moving in, that this was no bluff, no playacting; but Torleg hadn’t my expertise in such matters. The difference between journeyman and gifted amateur, I suppose, when all’s said.

  Torleg went on obliviously preening and prattling—things like, “At a certain point, a man has to put family considerations aside and act for the greater good”—right up to the moment when two of those ordinary-looking men pinioned his arms, and a third touched a dagger very gently to a place just below his left ear. I don’t know what became of the buckets.

  The Jiril said, “Go on, son. You have all my attention.” Torleg never lost control, not for a moment. There was an instant when his eyes widened slightly as he stared at the three men; then he laughed a different sort of laugh and said, “I could have sworn you lot were with us.”

  “We took your money, lord,”
the man with the dagger replied gravely. “It seemed the courteous thing.”

  “Indeed,” Torleg said. “Well. If you will permit me to salute my father.” The men holding his arms slacked their grip briefly, and he bowed gracefully to the Jiril, saying, “Farewell for now, sir. We are always underestimating you, are we not?”

  “Every time,” the Jiril grunted. “Good-bye.”

  Torleg nodded once to his mother and sister as he went with the Nameless Ones. I looked around to see that his rebels—triumphant only a little before, dazed and meek now—were themselves being hustled away, who knows where? In the silence, the Jirelle asked wearily, “How long will you keep them in prison this time?”

  “A year,” the Jiril said. “A year anyway, by the gods’ arseholes, this time a full year.” He caught sight of Lisonje and me then, and called out, “Dardis, my apologies for the damage. It will be made good.”

  “We never doubted it, lord,” Lisonje answered him brightly, just as though she didn’t have everything she owned packed for flight backstage. The Jiril turned abruptly and snapped at Firial, “Girl, is there nothing in the world you can do but that bloody ’broidering? Your brothers have all four just sought to overthrow me, and are under hatches for it, and you sit there with your eyes on those idiot beads, not a word, not even so much as looking up when Torleg says we’re being sent into exile. Are you weak in the head besides being plain as two sticks?” There was more, but let it be. He had an ugly anger at times, the Jiril.

  Firial did look up then, and whatever there was in her pleasant brown eyes shut the Jiril’s mouth with a click Lisonje and I heard where we stood. She put away the beadwork and rose swiftly to her feet, standing very straight. At my shoulder Lisonje whispered, “Ah, Barduinn, let me do it! Let me change places with her for two minutes, two minutes only!” Barduinn is supposed to be our god, the special deity of all actors, but I must say I never got any decent use out of him—perhaps you’ve had better luck, yes? As always, he paid Lisonje no heed: she was to be compelled to watch yet another amateur play out a scene that she knew she could have handled with vastly more panache. I felt for her, I must say that. But then Firial spoke, and everything changed.

  Firial said, “That will do, Father.” The Jiril’s head snapped around—as did ours—plainly not at the words themselves, but at the way she read the line. Tone and timing, it’s everything, I’ve always said that. Lisonje couldn’t have done better, and a side glance told me she knew it. Firial gave it just the right pause, just the right turn of the shoulders, and then the absolutely perfect small smile as she said clearly, “Because my husband will be very annoyed if he hears you speak to me so.”

  Well, there may have been a jaw somewhere in the theatre that didn’t drop, but I never saw it. I certainly never saw Lisonje so flabbergasted, before or since. The Jiril turned any number of colors, spluttering like an unprimed pump, while his wife stood up, her eyes all abulge, and said, “Hussy, I don’t believe it, how could you?” and sat down again. There was any amount of gasping and gobbling from the entourage; and I remember one bedizened bolster who must have been Firial’s old nurse trying to coax her back to her chair and her beadwork. But Firial put her firmly aside, calling, “Deh’kai, my lord, I am here.” I have rarely heard such serene invitation as was in her voice, and never quite such triumph.

  Nor have I ever in my life seen such astonishment as undid every muscle in the Jiril’s face and turned it the color of a Cape Dylee fog against that dyed beard when he saw his men—his very own incorruptible, utterly loyal Nameless Ones—turning to greet his very own cook as their master. For it was indeed young Deh’kai who came sauntering toward them now, the most nonchalant, least pretentious conqueror you ever saw, calmly greeting his turncoats by name and bowing with great respect to the Jiril and his wife before he embraced Firial. “Your pardon and your love, my parents,” he said, cool as Torleg. “I think I am as well entitled to one as to the other.”

  “You’re entitled to have children kicking your head up and down the street!” the Jiril howled at him. “Get your greasy hands off my daughter, or I’ll have them off with your own draw-knife—aye, and a few other things with them, you jumped-up potboy! You ash-pit, you scullery beetle, I refused six horses for you—six horses and a breeding pair of hunting shukris—and you do this to me! Rape my daughter, seduce my Guard—gods’ balls, is there anything in the world you won’t—?”

  Firial stepped between them and slapped the Jiril hard across his wet mouth. She would have done it again, but Deh’kai stopped her, gripping her wrists gently, smiling all the while. “Dearest heart, dearest,” he soothed her, “no one raises a hand to my father-in-law, I’ll not have it. I promise you he will come to treasure me in time, as I do you. He means none of these words, none—do you and Mother take him sweetly home, while we tidy somewhat here.” So he cozened her, and the Jirelle as well, as Lisonje and I gaped; until he actually had the two of them on the Jiril’s arms—like the men who had seized Torleg—and easing him away, carefully, the way you move an unwieldy wardrobe, turning it this way on this leg, this way on that. The old man was in such shock that they almost had him out of the theatre before he lunged free and came at Deh’kai. His eyes were mad, and there was a little ceremonial dagger in his hand.

  Men moved in fast from all sides, but Deh’kai waved them back and waited for him, his own eyes as friendly as could be. The Jiril halted before him, glaring like a trapped shukri himself, demanding, “What did you give them? My sons, others, other people, dozens, they’ve tried and tried to bribe my Nameless Ones—never, they never could, not for anything. What did you give them? What did you do?” He dropped the dagger as he collapsed weeping at Deh’kai’s feet, and the former kitchener stooped quickly and respectfully to raise him.

  “Why, I gave them nothing, sir,” he answered the Jiril. “As you so rightly say, there’s nothing in the world could buy the fidelity of such men.” Oh, he was good, that one—I’d have given a deal to have had the training of him. A year, six months even, and he’d have been playing the wizard Khyr, or even Lord Crocius in The Horseman’s Tragedy. He said, “They were always very fond of my cooking, your Nameless Ones. I used to save the leftover dishes from your high table for them, whenever I could.” The Jiril stared at him. Deh’kai went on, “By and by, they thought perhaps they might like to eat such meals every night, just as you do. We came to an understanding.”

  “Dinner,” the Jiril said. “They betrayed me for dinner.” He looked vaguely at the dagger still clenched in his fist and dropped it on the ground. “But I fed them,” he whispered. “If I fed no one else, I always fed the Nameless Ones.”

  For the first time Deh’kai looked just a bit smug, just a trifle too pleased with himself for my taste. He said, still pointedly humble, “Well, sir—Father—there’s feeding, and then there’s food, if you see what I mean. It’s rather a different thing.”

  The Jiril gave him one last despairing glance, and then turned silently away and wandered back to the arms of his captors. I never heard him speak word again, though I’m sure he must have done. As I remember, he died either just before or just after Deh’kai was installed as the new Jiril of Derridow. The Jirelle—or ex-Jirelle, Dowager Jirelle, whatever the exact term is—spent her remaining days, which were many, as the honored, ignored guest of her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren, while her four sons were sent into four very separate exiles, from which none are reported to have returned. All epilogue, this, all anticlimax, and it’s gotten dreadfully late, I do apologize. At least you and your lot can sleep in—we’d better be long past Lis by the time you’re at breakfast, if we’re to play in Goliak tomorrow night. Miserable town, Goliak. My deepest thanks for your courtesy to a babbling old colleague.

  What? Oh, of course, they’d been married by some hedge-priest or other before Firial ever came to see me. Just shows you, doesn’t it? As for the why and how of our leaving Derridow forever—well, Lisonje never did unpack, for all Deh
’kai’s apparent friendliness; and she was right, as she may one day tire of reminding me. Because Deh’kai called us to the great hall, together with Trygvalin, Nususir, and one or two more, not long after his installation. I can tell you his exact words this moment, as I’m sure those others could.

  “I greatly admire you all,” is what he said, “and it causes me no end of rue to tell you that you must be gone by tomorrow’s sunset and never return.” He still maintained a modest, amiable air, Jiril or no, but he was already putting on a bit of weight and beginning to show a fondness for uniforms. Putting his fingertips together, he continued, “To be quite candid, you know rather too much about how I came to be sitting where I am. There are those near who would much prefer that none of you ever left this hall.”

  At the time I assumed that he was referring to this minister or that, or to the Nameless Ones, but today I wonder. Could he have meant Firial herself, do you suppose? There was far more happening behind that round, mild face than any but Deh’kai ever knew. He said, “Myself, I see no need to begin so—what price the tales of a ragbag gang of mummers against the Jiril of Derridow? You may go freely, therefore, and if it is any consolation to you, the tannery stage will stand empty from this day. As I have reason to know, even the most domesticated theatre has in it too much potential for disturbance and uncertainty to run loose here while I rule. Pass the word, of your kindness, to any troupe you encounter—Derridow has no more welcome for players, move along. Yet be assured”—and yes, he studied us all, but those smiling eyes rested longest on me—“that my wife and I will remember you with affection, and with a certain real gratitude. Farewell.”