Innkeeper's Song

TIKAT

When I woke I asked about the Rabbit, and the stable boy said that he had already bitten two horses and one actor, so I went back to sleep.

The second time I woke alone to twilight and silence, except for the occasional stamp and whuffle below. The players, or whatever they were, had gone, and the boy, Rosseth, was whistling somewhere outside. I climbed down from the loft, going slowly, noticing in a far-off way that I was wearing a tunic too small for me, stiff with other peoples’ dried sweat. There was a dog, I remember—my head seemed to become huge as a cathedral, and then slowly small again, every time he barked. I saw the Rabbit in a stall near the door; he whinnied at me, but it was such a long way, and I could not reach him. I leaned against the door and said, “Good Rabbit. Good Rabbit.”

From the stable door, the inn bulked larger than any building I had ever seen. Two chimneys, lights in every window, laughter and cooking smoke blowing down the night breeze that cooled my face and made my legs feel a little stronger. I started toward the inn because I thought Lukassa might be there.

Rosseth found me under a tree next to the hog pen. I had been sick, I think, but I had not fainted again—I knew as well who and where I was as I understood that it would be better for me to stay on all fours for a little while longer. He crouched beside me, saying, “Tikat. I’ve been past this place twice, looking for you. Why didn’t you call out?”

When I did not answer, he put his hands under me and began trying to lift me to my feet. I pushed him away, harder than I meant to, perhaps, and he sat back on his heels and stared at me without speaking for a long time. He was a year or two younger than I, and built very much like the Rabbit: short-legged and thick through the chest, with shaggy red-gold hair, a wide mouth, and quick dark eyes. A kind, curious, irritating face, I thought it then. I said, “I don’t need any help.”

Rosseth grinned at me, unoffended, unmalicious. “Then you and Karsh should get along wonderfully well. He doesn’t give it. Come,” and he held out his hand.

“I don’t need your Karsh,” I said. “I need Lukassa and my horse, nothing more.” I got to my knees then, and we faced each other like that, while the hogs grunted in the deepening dark, muzzles pushing between the raw fence posts, trying to reach the place where I had vomited.

“Lukassa has not returned,” Rosseth answered, “nor have her friends. As for what you need and don’t need, believe me, the only thing that matters right now is Karsh’s permission to sleep here and eat here while you recover. Come on, Tikat.” Suddenly he looked his age, and very anxious with it.

I stood up without his aid, but my legs buckled under me at the third step. Rosseth caught me, but I was growing very tired of being picked up and patted and set down somewhere else, like a baby, and I shook him away again. “I can crawl,” I said. “I have crawled before.”

Rosseth blew out his breath, exactly the way the Rabbit does when he is displeased with me. Then he took hold of me and dragged me upright once more, would I or would I not. Stronger than they looked, those small, broken-nailed hands. He said in my ear, “I am not doing this for you, but for Lukassa. You are her friend, so I must help you until she comes back. After that, you can put your bloody pride where it belongs. Come on. You can either lean on me or I’ll just keep picking you up. Come on.” I felt him chuckle, setting his shoulder under mine. “You and Karsh,” he said. “I can hardly wait.”

The inn was somehow smaller within than it had seemed from outside. We entered through the kitchen—a woman came pushing past us in the greasy smoke, and then a man, but I never really saw them, my eyes were watering so. Someone was chopping meat so furiously that the racket drowned out whatever he was screaming. Rosseth led me like a blind man into the dining hall, where the smoke thinned out enough for me to see a good dozen or more people seated at their dinners. The chairs and tables were rough, splintery work, legs all uneven—I remember that especially, remember thinking, Oh, we do much better than that back home. The hall felt cold to me after the kitchen, in spite of the flames booming in the fireplace. It had a low ceiling of soot-blackened half-logs, held up by huge posts with the bark still on them. There were three lamps hanging from the crossbeams, swinging slowly in a draft and sending long, slow shadows twisting over the plaster walls. Rushes rattled underfoot.

No one took any notice of us. The guests looked little different from the ones who used to stop the night with Grandmother Taiwari, who alone in our village kept a room or two for travellers. A few merchants, a long table full of drunken drovers, a sailor, a holy man and woman making a pilgrimage to the hills—and off in a far corner, watching everything, a fat, pale man in a dirty apron. Rosseth led me toward him, saying out of the smiling side of his mouth, “Remember this. He detests people who contradict him, but he despises people who don’t. Bear it in mind.” The fat man watched us approach.

Close to, he was bigger than I had thought, exactly as his inn seemed smaller. Raw dough, nothing but dough, a gingerbread man who had magically escaped the oven.

His face was bread pudding, with moles and blemishes for the occasional raisin or berry; but the eyes stuck into it were round and blue and surprised, a little boy’s eyes under the creased, pouchy lids of a grum old man. I do not know if they would have seemed ordinary eyes in a gentler face. What I know is that I have never again in my life seen eyes like the eyes of fat Karsh the innkeeper.

Rosseth spoke rapidly. “Sir, this is Tikat. He comes from the south, looking for work.” The sweet blue eyes considered me, the thin mouth hardly parted; the fat man’s voice rasped its way through the dinner noise. “Another of your midden-heap strays? This one doesn’t look as though it could empty a chamberpot.” The blue eyes forgot me.

Rosseth patted my arm, winked, and moved quickly to put himself back into Karsh’s line of sight. “He’s weary, sir, travel-worn, I’m not denying that. But give him a meal and a night’s sleep, and he’ll be ready for any task you set him, in or out of doors. I promise you this, sir.”

“You promise.” The voice was heavy with dismissal, but he did look at me again, longer and more thoughtfully, finally shrugging. “Well, let him get his meal and his sleep where he likes and see me tomorrow. There might be something for him, I can’t say.”

“He can sleep in the loft with me—” Rosseth began, but Karsh’s head turned toward him and his voice cracked and dried. Karsh said, “A day’s work for a night’s lodging. I said, let him come back tomorrow.” The thick, wrinkled eyelids almost hid the little boy’s eyes.

Rosseth started to say something further, but I put him aside. My head was still swinging in and out, vast and clanging one minute, a withered pignut the next. I said, “Fat man, fat man, listen carefully to me. I have not come as far and hard and lonely as I have come to sleep and eat in your sty. I will work well for you, better than anyone you have, until my Lukassa returns, and then we will go home together. And while I work for you, beginning this night, I will sleep in your stable and eat as good a meal as you serve anyone.” Rosseth was desperately converting his grin into a coughing fit, muffling it in his sleeve. “If you do not agree to this, say so and be damned—I could find better quarters with no money than the best this midden-heap can offer. But I will be back for Lukassa tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, so you might as well get some use out of me, don’t you think?” There was more I said, but the echoes in my head drowned out the words. Rosseth’s hands were under my shoulders again, easing me down into a chair.

When I could open my eyes, the innkeeper was still studying me, his sagging white face as blank as the meal-sack it resembled. I heard Rosseth saying earnestly, “Sir, we do need the extra help just now, with the two new parties staying as long as they’ll be—” and then the slow reply, like a keel grating over stones, “I had no need to be reminded. Be quiet and let me think.” Doubtless it was only my exhaustion, but it seemed to me that the clamor of the dining hall softened slightly at his words. I had disliked Karsh the innkeeper on sight—I still do—but there was more to him than bread pudding.

“Take him away with you,” he said to Rosseth after a time. “Feed him in the kitchen, let him sleep where he will, and in the morning set him to cleaning the bathhouse and stopping those holes you haven’t yet touched, where the frogs get in. After that, Shadry should have some use for him in the kitchen.” He opened his eyes wide for a moment and peered at me with some kind of wonder that I was too weary to understand, drawing a breath as though to say something further, important, something to do with Lukassa, with me. But instead he looked at Rosseth again, mumbling, “Those two, those men, anywhere about, have you seen them?” Rosseth shook his head, and Karsh turned without another word and disappeared into a back room. He moved gracefully, the way a wave swells and rolls from shore to shore, never quite breaking. My mother, who was also fat, moved that way.

Rosseth said, very quietly, “My,” and began to laugh.

He said, “I know what I told you, but I can’t believe—” and his voice trailed away a second time. “Come on,” he said, “you’ve earned as much dinner as you can eat. What is it, what’s the matter, Tikat?” At the drovers’ table they had begun singing a dirty song that every child in my village knows. It made me think of Lukassa, and I was ashamed. Rosseth said, “Come on, Tikat, we’ll go and have our dinner.”