Innkeeper's Song

by Peter S. Beagle

  No sound, just me breathing, so sleepy, so good. Lal looks out window, watches pretty chickens roosting in bush. Lal says, “He loves somebody. Somebody knows his name.”

  Nyateneri starts on another arrow. Lal’s voice so quiet. “You saw him. No one could have done from a distance what has been done to him. Whoever has broken his magic was deeply trusted, greatly loved. It must be so.”

  They say names. Men, women, even something that is neither, lives in fire, in mud, who cares? But always Lal shakes head, Nyateneri says, “No, I suppose.” One time, they laugh even, and Lukassa looking one to the other, forgetting to scratch my ears. But at last, no more names. Lal says, “It is no one I ever knew.”

  Knock on door. Nyateneri curling around and up like smoke, no sound, big bow ready. Voice. “Me, Rosseth, please.” Bow comes down, Lal goes to door. Boy stands there, looks all unlicked, holding wooden platter. I smell cold meat, nice cheese, bad wine. He says, “I woke up, I heard your voices, you came back late, I thought you might not have had any dinner.” Eyes big as grapes, figs.

  Lal makes in-between sound, almost sigh, almost laugh. Lal says, “Thank you, Rosseth. You are very thoughtful.”

  Pushes platter into her hands. Says, “The wine is a little sour, Karsh keeps the best locked away. But the meat is fresh yesterday, I promise.”

  Nyateneri comes up, says, “Thank you, Rosseth. Go back to your bed now.” Smiles at him. Boy can’t breathe. Legs take one step to go away, rest of him takes two steps into room. Sees me on Lukassa’s pillow, tail over nose, little, little sweet snores. Eyes get big as plums, he says, “Karsh,” like ghost of a sneeze.

  Lukassa swifts me up, backs away. Nyateneri. “Karsh wants not to see a fox. He has not.”

  Lal. “Neither have you.” She touches boy’s cheek, pushes him out with her fingertips, closes the door. He stands there, I smell him, a long time. Lal turns, sets platter down. “A good child. He is full of wonder, and he really does work very hard.” Stops then and laughs, shakes her head. Says, “I suppose my—I suppose our friend has said exactly the same thing about us, many times. To whomever he loved.” Nyateneri goes back to arrows.

  All this time Lukassa is silent. Watches, holds me, not a word, but something down her arms, hands, into me, fur jumps with it, bones too. Now she says, “Today.”

  They look at her. Nyateneri. “Today. What?”

  Lukassa. “Not tomorrow. You found him today.” Stands there, looking right back, stubborn, certain. In her arms I turn, yawn, stretch out legs. Lal, gentle, careful. “Lukassa, no, we have not found him. The trail he left us ended in this country, but we have been hunting everywhere for twelve days, and we are good hunters, Nyateneri and I. No one even remembers having seen him—there is no sign, no slightest trace—”

  Lukassa interrupts her. “You’ve been where he was, then—you’ve been where something happened, something bad.” Now they look at each other. Nyateneri raises eyebrow just a little, Lal not. Lukassa sees, voice gets louder. “It’s on you, I can smell it. Somewhere today, a place of death, you were there, it’s all over you.” Trembling harder, might drop me. Says, “Death.”

  Nyateneri turns a little to Lal. “In that room, the day we came. Now again. Doesn’t she know any other tricks?”

  Lal. “It is no trick.” Very soft, golden eyes darken to shadowy bronze. Lal is angry. Says, “She knows death as we do not, she can tell where it has passed. And you will have to take my word for this.”

  Slow, Nyateneri. “So I shall.” Quiet then, everybody quiet. Lal tastes wine, makes a face, keeps drinking. Lukassa takes slices of cold meat, one for me, one for her, one for me. Nyateneri says, “The tower.”

  Lal blinks. “Tower.” Then, “Oh, that. A pile of red rocks, we saw nothing but spiders, owls, centuries of dust. Why there?”

  Nyateneri. “Why centuries? Nothing else in this country is old enough to be that ruinous. Why only one tower, and everything else—everything—squat as a horse-pile?” Shrugs. “We have to start somewhere.” Looks at Lukassa. “She comes with us. Our very own little deathstalker.”

  Lukassa tosses me on the bed, me, just like that, like a pillow. Walks straight up to Nyateneri, stands almost on tiptoe to meet her eyes. Says, “I belong to no one. Lal told me. I am not a hat, not a pet fox, not somebody who does a trick. I am your companion, and Lal’s, or I am not, and if I am, then from tomorrow I go where you go, and there’s an end to that.” Mouths open, even I. Lukassa. “For I have come a longer journey than you have.”

  Lal is smiling, turns away. Nyateneri. Years, years, not friends, not not-friends, each one other’s secret, coming, going, saying nothing, knowing what we know. Hoho, Nyateneri. Only one time before so still, so amazed, long ago, both of us nearly die that time. Shakes head slowly, sits down, picks up the big bow. Says, “Well, companions. I am now going to put a new string on my bow. If this doesn’t bite me too, it should take me about five minutes. Then I am going to sleep, as we should all do, because tomorrow will be a hard day.” No more than that.

  In bed, Lukassa whispers to me, like every night, “Fox, fox, what is your name?” I lick inside wrist, she makes little tired sigh. Whisper. “They call me Lukassa, but I don’t know.” Like every night.

  Sleeps. Lal sleeps. Nyateneri leans over bed, speaks in the other talk, ours. Says, “Hear me. Old man drinks no more ale downstairs.” I keep eyes tight shut. Nyateneri. “Hear me.”

  Early, early morning, they go out, all three together. Lukassa kisses nose, says, “Be good.” Nyateneri looks at me. Boots on stairs, gone. I eat rest of the meat and cheese, go under bed when Marinesha comes in to sweep. Very safe place. Marinesha opens window a little, goes away. Tree makes crick-sish, crick-sish against window.

  People don’t know foxes can climb trees if they really want. Squirrels know.

  MARINESHA

  What happened was, I was running after the fox in the tree—I mean, the fox wasn’t actually in the tree anymore, because it had already jumped down to the ground, given me one quick look, and then flashed out of sight between the stable and my vegetable garden. I was carrying a basket of new-washed clothes to hang in the sun, but I just dropped them where I stood and went after that animal. It had killed my hen— she wasn’t really mine, exactly, but I was the one who named her, Sona was what I called her, and she always followed me everywhere, even when I didn’t have any grain for her. And that fox killed her, and I would have killed it if I could. I would have.

  But it was gone when I came around the stable—just completely vanished; it must have turned on its track, shot right under the bathhouse and slipped away through the wild berry-brambles beyond. Rosseth has been told and told and told to block up that place—the frogs pop up and frighten the guests, and once or twice there’s been a tharakki. Rosseth can be quite pleasant, in his way, but he is simply an irresponsible boy.

  Anyway, I stood there for a moment—so angry all over again about Sona, she was such a nice hen—and then I remembered the wet clothes, and I hurried back, hoping I hadn’t spilled any out of the basket. And I hadn’t, thank goodness, at least nothing that would be any the worse off for one more grass-stain, and I was just turning toward the naril tree where I like to hang wash this time of year because everything picks up the smell of the blossoms— and suddenly there they were, two men coming up out of the orchard, as though they’d cut right across the fields, not staying to the road at all. I didn’t trust them right away. I don’t trust people who don’t walk the road.

  They were small, thin, brown men, both of them, dressed in brown, and they looked almost exactly alike to me, except that one of them had something wrong with his mouth—only half of his upper lip moved when he spoke. The other had blue eyes. I was frightened of his eyes. I can’t tell you why.

  I stood very, very still, pretending I hadn’t seen them. That’s what Sona used to do, my hen, when a hawk was circling overhead. The other chickens would be running in all directions, screaming and cackling, and Sona woul
d just stand right where she was, so still, never once looking at the hawk, not even at its shadow sweeping over the ground. It always worked for her, poor Sona, so she thought it always would.

  Well, it didn’t work any better for me. They came up to me—they really were small, no taller than I am, and they made no sound. Their feet didn’t, I mean. The one with the blue eyes stood right in front of me, facing me, and the one with the funny mouth stood just behind my shoulder—I couldn’t see him without turning my head, but I could feel him there.

  They were very polite, I’ll say that for them. The blue-eyed one said, “Please excuse us, good young lady, we are looking for a friend? A tall woman? With a bow and a pet fox? Her name will be Nyateneri?” That was how he talked, everything a question, in a soft, slidey kind of voice. Foreign accents like that make me nervous, anyway.

  I know they shouldn’t, working around inns most of my life, but they always do.

  Just the kind of friends that hulking creature would have, that’s what I thought. I didn’t have any reason to do her any favors, strutting around in her ugly boots and letting her fox kill my Sona. “There’s no one like that staying here,” I told them. “The only women we have right now are with the players, sleeping in the stable. But they don’t have any bows.” Let her miss her stupid message, I thought—maybe she’ll learn to say Good morning, Marinesha once in a while.

  The blue-eyed man asked me, “Perhaps she only stayed here a night or two, and then went on? It would be recent, quite recent?” I just shook my head. I said, “We had some dancers here last month, and a horse-coper, she cured Rosseth’s donkey of the staggers, but she was small, tiny. That’s all, honestly.” Once you start lying, it’s amazing how you go on, how it catches you up. I made up all that part about the horse-coper.

  The other one said, at my shoulder, “Perhaps we should talk to the landlord? You could take us to him?” The same sort of voice, you couldn’t have told them apart with your eyes shut. I looked around for Rosseth, but of course he wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  Blue Eyes nodded. He said, “That would be best? If we spoke to the landlord?” He put his hand on my shoulder, and I actually cried out with the heat of it—I did, and I felt that heat for a week afterward, what’s more. I can feel it now, if I think about it. Blue Eyes said, “We will follow you? Please?”

  So I walked back to the inn, with my arms still full of washing, and those two right behind me. They didn’t touch me again, and they didn’t say anything to frighten me—they didn’t say anything at all, and that was the most frightening thing, because I couldn’t see them, you see, and they were so silent I wouldn’t have known they were there. And when we got to the door, I just jumped aside, and I said, “In there, just wait, you wait for Karsh,” and I ran back to the naril tree and began hanging those clothes over the branches as though my life depended on it and I never once looked back over to see if they had gone inside. I just hung those clothes and hung them, and I didn’t even know I was crying until I was done.

  ROSSETH

  I hadn’t slept very well, because of the players. They were supposed to give a performance in two days for the Mercers’ Guild in town, and they had been rehearsing almost all night every night for a week. It wasn’t that they didn’t know the play well—there can’t be a traveling troupe in the land that doesn’t give some version of The Marriage of the Wicked Lord Hassidanya twenty or thirty times a year—but I think this must have been the largest and most knowledgeable audience they were ever likely to face, and none of them could sleep for nervousness anyway. So they kept going over and over their parts, two and three at a time or all together, running the whole thing through just once more: there in the straw by lantern-light, with the horses looking on solemnly over their stall doors and nodding at the good parts. Finally I came down from the loft, wished them all disaster for luck, and went outside to walk and think until sunrise, as I do sometimes.

  The women rode out just before dawn, all three together for the first time. They didn’t see me. Usually I waved at them when I saw them setting off each day— and Lal, at least, always waved back—but this once I stepped aside, into the hollow of a burned-out tree, and watched them pass by in silence. It might have been a different air about them, literally, a new smell of purpose, for I was already as tuned, as pitched to their scent as to no other in my life, except that of Karsh, because of the way he likes to slip up and catch you not working. Or perhaps it was simply the way they looked in the red and silver morning: sudden strangers beyond my conception of foreignness, alien as I had never imagined them, although I should have. I was too young then to see past my own skin, and my skin was in love with them, all three. Yet I never saw them more truly than I did that morning.

  They troubled my sleep terribly, as they do now sometimes, even now, even knowing what I know. I don’t want you to think that I was an utter innocent—I had already been with a woman, in a sort of a way (no, not Marinesha, not ever Marinesha)—but Lal and Nyateneri and Lukassa were shadows of the future, though I didn’t know it, and what I feared and adored and hungered for in them was myself-to-be, you might say. But I didn’t know that either, of course: only that I had never in my life been hurt so by the sound of women laughing in a little rented room upstairs.

  What? Forgive me. I had tasks to do, and I did them as always, mucking out stalls and filling mangers, laying down new straw, combing burrs out of manes and tails— even trimming a few hooves, depending on what the beasts’ owners had required of me. Karsh set me to work in The Gaff and Slasher’s stables when I was five, and I am good with horses. I can’t even say whether I actually like them or not, to this day. I am just good with them.

  Karsh had gone to town, to the market, not long after the women left. Gatti Jinni usually runs things in his absence, but Gatti Jinni gets drunk one night in the month, without any particular pattern or regularity to it. One night in the month, and last night had been it—I know, because I helped him to his room, cleaned his face of tears and slobber, and put him to bed. So I was keeping an eye on the inn as I worked, and I saw those two men follow Marinesha to the door. Nothing out of the way there, but when they went in alone and she came flying back to her laundry-basket, trembling so hard that I could see it from where I was, then I dropped my spade and went to her. I did turn back and pick the spade up again, after a few steps—even a dungheap warrior needs his lance, after all.

  She could not speak, which had nothing to do with the fact that she had not been speaking to me for two days, or whenever it was that I’d said something admiring about Lukassa in the taproom. When I touched her, she clung to me and whimpered, which frightened me in turn. Marinesha is an orphan, like me: we may adopt obsequiousness as a condition of survival, but we have never been able to afford terror, any more than we can certain kinds of courage. So I patted her back and mumbled, “It’s all right, just stay here,” and I hoisted my trusty spade and. went inside.

  They were on the second floor, just coming out of the little room where Karsh had put two old pilgrims from Darafshiyan. I don’t know if they’d been in the women’s room or not. Small men and slender, graceful in their movements, almost dainty, their plain brown clothes fitting them like fur. They reminded me of shukris, those hot, rippling little animals that follow the smell of blood down holes, up trees, anywhere, endlessly. I said, “May I be of service, gentlemen? My name is Rosseth.”

  At times it’s an advantage not to know your true name, since you should never tell it to strangers anyway. The two men looked at me without answering for what seemed a very long time. I felt myself trembling, exactly like Marinesha—the difference between us was only that my fear made me angry. “The patron is not here,” I said to them. “If you want a room, you will have to wait until he returns. Downstairs.” I made my tone as insulting as I could, because my voice was so unsteady.

  The blue-eyed man smiled at me, and I wet myself. It is the truth, no more: his lips stretched and thinned and a sudden wash of ab
solute terror sluiced over me like the blast from an open furnace. I fell against the wall. If it had not been for my spade, bracing myself with it, I would have collapsed completely. But I didn’t; and I have just enough of Karsh’s idiot-stubbornness to behave like him, like an idiot, like a rock, when my bowels are falling to the floor. I said again, gasping, I’m sure, “You will have to wait downstairs.”

  They looked at each other then, and I suppose it was kind of them not to burst out laughing. The one whose mouth broke upwards on one side said, “We do not wish a room? We seek a woman?” Later it seemed to me that I almost knew the accent—all I thought at the time was that fire would speak like that if it could make human words.

  The blue-eyed man—and I should tell you that in this country blue is the color of death—came to me in two strides and lifted me by my throat. He did it so daintily and tidily that I barely had time to realize that I was strangling before I was. He hummed into my ear, “A tall woman with gray eyes? We have tracked her here? Please?” I heard an irritating sound, somewhere very far away, and somebody realized that it was my heels kicking at the wall.

  I would have told them. Nyateneri said afterward that it was brave of me to keep silent, but truly I would have told them anything if they had only let me. I saw the other man’s lips move, though I couldn’t hear anything anymore except the howl of blood in my ears and that thin, caressing voice saying, “Please? Yes?” Then Karsh came. I think that’s what happened, anyway.

  THE INNKEEPER

  I should have married when I had the chance—then at least there would have been someone instead of me to do the marketing. Now and then I take on someone just for that purpose, and I always regret it. No one who wasn’t born to it can deal with those old thieves in the Corcorua stalls; anyone else comes home with a cartload of rotting vegetables, maggoty meat, and salt fish you can smell before you hear the wagon wheels on the road. I manage well enough, but I don’t like it, never have, even when my father used to take me with him to teach me the trade. He loved it as much as they did, the butchers, the fishmongers, and the rest of them—he loved the yelling and haggling as much as finding the first fresh melons off the ship from Stimeszt, and he would have died of contempt instead of drink if people had stopped trying to swindle him out of his shirt. I am not like that.