“Why did you leave?” Her hand was beginning to respond—I have no idea why that island trick works as it does, and I am never comfortable with the sense of near-scalding water pumping through my own flesh, even though I know it to be illusion. But it does work.
Nyateneri shrugged. “I was invited to become a force in the convent, and beyond it. They had been training me for this since my childhood, and the time had now come for me to take my place with them, a superior being among superior beings. I was honored in a way, even grateful, and I still am. If they had not offered me the chance of power, I might never have been certain—as I was, on the instant—that power was not what I wanted. To spend the rest of my life as a sort of ringmaster of secrets, to be trapped forever in the dreary hidey-holes of the great with old unspeakable histories hanging head-down from the roof of my mouth, like sleeping bats—no, no, that bony little northern girl never agreed to that.“ Nyateneri struck the table again, with her wine-mug this time; but then she looked away and spoke very softly, not at all to us but to the fox, no doubt of it. ”She agreed to many things that she had no objection to, and to some others as well, but she never agreed to that.”
The fox looked straight back at her and yawned very deliberately, as he had on the night of our meeting. They know each other like lovers, I thought, past love itself, past hatred, past questions, past trust or betrayal. I wondered how they had met, and how long ago, and how long foxes live. Nyateneri went on, “You cannot say no to such an offer. It is not allowed. So I said yes. I said, yes, thank you, I am not worthy.”
“And you ran away that same night.” Lukassa, leaning forward, brown eyes living Nyateneri’s tale exactly as they lived any legend I ever told her. Nyateneri’s thin, short smile. “I knew they would guard my door that night. I was gone within an hour. I have been running ever since.”
Now some of the drovers crash past the door, yelling, laughing, spitting, stumbling into each other—Efranis, westerners far from home, by their curses. Karsh’s sudden voice, quieting them—not a growl, but the sound that a large animal makes before the real growl. That fat man knows how to run an inn, whatever else he chooses not to know. The holy couple keep to their chanting, as we to our grim drinking. This is all so long ago.
“Well,” I said. “Perhaps when this news gets back, the convent will grow tired of sending out killers to be killed.” Nyateneri drew a very long breath, plainly about to reply. Then, instead, she stood up and walked to the window, looking out at dark leaves and a few stars. I said, “Perhaps there will be no more teams after this one.”
How long did it take her to turn and look at me? A long time, I think, but drink slows much down for me, so that I cannot be sure. It seemed a long time. Perhaps she never turned at all—I only remember her words, and the sound of her voice, whispering, “I have not told you everything,” and bringing me instantly to my feet, wine or no wine, saying, “No, of course not, you never do.” Did I shout it? I think I shouted. I really think I knew what was coming.
“There are always three of them,” she said. “Always.” Did we hear the first quiet steps on the stairs then, or just after, after I had begun screaming at her again? Nyateneri said, “Lal, be still, I am telling you the truth. The third moves apart from the other two; he watches, but he is not with them. He is always the cleverest, they make sure of that. He is never far away. Be still, be quiet, Lal.” The knock came then, very gentle; you almost had to be listening for it.
NYATENERI
I was praying that it would be anyone but him. Anyone. I would have welcomed that third assassin, right then, sword hand no good and the rest of me feeling in much the same shape as those two stiffening underground. Just not him, not now, if it please any interested deity. I am exhausted and afraid, and I cannot tell what will happen. I am afraid to see him now.
Lal rose to open the door. I said, “Don’t,” not meaning to say it. Lal looked at me. I stood up myself then.
LAL
When I stood, the room pulsed in and out around me, and I had to close my eyes because the blurry throb of the candles made me dizzy. For that moment I could not even see Nyateneri clearly as she moved to the door. But my mind was knife-cold. I braced myself with the back of the chair, and I thought, Stupid, stupid, I should not have touched the wine again, not after the bathhouse. Whoever is on the other side of that door, killer or drover or pot-boy, could slaughter the stupid three of us as we stand. What is happening, what have I let myself come to? I put Lukassa behind me. My hands were sweating so that the swordcane slipped and slipped between them, and would not come open.
THE FOX
Yesyesyesyes, I smell him. I smell them all. Pigeons, too.
ROSSETH
The actors came in late and quarrelsome, but they didn’t wake Tikat. They didn’t wake me, either, for I hadn’t even tried to sleep. I was sitting up in the loft, watching the moon start down and Tikat trying to claw his way through the straw pallet I had fixed for him. Lisonje, the one I always liked, climbed the ladder and popped her bewigged head through the trapdoor to ask me, “How fares our sylvan swain?”
“Well enough, so’t please you, madam,” I answered, “in the body.” Every time the troupe came to stay with us—two or three weeks of every summer I could remember—I would be talking like them by the time they left again, and Karsh would spend the next week at least growling and grinding it out of me. I told Lisonje what had happened when Lukassa returned—no more than that—and she leaned on her elbows and regarded Tikat for a while without saying anything. She was still in her paint and costume as the wicked Lord Hassidanya’s mistress, and she looked like a child who has been up very late with grown people.
“Once,” she said finally, “and not too long ago, either, I would have shooed you down this ladder and lain down in that straw with him, for comfort’s sake. And I might even now, if he were someone else and would not hate me and himself so stupidly afterward.“ She thought about it a moment longer, then shook her head briskly and said, ”No, not even then, no, I wouldn’t. I’m done with comforting, must remember that.“ Patting my hand, she started back down, but she put her head in again to say, ”Rosseth, be watchful with him. I’ve seen that kind of heartbreak sleep before. If I were you, I’d wake him every so often. He doesn’t want ever to wake again.”
She slept quickly, as did the others. I did not move until I could identify every snore from every stall, from old Dardis’ whinnying blasts to Lisonje’s dainty chirpings. Then, as she had bid me, I shook Tikat by the shoulder until he blinked at me, whispering to him, “Something worrying the hogs, I must see to them. Go back to sleep.” He cursed me clearly and healthily, and was asleep again before he had turned over in the straw.
I had no choice. I know perfectly well that most people who say that mean only that they have no excuse for the choice, and more than likely I was no different. But I was truly anxious about Nyateneri—where else might she be bloodlessly wounded besides her sword hand?—and it seemed to me that it would do no harm to ask whether I could be of any further aid. As for what Lal had said to me, where had Lal been when Nyateneri and I were at grips with those laughing little men in the bathhouse? We had shared a battle and a kiss, we had faced death together—not shoulder to shoulder, perhaps, but together—and I was entitled, obliged, to see to my comrade’s comfort. Such reasoning it was that took me barefoot down the ladder, all the way to the inn and up the stairs to that room without waking so much as an actor, a hog, or Karsh snoring in the empty taproom, cheek pillowed in the crook of his elbow.
And yes, of course, so many years gone, of course I can say now that I stole up there for one reason alone, and that the old, blind, stamping one that’s had you chuckling so dryly and knowingly to yourself all this time. What else could it have been, eh, at his age? Yet there was more, it was more than only that, even at my age, if not at yours. Let it be. Her mouth and her round brown breasts—let it be that, for now.
NYATENERI
If the
re is one thing in this world that I was raised and trained to know, it is that there is only so much you may ask of the gods. Victory in battle is their lightest gift; a quiet heart is your own concern. Even before I opened the door, I was already lowering my eyes to the point where they would meet his eyes. I think I may already have said his name.
“I was worried,” he said, so low that I could hardly hear him. He said, “Your hand. Is your hand better? I was worried.” There was straw chaff in his hair.
I did not invite him in. That I will swear until my last day. Whatever I may have mumbled, as thick-voiced as he, it was bloody drunken Lal who called behind me, “Welcome, Rosseth—welcome, come and join us, come meet the Dragon’s Daughter.” Bloody Lal, not me. I swear I would have sent him away.
LAL
What does it matter? From the moment we saw him on the threshold, we all knew what was going to happen. Well, no, not everything—at least I didn’t. If I had known? I can’t say. Whether or not it was I invited him in, the real choice was Nyateneri’s. Nyateneri knows that.
Yes, I was drunk—though not nearly drunk enough, by my reckoning—and yes, I was adrift between old, old aches and furies, as I had not been for a very long time. But I do not love out of pain, and I do not desire out of need or fear, no matter how far off my course I am. What went to my heart about Rosseth that midnight—short, square, tangle-headed Rosseth the stable boy—was the way he looked at Nyateneri, somehow seeing her real injury through all the innocently selfish dreams that clouded his eyes. No one has ever looked at me like that; no one ever will; nor do I want to be seen so now, truly, it’s far too late. But just then, just then.
I hope I was the one. I hope it was I who said it: “Oh, come in, Rosseth, come in and welcome.” But I honestly don’t remember.
ROSSETH
No one invited me, not in words. Nyateneri and I looked at each other, and I babbled out whatever I babbled, and then she stepped back from the door and I walked into the room.
This is how it was. They were all standing—Lal behind the table, Lukassa between the bed and the window. The room smelled strongly of wine, of course, and there were empty bottles rolling everywhere; but the three of them were not drunk, not as I understood it then. Drunkenness to me was dragging Gatti Jinni up to his sad garret once a month, or watching Karsh wearily facing down some grinning bargeman with a meat-knife in one hand and a broken bottleneck in the other, with two farmers bleeding and vomiting on the floor. For myself, I rarely got a chance at anything but red ale in those days, and almost never enough of that even to feel drowsy. I never saw Karsh himself drunk, by the way. Karsh only drinks alone.
Yes, naturally I noticed certain things, even I. Nyateneri remained pale and taut as I had left her, but her changing eyes had gone a deep gray with no blue in them whatever, and they were very bright, as exhaustion will make eyes look sometimes. Lal was smiling—not at me, I thought even then, but at something just behind and above me—but the smile seemed to keep wandering from her mouth to her own golden eyes, and then back by way of the warm dark of her cheeks and brow. And Lukassa—Lukassa was the one who looked straight at me in that first moment, with high color in her face and a look of laughter barely held in. I had never seen her look at all like that, and oh, Tikat went through me like a slash of ice. I could not help it.
What did I feel, in that little room with those three women I loved, and the door creeping shut behind me of its own slow weight? What do you think I felt? I was hot and cold by turns: lips and ears afire one minute, stomach frozen solid the next. Lal’s vagrant smile had me trembling until I could hardly stand, while Lukassa’s flushed cheekbones turned me rigid as one of those enchanted idiots in the players’ shows. And Nyateneri? I took her left hand as gently as I could—it seemed to cry out in my grasp, like a trapped animal—and I kissed it, and then I raised up on my toes (only slightly, mind you) and I kissed her on the mouth, saying as loudly as I could, “I love you.” And I had never said that before in my life, although I had been with a woman, more or less.
Nyateneri sighed into my mouth. I can still taste that sigh today, all wine and surrender—more to herself than to me, certainly, but what did I care then? She said something against my lips—I don’t know what it was she said. Over her shoulder I could see the fox in the corner, eyes shut tight, ears and body stiff with attention, red tongue smoothing his whiskers, left, right.
No, I did not sweep her up on the instant and carry her across the room to the bed (so few strides for so great a journey!). In the first place, I would likely enough have injured myself, being new at this, too; in the second, my first step had a wine bottle under it, and Nyateneri herself had to catch me up; and in the third place—well, in the third place there stood Lal and Lukassa. And whatever else you choose to believe of me, and of my story, believe that I was a modest boy. Lustful, certainly; ignorant and fearful, without question; but not vain. Vanity came a stride or two later.
LAL
What happened to me that night has never happened again. Before, yes—I could see my omission in your face—yes, it had happened, if by it you mean my being in a bed with more than one other person. But I had no choice in that situation, and no pleasure in it, and I do not care to speak of it further to you. I am talking about choice, and about something more than choice, more than honest desire—something that I had truly never known, for all my old acquaintance with my own blood. When Nyateneri sighed and took Rosseth fully into her arms, then I had to have him, too. The madness was that sudden, that simple, that complete.
Too much wine, too deep a weeping? Like enough. It certainly had nothing to do with jealousy, with Nyateneri—I hardly saw Nyateneri in that moment, hardly heard anything but my voice saying nearby, “Not without us. Not tonight.”
Why did I say it? And why on earth did I speak for Lukassa, concerned as I surely was just then with nothing on earth but myself? All I can offer for answer is that I must have seen Nyateneri in some way after all, must in some way have read the look she gave me then which was not one of anger, but of terror, pleading, desperation. The boy stood back gaping, poor child, but Lukassa— Lukassa laughed aloud, and the sound was as sweet as the sound that ice-covered twigs make in the spring, chiming and cracking together. I said, “Rosseth is ours. He is our knight, our pure and valiant lover, serving each of us three without favor or demand.” My body was shaking—I could not hold it still—but my voice was calm and slow. It is another trick, one of my oldest, dearly learned. It always works.
“You have well earned your reward,” I said to Rosseth. I walked up to him and I put my hands on his hot face and pulled him down to me. How many jokes and songs there are about kissing the slack-jawed lout from the stables, with manure on his boots and under his nails, mares and stallions his only visions of loving. Rosseth’s mouth was soft and strong at once, and tasted like the first small breeze of a summer’s dawn. His hands on me, when they came, were so tender that I felt myself about to weep all over again, or to scream with laughter, or run out of the room. If he had not held me then, I would have fallen.
It is fortunate that I have had very few chances to learn with what terrible ease gentleness finds my heart. I give thanks for my good fortune every day. Oh yes, I do.
THE FOX
Pigeons. Lift up my nose, no ceiling, no rafters between us. Close my eyes and see rumblysoft pigeon dark, juicy wing-beats filling the air with dust and grain, fluffy little under-feathers drift down. Much talking, much shifty-shuffly on their nests, restless with me. Close their pretty eyes like drops of blood, they see me, too.
Down here, hoho, down here all sorts of shifty-shuffly going on. Very crowded room, so many people trying to take other people’s clothes off. Boy backs toward the bed, one hand holding Nyateneri’s hand, other trying to open Lal’s shirt. Lal helps him, breaks fingernail, swears. Boy’s legs tangle all up with bed legs, he sits down. Lukassa kneels on bed behind him, laughing. Nyateneri turns, looks at me. We talk.
&nbs
p; Do not. Do not.
Must.
Will not hold. Cannot hold.
I know. Must. Help me.
Window open almost wide enough. Tree goes crick-sish, one thin branch points up to pigeons’ nice little bedroom. Nyateneri. Help me. Lal reaches out, draws her down.
ROSSETH
Lal has dimples in both shoulders. Lal’s collarbones are as proud and velvety as the spring antlers of a young sintu. The back of Lal’s neck makes me cry as she bends her head down to me.
Lukassa smells of fresh, fresh melons and peppers and spice-apples on market stalls. Her breasts are softer and more pointed than Nyateneri’s breasts, and the insides of her forearms are transparent, truly—I can almost see little blue fish sculling serenely in and out between her veins. Putting her hand on me, she finds Lal’s hand there already. She turns her head and smiles, so simply.
Nyateneri. I cannot see Nyateneri. Her hands move on me, too, and she bites my mouth until blood comes, but I cannot see her face.
NYATENERI
No. No. I cannot let this happen, cannot. For everyone’s sake, all sakes, no. But such sweetness—such friendliness. When was the last time anyone kissed you as that boy does— kissed you, not your bow or your dagger, the things you can do, the things you know? When did hands caress you as wisely as Lal’s hands, or with such welcome as Lukassa’s? And you are so tired, and so lonely, and everything has been so long.
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