Innkeeper's Song

LAL

I never sensed him behind me, not once, but the Mildasi horse did. As long as those shaggy black ears stayed back and those scarlet nostrils kept flaring and rumbling, I kept moving upriver in the dying light.

The trap we were laying was so childishly obvious that we could only count on our pursuer’s dismissing it out of hand as a blind to cover our true deadfall. We had expected him to track me some distance, against the off chance that I really might double back to ambush him. But it would seem far more likely—or so we hoped—that I might be trying to lure him away from Nyateneri, and he could never afford the greater risk of his quarry actually escaping on some lashed-together heap of floating debris. He would turn back before I dared and reach Nyateneri well before me. Exactly how well was my responsibility.

When the black’s behavior finally told me that we were no longer being trailed, it was past sunset and I had lost sight of the Susathi. I had held to its course as closely as I could, but the further I traveled, the more impassable the bank became for a rider, and I was forced steadily away into brambles and sword-grass, and so into the trees. I could not even smell the river now.

I dismounted, unsaddled and unburdened the horses, and loaded myself with whatever would not slow me. Then I took the beasts’ heads between my hands, each in turn, saying certain words, and told them that they were free to follow me back down the river or not, as they chose, and that the Mildasi black would be their leader and bring them safely to kindness and good grazing. My friend taught me always to do this when forced to abandon horses. What use it may be to them, I cannot say, but I have always done it, just so.

Hard going it was at first in the wild old tree-dark, on a path that only my three horses had trodden before me. There were mossy roots to stumble over, thorny creepers to snatch at my legs, and a sickly weight in the air that sometimes forced me to stand still for too long, my heart pounding absurdly and my mind unfamiliar. In those moments, nothing would stay in focus, not even Nyateneri’s peril, which became infinitely less real than the dimmest of my old dreams. I did not then know what was happening to me, and that frightened me as nothing waiting in the woods or on the river shore could ever have done. Madness is my enemy, not wizards or assassins.

I lost the path twice, and nearly my swordcane as well—a vine twitched it neatly out of my belt, leaving me to scrabble wildly through brush and leaf-mold in the dark—but I did find my way back to the Susathi at last. No moon yet, but better than the moon is the long summer twilight of the north that turns clouds to a pale gold-violet that exists nowhere else, and riverbank reeds to glowing shadows. Compared to the woods, it was brightest noon, and I slung my boots around my neck and settled down to running with great relief.

I am a good runner. There are many faster, but not so many for whom it has been as necessary to learn to become nothing but flight. Even with boots and saddlebags bouncing heavily over my shoulders, I covered the same ground in less time than I had on horseback with two other horses to mind. No other sound but my breath and the river, much louder now in the evening stillness: a blue-black carpet with its nap ruffled the wrong way to show the pink and pale gold beneath. Sometimes I walked over rough ground, and twice waded carefully through shallow streams with soft, hungry beds. But for the most of it I became my own running; and had I thought of anything at all, it might have been of another woman on another night path, and of what was behind her then. But running cannot think.

Running cannot think. It was plain chance that I recognized the sharp bend in the shoreline beyond which I had left Nyateneri. I stopped and waited for a few moments, letting myself return a little slowly to myself and listening for any least noise from that quarter-moon of stones and swordgrass. But I heard only the creaky piping of a long-legged skim stalking through the reeds. I shrugged my burdens silently to the ground, and I put my boots on and went forward.

No one was there. The late moon was rising, almost full, too full to hide from. I walked down to the water’s edge and squatted on my heels to read what I could. Most of the driftwood and all the heaps of dead-man’s-ringlets were gone—so Nyateneri had managed to build his mock-raft—and a few scrapes in the pebbly mud indicated that he must actually have launched it, though I saw no darkness of the right size or shape anywhere on the river. But the moonlight did show me two men’s jumbled footprints, one set booted, Nyateneri’s; the others those of a smaller man, barefoot. The prints skidded across each other, trampled and blurred each others’ outlines. I found no dried blood, no sure sign of a leg crippled or a body dragged. There was nothing to tell Lal the Great Tracker how it had been when Nyateneri turned in the twilight to meet the man coming out of the trees.

I stood up slowly, with no idea of where to turn myself—not even which way to look, let alone what to hope for, what to do next. The skim kept calling, and the moon grew smaller and colder as I watched, and so did I. My stomach hurt with my fear for Nyateneri; and then I grew furious at him for being someone I was frightened for, and for having the bloody nerve to be lost and dead in the night. It did not once occur to me to be angry with his killer until the little river wind shifted and I smelled him.

The two men in the bathhouse had smelled only of sudden death, which wipes out the natural odor instantly and forever. This was a nearly familiar smell, too sharp to be sweet, but not at all acrid; not the scent of a wild hunter, but of wild weather coming. My sword was already clear, though I did not remember having drawn it. I never do. I said, “I see you. I see you there.”

The chuckle just behind me was pleasant kin to the smell: warm, sleepy lightning, stirring in its nest. “Do you so?” I was facing him before the last word was out, but I should have been dead by then. In a way I did die, right there, all that time ago, and this is a ghost who has been telling you stories and drinking your wine. You don’t understand. Never mind.

He was small, like the other two, smaller than I—a long-faced, crook-necked, thin-built man in loose dark clothing, strolling toward me out of a particular clump of reeds where there had been no one when I scanned it a minute before. I stepped backward, with the sword steady on his heart. “Stand, ” I said. “Stand. I don’t want to kill you yet. Stand.”

He kept walking, more slowly now. In the last of the twilight his eyes were so pale as to be almost white, and the teeth in his long wry mouth were the color of the river where it broke over a hidden snag. His hair was very short, hardly more than a shadow on his skull. Holding up his empty hands, he said pleasantly, “Well, of course you don’t want to kill me, Lal-after-dark. You don’t even want to be under the same moon with me.”

Rosseth had told me that the men Nyateneri fought had questioned him in strange voices, both having a cold, questioning lift to every phrase. This one spoke with the flat accent of this mountain country, touched only slightly by the sideways glide of the south—more than a bit like Nyateneri’s voice, in fact. He said now, “For myself, I’ve no quarrel at all with you. My work is completed. Let me pass.”

My stomach stopped hurting, strangely or not, and both fear and anger went from me. I answered him, “Not until you say what you have done with my companion, and likely not then. Stand.”

He smiled. I backed and backed again, making certain that I stayed on open ground and requesting of gods whose names I had nearly forgotten that I not stumble. He walked patiently after me, barely beyond the sword’s point, thin hands swinging loose at the ends of his thin arms. “He’s dead as dinner,” he said, “and well you know it. Unless you suppose that he fled me one more time, and what indeed would I be doing here in that case? Down sword, colleague, and let me by.”

“Thank you, not I,” I said, and went on retreating. “Where is the body, then? We buried your two consorts, but that’s not your way, is it? What have you done with Nyateneri’s body?”

He did stand still for that moment, and had I chosen, I almost think I might have had him, though perhaps not. Perhaps not. He waited, eyes moon-white in the moon; not the first man who ever savored his power over me. He said lightly, “Why, I bundled it aboard that poor pile of sticks, and set all adrift and alight. And a fitting end, surely, for such a one, wouldn’t you say? As much of a Goro as he was.”

The Goro are a brave and cunning people, once cousins to my folk, who live on a double handful of islands in the low Q’nrak Seas. They raid their neighbors and one another; they sail everywhere in the world, fearing nothing in it; and when one of them dies, the body—or what is left of it, following certain rituals—is placed on a richly draped barge and sent out with the tide, after being set afire. I said, speaking very carefully, “I think there is no raft out there on the river. I know there is no funeral pyre.”

Oh, how he clapped his hands at that! And, oh, how he laughed, like carrion birds mating, bent almost double with his hands on his thighs and went on laughing himself to soundless wheezing because I could not strike, did not dare to chance his lie. In time he managed a cackling whisper: “Ah, you don’t know our way nearly so thoroughly, after all. Watch a bit with me, I beg you, watch but a little, little more—” he was dissolving into merriment again “—and see what it is to be on good terms with fire.”

I did strike then, a thrust you would not have seen. That is a fact, nothing more. Wrist and forearm only, no lunge, no wasted motion—which means no thought—then clear and away while Uncle Death is yet groping for his bedside slippers. But the small man with the moon-white eyes was not there. He was almost there, mind you—the point scored his tunic—but not quite, and not quite laughing anymore, either, but making a sort of purring, private sound. “Oh, well done. They spoke truly of Swordcane Lal. This will be an honor for me.”

Listen now. In the moment it took him to speak those few words, I had struck at him three more times. I tell you this not out of vanity, but to make you see what he was. Not even Nyateneri knows that I not only missed with each blow, but missed badly, never even grazing him again. The best I can say for myself is that his counterstroke—which I never saw—came when I was extended and off-balance, and I was still able to leap aside and slip his second stroke as I landed. Then I backed out of range as fast as I could, while he followed, purring. “This is nice, this is very nice. Your friend now, he turned out a bit of a disappointment. I hope it doesn’t offend you, my saying that?”

I answered with a shoulder feint and pass that had nearly cost me my life to learn, and did cost me four years to learn right. He seemed hardly to notice it, but drifted after me, all amiable amusement. “To be fair, he didn’t see me soon enough. It might have taken longer if he had. Still, I must say that I’d expected something rather more from a man who eluded us for almost eleven years. The record will never be equaled, I am sure of it. Ah, you see it now, the fire.”

I did what he wanted. I looked past him, over his shoulder, only for an instant, one instinct already wrenching my head back as the other turned it toward the river. I saw no floating fire, not until he hit me. The left side it was, and why it cracked no more than one rib I do not know. There was no pain, not then; there was no feeling at all in half my chest. Somehow I kept hold of my sword-cane, even while I was tumbling clear across the quarter-moon shore to bring up hard against a fallen log. He was on me before my vision had fully returned, but I kicked out and stabbed and rolled all at once, and that time he did not touch me. In the reeds, the skim gave the bubbling little murmur which means that it has taken prey.

I came up spitting and sneering, because that is what you do, even when there isn’t enough air in your body to make the contempt entirely convincing. “That was your death-blow? That was it?” But another such would have killed me, and he knew. He did not laugh, but that purring sound deepened and took on new colors, and he came lazily on, saying, “Oh, you really are so good, you are unbelievable.” The words and the voice were those of a lover, and I think that was the worst thing of all.

For a time, little or long, I did nothing but fight to get my lungs working again, and to keep him a sword’s length away from me. My side was beginning to hurt very badly, which did not trouble me in itself—I have been taught to set pain aside, to be dealt with later, as some put off doing the household accounts—but I knew that it must slow me down, and I knew certainly now that nothing but speed could save me. I spun, sprang, twisted and flipped in midair, somersaulted away when he tried to pin me against a tree or a boulder; cracked him with a knee, an elbow—once even the top of my head—when I missed with the swordcane, which was always. Nyateneri’s dagger at least marked his two accomplices here and there, before Rosseth’s wit blinded them; all I could have claimed as my proper signature would be a bruise or two in fairly pointless places. But I stayed alive.

The long dusk was fading at last—perhaps to my natural advantage, perhaps not, since the moonlight flattened out the sheltering shadows. He halted abruptly, deliberately allowing me an instant to stand still myself and breathe, and understand how badly I was injured. He said, “Swordcane Lal, you make me regret that I will never have children and grandchildren to tell of you. I can only promise that the eternal annals of my strange home, where nothing is forgotten, will forever be telling more great ones than you know how valiantly you died.” He sighed elaborately, blinked away a single real tear, and added, “That lovely weapon of yours will never be soiled—I’ll snatch it from the air before you hit the ground. You have my word on that.”

It pleases me to remember that I was at him before he had finished speaking. Back down the shore we went, and this time he was the one doing the dancing, having to leap this way and that, to duck and roll and spring away out of corner after corner. No, I touched him no more than I had; but for all that, I heard his breath mewing thinly in his chest this time, and in those white eyes at last I saw the same distant curiosity that he must have seen in mine. Is it you, really? Is it to be you? I do like to remember that.

But by then it was over. Not because of the rib—I have been worse hurt, far worse, and fought better—nor because I was past my best, although I had known that for some while. Younger, I would have struck four times, not three, when he was praising me, and missed as surely then as now. My friend was right: a master knows his master very quickly indeed, and this one would have been my master on the finest day I ever knew. I still had to kill him.

“The raft is burning,” he purred, over and over. “The raft is burning, you can see the flames in the water.” But I never took my eyes from his again—what use to Nyateneri in that?—and the result, inevitably, was that a piece of driftwood turned under my heel and I fell. I was up on the instant, scrambling away in the direction he least expected, but he caught me with both bare feet, high on the right thigh and again on the right shoulder. I went down.

Sometimes, in the sea, when a great wave smashes over you, you can find yourself swimming down, into the cold blackness, too dazed to realize that life is the other way. It was so now with me. When I clawed myself up to one knee, he was standing calmly, arms folded, marveling at me all over again. “And even so, even fallen witless, yet you brandish that swordcane high and clear. Your heart may touch the common earth, but not that blade. Truly it must have a mighty meaning for you, O Lal of the legends.”

At the time I took it for a cruel taunt; today I know that he meant to be complimentary. What mattered was that one word, legend, recalling me to a breeding and a heritage beside which all this nonsense with swords became less than children’s stick-battles. I said, “The same meaning it has had for many before me. It was forged in my country five hundred and ninety years ago for the poet ak’Shaban-dariyal. I am his descendant.”

Eternal annals, was it? Nyateneri had once implied that these folk were, in their way, as much in bondage to memory as my own, who would interrupt a wedding, abandon a harvest, or simply forget to die in order to hear another tale about something that once happened to somebody when. My man, at least, with every opportunity to finish me off, had dallied on the casual chance that there might be a story to my swordcane. I could barely stand erect to face him, and my body was ice on the right side and howling mush on the left, but there would certainly be a story.

“Father to son, son to daughter, and so on,” he said, politely enough. “The same everywhere. A pity such an inheritance must end here.” I did not dare so much as a step back now, but bent all my remaining strength to keeping his eyes on my eyes, hoping always to read the next few seconds there and praying that he could not do the same. Then I took a long breath and handed my swordcane to him.

“Actually, the custom is a bit different in my family,” I said. “The sword is not handed on, generation to generation—it must be stolen. Look at the blade.”

He lifted it between us, squinting in the moonlight at the engraved words few had ever had the time even to notice. His hands, as well as his eyes, seemed occupied then, but I knew enough to let the opportunity pass. “Steal me, marry me,” he read aloud. “A curious warning. If it is a warning.”

I laughed, although it hurt my chest. “You could say so. That swordcane has been a thieves’ magnet since the day it was made. Why, the smith himself tried to steal it back from my ancestor within a week of presenting it to him, and from then on the poor poet never slept a night through for the constant racket of burglars falling off his roof, digging under his house, fighting and yowling when they bumped into each other in his closet. Old and young, man, woman, and little scoundrelly children, they came from every corner of the country to try their slyness at relieving him of that same sword you hold now. Even his closest friends were not to be trusted—let alone his gentle, doddering old parents. It all became quite wearying. Soon enough, my ancestor was ready to hand the swordcane personally to the very next housebreaker he found hiding in his pantry, or the next bandit who tried to lure him down an alley behind the marketplace. I assure you, it’s the truth.”

“Ah, but naturally he didn’t give it away, or where would we be?” Still not looking at me, he took a step or two back, in order to make the moonlight shudder along the thin blade as he tilted it up and down. “And how did the good man resolve his difficulty?”

“As it happens, my ancestor was not a good man at all,” I said, “but he was a clever one. After much consideration, he had those words you see etched on the sword-cane, and when a particularly bold and cunning young thief actually did manage to lift it from him—in broadest daylight, if you will—he ran the man to earth himself and offered him a daring proposition. He might keep the swordcane and welcome, if he would marry my ancestor’s eldest daughter and become a part of his family. The thief agreed on the spot—as did the daughter, for he was apparently a pleasing youth. And so began our most ancient tradition.”

Up, down, tip it toward the moon, tip it into darkness. “A fascinating tale.” And he was fascinated, though careful not to show it; so much so that he paid no heed when I let myself move at last, the slightest shuffle, more to the side than backward. “Even if the thief’s only other choice was death. Meaning no disrespect to your ancestor’s daughter.”

“Ah, but that wasn’t the case at all.” And with that I had him. He forgot to play with the swordcane and stared at me; and for the first time he looked like a human being, round-eyed (though he narrowed them quickly) with blessed human puzzlement and my dear, dear, precious, beloved human hunger to know what happened next. Hurt, exhausted, and frightened for my life as I was, that look is, at the very last, my home.

I said, “The young man could have gone free and unharmed, nevermore to see the beautiful sword. He was happy to obey the graven command, steal me, marry me, and he turned out to be a faithful husband to both his wives. And since he knew so much better than my ancestor all the ways of thieves, not one ever again came within sight of the swordcane, no one but those whose last sight it was. The only difficulty was that he never could bring himself to leave his treasure to any of his own descendants, even on his deathbed. Myself, I think that he would have ordered it to be buried with him, if a quick-fingered serving wench hadn’t made away with it at the very last— which meant, of course, that his eldest son had to track her down and marry her in his turn in order to keep both the sword and such skill in the family. And so it has gone ever since, except for Grandmother. Always excepting Grandmother.”

Even then I could not be sure that he had taken the right bait, for all that he kept blinking from the swordcane to me and back again. “Keep the blood moving, that’s the way,” he purred, almost to himself. “Much as we do, imagine.” But he had to know, you see, and what’s a foot more or less of distance between one person and another when you have to know how a story comes out? “Your grandmother,” he said slowly; and I said, entirely to myself, You are mine.

“Ah, Grandmother,” I sighed. “The most magical figure of my childhood.” So she was indeed, bless her wicked, utterly shameless heart. “Grandmother was Great-Grandfather’s daughter, so therefore she was not eligible to steal the swordcane and marry to keep it. This struck her as a great injustice, and my grandmother never could abide injustice. She was small, like me, and easily ignored then, but from the age of twelve or thereabouts, she did little else but stand watch over the weapon and learn its use—that, at least, was permitted her. She studied every morning, before he had started drinking, with the old Kirianese master L’kl’yara ”—I saw my listener’s eyes go even wider than they already were “—until she knew everything he knew and could invent her own variations on his guards and counters, his legendary traps and responses, for hours on end. She became very nearly unbeatable, my quiet little grandmother who sang nursery songs to me every night, even when I was really too old for them. And when she understood that she was unbeatable—then one day, after her regular practice, she simply took the swordcane and vanished.”

“Vanished?” I was half-singing myself now, as completely fallen into the manner of storytelling that I was taught almost with my name as he was into the tale itself. But I have learned other things since my name, and I knew that I must slow everything down, everything—not merely my movement away from him, but my breathing as well, my pain and my banging blood, and even my thoughts—slow all down to the rhythm of the cold, quiet moon. Off to the right, under a scrubby bush, a shapeless blue shadow that must be his pack.

“Actually, she went to her room,” I said. “It was much the same thing, however, since for three whole years she only emerged to push out the body of the swordcane’s latest midnight claimant and pop back inside. No one saw her but her victims and the servants who brought her food—oh, her mother and father came almost every day to plead with her to behave sensibly, give the swordcane back, and marry whomever should steal it from them properly after that. But all their beseechments were in vain. Grandmother wrote them affectionate notes, asked after the health of her brothers, apologized for the condition of the last thief, and went on standing off all sieges. In the third year, I think it was, Great-grandfather, utterly exasperated, sent soldiers to break down her door. When she was finished with them, she never replaced the door, but deliberately left the room wide open from then on. Not a soul ever dared so much as a peep across the threshold—not until my one-eyed grandfather came prowling along. But that is another story altogether.”

Is that his pack, then? It must be, but what could it contain, what can these people travel with? Nyateneri had said that he would have come prepared for water, but what sort of boat but a toy would fit into a bundle that small? Fool, don’t look at it, for your life—keep those white, entranced eyes on yours, hold him, hold him—pick your spot now, half a step, so, let your right leg shiver and buckle just a bit, as it’s crying to do—I wonder if there’s a rib gone on that side, too, don’t let there be—and under all that a very different trembling, deeper than any of it. I can still do this, what I was made to do, it has not left me. I can still tell a story.

“And that was the woman who taught you to fight as you do?” His voice startled me strangely: in planning so totally to kill him I had almost forgotten about him himself, if you understand. He still wanted to know the ending before he killed me.

“No,” I said, “no, not exactly,” and let the leg go all the way this time, stumbling aside and down with a whimper that was quite real, breaking the fall with my left hand while my right was in and out of my boot in the same motion, and I was the one to catch the sword-cane, after all, before either it or he had fallen. The tiny dagger had sunk so deep into his throat that only the hilt was visible, jerking and bobbing with his breath as he stared at me. I got up slowly and walked over to him.

“My grandmother never touched so much as a carving knife in her life,” I said. “I bought that thing off a peddler’s cart in Fors na’Shachim, and I’ve no more notion than you of what that inscription means. And the person who taught me the sword was a vicious, drunken old soldier who would tell me before each lesson what his payment would be this time, and let me think about it as we fought. The dagger is his.”

That much I am certain he understood, but the white eyes were fading when I added, “I apologize for cheating you. You were too good for me to defeat honestly. Sunlight on your road.” We say that also at parting. I do not know if he heard.