Innkeeper's Song

TIKAT

Of course I knew him. With that red soldier’s coat of his and that way he had of walking—two steps forward, the third just a bit to the side—the distance didn’t matter, nor that his face was half-hidden by the ragged man in his arms. I dropped my basket at Rosseth’s feet (we were gathering windfalls and acorns for the hogs) and set off running.

I met him in the courtyard. The dogs were all barking madly, swirling around his ankles, and Gatti Jinni was shouting at them from a window. As I drew near, he set the ragged man on his feet, holding him up with an arm around his waist. The man sagged over his arm, coughing. He was very old, far older than my redcoated friend, and the sound of those coughs told me that there was no strength left in him, none at all. I thought he was dying. Redcoat looked at me over his head and said in the quick, shrill bark I knew, “My horse-thieving colleague. How pleasant to see you again.”

“The Mildasis didn’t get you,” I said. Lame, if you like, but what would you have said to a person who had last brought you your breakfast in his teeth? He showed them now, white as I remembered. “Would you be feeding and currying a little gray horse if they had? Look sharp, boy, here’s a friend for the ladies.” I went slowly to him, and he let the old man fall against me. When I lifted him the heaviness of him amazed me, and even frightened me somewhat, for he should have weighed nothing at all, as little flesh as covered his fragile bones. But my knees bent under those bones all the same, and I staggered a step forward, which made Redcoat laugh mightily. I would have fallen—I’ll tell you straight—but he gripped my shoulders and set me upright again.

“More to him than there seems, aye? Well, the old surprise us betimes, fellow thief. This one, now, his bones are full of darkness and his blood’s thick and cold with ancient wisdom, mysteries. Weighs a deal, that sort of thing—wears a man out just taking himself from place to place.” So he buzzed and chuckled while I strained to carry the old man as far as the inn door, where Gatti Jinni stood blinking slack-mouthed. I was grateful when Rosseth came up and helped me, never saying a word.

Karsh came out then. He pushed Gatti Jinni aside and stood scowling as we danced the poor creature along like a cumbersome piece of furniture. Behind me, Redcoat was still laughing: the sound of it prickled in my palms. Karsh looked at Rosseth, not at me. He never looked straight at me.

“Another one,” he said. As sad for myself as I woke and worked and slept each day then, for that moment I pitied Rosseth with my whole heart, to be hearing that slow, offended voice every day of his life. Yet one thing I also realized was that in his own heart Rosseth did not hear Karsh at all. He heard the voice, the orders; he was always respectful, always responsible, quick and keen to jump to any task—but there was a way in which he always eluded his master, just as the words to say how it was escape me. Karsh knew it, too—you could see that he knew, and that he didn’t like it. I do not believe that Rosseth knew that.

Now he only shook his head and answered cheerfully, “Not one of mine this time, sir, but a visitor to see Mistress Lal and Mistress Nyateneri. We’ll take him to their room and let him rest there till they return.” He nodded to me, and we began dragging and pushing the half-conscious old man toward the inn once again.

Karsh grunted and spat. He made no move to interfere, but stared hard at us with his pale eyes as we struggled by him. We had reached the threshold when he said, not loudly but very clearly, “A visitor, is it? More likely another body for the tickberry patch.” I did not understand what he meant, but the color came up in Rosseth’s neck. He called for Gatti Jinni to come and help us, but Gatti Jinni had faded away into one of the musty places he knew. So we got the old man up the stairs by ourselves.

I had thought I could go in. I knew that the room would smell of her, and that it might be hard to look at the bed where she slept and wonder if someone who had been dead could ever dream of someone living. But I had no more than lifted the latch and pushed the door an arm’s-length open when I saw the velvet sash hanging across the back of a chair. It was the sash I had traded my first real woven cloth for at Limsatty Fair; it was the sash she was wearing when she drowned. I shut the door and turned away.

Rosseth meant to be gentle. He said, “Tikat, they left by moonlight, they’ll be gone all day. She—Lukassa—she isn’t in there.” I remember that he flushed again when he said her name. Trying so hard to spare others’ feelings must be very embarrassing, I suppose.

“I’ll send Marinesha up,” I said. “I am sorry.” Then I ran back down the stairs as though all the beasts out of my walking nightmares in the Northern Barrens were after me together, so fast that I stumbled and fell to my knees in the courtyard. If Karsh had been there still, he would have split his fat belly with laughing, and well enough I would have deserved it. But I had suddenly come to the end of my tracking at that door. I had followed Lukassa through deserts, forests, across rivers and mountains, tracing out every least shadow of a memory of her passage that all these had kept for me—but into that room I would not follow, not if my one love stood beckoning in the doorway, no more, no. “Let her come to me if she will,” I said to the dusty chickens clucking and scattering all around. “She must come to me.”

And a foolish vow that was, as you will see—aye, and unkind as well, for all the while I yet believed her to be under a spell that kept her from knowing me. But I was very weary—I’ll say that much for myself—and very angry, and full of despair; and just then, there on my knees, I did not love anyone, and I never had.