Innkeeper's Song

by Peter S. Beagle

  The old man said, “Arshadin, there is no time. I will agree to anything you like, but we must get you gone from here this minute. Arshadin, listen to me. I am begging you.”

  Arshadin laughed. It was a surprising laugh, slow and suddenly real and deeply amused, and I hear it still and wonder. Did he laugh in the comfort of arrogance, in certainty that his dear-bought new power would shelter him from any revenge, human or other? Or was it the laughter of someone with nothing to lose and no possible escape to debate? I don’t know, of course, but there are worse ways to remember a bad man.

  “Nothing has changed,” he repeated. “Only you could come back from where you have been still whining at me to behave.” The air crumpled again, close beside him. A ripple appeared in it, exactly like the circles that spread out and out when you toss a stone into quiet water. This circle darkened, tightened, and became a blue mouth, its lips sparkling wetly with tiny red and blue teeth. Arshadin turned and struck at it, crying out words that sounded like trees snapping in a windstorm, one after another. The round mouth pushed forward, as though for a dreadful kiss. It puckered around him, drew him in, and was gone.

  In the silence, I heard Tikat singing. He had never looked up, but was rocking Lukassa in his arms, his long light hair half-hiding her face, mingling with her own dark tangle, as he droned along so softly. I knew the song—it was the lullaby about Byrnarik Bay. He had the words all wrong; or perhaps I do.

  TIKAT

  She slept without stirring for not quite three days. Without asking leave, I put her in the best upstairs room, the one that Rosseth says goes vacant all year sometimes, because Karsh insists on keeping it for the kind of people who rarely come to Corcorua. When Karsh grew noisy about it, the tafiya said to him, mildly enough, “Good Master Innkeeper, when Lukassa wakes in this bed, that day will I restore your establishment to its former condition, and get rid of the stink-beetles in your walls into the bargain. But if you say another word on the matter between now and then—” and he gestured around him at the wreck that the wizard Arshadin had made of The Gaff and Slasher—“I promise you that you will forever look back on this as the good old days.” Karsh stormed off to check on the outbuildings, and the tafiya sighed and sat down to watch Lukassa through the night. He did better than his pledge, in fact, for we all woke on the third morning to find the inn’s roof back where it should be, whole windows set neatly into new frames in remade walls; the floors certainly as level as they ever were, the two stone chimneys as straight, the foundations probably more sound, and such things as beer pumps, cisterns, and water pipes working as though they’d never been wrenched up like weeds. The stink-beetles were indeed gone, and the sign over the front door had been freshly painted over, which strangely infuriated Karsh. He stamped around all that day mumbling that there had been nothing wrong with the sign the way it was, and that there never was a wizard who knew when to leave well alone. Which is true enough, as I can say now.

  Lukassa did not wake until that evening. The fox was asleep on her bed, and the tafiya had fallen asleep himself; or I think he had—he was a deceitful old man in some ways, and enjoyed being so. She came awake all at once, her eyes too ready for terror. I put my hands lightly on her arms, chancing the terror, and said, “Lukassa.”

  I am not certain whether I could have borne it if she had not known me this time. But I saw that she did even before she spoke. She said, softly but clearly, “Tikat. There you are, Tikat.”

  “I’m here,” I said, “and you’re here with me, and so is he,” and I nodded toward the tafiya snoring earnestly in his chair. I said, “You saved him. I think you saved us all.”

  She did not answer, but looked at me in silence for a long time. Her face was a stranger’s face, which was as it should be. Love each other from the day we are born to the day we die, we are still strangers every minute, and nobody should forget that, even though we have to. Marinesha looked in at the bedroom door, smiled shyly, and went away again. Lukassa said, “When I was there, in that place, I heard you calling me.”

  My throat was raw with it still. I bowed my head over her hands. She went on, halting often. “Tikat, I don’t remember you from—from before the river. He says I never will remember, not you, not myself, not anyone.” There were tears in her eyes, but they did not fall. “But I do know that you are my friend and care truly for me. And that I have hurt you.” One hand turned over in mine to close on my fingers.

  “It was nothing you could help,” I said. “No more than I could help calling after you, I never thought you would hear me.”

  “I did, though.” She smiled for the first time, the smile she always tries to rein in, because if her happiness spreads past the left corner of her mouth a crooked tooth shows. “It was very annoying, until I needed it to find my way back. But then I couldn’t hear it anymore.”

  “I couldn’t call anymore,” I said. Lukassa looked into my eyes and nodded. Her hand closed tighter on my hand. I said, “I couldn’t, Lukassa.” She nodded again. I turned my head to watch the fox: slanting eyes shut tight, fluffed-out tail across his muzzle, the black-tipped fur parting with his dainty snores. Lukassa stroked him with her free hand, and he wriggled against it without ever waking. “He was the man in the red coat, you know,” I said. “I met him on the way here, when I was following you and Lal.”

  “There is something else he is,” Lukassa whispered. “Something else, something not like anything.” I could barely hear her, and she did not go on. We were silent for a while, just holding hands, looking at each other, looking away. All the questions I wanted to ask her sat on the bed with us: the mattress seemed to sag under their weight. At last Lukassa said, “I want to tell you about that place, about being there. I want to tell someone.”

  I began to say, “I have no right—” but she interrupted me. She said, “I want to tell you, but I cannot. The person who could have told you how it was is dead.” I stared at her, not understanding at all. Lukassa said, “She never came back—she died on the other side of that black gate, as surely as the girl you knew died in the river. And here I am, here I am talking to you, and who am I? Tikat, am I dead or alive, can you tell me that? And if I am alive, who am I?” She tried to pull her hand from mine, but I held hard onto it, even when her emerald ring ground against my finger. The fox woke up and yawned elaborately, stretching his forepaws and watching us.

  “You are as alive as I am,” I said, “and you are yourself. If you are not the Lukassa I followed here, maybe there never was any such person. Myself, I cannot again be the Tikat I was, and I am well content with that, as long as you and I recognize each other.” I opened my hand then, and she took hers away, but then brought it back so that our fingertips touched. I said, “What do we do now, Lukassa? I thought we could go home, back to those two other people, but we never can.”

  “No,” she said very quietly. “Lal would take me along with her, if I asked her, but only because I asked. And Soukyan—” She spread her hands out, and I saw the scars I had been feeling, the two long cloudy blotches on the pale right palm, and the dark whiplash across the back, just below the ring. She said, “Soukyan would take me if Lal asked. So there we are.” Her smile was not the one I knew.

  I took her hand and kissed the scarred palm. She clenched it for a moment, then let it fall open again. I said, “I would take you anywhere, but I don’t know a place to go.” We were quiet for a little, and then I added, “We could always stay here and work at the inn. Grow old with Karsh.”

  It was said as a joke, but her face clouded and I realized that she had taken me seriously. I was just beginning to explain when the tafiya coughed politely behind us. He said, “If nobody would mind a suggestion?”

  How long had he been awake and listening? We never knew. You never do know with him. We turned together, and there he sat, green eyes as mocking as the fox’s yellow eyes. Very full of himself, he was, exactly like the fox.

  “It seems that my lamisetha can wait a bit longer,” he said.
“I will take you with me.” When he looked at Lukassa, his eyes changed. He said to her, “I have passed the gates of death myself, but I was worse than dead. I would have been worse than dead through all eternity, if not for you. So you have a claim on me that I will never outlive. Also—”

  Lukassa shook her head fiercely. She said, “What I did, I did without choice, without any idea of what it all meant. I have no claim on anyone.” Her voice was tired and flat.

  “Don’t interrupt,” the old man said severely. “I turned Soukyan to stone once for ten minutes, for interrupting me one time too many.” But he was smiling at Lukassa almost with admiration. He said, “Also. Apparently my need to be forever teaching somebody something has survived the black gate as well as I. If you have sense enough to come with me, I may be able—”

  Lukassa broke in again, “I do not want to be a wizard. Not for me, not ever.” She took hard hold of my hand again.

  The old man sighed. “Is Lal a wizard? Is Soukyan a wizard? Be quiet and pay attention. If you come home with me, it is possible that I may in a while remember a way to let this Lukassa and that Lukassa—the one still there in the riverbed—visit each other, talk together, perhaps even live together. Then again, perhaps not—I promise nothing. But the roof doesn’t leak, and the food is generally quite good, and the house is a restful one.” He grinned then, a joyous, teasing, snaggle-mouthed grin, and I recalled Redcoat’s words, the fox’s words—Bones full of darkness, blood thick and cold with ancient mysteries. He added, “A little disquieting, just from time to time, but restful.”

  Lukassa said firmly, “Tikat has to come too. I will not come without him.” The tafiya looked at me and raised his caterpillar eyebrows slightly. I said, “I can work, you know that. And what I can learn from being in your house, I will.” It made me nervous, to be talking to him in this way, and I kept turning Lukassa’s ring around and around on her finger, hardly aware that I was doing it.

  The tafiya said nothing for a long time. He seemed to be looking, not at either of us, but at the fox, who presently yawned in his face, jumped down off the bed and trotted importantly away, tail high. Finally he said, and his tone was oddly melancholy, “You are as welcome as Lukassa, Tikat, but I would think carefully in your place, because you may find yourself learning more than you meant to learn. There are gifts and dreams and voices in you that may wake in my house, as they would nowhere else. So I would be very careful.”

  I did not know how to answer him. I kept toying with Lukassa’s ring until it slipped over the knuckle and almost off her finger into my hand. She clutched at it immediately, saying, “Don’t, don’t do that, I must never take it off. Lal gave it to me when she raised me—if I lose it, I will die for good, fall to the dust I should have been so long ago.” Her hands were damp and shaking, and her face was old with fear.

  The tafiya gazed at her with such concern, such tenderness that for a moment his face became like hers—he looked like her, how else can I say it? Only for a moment, it was, but I will remember it when I have forgotten every feat of wizardry I ever saw him do. Very, very gently, he said to her, “Lukassa, it is not so. I gave Lal that ring, and I should know. It was made to comfort and quiet certain sorrows, nothing more. Your life is yours, not the ring’s. Lukassa’s heart and soul and spirit are what keep Lukassa alive, not a dead green stone in a piece of dead metal. Give me the ring, and I will prove it to you.”

  It took a long time for her to stop trembling and listen to him, and even then she would not take off the ring, for all his talk and mine. At first she said nothing but, “No,” over and over, into her fists; but at last she turned to the old man and told him, “I will give it to Lal. When we leave here, Tikat and I, to go with you, then I will give it back to Lal, and she can return it to you if she chooses. Or not.”

  And from there she would not budge. The tafiya shook his head and blew through his beard and grumbled, “If we begin like this, teacher and student, how shall we end? You minded me better when I was a griga’ath.” But he had to be content with her decision all the same, and I think he was, in his way.

  THE INNKEEPER

  It has never been right since, I don’t care what he said or how great a wizard he was. Oh aye, everything works, if that’s what you mean by rightness, and some things work even better—I’m not such a fool as to say they don’t. But none of that is the same as being the way it was. Things can be replaced, fixed up perfectly, but they can’t be put back. Repaired doesn’t mean right.

  Never mind, never mind—it isn’t worth the trouble, and besides there’s not much more to tell. The next two weeks were chaos, no more and no less. Marinesha and Rosseth had to run the inn—pity me, gods!—while I spent my time groveling and begging pardon before angry guests, injured guests (mercifully, a very few; as for the Kinariki wagoner, we never did find him again), and guests so terrified that some of them would not come back even for their belongings, not to mention settling their bills. Not only did I lose any number of valuable old customers, but of course the story got around everywhere, and I’ve been from that day to this building my clientele back to something like what it used to be. No wizard offered to help with that, I can assure you!

  The woman Lal let me know that she and her companions would be leaving at last, as soon as the wizard and the little Lukassa were fit to travel. She also expressed her regrets—pointlessly but quite prettily, I will say—for all the troubles that had come with them to plague The Gaff and Slasher. “All the troubles”—as if she could have understood the half of what her lot had done to my life. But it was a change to have someone ask my pardon, so I told her we’d say no more about it, and let it go. Miss Nyateneri never bothered with any apology of her own, but that’s as well. I couldn’t have dealt with any more shocks just then.

  Rosseth stayed out of my way to a remarkable degree during those days. It’s not that he doesn’t try to avoid me as much as he can, in the normal run of things; but in the normal run we don’t go much more than a long afternoon without my having to shout at him about something. To be honest, I made no great effort to bump into him, either. I had charged up a collapsing stairway through a stampede of screaming idiots and broken down a perfectly good door, all because I couldn’t endure the thought of having to train another stable boy. You never know how people take these things. It can be awkward afterwards, that’s all.

  I became certain that he was once again planning to run off with the women and the wizard, and didn’t want to face me because he knew I’d read him first glance. I took council with myself one night, consulting in my room with two bottles of that fermented harness polish they make east of the mountains—Sheknath’s Kidneys, the locals call it. What all of us decided eventually was, if he wanted that much to leave, let him leave and be damned. I had headed him off a dozen times when he and I were both younger; he was sharp enough now to give me the slip tomorrow, the day after, if not today. Well, let him, then, and good riddance, the best riddance—but before he showed me his heels, I had a thing or two to show him.

  Thinking about that made the night go too slowly, and the Sheknath’s Kidneys far too fast, and I was moving a bit gingerly when I sought him out the next morning. He was rubbing a vile-smelling ointment that he makes himself into the flanks of a bay gelding whose owner obviously enjoyed owning a pair of spurs. Rosseth was talking to the horse as he worked—not in words, just murmuring quietly, smoothing his voice into the raw places with the ointment. I waited, watching him until he felt somebody there and whipped around fast, the way those women do. He said, “I’m almost through with him. I’ll get to the hogpen right away.”

  Because there was a rail coming loose there, you see, and I’d been after him for a week to replace it. He finished with the gelding, forked some fresh hay into its manger, and then just leaned against it for a moment, the way horses will lean against each other, before he came out of the stall. We stood looking at each other, him braced for orders, keeping a careful eye on my hands; and me
studying the size of his own stubby hands, and the two swirls of down on his upper lip. Won’t ever be as big as I am, but he might turn out stronger.

  “I want to talk to you,” I said. Oh, that made his eyes go tight, flicking back and forth between me and the stable door. He said, “Well, the rail, the hogs might—” I nodded toward a bale of hay and said, “Sit.”

  He sat. I wanted to keep standing, but my head was clanging too much for that, so I turned over a pail and sat facing him. “If you want to go with that old wizard and the rest of them,” I said, “you don’t have to sneak away. Go. I won’t beat you, and I won’t try to stop you. Just take what’s yours and go. Close your mouth,” for his jaw was sagging like that hog-pen rail giving way. “You understand me?”

  Rosseth nodded. I couldn’t tell if he was joyous, relieved, angry, somehow disappointed—I can’t always tell. I said, “But there is something you have to hear. The only condition I’m making is that you have to sit there and listen to this. All of it. Close your mouth—you don’t have to look like an idiot! Do you hear me, Rosseth?”

  “Yes,” he said. Chatters endlessly when you don’t want to hear one more word out of him, goes dumb as a fish when it really means something. My head got worse just meeting those blank, watchful eyes of his. Why did I bring up this whole damned business now? It could have waited. As long as it’s waited already, what’s another day, or another week, or the rest of my life? I said, “All right, then. A long time ago, I had to go to Cheth na’Deka, never mind why. It was a long journey there, and a worse one back. You know why?”

  “Bandits?” Not much of a guess, considering that Cheth more or less means bandits, always has. “Bandits,” I said. “Or maybe there was a war going on—not much difference down there, except for the clothes. I never did find out which gang it was that had been through that village.”