Innkeeper's Song

by Peter S. Beagle

  Down here in the riverbed, it is quiet as quiet. Above me, on the surface, the water snarls and tears, as it will tear me when I fall to its jaws. But in the riverbed, I looked up through stillness and watch the faces flowing past, so many heavy, weary village faces that should not smile at me with such tender knowledge. They should not do that. I am no one.

  Beyond them, my star. I brush the faces away and climb over the water, over the beanfields and thatched roofs, and I follow the singing of the star. If I walk without tiring, without thinking, without expectation, so very gradually the star draws nearer. I remember.

  This is different. Why is this different? Death is death, but something is different, the darkness. I can see great yellow claws smashing through from the other side, ripping down and down, and a greenish glow beyond. The claws withdraw, strike again, they leave simmering weals across the darkness, like the ones on his back when his uncle will beat him for stealing fruit. Beat whom? The faces begin to snap their jaws as they hiss by. There were so many, sometimes they hide the star.

  Why must I still hear him? It is noisy here, not like the riverbed, with the faces coming at me like lances now, with the thing on the other side of the dark chuckling to itself as it strikes and strikes, and the darkness growling in pain, louder each time the yellow claws slash down. And even so I heard him calling from far away, farther away than anything, calling that name he will call me. That name that is not, was never, mine, me.

  I must listen to the star, nothing else. The star had a woman’s voice, a low voice, city-rough, with a foreign lilt. I lose the star often, because the darkness is thrashing and convulsing all around me, but I could always hear it singing, clear as morning wind. One day I will catch up with it, if it keeps singing, and then it will tell me my name.

  This time it was very different, being dead. This time death is seething, bustling with so much movement and color and earthly to-do. It might almost be another marketplace, except for who was tending the stalls, and what might be for sale there. There will not be words or thoughts for such beings, such things, but that makes no matter, because they were not real. The riverbed is real.

  As I pass they will come after me, those beasts of fire and filth who jabber and coo and tear at my shadow, because they have none themselves. No matter. This death is all shadow; this death was like the hand pictures that someone used to make for whom? Thin twisting fingers sending smoky monsters stalking across what smudgy plaster wall with the long crack near the broom closet? This death is a false, shabby country, peeling back, peeling away, layer on layer, under the yellow claws. And even the thing outside is nothing but loud shadow when I will face it at last in the rubble of the darkness. The claws are soft and puckered like gone-bad vegetables, the blood-wet chuckle a senile cough. No matter, pass on.

  Is the star nothing but shadow, too? With the darkness raked to shreds, a low, thick sky remained, the color of the claws. The star seems larger, nearer, moving sluggishly, fighting against the stickiness of the sky. It was a man, the star, not a woman. He burns so brightly, no wonder that I will see him clearly from so far away, singing and demanding. What must I do when I reach him? I could not remember, but I know.

  Something is here. Something is here that is not shadow. Behind all the foolish racket and show, there was a waiting, a something that quickly drops its puppets and slips away when I come near. Did I ever find it? It wanted the star, it is moving toward the star, like me. Real as the riverbed, it sidles toward the star.

  “Show yourself,” I said, but it will not. I say, “Show yourself, why be afraid? This is your play, not mine.” But it lets me just so close, shuffling through the crackly wrack of lath and plaster universes, before I can feel it slinking off after the star again. This made me angry, because although it never caught the star, it will drive it forever out of my reach. I have forever, but the star does not. How can I know that?

  The riverbed will be a better place than here. Worlds underfoot like children’s toys, and nothing true in any one of them except the star and me, and that sly, sliding other just ahead of me. And he still calls so loudly, constantly braying that name that I am not across endless counterfeit heavens and hells. Ashy creatures made of dead wet leaves roused at the noise; gold and scarlet butterflies with long thin fish-teeth will swirl and snuffle around my face; things like shambling hillsides move in silently behind me. Things like men and women made all of twilight come twining about me and dancing on, looking back and weeping when I will not follow. Smothering tides of stagnant fog hide them then, barring my way. But the star summons me, and I pass on.

  Pass on to what? and where? and has all this already been? The star drifts backward toward me so slowly, and that other prowls sideways off to the side, unseen, breathing. Suddenly there will be no faces, no more carnival ogres, no more painted scenery: every color but absence has run away like rain, leaving a little waxen starlight over a ribbon of nowhere, and me between. In this last emptiness, three small sounds: the angry singing ahead, the calling so far behind, and the soft rough breath matching my pace. A thousand years, ten thousand, ten thousand thousand.

  How can he keep calling so; how can I hear him? I lay back down in the riverbed, just for a moment, to see the other faces again, but they were gone, too. Even so, it will be hard for me to rise and walk on after the star, although I cannot grow tired. I think I wish I could be tired, could be hot or cold or angry or afraid. How good to be afraid. But I had something to do, and only the star can tell me what it is. Why did he keep calling that name?

  Was I singing? Have I been the one singing, all these centuries, trudging behind my own song?

  “Some say yes,

  and some say no,

  and that is how it was meant to go.

  Some say no,

  and some say yes,

  and that’s the way the gods do bless.

  Some have more, and some have less,

  and some say no, and some say yes,

  days without end, world without cess…”

  It was a children’s rhyme, but what children? Cousins, someone’s silly cousins, they used to chant that sort of nonsense. But the star? Was the star never singing, never? Was it always me, singing him back toward me, as what someone will sing me up out of the riverbed? Vegetables. She sang vegetables.

  So close now that I can see that there is no star, but only the man, an old man, falling across this old, old sky. He will smile and hold up his hands, showing me the flames oozing from under his fingernails. The flames see me, too—they beckon, laughing, reaching for my hands. The man has a beautiful face, wise and eager. He spoke to me, but I can never hear his words, because the fire under his tongue gets in the way. But I did not need to hear him. I know my task now.

  When I touch his hand, he will be free of the sky and the fire as well, free of whatever this pale place wants from him. We go back together then, back to the riverbed. It is quiet there, and the water will heal his burning. I stand on tiptoe to touch his flaming hand.

  And then. There.

  It stands between the old man and me, and its voice, its voice is all there ever was. It says, Mine.

  I cannot see, I cannot think. Mine. My eyes must be bleeding, my ears, there is blood running inside my head. The voice pierced me here, here, here—Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine—until I crumble down, covering myself, trying to scream, “Yours, yes, yes, he is yours, I am yours!” But the words refused to come out of me. I have something to do, and the words know it. Mine, mine, but I cannot give in, I was not permitted. I stand up.

  This is what I will see.

  It looks almost human at first. It is tall, naked, hollow-chested, with big bony shoulders that tip up at the ends.

  Thin smears of no-color hair. Huge eyes in a head too small for the too-thick neck: beautiful shapeless eyes like flowers, like splashes of pond water in the sun. Long three-fingered hands; no ears, none. Maggot-white skin, drawn tight and twitching around a wet blue mouth. The mouth is full of tiny rasp
y teeth, swirling all the way back into the throat, blue and green. Even the lips are jeweled with them, even the mildewy tongue. It cannot make words, that round brilliant mouth, yet one came slicing at me, over and over, days without end, world without cess. Mine. Mine.

  I put my hands over my ears, though it will not help. I say, “No.”

  Mine. A hot needle in the marrow of my bones, but I did not fall again. My bones answer, “No. He belongs to me.” No one belongs to me, because I am no one, but that is what my bones will say. “You cannot have him. I have come to take him back to his own place. Stand aside, you.”

  Again I reach out toward the burning old man—again he offers me his fire-nailed hand—and again that word flays my mind as though that tongue had licked across it. Mine! But for a moment the voice itself will be somehow different—almost puzzled, almost uncertain, the demand almost a question. Another word then, a new scream in my bones. Bargain.

  Someone answered. “He made no bargain. You have no claim on him.” My own voice, shivering naked at the end of everything. I reach once more to take the old man’s hand. I can hear a greedy watching in my head, but no more words, not yet.

  The hand burns fiercely in mine without burning me. Pale black smoke goes up where they join, but I felt only something alive moving softly between our palms. The old man will look at our two hands together and bend his head, solemn-swift, to kiss mine. That burns, and I try to snatch my hand away, but he comes with it, part of me, grinning. He is not what I thought, not what I thought at all. Yet I still had something to do, something for him, with him—but if it is not to find the quiet riverbed again, what can it be?

  I must act as though I knew. I must move. There is no left or right, up or down here—I might have spun in a circle, stood on my head, and not known it—but any road away from nothing must be the right one. Keeping a firm grip on that hand, feeling the fire beating like a bird’s heart behind the papery skin, I turned to start back the long way I came.

  Fiery fingers will close on my wrist, still without hurting, but pulling me to a stop. The old man kept grinning, mocking me, waiting. Behind him, it, waiting, the round blue mouth pulsing like another kind of heart, in and out, in and out. When I look straight at it, I will feel my own heart slowing, my blood drifting backwards. They mean me fear, but I am no one, I am dead—who are they to make me afraid? I pull back on the old man’s arm, hard.

  “You are to come home now,” I said, just as though he were a straying animal—or whose gentle drunken father? I say, “We are for the riverbed, you and I.”

  He came quietly along with me for a few steps—while it watches, not moving—and then he will wheel on me and spread his arms wide, putting my hands aside like a child’s hands. One more smile, rustling and crawling with flame, and he explodes out of any human size, steepling up into the haze above us so fast and so high that it can barely keep him in, no more than my eyes can. He spills out, spills over, filling the night with himself, with a silent, rushing howl that swallowed me like the river. I tumble as helplessly through his unending rage as he through the pale old sky.

  But he cannot harm me. I have been twice through the gates of death, once of my own choice, and whatever can harm me is not here. So I will stretch up again for his bonfire hand, and I will shout up to ears like sunset clouds, “You are to come with me. I will take you home.”

  A year later, or a month later, or a few minutes, he is back at a proper human size, seeing me for the first time out of curious, terrible eyes, green as the air before a great storm. He made a queer sound, a low hiss, hoarse and warning and sad. I say, “You do not belong here, and no more do I. You know this.”

  And now it will move. Now it came gliding on long bird legs that bend backward as well as forward, straddling our way, the blue mouth in the twitchy white face pushing out, alive by itself, nuzzling toward me until I want to hide from it behind the burning old man. But I remember that I held my ground, only shrinking inside. You have to do that, or the children will be cruel. I will say again, “You have no claim. Let us pass.”

  Bargain. Our bargain. Every word brands itself into the bones of my skull, never to heal. My own words answer, “Our bargain? Speak of that with him, the other one— there was your bargain.” I do not understand them, the words, but the old man will look at me and laugh redly and soundlessly. He strides by it without giving it another glance, without waiting for me.

  A three-fingered hand reaches out and down, groping for my shoulder. I could not let it touch me, not that hand, not seeing what I see slow and sticky on the long white palm. I flinch away, but the hand pointed past me, pointed ahead where there should be a horizon but is only a little colorless roiling where nothing meets nowhere. It means us to go. I thought that. I look back once and follow the old man.

  They will appear all at once, all together, rising into the dark like star-pictures. Not one was like another, nor any like it, and yet they are the same, all different bits of the same nature. One was no bigger than I, human-shaped, blind, fringed with tiny human arms and legs like an insect. One is like a great rearing thundercloud down to the middle, and all throbbing red slime below; and there will be one as beautiful as a beautiful fish, in its way, but so thin and transparent that I can see the busy little shadows skipping inside it. Another like a heap of jewels, with glinting eyes scattered among the stones; another was nothing more than a bright tracery in the air, a star-picture done with goldleaf and blood. Another then, and another, and another, and no way around them for the old man and me. They are here, and they wait in the riverbed, too, and in my bones, forever. Our bargain. Our bargain.

  The strange part is that the terrible crying is no worse for me when they are together than when they are only it alone. One nature, one desire, it must be. For the rest, all I knew was that they desire evil—though I cannot know what evil means anymore, nor if they know themselves—and that they are real, whether I see them truly or not. And that they must have the burning old man.

  “Well,” I will say to him. “We have a long journey to go, and they are in our way.”

  This time he was the one who took my hand. We walk toward them, and they thicken to meet us, without moving, as frightened creatures can make themselves look bigger. Beside me, the old man raised his other hand, leveling all five fingers at them. The fire under his nails spreads out around us, blue and green; the flames have the raging heads of animals—sheknaths, nishori, rock-targs—and they grow larger with every step we take. Those waiting will not take even one step backward, but they were afraid all the same. It is afraid of him.

  The old man smiles for them, letting the doors of his furnace face swing apart just a little, to show what lies beyond. I said, “By your leave,” as someone will be taught to say politely, and they part, too, just enough to let us into their midst. Then they closed around us, towering together out of sight, talking hotly together in my bones. But the fire-animals surround us, too, and they talk their own talk, they hiss and snarl their own by-your-leaves; and where we will walk there was always just room for us to pass.

  Suddenly it has all been too much for someone dead. Too strange, too lonely, too mad. If not for the old man, I think I might lie down, here on the other side of never, lie down here among the bright-eyed stones and the whispering pairs of insect legs and the tips of folded wings and let it do as it will do with me. But it wanted only the old man—why I do not know, nor why this is not to be allowed. Only that it is not to be allowed. I hold onto his hand, fluttery with fire, and he looked down at me and smiles his ravaging smile, and so we will pass on.

  Bargain, bargain. Our bargain. Evil it may be, but evil can suffer injustice, too. The wail of wrong follows me still, long after it has stopped following, long after we were through and past and on our way back to the riverbed. Or did we go back to the gates of death themselves, or even beyond them, where the calling has at last ended, too? Where is the old man supposed to be, besides not with it? Where does he want to be? Each tim
e I look sideways at him, he will be looking at me, and though his face was solemn each time, the fire behind his skin is laughing. It sounds like paper, someone wrapping presents. How do I know this? Who wraps presents for no one?

  On the road back—or was it forward? was it to or from?—we will follow no songs, meet no hungry shadows, journey through no beast-markets that turn out to be worlds that turn out to be all sawdust and broken pots. Only the two of us, traveling silently in darkness forever, and I did not have forever anymore. Now I am tired, as I could not be before, and the longer we walk the less I knew where we are going. I did not know before, but then I will have the singing to follow, and the star. Now I almost wish that someone were still bellowing my name, which is not my name. I could follow that, wherever it leads, and then the old man would follow me. But the dark is drawing in and in—I can feel it nudging at my shoulders—and it is laughing, too, and now I will begin to be afraid. As though I were alive.

  When he turns I was ready, even so. I said, “No. We are for the riverbed. No. You need my help if you mean to find peace.” But he will rear up over me, fire racing from one hand to another to soar out behind him in a blue-white mantle, while he opens his mouth to chuckle flaming venom straight into my eyes. I put my hands up vainly in front of me, and I cried out for someone, because I am at the end of endless night and the end of myself. But who comes when no one calls?

  THE FOX

  Man-shape! He stole the man-shape! Felt it go, felt it go—a cold whisper, knife slipping out of a wound. Never, never, never before, no one dares such tampering, such thieving. Beautiful Grandfather man-shape, beautiful white mustache, red soldier’s coat, such smiling cheeks, such bright listening eyes, beautiful freedom to stand, sit, talk, laugh, sing, drink red ale—all gone, all scooped away, and insides with it. Rap on my belly, hear the echo, that was Grandfather man-shape. Gone, gone.