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.
THE INNKEEPER
I should have married when I had the chance—then at least there would have been someone instead of me to do the marketing. Now and then I take on someone just for that purpose, and I always regret it. No one who wasn’t born to it can deal with those old thieves in the Corcorua stalls; anyone else comes home with a cartload of rotting vegetables, maggoty meat, and salt fish you can smell before you hear the wagon wheels on the road. I manage well enough, but I don’t like it, never have, even when my father used to take me with him to teach me the trade. He loved it as much as they did, the butchers, the fishmongers, and the rest of them—he loved the yelling and haggling as much as finding the first fresh melons off the ship from Stimeszt, and he would have died of contempt instead of drink if people had stopped trying to swindle him out of his shirt. I am not like that.
So I came home that day as I do every market day, tired and disgusted, breakfast going rancid in the back of my throat. There have been times when I wouldn’t have minded walking into The Gaff and Slasher to look up the stairs and see that fool of a boy pinned to the wall with his neck half-wrung, but all I wanted to deal with then was a gallon of my own red ale, and this was one plaguey annoyance too many. Especially from outlanders.
I roared, “Put him down!” in a voice to rattle crockery—how else would you make yourself heard across taprooms for forty years?—and the one who had the boy said, “Ah? Certainly?” and dropped him. They turned toward me, smiling as though nothing in any way unusual were going on, smiles to scrape your bones. “At last the patron? The master of the house?”
“My name’s Karsh,” I said, “and no one but me lays a hand on the help. Come down here and talk to me if you want a room.”
They did not move, so I climbed the stairs to them. Pride is not my problem. Close to, they were older than I’d thought, though you had to stare to be sure of it. Long necks, triangular faces, light brown skin so tight over the bones that the lines were no more than tiny pale grooves. I felt their faces would rattle like kites if I touched them. The one who’d been choking the boy—yes, yes, he was already on his feet, coughing a bit, no harm done—told me that they were looking for a woman, a friend of theirs. “A good, good friend? It is most, most urgent?”
A southern voice, like hers, but with something else to it, a kind of restless twitch that isn’t southern at all. I knew whom they meant, of course, and saw no reason not to tell them she was staying here. No, I didn’t care much for their manner, nor for their way of taking liberties in my house without so much as paying for a bottle; but I’d put up uglier sorts many a night, and besides, I had no worries on Miss Nyateneri’s account. She would have made two of them, and she’d likely enough teethed on that dagger and that bow of hers. I said to the boy, “Is she here?”