Innkeeper's Song

THE INNKEEPER

I should have married when I had the chance—then at least there would have been someone instead of me to do the marketing. Now and then I take on someone just for that purpose, and I always regret it. No one who wasn’t born to it can deal with those old thieves in the Corcorua stalls; anyone else comes home with a cartload of rotting vegetables, maggoty meat, and salt fish you can smell before you hear the wagon wheels on the road. I manage well enough, but I don’t like it, never have, even when my father used to take me with him to teach me the trade. He loved it as much as they did, the butchers, the fishmongers, and the rest of them—he loved the yelling and haggling as much as finding the first fresh melons off the ship from Stimeszt, and he would have died of contempt instead of drink if people had stopped trying to swindle him out of his shirt. I am not like that.

So I came home that day as I do every market day, tired and disgusted, breakfast going rancid in the back of my throat. There have been times when I wouldn’t have minded walking into The Gaff and Slasher to look up the stairs and see that fool of a boy pinned to the wall with his neck half-wrung, but all I wanted to deal with then was a gallon of my own red ale, and this was one plaguey annoyance too many. Especially from outlanders.

I roared, “Put him down!” in a voice to rattle crockery—how else would you make yourself heard across taprooms for forty years?—and the one who had the boy said, “Ah? Certainly?” and dropped him. They turned toward me, smiling as though nothing in any way unusual were going on, smiles to scrape your bones. “At last the patron? The master of the house?”

“My name’s Karsh,” I said, “and no one but me lays a hand on the help. Come down here and talk to me if you want a room.”

They did not move, so I climbed the stairs to them. Pride is not my problem. Close to, they were older than I’d thought, though you had to stare to be sure of it. Long necks, triangular faces, light brown skin so tight over the bones that the lines were no more than tiny pale grooves. I felt their faces would rattle like kites if I touched them. The one who’d been choking the boy—yes, yes, he was already on his feet, coughing a bit, no harm done—told me that they were looking for a woman, a friend of theirs. “A good, good friend? It is most, most urgent?”

A southern voice, like hers, but with something else to it, a kind of restless twitch that isn’t southern at all. I knew whom they meant, of course, and saw no reason not to tell them she was staying here. No, I didn’t care much for their manner, nor for their way of taking liberties in my house without so much as paying for a bottle; but I’d put up uglier sorts many a night, and besides, I had no worries on Miss Nyateneri’s account. She would have made two of them, and she’d likely enough teethed on that dagger and that bow of hers. I said to the boy, “Is she here?”

I can read his mind sometimes, more often than he likes, but never his face, not for years. The way he looked at me, I couldn’t have told you if he was grateful for my showing up when I did, angry because I didn’t pay his squeezed windpipe enough mind, or alarmed—or jealous, for that matter—because these dubious customers were claiming intimacy with Miss Nyateneri. He shook his head. “They went out this morning. I don’t know when they’ll be back.” Voice just a bit hoarse, but not bad at all—air flowing up and down his neck like anyone else’s. I put up with worse, from worse, at his age, and here I am.

Half-Mouth said, “We will wait? In the room?” No question about it, as far as that pair were concerned—they were halfway down the hall by the time he was done speaking. I said, “You will not wait in the room,” and though I didn’t shout, that time, they heard me and they turned. My father taught me that, how to catch a guest’s ear without losing either the guest or your own ears. “The rooms are private,” I told them. “As yours would be, if you were staying here. You may wait downstairs, in the taproom, and I will stand you each a pint of ale.”

I added that last because of the way they were looking at me. As I have told you, I am not brave, but doing what I do for so long has taught me that a joke and a free drink take care of most misunderstandings. Few people come to a crossroads inn like this chasing trouble—not with trouble so handy in town, less than five miles away. There’s a dika-wood cudgel behind the bar that’s come in useful once or twice, but these days I’d have to dig for it under dishrags and aprons and the tablecloth I keep for private meals. The last time any eyes made me as uneasy as this pair’s, they belonged to a whole roomful of wild Arameshti bargemen with ideas about the barmaid who worked here before Marinesha. Half-Mouth shook his head and half-smiled. He said, “We thank you? We would prefer?”

I shook my head. Their shoulders went loose and easy, and the boy moved up alongside me—as though he would have been any more use than a hangnail. But Gatti Jinni came in just then, with a couple of those actors, trying to cozen them into a game of bast. I never let stable-guests into the house before nightfall, but I greeted this lot like royalty, calling down that their rooms were ready and dinner already on the hob. They were still gaping at me when I turned back to my precious little southerners and beckoned to them. No, I jerked a finger—there’s a difference.

Well, they looked at each other, and then they looked down at Gatti Jinni and his new pair of marks (I cuff his head at least once a month over this, but he still regards it as his legal, sovereign right to skin my guests at cards); and then they looked back, sizing up the boy and me again. I hadn’t yet seen a weapon on either of them, mind you, but there wasn’t a doubt in my belly that they could have killed us all and barely raised a sweat. But it clearly wasn’t worth the sweat to them, nor the clamor. They came toward us, and I pushed the boy aside—him waving that spade of his to scatter muck all over the hall—and they passed by without a sound or a glance. Down the stairs, across the taproom, and on out into the road. The door never even creaked behind them. When I went myself to look outside, so as to be sure they weren’t bothering Marinesha, they were already gone.

The boy said, “I’ll go after her.” He was red and pale by turns, sweating, and shaking, the way it happens when you’re either going to soil your breeches or kill people. He said, “I’ll warn her, I’ll tell her they’re waiting.” I almost didn’t catch him at the door, and me with the slopjars not even emptied.