Innkeeper's Song by Peter Beagle

Author:Peter Beagle [Beagle, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy
Published: 1993-11-10T21:00:00+00:00

TIKAT

It took me longer to recover from the bare-hand touch of a man I never saw than it did from my journey through the Northern Barrens. Days afterward, no mark on me, and I was still coming over dazey and faint and trembling without warning, unable to trust my body anywhere. Rosseth, uncomplainingly doing half my work as well as his own, told me about those three men who had followed Nyateneri for years and finally caught up with her at The Gaff and Slasher. He said there was no shame in my falling without a fight, like a market animal, and that I should be proud of myself simply for having survived the encounter. I took his word for it.

He never once asked what I had been doing at that door, which was as kind in its way as the other, the work. In spite of the fact that I am not easy speaking of myself, while he seemed to be always clacking along like a little windmill, somehow he ended up knowing nearly as much about my life as I did about his. I don’t mean Lukassa and me—no hide-buyer or corn-merchant staying the night but knew that much by now—but about our village with its two priests and its one whore; about the blacksmith, whom everyone feared except Lukassa, and about my aunt and uncle and the weaver-woman who was teaching me her trade. I cannot say to this day how I came to tell him such things—even the story of my theft of dirigari fruit from my teacher’s orchard, which shames me still. He was only a boy, after all, Rosseth, two years younger than I, innocent as one of Shadry’s potboys— more innocent—and all the time thinking himself as knowing as an old bargeman. I do not know why I talked to him as I did.

“Tell me about your parents again,” he would urge me; and when I stumbled, forgetting my father’s favorite dish or the turn of a joke my mother liked to make, then an odd look would come into his eyes, almost reproachful, as though if he had known his parents he would have remembered everything; and perhaps he would have. His own first clear memory was of Karsh carrying him somewhere by the back of his neck—before that, there were only bits and shadows that might have been dreams, though you could tell Rosseth didn’t think so all the time. When I asked him how he came to be at The Gaff and Slasher, he told me that Karsh had taken him from a traveling Creeshi peddler, “in trade for three gamecocks and a bag of Limsatty onions. He complains about it to this day—says two of those birds were champions, and sweet Limsatties have never been as good since. Gatti Jinni says one cock was blind, but I don’t know.”

He talked of Lal and Nyateneri hardly at all now, which suited me well. He made up for that, though, with his endless stream of chatter about Lukassa.

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