Rosseth was listening. I got up, kicked the pail a bit to the right, walked around it, sat down again. “I was coming back alone and on foot, not by choice, but because I couldn’t hire a coach or a guide for any money. You still can’t, as far as I know. All I had for protection was a staff, my father’s, the kind with a big chunk of iron at one end. I traveled at night, and I stayed off the main roads, and the third evening I saw smoke far away. Black smoke, the kind you get when it’s houses burning.”
He kept his eyes absolutely still, flat as a stock pond, but he was leaning forward a little, hands gripping the edge of the hay-bale. “I didn’t go any further that night,” I told him. “I heard horses, a lot of them, passing close enough for me to hear men laughing. It wasn’t until noon the next day that I started on again, and I spent so much time hiding in the trees by the roadside that I didn’t reach the village until mid-afternoon. Tiptoeing slows you down a good deal.” I didn’t want him getting any idea that I was trying to sound like a hero. It was going to be bad enough as it was.
“What was its name?” His voice was so low I couldn’t make him out the first time. “What was the village’s name?”
“How should I know? There wasn’t a soul alive to tell me. Just bodies up and down the one street, bodies lying in their own doorways, bodies shoved down the well, floating in the horse-trough, sprawled across tables in the square. There was one crammed into the baker’s oven— his wife, his daughter, who knows? Split open like a sack of meal, like the rest of them.” I said it all hard and fast and as tonelessly as I could, to get it done with. I left some things out.
“There wasn’t anyone?” He cleared his throat. “There wasn’t anyone left alive.” It wasn’t a question. We could have been in a temple, with the priest lining out the invocation and the worshippers chanting it all back to him dutifully. I said, “I didn’t think so. Until I heard the baby.”
Well, he saved me the least little bit of it, anyway. He whispered, “Me. That was me.”
I got up again. I thought about really trying to tell him what it was like: the silence, the slow buzzing, the smell of blood and shit and burning, and the tiny, angry, hungry cry drifting upward with the last trails of smoke. Instead I stood with my back to him, hands in my apron pockets, staring at that mean little black horse of Tikat’s and wishing I’d had the sense to bring whatever was left of the Sheknath’s Kidneys with me.
“I couldn’t find the place right away,” I said. “Get off the street and it was all just ruts and holes, break your ankle like that. It was a one-room cottage—clay walls and a peat thatch, the usual. There were a few sweet-regrets around the front step, I remember that. And a little bundle of dika thorns hanging on the door.”
They do that to keep away evil, in that country. He didn’t speak. I said, “The door was on the latch, and there was something jammed against it. I knocked and I pushed, and then I called out.” I turned back around. “I did, Rosseth. I called four, five, six times.” I don’t know why I so much wanted him to believe that. What did it matter if he believed me or no? It seemed to matter then. “I called, ‘Hello, is anyone there? Is anyone there? Can you hear me?’ But there was no answer, none—nothing but the crying.”
He tried to say, “Me” again, but it didn’t come out— only his mouth shaping the word. I heard footsteps outside, and voices, and I waited, hoping to be interrupted, even by Shadry, even by the bloody fox. He hadn’t shown his face at the inn since the night everything went to hell, but by now I saw him in every shadow and under every bush, and I’d have been happy to see him swaggering into the barn just then. But there was no one but me, and my head, and my throat getting drier, and my voice going on. And Rosseth’s eyes.
“I went to the window,” I said. “Forced the catch with my staff and climbed over the sill. It was dark inside there, Rosseth, because of being shut up so tight and me coming out of the sunlight. I could hear the baby—you— but I couldn’t see you, or anything else. I just had to stand still until I got used to the darkness.”
He knew what was coming now. Not the way I knew, but you could tell. He wouldn’t look at me, but kept wetting his lips and staring down at the barn floor. My face and hands were cold. I said, “Somebody hit me. Hard, here, on the side of my head. I thought it was a sword. I went straight down, and they were all over me. Not a sound out of them—it felt like a dozen people hitting me everywhere at once, kicking, pounding me like mashing up a tialy root. A dozen people, killing me, I couldn’t see even one of them. I swear, that’s what it was like.”
“But there were only two,” Rosseth said. His face had gone as white as Lukassa’s, and so small. He said, “There were only two.”
“Well, I didn’t know that, did I? They never said a word, I told you that. All I knew was, I was being fucking murdered.” I didn’t realize that I was shouting until a couple of the horses nickered in alarm. “Rosseth, I couldn’t see for the blood, I thought they’d split my head. Look, right here, it’s still tender after fifteen years. I thought I was dead as that thing in the oven, do you understand?“
He did not answer. He got up off the hay-bale and turned in a circle, arms hanging, eyes vague, still not looking at me. After a bit of that, he wandered back toward the horse he’d been doctoring, but then he turned again and just stood there. I said, “I had my staff. I got my legs under me somehow, and I just struck out, left, right, swinging blind in the dark, trying to keep them off. That’s all I wanted to do, keep them off me.”
I had to sit down again. I was dripping and reeking with sweat, and beginning to wheeze as though I’d been for another brisk stroll up those stairs. Rosseth stayed where he was, looking down at me. He said, “My mother and my father.”
I nodded, waiting for the next question, the one I hear in my sleep most nights, even now. But he couldn’t ask it, he could not make the words come out. Trust him, I had to say it all myself, and me with a load of mortar hardening in my chest. “I killed them,” I said. “I never meant to. I didn’t know.”
In the dreams he usually comes for me, screaming, trying to tear me apart with his hands. I was ready for that, or for him crying, but he didn’t do either. His knees folded slowly, and he dropped to the floor and stayed there, kneeling with his arms wrapped tight around himself and his head bowed. He was making a tiny dry sound. I’d never have heard it in that burned-out village.
“They must have thought I was one of the killers coming back,” I said. “Soldiers, outlaws, whoever it was.” I told him that I had buried his parents, that I didn’t leave them to rot with the other murdered ones, and that I could take him right to the village and the grave, if he ever wanted to go there. Which is certainly the truth—I could find that terrible place again if the sea had rolled over it.
He was rocking back and forth on his knees, just a little. Without looking up he whispered, “And you took me with you. You buried them, and you took me with you.”
“What else could I do? You were weaned, thank the gods. I bought a goat in the next town, and I used to dip bits of bread in her warm milk and feed you like that, all the way.” I tried to make a joke, to get him to stop that rocking. I said, “Heavy as a little anvil you were, too. Lugging you along with one arm, dragging that goat with the other—I don’t know how women do it. If you’d weighed an ounce more, I’d have had to leave you where I found you.”
Well, that did get him off his knees, no question about that. Shoulders hunched and shaking, the whole face writhing back from his bared teeth, hands clawing up, not toward me but himself. “I wish you had! Oh, I wish you’d left me there with them and just gone on your miserable, stinking way, and never given any of us another thought ever again! Rot your fat guts, I wish you’d left me to die with my family, my family!”
There was more, fifteen years’ worth of it. I let him go on as long as the supply lasted. He did hit me once, but he doesn’t really know how, and my body soaks these things up. When he finally ran out of breath, wheezing like me, I sa
id, “I’m sorry I killed them, your parents. That started the moment I stood up in that shattered house and mopped the blood out of my eyes. I’ve lived with what I saw every second since, waking or sleeping, a lot longer than you have. It’s my business, and it will go on being my business until the day I die. But what I will not apologize for, not ever, to you or anybody, is that I brought you away from that house with me. Beyond a doubt it’s the stupidest thing I’ve done in my life, but it might be the only good thing, too. One or two others, just maybe, but the chances are you’ll be all I’ve got to show. When my time comes.”
How long did we stand looking at each other? I can’t say, but I’ll swear I felt the sun rising and setting on the back of my neck, and seasons changing, and I know I saw Rosseth grow older before my eyes. Was it the same for him, I wonder, looking at me, seeing me, seeing his childhood march away? And what I mumbled, after so many years, so much fuss, was, “You’re all I’ve got to show, and I could have done worse.” And we stared at each other some more, and I said, “Much worse.”
Rosseth said at last, “I am not going with Lal and Soukyan.” His voice was quiet, with neither tears nor anger in it, nothing but its own clarity. “But I am leaving. Not today, but soon.”
“When you please,” I said. “In your own time. Now it’s my time to go and kick Shadry and roar at Marinesha. An innkeeper’s work is never done.” He just blinked—he never knows when I’m joking, never has known. I turned and started away.
He stopped me at the stable door with a single word. “Karsh?” The shock of it was completely physical—not a sound at all, but a touch on your shoulder when you thought no one was there. I cannot remember when he last called me by my name. He said, “There was a song. Someone used to sing me a song. It was about going to Byrnarik Bay, going to play all day on Byrnarik Bay. That’s all I remember of it. I was wondering, do you think—do you think they used to sing that song, my parents?”
There’s a good reason I’m the size I am. Fat softens and soaks up other things besides blows. “Only parents would sing a song like that,” I said. “Must have been them,” and I got myself out of there and went on up the hill to the courtyard. He’ll sing “Byrnarik Bay” to his own brats, soon enough, and always grow damp around the eyes and soft around the chin when he does, and welcome to it. The song’s as idiotic as any of that sort, but it’s the only one I know. I sang it to him all the way through that bandit country where I found him, over and over, all the way home to my country, to The Gaff and Slasher.
LAL
I said, “What? Excuse me? You are going to do what?”
“I have to go back,” Soukyan repeated. “There really is no other choice.”
We were alone in the travelers’ shrine. Soukyan wanted to make a departure prayer, since we would be leaving tomorrow. Until now he had not spoken of his plans, and I had assumed that we might journey pleasantly together as far as Arakli, where many roads meet. Now, carefully fitting the greenish lumps of incense into the two tin burners, he said, “I am tired of running, Lal. I am also getting a bit old for it. If I am not to spend the last years of a short life trying to deal with new teams of assassins as they keep coming after me, then I must return to the place they all come from. The place I come from.”
I said, “That is completely insane. You told me yourself—they don’t forgive, and they won’t rest until you’re dead. You might as well commit suicide right here, where you’re guaranteed a decent burial, and spare yourself the ride.”
Soukyan shook his head slowly. “I don’t want them to forgive me. I want them to stop following me.” He made a quick gesture of blessing over the burners and lit the incense. “I want it done with, that’s all, one way or the other.”
“Oh, it will be done with,” I said. “That it will. I fought one of those people, remember.” Soukyan had his back to me, murmuring inaudibly into the thin fumes that smelled faintly like marsh water. I was furious. I said, “So you’ll fight them all at once and get it done with indeed. A hero’s death, no doubt of it. I would have let you drown if I’d known.”
Soukyan laughed then. His laugh is a private laugh, even when shared: there is always something kept aside. “Did I say I was going to fight them all? Did I? I thought you knew me better than that, Lal.” He turned to face me. “I have a plan. I even have an ally or two back there, and some old sleights and confidences to bargain with. Believe me, I will be as safe as I was with you on the river.” He put his hands on my shoulders, adding quietly, “Though not as happy. Likely, never again.”
“Stupidity,” I said. “I cannot abide stupidity.” I sounded like Karsh. I had never been so angry with him, not even when I discovered his deception, and I was angrier because I had no possible right to be angry. I said, “What plan? Let me hear this wonderful plan.”
He shook his head again. “Later, maybe. It’s far too long a story.”
“Everything is a long story,” I said. I felt very tired, suddenly not the slightest bit ready for any new adventures, any voyages anywhere. I put his hands away and moved restlessly around the little windowless room. It was designed and appointed more or less like any travelers’ shrine in this half of the world: always white, always freshly painted (there is a law, and even Karsh apparently heeds it), always provided with the ritual cloths and candles and statues of a dozen major religions. They vary somewhat, depending on the region, but the one in which I was raised is never among them. Mostly I find that just as well, but not then.
Behind me Soukyan said, “Lal, it has nothing to do with you. This is my life, my past, my own small destiny. I am finished with waiting for it to bring me to bay one more time. I will go and meet it, for a change—and not in a bathhouse or on a river shore, but on a field of my choosing. There’s really no more to be said.”
Nor was there, for some while. He commenced a cumbersome process of passing his bow, sword, and dagger back and forth through the two tiny threads of incense, muttering to himself as he did so. I went outside and sat in the dry grass, chewing weeds viciously and watching a flock of tourik birds mob a snow-hawk that had ventured too close to their nests. Then I came back into the shrine, though you’re not supposed to reenter after leaving a ceremony. Soukyan was kneeling, head bowed, weapons arranged just so before him. I said, “You can’t cross the Barrens in winter.”
Without looking up, he answered, “I know that. I will make for the coast and turn south at Leishai. A longer road, but a safer one, for some way at least.” When the last of the incense had smoldered away, he rose stiffly to his feet, making a final obeisance to nothing. He said, “And you?”
I shrugged. “Arakli, I suppose. I have wintered there before.” The marshy incense-smell still lingered in my nostrils, irritatingly heavy with memories that were not even mine. Soukyan said, “And after Arakli?” I did not answer him. He said, “Come, I’ve told you my destination. It would comfort me much to know where you are.”
“I am Lal,” I said. “That is where I am.” Soukyan looked at me for a moment longer, then nodded and strode to the shrine door. When he opened it, we both heard Lukassa laughing nearby, a sound neither of us had ever imagined hearing: it went by us like a breeze in the grass. Soukyan held the door, but I said, “I will stay here for a little,” and turned back toward the white chests full of other peoples’ gods.
ROSSETH
I rode with them as far as the turning where I had first seen them, by Marinesha’s bee tree. Not clinging behind Lal this time, but on Karsh’s old white Tunzi, who clearly felt very important to be part of such a procession. The wizard led the way, mounted on a tall sorrel stallion that had simply appeared in the stables the night before, calmly munching oats and barley with the guests’ beasts as though it had every right to be there. Tikat and Lukassa rode beside him on the two little goat-eyed Mildasi horses, and I rode in the rear between Lal and Soukyan. I must always remember it just as it was, because I never saw any of them again.
It was a cool, windy dawn, a
nd leaves dead too soon were rattling across the path, hundreds at a gust. With the end of the terrible summer of the magicians, autumn seemed to be rushing in too fast, reaping the dry sticks in the fields, stripping the trees of the scabby brown lumps that the birds wouldn’t eat. It saddened me to see it then, because I felt that my life was being stripped of companionship and excitement and dreams in the same way. Soukyan read it in my face, surely, for he leaned from his saddle to put his hand on my neck, as he had before. Once we had passed out of sight of the inn, he had let his woman’s guise rise from him like mist, dissolving in the morning sun. His gray-brown hair was growing out, the harsh convent cut fading as well, but the twilight eyes and the reluctantly gentle mouth were still Nyateneri’s.
“Nature always likes to clear away and start over,” he said. “Mark me, next spring will be richer than anyone has seen for years. You’ll never be able to tell that a couple of wizards fought a war here.”
“No, I won’t,” I answered, “because I won’t be here next spring.” Lal put her arm around me, and I breathed in her smell of great distances and strange, warm stars. She said, “So many lovely things burned without having a chance to ripen. Be sure that this does not happen to you.” Her hand brushed Soukyan’s hand then, and she pulled it away sharply, covering the movement by ruffling my hair. She began to sing softly in that half-talking, rise-and-roll-and-fall way of hers. I inhaled that, too, as I did Soukyan’s exasperated sigh and Tikat’s quiet, almost invisible attentiveness to both the old man and Lukassa. I wanted to move up beside him and say a proper farewell, because we had been friends, but he was already gone from my world, as surely and finally as the wizard Arshadin was gone.
Oh, it was never so short a ride to the tree and the spring and the bend in the road as it was that day. Nothing I could do or say or think about could make it last any longer. All that was left was to concentrate on remembering everything: the blowing leaves, a scuttling shukri that hunched and spat at us by the roadside, the sudden cross-currents of cold air down from the mountains, the colors of the six ribbons in the old wizard’s beard. Lal’s song, the flickering loose end of Lukassa’s white headscarf, Tunzi’s constant farting which embarrassed me so. And I did remember it all, and I fall asleep to it still.
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