Innkeeper's Song

by Peter S. Beagle

  “Oh, we certainly do not,” Nyateneri mimicked her. “It took all our wit merely to persuade our master to let us go with his blessing—there was none left over for anything like a plan of action. Find mountain, find river, find wizard, do something.” He sighed and shook his head in mock despair. “It lacks a certain precision.”

  Lal ignored him, taking my wrists in her hands. She said, “We need you to guard him while we are gone. It will help us greatly to know that he is safe and warm and not alone.” She would have said more, but I interrupted her, pulling my hands away.

  “A nursemaid,” I said. “Be honest with me—I have that much claim on you. A nursemaid to a sick old man, that is all you need.” I am telling you what I said.

  Nyateneri’s horse pushed past Lal’s, and Nyateneri gripped me between shoulder and neck with the same hand that had caressed me just there, after I had saved his life and my nose was bleeding. I stood up in my stirrups, prying at his fingers. He said very softly, “Boy. There is a world you do not know. In that world there are wizards and mages who could spread you and me on their morning toast before their eyes were quite open, and truly never realize that we weren’t last year’s ice-flower preserve. And among those vast beings, there is not one who would not cast aside every preoccupation, every pride, every loyalty, on the slightest chance of being allowed to sit by that sick old man’s bed. Think carefully about this, Rosseth, as you change his linen.”

  Lal made him let go of my shoulder. I think he was so angry that he had forgotten he was holding me. But I was angry, too—I could not believe the rage that took me over then. As I have said, in those days a show of anger was the greatest luxury I dared imagine allowing myself, and at sixteen, the actual emotion seemed already as rare and unnatural in me as the display. I tried to keep from shaking with it as I answered Nyateneri. I said, “There is Lukassa, who refuses to let your master out of her sight. There is Tikat, who is never so far from Lukassa that he could not hear her call him, if she ever would. There is Marinesha, who knows more about sickness than all three of us put together. What can I do for the old man that they cannot?“

  “I said it was a guard we needed,” Lal replied. “In the first place, you must keep Karsh from bothering him. We have paid in advance for the extra room, and for the extra cost of Marinesha bringing him his meals. Karsh has no reason to be anywhere near him. Can you see to that, Rosseth?”

  I was slow to answer her, not because what she asked would require any special new skill of me—what had my life been so far but learning to manage Karsh?—but because I was still feeling deeply slighted, and particularly furious at Nyateneri, who seemed to take no notice of what he must have known. He said, “In the second place, Arshadin will certainly find our master here, and sooner rather than later. Whenever it happens, there will be danger to follow, such as your Gaff and Slasher has never known. Given the choice”—he paused—“given the choice, we would rather leave someone on watch whose courage and wit and resourcefulness we have observed for ourselves. No one can help us now as you can, if you will.”

  To me then, it was the rawest, most contemptible flattery: surely as much an embarrassment to him as to me. I feel differently now. When I still said nothing, Lal took her turn again. “Rosseth, you must know this, too. Those men Nyateneri killed—there is a third. We think it was he who overcame Tikat outside our door. Without doubt, he will follow us into the mountains and trouble the inn not at all, but you must look out for him even so, as much as for any sign or sendings of Arshadin.” She took hold of my hand, but there was no cozening in her touch or her glance. She was not smiling when she asked, “Do you still believe that we are offering you nursemaid’s duty?”

  At the inn, the kitchen door slammed loudly, heedless of sleeping guests. I knew that slam, and I knew that Karsh had come out into the cool mist to stand with his hands on his hips and peer around for me. It would be a moment yet before he started bawling my name. I looked back and forth from one to the other of them, these beautiful strangers who knew they could do what they wanted with me, having so quickly overturned and disjointed my life at The Gaff and Slasher that it might as well have been as much a dream as the song about Byrnarik Bay, where someone was going to take me once. There is no finding a dream again; good or bad, there’s no returning to a dream. I said to them, more carefully than I had ever said anything, “What I believe makes as much difference to you as whoever has my throat in his hands makes to me.” Then I got down from Tunzi’s back and walked him into the stable to unsaddle him. I did not turn, and I did not look up when I heard them finally riding away.

  THE INNKEEPER

  I watched him come toward me, exactly as I had watched him walk away that night when there were dead men all over the bathhouse. Sounds carry far and long on damp mornings here, and I could still hear the hoofbeats even after they had reached the main road. I said, “Wouldn’t take you along, heh?”

  He answered nothing at all to that but, “I had to see to Tikat. I am sorry to be late. It was a bad night.”

  “There’s naught in the least amiss with Tikat, and well you both know it,” I said. “Nothing wrong with anybody who can turn an addled gape and a tiny bruise on the neck into two full days’ eating at my expense. As for those women—ah, well, cheer up, keep at it. Bound to be a slave caravan or a bandit gang through here sometime soon, and you can run off with them. Steal a younger horse than Tunzi, though—he’d not make it past Hrakimakka’s orchard, if he got that far.” By this time, I was hitting him, or trying to: half-asleep, he was still all shrugs and sidesteps, catching blows on every part of his body that could possibly hurt me and not him. I don’t believe I ever landed one solid clout on that boy after he turned eight or so. I really don’t.

  He kept mumbling, “I was not running away, I was not,” but I paid that no more attention than you’d have done. Who wouldn’t run from fat old Karsh and The Gaff and Slasher to follow two beautiful women adventurers away to the golden horizon? I hit him for thinking I’d believe anything different, and for not having the wit and the courtesy to imagine that I might have done the same myself. As well as he imagined he knew me.

  “Shadry needs wood and water in the kitchen,” I said. “When he’s done with you, I want those drainage ditches below the stable cleaned out. They’re fouled again—I can smell them from here. Tikat’s to help you, if he plans to spend another night under any roof of mine. As for your plans”—and I bounced one off the point of his elbow that left my hand sore all that day—“next time, don’t let them hang on someone else’s yes or no. Next time, you’d best keep running as straight and far as you can go, for I’ll pulp every last drop of cider out of you if you try sneaking back. Do you understand what I am telling you, boy?”

  He didn’t, not then. He gave me one dark, puzzled blink, and then ducked past me toward the woodshed. I shouted after him, “Stay away from the old man, do you hear me? And the girl, too—I don’t want you speaking a bloody word to that mad girl.” When I turned, because I felt someone watching me, it was the fox, grinning between the withes of a berry basket. He was gone, vanished, while my shout for Gatti Jinni was still echoing, but I know I saw him. I saw him, all right.

  NYATENERI

  Lal said, “I’m sorry you don’t like my singing. I don’t care, but I am sorry.”

  We were walking the horses by then, letting the little Mildasi black lead, packhorse or not, because he understood this country: hardly a stone spurted backward under his feet, while our poor larger beasts flailed their way up the path like men floundering through a snowstorm. I said, “I never complained about your voice; it’s what you sing that I can’t abide. No tune, no shape, no end—just an everlasting melancholy whine quavering in my skull day after day. Meaning no mockery, this is truly what your folk call music?”

  My horse flung back his head and balked, having winded the rock-targ I smelled a moment later. There’s no high range without them, not north of the Corun Beg, anyway. I spent the next
few minutes reassuring him that it was dead scent from a last-year’s lair, which I certainly hoped was true. Lal waited for me a little way ahead. “So they do,” she answered me, “and history, too, and poetry and genealogy, for the matter of that. Ride on ahead if it troubles you to hear. Or sing something yourself—there would be an interesting change. Even Lukassa sings now and then, and I’ve often heard Rosseth humming about his chores, only the gods know why. Never you.”

  “The air is thin here,” I said. “I save my breath for breathing.” We were four days out and up among the mountains above Corcorua, on a road that tacked constantly back and forth, as Lal said, like a boat trying to find the wind, at times veering three and four and five miles sidewise to climb less than one. For all that, we had scrambled high enough already to look down on the backs of coasting snowhawks, high enough that the foothills among which we had first sought our master looked as flat and pale as the farmlands they surveyed. The air was indeed thin, and chill, too, full summer or no, with a curious tang about it, rather like fruit about to go bad. Above us, the icy peaks leaned together, breathing grayness.

  “To me, singing is breathing,” Lal said over her shoulder as we started on. “I don’t understand people who don’t sing.” She had been in a sideways quarrelsome mood since we set out—longer, really—never giving her disquiet proper voice, but neither allowing us a truly easy moment, even in silence. There are many who find deep contentment in such a situation, but Lal was not of them—I have known no one less comfortable with the common subtleties. Anger she could enjoy well enough; deviousness, never. I halted my horse a second time and stood where I was until she turned, hearing no one trudging behind.

  “Are we no more to be companions, then?” I asked her. “Because of what occurred between weary and lonely friends who had endured much together, is there to be no friendship ever again between you and me?” My life has not led me easily to ask such questions, nor Lal’s taught her to answer them, and she did not. She said only, so low that I could barely hear her, “We must reach Simburi Pass by sunset.” This time she did not look back to see if I were following.

  We did reach Simburi Pass—substantial name for what amounts to a goatherd’s trail up to summer grazing, hardly wider than the stream where we made our camp. We spoke little until the horses were seen to, and then we sat down and faced each other across a shallow pit in which a hundred or a thousand generations of goatherds must have built their cooking fires. Lal said presently, “Where do you think he picked up our track?”

  “Trodai,” I said. “That place like a bit of lichen on a bit of stone, where we asked too many people if they knew of a river in these mountains. He caught up at Trodai.”

  Lal shook her head. “You do yourself an injustice. No one’s taken that overgrown old path out of Corcorua in centuries, I’m sure of it. You gave us a day’s start with that, maybe two. He found us no earlier than last night or this morning.”

  “What difference? Either way, at least we can have a fire. I’m tired of sleeping cold and going without my tea for his benefit. I’ll gather some wood—you see if there might not be a few fish in that stream.”

  I started to rise, but Lal seized my arm and pulled me back, crying, “Fool, get down! Even Rosseth wouldn’t stand like that against the sunset!” The Mildasi horse, reacting to the furious panic in her tone, made a strange low sound in its throat, less a nicker than a questioning growl.

  My laughter plainly offended Lal, but I couldn’t help that. “If he were within bowshot, and I think he is, he could have picked us off long ago. I told you, they never use weapons of any sort—it’s one-third religion, two-thirds a question of pride. Now that he is alone, he might strike from ambush, but I doubt it.” I stood up, deliberately raising my voice. “The one trouble with knowing that an armed warrior facing your bare hands is overmatched is that it leads to a certain vanity, a certain carelessness. That is exactly why his friends are dead. That is why he will join them in a while.”

  I took Lal’s hands and she came up in a single motion, as I have seen her flow out of a sound sleep, swordcane half-drawn before her eyes were fully open. Now they were wary, probing: suspicious, but not altogether untrusting. My life has hung often on knowing that particular difference. I said, “I will find the wood. If we die tonight, it won’t be on salt meat and stale bread.”

  There were fish, small but plentiful, and very tasty. Lal lay flat and scooped them out of the water as the sheknath do, and I cooked them crisp in oil and a bit of our precious flour. We had darit-root still, which keeps well and clears the mouth, and there was even a winter apple we had forgotten about. Lal made the tea, just as my Man Who Laughs had taught me to make it, as he surely taught every student he ever had. It is not a common blend; sometimes I fancy that I’ve surely left as plain a spoor of tea-leaves across two continents as any following killer could wish, and one far less escapable than my sex. Nothing much to be done about it now.

  With those mountains toppling over us, we finished our supper in darkness. Our small fire was warm enough, but it threw its light no further than the horses’ glinting eyes. There was no scent of rock-targ now, and no sound but the soft jingle of the stream. I said, “First watch to me.”

  “We should set out the bima sticks. They’d give us some warning, anyway.”

  “No, they wouldn’t. Believe me.” Lal met my eyes, nodded, and shrugged. I said, “He has no interest in you. I am all he’s after.”

  “And suppose he gets me by mistake, what then? It’s chance and stupidity that keep me awake, not any fanatical assassins. I really fear a stupid death.” It is often hard to tell when Lal is joking.

  “If he should kill you, it will be entirely intentional. That I can safely promise you.”

  “Thank you,” Lal said. “That does ease my mind. Now, according to the folk of Trodai, we should reach the River Susathi by the day after tomorrow, assuming we reach it at all. From that point, it sounds very much to me like a good two weeks’ journey at least to where Arshadin lives. Didn’t it sound so to you?”

  It was my turn to shrug, busying myself with the fire.

  “No more than that—perhaps even a day or so less. They disagreed among themselves, you remember.”

  Lal said quietly, “I don’t think we have the time.”

  Beyond the firelight there was a sudden rustle and a miniature scream: something very small catching something smaller in the dark. I said, “He escaped Arshadin, sick and feeble, and has eluded him ever since. Why fear he’ll be any easier to take with his strength returned?”

  Lal sat crosslegged, slowly tapping her left palm with her right forefinger. “First, because I know a lot of old tales about sorcerers dying and being resurrected, and I’ve noticed that they always seem to come back even stronger and meaner than they were. Second, because my friend— our friend’s true power has not returned, and may well never return again. Yes, he can still protect himself better than we can guard him—yes, even now he can still work magics for which lesser wizards would give all that Arshadin has already given. But he is a gutted man.”

  The last words came out so harshly that for a moment I did not recognize them. I said, more hesitantly than I am used to speaking, “I would not call him that. Gutted.”

  Lal smiled at me for the first time in a long while. She said, “This is one place anyway where there can be no misunderstanding between us. We have had the same dreams, each knows what the other knows. What he suffered at Arshadin’s hands took his belly, his”—she hesitated, stumbled, and finally used a word that must have been in her own tongue. “What’s left is skill, wisdom, cunning, desperation. Let Arshadin close on him again, and none of these will avail him any more than they would you or me. We dare not give away so much as an extra day, let alone two weeks. Not to Arshadin”—she turned away from the fire and spoke loudly—“and certainly not to whoever hears us now.”

  A night bird chirred softly from its nest; a nishoru sang far away. Not far enou
gh for me, but they have to be really hungry before they’ll charge a fire.

  “Sailor Lal,” I said, “I see where this is going.” Lal smiled smugly. I said, “I don’t like it.”

  Lal’s expression grew even more self-satisfied. She said simply, “You have not sailed with me.”

  “True enough. Something else I have yet to do is see a river running west to east. So I won’t believe in this Susathi until I’ve washed my feet in it. And since we don’t know exactly where we may strike it, how can we know if Arshadin’s home lies upstream or down?”

  “Think about what Lukassa told us. She spoke of the white teeth of the river—she said that it sang of its hunger. Do you remember?”

  “A rapids,” I said. “The house overlooks a rapids, which could be upstream as easily as not. Wonderful.”

  Lal began placidly to unroll her bedding and embark on her nightly search for the perfect twig to clean her teeth with. I have known it to take an hour. She said, demure as a temple novice, “Not everyone who can handle a boat is called sailor. There are other considerations involved.” And after that she wouldn’t do anything but mumble to herself and compare twigs.

  I spent the night with my back against a boulder and the bow across my knees. I wondered what mischief the fox was most likely to be up to by now, and about the possible nature of Arshadin’s Others, and I thought often of Rosseth. Both Lal’s watches and mine passed without event; but he was very near, that third one, and he knew I knew it. Once, just before I woke Lal, a tharakki scuttled through the firelight and was gone again—it was the two-legged variety, you don’t find the other sort this high— and at that moment I could have thrown a stone into the dark and hit him. You have to work to startle a tharakki from its hole, night-blind as they are, but he must have thought the joke was worth the effort. There would be no attack, not with Lal at hand; time enough for that after we came to the river. He was only saying hello.