The Magician of Karakosk: Tales from the Innkeeper's World

by Peter S. Beagle

  Fourteen, and ordering Sirit Byar about like a plow horse. But he came, and we sat close against each other, because the night had turned wickedly cold. Sirit Byar even laid his arm across my shoulders, and it was all right. Whatever happened, whatever it was took me for a little time, it never happened again. Not with him, not with anybody. I asked, “Did you know there was a baby?”

  Sirit Byar nodded. After a while he said, “What could I have done? Her parents would have locked her away forever, rather than have her walking the roads with a moneyless, mannerless south-coast street singer. And here’s a wealthy man waiting to marry her and take her to live in Credevek, and what’s a street singer to do for a gently bred girl and a child?” He shivered suddenly, hard, I could feel it. He said, “I went away.”

  “What became of her?” He blinked at me. “I mean, after—afterward? Where is she now, who takes care of her?” In Davlo we had Mother Choy. She took in all our strays—animals, children, and the moontouched alike—and if the lot of them lived in rags, on scraps, and under rotting thatch, well, they were glad enough to get it. Sirit Byar said, “Jailly Doura’s husband is a good man. Another would have sent her away, but she lives with him still, in a house just north of Credevek, and he looks after her himself. I have been to that house.”

  “Once,” I said. Sirit Byar’s hand tightened on my shoulder, hard, and his face clenched in the same way. I couldn’t tell you which hurt me more. He said, “She would not come into the room. I sang all night for a dark doorway, and I could smell her, feel the air move against me when she moved, but she would not let me see her. I could not bear that. I could not bear to come back again.”

  I knew there was more. I knew him that well, anyway. Nothing to do but sit there in the stall, with the rishu snoring and her calf looking sleepily at us, and the air growing lighter and colder, both. And sure enough, in a year or two, Sirit Byar said, “I thought I could make her well. I was so sure.”

  He wasn’t talking to me. I said, “All songs are magic, always. You told me that.”

  “So they are,” Sirit Byar answered. “But my songs are for farmers’ dogs, I told you that also. I learned that before you were born, in that house in Credevek.” He turned to look at me, and his eyes were as old and weary as any I ever saw. He said, “The great ones, they could have healed her. Sarani Elsu could have brought her back. I—” and he just stopped, and his head went down.

  I knew there wouldn’t be another word this time, no matter how long I waited for it. So after a while I said, “So you tried to sing her madness away, and it didn’t work. And you never tried again. Fifteen years.”

  “Her husband told me not to come back,” Sirit Byar mumbled. “I left her worse off than before, what could I say to him? He is a good man, what could I say?” He looked at me for an answer, but I didn’t have one. In a bit his head sagged forward again. I wriggled around until I could get comfortable with his head resting on my arm, and then I just sat like that until long into morning, while the old man slept and slept, and I just sat.

  And the next day, and the days after that, you’d think none of it had ever happened. We walked the roads as usual, talking a bit more, as I’ve said, but we never once talked about our night in the byre, and there was never another bloody word about his Jailly Doura. Oh, I might have asked, and he might have answered, but I didn’t think I wanted to know a thing more about her and him and their child than I already knew, thank you very much. No, I wasn’t jealous—please, do me a favor—but I was fourteen and he was mine, that’s all, whatever that means when you’re fourteen. He wasn’t my father or my lover, he was just mine. And if I was jealous, I had a bloody right to be, only I wasn’t. Just big and ugly, the same as always.

  One thing different, though. At night, usually when he thought I was asleep, he practiced a new song over and over. Or maybe it was an old one, for all I could tell—he kept his voice so low and his south-coast accent would get so thick that I couldn’t make out one word in ten. Even when I really was asleep, the slidey, whispery music always filled my dreams full of faces I’d never seen, animals I didn’t recognize. It sounded like a lullaby people might sing in some other country; like my lucky coin that’s worth something somewhere, I’ve no doubt. Never had dreams like that again.

  We did get to Davlo that spring—Sirit Byar went out of his usual way to make sure of it. There was nothing for him there—he didn’t bother with even a single night at the Miller’s Joy, but stayed with a farmer while I went on alone. I found Desh Jakani at his smithy, and he told me that my father hadn’t been into the Miller’s Joy for more than a month now, and that he’d been thinking seriously of going by our farm any day to look in on him. “Never the same man after you ran away,” he told me. “The spirit just went out of him, everybody says so.” My father hadn’t had much spirit in him to begin with, and Desh Jakani was a liar born, but all the same I scrambled up that mountain track as though a rock-targ were after me, really thankful that I’d come home when I had, and wishing with all my heart that I were anywhere, anywhere else in the world.

  The way had disappeared completely. I’d always kept things cut back at least a little, but everything—the path, the pasture, our few poor fields—everything was smothered in foxweed, ice-berry brambles and drumak. I looked for our rishu and the two Karakosk horses, but they were gone. The door of the house hung on one hinge. My father squatted naked in the doorway.

  He wasn’t mad, like Sirit Byar’s Jailly Doura, or even very drunk. He knew me right away, but he didn’t care. I picked him up—all cold bones, he was—and carried him into the house. No point in going into what it looked like; it was just the house of a man who’d given up long ago. When I left? Like enough. Likely Desh Jakani was right about that, after all.

  My father never spoke a single word during the two days I stayed with him. I put him to bed, and I made soup for him—I’m no cook, and proud of it, but I can make decent soup—and managed to get some of it down his throat, while I told him all about my travels with Sirit Byar, the things I’d seen with him, the people I’d met, the songs I’d learned. I think I sang him every song I knew of Sirit Byar’s during those two days, including “The Good Folk,” the one that started the brawl in the Miller’s Joy so long ago. He listened. I don’t know what he heard, because his eyes never changed, but he was listening, I know that much. I swear he was listening.

  I even told him about the salt-meat boy. That was on the morning of the third day, when I was holding him steady on the chamber pot. That’s when he died, trust my father. Not a sound, not a whimper, not the tiniest fart—he was just dead in my arms, just like that. I buried him at the doorstep, because that’s the way we do in Davlo, and left the door open for the animals and the creeping vines, and walked down into town one last time to join Sirit Byar.

  What? What? You should see the look on your little face—you can’t wait to know if we ever went to Credevek together, ever tried a second time to sing Jailly Doura back from wherever her poor ragged mind had been roaming all this long time. Well, let me tell you, for the next two years, Sirit Byar saw to it that we didn’t go anywhere near Suk’kai, let alone Credevek. He’d have us veering back south as early as Chun, never mind who expected him where, or what bounty he might be passing up. When I asked, he only grunted that he was getting too old to trudge that far uphill, and anyway, those folk were all too tightfisted to make the extra miles worthwhile. Wasn’t my place to argue with him, even if I’d been of a mind to. I wasn’t.

  Those were good years, those last two we had together. My strength had caught up with my size, and I could have carried the kiit all day by a couple of fingers. We tramped every road between Cape Dylee and Karakosk, between Grannach Harbor and Derridow, him writing his new songs in the air as we went, and me eyeing every pretty boy in every town square as boldly as though I were some great wild beauty who’d been the one to do the choosing all her life. There wasn’t one of them as beautiful as my salt-meat boy, and they didn�
��t all come bleating after me by night—no fear about that—but I’ll tell you one thing, Sirit Byar never had to sing anybody to my bed again, no bloody fear about that, either. You’re almost sweet when you blush, chicken-wrist, do you know that? Almost.

  Yes. Yes, yes, we did go to Credevek together.

  It was my doing, if you want to know. What put it into my head, that’s another story. I wanted to see her, I know that. It started as a notion, just a casual wondering what she looked like, but then I couldn’t get it out of my head; it kept growing stronger and stronger. And maybe I wanted to see him, too, see him with her, just to know. Just to find out what it was I wanted to know. Maybe that was it, who remembers?

  So that last morning, after we’d been to Chun—I remember it was Chun, because that was one place where Sirit Byar did sing “The Juggler” in public—and came once more to the Fors na’Shachim crossroads, I said to him, as casually as I could, “That peddler yesterday, the man we traded with for the new kettle? He spoke of trouble on the Fors road. I meant to tell you.”

  Sirit Byar shrugged. “Bandits.” One fairy tale’s true, anyway—there wasn’t a high-toby in the country would have laid a hand on Sirit Byar or lifted a single copper from him. They used to come out of the woods sometimes, bashful as marsh-goats, and travel along with us a little way, hanging back to encourage him to try over a new song as though they weren’t there. They couldn’t make him out, you see. I think they felt he was somehow one of them, but they couldn’t have said why. That’s what I think.

  “Plague,” I told him. “Fire-plague, broken out all down the Fors road between here and Dushant. He said the only safe route south was the Snowhawk’s Highway. It’s a good road—we can follow it as far as Cheth na’Vaudry and then cut west to Fors. We could do that.”

  Sirit Byar looked at me for a long time. Did he know I was lying? I’ve no more idea than you have. What I knew was that fire-plague hits the south coast, his country, at least once every ten years; people die in hundreds, thousands sometimes. He said at last, “We would have to pass through Credevek.”

  I didn’t answer him. We stood silent at the crossroads, listening to insects, birds, the wind in the dry leaves. Then Sirit Byar said, “Azdak.” Not another word. He took the kiit from my hand and set off toward Credevek without looking back. Limp or no limp, I had to trot to catch up with him.

  So there’s how we came to Credevek, which is a strange place, all grand lawns, high stone houses, cobblestone streets, servants coming and going on their masters’ errands. No beggars. No tinkers, no peddlers. A few farm carts, a few children. Quiet. The quiet sticks to your skin in that town.

  Sirit Byar marched straight down the main street of Credevek, with me trailing after him, not knowing what to do or even how to walk if I wasn’t carrying the kiit. People came to their windows to stare at us, but no one recognized Sirit Byar, and he never looked this way or that. Straight through the town until the paved streets and the stone houses fell away, nothing much after but meadowland gone to seed, a few pastures, and the brown Durli Hills in the distance. And one big wooden house snugged down into the shadows between two foothills—you could miss it if you didn’t look sharp. Sirit Byar said, “If we travel by night, we will reach the Snowhawk’s Highway before noon tomorrow.”

  I said, “That’s where they live, isn’t it? That’s where Jailly Doura lives.”

  Sirit Byar nodded. “If she lives still.” He turned to look at me, and suddenly he reached out to put his hand on the side of my neck, right here. My hair, the roots of my hair, just went cold with it. He said, “Between that house and where we stand, there’s our journey. That’s what the god of wanderers was saying to me. Whatever happens in that house, this is why we met, you and I. I would never be here, but for you. Thank you, Mircha.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I just said, “Well, I wanted to get out of Davlo, that’s all.” I tried to take the kiit back—I mean, it was my job, carrying it, from the first day—but he wouldn’t let me. He swung it to his shoulder and we started on our journey.

  And it was a longer journey than it looked, I can tell you. By noon, which is when we should have reached the house in the foothills, it hardly seemed any closer than when we’d first seen it. Barely this side of sunset, it was, before we’d done with trudging through empty, stony defiles and turned up a last steep road that ran between two huge boulders. There was a man waiting there. He was short and old, and the little that was left of his hair was as white as Sirit Byar’s, and if he wasn’t exactly fat, he looked soft as porridge, and about that color. But he faced us proudly, blocking our way like one of those boulders himself. He said, “Sirit Byar. I thought it would be today.”

  Now. I have to tell the rest slowly. I have to be careful, remember it right, so you can set it down exactly the way it was. Sirit Byar said, “Aung Jatt,” and nothing more. He just stood looking down at the other man, the way the high, shadowed house looked down on us three. Aung Jatt didn’t take any notice of me, which is difficult. He said to Sirit Byar, “You cannot see her. I will not allow it.”

  “It has been nineteen years,” Sirit Byar began, but Aung Jatt interrupted him.

  “And if it had been fifty, she’d still not be healed of you, healed of your music. I told you never to return here, Sirit Byar.” You know how, when you grip something too tightly, it starts shivering and slipping in your hand? Aung Jatt’s voice was like that.

  Sirit Byar said only, “I must sing for her once more.”

  “Oh, aye, once more,” the old man answered him. “And when you have sung your songs of love and ghosts, dragons and sailors, and gone your way again, who will stay behind to piece what’s left of her into some kind of human shape once more?” He mimicked Sirit Byar’s deep, hoarse voice so bitterly that I giggled. I couldn’t help it. Aung Jatt never took his eyes off Sirit Byar.

  “She did not know me for three years after you were here,” he whispered. “Three years. What possessed me to let her listen to you? What made me imagine that the music of the father might keep her from trying to follow the child? For three years, she wept in the dark and ate what I pushed under her door—for two years more, she said no word but the child’s name, over and over and over. For five years after that—” He made himself stop; you could hear his throat clicking and grinding. Sirit Byar waited, blinking in the setting sun.

  “Nineteen years,” Aung Jatt said presently. “There are times even now when she takes me for you, do you know that?” He grinned like a dead man. “You might think that would hurt me, and in a way it does, because then she sometimes tries to kill me. I must always be watchful.”

  Sirit Byar closed his eyes, shook his head, and started to move around Aung Jatt, up the road toward the house beyond. Aung Jatt stopped him with a palm gently against his chest. He said, “But she has stopped calling for the child. Most often she sleeps through the night, and it has been some while since I had to feed her. And she hates you far more than I do, Sirit Byar.”

  You couldn’t be sure, because the sunlight was slanting off the windows, but I thought I saw someone moving in the house, just for a moment, the way you can see a feeling flicker across someone’s eyes and gone again. Aung Jatt went on, “She hates you because she knows—she knows—that the child would still be alive if you had defied her parents and stayed with her. I know better, but there.” He chuckled and patted Sirit Byar’s chest with his fingertips. He said, “Did I tell you when you were here before that it was a boy? I’m growing old, I forget things.”

  Sirit Byar said, without looking at me, “Come on, big girl,” and put Aung Jatt out of his way with one arm. Aung Jatt made no protest this time. He was still smiling a little as he watched us step past him—I say us, but he never saw me, not for a minute. He didn’t follow, and he didn’t speak again until we were on the stone steps that led to the front door. Then he called after us, “Beware, Sirit Byar! The second floor is her domain—when you are there with her, you are in the moon. The se
rvants will not ever climb the stair, and should she come down, they scuttle away into corners like beetles until she passes. Beware of her, Sirit Byar!”

  I heard Sirit Byar’s scornful grunt next to me—after six years, there wasn’t a grunt or a snort of his I couldn’t translate. But I wasn’t scornful, I’ll tell you that much. I said I’ve never been frightened, and it’s true, but madmen—madwomen—make me uneasy, if you like. Madwomen in the dark make me very uneasy. Sirit Byar pushed the door open. Just before we went inside, I looked back at Aung Jatt. He was standing exactly where we had left him, and he was laughing without making a sound.

  It was a fine, proud house, certainly—and remember, I’ve slept in a palace. Felt bigger inside than outside somehow, and it felt soft, too—lots of thick Tahi’rak rugs and drapes and those buttery cushions they sew in Fors out of traders’ old saddle-blankets. Hardly an inch of floor or wall showing: the whole place was made like a cradle, like a special box you keep something precious and breakable in. Servants slipped past us without a word, or anyway their shadows did, for I couldn’t hear their footsteps, nor our own, come to that. I couldn’t hear the front door swing shut, or any sound from the outside once it had. What I did hear was someone breathing. It wasn’t Sirit Byar, and it wasn’t me—I don’t think either of us had breathed since we came through that door. Sirit Byar touched my shoulder and nodded me left, toward the stair. You’d expect a house like this to have a grand spiral stairway, but this was just a narrow little one, not room enough for the two of us to go abreast. Sirit Byar had to hold the kiit tight against his side to keep it from hitting the railing. I followed him, not thinking too much, not feeling anything, because why not? Where else was I to go right then?