Innkeeper's Song

by Peter S. Beagle

  His voice remained sexless and rigidly ordinary, but with the last words his face changed. If I had been frightened before of a face that gave witness to a lifetime of showing nothing, I was more frightened now of what happened to his eyes when he finally turned them on my friend. The bitter rage and loss in them made his heavy, shovel-shaped face seem strangely delicate, almost transparent, like a burning house just before it collapses on itself. His mouth was slightly open, the lips twisted slightly up at one corner, down at the other. I remember even now a fleck of cracked skin in the down corner. He said, “Afterward it will be time to meet those who are waiting.”

  My friend was silent for a moment, then rubbed a hand across his own mouth, as I remembered him doing very long ago, when I would somehow come too close to winning an argument. “As you please. But if you are considering doing to them what I think you are, I must drearily warn you again—you cannot do it and still hold me in this place. You probably have the strength, yes”—oh, the gentle contempt in that probably would have maddened me, never mind an Arshadin— “but you have nothing like the mature precision that is necessary. If you did, I could never have escaped you, and if you had gained it since, I could not have remained out of your reach, as I will remain. Free yourself of me, have that much sense, and then—” He looked full at us and shrugged. “A nasty, messy little parlor trick, I always thought it—but there, your tastes are your own affair, quite right. Who am I, after all, to plague you with counsel? Quite right. Quite right.”

  His voice had fallen into a sleepy singsong drone, which instantly alerted Nyateneri and me: that was the way he always sounded when he was about to set you a particularly exasperating riddle or challenge. He nattered on, buzzing away, turning slowly one way and another within the grayness like a fat fly against a windowpane. Arshadin’s deathly heed was all on him: he watched him with a completeness that—for that moment—left no room for us. We realized so suddenly that we could move that it was shockingly painful not to. I still remember that strange pain of stillness.

  Nyateneri sprang first—I lost an instant in getting my sword clear, because of my bad arm. I heard my friend shout furiously, “Fools! No!” Arshadin turned the vermillion-striped face of a rock-targ on us, all bony frills and great dripping mouth horribly topping the same squat human body. Nyateneri never faltered, but lunged in under the neck-plates, bare hands reaching for the still-human throat, trusting me to follow with my blade. So I did, but the dharises swooped screeching at my eyes, hurling themselves against my face and head until all I could do was to flail at them with the swordcane, helpless to aid Nyateneri as he clung desperately to Arshadin’s constantly changing form—rock-targ to bellowing sheknath to eight-foot-high, axe-beaked nishoru to something that I would, quite simply, kill myself to keep from seeing again. Nyateneri held on and held on, sometimes with only one hand, riding barely out of reach between hairy shoulders or razor-feathered wings like some baby animal perched high on its mother’s back. He was laughing, his lips stretched grotesquely back from his teeth like any rock-targ’s, and his eyes straining wide in the same way. So Rosseth must have seen him when he killed those two in the bathhouse. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, as it always seems at such times. In fact, of course, everything is happening so fast that your mind trudges along far in the rear, dusty and lame. I remember at some point glimpsing Nyateneri through that battering cloud of dharises and thinking quite seriously, Well, he certainly does enjoy this more than sailing.

  My friend, for his part, was jumping wildly up and down in his foggy prison, kicking and pounding at silent gray walls. All dignity seemed forgotten, even that of a caged animal; he was only a mad old man in a nightgown, yelling till his voice cracked in frustration. “Stop that! Lal, Nyateneri—idiots, idiots, stop that! To me, you imbeciles—here, to me! You cannot kill him!” Arshadin had taken the nishoru form—more or less—a second time; now he spread those stubby, scabby, glittering wings and finally shook Nyateneri loose, hurling him ten yards away, back toward the riverbank. He landed rolling, but brought up hard against a rock. I could hear the wind retch out of his lungs even from that distance.

  Arshadin was already turning, himself again, ignoring me as I ran past him toward Nyateneri. With his rightful shape, his ghastly blank calmness returned; he glanced briefly toward my friend, dancing and swearing futilely, then let his breath out in a long, barely audible sigh that became a bolt of black lightning and made exactly the same sound slashing into the grayness that a blade makes in flesh.

  The grayness did not vanish or blow apart, but hissed and darkened like meat over a fire; in a moment I could not see my friend at all. Nyateneri was on his feet, swaying—I clutched his wrist and dragged him forward, while Arshadin shouted boulders and dharises after us. The rocks came careening down the cliffside out of nowhere, gouging real tracks in the dirt and bringing real trees and stones ripping and skidding down with them. I lost hold of Nyateneri and screamed for him until grayness came down over me like a heavy, smothering cloth over a birdcage, and an irritable voice announced, “Chamata, a little less bustle, if you don’t mind. This wretched thing is difficult enough to manage at the best of times.”

  Close as he was, I could barely see him, let alone distinguish him from Nyateneri. He was sitting straight up, as though in a high-backed chair, slightly above my head. His eyes were closed. The river gorge, the house, and Arshadin were gone, as were earth, sky, and everything but the grayness, which had no dimension and no ending, but only dwindled off into a further grayness, in which, at the very end of my eyesight, I thought I saw darker shapes appearing and vanishing again. I asked loudly, “Where are we? What has happened? When are we?”

  I have dealt with magicians before. There isn’t one of them, even the best—even my friend—who could ever resist the least excuse to play with time. I think it must be the first thing they are all warned never to do. True or not, it is the first thing they turn to in a crisis, as others turn to red ale. I dread it and want no part of it, ever, and I always know when it is happening again.

  Without opening his eyes, my friend said, “Sit down somewhere and be quiet, Lal.” Nyateneri touched my arm and drew me away. The air had become bitterly thin and cold; no matter how fiercely you drank it in, there was never quite enough breath in your lungs. That was the only sound: our shallow, too-rapid breathing. There was no wind, no flicker in the grayness, no slightest sense that we were moving, except for the distant come-and-go shapes that might have been nothing but eyestrain. I hugged myself for warmth and huddled beside Nyateneri.

  “We are in a far place,” my friend said presently, “neither where nor when, but what you might call elsewhen. This”—and he gestured blindly at the freezing mist around us—“this is not a fairy coach, not a magic carpet sweeping us away to safety; it is a bubble of time—but it is not our time. Do either of you understand me?”

  Nyateneri said simply, “I don’t want to understand you. Why do you have your eyes shut like that?”

  “Because I am not entirely sure what would happen if I opened them. You might cease to exist—I might cease to exist. Or existence itself might—no, let that go, it makes even me a bit seasick. Like as not, we would merely end up back with Arshadin. Which would amount to the same thing.”

  For all the familiar and comforting testiness, there was an undertone to his voice that I had never heard before. It was not a note of fear or anxiety or plain uncertainty—it fell between all such words, such sounds. But I was frightened, and literally uncertain even of what was under my feet; and cold as well, rattling with it. I demanded, “What happened there, back with Arshadin? Where are we going now? And why, in the name of”—but I could find no god quite equal to the situation—“why are you sitting in the air?”

  My friend laughed, but for once it did not comfort me to hear him. “Am I? I hadn’t noticed. Where are we going? Why, back to the inn, if I should be permitted to manage it without undue distraction. I have never liked th
is particular method of travel, and I don’t think I have a natural knack for it. Arshadin, now—Arshadin has the knack. He used to scurry about like this all the time, no matter what I said to him. Had it fetch his lunch sometimes.”

  He was silent for a moment, his eyes squeezing a bit more tightly shut. He said, “It betrayed him this time, that knack. There was no way I could resist him when he used the time-bubble to bring me here; but it drains so much strength merely to hold such a thing in this world, let alone make it work for you, that I knew he could not possibly keep it and me and you two all under control at once. I have told him so often—all energy has its natural limits: all, even his. I did tell him.” The last words were spoken in a near-whisper, and not to us. ”And then you two caused your diversion—clumsily, if I may say so, but quite effectively—and he tried to kill me in the bubble, believing that I was manipulating you, which shows a certain touching faith in his old teacher, even now.” His half-laugh held more rue than triumph.

  Nyateneri said, “He spoke of those who are waiting. Are they waiting for you?”

  “They are indeed,” my friend replied with surprising cheerfulness. “But they may have to wait a little longer yet. Now, if nobody asks me any more questions, I think—I am very nearly sure—that I will be able to bring this unseemly anomaly to rest at Karsh’s dining table. Whether it will be the right Karsh, of course, or the right Karsh’s table—well, well, in any case we should all find it an instructive experience, especially Karsh. Lal, if you close your eyes, too, you will not shiver so much. Do as I say.”

  He was right—the murderous cold receded once I could no longer see the grayness, as though the sight of it had been what was truly invading my bones—but I could not keep from stealing small glances around me, though nothing was visible except the tiny dark figures that never drew nearer and never quite disappeared. I said, “Those. Who are they?”

  “The people whose time we are using,” he replied shortly. “Close your eyes, Lal.”

  I shut them. I said, “Arshadin does not bleed. My sword went almost through him, and there was no blood.”

  “Because there is no blood in him,” my friend answered. “Lukassa is quite right—he gave his life to the Others, that night in the red tower, and they gave him back a kind of aliveness for which blood is not necessary. I know of such bargains, very long ago, but I never thought to see one struck in my time. My poor Arshadin. My poor Arshadin.” And after that quiet, toneless wail, he said nothing at all.

  How much more time passed—ours or someone else’s—I cannot say. I heard my friend humming to himself: a maddeningly repetitious up-and-down five-note pattern that came, after awhile, to seem like the drone of a great engine under us, tireless and strangely soothing. I think I slept a little.

  No, I know I slept, because I remember jolting painfully awake at the tensing of Nyateneri’s arm around me. He was saying very quietly, close to my ear, “Lal. Something is happening.” Even through the grayness I could see how stiff and pale his face was.

  “What is it?” I asked. Nothing seemed to have changed: we were still motionless in freezing nowhere, and my friend was still sitting in the air, humming the same notes over and over. The only difference, if it was a difference, was that the little shapes at the edge of my vision had finally vanished. Nyateneri’s hand tightened on my left arm, the bad one, and I did not notice at all; not until later, when I saw the new bruise. “Look,” he said.

  The grayness was thinning slowly, down from mist to dirty bathwater, and there were people appearing through it, and they were us. How much more plainly, or more madly, can I say it? I saw the three of us—perfect duplicates, down to the ribbons in my friend’s beard and the river mud caked on Nyateneri’s feet—but they, the figures, they didn’t see us. They went on about their business, which was not here, and were followed by others—some of them were us again, but more were being Karsh and Marinesha, and there seemed to be more Tikats than anyone else. No two were identical: there were versions of my friend that had neither ribbons nor beard nor nightgown, and variations on Nyateneri that I might not have recognized but for the height and the changing eyes. As for me, it made me giddy and a little sick, seeing so many copies of myself obliviously passing two feet away. There were small differences enough between them, as well, in dress and mannerism; but to my mind they were all twins, and all too short, too wide-mouthed and pointy-chinned—the old goblin face I have learned to tolerate in the glass, but not in bloody dozens!—and every one of them walking with the same awful swaggering roll. Do I walk like that? I still cannot believe I really walk like that.

  There were others, too, crowding around and past them, coming and going in the dissipating grayness. I recognized Rosseth—looking wide-eyed and kind in every translation, and stronger than any of them knew—and other servants or guests at The Gaff and Slasher; beyond those were countless faces I had never seen, or anyway could not remember having seen. They were opaque but not solid: they passed through one another as they did through the mist, without taking notice. What I noticed, gaping and shaking my head, was that not one of them was Lukassa.

  Beside me Nyateneri said, quite loudly, “Master”—and then he pronounced what I had always believed to be my friend’s name—“enough mystification is enough. What are we seeing, and who are these?”

  My friend’s eyes were still so grimly shut that the corners of his mouth squeezed up with them when he turned toward us, but in that instant his face was very terrible. I did not know that face at all, and I was frightened of it—of him—then. He said in a slow, light, almost dreaming voice, “We will now all proceed to be extremely glad that I have at least maintained sense enough never to tell either of you my true name. If you had spoken it here, now, the three of us would have been spread through time—no, across time, smeared over it like so much butter. Do you have the least notion of what I am telling you?”

  Before that blind face and that even more terrifying voice, I cowered as silently as I had when he first found me; but it was worse now, because I was older and could almost conceive of what he meant. Nyateneri tried for a moment to face him down, then crouched humbly before him. The voice said, “No, of course not, what possessed me to ask you that? If you ever came anywhere near understanding what I just told you, that understanding would drive you mad. At present, I think I could endure that well enough, but sooner or later I would probably start to feel bad about it. Probably. Are all that lot gone yet?”

  Almost all of the duplicates had passed out of sight, save for a couple of the Tikats and one Karsh. I told him so, and he nodded and sat up straighter in the chair we could not see. His hands were shaping something equally invisible that seemed to be leaping and struggling between them, and growing as well. “When those go,” he said, “those last, tell me. Immediately.”

  The Tikats vanished together, and there was just Karsh left—a younger, brown-eyed Karsh, wearing the embroidered vest and leather leggings of a prosperous south-coast farmer. It did not surprise me that he was the only one of all those figures who stood still even for a moment, peering briefly but very intently into the grayness all around him. Wherever he really was, he knew that something to do with him was happening somewhere. I said, “He’s going away now. He’s gone.”

  “So, then,” my friend said softly, like Arshadin. He spoke several words that did not even sound like a language: from another room, I would have thought he was snoring or clearing his throat. The unseen thing growing between his hands seemed first to surge into him, and then to explode out of his grasp with a violence that rocked him backward, almost knocking him off his perch in the air. The grayness turned to night, but not any sort of night I knew. The air was too clear, as though its skin had somehow been ripped away, and the stars were too big. I never breathed that air, but held my breath for an hour or an instant, until my friend suddenly opened his eyes, and we were all three sitting quietly, like picnickers, on the stubbly little hill where Karsh has his travelers’ shrine
. It was late afternoon, with a gray quarter-moon already rising in the west, behind the inn. We could hear the hogs snuffling in their pen, and Gatti Jinni shouting across the courtyard.

  The moon over our little boat’s masthead last night had been full and golden, dripping ripe into the river. Nyateneri and I looked at each other. Someone began whistling in the stable.

  THE INNKEEPER

  They paid me handsomely for the horses—I will say that—and did me the honor of offering no explanations as to what had become of them. When you are my age, you’ll have long given up expecting the truth from anybody, but you will appreciate not being lied to all the more for it. As for where they had been and, more important, how they got back in only seven days from a journey that had left the black one limping badly and a good ten pounds thinner, while Miss Kiss-my-ring Nyateneri looked as many years older… well, what could they have told me that I’d have believed, then or even now? I took the money, told the boy to tell Marinesha to bring dinner to their room, and bloody let it go.

  The old man was starting to have me more nervous than the women by then, anyway. I knew him for a wizard, of course—had from the first day; you can’t miss them, it’s almost a smell—which made no matter by itself. I don’t like wizards—show me someone who does—but they’re usually mannerly guests, generous to the help, and a good bit more careful than most about keeping the landlord sweet. But I also knew from Marinesha that this one was frail, sick, practically dying, hadn’t stirred out of his room since Rosseth and Tikat carried him there. And here he was now, on his feet at any rate, and plainly up to his neck in whatever those women had been at since they left the inn. No simple woods wizard, either, curing colicky-animals and promising sunshine for the harvest—oh no, thank you, this one was turning out to be just the sort that trouble delights in following home like a stray dog, never mind whose home it may be, nor who’s to feed the beast. I’d no idea what breed of trouble it was likely to be, but I could smell that, too, as you smell rain, or a cartload of manure coming around the next bend. Unmistakable. About that, at least, I am never wrong.