Innkeeper's Song

by Peter S. Beagle

  We found the Susathi a day and a half later, flowing serenely through a steep slice in the mountains that took us utterly by surprise. As I’ve told you, our progress had been far less dramatic than tedious and serpentine: we never hung from crumbling ledges by our fingernails or coaxed our horses to leap snowy chasms, but mostly plodded off to the left one more time to toil up another sky-filling field of rattling, tumbling stones. No descents to catch our breath in, none at all: only one or two passes where the way was more or less level—keyholes between the mountains, half-choked by ancient ice-boulders and scree, harder to traverse than the slopes themselves. Then we trudged single-file around a bulging shoulder of stone and saw it, not that far below, a river as straight as a sword-cut, twinkling away, west to east, in the noonday sun.

  Lal and I stood looking at each other, while the horses nudged our necks and stepped on our feet, smelling the water down there. I smelled it myself, a cool dance in my nostrils. Lal sighed presently and said, “Well. So much for the easy part.”

  “No rapids that I can see,” I said. Her face took on that look again, so full of the knowledge of its own secret knowledge that she could hardly endure it herself. I felt much the same. She lowered one eyelid very slowly, let it float up again, then swung into her saddle and started down the trail. I mounted, caught the Mildasi horse’s reins, and followed. Once I looked back, but of course there was nothing behind us but stone and old, old snow. I wished I had not laid rough hands on Rosseth.

  TIKAT

  It took me longer to recover from the bare-hand touch of a man I never saw than it did from my journey through the Northern Barrens. Days afterward, no mark on me, and I was still coming over dazey and faint and trembling without warning, unable to trust my body anywhere. Rosseth, uncomplainingly doing half my work as well as his own, told me about those three men who had followed Nyateneri for years and finally caught up with her at The Gaff and Slasher. He said there was no shame in my falling without a fight, like a market animal, and that I should be proud of myself simply for having survived the encounter. I took his word for it.

  He never once asked what I had been doing at that door, which was as kind in its way as the other, the work. In spite of the fact that I am not easy speaking of myself, while he seemed to be always clacking along like a little windmill, somehow he ended up knowing nearly as much about my life as I did about his. I don’t mean Lukassa and me—no hide-buyer or corn-merchant staying the night but knew that much by now—but about our village with its two priests and its one whore; about the blacksmith, whom everyone feared except Lukassa, and about my aunt and uncle and the weaver-woman who was teaching me her trade. I cannot say to this day how I came to tell him such things—even the story of my theft of dirigari fruit from my teacher’s orchard, which shames me still. He was only a boy, after all, Rosseth, two years younger than I, innocent as one of Shadry’s potboys— more innocent—and all the time thinking himself as knowing as an old bargeman. I do not know why I talked to him as I did.

  “Tell me about your parents again,” he would urge me; and when I stumbled, forgetting my father’s favorite dish or the turn of a joke my mother liked to make, then an odd look would come into his eyes, almost reproachful, as though if he had known his parents he would have remembered everything; and perhaps he would have. His own first clear memory was of Karsh carrying him somewhere by the back of his neck—before that, there were only bits and shadows that might have been dreams, though you could tell Rosseth didn’t think so all the time. When I asked him how he came to be at The Gaff and Slasher, he told me that Karsh had taken him from a traveling Creeshi peddler, “in trade for three gamecocks and a bag of Limsatty onions. He complains about it to this day—says two of those birds were champions, and sweet Limsatties have never been as good since. Gatti Jinni says one cock was blind, but I don’t know.”

  He talked of Lal and Nyateneri hardly at all now, which suited me well. He made up for that, though, with his endless stream of chatter about Lukassa. She was surely not herself, he kept reassuring me—clearly she had endured a great deal, and many times such suffering changes people so that they cannot even recognize those who love them best. But patience and endurance on my part would triumph at last, he was certain of it; every day he could see her gentling toward me, see her expression changing bit by bit when she looked at me. It was all so well-meant that I could never tell him—as I would have anyone else, the first time it happened—that he was not to speak of this. But neither could I bear to listen to him; so there was nothing for me to do but move away, if we were working together, or find some solitary chore that would keep me well out of earshot for hours. That is how I began to be so often with the old man.

  He never told me his name. I called him first sir, and later on tafiya, which is what people in my village sometimes choose to call someone—man or woman, old or not so old—who is seen to have a certain kind of power, dignity, stature, whatever you want to call it. Hard to explain: my teacher is called tafiya, for instance, while the blacksmith is not and the one whore is not, but her mother is. One priest, not the other; two or three farmers and the brewer, but not the headman, not the doctor, not the schoolmaster. I cannot put it any better than that. I called him tafiya, and he knew the word and seemed pleased.

  He was very weak at first: not so much in the body, though there was that, too, since he could keep down nothing but the thin soup with bread in it, and now and then some milk or wine. But the real frailness was elsewhere, and I cannot explain that any better than I can the real meaning of tafiya. Let it be a wind that puts your fire out, and often you can nurse it back to life, if you are patient enough and feed it and blow on it just so. But let it be a splash of rain, and you will build a new fire in a dry place or go without. I think the old man was waiting to learn, those early days, whether it was wind or rain in his heart, or in his spirit, as you will. I think that was what it was.

  The women had paid for his room and care, and Karsh kept his word to them, so far as it went. Marinesha was supposed to be the only one looking after him—Karsh did his best to keep Rosseth too busy to go anywhere near that room—but she twisted her ankle slipping away from a pair of rope-dealers in the taproom. So, until she could climb stairs twenty times a day again, I was often told off to bring my tafiya his meals, arrange his new bedding, and empty out his chamberpot. I neither enjoyed the task nor minded doing it. It was all one to me then.

  No, that is not true. I did mind doing it, very much, and I feared it as well, and of course he knew. I had not been attending him for more than three days when he said to me, as I was helping him into a nightshirt that Shadry thought was in a chest under his own bed, “I rather wish I smelled worse than I do. Perhaps then it would be harder for you to smell Lukassa when you come into this room.”

  I could not answer him. With the other women gone, I knew that she spent the best part of her time in his company, but I saw her on occasion walking the roads and meadows near the inn, or even chatting a little with Marinesha in the courtyard. That same day she had come on me carrying a load of firewood too high for her to see my face. When I stood before her, demanding once again, “Lukassa, Lukassa, it is Tikat, how can you not know me?” she screamed and ran away, as she had done before. I started after her, shouting her name, but the logs tumbled loose around my feet and I fell with them. Gatti Jinni and Shadry, who saw it all, were still laughing that evening, and my feet were still hurting.

  When I did not speak, the old man touched my hand and said, “No. Well, I can at least assure you that you will never encounter Lukassa here, and that if you would prefer to come somewhat less often yourself, I will manage quite well, and never mind your orders. That much I can do for you, even in my present condition.”

  Did he see then how angry his kindness made me? Do you see it now, even a little? I have never been able to bear pity—it enrages me as nothing else in this world does. I suppose it goes back to my parents’ death, with everyone who had survived the
plague-wind weeping over me, feeding me, petting me. I wanted to kill them, the whole wretched understanding lot of them. The only person who ever knew that I wanted to kill them was Lukassa. Or maybe I have been this way since I was born.

  I said, “There is no need,” and went on adjusting the night-shirt. He was beginning to gain a little weight, but all his bones stood up like bruises under his skin. He watched me silently, eyes half-shut, until I had settled him in bed and begun gathering his day’s cups and dishes. Then he said abruptly, “Tikat. She will not ever remember.”

  I did not dare let myself look at him. I went to the door, careful to hold the dishes safely while I fumbled for the latch. They would never chip or break if you dropped them, those dishes, but always shattered beyond repairing. Behind me, he said, “If you want her, you must go where she is. She cannot come back to you.” I closed the door and took the dishes down to the scullery.

  But in the middle of the night I went back. The inn was shuttered and locked, of course, and the dogs roaming, but they knew me now, and Rosseth had shown me a way to get in through a loose window-sash in the root cellar. No one awake except a journeying Mazarite priest and his body-servant: they aren’t supposed to do anything at all with their hands, those Mazarites, not so much as comb their beards or scratch an itch, but I could have led a regiment past that door, instead of creeping all the way to the other one, as I did.

  His eyes were open, glinting in the moonlight, but I had already seen him sleeping like that. I stood in the doorway, unable to speak to him, unable to turn away. He said, “Come in, Tikat.”

  So I took a three-legged stool from the corner and sat down by his bed. It was hard for me to talk, but I said, “I want to know what you meant. About Lukassa, about me going to her. I have already followed her beyond death, across deserts and mountains to this place which is—” I could not find words—“which is so much not our place that I think as long as we are here she cannot know me. But if she were to come home, to come home with me—”

  “It would be no different.” His voice was gentle and merciless, comforting. “I told you that you would have to go where she is now, and that place is neither here nor there. It is a country where Lal and Nyateneri have always been her older sisters, where I am, if you will, her grandfather, and where you never existed. Do you understand me, Tikat? No long, long river afternoons, no dreaming in the willows; no tall, sweet boy who played boats with her, and told her stories, and kept the other boys from teasing her. It never happened, Tikat, none of it—she never rescued you from the wild pigs, nor put the cool leaves on your back when your uncle beat you for drinking his featherberry wine. You cannot go back to a world and a life that never was.”

  How did he know what he knew? How do I know? He was my tafiya. I did not weep—no one but Lukassa has ever seen me weep—but there seemed to be a very long time before I could speak as I wanted. I said at last, “What must I do to be with her?”

  He rolled his eyes, mimicking me brutally. “ ‘What must I do, O master? Advise me, direct me, think for me, greatest, wisest of wizards.’ Whose wisdom got you this far, yours or mine? Who loves that child best, you or me?” He slapped his hands down so violently on the blankets that the gesture shot him upright, glaring at me in utter disgust. “The older I become, the more I wish I had a reputation for total, transcendent idiocy. Perhaps that would mean even a few less idiots whining for my magical counsel. Get out of my sight—there is a particular kind of intelligent stupidity that I cannot abide, and you embody it absolutely. Get out of my sight!”

  If it was a real rage or not, I could not tell, but I paid it no heed at all, because I am far more stubborn than I am either foolish or clever. When I did not move from the stool, he grew calm almost as suddenly as he had become furious with me. “Never ask me what you must do, Tikat. Tell me what you will do—then at least we can argue properly. Tell me now.”

  I said slowly, “If I am to begin as a stranger—if I am to begin all over, everything, with no history between Lukassa and me, no childhood, no love from the moment we crawled into each other’s vision—why, then so be it, so be it. I will go to her tomorrow and speak to her as gently as I would any stranger, assuming nothing, hoping for nothing but to assure her that I am a friend and no madman. This is what I will do tomorrow—beyond tomorrow, who knows? And so be it.”

  I did not look at him as I spoke, but at my cupped hands; it was all I could do at the last not to ask, “Is that well? Is that the right way for us to begin the rest of our lives? Will you help me now?” But I did not—not that it would have been any use just then, for he had fallen quite asleep. I sat beside him almost until dawn, when I slipped off back to the stable so that Rosseth could rouse me to begin our day’s work. In all that time he never stirred, but snored away sweetly and politely, even when I dabbed a bit of dried soup from a corner of his mouth. I said aloud, “I am becoming Lukassa, finicking over you so,” but he did not awaken.

  Above the woodlot there is a little shrubby slope where Karsh has built a shrine, as innkeepers are required to do, for the use of all such holy wanderers as that Mazarite priest. Just for a moment, as I was going into the stable, I thought I saw Redcoat squatting by a thornbush halfway up the hillside. He was smiling with his mouth closed and his eyes almost shut, and Lukassa’s locket glinting between his dreaming fingers. I stopped for a better look, but if he was really there I lost him in the dazzle of the morning rising behind him, pale blue, palest silver.

  LAL

  “Downstream.”

  “How can you know?” I bent my head a second time to the river water cupped in my hands. I made a bit of a spectacle out of it, more than a bit, letting the water trickle over my lips and throat and smiling lingeringly as I sipped it. Finally I said, “Human life leaves a taste. In the air, in the water, in the ground. One house—not a village, only a single house, with a few people, an animal or two, coming and going, fishing, eating, using the river—it changes the flavor. It just does.” I sampled the water once more and nodded. “There’s no one living anywhere upstream. Try it, you can tell.”

  Nyateneri said thoughtfully, “How nice to hear the most ridiculous statement of my entire life while I am still young enough to appreciate it.” He crouched beside me, scooped up a few drops, licked at them impatiently and stood up at once, looking abruptly angry and embarrassed. Only when we were well into the mountains had he let his woman’s form dissolve again, showing himself lean and gray; heavy-boned, yet more graceful than he should be for his size, the hair as ragged as ever (he chopped it periodically into the same scorched-earth monastery cut, for no reason that he would ever tell), and the eyes still as slowly changeable as twilight skies. A gentle mouth still, in a hard, tired face.

  “This is stupid,” he said. “I know all the stories, I am quite ready to believe that Lal-Alone can give a lizard two weeks’ start and track it across any desert you like, blindfolded if you like. But one fisherman pissing out of a skiff—no, no, I am sorry, I spent my youth in a cloister, my trustfulness is not what it should be. No.”

  Well, it served me right for making such a grand show of my skills. “No rapids further up, either—no taste of white water at all.” Nyateneri snorted. I wiped my hands on my breeks and pointed to the sky as I stood up myself. “Very well, consider our friends there. Name them for me. If you like.”

  Nyateneri gave the black-and-white birds circling just upstream of us a brief glance, and answered, “Vrajis. In the south we call them priest-catchers. Why?”

  I said, “Because even in your country it is surely known that these birds do not nest where men are. If there were a settlement within fifty miles, you wouldn’t see a vraji here until the village had been ashes for fifty years. Tell me I am mistaken.”

  No chance of that, anyway—there must be jokes and proverbs in a hundred tongues about the vrajis’ antipathy to human beings. One of my own folk’s nastier religions is based upon it. Nyateneri sighed, rubbed his neck, stared at the birds,
walked away from me, walked back, rubbed his neck again and said, “So. Not one house.” It was not exactly an agreement, but it was not a question either.

  “You really can tell by the taste,” I said. “It doesn’t take as much practice as you might think.” Nyateneri had wandered off again, morosely studying the stony, sloping quarter-moon of shore where we stood, and the dark trees beyond. I raised my voice slightly. “The real question is not where Arshadin’s house is, but how distant it is, and how we plan to get there. Having completely exhausted my legendary woodcraft, I would welcome any suggestions.”

  When Nyateneri finally turned to me and spoke, my blood stopped moving for a moment, because he spoke in Dirvic. That tongue has been dead for five centuries, which is not nearly long enough. I have met three people who knew Dirvic, including the one who taught it to me, and each came to an uncommonly evil end. How Nyateneri learned it, and how he guessed that I knew it, I still do not want to discover. He said, “My first suggestion would be that we speak this terrible language from now on. Can you bear it?”

  The sudden kindness of the question made my eyes sting, which angered me. “I will bear it,” I said. Dirvic hurts the mouth and coats the throat with a thick bitterness. It was never meant for ordinary conversation. Nyateneri said, “There was one man at the monastery who spoke it, but he died. I am betting our lives that there are no others. Now. Since you have obviously been nursing a plan of attack since we set out, it is pointlessly polite of you to ask for my own ideas. Tell me how you propose to build the boat.”