Innkeeper's Song

by Peter S. Beagle

  Ah, but Nyateneri! She assumed nothing, conceded nothing. There was a third element, the fire-trench itself, and she built every foray, every sortie around it, springing back and forth to safety only when one or another pair of hands were closing upon her, trying constantly to lure her pursuers into fiery space, right down onto the burning stones. Twice she almost managed it: one time Half-Mouth was actually in the air, actually flailing his arms and legs in silent, gaping horror, when Blue Eyes snatched him to safety with one arm, cheerfully saluting Nyateneri with the other. Her dagger danced its own butterfly dance, even when she was in full leap or mid-roll, and she left her mark on those two, each time so swiftly that it might be minutes before they noticed themselves bleeding in two new places. She was the first warrior I had ever seen.

  But she could not reach the door. Finally, nothing mattered but the fact that she could not reach the door. Scratches or no scratches, Blue Eyes and Half-Mouth’s endurance was yet greater than hers, and one of them could allow the other time to rest, as she dared not allow it to herself. Even now she was slipping most of their blows; but when one or another fingertip or palm-edge or elbow as much as grazed her, the shock clearly roared through her whole body, and each time she was slower to recover, slower to escape to another momentary sanctuary on the other side of the fire-trench. Half the time I could only go by sound even to guess what was happening, but one moment is with me now, telling it: she has gathered herself, gathered in all her hakai—oh, you don’t have that word, do you? let’s say her deepest strength, it’s the best I can do—and flies straight across the trench, out of the corner into which Blue Eyes has driven her, straight at Half-Mouth’s throat. A gallant gamble, but a rash one— Half-Mouth takes two steps back, one to the left, and smashes her down with a two-handed blow that knocks the dagger from her hands and sends it skidding back toward the fire. Lunging dazedly, desperately after it, she goes partway over the edge herself, and completely out of my range of vision. The dagger spins away on its side: red, silver, red.

  And still she makes no sound. All I can hear is Blue Eyes and Half-Mouth’s soft, joyous giggling; all I can see is the aching happiness in their faces as they rush past my spy-hole, closing on Nyateneri. Then nothing. Nothing for how long? Five seconds? ten? half a minute? I have turned from the wall, my eyes closed, too numb for grief—like Tikat, perhaps—vaguely conscious that I should run, run, get to the inn, the stable, anywhere, before those two come out and find me. But I cannot move, not to help Nyateneri then, not to save myself now—and it has been like this before. Fire, blood, laughing men, and me aware, aware but unable: lost and alone and terrified past thought, past breath. It has been like this before. There was a huge man who smelled like bread and milk.

  No sense in any of that for you, is there? No. I only opened my eyes when I heard Half-Mouth’s snarl of incredulous outrage, for all the world like a shukri who has suddenly discovered that mice can fly. How she had saved herself from the burning stones, I have no idea to this day, but as I stooped to the spy-hole again, Nyateneri backflipped across my sight and stood there for a moment, the dagger in her right hand now, and the left hanging oddly crooked. Oh, but I do remember her—as I shouldn’t, for any number of reasons—with her ragged, graying hair sticking out on all sides, her mouth glorious with mockery and her body wearing blood-flecked sweat as a queen wears velvet. Want her? Did I still want her? I wanted to be her, with all my soul, do you understand me? Do you understand?

  It was the end, you see, and even I knew it. When she challenged them once more in their own tongue, there was a shadowy wheeze in her voice; when she crouched, arms open, coaxing them into her embrace, one knee trembled—only a very little, but if I noticed it, you can imagine what Blue Eyes and Half-Mouth saw. Her left hand was plainly useless, and she kept shaking her head slightly, as though to clear it of doubt or a lingering dream. There was no fear in her, and no resignation either. Blue Eyes moved into view, smiling, touching his brow with a forefinger in a way that was no salute this time but a farewell. Nyateneri laughed at him.

  And suddenly I was there. No, I don’t mean to brag that at last I sprang into decisive, heroic action, for I don’t believe that I could have looked a second time into those two men’s faces for anyone’s sake. I mean only that I knew I was Rosseth, which was, for good or ill, something more than a pair of eyes peering through a crack in a wall. I could think again, and I could move, and feel anger as well as terror and dull loss; and what else I could do was what I had come there to do in the first place. I lifted the bucket that I had absurdly never set down, bent, and carefully poured the water into the channel at the base of the wall.

  You have to do it slowly; it always takes less water than you think to fill the bathhouse with steam. I heard one of them shout, then another, and then a wild surge of laughter from Nyateneri which—I will swear—made the log wall pulse like warm, living flesh against my cheek I emptied the bucket, straightened, and set my eye to the crack in time to see Half-Mouth backing toward me, seemingly setting himself to chop billowing nothingness to pieces with his deadly hands and feet. Nyateneri’s dagger, glinting demurely, slipped through the steam as gently as it did through the skin just below his ribs. The first thrust probably killed him, though I think there was another. He folded silently forward into clouds.

  I dropped the bucket and crept to the door. Blue Eyes had to be stopped there if he tried to flee, somehow impeded long enough for Nyateneri to catch up with him. I had no plans: I knew that whatever I did might likely mean my death, and I was frightened but not paralyzed, no more of that. I have done a great many foolish things in all the years between that night and this, but never, never again through inaction, and I never will until I do die. Nyateneri taught me.

  Crouching by the door, I cursed myself for abandoning the bucket; perhaps I could have hit Blue Eyes with it, or thrown it in his way when he bolted from the bathhouse. It didn’t cross my mind for a minute that he might not bolt, but he might still be more than a match on his own for an exhausted Nyateneri. There was no sound from beyond the door. I imagined Blue Eyes and Nyateneri circling invisibly in the steam, all bearings lost except for the sense of the enemy inches away: reaching for each other with their skins and their hair. Something cracked against the logs from inside—a solid, unyielding thud that could easily have been a skull—and I promptly began my new life of active stupidity by pushing the door open.

  What happened next happened so quickly that it isn’t clear to me even now. There was the steam, of course, blinding me immediately—then a body banged into me, hard, utterly shocking, as though I had blundered straight into a wall. I went down flat on my back. The body came down with me, because our legs were tangled up together. Something hot and silent clawed at me, and I kicked out in wild panic, trying to free my legs. One foot found softness; there was a gasping whistle, and then another weight crushed the air out of my lungs in turn. Blue Eyes and Nyateneri were raging over me like storm winds, pinning me to earth, battering me so that I struggled in a helpless fury of my own, wanting in that moment to kill them both because they were hurting me. Somebody’s elbow caught my nose, and I thought it was broken.

  Then it all stopped. I heard—I felt—a dry little sound, like someone unobtrusively clearing his throat. A body slid slowly off me when I pushed at it; a head wobbled in the dirt next to mine. Nyateneri’s quiet, tired voice said, “Thank you, Rosseth.”

  I couldn’t stand up at first; she had to help me, which she did quite gently and carefully, even with one hand as limp as Blue Eyes’ neck. He lay so still, half-curled on his side, looking small and surprised. The blood from my nose was dripping all over him. I asked Nyateneri, “Is he dead?”

  “If he isn’t, we are,” Nyateneri said. “You only get one chance at people like those.” Then she laughed very softly and added, “As a rule.” She reached inside the door to pick up her dagger where it lay, turning it a bit awkwardly in her right hand. “I have never been able to throw a knife
properly,” she said, almost to herself, “not once. I don’t know what possessed me to try it this time. Until you opened that door, I was finished. Thank you.”

  The pain in my nose made me feel sick, and the blood wouldn’t stop coming. Nyateneri had me lie down again, my head in her lap, while she held my nose with a soaked cloth in a particularly unpleasant way. When I honked, “Who were those men?” she pretended to mishear me, replying, “I know, we’ll have to tell Karsh—I don’t see any way out of it. I am just too weary to bury anybody right now.” She stroked my hair absently, and I gave myself up to the smell of her quieting body and my first understanding that nothing ever happens the way you imagined it. Here I was at last, lying with Nyateneri’s damp skin under my cheek, the breasts I had so earnestly spied on sighing in and out above me as she breathed, and all I had strength or ambition to do was wait for my nose to stop bleeding. Yes, you can laugh, it’s all right. I thought it was funny even then.

  After a time, I was able to sit up, and Nyateneri went back into the bathhouse to find her robe. I said through the doorway, “They came looking for you, they meant to kill you. Why? What had you ever done to them?”

  She did not answer until she came out again. I sat there in the calm dark, with a dead man at my feet, and liri-lith—what you’d call a nightcryer—already mourning for him away down in the orchard. I don’t understand how they can know death so instantly, but they always do; at least, that’s what I grew up believing in that country. Nyateneri leaned in the doorway, gingerly trying her left hand with her right. She asked me, abruptly but without expression, “How did you happen to be bringing the water and not Marinesha? I had asked for her.”

  “I never saw her,” I said. “I met that old man—you know the one? with the white mustache?—and he told me that you had given him the message for me. Perhaps he got it mixed up. He’s really quite old.”

  “Ah,” Nyateneri said, and nothing more until I asked her a third time about Blue Eyes and Half-Mouth. Then she came to crouch beside me again, looking into my eyes and putting her injured hand lightly on the side of my neck. She said, “Rosseth, if one thing goes against my nature more than another, it is lying to a person who has just saved my life. Please don’t make me do it.” Her own ever-changing eyes were silver half-moons in the moonlight.

  “Secrets everywhere,” I answered, emboldened to mimic her. But I felt honored, like a child cozened with just the least fragment of an adult confidence, the least suggestion of a world beyond the nursery. “I won’t, then,” I said, “if you’ll tell me about them sometime.” She nodded very seriously, saying, “I promise.” Her hand was hot on me, hot as Blue Eyes’ hands had been when he held me up by my throat, so long ago. I asked her if it was much hurt, and she replied, “Badly enough, but not as badly as it could be. Like your nose,” and she kissed me there; and then, quickly, on the mouth. “Come,” she said, “we’ll have to help each other back to the inn. I feel really quite old.”

  I went around the bathhouse to pick up my buckets. When I returned, she was standing with the dagger out again, holding it by the point and thoughtfully tossing it up high enough to let it turn one slow circle in the air before she caught it. “It’s not very well balanced, of course,” she said softly, not to me. “It wasn’t ever meant for throwing.” She turned and smiled at me, and I thought she might kiss me again, but no.

  THE INNKEEPER

  There is a queen in this country still, in her black castle down in Fors na’Shachim. Or perhaps it’s a king by now, or the army back again, no matter. The tax collectors stay the same, whoever rules. But king, queen, or jumped-up captain, one day I mean to travel there and seek audience. It will be a hard and tiresome journey, and any highwaymen will have to wait in line for whatever the coachmen and hostellers leave me; and then it will take the last coins hidden in my shoe-soles to bribe my way into line to make my complaint. But I will be heard. If it costs me my head, believe that I will be heard.

  “Your Majesty,” I will say, “where in all your royal scrolls and parchments of law is it decreed that Karsh the innkeeper is to be forever denied a single moment of simple peace? Where have your noble ministers set it down that when I am not being racked by the daily balks and foils of running my poor establishment, I am to be plagued by an endless succession of zanies, frauds, incompetents, and maniacs? And please, just to satisfy an old man’s curiosity, sire, where do you get them? Where could even so great a monarch as yourself procure, all at the same time, three madwomen—none of whom is even remotely what she claims to be—an impossible bumpkin who claims to be betrothed to the maddest of the lot, a stable full of penniless actors who keep my guests’ horses awake with their goings-on, and a stableboy who was never worth much to begin with and lately shows real promise of becoming a complete liability? And that final touch of true genius, those two chuckling little assassins who ended up dead in my bathhouse—Your Majesty, my peasant palate isn’t sensitive enough to appreciate such brilliance. To me it’s all equal, all blankly vexatious; why waste such jewels of aggravation on fat, weary Karsh? Show me only where this is written, and I will trudge the long way back to The Gaff and Slasher and trouble you never again.“ I will say all that to someone on a throne before I die.

  Not that it will change a thing—I have no illusions about that. My lot is my bloody lot, whoever inscribed it wherever, and if I were to doubt it for a moment, all I have to do is remember that evening when I stood looking dumbly down at two sprawled bodies by lantern-light, while that brown soldier-nun Nyateneri had the face to demand whether I sent such attendants to wait on everybody who bathed at my inn. The boy was standing as close to her as her skin would let him, glaring at me, defying me to send him about his proper business. And so I would have done, but for the way—no, let it go, it’s nothing to do with anyone, and besides, I had other affairs to think about. Dead men had put The Gaff and Slasher into my hands thirty years ago, long enough for me to have learned just how easily two more dead men could snatch it away again. And I am too old to start over as some other innkeeper’s Gatti Jinni.

  Miss Nyateneri carried on for some while about murder, irresponsibility and the law, but that was all for show. I am also too old not to know that sort of thing when I see it. I did marvel at it though: two ragged little heaps of laundry stiffening there, as her muscles and nerves and heart must surely have been freezing and stiffening in her, in the wind that always seems to come after that sort of thing; and she still able to rant briskly away at me just as though her own wash had come back dirty. I let her run down—that was fair enough—and then I said, “We have no sheriff or queensman in Corcorua, but there is a county magistrate who rides through every two months or so. By good fortune, he is due here in another four or five days. We can turn this matter over to him then, as you please.”

  Well, that quieted Miss Nyateneri in a hurry. I don’t mind saying that it was a pleasure to watch her lower her eyes, hug her elbows tight, and mumble about her and her companions’ need for haste and privacy. I don’t take any particular joy in someone else’s discomfiture— what good is that to me, after all?—but of those three women who had imposed themselves on my custom two very long weeks ago, this one had been a special nuisance on her own account, from the moment that fox of hers ran off with my hen. So I folded my own arms and enjoyed myself while she fumbled on and the boy glowered as though I were menacing his darling, a head and more taller than he. Her left hand was hurt in some way; he kept touching it very gently, very shyly. Two long weeks for both of us, truly.

  At last I interrupted, saying, “In that case, I think what’s wanted here is a shovel and silence. Do you agree?” She stared at me. I went on. “We landlords deal in forgetfulness as much as in food and wine. All that interests me about these men you killed is that they were no strangers to you. They followed you to my inn, as that mad carl from the south followed your friend, as worse trouble will follow you all here—do not even bother to lie to me about that. I can do nothing, yo
u stay against my will, by force of arms, but do me at least the small honor of not asking me to be concerned. The boy and I will bury your dead. No one else will know.”

  She smiled then: only the quickest, leanest sort of fox-grin, but real enough even so, and the first such courtesy she had ever offered to her host at The Gaff and Slasher. “Do other guests misprize you as much as I have?” she wanted to know. “Say yes, please, of your kindness.”

  “How can I tell?” I asked her in my turn. The boy was goggling past me, but I never looked over my shoulder. “I deal in forgetfulness,” I said. “I ask only whether people wish a warming pan, an extra quilt, or perhaps a stuffed goose at dinner. The goose is Shadry’s specialty, and requires a day’s advance notice.” I heard the black woman, Lal, chuckle at my side, and the white one’s breath in the darkness beyond.

  “Much else requires notice,” Lal murmured, “and doesn’t get it.” Miss Nyateneri’s face slammed shut—you could hear it, and I am not an imaginative man. Lal said, “Go back to your guests, good Master Karsh. My friends and I will deal with this foolish business. You may take Rosseth with you.”

  A notably arbitrary tone she always had, that one, but just then I could yield to it happily enough. I was a good ten strides gone before it occurred to me that the boy was not following. When I turned he was standing with his back to me, facing the three of them, saying, “I will bring you a spade. At least let me do that, let me get the spade.” Hands on his hips, head shaking stubbornly. He was doing just that in the hayloft, in the potato patch, when he was five.