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

by Peter S. Beagle

  You’ve never been anywhere near a mountain, so I suppose I’d better tell you about being in the mountains. It’s cold, that’s one thing—maybe not all the time, but most always. And the roads are bad, when there are any roads, and you spend hours just crawling, scrambling, scuttling along on all fours. And all the while you’re doing that, the air’s growing thin and thinner, till you feel too weak to scratch your head and breathing doesn’t do you any good at all. And there are the rock-targs.

  You don’t even know what a rock-targ looks like do you? All that carrying on about them being under your bed, and you don’t even know…. You remember when your cousin Bai killed that lourijakh that climbed on the roof, trying to get in? Well, those are a little like rock-targs, only not as big, of course, not nearly as big. And the rock-targs’ faces look more human somehow, and they can almost talk—not really talk, but it makes it worse. You don’t ever find many of them in one spot, but in those days they were still scattered over Torgry Mountain and that whole northern range. Because of the kagi, there used to be a lot of wild kagi up on the high crags. But it doesn’t matter—they’re always hungry, always hunting. And they’d rather eat people. Your lourijakh doesn’t care, he’ll eat anything, but a rock-targ can smell you a mile upwind, and he’ll leave a fresh kill to come after you. No, I can’t tell you why, how do I know? It’s just the way they are.

  Well, in those days your Grandfather Selsim didn’t know much more about rock-targs than you do. No reason he should have—I told you, they don’t come down into the low country, thank the gods for something anyway. And mountain folk don’t usually see them either, unless it’s too late. Oh, they stay out of sight, but they’re there.

  I’m scaring you now? Well, there’s just no pleasing you, is there? First you’re at me and at me to tell you all about giants and rock-targs and how I know you’re going to be as tall as the rest of us—next minute, there you are, head under the blanket, just carrying on. Shall I leave off the story, then? I’d just as soon, it’s a deal more work than I expected. Your mother does it all so easily, every night, I don’t know how she does it. You go off to sleep then, and I’ll bed down with the jejebhai. Sooner or later she’s bound to give in and drop those… what? No. Well.

  Your Grandfather Selsim, he didn’t know how high the mountains were, nor what grew or moved in them, nor what was on the other side. Some of the foothill folk gave him work to do, and a little food for doing it, and when he asked them the best way across the range, everyone said there wasn’t any pass but the one over Torgry Mountain. Not that it was a real pass, nothing even like a real pass, but I’ll get to that. Now, today, you can flank the range, just go all the way around—it takes forever, but you can do it. But back then, no road, only that mountain track. And your Grandfather Selsim never was much for going around things, people always say that.

  Yes, naturally, everyone warned him about the rock-targs. They all said he’d best wait for winter, when the beasts get a bit sluggish, and you can see them better against the snow, so you’ve some sort of a chance to escape. But you can’t cross the bloody range in winter—not then, not today—so what difference? And all those people told your Grandfather Selsim first one thing and then another about what rock-targs look like and what they do, so by and by he understood that not a one of them knew one thing for certain. So he said to the churfa as he set off again, “Well, we’ll just go carefully, you and l, mind our manners and keep our wits about us, and might be we’ll jog along all right. Carried us this far, anyway, manners and wits.”

  But I think what he really put his faith in was the big old dasko knife he had from his father: the real South Island make, it was, double-edged and so long that it stuck out a bit at both ends of his blanket roll. I haven’t seen one of those in years—what? No, we don’t still have it. I’ll tell you why in a minute. Do you interrupt your mother all the time, every night, when she’s telling you a story? I don’t know how she does it.

  Right, right. Up went your Grandfather Selsim into the high country, with that mean little scribble of a road twitching and jiggling underfoot, until suddenly there wasn’t any road, and it wasn’t plain high country anymore, it was pure Torgry Mountain, and he had to dismount and lead the churfa, even with those clawed feet they have. And from there on he probably learned a deal about mountains in a very short time. How you’re always thirsty, doesn’t matter how cold it is, because the thin air dries the water right out of you. How you can climb for hours, and then look down and you’d swear you’re hardly any higher than when you started out, except that back down there the sun’s so bright you can see the shadows on the ground, and where you are it’s gray and windy as—as what?—as your Uncle Tavdal. And how there’s nothing like mountain quiet, and how sounds and smells are all so clear they almost hurt, and how they seem so much closer than they really are. Which is not good if you’re listening for monsters and winding their lairs. And you can’t mistake the rock-targ scent, even if you’ve never seen one. Even if you don’t know the bloody name of whatever smells like that, you know.

  Oh, no. You’ll just get frightened again if I tell you—I’m not going through that a second time, thanks ever so kindly. Besides, I’ve only sniffed a few places where they’d been long before, and that’s nothing like what your Grandfather Selsim had in his throat. I’ll tell you this much—just that shadow of a smell and I was pissing down my legs, each time. Oh, you like that, that’s funny, is it? Well, then you can just laugh yourself sick thinking what the fresh stink probably did to Grandfather Selsim. All I know is that the churfa screamed like a demon in foal, the way they do, and it reared and threw him, right there, and ran off back the way they’d come. Never did see it again.

  Well, what do you think he did? With the beast carrying everything he owned in the world? Of course, he went after it, and a good thing, too. Not that he caught up, but at least he did chance on the blanket roll—yes, yes, dasko knife and all—tangled in the brush that must have snatched it off the churfa’s back. So he’d sleep warm, whatever, and maybe having the big knife was some comfort to him. That first day or two, anyway.

  Far as anyone knows, nothing at all worried him those two days, except for the little matter of something to eat. I’m sure lower down he dug up some of those tanku roots you can’t stand, and then higher up he probably found some wild mountain radishes. They aren’t real radishes, but you can eat them raw, so your Grandfather Selsim can’t have gone too hungry on Torgry. Come nightfall, he must have slept in the open. Had to have the sense not to go into a cave. Late spring, it could have been worse.

  But by the third day he’d have climbed above the snowline.

  Now I’m not saying that everything changes the moment you take the first step into the first snowdrift. The birds don’t stop singing, and things still grow—although by now you’re down mostly to shrubs and cloudberries and wizeny little sulsawi-trees—and you don’t see skeletons lying around everywhere and rock-targs jumping out at you from every direction. It’s not like that. It’s just the quiet gets quieter—well, it just does—and it gets colder as you go higher, and the shadows move quicker over the snow. Sometimes you see a flock of kagi away off on a ridge, all blue and ripply horned and so pretty. Only, all the time you’re watching them, you keep knowing what else is watching, too, and watching you, and choosing.

  Rock-targs hunt by day. Get safely past sundown, you’ll be all right until morning. Story has it they’re afraid of the moon, but I couldn’t say. Anyway, your Grandfather Selsim would have been moving right on up Torgry Mountain, nearing dusk of that first day, probably some pleased with himself for managing as well as he was doing, alone, on foot, all his provisions gone. He couldn’t have known it, but another good day would have seen him to the summit, and an easy enough journey down from there. And if it had happened so, who knows where we’d all be? Or who? Hey?

  Gods, that was her! Sorry, boy, but we made our bargain. Ask your mother… no, no, she’s just belching. They do t
hat a lot when it’s near time. No, I wasn’t teasing you, I really thought—all right, all right, I’m sorry, be quiet! You do want to hear the rest of the tale? Then not another word, hear me? Not one word!

  All right, then. I don’t know just where or when the rock-targ came across the snowfield at your grandfather. One thing I know, he never heard it coming, because you don’t; they can move like smoke, no mind how big they are. Only reason he wasn’t killed in that first rush, it seems he turned for some reason—a bird, maybe a cloud red-gold with the sun behind it—and the thing’s charge ripped his left shoulder open, spun him, and knocked him twenty feet away, all over blood and next to unconscious, surely. He carried that scar the rest of his life, Grandfather Selsim, and the arm never worked right again. The eye, too. It caught his left eye, some way.

  I told you, I’ve never seen a rock-targ close to, myself, and I don’t expect you’ll ever meet anyone who has. But one thing people do say, when they’re over you, gobbling their almost-talk and ready to tear you apart, their faces slide right up and back, straight back, showing the whole skull beneath. Now I can’t tell you how that could be, I can’t imagine it, and it’s likely not true. But that’s what people say.

  When the creature came at him again, your Grandfather Selsim had just strength and wit enough to drag out his dasko knife and hold it on his belly, point up. They always go for the belly first, that’s a fact anyway. And the rock-targ snatched the knife away from him and bit it in half! Right in half. And I know this is true, because I’ve seen the two pieces—your Uncle Lenelosi has them now, you can see them when we visit next. What? Because he’s older than I am, will you hush? Yes, I’m sure we’ll get them when Uncle Lenelosi dies. Will you hush?

  All right. I won’t say your Grandfather Selsim gave himself up for lost, but I certainly don’t know what else he could have done, what with that thing blotting out the sky, its triple row of fangs becoming another kind of sky. Their spit burns if it gets on you, did you know that? He carried a few of those scars to his grave, too, I’ve been told.

  And then.

  Then a pair of hands as big as—as big as, I don’t know, big as two plows they must have looked to Grandfather Selsim—took hold of the rock-targ, one at the back of its human neck, one wrapped right around those hindquarters that were already curling off the ground to rip your grandfather’s belly clean out of his body. For a moment he saw it hanging up there, looking little and foolish, too bewildered even to snap its jaws. The hands shook it once; they shook it the way your mother snaps a sheet still wet from the river before she hangs it out on the line. Your grandfather heard the creature’s back break, just before he fainted. Or maybe he fainted just afterward, when the big hands reached down for him. It was very long ago, and I wasn’t there.

  Anyway, however it happened, your Grandfather Selsim didn’t remember another thing until he was suddenly wide awake and hurting everywhere as he’d never hurt in his life. Somebody’d neatly bound up his shoulder with his own torn shirt, and he was lying in a heap of leaves, looking up with his one good eye into what he thought were trees, great ragged trees with dark moons floating in their branches. It took him a long, long while to understand that those weren’t moons but huge bearded faces, not just bearded but swallowed up in mucky black hair that wasn’t really like a beard at all. And the size of them… well, they weren’t nearly as big as trees, but close enough, close enough; Nobody knows, not anymore, but from what I’ve been told I’d guess they’d have been between twelve and maybe fourteen feet tall. Now your Uncle Tavdal, he says they couldn’t have been that tall, says bones wouldn’t carry bodies that heavy. Your Uncle Tavdal is a fool.

  They were talking to each other, the faces were. Grandfather Selsim could feel the words, not so much hear them, right through his body, thumping and thrumming in his bones. Because their voices were so deep, you see. At first he figured they were like rock-targs that way, just imitating the cries of the things they killed. But then he got to realizing that the words made sentences, and that they sounded a little like the same dialect the foothill folk used, only with strange grumbles and gurgles mixed in. And after another really long time, the sentences even started to make some sense. They were about him. The hairy faces were trying to decide what to do about him.

  He couldn’t tell them apart, of course, not then, not at all. What he could tell was that most of them were for getting rid of him, doing him in—what? Well, how should I know? Likely just by leaving him there to starve or freeze or bleed to death. Maybe by stepping on his head, all right? If you want to hear the rest of this story, not another question. I can’t believe you ask your mother so many questions.

  Why did the giants want to kill him? Well, I was getting to that, if you hadn’t interrupted. Best your Grandfather Selsim could make out, they were afraid he would tell the other humans about them. It didn’t matter whether he meant them any harm—once humans know about you, you come to harm, that’s how it is. Well, I’m not saying that, that’s how those giants felt. And maybe it’s so. I’m not saying.

  They were the last ones, you see, the giants of Torgry Mountain, and they knew they were the last. “Giants know when giants go,” that’s something people always say your Grandfather Selsim always said. The odd thing, the funny thing, is that in those days it was the rock-targs that kept this lot of giants from being discovered. People were that afraid of the rock-targs, they wouldn’t ever cross the mountain except in winter, and not many then. Now I don’t know if the giants knew that the rock-targs were protecting them, just by being there, being what they were. Wouldn’t have made any difference, chances are.

  But that all comes later. Meanwhile, your Grandfather Selsim was lying there, looking away high at those great dark shaggy faces, hoping even one giant would speak for keeping him, though he couldn’t think why they should want to. For the babies to teethe on, maybe, the way you chewed that stuffed sheknath I made you to pieces. He just lay still and hurt, and hoped.

  And one giant did speak for him. Right when he was giving himself up a second time, one giant did speak out.

  Oh, you knew that would happen? There you are, then, the smartest child who ever interrupted his father’s story one time too many. Then you’ll know what the giant said, and what came of it, and I’ll be off to the barn, good night to you. The jejebhai’s making that sound again.

  No? Really? Well, there may be something to this storytelling business, after all. I’m holding you to that promise, don’t think I’ll forget. Get back in that bed and keep still.

  The giant who put in a word for your Grandfather Selsim was the biggest and hairiest of them, and smelled the worst. Not but what they all stank like—what? Because they did, because they just smelled that way, that’s all, worse than rock-targs, even. Yes, I’m sure they smelled all right to each other. What was it you just promised?

  Anyway. Your grandfather felt that biggest giant saying to the others, “I will keep this little one. It was I who killed the rock-targ, so this one belongs to me, and it is my choice to keep him. No more talk.”

  And there it stuck, though they kept at it until your grandfather had to roll himself up in a ball and cover his ears. Well, you think what a roomful of giants shouting and arguing would feel like if it was all booming around in your body. It went on a good long while, too.

  But all the booming and bellowing didn’t make any difference. That biggest giant seemed to be someone really grand among them, because the others couldn’t shift him an inch, and they couldn’t say no to him either. So at last they gave up, they wandered off one by one, rumbling away like thunderheads, and were gone into the trees like that. Took him the longest while to get used to it, your Grandfather Selsim, the way those great crashing things could just not be there, disappear without a sound when they wanted to. I’ve been told he got so he could do it himself, but I wouldn’t swear to that.

  Well, he figured he might as well stand up as not, so he grabbed on to a low-hanging branch and pul
led himself up on his feet. He was a small-made man, your grandfather—now this is important, why do you think I’m telling you this bloody story?—and they say he stood about knee-high to that creature that looked down at him, not saying a thing with the others gone, watching him silently out of its shadowy black eyes. Your Grandfather Selsim got tired of that in a hurry, and he tilted his head back and bawled, “Can you hear me?”

  No answer. He tries again, loud as he can—“Do you understand me?” Nothing more aggravating than someone staring at you and not speaking. I don’t care who it is.

  Then the giant laughed at him. They say your grandfather had to hang on hard to that branch to keep from falling, because the ground shivered under his feet, but maybe that’s just talk. Maybe it’s just he was so amazed at the notion of those faces even smiling, let alone laughing like that. The giant slapped his legs—must have sounded like trees snapping when it’s so cold the sap freezes—and dropped down, squatting, leaning in close. Your Grandfather Selsim didn’t back away. The giant said, keeping his voice as low as he could, “My name is Dudrilashashek”—or something like that, your grandfather wasn’t ever really sure. “Do you have a name, little one?”

  “Of course I have a name!” your grandfather yelled up into that face. “Why wouldn’t I have a name?”

  “No need to shout,” the giant answered—he was almost whispering himself, but with every word he spoke your grandfather’s hair blew straight back. “There are so many of you, and you swarm around so, squeaking and chittering. How are we to know if you all have proper names? If you think of yourselves as yourselves?” He talked like that, I’m not making it up. That’s just how your Grandfather Selsim said he talked.