Innkeeper's Song

by Peter S. Beagle

  “Actually, the custom is a bit different in my family,” I said. “The sword is not handed on, generation to generation—it must be stolen. Look at the blade.”

  He lifted it between us, squinting in the moonlight at the engraved words few had ever had the time even to notice. His hands, as well as his eyes, seemed occupied then, but I knew enough to let the opportunity pass. “Steal me, marry me,” he read aloud. “A curious warning. If it is a warning.”

  I laughed, although it hurt my chest. “You could say so. That swordcane has been a thieves’ magnet since the day it was made. Why, the smith himself tried to steal it back from my ancestor within a week of presenting it to him, and from then on the poor poet never slept a night through for the constant racket of burglars falling off his roof, digging under his house, fighting and yowling when they bumped into each other in his closet. Old and young, man, woman, and little scoundrelly children, they came from every corner of the country to try their slyness at relieving him of that same sword you hold now. Even his closest friends were not to be trusted—let alone his gentle, doddering old parents. It all became quite wearying. Soon enough, my ancestor was ready to hand the swordcane personally to the very next housebreaker he found hiding in his pantry, or the next bandit who tried to lure him down an alley behind the marketplace. I assure you, it’s the truth.”

  “Ah, but naturally he didn’t give it away, or where would we be?” Still not looking at me, he took a step or two back, in order to make the moonlight shudder along the thin blade as he tilted it up and down. “And how did the good man resolve his difficulty?”

  “As it happens, my ancestor was not a good man at all,” I said, “but he was a clever one. After much consideration, he had those words you see etched on the sword-cane, and when a particularly bold and cunning young thief actually did manage to lift it from him—in broadest daylight, if you will—he ran the man to earth himself and offered him a daring proposition. He might keep the swordcane and welcome, if he would marry my ancestor’s eldest daughter and become a part of his family. The thief agreed on the spot—as did the daughter, for he was apparently a pleasing youth. And so began our most ancient tradition.”

  Up, down, tip it toward the moon, tip it into darkness. “A fascinating tale.” And he was fascinated, though careful not to show it; so much so that he paid no heed when I let myself move at last, the slightest shuffle, more to the side than backward. “Even if the thief’s only other choice was death. Meaning no disrespect to your ancestor’s daughter.”

  “Ah, but that wasn’t the case at all.” And with that I had him. He forgot to play with the swordcane and stared at me; and for the first time he looked like a human being, round-eyed (though he narrowed them quickly) with blessed human puzzlement and my dear, dear, precious, beloved human hunger to know what happened next. Hurt, exhausted, and frightened for my life as I was, that look is, at the very last, my home.

  I said, “The young man could have gone free and unharmed, nevermore to see the beautiful sword. He was happy to obey the graven command, steal me, marry me, and he turned out to be a faithful husband to both his wives. And since he knew so much better than my ancestor all the ways of thieves, not one ever again came within sight of the swordcane, no one but those whose last sight it was. The only difficulty was that he never could bring himself to leave his treasure to any of his own descendants, even on his deathbed. Myself, I think that he would have ordered it to be buried with him, if a quick-fingered serving wench hadn’t made away with it at the very last— which meant, of course, that his eldest son had to track her down and marry her in his turn in order to keep both the sword and such skill in the family. And so it has gone ever since, except for Grandmother. Always excepting Grandmother.”

  Even then I could not be sure that he had taken the right bait, for all that he kept blinking from the swordcane to me and back again. “Keep the blood moving, that’s the way,” he purred, almost to himself. “Much as we do, imagine.” But he had to know, you see, and what’s a foot more or less of distance between one person and another when you have to know how a story comes out? “Your grandmother,” he said slowly; and I said, entirely to myself, You are mine.

  “Ah, Grandmother,” I sighed. “The most magical figure of my childhood.” So she was indeed, bless her wicked, utterly shameless heart. “Grandmother was Great-Grandfather’s daughter, so therefore she was not eligible to steal the swordcane and marry to keep it. This struck her as a great injustice, and my grandmother never could abide injustice. She was small, like me, and easily ignored then, but from the age of twelve or thereabouts, she did little else but stand watch over the weapon and learn its use—that, at least, was permitted her. She studied every morning, before he had started drinking, with the old Kirianese master L’kl’yara ”—I saw my listener’s eyes go even wider than they already were “—until she knew everything he knew and could invent her own variations on his guards and counters, his legendary traps and responses, for hours on end. She became very nearly unbeatable, my quiet little grandmother who sang nursery songs to me every night, even when I was really too old for them. And when she understood that she was unbeatable—then one day, after her regular practice, she simply took the swordcane and vanished.”

  “Vanished?” I was half-singing myself now, as completely fallen into the manner of storytelling that I was taught almost with my name as he was into the tale itself. But I have learned other things since my name, and I knew that I must slow everything down, everything—not merely my movement away from him, but my breathing as well, my pain and my banging blood, and even my thoughts—slow all down to the rhythm of the cold, quiet moon. Off to the right, under a scrubby bush, a shapeless blue shadow that must be his pack.

  “Actually, she went to her room,” I said. “It was much the same thing, however, since for three whole years she only emerged to push out the body of the swordcane’s latest midnight claimant and pop back inside. No one saw her but her victims and the servants who brought her food—oh, her mother and father came almost every day to plead with her to behave sensibly, give the swordcane back, and marry whomever should steal it from them properly after that. But all their beseechments were in vain. Grandmother wrote them affectionate notes, asked after the health of her brothers, apologized for the condition of the last thief, and went on standing off all sieges. In the third year, I think it was, Great-grandfather, utterly exasperated, sent soldiers to break down her door. When she was finished with them, she never replaced the door, but deliberately left the room wide open from then on. Not a soul ever dared so much as a peep across the threshold—not until my one-eyed grandfather came prowling along. But that is another story altogether.”

  Is that his pack, then? It must be, but what could it contain, what can these people travel with? Nyateneri had said that he would have come prepared for water, but what sort of boat but a toy would fit into a bundle that small? Fool, don’t look at it, for your life—keep those white, entranced eyes on yours, hold him, hold him—pick your spot now, half a step, so, let your right leg shiver and buckle just a bit, as it’s crying to do—I wonder if there’s a rib gone on that side, too, don’t let there be—and under all that a very different trembling, deeper than any of it. I can still do this, what I was made to do, it has not left me. I can still tell a story.

  “And that was the woman who taught you to fight as you do?” His voice startled me strangely: in planning so totally to kill him I had almost forgotten about him himself, if you understand. He still wanted to know the ending before he killed me.

  “No,” I said, “no, not exactly,” and let the leg go all the way this time, stumbling aside and down with a whimper that was quite real, breaking the fall with my left hand while my right was in and out of my boot in the same motion, and I was the one to catch the sword-cane, after all, before either it or he had fallen. The tiny dagger had sunk so deep into his throat that only the hilt was visible, jerking and bobbing with his breath as he stared at me. I
got up slowly and walked over to him.

  “My grandmother never touched so much as a carving knife in her life,” I said. “I bought that thing off a peddler’s cart in Fors na’Shachim, and I’ve no more notion than you of what that inscription means. And the person who taught me the sword was a vicious, drunken old soldier who would tell me before each lesson what his payment would be this time, and let me think about it as we fought. The dagger is his.”

  That much I am certain he understood, but the white eyes were fading when I added, “I apologize for cheating you. You were too good for me to defeat honestly. Sunlight on your road.” We say that also at parting. I do not know if he heard.

  NYATENERI

  At first I did not understand that I was moving. That may sound strange, but I was feeling very strange and sick, and the only thing that registered during those first few moments was that I was blind in one eye. There was a red darkness to my left side different from the cool, moony river dark around me on the right. Between that and the throbbing bewilderment in my head, it was some little while before I realized that I was not after all lying motionless while sky and river flowed courteously, distantly over me. My right foot was actually trailing in water, and the vague discomfort in my back turned out to be a knobbly bit of driftwood that floated away when I sat up. I was impossibly aboard the trash raft I had never intended to launch, and it was gently dissolving beneath me, and I was half-blind and could not swim. And if I did not scream my lungs out for Lal, the only reason is that I was even more dazed just then than I was frightened. That state of things changed quite rapidly.

  I did not dare to stand, but spent what seemed like the next two weeks wriggling up to a kneeling position. The last thing I remembered had been knotting strands of water-weed to make my driftwood look—at least in a bad light—as though it might possibly hold together if anyone were fool enough to launch it. That had been well over an hour ago, to judge by the moon, and most of the raft was, remarkably, still with me, but fraying. I could feel logs shifting and slipping as the dead branches I had jammed between them to make them fit tightly worked free one by one. Dead-man’s-ringlets are supple and easy to splice into cables, but they have one serious failing. They stretch. I gave the good ship Soukvan’s Coffin a conservative ten minutes, and myself an optimistic five.

  What I hated, even more than the thought of drowning, was the idea of dying without ever knowing what had happened to me. Plainly I had been the one ambushed, taken offguard as easily as Rosseth or Tikat would have been, not so much as glimpsing my attacker. For all the pains and numbnesses in my head and body, I could not recall being struck one time. My left eye was one of the few parts of me that did not hurt, no more than it did anything else. It might as well not have been there.

  I stayed on my knees, afraid that the slightest movement might hasten the raft’s unraveling. The dreaming river of the afternoon now seemed to lunge under me more hugely with every minute, hurtling me between black banks, faster and faster, on my way to a humiliatingly helpless death, a death not to my liking. Another branch slid free of the dead-man’s-ringlets, and a log I was gripping turned over in my hand. Idiotically, I imagined the Man Who Laughs settling down comfortably to discuss with me the exact moment when the fact of a raft must cease to exist and become only the fact of a passing agreement of sticks. It was just the kind of thing he would have debated all day, jumping to my side from time to time when he got bored with his own arguments and impatient with mine. The fact of water began to dance up through the gap where the branch had been, splashing over my legs.

  My left eye seemed to be beginning to distinguish between shapes and shadows, but I could not tell how far I was from either bank, as though it would have made the least difference. Still kneeling, I groped as far as I could reach in every direction, hoping idiotically to find a broken board, something to paddle with, some way of angling the raft toward a shore I could not see. One hand came up against something that felt like a little gilt-paper tube, like the paper whistles they blow in the west country to celebrate Thieves’ Day. It took me the longest instant of my life to understand what it was, but then I understood, and I dropped my arm back until my knuckles rasped on bark, and I threw the tiny thing as far away from me as I could. Still in the air, it melted soundlessly into fire, turning a quarter of the sky to dawn, a white dawn raked bloody from one horizon to another. In that terrible light, in that impossible silence, I saw the tumbling river and the trees on its banks, and the birds asleep on their branches, all blanched and dry of color. I saw night insects burning all around me, thousands of them, flaring up and gone, one filigreed second apiece. And I saw Lal.

  Only for that moment; then the little device that a wheezing man at the monastery used to make by the dozen, as needed, fell into the water and went out. The darkness returned and Lal was lost to my one eye, like the sleeping birds. But I could see her still, as I do now, flying down the river after me, sitting crosslegged in the stern of a boat smaller than my raft, a tapered chip of wood with a sail and a rudder, and looking for all the world as though she were clucking calmly to it, shaking the lines a bit to urge it along like a fat old horse. When she saw me, she waved to me.

  I would have waved back, but by that time I was using both hands, and my feet as well, in a hopeless, ridiculous attempt to hold what was left of the raft together. It was all drifting to pieces swiftly now, having held together so much longer than it was ever meant to do: all my debris sliding loosely through the water-weeds’ slackening grip. I heard Lal calling to me to abandon the raft and cling to any log until she reached me. Easy for her, born on the water—I would have been calmer in a burning tower, and jumped from it far more lightheartedly than I gave up on the idea of that raft. Absurdly, perhaps, I dallied, to find my bow, but while I fumbled in the darkness, the last few remaining logs skidded away beneath my feet and I went straight down, tearing at the river, biting and kicking it, dancing in it as I sank like a hanged man in air. A humorous picture, I do agree with you. Smile again and I will push your face as deep into your soup bowl as will improve your understanding of what I felt then. I promise to hold you under no longer than I was.

  Lal says that I was indeed draped over a log when she fished me out, holding on so tightly that I went round and round with the log as it spun and rolled over in the water. I know nothing of this. I came to myself a second time sprawled face down across the deck of Lal’s toy boat, coughing and puking, while she went on hauling on the lines, at the same time drumming briskly on my back with both feet to make me vomit some more. That much I remember. Lal’s feet are small but memorable, especially the heels.

  When I could speak, I said, “This is his boat.” It didn’t deserve an answer, and it didn’t get one. I sat up very slowly, dizzy and shivering, wiping my mouth. Even by moonlight, with only one eye working properly, I saw the way she was sitting, the way she held her body, the cold pallor under the black skin. I asked, “How badly are you hurt?”

  “Rib,” she said softly, indicating her left side. “Maybe two.” I could hardly hear her above the noise of the river. The coolly invulnerable Sailor Lal had vanished completely—now that I was safely aboard, she was at last permitting herself her own pain. Her wide eyes had stopped seeing me; in another moment she would surely collapse where she sat, leaving this unlikely craft to the equally dubious charge of Captain Soukyan, who had just recently gone down with his own ship. I took gentle hold of her shoulders and leaned close, asking, “How do you stop this thing? Make it go to land, I mean.”

  I had to repeat the question several times before she shook her head violently, as though to clear it, and put my left hand hard on the tiller. “Push,” she whispered; then pressed the lines controlling the little sail into my right hand, managed to mouth the word “Pull,” and sagged into me, so completely unconscious that her dead weight almost took us both into the water. I caught hold of the mast to hold us back.

  Even in the river darkness, her lips were blue. Her
heartbeat was too quick, her breathing too slow and torn; though I rejoiced, as much as I had time for it, to hear no sound suggesting a punctured lung. I braced her against the base of the mast as well as I could, while the damnable boat chased its tail and the thing whose name I always forget—the boom it is, and well-named—kept swinging across, trying to kill me, because I could not attend to Lal and do all that pushing and pulling as well. I hate boats. I know somewhat more about them today than I did that night, and I hate them exactly that much more.

  Once I was able to sit down to sailing, however, it became plain that Lal had given me the shortest possible course of lessons in making one of the things go where you want it to go. You shove the tiller over one way— hard left, in my case, so that the boat veered toward the right bank of the river—and then you pull the lines in the other direction, which should make the sail fill and the boat move properly forward. Of course, if you do not have a strong wind behind you, and don’t know how to make the best of what wind you have—both being true for me—then the sail flaps and sulks, while the boom thing comes around and breaks your head. Nevertheless, I pushed and jiggled and coaxed and cursed and ducked, and the boat wandered diffidently toward the bank, eventually stopping when it wedged its pointed prow into a tangle of overhanging tree roots. I tied it there and carried Lal ashore.

  She never stirred as I undressed her to learn the extent of her injuries. I could feel the broken rib immediately— only one, thank the gods—but she appeared to be hurt nowhere else. I knew better, of course, but the strange and terrifying thing was that there were almost no marks on her body; nor on mine, for that matter. All her right side was hot to my hand, and when I touched her she twitched away and moaned, but did not wake.

  Our provisions were not on the boat. I am fairly adept with herbs and simples, but not at night in a strange country. There was a spare sail tucked away in a compartment under the prow. I cut part of it into strips and set and bandaged her rib as well as I could. Then I forced some water between her lips, took off my own soaked clothes, and lay down beside her, drawing the remainder of the sail over us both. I held her all night to keep her warm, and myself as well. I had not expected to sleep, but I did, and deeply, nor did I dream at all.