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

by Peter S. Beagle

  Lisonje, as is her way, reversed her field and took his side without the least concern for consistency. “Dardis, he is absolutely right. I don’t care what you promised Gol—”

  “I promised him nothing,” I snapped at her. “He did all the promising. He made it very clear that if we don’t do as he wishes, we won’t have a theatre once the Jiril’s gone—”

  “You won’t have a cast if you do,” Chachak burst out. “We may only be a gang of fourth-rate bumpkins—oh, we know what you think of us, Dardis!—but we aren’t stupid. We’ve no theatre to lose, just our lives. The moment they learn who wrote that speech—”

  “But they won’t,” I said. “Will they, Chachak?”

  Well, there’s no point going into ignoble detail here. For a rapacious consideration, Chachak eventually swore on the unmarked graves of his unwashed grandparents never to reveal to his fellows the authorship of King Vilnanash’s new climactic oration. I counted less on that than on my threat to make certain that he never worked again for any reputable company this side of the Barrens if he betrayed me. I could promise such things with authority, in those days.

  Lisonje said afterward that she didn’t know which of us she was more ashamed of. I paid her no heed then, and I wouldn’t today, even knowing what I know. For people like you and me, artistic principle is not what people like Gol think it is. For us, the first principle of art is to feed your company, then to keep your company as safe and as whole as possible, to find them work and get them to it. And always, always to make sure they are adequately rehearsed. The rest—honor, courage, vision, taste—that’s all luxury. That comes after.

  The speech went in. It was mine to deliver, after all, and you well know how little attention actors pay to speeches that aren’t theirs. I had only to change two or three lines in the scene to accommodate it; within a few days you couldn’t have told the difference. No real harm done to the ending, no curiosity about the origins of the new passage. Chachak kept his mouth shut, as he had pledged, though I felt sourly certain that I had overpaid him for his silence. The company surely never would have panicked at the thought of Gol opaquely suggesting that his father abdicate. They knew the Jiril, and they knew his blowhard sons—more than likely they’d simply have laughed the whole idea away and gone on practicing their entrances and costume changes. I rather expected Lisonje to change course again and deride me for having let a clod like Chachak swindle me, but she never said a word. I should have taken that for an omen, if nothing else.

  Then Javeri paid us a visit.

  A week or ten days after Gol, I think it was—maybe less. He turned up at the start of a morning rehearsal, as his brother had done; but instead of waylaying me directly, he planted himself in one of the grand chairs always reserved for the Jiril’s family and sat expressionlessly through the entire runthrough, looking like nothing so much as a swollen, royally inflamed carbuncle. I found this disturbing—not his appearance, which was normal, but his patience, which was not. Javeri had no manners that the Jiril had not beaten into him, and those few were hardly to be squandered on his inferiors. Nevertheless, he waited until the players were dispersing before he approached me. He even attempted civility, growling that he’d seen worse companies than ours, before he dragged me into a corner and pulled the ball of crumpled pages from his pocket.

  “Not my sort of play, this, you understand,” he grunted. “Old-fangled, no delicacy of wit in it, no true philosophy, no precise balancing of humors choleric and melancholic, such as one finds in K’daro-daraf.” Try to imagine a nishoru, one of those flightless eight-foot-high man-eating birds they have up north—as I say, try to imagine a nishoru reciting classical poetry, and you may have some idea of Javeri’s presence. He went on, “But since the old brute insists on your staging the thing, here’s a bit to fix up the big scene with Vilnanash’s bastard. No, no, don’t thank me. Least, very least a person who cares about theatre could do.”

  Unlike Gol, he read it to me on the spot. The scene is the one in which the king’s beloved son Sakha breaks with his father over the issue of granting freedom and independence to a beleaguered enclave of runaway slaves who have taken refuge in the marshes. Vilnanash refuses, and Sakha spits in his face and goes to live with the fugitives and, eventually, to share their fate. It’s quite the best scene in the play, and Trygvalin and I did it well, underplaying as we built up to the point of Sakha’s sudden shocking revolt. Even now you have to watch Trygvalin every minute, or he’ll turn elocutionist on you; but I had him properly—if temporarily—disciplined just then, and the very last thing he needed was to have some new melodramatic tirade shoved into his hands. But there was nothing more for it than there had been with Gol. I sat down where I was and listened.

  What, say you so? And that’s your final word?

  Why, then, I name you no king but a beast.

  No father but a cruel degenerate,

  A heartless, ruthless, vile, vengeful villain,

  Whom all are honor-bound to overthrow,

  To drag his putrid, stinking reign to ruin,

  To celebrate the fall of such a fiend

  And quench our swords in his inglorious blood!

  There was a good deal more along those lines, but you get the general tone. All I could manage to say, once Javeri finished, was, “I thought spitting in his father’s face expressed his emotions rather concisely.” Javeri loomed over me, making unpleasant sounds to himself. I went on, “It lacks a certain balancing of humors, wouldn’t you say?”

  “So does the whole bloody play, I told you,” Javeri growled. “But just you put that speech in as it stands, and you’ll see the groundlings on their feet, I promise you. That’s what we want, after all, isn’t it?” When I was slow to reply, he squinted down his great pimply fist of a nose at me, as though he were taking aim, and repeated, “Isn’t it, Dardis?”

  For all his size and aggressiveness, Javeri generally intimidated people less than Gol, and decidedly less than Torleg. I would never have dared speak to either of them as I answered him. “Javeri, I thank you most humbly for your efforts on behalf of our company, but the speech will not do. It is completely unnecessary to the scene, and clumsily written besides.” I’m quite sure I actually added that last, and fairly sure that I then bowed and turned to walk away. Hard to remember one’s blocking from so long ago.

  Javeri spluttered, as one could have predicted. He seized my shoulder and whirled me around, thundering, “Imbecile, that speech is perfect for that scene!” He had a tendency to spit when he talked, now I think of it. I pried vainly at his fingers, all the while telling him, “For one thing, it is utterly redundant, overstated. Excessive.”

  “It is not!” Javeri roared back. “It’s lean and economical, and well you know it! It makes that stupid, boring scene move, for a change!”

  “Move? It would stop the play in its tracks!” Considering that he had me completely off the ground at that point, I do think I was remarkably firm and composed.

  Javeri was turning an interesting sunset color: mottled mauve, with a green underlay. “And so it bloody well should stop it! If you want the truth, Dardis, that speech is too good for that miserable relic of a play!”

  “And if you want the truth, it’s the worst speech I have ever heard in my life!” Which is actually untrue, to be fair. I’d been a showman for a very long time, even then.

  Javeri dropped me. His voice was very quiet when he spoke again: frightening, that can be, when you’re used to a bully’s empty bellow. He said, “It’s mine.”

  We looked at each other. Javeri said, still in the same soft, unnaturally precise voice, “It is mine, Dardis. You will put my speech in the scene, and you will see it performed exactly as I’ve written it. Exactly. Because I am who I am, and you are who you are, and that is how things are. Do you understand me?”

  I didn’t say anything. I bowed. Javeri glowered at me a moment longer, and then shoved the pages at me again, whipped his cloak around with a swirling flourish
that ended by hitting himself in the eye with the heavy hem, and lurched away. And I? I had just time for a cup of hot boreen, to calm myself down a bit, before calling the company back to work. When I introduced the new speech, Lisonje looked up sharply, but she neither protested then, nor said anything at all for the rest of the day. I found this distinctly unnerving. As for Trygvalin, he looked as though he had been left a fortune by a total stranger. More lines. Nothing, then or now, has ever made Trygvalin happier than having more lines.

  Lisonje came to see me that evening. (I should mention that, although the rest of the Jiril’s Players were housed together, as manager I had my own cottage down at the end of a tiny flowering alley just off the main square.) It was not unusual for her or any other of the senior players to call on me there, but it was surprising that she had not come to berate me for knuckling under to Javeri as I had to Gol. She appeared subdued, pensive, even anxious—none of which is natural to Lisonje—but she came directly to the point, which is. Straightaway she asked me, “What do you plan to do when Torleg hands you the speech he wants in the play?”

  “What makes you think he will?” It was a stupid question, and I knew it, and Lisonje surely heard it in my voice. She said, “Torleg next, then Davao—not because he’s the youngest, but because it will take him that long to get the idea. Dardis, each of those four idiots has his followers, and all those idiots are waiting for a signal to rise against the Jiril, and that’s what those speeches are. We’re rehearsing rallying cries, Dardis, calls to arms. That’s the truth.”

  “We don’t know that,” I answered lamely. “I am not about to chance angering any of them on your suspicion that one or another might be planning some half-baked revolt. True or not, it’s no business of ours. We are entertainers, Lisonje. We entertain.”

  “‘We entertain,’” Lisonje mimicked me—she has a brutal gift that way. “Dardis, I’ve known you too long to expect you to understand. I just want you to remember what I say now. We are going to be the ones caught in the middle when whatever is to happen happens—we are going to be the ones blamed for whatever happens, half-baked or not. But we could still avoid this, if you had the courage to cut every single word of theirs out of the play. You don’t even have to tell them—let them find out when we open.” She gripped my shoulders hard, and I was startled to feel her fingers trembling. “I promise you, if you do this, you will be so grateful to me that you’ll make an impossible nuisance of yourself thanking me every ten minutes. I promise you, Dardis.”

  Oh, yes, yes, it’s easy enough to say now that I should have taken her advice unquestioningly. But I still cannot honestly say that things would have been any better if I had. I quite liked the Jiril, but I feared his children: unlike their father, they all knew how to hold grudges very tenderly, as one might hold a baby bird. He would most likely have forgotten my supposed courage in a week; they never would. Call me coward.

  So I did nothing. Javeri’s speech was added to the scene, and though this time I needed to do a good bit of trimming and shifting to make it look as though it belonged there, the stitches showed hardly at all, if I say so myself. Indeed, the cast generally seemed to prefer the altered version. Trygvalin devoured his new lines in a single gulp, neither questioning nor comprehending them. Chachak looked horrified, but never said a word; and even the Jiril himself, when he threw us into hysterical disarray by appearing unannounced at a rehearsal, seemed hardly to notice the two additions at all. I think he commented on Gol’s speech for King Vilnanash, saying something like, “Completely forgot the man abdicates, been such a time since I saw the thing. Very moving, very moving.” When he left I sighed an immense, grateful sigh and smiled triumphantly at Lisonje. She pretended not to have seen me.

  Then came Torleg.

  Your pardon, but I need another drink. No, it is my turn, it must be. I was never a stingy man—no, nor a sponge. The worst anyone can say of me is that a certain professional vanity sometimes leads me to assume that because I know much, I know all. Sometimes. Yes. But that was not my failing in this instance, whatever Lisonje says. It was not pride that undid me, but fear; and not even that so much as a sense of responsibility that has too often been my ruin. Perhaps you have something of the same problem? Yes, I thought you might.

  Where was I? Right. Torleg made his appearance, not at the theatre, but in a hot, grimy warehouse by the river, where I had gone alone to rummage for a particular bolt of russet stuff for King Vilnanash’s first-act costume. It was not a place where anyone would expect to encounter the Jiril’s cleverest, best-beloved, and most dangerous son; and in candor, when I turned a corner on my way out, collided with Torleg’s broad chest, and peered over my roll of cloth to see that terrifyingly beautiful face smiling down at me, those coldly merry blue eyes twinkling away—very well, I came as close as you like to wetting myself. I told you Torleg had that effect on me.

  “Well met, Dardis,” he purred—he was the only one of that lot who could really purr, if you understand me. Gol could do it, after a fashion, but it was never more than a shadow of that treacherously warm rumble of his brother’s. He repeated, “Well, met indeed, how truly fortuitous. Here you are, a man seeking ways to nick out a drab antique play, all for my father’s amusement, and here am I, entirely at your service. Do but tell me what scene you wish enhanced, what speech spiced, what verse revivified—I’ll have it for you tomorrow, and thank you for the opportunity besides.” He threw an arm around my shoulders, leaning toward me like a lover. “Now speak to me, Dardis, say how I may help you. Are we not both lowly servants of the Jiril?”

  Have I drawn him at all for you? I am an actor—have I shown you something of his beguiling power? It was laced through with humor, you see, always—he was also the only member of his family who had even a touch of that; though Gol, again, could feign it for a little. As deeply as he had always frightened me, in less time than I care to confess, I had let slip to him that both of his older brothers had already made the same offer, though I still think I managed to avoid any mention of their interpolated passages without ever directly lying to him. Perhaps I deceive myself, but it hardly matters—Torleg was far too wily to believe for a moment that Gol and Javeri had sought me out for any reason but his own, or to imagine that I could have denied them with impunity. His arm never left my shoulders, tightening the more cozily as he assured me that he had no speeches to force into my hands—and my play—but only waited to be told how he might make himself useful to me.

  Yes, well, get it over with, Dardis. In no bloody time at all, I found myself asking him—asking, mind you!—to tidy a troublesome second-act scene in which a drunken sorceress predicts to King Vilnanash that he will soon be overthrown by a despised alliance of small merchants and apprentice boys, because the gods have abandoned him. Nususir could handle the drama of the role, no one better; but there’s comedy to it as well, and dear Nususir simply cannot play comedy—that’s Lisonje’s job. I told Torleg that I wished someone could rearrange the scene, shifting the humorous elements from Nususir’s shoulders and leaving her free to do what she does best, which is pronounce doom. There, it is confessed. I was neither bullied nor coerced nor blackmailed, but simply seduced into conniving at my own downfall. I saw what was happening, understood it perfectly, and still could do nothing about it. There it is.

  As he had promised, Torleg met me next day with the altered scene, handing it to me with the anxiously delighted air of any youth who dreams of running away with the players. He had quite daringly given the sorceress’s comedy lines to a mocking, disbelieving Vilnanash, where they fit as though they had always belonged there. Ironically, I completely missed the three lines of his own that he had given her, as though by way of compensation. Lisonje it was who pointed them out.

  And it is writ your foes shall muster this new moon

  by washmaids’ humble pool, where once a despot fell,

  to share their weapons out and ready them th’attack.

  The reference meant nothin
g to either of us, but it did to Trygvalin, oddly enough. He’d had a rendezvous with some local girl a few days before, and she had met him at a little stony hollow beyond the city gates, long dry and so overgrown with scraggly weeds that Trygvalin would never have seen it if not for the girl. A generation past, she told him, it had been a deep, spring-fed pond where all of Derridow’s laundresses gathered to chatter and work. Then the spring failed, and the washerwomen moved down to the river, and the pool’s existence was forgotten by all but a few. One of those, apparently, was Torleg.

  “Well, there’s three,” Lisonje said with a tired sigh. “I wonder where Davao will want his revolutionaries to assemble. Probably in the Jiril’s kitchen—it’s hungry work, overthrowing tyrants.” She had long since given up expostulating with me, and seemed if anything resigned to our situation, whatever it was. I add that because I myself had no real notion of how much trouble we were in, nor had Lisonje, let her say what she likes. What did it mean, after all, that three of the Jiril’s sons were planting messages to their devotees in our harmless old play? They might all try to stage a rebellion at the same time, or they might just as easily go off and get drunk together. Derridow was a famously peaceful town in those days, always had been; you can have no idea how absurd it seemed to imagine a violent end to that bumbling placidity. Ah, well, we know better now, don’t we? Mmm, yes, why not, thank you. Your health. Everybody’s health.

  No. No, Davao wasn’t the next to seek me out. The girl was next.

  I didn’t? Oh, I ask your pardon, but there you are. Even now I invariably forget Firial, the Jiril’s only daughter. Older than Davao by a year or two, she was—quiet girl, a pleasant creature; and in that family there was no surer way to oblivion than being quiet and pleasant. The Jiril himself quite forgot on occasion that he even had a daughter, and her mother always seemed vaguely irritated with Firial, as though on principle. Likely that was why she so rarely attended the theatre—which may give me some slight justification for not recognizing her when she spoke to me on the street. I was walking to clear my head after one of those nightmare rehearsals you invariably get when everyone knows his part altogether too well, and is deathly bored with it. That’s one thing, anyway, about playing the provinces out of a couple of wagons—whatever else, we’re all long, long past that particular stage. We’re bored with everything we do, but we know in the marrow of our bones how it’s done. Perhaps that’s actually preferable to what we had in Derridow. I doubt it.