Return

by Peter S. Beagle

  Nibbling the hard little pear at the door—he had summoned a servant to escort me back to my own room—he shook his head, saying, “I regret that we will not meet again, but there will be a proper breakfast waiting for you before you depart, and your horse will have been fed and groomed as well. And so farewell, and a comforting slumber to you, Madame Jalsa.”

  Back in my room, I lay down on the rope mattress and forced my eyes to close, knowing how much in need of rest and sleep I was. But all I could feel was the same saturating terror that had overwhelmed me on my last night in this house: exactly the same sense that I had no more than an hour to live, and that no one would learn whom I had been, nor what had become of me. Of my own choice, I had returned to a place whose walls were shadow: shadows that had weight and movement and bad intent, shadows that concealed beasts of evil, empty knowledge. Shadows that meant to crush me into shadow. This was a mistake. I am not strong enough for what must come next. I have no business here.

  I gave myself that hour on the bed, and then I rose and went down the stairs. At the door I paused in the darkness for one last long look at the place that had saved me and lost me and marked me forever; and what went through my mind cannot be described more clearly than that. I had my hand on the inner latch when a wheezing, roupy voice I knew as well as my own said behind me, “You take leave of us early, lady.”

  I turned to face the yellow-white hair emerging from a closet under the stair, where rumor had always had it that he slept to foil apprentices trying to slip out by night. Brother Laska was as I had always known him: gaping and squinting wet-mouthed, peering at me as though through a Cape Dylee fog, with his head thrust forward like a turtle, and his eyes as far beyond any recognizable color as his voice was beyond tone or expression. Nevertheless, he addressed me directly, saying, “I know why you come here. I know what you seek.” A deep, raking rasp in his chest; a brief, ugly coughing spasm. “I can take you there.”

  Laska? What in the world could Laska, practically born senile, know of any mission of mine? I kept my voice sharp, irritated as the woman I was impersonating would have been with a servant’s disrespect. “Fellow, you will take me nowhere but to the stable and my horse. Be quick about it, and silent, lest I rouse the Master.” Lal does that sort of thing much better than I.

  Laska made a sound I had never heard from him before: a sort of hawking sigh that I realized, after a moment or two, was meant as laughter. He said, “The Tree.”

  I stood as still as I ever have in my life, including the time when I hid from the Hunters in a manure wagon with the fox. Laska laughed again. The sound was not as chilling as the two words, nor the words nearly as frightening as the notion of Laska laughing at all. He smiled at me with his raw gums and his half-dozen brown teeth. “The Tree,” he repeated. “You have come for their Tree.”

  I gaped at him, no less amazed than I would have been if my horse had begun to express opinions. He had already spoken more words than I could remember him uttering in all the years I had known him as doorkeeper for that place. I said, very cautiously, “Tree? I came for Soukyan, as your Master now knows. But Soukyan is dead, and there is no hope here for me or my family.”

  A terrible, triumphant smile spilled over Laska’s face, spreading like some sort of infection. “Of course, lady. As you say. I will take you to the stable.”

  It was grimly, darkly fascinating, even for me. Whether or not he had penetrated my disguise—and I could not be certain either way, nor imagine what it might mean to him if he had—in any case, he knew there was something disguised somewhere. And if he knew, then certainly my attempt to gull his Master had not survived first trial, and I was right to leave immediately. I could trust nothing here, take nothing for granted—except for the certain conviction that I had done myself no service by this visit, but only armed and alerted my enemies. Something else not to tell the fox, if I survived to see him again. Or Lal, either. Oh, especially Lal.

  I said nothing as I followed Laska down the path that led to the stable, even as I contemplated and rejected alternatives. The night was moonless; if the stable proved unattended, I could have the old man unconscious and over the back of my mare in a silent instant, and prod him with questions about the Tree—whatever it was—at a safer distance. Worth the considering.

  They were good: not just for monks, but for professionals of any sort. They waited until we were nearly to my mare before they rose silently from the hay bales all around me, even dropping from the rafters like spiders. My bow and dagger were only an arm’s length away; but crowded and pinioned as I was—snared by the press of robed bodies, more than anything else—I never reached for them, having no wish to kill any but Hunters.

  The look on Laska’s face surprised me greatly: there was no triumph of treachery there, but only distress and disappointment. Whoever had arranged for my capture, clearly he wasn’t a part of it. I could find no one else to blame but myself, over and over.

  They brought me back to the mansion quite courteously, allowing me to walk on my own, but with my arms bound. I passed the rest of the night in the same visitor’s cell given to me by Master Caldrea when I first arrived. The only difference this second time was the guard on the door, and the confiscation of my bow, my arrows, and of course the trimoira dagger. Considering the circumstances (not to mention that martyr’s mattress)—I slept surprisingly well, and did not wake until a young novice brought me an excellent breakfast. I was clearly still Jalsa to him: he blushed carmine and rushed away as soon as he handed me tray and utensils. I ate slowly, paced the little room for a time, exercised as I could, and was sitting on the bed attempting to meditate, when I heard soft footsteps outside, and in a moment Master Caldrea entered alone. He closed the door behind him, and stood with his back to it, studying me.

  “Good morning,” I said. “You were quite right about the breakfast they serve here—I can’t remember a better one. Please pass my appreciation on to the cook.”

  “I will do that,” Master Caldrea replied. “Praise from Soukyan is praise indeed.”

  He smiled at me, and kept smiling, as I looked down at my woman’s body, unable to see any sign that my enchantment had dissolved. “No, have no fear—you are still the gracious and winning Madame Jalsa, as far as human eyes are concerned. But you may as well let the mask fall, don’t you think? It will serve you no further, I promise, and I would be greatly pleased to see young Soukyan in his own person again. I really was fond of the rascal, you know.” His voice was pensive, curiously regretful. “Speaking for myself, I privately respected his flight from what we offered him, and could not help applauding his success in avoiding so many trackers for so many years. You have all my admiration, my friend.” He bowed his head briefly over his clasped hands.

  “You knew,” I said. “From the beginning?”

  Master Caldrea smiled, a bit smugly, as he had every right to do. “Do you imagine yourself to be the first who has ever come here behind another face? Never underestimate the power of an old house, Soukyan. It was the house itself that recognized you—it was the house that told me who you were, before ever I came downstairs to greet you. The house knows its own.” He chuckled softly. “Actually, the house was quite pleased to see you. I think it has rather missed you, all these years.”

  The Jalsa-spell barely brushed my face as it slipped away as lightly as it had come. Master Caldrea regarded me thoughtfully, shaking his head very slightly. “Ah, they have been hard years, have they not?”

  “I was an ugly baby,” I said.

  Master Caldrea smiled. “I was not speaking of features, but of expressions. Man or woman, your eyes betray your life. Had you remained with us…” He did not finish.

  I said, “Had I accepted, I would have been like you. I’d have spent my life trafficking in pathetic secrets and fears, blackmail and lies and meaningless mysteries. It was not for me, none of it.”

  His smile hardened. “What was not for you was power. Not because you did not want it—oh, I
do remember you, Soukyan—but because you wanted it too much, and you knew you did. In that sense, you were quite wise to run off—I only marvel that you dared to return, and in such a manner.” He paused, cocking his head. “Would you care to tell me your reason?”

  “I came to destroy the Hunters,” I said. “I am tired of them, and it is time for them all to be gone. That is my reason.”

  It should tell you something important about Master Caldrea that he neither laughed outright, nor gave any indication that he was doing so inwardly. Rather, he nodded slowly, as though I had confirmed a pet speculation of his, and responded after a moment, “How fortunate that you should have chosen just this moment to revisit us, then. How very fortunate for everyone involved.”

  I stared. Master Caldrea said, “You see, as you might imagine, the Hunters are extremely eager to rid themselves of you. Indeed, they are quite literally born with that desire burning in their veins. I cannot tell you how gratified I am that you will be able…well, to gratify them in their yearning, their hunger. “ He spread his hands, and his smile was gone. “It has been a long frustration, you will agree.”

  “And will be longer,” I said, though my blood had abruptly begun roiling in my own veins. “A pity to rouse their hopes. The Hunter has not yet been born who stands any chance against me.” Noise, all bluster, and I knew it. But Master Caldrea nodded again, more vigorously this time, as though he thoroughly agreed with my nonsense.

  “Truer than perhaps you know, good Soukyan. We must wait together, just a little while, for that birth. In the meantime, you remain our guest, and no hurt will come to you.” He paused, scratching his head in a peculiarly human gesture. “Well, no, that may not be entirely true; my apologies. All the same, I would not waste time in attempting to repeat that first flight. Knowing you, however, I suspect those are wasted words, but I must leave that to your own judgment.” He bowed formally, and was gone.

  There was no lock; only the guard. When I put my head out into the corridor, after a little time, he smiled almost shyly at me, but both hands dropped to his waist, at which dangled a remarkable variety of sharp objects, long and short, and a couple of serviceable bludgeons to boot. I was touched by the implicit flattery, and reasonably certain that I could silence him well before he got any one of his toys free and pointed at me. But I looked at him and saw myself at his age: so earnestly steadfast, so proud to be trusted by my masters with such a responsibility…and I could not have laid a hand on him. Besides, there were other guards beyond. I went back into my cell and closed the door.

  And there I stayed, for days I grew too bored to bother counting. I invented ways to entertain myself, exercise and meditation—both in the economical South Island style—being the most obvious; but I also requested pen and paper, and tried my hand at poetry, which I love and memorize, and have absolutely no gift for. I am especially fond of the ballad form that my sister taught me, which is practiced in the west country, around Jara and Suyanashak. I wrote four during the time of my captivity in that place, most of them drawn from heroic legends of long ago, and all of them quite bad.

  I also meditated a good deal on what Brother Laska and the dying Hunter had meant. There were trees aplenty on the grounds—that place was squarely in the middle of an ancient wood, after all—but no individual trunk that I had ever known to have legend or reputation attached to it. Yet Laska was very nearly as old as the forest itself—or had always seemed so—and had spoken of this Tree as a thing he could guide me to. More, he had seemed eager to do just that, and most dismayed when he saw me a captive. I hoped he might come to my cell to chat with me, but he never once did.

  Master Caldrea did come, however, now and again. Often he came in company with one or another senior brother or subordinate Master: I remember in particular a thin, intense Master named Tudo who kept returning constantly to the matter of that place’s supposed loss of power and influence, even justifying the deterioration of its environs. “We have never been easy to discover; we have always preferred to go unnoticed, to be overlooked, passed by. Yet those who seek us—like you—still find us, and we ourselves still find anyone we care to find, still learn what we choose to know. Nothing has changed, nothing at all.” But Master Caldrea’s sidelong glance and the slight twist of his mouth told me otherwise.

  Sometimes, surprisingly, he would come to bring me some delicacy or other that he thought I might enjoy. When I commented that I was eating better as a prisoner than I ever had as a novice, as though I were being fattened like a goose for Thieves’ Day, he replied that this was only to be expected. “You are important to us, Soukyan, by now you are part of our folklore. The one who got away, the one who defied the Hunters…I assure you, among our young ones at least, you are positively mythical.” He grinned at me, half-tauntingly, half with something almost like affection. “That is why I make a point of setting them to guard you, those young ones. I have a sort of theory that it would go against your conscience to harm them. So far, it has proved correct.” He patted my arm and added smugly, “Admirable.”

  “I would not count too much on my admirable conscience,” I warned him. “I might be biding my time, debating exactly the right moment for my flight. It has happened before—any number of Hunters could tell you that. If they could still talk.”

  “Well, I would not wait too long on choosing that moment,” he answered dryly. “Another moment approaches, one that concerns you greatly.” And though we were both maintaining a jocular tone, I noticed the next morning that the young guards in the guest wing had been replaced by older, harder-looking monks who carried fewer weapons—some none at all, like the Hunters.

  I made my first attempt to escape during full daylight, reasoning that while the guard on my cell was always strengthened at night, even doubled, a certain confident laxness prevailed during the day. I have also always believed that an air of authority is everything; thus, when a guard who had just arrived at his post saw me strolling confidently down the corridor, beaming as benignly as some visiting dignitary, he actually let me come within reach before it occurred to him to try to cry out and brace himself to repel boarders. He never got a sound out of his mouth, though I am glad I did not have to kill him. I dropped him sleeping in a corner and moved on, sauntering straight ahead, as though I had every right to be doing so. A very old trick, but it works more often than you might expect.

  It got me through three guards, and very nearly as far as the big double doors before a dozen monks fell on me from all sides, putting paid to that particular getaway. As before, they made every effort not to damage me, but simply bore me down with the weight and mass of themselves. They returned me to my cell, outside which the first guard was sitting up, looking dazed and reproachful. I apologized as I was rushed by him, but we never really established a trustful relationship after that.

  “I am pleased to see you in condition for such a gallant and stylish endeavor,” Master Caldrea said, “but I did warn you that it would be useless. As every other will be.”

  “Whatever festivity you and your Hunters may have planned for me,” I assured him, “I will not be in attendance. You will have to send a messenger to inform me of the outcome.” Master Caldrea smiled without replying.

  Maintaining form, I made two more straightforward efforts to escape, both of which failed resoundingly. The first involved me dressing in a guard’s clothing, over the strenuous—and rather too loud—objections of the guard. The second try had to do with my discovery—thanks to the shy little kitchen boy who came every evening to clear away my food tray—of a small hatchway a few yards down the corridor, through which it was loaded onto a belt that was then wound on rollers back to the kitchen. It is still something of a sore point that I would have easily gotten away unseen if I had known to wait even half an hour for the brother on the night shift to close up the kitchen and go to bed. But he happened to be an extremely conscientious monk, who liked to see the belt completely clear of dirty dishes and utensils before he considere
d his work done. I crawled out of that hatch to a grinning welcome, and was cursing myself—not my captors—all the way back to my cell.

  Actually, it was a different cell this time: one without a mattress of any sort, nor any light, except when the door was opened. This did not happen, as a rule, more than once a day, even on the occasions when Master Caldrea brought my single meal himself. Despite the severity of my punishment, he could not resist praising my inventiveness, saying that no prisoner had ever thought of such an attempt, and that he almost wished that mine had succeeded. “Not that it would have made any difference in the long run—but all the same, I do wish you and I were to have a bit more time together. It would have been pleasant. Ah, well, the moon is the moon.” With that, he bowed, as he always did on leaving me, and shut the door, returning me to darkness, along with my sudden question.

  Which was not really a question, but an understanding. Having had no window in either cell, nor any way of seeing sun or moon, it had not occurred to me that he—and, obviously, the Hunters—were waiting for a certain phase of the moon. Why the waiting was necessary was a riddle I could not answer, but I did not feel I needed to. What I did need was to be out of this room. I sat on the cold floor that was all my furniture, and pondered whether it was yet time to make use of certain knowledge.

  To this day I do not know whether my hesitation served me well or ill, as men measure things, for the third Hunter came before the moon.

  He was dead. I had buried him. I had said “Sunlight on your road” to him.

  Yet there he stood in my cell, holding a tallow candle in one hand, having shut the door behind him with the other. It had made a sound like an axe falling, waking me out of a half-doze. Master Caldrea and another robed figure, unfamiliar to me, stood behind the small, smiling man. I stared up into their faces and felt my life closing with the door.

  “Soukyan,” the Hunter said.