Innkeeper's Song

TIKAT

On the ninth day, I began to starve. I had taken far too little food with me. How could I not have, sure as I was of catching up by first sunset and making that black woman give me back my Lukassa? Amazed I am to this day that I even thought to bring a blanket for the chill when we would be riding so happily home together. As long as she lay in the water, she will be frozen to her poor heart. That is all I was thinking, all, for nine days.

And of course I know now that it would have made no difference if I had stopped to steal a dozen horses—as though there were that many in the village—and load them to backbreak with food and water and clothing. For I never caught up with those two women, never drew within half a day’s ride, though my mare broke her own brave heart in trying. They were never closer than the horizon, never larger than my thumb, never any more solid than the chimney smoke from the towns they skirted. Now and then I crossed the remains of a campfire—carefully scattered—so they must have slept sometimes; but whether I rested or galloped all night, they were always far beyond my sight come dawn, and not before midday would I catch the least movement on the side of the furthest hill, the twitch of a shadow among stones so distant that they looked like water across the road. I have never been so lonely.

There’s this about starving, though, it takes your mind off things like loneliness and sorrow. It hurts very much at first, but soon you start to dream, and those are kind dreams, perhaps the sweetest I ever had They weren’t always about food and drink, either, as you’d suppose—most often I was old and home with my girl, children close and my arm so tight around her when the bridge railing broke that she still bore the mark all those years later. I dreamed about my father, too, and my teacher who was his teacher, and I dreamed I was little, sitting in a pile of sawdust and wood shavings, playing with a dead mouse. They were very dear dreams, all of them, and I tried harder and harder not to wake.

I don’t remember when I first noticed the tracks of the second horse. The ground was hard and stony, and growing worse and I often went a day or longer finding nothing but a hoofscratch or two on a displaced pebble But it must have been some little time after the dreams began, because I laughed and cried with pleasure to think that Lukassa would at last have a horse of her own to ride When we were children, she made me promise one day to buy her a real lady’s horse, none of your plough-beasts that might as well be oxen, but some dainty, dancy creature, as far beyond my reach then as now, and likely as useless in our life together as bangles on a hog. But I swore my word to her—so small a request it seemed, when she could have had my eyes for the asking. Seven we were, or eight, and I loved her even then.

If I had been in my right mind, surely I would have wondered where that second horse had come from in this empty country, and whether it truly bore Lukassa or another. A woman who had sung my girl up from the river bottom could summon a horse as easily, like enough; but why now, as far as they had come on the one, and tireless as he plainly was? But by then I was walking as much as riding, hanging on my mare’s sagging neck, pleading with her not to die, to live only a little longer, half a day, half a mile. You couldn’t have told which of us was dragging the other, and I couldn’t have told you, for I was swimming in the air, laughing at jokes the stones told me. Sometimes there were animals—great pale snakes, children with birds’ faces—sometimes not. Sometimes, when the black woman was not looking, Lukassa rode on my shoulders.

On the eleventh day, or the twelfth, or perhaps the fifteenth, my mare died under me. I felt her die, and managed to sprawl clear to keep from being crushed by her bones. If I had been strong enough to bury her, I would have done it; as it was, I tried to eat her, but I lacked even the strength to cut through her hide. So I thanked her, and asked her forgiveness, and the first bird that laid claw on her I fell on and strangled. It tasted like bloody dust, but I sat there beside her, chewing and growling in full sight of the other birds. They left her alone for a while, even after I walked away.

The bird sustained me for two more days, and cleared my mind enough at least to realize where I must be. The Northern Barrens, no desert, but almost as bad. As far as you can see, the land is broken to pieces, everything smashed or split or standing on edge. Here’s a toss of boulders blocking the way, the smallest bulking higher than a man on horseback; here’s a riverbed so long dry there are wrinkled little trees growing up out of it; there, all that tumble and ruin might have been a mountain once, before great claws ripped it down. No road, never so much as a cart track—if you have all your wits about you, you pick your way across this country, praying to the gods’ gods not to break a leg or fall in a hole forever. Starving mad like me, you stagger along singing, peaceful and fearless. I dreamed my death, and it kept me safe.

There was an old man in one of those dreams. He had bright gray eyes and a white mustache, curling into his mouth at the corners, and he wore a faded scarlet coat that might have been a soldier’s. In my dream he came galloping on a black horse, crouched so far forward that his cheek lay almost against the horse’s cheek, and I could hear him whispering to it. For a moment, as they flashed by me, the old man looked straight into my face. In his eyes I saw such laughter as I never expect to see again while I live. It woke me, that laughter, it brought me back to the pain of being about to die alone in the Barrens, without Lukassa, and I fell down weeping and screaming after that old man until I slept again, truly slept, on all fours like a baby. I dreamed that other horses passed, with great hounds riding them.

When I wakened, the sun was dropping low, the sky turning thick and soft, and the least breeze rising. The sleep and the hope of rain made me feel stronger, and I went on until I came to a place where the ground sloped down and in on all sides: not a valley, just a stony dimple with a stagnant pool at the bottom. They were down there, the hounds, and they had taken prey.

There were four of them, Mildasis by their daggers and their short hair. I had only seen Mildasis twice before— they come south but seldom, which is good. They had the old man in the scarlet coat between them and were buffeting him round and round, knocking him savagely from one to the other until his eyes rolled up in his head and he could not stand. Then they kicked him back and forth, like the ragged ball he rolled himself into, all the while cursing him and telling him there were worse pains waiting for a man insanely foolish enough to steal a Mildasi horse. Not that I know two words of Mildasi, but their gestures made things quite clear. The horse in question stood loose nearby, reins hanging, pawing for thistles among the stones. It was a shaggy little black, almost a pony, the kind the Mildasis say they have been breeding for a thousand years. They eat whatever grows, and keep running.

The Mildasis did not see me. I stood behind a rock, bracing myself against it, trying to think. I was sorry for the old man, but my pity seemed as quiet and faraway as all the rest of my feelings, even the hunger, even the understanding that I was dying. But my horse was already dead, and there were the four other Mildasi horses, waiting untethered like the black, and I did know that I needed one of those, because there was a place I had to go. I could not remember the place, or why I had to be there, but it was very important, more important than starving. So I made the best plan I could, watching the Mildasis and the old man and the setting sun.

I know about the Mildasis what everybody knows—that they roam and raid out of the barren lands, never surrender, and value their horses more than themselves—and perhaps one thing more, which my uncle Vyan told me. He had traveled with caravans when he was young, and he said that the Mildasis were a religious people in their way. They believe that the sun is a god, and they do not trust him to return every morning without a bribe of blood. Usually they sacrifice one of the beasts they raise for that purpose, but the god likes human blood much better, and they give it to him when they can. If my uncle was right, they would kill the old man just as the sun touched the furthest hills. I moved around the rock slowly, like a shadow stretching in the sun.

The horses watched me, but they made no sound, even when I was very close to them. I am not wise with horses, like some—I think it was my madness that made them take me for a friend, a cousin. Uncle Vyan said that Mildasi horses were more like dogs, loyal and sometimes fierce, not easy to frighten. I wanted to pray that he was wrong about that, but I had no room for prayer. The Mildasis had their backs to me, making ready for the sacrifice. They were not beating the old man anymore, or even mocking him—they seemed as serious as either of the priests in our village when they blessed a baby or begged for rain. First they smeared his cheeks with something yellow, then made marks in it with their fingers, so carefully. They made his mouth black with something else.

He stood quite still, not speaking, not struggling. One of the Mildasis was singing, a high, scraping song that quavered as though he were the one about to be killed. The same few notes, over and over. When he stopped singing, there was no more than a breath of wind between the sun and the hilltops.

The Mildasi who sang took a long knife from another one. He showed it to the old man, making him study it, pointing at the blade, handle, the blade again, like my teacher trying to make me understand the real life of a pattern. I would know that knife if I ever saw it again.

The horse I had chosen hours, days ago was gray, like a rabbit. He let me touch him. The Mildasi began to sing again, and I was up on the gray horse, shouting and waving my arms to terrify the others. They looked surprised, a little disappointed in me; they danced on their hind legs and glanced toward their masters, who were only now turning, gaping, as silently astonished as the horses, but two with their throwing axes already out. The Mildasis can bring down nightbirds with those, my uncle Vyan says.

It was the black horse who suddenly decided to be frightened, to rear and scream and bolt, knocking down the singing Mildasi and trampling the knife-man, who rushed in to help him. The two others jumped for the reins, but the black dashed past them, heading for the comfort of its friends. But now they caught the panic themselves, as though it were a torch bound to the black, setting their tails afire. My gray—the Rabbit, as I called him from that day—went up in the air, all four feet off the ground, and came down out of my control, running straight back toward the two Mildasis who barred the way, axes whirling red in their hands. I flattened myself along the Rabbit’s back, clutching him as I had held Lukassa in the river. I could not see the old man.

One axe sighed past my nose, taking nothing with it but a hank of gray mane. The second I never saw at all, but the poor Rabbit yelled to break your heart and shot away in a different course, as rabbits will do. The tip of his right ear was gone, blood spraying back on my hands.

I looked back once, in time to see all four Mildasis—two of them limping—scrambling madly after their horses, and those in no hurry at all to be sane and obedient ever again. Then, with my head still turned, a hand on the saddle, a hand in my belt, a grunt and a wheeze and me almost spilled to the ground, and the old man was up behind me, laughing like the wind. “Ride, boy,” he barked in my ear, “ride now!” and I felt him turn to shout back at the Mildasis, “Fools, imbecile children, to think you could kill me! Because I chose to play with you a while, to think you had me—” The Rabbit flew over a narrow ravine then, and the old man yelped and clung to me, never finished his brag, which suited me just as well. If he would only be silent, perhaps I could pretend that he was not really there.

But he would not hush, not for five minutes together. When he was not prattling about the stupidity of the Mildasis and praising himself for escaping them, he was urging me to press the Rabbit harder, to put more distance between ourselves and our pursuers. I did not want to talk to him. I muttered that it was dark, that we had to go carefully, but he scoffed shrilly, “They have eyes in their feet, these Mildasi beasts, he will travel all night without stumbling once. As will they.” His voice hurt my head, and whatever his talk, he smelled of fear.

The Mildasis never caught us. I cannot say if they even followed, since I was paying no attention at all to signs, nor to the old man’s yapping, nor to anything but the trick of staying in the saddle and the harder trick of remembering the reason for it. We might be still on the track of Lukassa and the black woman; we might as likely have been circling back the way I had come. I was at the end of sense, the end of everything but hanging on. There was nothing to think about past hanging on.

The old man saved me, no arguing that. It was he who held me when I slept and toppled sideways, and it was he who guided the Rabbit across those smashed lands all night, surely chattering in my ear the whole time, not caring if I heard or no. I remember nothing of that night, no dreams, nothing, until I woke on a hard hillside, wrapped in the old man’s scarlet coat, with the high sun blinding me and the Rabbit nudging to get at some prickly sprigs under my arm. The old man was gone.

There was a waterskin slung to the Rabbit’s neck, and I drank from it, not too much. I was very weak, but I think not mad anymore. The morning sky was pale, almost white, and the air smelled of distant snow, a breath from beyond the mountains. I leaned against the Rabbit, looking far across the Barrens where birds like the one I had eaten were circling, sliding downwind, and I said to my little gray horse, “I will not die. There is water in this land, and I will find it—there is game to hunt and roots to dig, or the Mildasis could not live here. I will not die. I will follow Lukassa over the mountains and wherever more I have to go, until I speak with her and touch her again. And if she will not come home with me—well, then I will die, but not till then.” The Rabbit nibbled on my ragged sleeve.

He winded the fox before I did; not until he whinnied and shook his head to make his ears snap did I see it trotting boldly up the hillside toward us, a bird half its size dangling limp in his jaws. A small fox, but burly and handsome, with bright, bright eyes. It waited deliberately for me to make sure of it before it changed.

A sway in the air, no more, the way you can see it shiver above a flame, and it was the old man there, holding out the bird as he came up to me. The Rabbit stamped and snorted and ran off a little way, but I was too tired to be frightened. I said, “A man who can turn into a fox. A fox that can turn into a man. Which are you?”

His thick white mustache softened the fox’s pointed grin. “The bird can turn into us. That’s what matters.” As jaunty as though he had never been helpless in the hands of the Mildasis, beaten bloody, listening to his death song, he dropped down beside me and began plucking feathers. The sacrifice paint on his face was gone, and the bruises on his pink cheekbones were already fading. He kept on smiling at me as he worked, and I kept on staring at him.

“If you’re expecting me to drip my tongue out and pant,” he said gently enough, “I don’t do that. Nor will I eat this bird whole and raw, crunching the bones. In this shape, I am a man like you.”

I laughed then, though the effort almost put me on my back. I told him, “A man like me has opened as many bellies with his teeth as any fox.” Which was not true, but I felt it so then. The old man answered me, “Well, then perhaps you might be pleased to start a fire for us, since men cook their food when they can.” He took flint and steel out of a leather scrip at his waist and handed them to me.

There was dead wood—an armload, no more—within easy reach, or I could never have gathered even that much. Merely breaking up the kindling twigs took me so long that the old man had the bird cleaned, neat as you please, by the time I had the fire going. Hardly enough heat to cook it through, but we managed, and we dined together like men, though the very last of my strength went to keep me from gobbling my half-bird half-cooked, and after that his, too. For his part, he chatted along blithely, getting my name from me—though never offering his own—and telling me that he was companion to a great lady from a far shore. I asked if she were black, but he shook his head. “Brown, if you will, but certainly not black. She is called Nyateneri, and she is very wise.”

“And you stole the Mildasi horse for her,” I said. “My soul, I wish I had such a loyal and valiant servant.”

That provoked him, as I thought it might. “We are comrades, equals, make good note of that. My lady sends me on no errands—I come and go on my own affairs, exactly as I choose.” For a moment he was truly angry, gray eyes gone almost yellow with it. “I do not serve.”

“What need of a horse, then, for one who can travel on four feet as he chooses?” I hoped to make him careless in his anger, but he was already on guard again, laughing at me, lolling tongue between teeth on purpose. “That was only my sport with the stupid Mildasis. Should it surprise you that my idea of play is not yours?”

“They beat you half to death,” I said, “and would have cut your throat, but for me. What kind of sport is that?”

“I was never in danger,” he answered me, haughty as a man may be with his mouth full and greasy. “Your diversion was well enough, but completely unnecessary. It was my play.”

I said, “They would have killed you. I saved your life.” For once he did not speak, but only turned his head, watching me out of the sides of his eyes. “Man or fox, you are in my debt,” I said. “You know you are in my debt.”

His mustache truly bristled, and he licked it down again. “Why, so are you in mine, boy, with my food and water in your belly. If you saved me indeed, you did it by chance—and well you know that—but I chose to help you, when I could have left you to get on about your business of dying. I hunt for no one, but I hunted for you, and so we are well quits in your world and mine.” And he would say nothing further until we had finished the bird and buried the scraps, to leave no trace for the Mildasis.

“If you want to wash your face and paws,” I said then, “I could look away.” I yawned as I spoke, because the good meal made me want to sleep immediately. The old man sat back with his arms around his knees, considering me long and long after that, not moving at all. Kind and cozy as a grandfather he looked, but I felt the way that bird must have felt in the last seconds, seeing him too late.

“You’ll never catch them, you know. Not on a Mildasi horse, not on any other. And if you did, you would dearly wish you hadn’t.”

I did not ask whom he meant, or how he knew. I said,

“The black woman is a great wizard, surely, for my Lukassa was drowned and she brought her back to life. And whatever terrible things she can do to me, she will have to do, and do them all twice over to make sure of me. For I will find her, and I will bring Lukassa home again.”

“Boys’ talk,” he answered contemptuously. “The woman’s no more magical than you are, but what she does not know about flight and following, about tracking and covering tracks, about sending the hounds howling off after their own smell, even I do not know. And now my lady Nyateneri has joined her—yes, as you guessed—and between the pair of them, a poor fox can only chew his paws and pray not to be too corrupted by their subtlety. Give over, boy, go home.”

“Fox talk,” I said in my turn, praying myself not to be convinced. “Tell your mistress, tell them both that Lukassa’s man is coming after her.” I swung myself up on the Rabbit’s back and sat still, glaring down at the old man as fiercely as I could, though I could hardly see him for the sudden giddiness that took me. “You tell them,” I said.

The old man never moved. He licked his mustache and licked it, and each time his smile slid a little wider. He said, “What will you give me if I leave you a trail to follow?”

The yellow-gray eyes and barking voice were so mocking that I could not believe what I had heard. “What will you give me? You’re still too near death for vanity—you know you’ve lost their track forever unless I help you. Give me that locket you wear on your neck. It’s cheap, it’s no loss to you, but I help no one without pay. The locket will do.”

“Lukassa gave it to me,” I said. “For my name-day, when I was thirteen.”

The old man’s teeth glittered in his mouth like ice. “Do you hear, Lukassa? Your swineherd sweetheart prefers your bauble to you. Joy of it, then, boy, and good luck.” He was on his feet, turning away.

I threw the locket at him then, and he whisked it out of the air without looking back at me. He said, “Get down, you are in no case to travel yet. Sleep out the day there”—he pointed, still not turning, to a rocky overhang where I could lie shadowed—“and start north at moon-rise, keeping those hills on your left. There is no road. There will be a trail.”

“A trail to where?” I demanded. “Where are they bound, and why are they taking Lukassa with them?” The old man began to walk away down the slope, leaving me infuriated. I slipped from the Rabbit’s saddle and ran after him, reaching for his shoulder, but he wheeled swiftly, and I did not touch him. I said, “What about yourself, tell me that at least. That’s not north, the way you’re going.”

Pink cheeks, white mustache, hair as wicked-white as the water that took my girl, he grinned until his eyes stretched shut to see me afraid of him. Even his whisper was harsh. “Why, I’m off after that black horse, where else?” And he was the fox again, loping off without a glance or farewell, brushy tail swaggering high as a housecat’s until he thought himself out of my sight. But I watched him a long way, and I knew when that tail came down.