Innkeeper's Song

by Peter S. Beagle

  But what, then? Man-shape cannot simply walk out, old nothing would never permit. Very well, sendings must leave, just as Lukassa begs, because it suits me—me, no one else. Think, fox. Man-shape slaps magician on shoulder again, keeps him company in the chorus:

  “And it’s left-right, one more mile,

  left-right, stop awhile,

  put down your packs and tell the captain,

  kiss my bum…”

  A good song. Magician keeps stamping and singing, eyes down always—won’t even look at nice old Grandfather man-shape, no more than at sendings. But Grandfather looks at everything, eyes bright as my teeth. Grandfather shouts out to sendings, greeting them by their names, names like night in the mouth, like broken glass, names like burning oil, dead water, like wind. Wind in bad places.

  They don’t like it, being called by their names. Don’t scream and scatter, don’t turn to stone, but they don’t like it. Interesting. Couldn’t harm them if I cared to—or they me—but interesting still. Grandfather man-shape shouts louder, makes stupid jokes of names, even puts them into marching magician’s song. Hissing and mumbling now, angrier at me than ever at him. Brighter and brighter they grow, all seething with the same black fire, mark of the power that set them on old magician. Room surges with their hurtful little voices, they drown left-right, even drown man-shape’s bellowing. Magician buckles, stumbles to knees, hands over ears, over face, no more song.

  On him in a moment now, the lot of them, laughing, mocking, gnawing, he’ll not rise again as what he was. Too bad, Lukassa—enough for you, old nothing? One less magician—one more griga’ath, and who cares? Not this fox.

  But then this magician turns, still on his knees, eyes wide, blazing green as the sky just after sunset. He throws out one hand, says three words, dry grass rattling—and gone, all of them, all at once, gone, blown-out candles, slamming doors, dew-bugs in a starik’s mouth. Nothing remains—not an echo, not a twist of smoke, only a cold narrow room left huge by its emptiness. This magician stands up, slowly, smiles very slowly.

  “Thank you,” he says, as Grandfather man-shape blinks and shrivels into a red fox sitting on the bed. “That was becoming quite exhausting.”

  “No thanks wanted,” I tell him. I am puzzled, hate that, hate puzzled. I say, “It was not to help you.”

  Smile widens and widens, teeth or no teeth. “I know that, but I am still just as grateful. It was most clever of you to realize that their own names hurt their ears as much as they do ours. There will be others here, very soon, but at least I will rest a little and perhaps think of a new song to keep them at bay. The captain and the corporal are beginning to lose their charm.”

  Brushes me off the bed like dust, lies down sighing. My nice teeth grind together, but too many stories about foxes who bite magicians. “Snap your fingers, mumble words, send them off,” I say. “Why bother with songs?”

  Half-asleep already, he looks smaller with every breath. “Too tired,” he whispers. “Have to face them, hear them, too tired, they’d have me. Too tired for anything but singing. Thank you, old friend.”

  Last word is a snore. I stand looking at him for a long time, not wanting to. Friend of his, this fox, friend of any magician? He knows better, wicked old tired man. Yet I have gone to him, not wanting to—helped him, not meaning to, meaning only to help this fox. Just as Lukassa begs, kissing nose. I hate this. Magician snores on, ends of mustache fluttering in the wind. Some other is here, watching with me—not old nothing, but a deadness, a dead place, window-high, just beyond bed, no bigger than my front paws together. Where it is, no air. Not for foxes, this room. Good Grandfather man-shape, to leave the door a little open.

  So back down the hall, clickclick, clickclick, past more snoring, past sighs, whimpers, a fox indoors, swimming through currents of human noises, human smells. I hear magician muttering in his sleep, same as always:

  “And it’s left-right, one more mile,

  left-right, stop awhile…”

  My feet pick up the rhythm, not wanting to.

  TIKAT

  Of course I knew that he was ill. I was usually the first to see him in the mornings—before the women, even—and I know the air of a sickroom as well as any. But sickness to me is the plague-wind, is childbed fever, is colic, black blood, bone-rot, and all the village complaints that we treat exactly as we do the ailments of farm animals. My tafiya slept poorly, plain enough; he lost weight by the day, his color grew steadily worse, and his voice was most often a rasping whisper, as painful to me, listening, as it must have been to him. Yet when I would have slept in his room, he forbade it at the top of that tattered voice, as he forbade me ever to visit him again after dark. How should I have realized that he was being galloped to madness and halfway back between every sundown and every cockcrow? That is no air I know.

  Tending him drew Lukassa and me together in a strange way, as though I were again slipping up on the Rabbit, my Mildasi horse, step by step, praying not to alarm him by any smallest thought of capture. We spoke rarely; what mattered was that she did not seem to fear being in the same room with me, although how it would have been without him there I cannot say. Our duties were silently self-appointed: she bathed and shaved him, whether he would or no, and changed his sweated linen daily. I never learned where she got the clean sheets, those being one of Karsh’s chief economies. Once or twice she asked me for help in turning his mattress, and several times I took the chamberpot from her hands and emptied it myself. She thanked me politely each time, but she never spoke my name.

  For my part, I brought his meals, swept the floor, took away yesterday’s platters, and listened when the mood to talk was on him. It never happened when Lukassa was in the room—or the other two either, when I think about it. They loved him, you see, and I did not. You don’t have to love a tafiya; you can even hate him, as you might anyone else. I thought he was the wisest person I had ever met, except for my teacher at home, but it was a wisdom too playful for my comfort, and the play was too quickly apt to turn edged and pointed. Yet he had a liking for me, I knew that—perhaps because I owed him nothing and did not care so much for his good opinion. It may have been just so, contrary as he was.

  Sometimes he spoke of his life, which had been a very long one. I never knew how old he was; but if even half of what he told me is true—half the journeys in quest of hidden learning, half the tests and terrors and magical encounters—it would surely have taken two ordinary mortal lifetimes to crowd them all in. Wizards must lie like other people—only better—but in fact he mumbled quickly over the adventurous parts and kept returning again and again to the plainest human sorrows and defeats. “There was a woman,” he said once. “We traveled together, many, many years. Then she died.” I saw no tears in his pale greenish eyes, but I don’t think you can tell with a wizard.

  “I am sorry,” I said. The eyes had turned away from me; now they swung back with an impact I could feel in my flesh. “Why? Imagining that moping and pining for Lukassa fits you for understanding someone else’s loss? There is no comparison. You understand nothing.” And he spoke no further for the rest of that day.

  Yet another time he asked me, very suddenly, in the middle of a complaint about Shadry’s bread, “Is there anything you fear, Tikat?” The words came lightly, but his voice was like thatch tearing in the wind. “Tell me what you fear.”

  I had no need to think longer than it took me to draw breath. “Nothing. Before… before, I was afraid of everything in the world, everything that had the least chance of parting Lukassa and me. Now the worst that could have happened has happened, and there is nothing left for me to fear.” I stopped for a moment, as he began to smile, and then I added, “I truly wish there were. I don’t think it can be right, to fear nothing at all.”

  The smile widened, exposing his withered gums and stumpy teeth. I thought that I would never let myself fall to ruin like that, not if I could mend such things with a snap of my fingers. He said softly, almost dreamily, “No,
it is not, but I envy you all the same. You see, the thing you are most afraid of is always the thing that happens— always.” The last word seared the air between us. “We make it happen, we all do, wizard and weaver alike, though I could never tell you how. Yet here you are—here you sit by me, and your worst fear has come true, it’s done with, and you did not die. Indeed I do envy you, Tikat.”

  I thought he was mocking me. I said, “I survived. I do not know if that is the same as not dying.”

  “A dainty distinction for a village boy,” and this time there was no missing the ravaged amusement in that voice. “Now I recall that I have feared many, many things myself, in different times, but I seem to have outlived them all, just as I have outlived loving and hating as well. The irony of it is that in all these years I have never feared death, being what I am and knowing what I know. Now I do. As much as you dreaded living without Lukassa, so I live in absolute horror of dying. It is a great humiliation for a magician.”

  All mockery, whether of me or of himself, was gone from his voice. He reached up to grip my shoulder, and I could feel how thin and tremulous his fingers had become. “Tikat, I dare not die, I must not, not yet. Do not let me die.”

  Panic and bewilderment spilled through me then, as though from his fingers on my arm. I said, “Why turn to me? What can I do to help you?”

  But he was looking beyond me as I spoke, toward the one window. He said loudly, “Ah, there you are. I was beginning to think you had forsaken me.”

  There was no one else in the room. He was talking to a dance of sunlight just below the windowsill. “No, no, certainly not, I trust I know you better than that.” The voice held a bantering tone, close almost to laughter.

  I left then, before I could begin hearing the sunlight answer him. In the corridor, sweeping, Marinesha looked up too quickly and then away. I knew that she had been listening at the door—Marinesha is a bad liar, even wordlessly. I said, “He is no worse. No better than yesterday, but no worse.”

  I would have gone on by, but she came and stood before me, closer than was usual for her. If I have not said that Marinesha is quite pretty, with large dark-gray eyes, a generous mouth, and skin that should have been coarsened by her work and has not been at all, it is because her appearance meant nothing to me, one way or the other. She talked too much, but she always treated me gently enough, while giving Rosseth the raw side of her tongue on any pretext. She said now, anxious but hesitant, “Tikat—Tikat, did he speak to—to another in the room?”

  “Aye,” I said, “an old acquaintance who just happens to look like a wall. For all I know, wizards have many such friends.” In truth, I was concerned to be away, to puzzle over my tafiya’s words by myself. But Marinesha did not move from my path. She bit her lip and looked somewhere else again, and said, very low, “Tikat, Lukassa is not the only woman in the world.”

  I could hardly hear her. She was blushing so deeply that even her yellow-brown hair seemed to darken with blood. I said, with a harshness that was starting to come too easily, “And if she were, I would not have her, nor any other in her place. I want no one, Marinesha. No more of that for me, never.”

  Marinesha put her hand timidly against my cheek. I took hold of her wrist and shook my head, saying nothing. I think I was not rough, but when I looked back she had pushed the wrist hard against her lips, as though I had bruised her. It plagues me to this day, that sight of her. There was no need to hurt Marinesha.

  The days strained toward autumn without seeming to grow any shorter or cooler. I felt that I had been all my life drudging at that inn, like Rosseth, and wondered often why I should stay on another hour. There were some still who might be missing me at home; and the Barrens, killing in spring, would be impassable when the snow came. There was nothing for me in this place; there never had been. It was all a waste, all of it, and time to say so and be done. And still I drudged on.

  One afternoon Karsh ordered Rosseth and me to replace several rotted roof beams in the smokehouse. This would have been weary work in any weather; now it was both exhausting and dangerous, since the timbers slipped constantly through our sweating fingers and twice came near crushing our legs. We finally rigged a serviceable hoist, and I was standing underneath, guiding a beam up to Rosseth on the roof, when I saw Nyateneri in the doorway. The fox sat on his haunches beside her.

  We got the beam properly set in, and Rosseth began hammering hard and wildly, never looking at Nyateneri. She was a handsome woman, in a soldierly way, as tall as I, with changing eyes and short, thick gray-brown hair. Not at all beautiful, nor suddenly, unexpectedly pretty like Marinesha—but even in my village you would stare when she strode past, and remember her long after the beautiful ones. I had never seen her and the fox together. He looked straight at me, putting one ear back and laughing out of his bright yellow eyes.

  Nyateneri said, “I need to speak to you both. Come down, Rosseth.” She did not raise her voice, but he looked up, hesitated for a moment, and then dropped lightly from the roof to land in the straw beside me. “Soukyan,” he said, almost whispering. I did not know what the word meant then.

  “He is dying,” Nyateneri said. “There is nothing we can do.” Her brown face showed no emotion, but her voice was slow in that way I know myself, when each word seems to be dragged back into your throat by despair. She said, “It will be tomorrow night.”

  “How do you know?” Rosseth had hold of my hand, a child’s blind clutch, which I still felt long after he had let go. “He’s strong, you don’t know. I never thought he’d last out the first night he came, but he did, he did, and he’ll last through this one too. You don’t know.” He was blinking very fast.

  Nyateneri looked at him with more softness than I had ever supposed in that swaggering woman. “He does, Rosseth. He knows.” Rosseth stared at her for a long time before he nodded very slowly. Nyateneri said, “He wants us there. You, me, Lal, Lukassa—Tikat.” She paused just enough to let me know whose idea I was. “He wants us all there.”

  “Why tomorrow night?” Rosseth’s dark eyes were dry and stubbornly angry now, the way he gets. “How can he—why tomorrow night?”

  “Because of the new moon.” Nyateneri seemed genuinely surprised. “Wizards can only die on new-moon nights.” Plainly she had thought that even louts like us must have known so simple a thing, and was annoyed with herself for the assumption. She turned away without another word, but the fox sat where he was, yellow gaze never leaving me. I heard him in my head, no mistaking that grating, derisive bark: Well, boy, well now, fellow horsethief, and aren’t you a longer way from home than anyone in the world? I could not move from where I stood until he stretched himself lingeringly, fore and aft, like any dog or cat, then sauntered off after Nyateneri. A dust-draggled little bird flew up almost under his nose, and he pounced stifflegged at it but missed.

  Rosseth was looking at me as I had looked at the fox. He said, “You have another new friend.”

  “Not likely,” I said. “I leave a few tidbits out now and then, to persuade him to spare Karsh’s chickens. He knows my smell by now, I suppose.”

  “When did you ever care about Karsh’s chickens?” Rosseth’s voice was tight and thin. I shrugged and reached for the last beam remaining, but Rosseth caught my hand again, crying out, “Tikat, no one tells me what is happening. Why is the wizard really dying? How can he be certain that he will go with the new moon tomorrow night? Something terrible is happening, and no one will tell me what it is. Guests fight in their rooms—horses kick down their stall doors and go at each other like demons, for no reason, even poor old Tunzi. Marinesha says that Shadry wakes everyone every night, screaming that he is being buried alive. Why did Gatti Jinni throw a wine bottle at that street-singer yesterday? Why does the well water smell filthy-sweet as gangrene, and why won’t the wind ever, ever stop? What is Karsh trying so hard to say to me—and why now, why now?—why do you have secrets with a fox? And Tikat, Tikat, what is watching? What is watching us all out of the wind
and the well and the horses’ eyes?”

  I put my arm around his shoulders. He looked as surprised by the gesture as I felt. Rosseth always called a—a something, a wishfulness—from me that no one else has ever summoned, except Lukassa. It frightened me each time, but each time a bit less. I said, “I don’t know. I was sure it must be my imagining.”

  Rosseth shook his head violently. “No, it is all real. Tikat, talk to me, let us put what knowledge we do have side by side. I will tell you what I almost see—you tell me what you think you imagine. I’ll tell you what I begin to guess—you’ll say what you—”

  “—what I fear,” I said, thinking of the wizard. Rosseth blinked in puzzlement. I said, “Never mind. Go on, Rosseth. Let’s talk, then.”

  So we talked for a long time, longer than we ever had before, while spiking the last beam in place and plastering a mix of straw and horse dung over the roof to seal the cracks. We do it just so at home. I spoke of the fox being also Redcoat, and of my drowned Lukassa having been drawn up from the riverbed by Lal’s song. Rosseth drew breath both times to give me the lie, but did not; no more than I when he told me about Nyateneri being no woman but a man named Soukyan, who had left two other men— fell, dire men—dead in the bathhouse. (Was it one such who touched me and left me unconscious in the corridor outside the wizard’s room? I never knew.) He flushed and stammered over much of that, but I understood enough to pat his shoulder and nod slightly. In my village, one of our priests says that love between men is a great sin— the other argues that nothing at all is sinful except weak ale, overdone meat, and building a fire in any way but his. As for me, my notions in such matters are my notions.

  “So what do we know, when all’s said?” I asked at last. “We know that Lal and Soukyan came here in search of their friend, their master, and that they found him the prey of a wizard named Arshadin, more powerful than he. Agreed so far?”