Innkeeper's Song

ROSSETH

I hadn’t slept very well, because of the players. They were supposed to give a performance in two days for the Mercers’ Guild in town, and they had been rehearsing almost all night every night for a week. It wasn’t that they didn’t know the play well—there can’t be a traveling troupe in the land that doesn’t give some version of The Marriage of the Wicked Lord Hassidanya twenty or thirty times a year—but I think this must have been the largest and most knowledgeable audience they were ever likely to face, and none of them could sleep for nervousness anyway. So they kept going over and over their parts, two and three at a time or all together, running the whole thing through just once more: there in the straw by lantern-light, with the horses looking on solemnly over their stall doors and nodding at the good parts. Finally I came down from the loft, wished them all disaster for luck, and went outside to walk and think until sunrise, as I do sometimes.

The women rode out just before dawn, all three together for the first time. They didn’t see me. Usually I waved at them when I saw them setting off each day— and Lal, at least, always waved back—but this once I stepped aside, into the hollow of a burned-out tree, and watched them pass by in silence. It might have been a different air about them, literally, a new smell of purpose, for I was already as tuned, as pitched to their scent as to no other in my life, except that of Karsh, because of the way he likes to slip up and catch you not working. Or perhaps it was simply the way they looked in the red and silver morning: sudden strangers beyond my conception of foreignness, alien as I had never imagined them, although I should have. I was too young then to see past my own skin, and my skin was in love with them, all three. Yet I never saw them more truly than I did that morning.

They troubled my sleep terribly, as they do now sometimes, even now, even knowing what I know. I don’t want you to think that I was an utter innocent—I had already been with a woman, in a sort of a way (no, not Marinesha, not ever Marinesha)—but Lal and Nyateneri and Lukassa were shadows of the future, though I didn’t know it, and what I feared and adored and hungered for in them was myself-to-be, you might say. But I didn’t know that either, of course: only that I had never in my life been hurt so by the sound of women laughing in a little rented room upstairs.

What? Forgive me. I had tasks to do, and I did them as always, mucking out stalls and filling mangers, laying down new straw, combing burrs out of manes and tails— even trimming a few hooves, depending on what the beasts’ owners had required of me. Karsh set me to work in The Gaff and Slasher’s stables when I was five, and I am good with horses. I can’t even say whether I actually like them or not, to this day. I am just good with them.

Karsh had gone to town, to the market, not long after the women left. Gatti Jinni usually runs things in his absence, but Gatti Jinni gets drunk one night in the month, without any particular pattern or regularity to it. One night in the month, and last night had been it—I know, because I helped him to his room, cleaned his face of tears and slobber, and put him to bed. So I was keeping an eye on the inn as I worked, and I saw those two men follow Marinesha to the door. Nothing out of the way there, but when they went in alone and she came flying back to her laundry-basket, trembling so hard that I could see it from where I was, then I dropped my spade and went to her. I did turn back and pick the spade up again, after a few steps—even a dungheap warrior needs his lance, after all.

She could not speak, which had nothing to do with the fact that she had not been speaking to me for two days, or whenever it was that I’d said something admiring about Lukassa in the taproom. When I touched her, she clung to me and whimpered, which frightened me in turn. Marinesha is an orphan, like me: we may adopt obsequiousness as a condition of survival, but we have never been able to afford terror, any more than we can certain kinds of courage. So I patted her back and mumbled, “It’s all right, just stay here,” and I hoisted my trusty spade and. went inside.

They were on the second floor, just coming out of the little room where Karsh had put two old pilgrims from Darafshiyan. I don’t know if they’d been in the women’s room or not. Small men and slender, graceful in their movements, almost dainty, their plain brown clothes fitting them like fur. They reminded me of shukris, those hot, rippling little animals that follow the smell of blood down holes, up trees, anywhere, endlessly. I said, “May I be of service, gentlemen? My name is Rosseth.”

At times it’s an advantage not to know your true name, since you should never tell it to strangers anyway. The two men looked at me without answering for what seemed a very long time. I felt myself trembling, exactly like Marinesha—the difference between us was only that my fear made me angry. “The patron is not here,” I said to them. “If you want a room, you will have to wait until he returns. Downstairs.” I made my tone as insulting as I could, because my voice was so unsteady.

The blue-eyed man smiled at me, and I wet myself. It is the truth, no more: his lips stretched and thinned and a sudden wash of absolute terror sluiced over me like the blast from an open furnace. I fell against the wall. If it had not been for my spade, bracing myself with it, I would have collapsed completely. But I didn’t; and I have just enough of Karsh’s idiot-stubbornness to behave like him, like an idiot, like a rock, when my bowels are falling to the floor. I said again, gasping, I’m sure, “You will have to wait downstairs.”

They looked at each other then, and I suppose it was kind of them not to burst out laughing. The one whose mouth broke upwards on one side said, “We do not wish a room? We seek a woman?” Later it seemed to me that I almost knew the accent—all I thought at the time was that fire would speak like that if it could make human words.

The blue-eyed man—and I should tell you that in this country blue is the color of death—came to me in two strides and lifted me by my throat. He did it so daintily and tidily that I barely had time to realize that I was strangling before I was. He hummed into my ear, “A tall woman with gray eyes? We have tracked her here? Please?” I heard an irritating sound, somewhere very far away, and somebody realized that it was my heels kicking at the wall.

I would have told them. Nyateneri said afterward that it was brave of me to keep silent, but truly I would have told them anything if they had only let me. I saw the other man’s lips move, though I couldn’t hear anything anymore except the howl of blood in my ears and that thin, caressing voice saying, “Please? Yes?” Then Karsh came. I think that’s what happened, anyway.