Innkeeper's Song

NYATENERI

Lal said, “I’m sorry you don’t like my singing. I don’t care, but I am sorry.”

We were walking the horses by then, letting the little Mildasi black lead, packhorse or not, because he understood this country: hardly a stone spurted backward under his feet, while our poor larger beasts flailed their way up the path like men floundering through a snowstorm. I said, “I never complained about your voice; it’s what you sing that I can’t abide. No tune, no shape, no end—just an everlasting melancholy whine quavering in my skull day after day. Meaning no mockery, this is truly what your folk call music?”

My horse flung back his head and balked, having winded the rock-targ I smelled a moment later. There’s no high range without them, not north of the Corun Beg, anyway. I spent the next few minutes reassuring him that it was dead scent from a last-year’s lair, which I certainly hoped was true. Lal waited for me a little way ahead. “So they do,” she answered me, “and history, too, and poetry and genealogy, for the matter of that. Ride on ahead if it troubles you to hear. Or sing something yourself—there would be an interesting change. Even Lukassa sings now and then, and I’ve often heard Rosseth humming about his chores, only the gods know why. Never you.”

“The air is thin here,” I said. “I save my breath for breathing.” We were four days out and up among the mountains above Corcorua, on a road that tacked constantly back and forth, as Lal said, like a boat trying to find the wind, at times veering three and four and five miles sidewise to climb less than one. For all that, we had scrambled high enough already to look down on the backs of coasting snowhawks, high enough that the foothills among which we had first sought our master looked as flat and pale as the farmlands they surveyed. The air was indeed thin, and chill, too, full summer or no, with a curious tang about it, rather like fruit about to go bad. Above us, the icy peaks leaned together, breathing grayness.

“To me, singing is breathing,” Lal said over her shoulder as we started on. “I don’t understand people who don’t sing.” She had been in a sideways quarrelsome mood since we set out—longer, really—never giving her disquiet proper voice, but neither allowing us a truly easy moment, even in silence. There are many who find deep contentment in such a situation, but Lal was not of them—I have known no one less comfortable with the common subtleties. Anger she could enjoy well enough; deviousness, never. I halted my horse a second time and stood where I was until she turned, hearing no one trudging behind.

“Are we no more to be companions, then?” I asked her. “Because of what occurred between weary and lonely friends who had endured much together, is there to be no friendship ever again between you and me?” My life has not led me easily to ask such questions, nor Lal’s taught her to answer them, and she did not. She said only, so low that I could barely hear her, “We must reach Simburi Pass by sunset.” This time she did not look back to see if I were following.

We did reach Simburi Pass—substantial name for what amounts to a goatherd’s trail up to summer grazing, hardly wider than the stream where we made our camp. We spoke little until the horses were seen to, and then we sat down and faced each other across a shallow pit in which a hundred or a thousand generations of goatherds must have built their cooking fires. Lal said presently, “Where do you think he picked up our track?”

“Trodai,” I said. “That place like a bit of lichen on a bit of stone, where we asked too many people if they knew of a river in these mountains. He caught up at Trodai.”

Lal shook her head. “You do yourself an injustice. No one’s taken that overgrown old path out of Corcorua in centuries, I’m sure of it. You gave us a day’s start with that, maybe two. He found us no earlier than last night or this morning.”

“What difference? Either way, at least we can have a fire. I’m tired of sleeping cold and going without my tea for his benefit. I’ll gather some wood—you see if there might not be a few fish in that stream.”

I started to rise, but Lal seized my arm and pulled me back, crying, “Fool, get down! Even Rosseth wouldn’t stand like that against the sunset!” The Mildasi horse, reacting to the furious panic in her tone, made a strange low sound in its throat, less a nicker than a questioning growl.

My laughter plainly offended Lal, but I couldn’t help that. “If he were within bowshot, and I think he is, he could have picked us off long ago. I told you, they never use weapons of any sort—it’s one-third religion, two-thirds a question of pride. Now that he is alone, he might strike from ambush, but I doubt it.” I stood up, deliberately raising my voice. “The one trouble with knowing that an armed warrior facing your bare hands is overmatched is that it leads to a certain vanity, a certain carelessness. That is exactly why his friends are dead. That is why he will join them in a while.”

I took Lal’s hands and she came up in a single motion, as I have seen her flow out of a sound sleep, swordcane half-drawn before her eyes were fully open. Now they were wary, probing: suspicious, but not altogether untrusting. My life has hung often on knowing that particular difference. I said, “I will find the wood. If we die tonight, it won’t be on salt meat and stale bread.”

There were fish, small but plentiful, and very tasty. Lal lay flat and scooped them out of the water as the sheknath do, and I cooked them crisp in oil and a bit of our precious flour. We had darit-root still, which keeps well and clears the mouth, and there was even a winter apple we had forgotten about. Lal made the tea, just as my Man Who Laughs had taught me to make it, as he surely taught every student he ever had. It is not a common blend; sometimes I fancy that I’ve surely left as plain a spoor of tea-leaves across two continents as any following killer could wish, and one far less escapable than my sex. Nothing much to be done about it now.

With those mountains toppling over us, we finished our supper in darkness. Our small fire was warm enough, but it threw its light no further than the horses’ glinting eyes. There was no scent of rock-targ now, and no sound but the soft jingle of the stream. I said, “First watch to me.”

“We should set out the bima sticks. They’d give us some warning, anyway.”

“No, they wouldn’t. Believe me.” Lal met my eyes, nodded, and shrugged. I said, “He has no interest in you. I am all he’s after.”

“And suppose he gets me by mistake, what then? It’s chance and stupidity that keep me awake, not any fanatical assassins. I really fear a stupid death.” It is often hard to tell when Lal is joking.

“If he should kill you, it will be entirely intentional. That I can safely promise you.”

“Thank you,” Lal said. “That does ease my mind. Now, according to the folk of Trodai, we should reach the River Susathi by the day after tomorrow, assuming we reach it at all. From that point, it sounds very much to me like a good two weeks’ journey at least to where Arshadin lives. Didn’t it sound so to you?”

It was my turn to shrug, busying myself with the fire.

“No more than that—perhaps even a day or so less. They disagreed among themselves, you remember.”

Lal said quietly, “I don’t think we have the time.”

Beyond the firelight there was a sudden rustle and a miniature scream: something very small catching something smaller in the dark. I said, “He escaped Arshadin, sick and feeble, and has eluded him ever since. Why fear he’ll be any easier to take with his strength returned?”

Lal sat crosslegged, slowly tapping her left palm with her right forefinger. “First, because I know a lot of old tales about sorcerers dying and being resurrected, and I’ve noticed that they always seem to come back even stronger and meaner than they were. Second, because my friend— our friend’s true power has not returned, and may well never return again. Yes, he can still protect himself better than we can guard him—yes, even now he can still work magics for which lesser wizards would give all that Arshadin has already given. But he is a gutted man.”

The last words came out so harshly that for a moment I did not recognize them. I said, more hesitantly than I am used to speaking, “I would not call him that. Gutted.”

Lal smiled at me for the first time in a long while. She said, “This is one place anyway where there can be no misunderstanding between us. We have had the same dreams, each knows what the other knows. What he suffered at Arshadin’s hands took his belly, his”—she hesitated, stumbled, and finally used a word that must have been in her own tongue. “What’s left is skill, wisdom, cunning, desperation. Let Arshadin close on him again, and none of these will avail him any more than they would you or me. We dare not give away so much as an extra day, let alone two weeks. Not to Arshadin”—she turned away from the fire and spoke loudly—“and certainly not to whoever hears us now.”

A night bird chirred softly from its nest; a nishoru sang far away. Not far enough for me, but they have to be really hungry before they’ll charge a fire.

“Sailor Lal,” I said, “I see where this is going.” Lal smiled smugly. I said, “I don’t like it.”

Lal’s expression grew even more self-satisfied. She said simply, “You have not sailed with me.”

“True enough. Something else I have yet to do is see a river running west to east. So I won’t believe in this Susathi until I’ve washed my feet in it. And since we don’t know exactly where we may strike it, how can we know if Arshadin’s home lies upstream or down?”

“Think about what Lukassa told us. She spoke of the white teeth of the river—she said that it sang of its hunger. Do you remember?”

“A rapids,” I said. “The house overlooks a rapids, which could be upstream as easily as not. Wonderful.”

Lal began placidly to unroll her bedding and embark on her nightly search for the perfect twig to clean her teeth with. I have known it to take an hour. She said, demure as a temple novice, “Not everyone who can handle a boat is called sailor. There are other considerations involved.” And after that she wouldn’t do anything but mumble to herself and compare twigs.

I spent the night with my back against a boulder and the bow across my knees. I wondered what mischief the fox was most likely to be up to by now, and about the possible nature of Arshadin’s Others, and I thought often of Rosseth. Both Lal’s watches and mine passed without event; but he was very near, that third one, and he knew I knew it. Once, just before I woke Lal, a tharakki scuttled through the firelight and was gone again—it was the two-legged variety, you don’t find the other sort this high— and at that moment I could have thrown a stone into the dark and hit him. You have to work to startle a tharakki from its hole, night-blind as they are, but he must have thought the joke was worth the effort. There would be no attack, not with Lal at hand; time enough for that after we came to the river. He was only saying hello.

We found the Susathi a day and a half later, flowing serenely through a steep slice in the mountains that took us utterly by surprise. As I’ve told you, our progress had been far less dramatic than tedious and serpentine: we never hung from crumbling ledges by our fingernails or coaxed our horses to leap snowy chasms, but mostly plodded off to the left one more time to toil up another sky-filling field of rattling, tumbling stones. No descents to catch our breath in, none at all: only one or two passes where the way was more or less level—keyholes between the mountains, half-choked by ancient ice-boulders and scree, harder to traverse than the slopes themselves. Then we trudged single-file around a bulging shoulder of stone and saw it, not that far below, a river as straight as a sword-cut, twinkling away, west to east, in the noonday sun.

Lal and I stood looking at each other, while the horses nudged our necks and stepped on our feet, smelling the water down there. I smelled it myself, a cool dance in my nostrils. Lal sighed presently and said, “Well. So much for the easy part.”

“No rapids that I can see,” I said. Her face took on that look again, so full of the knowledge of its own secret knowledge that she could hardly endure it herself. I felt much the same. She lowered one eyelid very slowly, let it float up again, then swung into her saddle and started down the trail. I mounted, caught the Mildasi horse’s reins, and followed. Once I looked back, but of course there was nothing behind us but stone and old, old snow. I wished I had not laid rough hands on Rosseth.