Innkeeper's Song

by Peter S. Beagle

  Rosseth objected. “We don’t know that Arshadin is the greater wizard. If this one were in his proper health, rested and strong, it might well be another story.” Rosseth is very loyal.

  “That’s as may be,” I said, “but it’s Arshadin who keeps him from resting, who sends voices and visitations to plague him by night, if Marinesha’s to be believed. So that makes Arshadin his master, by my count.” Rosseth chewed his lower lip and looked stubborn. I said, “And if this Arshadin can do such wicked wonders, then he’s like enough to be at the bottom of all else that’s been bedeviling The Gaff and Slasher all summer.” I realized that I had never spoken the inn’s name since the day I arrived there, and suddenly I longed more than I can say for the world in which I had never known it.

  Rosseth was nodding eagerly, beginning to speak, but I cut him off as coldly as I could. “Not that any of this is any of my concern. This midden-heap is your home, not mine, and there’s my one great joy in life just now. Whatever happens or does not happen, whatever becomes of your squabbling little wizards, I’ll be off where I belong, and never know.” I stood up. “We’re done—I am supposed to help Gatti Jinni in the storerooms.”

  Rosseth let me get to the door before he said, “Lukassa will be here.” I began to answer, but he interrupted me as harshly as I had done to him. “And so will I be, and Marinesha, who has been kind to you. Will you truly never want to know what became of us, Tikat?”

  Two years younger than I, and already going for the belly like a starving sheknath. We stared silently at each other until I looked down first. I said, “I will not leave until she is in a safe place, if there can be such a place for her. Afterward—why, afterward the Rabbit and I may as well go home as anywhere.” Rosseth said nothing. I went on. “The rest of you must look after yourselves. I have no skill at loving more than one person at a time, and that is hard enough. Now I’m going to the storerooms.”

  I was already outside the smokehouse, closing my eyes against the onslaught of light, when he called to me. “Tikat? I have lived here all my life and never once called it home, not once. But you are right—it is my home, after all, and I will defend it as well as I can, and my friends, too. Thank you, Tikat, for teaching me.” I did not turn, but kept walking toward the inn, uphill in the pounding sunlight.

  THE POTBOY

  That was the best time there ever was at that place, because Shadry used to fall asleep by noon, sprawled across his big chopping block like one of his own thick, slubbery sides of meat. Once he began snoring, he’d never stir until it was time to prepare the evening meal, if anyone had the strength to eat. Even so, none of the others ever dared to sneak out of the kitchen with me, not for so much as a quick squint at the guests, or to pet Rosseth’s old donkey. They all curled themselves away in the darkest corners they could find and slept through the day like our master. Snoring exactly like him, too, some of them.

  Not me. Each day, the moment Shadry’s wet, squirmy mouth sagged open on his wrist, I was across the scullery and through the side door, already opening my own mouth to gasp even before the full morning hit me. I have never known heat like that: barely past sunrise and you’d feel the sweat begin to sizzle on your skin, like fat meat in the pan. I never saw such a sky, either—first white as bone, then white as ashes in the afternoon. At night, late, it turned a sort of white-streaky lavender, but that was as dark as it ever got; and day or night, indoors or out, we all went on turning and turning in the pan. Everything was the pan.

  The scullery would have been cooler—the scullery was the nicest shelter of all, except for the wine cellar where fat Karsh napped out the worst part of the days. But I wouldn’t have passed a single free second in that kitchen, not for anything in the world; and none of us except Shadry was allowed to go anywhere else in The Gaff and Slasher. So I usually stole off first to the stables and helped Rosseth with the horses.

  Rosseth was my friend. He was years older, of course, grown up, and often he had too much work to do, or something on his mind, and then we couldn’t talk about things the way we liked to. But he never got angry at me, and two times he let me hide in the hayloft and lied to Shadry when he came hissing after me, swinging his long arms. Rosseth never was afraid of Shadry, no matter what he did. I was always safe with Rosseth.

  That day the horses lay in their straw and would not even stand up to be curried or have their feet seen to. Rosseth did what he could with them, and I carried water in and pushed fresh hay down from the loft. Then we rested in an empty stall, where we couldn’t be seen from the door, and we talked for a while. I remember, I asked why it was so hot all the time, even at night, and Rosseth told me that it was because two great wizards were fighting in the sky. He made a whole story out of it for me, but I fell asleep in the middle, with my head on his arm.

  I didn’t get to sleep very long, because Tikat came in and woke me—he woke up Rosseth, too, I think—saying that heat or no heat, Karsh wanted a cart of market vegetables unloaded. I never liked Tikat. Not that he ever did me any harm—I just didn’t like him. Sometimes I couldn’t understand what he was saying, because of the southern way he talked, and when I could he was telling me to get back from there, get out of everybody’s way. But he did point at his lunch—a winter apple and two whole heshtis, all crusty-brown with cheese—as he and Rosseth left, meaning for me to eat it. So he wasn’t so bad, I suppose, for a southerner.

  For the rest of that day, I dodged everywhere around The Gaff and Slasher, slipping back into the kitchen now and then to make sure that Shadry was still asleep. I hid in the smokehouse, the buttery, the bathhouse—even in the smelly little shrine place on the hillside—trying to follow the shadows as the sun moved. But after a while it seemed to me that the sun was hardly moving at all. I watched and watched it, looking through my fingers, and it didn’t stir as much as the length of my thumbnail. From high noon it hung up above the stable, growing riper and heavier every minute, and brighter too, until it was almost white on the outside, white as daisies. But on the inside it was dark—all hard, swollen dark, like a yolk gone bad in the egg. I stopped looking at it when it went like that, but then I began to hear it beating, thumping like an iron heart—you could feel that slow clang everywhere, all the time, in your bones, in your eyes. And it never moved, that clanging sun.

  I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to find Rosseth, to show him what was wrong with the sun, but he was still busy with Tikat somewhere. Gatti Milk-Eye came out, and I talked with him a little, because he hates Shadry and wouldn’t ever tell him about me running off from the kitchen. But all he could say, over and over, was how frightened he was of the new moon that night. Over and over, rolling his white eye—“I don’t like it when there is no moon, no, I don’t like it. There should always be a moon, just a little piece, so you can find your way between things. Not good to see the night without a moon.” So it wasn’t any comfort to be with him.

  Then the old man in the red coat came, and that was a comfort. He came in the afternoon, late—on any other day, it would have been already twilight. That was his usual hour to walk out from Corcorua, where his grandson lived, and sit a while chatting and drinking in the taproom. I know that because Rosseth told me—I was only once in the taproom, to clean up after a fight—and because that old man talked with everybody, he knew everybody, even potboys. He had a funny voice that really hurt to listen to, as though it kept hitting some kind of crazy-bone inside your head. But everybody liked him, except fat Karsh.

  When the old man saw me hanging about in the big shadows of the courtyard trees, he called my name, saying, “Little one, what are you doing so far from your kettles and cauldrons? Do you realize that the sun is refusing to set because it is so astonished to see you out in its light?” He gave me a dusty boiled sweet out of his coat pocket.

  “No, it’s not,” I said. He didn’t seem to mind the awful heat at all—it might have been any other evening, except that I’d have been in the kitchen, running and fetching, stirring and
scouring, trying to keep one jump ahead of Shadry’s long swinging arms. I said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with the sun or the weather or the people, but it’s nothing to do with me. I just want it to stop.”

  He picked me up and swung me around in the air. He was very strong for somebody with white hair and thin old hands. He said, “Why, I can stop it, child, if that is what you wish. Shall I do that? Shall I argue with the sun and tell it to go to bed, so that you can get to your rest? Say the word and it shall be done.” I nodded, and he said, “Well, then,” and set me down, both of us laughing.

  I went off a few steps and turned around again. I don’t know why. He was already stumping toward the inn door—not the one to the taproom, but the big carved one for the paying guests. When I called to him, to remind him of his promise, he just kept walking. He didn’t knock on the door, either, but pushed it open and went inside, bold as Karsh himself. The door slammed shut behind him, hard, without making a sound. I saw it.

  Then right away the sky began to darken, and the sun stopped its awful slow clanging. Birds started making their night noises all at once. If I had turned my head, I know I would have seen the sun skidding down the sky, butter in the pan now, but I didn’t turn. I just stood there with my eyes closed, and felt the stars coming out.

  LAL

  It was absurd. I was never so ashamed of myself. Here we were—Soukyan, Lukassa, Rosseth, and I— crowded together around my friend’s bed, just as though he were about to read us his testament before folding his hands on his chest and wafting politely off into the next world. In fact, we were five friends doing the best we could to say a hopeless, terrifying farewell; but what I remember best is the pain in my still-tender ribs from containing a torrent of schoolgirl giggles. No excuse, absolutely no excuse. I think only Soukyan noticed anything, but if they all had it would serve me right.

  He had been gone from us all that day and the night before: not dead, not wandering in his mind, but far away on a frontier we could not begin to imagine, fighting back the new moon. There was never a chance of that, of course, not even for him. But he fought on anyway— unconscious, drooling, wasted to a new moon of a man himself, he lay on a mattress in a tiny, shabby room and fought for daylight, and lost.

  The instant the sun passed from sight, he gave a small, quick gasp and opened his eyes. As though he had only been interrupted by a cough or a witless question, he said, “Now this is what you will need to do about the griga’ath.” Of all that happened so soon afterward, of all that has happened to me since, nothing has ever been as frightening as those few words in that calm, rasping voice.

  My friend said, “We have only a moment, so pay attention for once. There is no defeating or destroying a griga’ath—you are hearing me, aren’t you, Lal? It is possible, however, to divert it briefly, and perhaps escape, if you all do exactly as I tell you.” He looked around the darkening room. “Where is Tikat?”

  Rosseth answered, his voice cracking hoarsely. “He is surely on his way—Karsh had him cleaning the sacrifice stones at the shrine. He will be here in a minute, I promise.”

  My friend reached out and put his trembling hand over Rosseth’s hand. He said gently, “The griga’ath will destroy this place and everyone in it. You may be able to save a few people, I don’t know. I will not be able to help you.”

  Soukyan was crying, not making a sound, standing with his shoulders back and one single tear at a time wandering down one side or the other of his nose. Lukassa’s face, for a wonder, was pulsing with color, and her mouth was drawn tight and hard as my friend went on. “There are beings, as you know, who can only travel in a straight line—the simplest screen will head the worst of them off—and there are others who cannot cross running water. Griga’aths have no such weaknesses.” He nodded toward a vase of silvery sweet-regrets on the table. “Fetch those to me, Lukassa. Quickly.”

  Marinesha had set them there that morning, wilted and dry before she ever picked them, but a find for all that, so deep in that evil summer. Along with the sweet-regrets (in the south they grow taller and darker, and are called windshadows), she had also placed two or three shuli flowers in the vase. Shuli are always the exact shade of the sky above them; these were completely colorless, warm to the touch even in water. My friend took the vase from Lukassa, though he seemed barely able to hold it upright. The flowers stirred feebly between his hands.

  “These will not save you,” he said. “The griga’ath will not recoil from them, shivering in a corner. But for perhaps an instant it may remember flowers. It may remember that it was human once.”

  He never gave us a chance to break down. I think none of us dared to look at one another—I certainly did not— and for my part I felt as though all the blood in my body had turned to tears. He said, “It will look like me. You must understand that, for your lives’ sake. It will look exactly like me, and it will be hungry. Listen now. Throw the flowers in its path, vase and all—that had better be you, Soukyan—then turn and run. Do not look back, not even to aid each other. Do not meet the griga’ath’s eyes. Have you understood me?”

  None of us could speak. I heard his impatient little sigh—familiar to me as my own breath, and as dear—and again I was oddly struck by the dry-eyed anger and resolve in Lukassa’s face. My friend said, “You must not weep when I go—there will not be time,” and at that moment the door opened and the old man in the red coat came sauntering in.

  I know now about the fox. I know what he was, and I know how he and Soukyan met, and what they meant and did not mean to each other. But at that time I made no connection between him and courtly, over-jolly old Redcoat, and I was astonished to see Soukyan whirl on him furiously, shouting in a sibilant tongue that I should have recognized from hearing him speaking to the fox, that very first night. Redcoat paid him no mind at all, but beamed benignly on us all and started toward the bed. I barred his way, without knowing why.

  “Let me pass, foolish woman,” he ordered me, in a voice that started out as Redcoat’s fox-bark and became something else, something I had also heard before. Behind me, my friend said softly, “Let him pass, Lal.” Then I knew who it was, and I stepped aside.

  He did not shift shape until he was standing close beside the bed, looking down at my friend out of the fox’s yellow eyes. They were the first to change, turning the unfocused, pupilless blue that I remembered. The rest of the metamorphosis seemed to happen slowly—hideously, languorously slowly—yet when it was over, it was impossible to believe that anyone but Arshadin had ever been there, saying in his own flat, arid voice, “I told you long ago we would meet like this at the last. You cannot say I never told you.”

  My friend answered him, infuriatingly calm as ever. “Do not preen yourself quite yet, Arshadin. Great as you are, and weak as I am, still it took you long and long to pry the sun from my grasp and force it down into darkness. And even now you cannot kill me, but must await the new moon. I would have brought a book, or a bit of needlework, if I were you.”

  But there was no baiting Arshadin, not this time. Bleakly placid, he replied, “I can wait. You know better than any how I can wait. It is the others who cannot.”

  “Then they will have to learn,” my friend retorted. “I am better acquainted than you with those others of yours, and there’s not one would dare try conclusions with me as I lie here. Come, draw up a chair, let’s talk a little last while. Indulge an old pedant,” he added, and I caught my breath, thinking, he has a plan, oh he has, I must be ready. Even then I would have believed that he knew something Uncle Death did not know.

  There was a stool, but Arshadin never looked at it, nor at anyone else in the room. He remained standing, blank and heavy and damp as so much cheese; but his attention was such a physical reality that it seemed a visible beast, crouching red-jawed over my friend on the bed. He said stolidly, “What have we to talk about, you and I? I know what you know, and you must finally understand what I have been trying to tell you since the first day I was your stud
ent.” The word broke free of his taut, flat lips with such force that my friend put up a hand as though to ward it off. “Your student,” Arshadin said again. “Your disciple, your apprentice, your anointed crown prince, your inheritor. I would have sold myself gladly to the vilest west-country slaver to be rid of those wondrous birthrights forever. Do you hear me now, now, at last, my master? Do you hear me now?“

  My friend did not answer. Soukyan growled very softly and took a step toward Arshadin. I caught his arm. Rosseth kept glancing at the door, plainly needing Tikat to come through it. As for Lukassa, she never took her eyes off Arshadin: their expression was so rapt that she might have been gazing at her lover, if you ignored the set of her mouth. She looked far older than she was.

  Arshadin did not notice her. Beyond the window, the last stains of twilight had already bled away into a strange, pale dark: not the transparent summer night of the north, but a watery false dawn, gray and evasive as quicksilver. There was a light bent through it, faintly brightening the room though no candle had been lit. Rosseth’s body was utterly rigid, his eyes too wide and still. I put my arm around him, so that he could let himself tremble against me.

  On the bed, my friend mumbled, “I had very little to teach you, Arshadin, but that little will cost you dear when you learn it at last, at other hands.” His voice was fraying, his words beginning to blear into each other. He said, “You were never my student—that was the mistake. I should have mocked and browbeaten you, riddled you without letup, insulted you, challenged you morning to night, just as I treated Lal and Soukyan and all the others. But they were students—you were my equal, from that first day, and I let you know it. That was the mistake.” He had no strength even to shake his head, but barely managed to turn it from this side to that. “Yet what else should one do with an equal? I had no practice at it— perhaps you will deal more wisely in your turn.” The last words might have been drops of rain in dry leaves.