The Magician of Karakosk, and Other Stories

by Peter S. Beagle

  So there you are, there’s how we lost our beautiful theatre. We took to the road next day, and we have been on it ever since, more than twenty years now. Deh’kai is still Jiril of Derridow—governs indifferent well, too, from what I hear—bar the odd crackdown, lockup, banishment or vanishing—but you won’t find so much as a juggler or a ropedancer crossing his border even today, and his folk are said to live with this comfortably enough. What they think about it, what they feel—aye, well, that’s what theatre’s for, isn’t it? To discover just such things about ourselves, all of us together? He was quite right, you know, Deh’kai.

  I sometimes ponder whether they remember us in Derridow, if only when they pass that twice-abandoned tannery on the Tomelly shore. We gave them some proper shows there, in the old times. Anyway, good night to you, and good luck to your season here in the Keep—full houses, sober stage managers, industrious apprentices who can speak lines if they have to, leads who can at least remember their lines, tolerable clowns, and the blessing of divine Barduinn over all. For what that’s worth. None of them really like players, the gods, none of them, not really.

  LAL AND SOUKYAN

  Beyond the whitewashed one-room hut lay only desert. The old black woman saw him coming a long way and a very long time off, and knew him before the girl could even discern movement on the milky horizon. She set her long, still-youthful hands on her hips, cocked her head and shook it slowly from side to side without saying a word.

  Skin bag in one hand, crude rush basket in the other, the little girl watched intently, mimicking the old woman’s silence as she copied everything else about her. There was no one else in the hut, and nothing to be seen within its walls but a few dishes, a firepit, and two sleeping mats away in a corner. In a startlingly deep whisper the girl finally asked, “Shall I go, inbarati?”

  “Of course not,” the old woman said. “Set the water down in the shade, you know where. And bring the basket here. I’m hungry.” She was a small woman, completely white-haired, with a cat’s triangular face and smoky golden eyes; and her own voice had a distinct up-and-down lilt to it, different from the child’s husky singsong. She remained in the doorway, watching the distant figure making its way toward them.

  The little girl set the basket at her feet and crouched there herself, bright-eyed with curiosity but patiently immobile. Presently the old woman sighed, muttered something the girl could not make out, and dropped down easily on her own heels beside her. Lifting the lid of the basket, she brought out several broad, thick yellow leaves, setting them on the ground one after another. Most of them were folded over strips of dried meat, but a few contained small, stubby vegetables, and there was even an overripe melon, purple and sticky. The old woman divided the food carefully between herself and the girl, giving her most of the melon. “I can’t taste sweet anymore,” she explained dispassionately. “Never waste sweet things on someone who cannot taste them. Tell me a story now, while I have my breakfast.”

  The girl took a long, slow breath, closed her eyes, and began to recite a tale involving a mighty lord, his wicked minister, a peasant and her daughter, a clever thief, and a singing fish. Her hands shaped them all in the air, and her voice took on a droning, chantlike quality. The old woman ate without looking at her, grunting now and then at a particular turn in the story, though whether with pleasure or disapproval the child could never tell. The tale and the meal came to an end at the same moment, but the old woman said nothing for some time. She stood up and went to lean in the doorway again, squinting against the new-risen sun. Staring across the desert made the little girl’s eyes swim and sting: she could not see that the tiny figure was any nearer, nor whether it was man or woman, old or young, or even mounted or afoot. She waited, alert as a lizard, ready for anything, thinking of nothing.

  “You must tell that story this way,” the old woman said. Her bare feet made no sound on the hard mud floor as she came back, walking with a slight seagoing roll, to squat in front of the little girl. Looking directly into her face now, she began to repeat the entire story from the beginning. She told it in almost the same words that the girl had used, but in a voice like muffled drums and like sails snapping in the wind. Now playful, now resonant with action, now shivering with pity or wonder or rage, now briefly flowering into song, her voice built and kept a hypnotic rhythm that held the girl absolutely still even after the tale was over. She never moved until the old woman passed a hand back and forth before her eyes, saying in an ordinary voice, “There, that is how I learned to tell it. That’s how it is done.”

  “Another,” the little girl whispered. “Please, inbarati.”

  The old woman smiled for the first time. Her teeth were small and remarkably white against her plum-dark skin. “First you will tell me the tale of the thief and the singing fish once again. Then you will bring in some firewood while I sweep out the hut, and then we will have our nap. Then,”—and she tugged gently on one coarse black braid—“then you will hear of Zivinaki, who was the greatest liar in the whole world. It is most important for you to know about Zivinaki if you wish to be an inbarati.”

  The girl looked down forlornly at her own tiny brown feet. “By then your—guest—will be here, and you will send me away.”

  “My guest?” The old woman laughed outright: an odd, throaty crackle that always retained a quality of surprise, as though amusement were constantly catching her unaware. “Child, whatever else that one may be, he will never be my guest. Besides, he is ancient, doddering, practically senile, like me—I assure you, it will take him all the rest of the day to reach this house. Now. Tell me a story.”

  The sun was halfway down the sky, and the little girl was sound asleep on a straw mat by the time the old woman walked out to meet her visitor. They met by the one tree in the vicinity, a stunted, charred-looking object like a clenched fist. The old woman was the first to speak. She said, “You are thinner than you were.”

  “Only a whittling away of the inessential,” he answered her gravely. “Nothing needed is lost.” He was a tall old man, all knobby bone and gristle and weathered brown hide not many shades lighter than the old woman’s skin. He wore little more than light trousers, a leather vest, and a pair of bald, splitting boots. A bow nearly as long as himself was slung over his right shoulder. The bowstring pulled the vest open, revealing several thin white scars up and down his ribs, and one great jagged cicatrix just above the waist that ran halfway around his body. When he smiled, his eyes—which were of a nameless, impermanent twilight shade—warmed to a color that was almost lavender. “Look at you,” he said. “Greetings, Lal.”

  “Hello, Soukyan,” the old woman said. “What do you want?”

  “A cup of tea would be nice,” the old man replied. “A cup of tea, a night’s lodging, and a kind word—I cannot imagine desiring anything more in the world, just at present.” He put his hands lightly on the old woman’s shoulders. “Look at you,” he said again. “Look at you.”

  “Not for years, thank you.” The old woman pulled away from him. “There are no mirrors in my house, and no portraits either. There is no Lal in my house, Soukyan, no more.”

  The old man’s smile widened slightly. “No? Then who is that waiting for us there?” She turned swiftly to see the little girl standing at the door of the hut, rubbing her eyes as she peered out toward them. Soukyan said, “Lal, surely.”

  “No.” The answer came quietly and savagely. “Her name is Choushi-wai. After I had been in this place awhile, and the people had grown used to my presence, they sent her to me. ‘She lies all the time,’ they said, ‘but she is strong, and she can cook. Use her as you will.’ So she is my housekeeper now, and my apprentice as well, the only one I ever had. But she is not me, Soukyan, not me, never.” The long fingers dug hard into his upper right arm. “Thank all the imbecile gods who made me what I am—what I was—she will never, never have to be Lal.”

  The big old man put his hand on hers. “Ah. Now it seems to me that there are many worse thi
ngs in this world than being Lalkhamsin-khamsolal.”

  “Not for Lal,” she said. “Soukyan, you may have the tea and the lodging, but tomorrow I want you gone. Whatever you want of me, the answer is no. You came seeking Sailor Lal, Swordcane Lal, Lal-Alone, and you have found a folktale crone, withered and forbidding, living out her time by telling stories to a barbaric desert tribe which is not her own but will do well enough. I am at last what I was always meant to be—all the rest, all of it, that was a dream, one of my old bad dreams. You remember my dreams.”

  “As many of them as I held you through?” They were walking slowly toward the hut now, blinking against the setting sun. The old man said, “As you will. I’ll drink my tea and be grateful for the night’s lodging, and be off where I’m bound in the morning. But in the hours between may we not speak of Lal, even a little? I did have a message for her, that much is true. Perhaps you will see that it reaches her.”

  The old woman did not reply. When they reached the door, Choushi-wai bowed to the ground three times to greet the guest, as was the custom of her tribe; but when Soukyan solemnly knelt before her to kiss her hand, then her courage failed and she fled wailing into the hut. Coaxed back, she quickly grew shyly flirtatious: she would not say a word to the old man, but by the end of dinner, she was leaning against his shoulder, alternately eating from his dish and offering him bites from her own. Lal ignored this until the girl had left for her mother’s house, where she still spent every night. Then she said irritably to Soukyan, “Now she will be useless to me for days. Instead of learning the immortal chronicles and praise-songs and ballads she must know, she will fill her mind with a dozen soap-bubble fancies that have you in them—and herself, of course. Can you never come into my life and leave things the way you found them?”

  “And have you never made up such foolish tales, but only retold those same immortal old ones, over and over?” Neither question expected an answer. They sat silent, looking at each other across two small, smoky oil lamps in the darkening hut. Lal said in time, “These people are some way related to my own folk. The language is much the same, and they know what an inbarati is, though they have never had one among them. Now they do. I am well content here, Soukyan.”

  “Contentment becomes you. Truly, I am not mocking.” The old man stretched out his long legs and arms, smiling wryly as joints crackled like pine knots in a fire. “Where has the swordcane gone, then?”

  Lal nodded toward a slim rosewood stick leaning against the far wall. “Enough dust on it for a king’s library. I do use it once in a while, to knock down fruit, to draw pictures on the ground for Choushi-wai. She has no notion of what it contains, and presently neither will I. That will suit me.”

  “Well, well, and so it should.” Soukyan’s tone was drowsily tranquil, and his strange eyes were half-closed. “But does it suit the swordcane? There’s the question.” He chuckled very softly. “Now I myself owe my life three times over to that dainty weapon, so I have reason to be concerned for its peace of mind. You understand how such a thing might be?”

  “I understand you,” Lal said flatly. “Which is what matters. I never knew anyone more devious who wasn’t a wizard. Understand me once for all—the swordcane and I are both where we belong, and there’s an end of it. Here, you can sleep on the child’s mat. She would be thrilled to idiocy if she knew.”

  Straightening and brushing the worn straw, she added over her shoulder, “As for myself, that bow of yours kept me alive three times, at very least, so we’re long quits, as you well know. There, so, there we are. Now we have dined, and we have talked together, and now we will sleep, and in the morning say our farewells one more time.” She turned to face him fully then, and the long golden eyes were at last permitted some emotion. She said, “How many of those have we said, do you suppose? I lost count somewhere around Arakli.”

  “And well you might have,” the old man answered her, “since that’s where I lost you. In a marketplace full of drunken soldiers, it was, with half the stalls on fire, and you crouched over that poor crazy street-girl like a mother sheknath.” He stood up, his own eyes gone dark and distant. “I knew you were dead, Lal. For three years I knew. The sun rises, the stars move, the breeze is pleasant today, the beer is miserable in Chun, Lal is gone.”

  “I searched for you,” she said hotly. “You know how I searched, how I left word everywhere you might possibly seek me. And it was no whit worse than Bitava, when I watched you off on the Queen’s Road—you would ride that way, never mind any warnings—knowing where you were bound, not knowing if I would ever see you alive again. How different was that? How different was the parting at Cheth na’Bata? At Rhyak? Soukyan, I think we were never meant to be friends, comrades, companions, whatever word you will. Neither of us ever can be certain of what we are entitled to ask of the other, so we wear each other out, and enough good-byes are enough after forty years. We do not want the same things from what’s left of our lives, you and I. Sleep well, and go away.”

  “And my message for Lal?” Gray and gaunt and inexorable, he stood too close to her, smelling of roads through woods long cut down, of stories forgotten, of towns and people long since left behind. “Will she never receive it, after all?”

  “You’d do as well to put it in a bottle,” the old woman said, “and drop it in the sea off Cape Dylee.” They stared at each other in an instant of almost unbearable familiarity, memories measuring themselves fiercely against memories. At length, Lal shrugged very slightly; anyone but the old man would have missed it. She said, “Bloody hell. I’m not going to get any sleep tonight, am I?”

  “Ah, that depends.” Soukyan let his legs fold under him, lowering himself onto the sleeping mat with no more than the slightest grunt. “Where’s yours? Drag it over here and let’s talk. The way we used to talk at night, once you’d found exactly the right twig to clean your teeth with. That tiny chip of a boat, on the Susathi—do you remember?”

  “The very best thing about being old,” Lal said, “is the privilege of remembering exactly what you choose to remember, and no more.” But she smiled then, the lean, three-cornered face momentarily as soft as Choushi-wai’s, and as wondering. She brought her mat from the corner, saying as she did so, “Very well, we will talk of times past. Anything you like, but nothing—nothing—beyond tomorrow. This is agreed?”

  “Agreed, and welcome.” The old man waited patiently for her to settle on the mat, where she arranged herself with care, curling her own surprisingly long legs just so, propping her chin on a hard-knuckled fist. He asked, “Just because I think about such matters—did you ever go home?”

  “No,” she said fiercely. “No, never. Home to where I was stolen and sold, and sold again—home to where no one cared enough to follow and find me? Soukyan, if anyone in the world knows better—” She broke off and looked away from him; when she spoke again, her tone was carefully flat. “We will not talk about that either.”

  “No, we will not.” The old man leaned forward; he seemed about to touch her face, but did not. “Rather, let us remember a place where we were together, very long ago. Let us consider Surijat.”

  “Surijat.” Lal blinked at him. “Surijat. That pretty little place up in the Durli Hills, where we were escorting the caravan. Surijat, I remember.”

  “No, you remember Toshtiyk. This was before Toshtiyk—you were just back from sea, I think, and we met on the wharf—”

  “Kulpai,” Lal said. “Kulpai, and it wasn’t the wharf, it was in the cells.” She laughed a sudden broken bark of a laugh. “I told Choushi-wai you were as senile as I am, and you really must be, to have forgotten the lockup at Kulpai. I’d gotten swept up with a gang of smugglers—I never did know what you were in for.”

  Soukyan grinned, lips flattening over stained teeth. “Just as well. Much too embarrassing to go into, even now. Kulpai, then—what matters is that you and I found ourselves together there, and what really matters is that we escaped on the second night. You do remember that much?”


  “Better than you do,” the old woman replied tartly. “It was the third night, and I’d never have had the cheek to call it an escape. The guard”—she halted for only an instant—“the guard fell asleep, that was it. And you hooked the keys out of his belt and unlocked all the cells. There, ask me if I remember Kulpai.”

  Soukyan leaned closer, not smiling at all now. She noticed an unfamiliar scar, half-hidden in the white stubble along his jawline. “No. No, that is not what happened. You told the guard a story.”

  Lal sat up, the golden eyes round and indignant. “Oh, you are starting to unravel. That was never in Kulpai.”

  “Yes, it was,” the old man said. “You told him a tale of a lord who could turn himself into a rock-targ when he chose, and of a lady who fell in love with him even knowing what he was. And she had a friend who was only a seamstress, but who wanted very much to help her. You told that story, and he came closer and closer to the bars and listened as that little girl of yours would listen. I was standing beside you, and he never saw me move—he never saw me at all until I had my hands on his throat.” His voice was harsh with intensity, and the brown skin had gone strangely pale.