It took a long time for her to stop trembling and listen to him, and even then she would not take off the ring, for all his talk and mine. At first she said nothing but, “No,” over and over, into her fists; but at last she turned to the old man and told him, “I will give it to Lal. When we leave here, Tikat and I, to go with you, then I will give it back to Lal, and she can return it to you if she chooses. Or not.”
And from there she would not budge. The tafiya shook his head and blew through his beard and grumbled, “If we begin like this, teacher and student, how shall we end? You minded me better when I was a griga’ath.” But he had to be content with her decision all the same, and I think he was, in his way.
THE INNKEEPER
It has never been right since, I don’t care what he said or how great a wizard he was. Oh aye, everything works, if that’s what you mean by rightness, and some things work even better—I’m not such a fool as to say they don’t. But none of that is the same as being the way it was. Things can be replaced, fixed up perfectly, but they can’t be put back. Repaired doesn’t mean right.
Never mind, never mind—it isn’t worth the trouble, and besides there’s not much more to tell. The next two weeks were chaos, no more and no less. Marinesha and Rosseth had to run the inn—pity me, gods!—while I spent my time groveling and begging pardon before angry guests, injured guests (mercifully, a very few; as for the Kinariki wagoner, we never did find him again), and guests so terrified that some of them would not come back even for their belongings, not to mention settling their bills. Not only did I lose any number of valuable old customers, but of course the story got around everywhere, and I’ve been from that day to this building my clientele back to something like what it used to be. No wizard offered to help with that, I can assure you!
The woman Lal let me know that she and her companions would be leaving at last, as soon as the wizard and the little Lukassa were fit to travel. She also expressed her regrets—pointlessly but quite prettily, I will say—for all the troubles that had come with them to plague The Gaff and Slasher. “All the troubles”—as if she could have understood the half of what her lot had done to my life. But it was a change to have someone ask my pardon, so I told her we’d say no more about it, and let it go. Miss Nyateneri never bothered with any apology of her own, but that’s as well. I couldn’t have dealt with any more shocks just then.
Rosseth stayed out of my way to a remarkable degree during those days. It’s not that he doesn’t try to avoid me as much as he can, in the normal run of things; but in the normal run we don’t go much more than a long afternoon without my having to shout at him about something. To be honest, I made no great effort to bump into him, either. I had charged up a collapsing stairway through a stampede of screaming idiots and broken down a perfectly good door, all because I couldn’t endure the thought of having to train another stable boy. You never know how people take these things. It can be awkward afterwards, that’s all.
I became certain that he was once again planning to run off with the women and the wizard, and didn’t want to face me because he knew I’d read him first glance. I took council with myself one night, consulting in my room with two bottles of that fermented harness polish they make east of the mountains—Sheknath’s Kidneys, the locals call it. What all of us decided eventually was, if he wanted that much to leave, let him leave and be damned. I had headed him off a dozen times when he and I were both younger; he was sharp enough now to give me the slip tomorrow, the day after, if not today. Well, let him, then, and good riddance, the best riddance—but before he showed me his heels, I had a thing or two to show him.
Thinking about that made the night go too slowly, and the Sheknath’s Kidneys far too fast, and I was moving a bit gingerly when I sought him out the next morning. He was rubbing a vile-smelling ointment that he makes himself into the flanks of a bay gelding whose owner obviously enjoyed owning a pair of spurs. Rosseth was talking to the horse as he worked—not in words, just murmuring quietly, smoothing his voice into the raw places with the ointment. I waited, watching him until he felt somebody there and whipped around fast, the way those women do. He said, “I’m almost through with him. I’ll get to the hogpen right away.”
Because there was a rail coming loose there, you see, and I’d been after him for a week to replace it. He finished with the gelding, forked some fresh hay into its manger, and then just leaned against it for a moment, the way horses will lean against each other, before he came out of the stall. We stood looking at each other, him braced for orders, keeping a careful eye on my hands; and me studying the size of his own stubby hands, and the two swirls of down on his upper lip. Won’t ever be as big as I am, but he might turn out stronger.
“I want to talk to you,” I said. Oh, that made his eyes go tight, flicking back and forth between me and the stable door. He said, “Well, the rail, the hogs might—” I nodded toward a bale of hay and said, “Sit.”
He sat. I wanted to keep standing, but my head was clanging too much for that, so I turned over a pail and sat facing him. “If you want to go with that old wizard and the rest of them,” I said, “you don’t have to sneak away. Go. I won’t beat you, and I won’t try to stop you. Just take what’s yours and go. Close your mouth,” for his jaw was sagging like that hog-pen rail giving way. “You understand me?”
Rosseth nodded. I couldn’t tell if he was joyous, relieved, angry, somehow disappointed—I can’t always tell. I said, “But there is something you have to hear. The only condition I’m making is that you have to sit there and listen to this. All of it. Close your mouth—you don’t have to look like an idiot! Do you hear me, Rosseth?”
“Yes,” he said. Chatters endlessly when you don’t want to hear one more word out of him, goes dumb as a fish when it really means something. My head got worse just meeting those blank, watchful eyes of his. Why did I bring up this whole damned business now? It could have waited. As long as it’s waited already, what’s another day, or another week, or the rest of my life? I said, “All right, then. A long time ago, I had to go to Cheth na’Deka, never mind why. It was a long journey there, and a worse one back. You know why?”
“Bandits?” Not much of a guess, considering that Cheth more or less means bandits, always has. “Bandits,” I said. “Or maybe there was a war going on—not much difference down there, except for the clothes. I never did find out which gang it was that had been through that village.”
Rosseth was listening. I got up, kicked the pail a bit to the right, walked around it, sat down again. “I was coming back alone and on foot, not by choice, but because I couldn’t hire a coach or a guide for any money. You still can’t, as far as I know. All I had for protection was a staff, my father’s, the kind with a big chunk of iron at one end. I traveled at night, and I stayed off the main roads, and the third evening I saw smoke far away. Black smoke, the kind you get when it’s houses burning.”
He kept his eyes absolutely still, flat as a stock pond, but he was leaning forward a little, hands gripping the edge of the hay-bale. “I didn’t go any further that night,” I told him. “I heard horses, a lot of them, passing close enough for me to hear men laughing. It wasn’t until noon the next day that I started on again, and I spent so much time hiding in the trees by the roadside that I didn’t reach the village until mid-afternoon. Tiptoeing slows you down a good deal.” I didn’t want him getting any idea that I was trying to sound like a hero. It was going to be bad enough as it was.
“What was its name?” His voice was so low I couldn’t make him out the first time. “What was the village’s name?”
“How should I know? There wasn’t a soul alive to tell me. Just bodies up and down the one street, bodies lying in their own doorways, bodies shoved down the well, floating in the horse-trough, sprawled across tables in the square. There was one crammed into the baker’s oven— his wife, his daughter, who knows? Split open like a sack of meal, like the rest of them.” I said it all hard and fast and as tonelessly as I could, to get it done with. I left some things out.
“There wasn’t anyone?” He cleared his throat. “There wasn’t anyone left alive.” It wasn’t a question. We could have been in a temple, with the priest lining out the invocation and the worshippers chanting it all back to him dutifully. I said, “I didn’t think so. Until I heard the baby.”
Well, he saved me the least little bit of it, anyway. He whispered, “Me. That was me.”
I got up again. I thought about really trying to tell him what it was like: the silence, the slow buzzing, the smell of blood and shit and burning, and the tiny, angry, hungry cry drifting upward with the last trails of smoke. Instead I stood with my back to him, hands in my apron pockets, staring at that mean little black horse of Tikat’s and wishing I’d had the sense to bring whatever was left of the Sheknath’s Kidneys with me.
“I couldn’t find the place right away,” I said. “Get off the street and it was all just ruts and holes, break your ankle like that. It was a one-room cottage—clay walls and a peat thatch, the usual. There were a few sweet-regrets around the front step, I remember that. And a little bundle of dika thorns hanging on the door.”
They do that to keep away evil, in that country. He didn’t speak. I said, “The door was on the latch, and there was something jammed against it. I knocked and I pushed, and then I called out.” I turned back around. “I did, Rosseth. I called four, five, six times.” I don’t know why I so much wanted him to believe that. What did it matter if he believed me or no? It seemed to matter then. “I called, ‘Hello, is anyone there? Is anyone there? Can you hear me?’ But there was no answer, none—nothing but the crying.”
He tried to say, “Me” again, but it didn’t come out— only his mouth shaping the word. I heard footsteps outside, and voices, and I waited, hoping to be interrupted, even by Shadry, even by the bloody fox. He hadn’t shown his face at the inn since the night everything went to hell, but by now I saw him in every shadow and under every bush, and I’d have been happy to see him swaggering into the barn just then. But there was no one but me, and my head, and my throat getting drier, and my voice going on. And Rosseth’s eyes.
“I went to the window,” I said. “Forced the catch with my staff and climbed over the sill. It was dark inside there, Rosseth, because of being shut up so tight and me coming out of the sunlight. I could hear the baby—you— but I couldn’t see you, or anything else. I just had to stand still until I got used to the darkness.”
He knew what was coming now. Not the way I knew, but you could tell. He wouldn’t look at me, but kept wetting his lips and staring down at the barn floor. My face and hands were cold. I said, “Somebody hit me. Hard, here, on the side of my head. I thought it was a sword. I went straight down, and they were all over me. Not a sound out of them—it felt like a dozen people hitting me everywhere at once, kicking, pounding me like mashing up a tialy root. A dozen people, killing me, I couldn’t see even one of them. I swear, that’s what it was like.”
“But there were only two,” Rosseth said. His face had gone as white as Lukassa’s, and so small. He said, “There were only two.”
“Well, I didn’t know that, did I? They never said a word, I told you that. All I knew was, I was being fucking murdered.” I didn’t realize that I was shouting until a couple of the horses nickered in alarm. “Rosseth, I couldn’t see for the blood, I thought they’d split my head. Look, right here, it’s still tender after fifteen years. I thought I was dead as that thing in the oven, do you understand?“
He did not answer. He got up off the hay-bale and turned in a circle, arms hanging, eyes vague, still not looking at me. After a bit of that, he wandered back toward the horse he’d been doctoring, but then he turned again and just stood there. I said, “I had my staff. I got my legs under me somehow, and I just struck out, left, right, swinging blind in the dark, trying to keep them off. That’s all I wanted to do, keep them off me.”
I had to sit down again. I was dripping and reeking with sweat, and beginning to wheeze as though I’d been for another brisk stroll up those stairs. Rosseth stayed where he was, looking down at me. He said, “My mother and my father.”
I nodded, waiting for the next question, the one I hear in my sleep most nights, even now. But he couldn’t ask it, he could not make the words come out. Trust him, I had to say it all myself, and me with a load of mortar hardening in my chest. “I killed them,” I said. “I never meant to. I didn’t know.”
In the dreams he usually comes for me, screaming, trying to tear me apart with his hands. I was ready for that, or for him crying, but he didn’t do either. His knees folded slowly, and he dropped to the floor and stayed there, kneeling with his arms wrapped tight around himself and his head bowed. He was making a tiny dry sound. I’d never have heard it in that burned-out village.
“They must have thought I was one of the killers coming back,” I said. “Soldiers, outlaws, whoever it was.” I told him that I had buried his parents, that I didn’t leave them to rot with the other murdered ones, and that I could take him right to the village and the grave, if he ever wanted to go there. Which is certainly the truth—I could find that terrible place again if the sea had rolled over it.
He was rocking back and forth on his knees, just a little. Without looking up he whispered, “And you took me with you. You buried them, and you took me with you.”
“What else could I do? You were weaned, thank the gods. I bought a goat in the next town, and I used to dip bits of bread in her warm milk and feed you like that, all the way.” I tried to make a joke, to get him to stop that rocking. I said, “Heavy as a little anvil you were, too. Lugging you along with one arm, dragging that goat with the other—I don’t know how women do it. If you’d weighed an ounce more, I’d have had to leave you where I found you.”
Well, that did get him off his knees, no question about that. Shoulders hunched and shaking, the whole face writhing back from his bared teeth, hands clawing up, not toward me but himself. “I wish you had! Oh, I wish you’d left me there with them and just gone on your miserable, stinking way, and never given any of us another thought ever again! Rot your fat guts, I wish you’d left me to die with my family, my family!”
There was more, fifteen years’ worth of it. I let him go on as long as the supply lasted. He did hit me once, but he doesn’t really know how, and my body soaks these things up. When he finally ran out of breath, wheezing like me, I said, “I’m sorry I killed them, your parents. That started the moment I stood up in that shattered house and mopped the blood out of my eyes. I’ve lived with what I saw every second since, waking or sleeping, a lot longer than you have. It’s my business, and it will go on being my business until the day I die. But what I will not apologize for, not ever, to you or anybody, is that I brought you away from that house with me. Beyond a doubt it’s the stupidest thing I’ve done in my life, but it might be the only good thing, too. One or two others, just maybe, but the chances are you’ll be all I’ve got to show. When my time comes.”
How long did we stand looking at each other? I can’t say, but I’ll swear I felt the sun rising and setting on the back of my neck, and seasons changing, and I know I saw Rosseth grow older before my eyes. Was it the same for him, I wonder, looking at me, seeing me, seeing his childhood march away? And what I mumbled, after so many years, so much fuss, was, “You’re all I’ve got to show, and I could have done worse.” And we stared at each other some more, and I said, “Much worse.”
Rosseth said at last, “I am not going with Lal and Soukyan.” His voice was quiet, with neither tears nor anger in it, nothing but its own clarity. “But I am leaving. Not today, but soon.”
