The Magician of Karakosk, and Other Stories

by Peter S. Beagle

  “Stagnant water,” she said. “Spoiled vegetables. I never knew a coast town that smelled less like the sea.” Soukyan slept quickly, but Riaan stayed wide-awake, which meant that Lal remained more or less awake herself. Riaan asked her for a story: never having heard more than the few sad fragments his mother could recall, he was as guilelessly greedy for tales as a child much younger. Lal told him Choushi-wai’s favorite, which had to do with a magic tree, a queen’s twin daughters, and a young monk on a dreadful quest, aided by the ghost of a poet. When she was done, Riaan sighed wistfully and said, “I wish that were true. I wish all stories were true.”

  Lal smiled in the darkness, though he could not see her. “All stories are lies, just because they are stories. But they are true even so, every one of them, and sometimes the biggest lies turn out the truest of all. And don’t ask me why that is, Riaan, because I could never tell you. But it is so with stories.”

  The boy was silent long enough that Lal almost dozed off; but he roused her abruptly by saying, “So then ghosts are true. I’m glad. The ghost in the story, who was a friend—it would be good to meet a ghost like that. It could tell me about my father.”

  “Depends on the ghost,” she mumbled. “They aren’t all like that one, take my word.” Then his last words penetrated, and she shook herself awake to demand, “Why should you care? Why should it matter which of those”—she struggled fruitlessly for a word in his language—“those bad people bred your mother?”

  “Oh,” he answered with surprising eagerness, “because I know that it was not Cajli. He wanted to, but he couldn’t, I know that much anyway. And if not Cajli, then none of the other great lords….” His voice trailed away for a little, but then he went on. “My mother will never say, but I think my father is dead. And I think he was someone like us, someone like me. I think he—he cared for my mother. Maybe he could not protect her, maybe he could not be with me, but he did care about us. Sometimes I make it up in my head that he died trying to save us. I have to know, Lal, do you see? Do you see?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course you do.” She felt ponderous with memories, sticky and sluggish with time, and knew that there was no hope of sleeping now. She began to say, “Riaan, you might well be sadder for the learning, you have to know that, too,” but he was sitting up, staring away, groping for her hand like any frightened child. “The lights,” he said. “Lal, the lights, what are they doing? Over there, look.”

  There were a dozen or more of them, tiny and fragile, bobbing slowly between the trees, circling like dancers. Now and then one dropped swiftly, almost to the ground, then shivered straight up again to the height of a human heart. Riaan’s hand was cold in hers, but Lal said, “Night gleaners, nothing more. They come to pick up the windfalls, anything the pickers pass up or reject. Anything.”

  “We do that,” Riaan said softly, “my mother and I. Not at night, not in orchards—in the cornfields, the berry fields. We do just the same.” He stared at the little flames for a long while before he lay down again; and Lal stared up at the moon and told herself very old tales until morning.

  The Churush road was a proper highway—at least, by comparison with the brambly wagon-roads and rishu-paths they had been traveling—and Riaan constantly slipped delightedly down from his usual perch behind Lal to investigate everything from unfamiliar flowers and animal tracks to the small fish of the murky ditches. Periodically he would sprint to catch up with the jogging churfas: his natural strength and resiliency had returned, and he often ran circles around them for the pure pleasure of it. Lal took the opportunity to relate their night conversation to Soukyan. The old brown man barely let her finish before snapping, “No! No, absolutely not!”

  “No what?” she asked, genuinely startled. “What did I suggest that I don’t know about?” But Riaan bounded back up behind her then, and they were unable to talk in privacy until evening, when they had made camp in a wild bare meadow and the boy had gone off gathering firewood. Soukyan, sitting on a stump to skin a plump, long-eared sayao was pointedly silent, leaving it to her to bring up the subject that was not yet a subject. She said at last, “He just wants to know who his father was. Even the gods couldn’t find anything wrong in that.”

  Soukyan did not look up. “And his father is dead. Yes?”

  “He thinks so. He’s probably right.”

  “Probably.” Soukyan spun around suddenly—Damn the man, he’s always moving faster than you think, even sitting down—and leveled a forefinger at her exactly as though he were fitting it to a bowstring. “And you are nursing the truly insane notion of calling that dead peasant—no, no, worse off than a peasant, he was a plow, a shovel, a slop bucket—calling that wretched thing back from a rest more dearly earned than you or I could imagine, all because his wretched son has had a moment’s curiosity about him! Don’t even bother denying it—it’s not worth the effort, not between us. Just no, put it out of your mind right now. No, Lal.

  He had hardly raised his voice, but even through the cold, quick dusk she could see his eyes. She walked over and sat down beside him, reaching to take the carcass and the skinning knife. “Give me that. He’s the one chopping wood, not you.”

  Soukyan indignantly snatched the mess away from her. “I was cleaning sayaos when you couldn’t tell a ballad from a belch.” But he smiled then, and she realized one more time how long and bitter a journey his face had made from its born gentleness. He said reflectively, “Of all the spells. The one bit of magic you and I ever managed to learn, for all the time we’ve spent around great wizards. If you remember, we also learned why even great wizards fear to summon the dead.”

  “Of course, I know that,” she retorted. “Of course, I know it’s no parlor trick. But they do it, all the same.” They could hear Riaan singing in the distance: a cheerful, wordless attempt at one of Lal’s churfa-calming airs. She said, “In a just cause, and with respect, where is the harm?”

  “Harm? The harm is to the tissue of things, Lal—the things that exist beyond our desires. If we ever did learn anything from a magician, we learned that it is not a wall that keeps this world apart from… from those others that we know some little of—not a wall, but a dam. Open the way, with the very best of intentions, for one perfectly harmless spirit, and neither of us can possibly guess what might come spilling through. But we both know very well what could.” He flourished the gutted sayao at her dramatically. “They are not supposed to be here, never, the universe hates it. Lal, let it alone.”

  Riaan’s singing was drawing nearer; they could just make out his log-laden silhouette through the darkness. She said, “You’re right, I know it, I am not arguing. You’re right.”

  Soukyan regarded her with distinctly heightened suspicion. “The last time you listened to me this meekly, we were in the worst trouble of our lives not ten minutes later.” But the boy was there, proudly flinging down more than enough wood for the night and setting immediately to fire building. There was no chance to talk further until he had had his story and fallen asleep; and by that time Soukyan had drifted away, as he did every night, to prowl the meadow and the woods nearby until he knew their surroundings better than anything that lived there. Lal buried the remains of the meal and sat cosseting the fire, performing her own nighttime ritual of cleaning her teeth with a broken twig. Now and then, in a whisper, she practiced a word or two words in a language that sounded like the cracking and grinding of bones between great jaws. She tried the phrases over and over, changing the order and the accent, plainly never satisfied. The firelight turned her eyes and cheekbones red-gold as its own coals.

  Beside her, Soukyan murmured gravely, “It’s certainly a good thing you never could pronounce g’reuilljk correctly. Where might we not be otherwise?”

  A lifetime of control—no more natural to her than hardness to Soukyan’s mouth—kept Lal from even turning her head. She tossed her twig into the fire, spat after it, and said, “I speak the spell as well as you. It’s the ingredients I can’t
remember.”

  “The ingredients are quite simple,” Soukyan replied, “and more available than I care to think about just now. Fortunately, the moon is not in the right quarter, nor is the Gardener”—he pointed up at the overcast sky—“in the ascendant. Therefore, you may at once abandon whatever is brewing under that elegant cap of white hair—which is very becoming, have I mentioned that? Utterly deceptive, but becoming.” When Lal did not answer, he rested a hand gently on her shoulder. “This matters more than I thought,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because I am Riaan,” the old woman said. Her face was stiff and taut, as though with great cold, and the golden eyes were very far away, gone further than Soukyan had ever seen them. “Because I know what has been done to him better than he does, and because I know what such a life can make of a child. As that prison guard and his boy still trouble you, so it would haunt me for all the time I have left not to do the little I can for him. Because I know, Soukyan.”

  They sat together in silence, staring into the darkness made all the more smothering by the firelight. Above them the wind miaowed thinly in the treetops, and even the sputter of the flames sounded like branches cracking under the weight of snow. A korevu cried plaintively somewhere too near, and Soukyan muttered, “Bloody things should be hibernating by now.” He drew his bow closer and prodded the fire to make it flare.

  “After Kulpai,” Lal said.

  “I don’t know.” Soukyan did not look at her. “You have a place to return to, a place where you are pleased to belong. My atonement, my apology to the man I hurt so—that has been all my destination for so long that I forgot it was not home. A sign of age, surely.” He spread his hands to the fire, gazing down at their scarred, ridgy backs. “After Kulpai I don’t know where I will go, Lal, or why. There will be something.”

  The korevu’s moan came again and again, seemingly from every direction, as it always does. Soukyan spoke no further, but fitted an arrow, drew without appearing to aim, and loosed off into the night. There was no answering hiss of pain or alarm, but the deadly lament was not repeated that night, though they sat very still until dawn.

  Unlike Doule, Jahmanyar is a real city, and a handsome one, near enough to the coast to have first choice of everything landed from the southern islands and the Strange Lands beyond. It has everything a true port could want, except the sea, and it makes up for that with a romping overabundance of all else. Riaan, seeing absolutely everything for the first time—from street dancers to public poets yowling their verses, from jai-fish barrowmen to slinking poison-mongers, to grand courtesans being borne to their assignations by liveried bearers—had to be physically threatened to keep him from sliding happily off the rear of Lal’s churfa and vanishing forever through a hundred giltcurtained doorways, or into the wondrously anonymous mystery of a hundred alleys. Only the warning that they would pass straight through Jahmanyar instead of staying even the one night had the slightest sobering effect.

  They spent that night at an inn called the Golden Seadrake. It was located on a side street; but from the fighting, screaming, and singing that went on below their window at all hours, they might as well have made camp in the market square. Lal immediately ordered their meal to be brought up to them, but Riaan begged so earnestly to have it served in a real taproom that she and Soukyan yielded, against misgivings, and went downstairs. On the way, Soukyan said to her out of the side of his mouth, “This is what it is to be grandparents. I hate it already.”

  “I think we must have had a nice daughter, though,” Lal said softly. “I do think so.”

  The taproom was a proper chaos, which clearly suited Riaan perfectly. Coast city or not, the landlord’s menu was limited to overdone chops and underdone green-eel pies, accompanied by wine that appeared to have begun life as a stockpond. Soukyan sized up the drunken men lurching into their table, stopped Lal from drawing on one who was about to urinate on her leg, and told Riaan to eat up quickly so that they could be gone within half an hour. When the boy asked why, Soukyan answered, “Because there are a dozen bargemen in tonight, and at least that many sailors off the coast freighters. Half an hour, likely less.”

  “There’s a magician,” Riaan said in wonder. And so there was: a short, irritated-looking man dressed in the black and gray of the lower ranks of his trade, standing on the bar and snapping his fingers to make fire leap from the tips. Riaan gasped, and Lal grumbled. “Always, the third-raters always start like that, that’s how you tell.” But his audience paid no mind, not until the magician stamped in a certain way, and something with hot yellow eyes, long yellow teeth, and bloodred wings flashed high across the taproom, shrieking like steel on stone. It circled the room, stooping viciously at terrified tosspots, then vanished up the chimney with a thunderous fart. Riaan cheered rapturously, and the magician bowed directly to him, causing Soukyan to snort like a peeved churfa, and Lal to whisper, “Don’t spoil it for him. What does it matter?”

  “Yes, Grandmother,” Soukyan muttered back. The magician played directly to Riaan after that, the bargemen and sailors being already too reeling drunk to take any heed of anything but their old hatred of one another. The boy sat enchanted, forgetting to eat, while ale mugs, first juggled, then tossed in the air, floated down as flower petals; while small birds bloomed between the magician’s empty hands; and beer better than any the Golden Seadrake had ever pumped fountained from the magician’s ears, nose, the top of his head, even his coat pockets. That did get even the sailors’ attention, briefly; even Soukyan laughed, and even Lal murmured, “Very well, then, second-rate….”

  To finish, the magician called for silence, and did not get it, except from Riaan and his companions; the clientele was rapidly approaching a joyous boiling point. Someone bellowed and threw a chair at someone else. It missed, smashing against the bar. The magician’s cross little face darkened, the gray cloak was flung back, and he nodded a brisk, private nod. He took a handful of red powder from one secret pocket, a bunch of scraggly herbs from another, hurled both down on the bar before him, spat on them three times, and spoke words that neither Lal nor Soukyan could make out above the turmoil, as the bone-white, maggot-white, hideously white figure began to take form in the middle of the smoky air. It grew just as a pearl grows, or a child, accumulating itself around a single fiery spark where its heart should have been. But it was dead; it had been dead for a very long time, and it had not died peacefully, or found any grace beyond the grave. Its robes were stiff and brown with blood, and its transparent, empty-eyed face was wrenched out of all human shape with furious envy of the living. It crouched in the air, hissed silently, lunging out in vain at the meanly unremarkable man who had summoned it. He balked it with a single word, smiling.

  What that word was, there was still no way of hearing, since none but Lal, Soukyan, and Riaan were paying the least heed to the thing raging overhead. One sailor did throw a bottle at it, but that was most likely meant for a drunken bargeman who was holding two sailors off the floor with a hand around each throat while he laboriously explained some point of etiquette to them. The bottle passed through the apparition and caromed off the bald skull of the landlord, who, with the weary ease of long experience, snatched up a worn cudgel from behind the bar and began flailing away at any head within range. This included the bargeman with the dangling sailors: he promptly threw them at the landlord and followed them over the bar. Half a dozen sailors were right behind him.

  “Out,” Soukyan said, and he and Lal, warding away all combatants with bow and sheathed swordcane, whisked Riaan from the table a moment before it was kicked over by bargemen charging to their fellow’s rescue. The boy made no protest, but he twisted around in the doorway to stare back at the magician. The little man was standing against a side wall, ignored as ever in peace or war, while his equally slighted specter stalked and gibbered impotently above the fray. He mopped his forehead and absently flicked a finger at the creature to banish it. Catching sight of the three of them then, he made a deep formal bo
w to Riaan, spun around on his toes in the usual manner of magicians, and disappeared into the same smoking hole in the air as the apparition. They left a smell of rotting flowers behind them.

  “Out, out, out, out,” Soukyan said. Lal, Riaan, and he spent the rest of that evening in their room, listening to the debate belowstairs going on well into the night. Riaan said almost nothing, asking only once, “That was a ghost, wasn’t it? That was a real ghost.”

  “I told you they weren’t all like the one in the story,” Lal said. Riaan nodded. Soukyan, sleeping as warily indoors as out, woke fully several times, each time to see the boy lying still on his cot by the window, with the moonlight silvering his wide eyes.

  He remained unusually quiet during the next few days on the Churush road. The country between Jahmanyar and Kulpai is boggy but lovely in its own dank way, rich with water birds’ cries and the scent of winter-roses, the luraveli, whose instant of loveliest bloom is set off by the coming of the first cold. Sometimes a traveler’s presence will startle a marsh-goat and its twiggy-legged kid from their bed in the rushes and send them off in great splashing leaps down water-lily alleys to find another. Ordinarily, Riaan would have been chattering like a bird himself, calling his companions’ attention to even the most common flower or footprint; now it was his silence they found distracting. It was not a brooding, resentful silence, only thoughtful, and there was no penetrating it. Lal said privately to Soukyan, “Real grandparents would know what to say to him,” to which the old man replied, “Real grandparents wouldn’t have started him thinking about ghosts and calling his father back. This is your doing, never forget it. Kulpai will be a holiday, a carnival, compared to this.”

  Lal watched the boy carefully, never letting him quite out of her sight, even when he thought he was. Soukyan did the same. The levee roads through the marshland most often necessitated riding single-file; but three days from Kulpai she guided Butterfly alongside Soukyan’s churfa to ask, “And when we get there—what then?” Riaan, mounted behind her, had been so especially lost that day in—fancy? memory? daydream?—that he might not have been there. Butterfly, who always complained loudly when he hauled himself up on her back, appeared not to feel his weight at all.