Innkeeper's Song

by Peter S. Beagle

  But he would not hush, not for five minutes together. When he was not prattling about the stupidity of the Mildasis and praising himself for escaping them, he was urging me to press the Rabbit harder, to put more distance between ourselves and our pursuers. I did not want to talk to him. I muttered that it was dark, that we had to go carefully, but he scoffed shrilly, “They have eyes in their feet, these Mildasi beasts, he will travel all night without stumbling once. As will they.” His voice hurt my head, and whatever his talk, he smelled of fear.

  The Mildasis never caught us. I cannot say if they even followed, since I was paying no attention at all to signs, nor to the old man’s yapping, nor to anything but the trick of staying in the saddle and the harder trick of remembering the reason for it. We might be still on the track of Lukassa and the black woman; we might as likely have been circling back the way I had come. I was at the end of sense, the end of everything but hanging on. There was nothing to think about past hanging on.

  The old man saved me, no arguing that. It was he who held me when I slept and toppled sideways, and it was he who guided the Rabbit across those smashed lands all night, surely chattering in my ear the whole time, not caring if I heard or no. I remember nothing of that night, no dreams, nothing, until I woke on a hard hillside, wrapped in the old man’s scarlet coat, with the high sun blinding me and the Rabbit nudging to get at some prickly sprigs under my arm. The old man was gone.

  There was a waterskin slung to the Rabbit’s neck, and I drank from it, not too much. I was very weak, but I think not mad anymore. The morning sky was pale, almost white, and the air smelled of distant snow, a breath from beyond the mountains. I leaned against the Rabbit, looking far across the Barrens where birds like the one I had eaten were circling, sliding downwind, and I said to my little gray horse, “I will not die. There is water in this land, and I will find it—there is game to hunt and roots to dig, or the Mildasis could not live here. I will not die. I will follow Lukassa over the mountains and wherever more I have to go, until I speak with her and touch her again. And if she will not come home with me—well, then I will die, but not till then.” The Rabbit nibbled on my ragged sleeve.

  He winded the fox before I did; not until he whinnied and shook his head to make his ears snap did I see it trotting boldly up the hillside toward us, a bird half its size dangling limp in his jaws. A small fox, but burly and handsome, with bright, bright eyes. It waited deliberately for me to make sure of it before it changed.

  A sway in the air, no more, the way you can see it shiver above a flame, and it was the old man there, holding out the bird as he came up to me. The Rabbit stamped and snorted and ran off a little way, but I was too tired to be frightened. I said, “A man who can turn into a fox. A fox that can turn into a man. Which are you?”

  His thick white mustache softened the fox’s pointed grin. “The bird can turn into us. That’s what matters.” As jaunty as though he had never been helpless in the hands of the Mildasis, beaten bloody, listening to his death song, he dropped down beside me and began plucking feathers. The sacrifice paint on his face was gone, and the bruises on his pink cheekbones were already fading. He kept on smiling at me as he worked, and I kept on staring at him.

  “If you’re expecting me to drip my tongue out and pant,” he said gently enough, “I don’t do that. Nor will I eat this bird whole and raw, crunching the bones. In this shape, I am a man like you.”

  I laughed then, though the effort almost put me on my back. I told him, “A man like me has opened as many bellies with his teeth as any fox.” Which was not true, but I felt it so then. The old man answered me, “Well, then perhaps you might be pleased to start a fire for us, since men cook their food when they can.” He took flint and steel out of a leather scrip at his waist and handed them to me.

  There was dead wood—an armload, no more—within easy reach, or I could never have gathered even that much. Merely breaking up the kindling twigs took me so long that the old man had the bird cleaned, neat as you please, by the time I had the fire going. Hardly enough heat to cook it through, but we managed, and we dined together like men, though the very last of my strength went to keep me from gobbling my half-bird half-cooked, and after that his, too. For his part, he chatted along blithely, getting my name from me—though never offering his own—and telling me that he was companion to a great lady from a far shore. I asked if she were black, but he shook his head. “Brown, if you will, but certainly not black. She is called Nyateneri, and she is very wise.”

  “And you stole the Mildasi horse for her,” I said. “My soul, I wish I had such a loyal and valiant servant.”

  That provoked him, as I thought it might. “We are comrades, equals, make good note of that. My lady sends me on no errands—I come and go on my own affairs, exactly as I choose.” For a moment he was truly angry, gray eyes gone almost yellow with it. “I do not serve.”

  “What need of a horse, then, for one who can travel on four feet as he chooses?” I hoped to make him careless in his anger, but he was already on guard again, laughing at me, lolling tongue between teeth on purpose. “That was only my sport with the stupid Mildasis. Should it surprise you that my idea of play is not yours?”

  “They beat you half to death,” I said, “and would have cut your throat, but for me. What kind of sport is that?”

  “I was never in danger,” he answered me, haughty as a man may be with his mouth full and greasy. “Your diversion was well enough, but completely unnecessary. It was my play.”

  I said, “They would have killed you. I saved your life.” For once he did not speak, but only turned his head, watching me out of the sides of his eyes. “Man or fox, you are in my debt,” I said. “You know you are in my debt.”

  His mustache truly bristled, and he licked it down again. “Why, so are you in mine, boy, with my food and water in your belly. If you saved me indeed, you did it by chance—and well you know that—but I chose to help you, when I could have left you to get on about your business of dying. I hunt for no one, but I hunted for you, and so we are well quits in your world and mine.” And he would say nothing further until we had finished the bird and buried the scraps, to leave no trace for the Mildasis.

  “If you want to wash your face and paws,” I said then, “I could look away.” I yawned as I spoke, because the good meal made me want to sleep immediately. The old man sat back with his arms around his knees, considering me long and long after that, not moving at all. Kind and cozy as a grandfather he looked, but I felt the way that bird must have felt in the last seconds, seeing him too late.

  “You’ll never catch them, you know. Not on a Mildasi horse, not on any other. And if you did, you would dearly wish you hadn’t.”

  I did not ask whom he meant, or how he knew. I said,

  “The black woman is a great wizard, surely, for my Lukassa was drowned and she brought her back to life. And whatever terrible things she can do to me, she will have to do, and do them all twice over to make sure of me. For I will find her, and I will bring Lukassa home again.”

  “Boys’ talk,” he answered contemptuously. “The woman’s no more magical than you are, but what she does not know about flight and following, about tracking and covering tracks, about sending the hounds howling off after their own smell, even I do not know. And now my lady Nyateneri has joined her—yes, as you guessed—and between the pair of them, a poor fox can only chew his paws and pray not to be too corrupted by their subtlety. Give over, boy, go home.”

  “Fox talk,” I said in my turn, praying myself not to be convinced. “Tell your mistress, tell them both that Lukassa’s man is coming after her.” I swung myself up on the Rabbit’s back and sat still, glaring down at the old man as fiercely as I could, though I could hardly see him for the sudden giddiness that took me. “You tell them,” I said.

  The old man never moved. He licked his mustache and licked it, and each time his smile slid a little wider. He said, “What will you give me if I leave you a trail to foll
ow?”

  The yellow-gray eyes and barking voice were so mocking that I could not believe what I had heard. “What will you give me? You’re still too near death for vanity—you know you’ve lost their track forever unless I help you. Give me that locket you wear on your neck. It’s cheap, it’s no loss to you, but I help no one without pay. The locket will do.”

  “Lukassa gave it to me,” I said. “For my name-day, when I was thirteen.”

  The old man’s teeth glittered in his mouth like ice. “Do you hear, Lukassa? Your swineherd sweetheart prefers your bauble to you. Joy of it, then, boy, and good luck.” He was on his feet, turning away.

  I threw the locket at him then, and he whisked it out of the air without looking back at me. He said, “Get down, you are in no case to travel yet. Sleep out the day there”—he pointed, still not turning, to a rocky overhang where I could lie shadowed—“and start north at moon-rise, keeping those hills on your left. There is no road. There will be a trail.”

  “A trail to where?” I demanded. “Where are they bound, and why are they taking Lukassa with them?” The old man began to walk away down the slope, leaving me infuriated. I slipped from the Rabbit’s saddle and ran after him, reaching for his shoulder, but he wheeled swiftly, and I did not touch him. I said, “What about yourself, tell me that at least. That’s not north, the way you’re going.”

  Pink cheeks, white mustache, hair as wicked-white as the water that took my girl, he grinned until his eyes stretched shut to see me afraid of him. Even his whisper was harsh. “Why, I’m off after that black horse, where else?” And he was the fox again, loping off without a glance or farewell, brushy tail swaggering high as a housecat’s until he thought himself out of my sight. But I watched him a long way, and I knew when that tail came down.

  LAL

  The dreams began again as soon as I gave my ring to that girl. I knew they would, but there was nothing for it, because of the other dream, the one my friend sent. Drowned white, crying out with all the unused strength of her unlived life, calling so desperately from the riverbed that even my skin hurt with it, miles distant, even the soles of my feet. She was still alive when that dream came to me, three nights before.

  But that was not one of the bad dreams, that is only the way my friend talks to me, as he has done for all the years since I first knew him. The bad dreams are older, far older and come from another place; the bad dreams are the way I bleed—I, Lal, Lalkhamsin-khamsolal, sleek and lean and fearless, Sailor Lal, Swordcane Lal, Lal-Alone, prowling the seas and alleys of the world for her own mysterious delight. Lal who wept and screamed in the night, every night from the time she was twelve years old, until my friend gave her that emerald ring that a dead queen gave him.

  “You have dreamed enough,” he told me, the smile hiding in his braided beard like a small wild animal. “There will be no more dreams, no dreams, I promise, not unless I send them, as I may. Keep the ring until you meet one whose need is greater than your own. You will know that one when the time comes, and after that you will need my ring no longer. I promise you this, chamata.” That was always his name for me, from the first, and I still have not the least idea of its meaning.

  Well, he was wrong, wise as he is, wrong about me, not the ring. Every one of those old terrors had been laired up in wait for the moment when I handed it on; every last one of them came hopping and hissing and grinning to crouch on my heart, even before I closed my eyes when I finally had to sleep. Jaejian, with his mouth like a hot mudhole, Jaejian and his nameless friend, and me not three hours stolen from my home. Shavak. Daradara, who killed him, and what she did to me in his blood. Loum, that little boy, I could not have helped him, I could not have helped, I was little too. Unavavia, with his striped nightgowns and his knives. Edkilos, who pretended to be kind.

  Bismaya, who sold me.

  I am not a queen, nor ever claimed to be one, though the story follows me. I was raised from birth to be somewhat less and something much more than a queen: a storyteller, a chronicler, a rememberer. The word we use is inbarati, and in my family the oldest daughter has been the Inbarati of Khaidun since the word and the city have existed. By the time I was nine years old, I could sing the history of every family in Khaidun, both in the formal language I was taught and in the market speech my teachers whipped me for using. I could still—if I ever spoke either tongue anymore—along with every battle song, every beast-tale, every version of the founding of our city and the floods and droughts and plagues we survived. Not to mention every legend imaginable of great loves and magical, terrible lovers, forever testing each other’s faithfulness. My people are extremely romantic.

  Bismaya. Cousin, playmate, dearest friend. Dead in childbirth before I could kill her, not for arranging to have me stolen and sold, but because she did it out of a child’s boredom. If we had loved the same boy, quarreled once too often over my bullying ways (and I did bully Bismaya, it was impossible not to), if it had even been that she wanted to be Inbarati in my stead—well, I doubt I could yet forgive her, but at least there would be something to forgive. But she betrayed me out of a vague need for excitement, and for enough money to buy a pet bird. I dream of Bismaya more than any of the others.

  But I know a way of dealing with dreams, a way that I taught myself before ever I met my friend, because, though I wanted so to die, I refused to go mad. There is a story that I tell myself in the night, an old Khaidun waterfront tale of a boatwoman who knew the talk of fish and could call them where she chose or, with a word, empty the harbor of everything but children diving for coins. This gift made her much courted, though not popular, and her many adventures will usually see me from moonrise to moonset in something like peace. If I am yet awake, I know an endless praise-song for a king, full of heroes, victories, and feasts enough to guard me until dawn. The ring was better, the ring let me sleep truly, but this other is an old friend, too.

  The girl slept like the dead she was those first nights, while I lay watching the low, prowling stars of this country and listening with all of myself for my friend to call a third time. The first dream had wrenched me out of a lover’s bed—which, in this case, was probably just as well—but the second woke me in sick convulsions, vomiting with another’s pain, feverish with another’s fear. There was a rage of despair in it such as I—who thought I understood helplessness as well as any—have never known. Nor could I imagine a magus powerful enough to crumble great ships of war into the sea like biscuits in soup (and kind enough to send dolphins to bear the sailors home) so desperate as to cry out for the aid of an escaped never-mind-what whom he found hiding naked under a fish-basket on the wharf at Lameddin. But he had called, and I was in the saddle within half an hour and on my unprepared way into an alien land. There are those to whom I owe my life, as others owe me theirs—this one gave me back my soul.

  The third dream came to me in the Barrens, on the night that we ran out of road. Lukassa—I had her name from that boy’s crying after her—was as much herself as she could be by then: a pretty, gentle, ignorant village girl who had never been anywhere in her life, except dead. She had no memory of that, nor of much else before— neither name, family nor friends, nor that idiot boy still blundering after us, stupid as a rock tumbling downhill. Everything began for her with my voice and the moon.

  That night, like a child begging to hear a favorite story again and again in the same words, she asked me to tell her once more how I sang over her and raised her from the river. I said, weary and impatient, “Lukassa, it was only a song an old man taught me long ago. He generally used it in his vegetable garden.”

  “I want to know it,” she insisted. “It is my song now, I have a right to know it.” With shy peasant guile she looked sideways at me and added, “I could never be a great wizard like you, but maybe I can learn just a few things.”

  “That’s all I know,” I said, “a few things, a few tricks, and it has taken me all my life to learn that much. Be still, I’ll tell you another tale about Zivinaki, w
ho was the king of liars.” I wanted her to sleep quickly and leave me to think what I must do if no third dream came. But it was a long time before she gave up asking me to teach her that song. Stubborn as that boy, really, in her way. It must be a remarkable village.

  I did not sleep at all that night, but my friend came to me even so. He rose from the fire as I knelt to feed it: a trembling old man, as scarred and naked as he had first found me. The jewels were gone from his ears—four in the left, three in the right, I remember everything, my friend— the color from his eyes, the braids and the silly little ribbons from his beard. No rings, no robes, no staff; and, most terrible of all, he cast no shadow, neither in the moon nor the firelight. In my country—in what was my country—it is believed that to see a man or woman without a shadow is a sure sign that you will die soon, alone, in a bad place. I believe it myself, though it is nonsense.

  But I went to him with joy, trying to put my cloak around him. It fell to the ground, of course, and my arms passed through the shivering image of his body; wherever he was cold, it was not here. I spoke to him then, saying, “Tell me what to do,” and he saw me, but he could not answer. Instead he pointed to where the stars were graying over the blunt, broken-nosed hills of the Northern Barrens. A ribbon of light, green as his eyes had been, leaped from his finger: it fled away across the Barrens, straight on into mountains too far to see clearly even by day. When he lowered his arm and looked at me again, I had to turn away from the pale terror in his face, because it was wrong for me to see even his ghost so. I said, “I will find you. Lal is coming to find you.”