Oh, wasn’t Rosseth furious at me, though? I did it on purpose, I don’t mind telling you that. Because ever since those women came to the inn, Rosseth had been growing more and more impossible, especially in the last week or two. We’d been used to having our nice restful chats, when Karsh wasn’t around, and sometimes our little walks in the woods or even an afternoon in Corcorua— but now he couldn’t talk about anything except Lal’s beautiful hands or Nyateneri’s elegant ways, or how charming and friendly that Lukassa was, once you got to know her. So tedious, so tiresome. I’m afraid I’d just run out of patience with his daydreaming, that’s all.
“Marinesha,” he said to me—like that, through his teeth—“Marinesha, come here and sit down.” He sat down himself by the mattress and beckoned me over. I stood where I was, thank you very much, until he said, “Please,” really rather nicely. Then I went and sat across from him, on the other side of the old man, and I said, “Well?” Just that, you see.
Rosseth said, “You know something about healing. More than I do, unless it’s a horse. Tell me what to do.”
“I’ve told you already,” I said. “Ask him where he wants to be buried. He hasn’t eaten for days, by the look of him, and he must have gotten caught in that squall that came up over town this morning. And he’s very old. That’s all that’s wrong with him, but there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Well, Rosseth looked so stricken at that that I really felt sorry for him. Some people look nicer when they’re sad, and Rosseth was one of those. I asked, “Why should a stranger trouble you so? I’m sure he’s a good old man, but he’s no uncle of yours. Or is he?” I added that last because Rosseth is an orphan—I mean, I am, too, which gave us anyway that much in common—but at least I’d always known my parents’ names and where they came from, and poor Rosseth didn’t even know where he was born. So the man could have been a relative of his, you see, like anyone.
Rosseth said, “Look at him. He’s somebody, he’s important.” At that I got angry all over again, and I said, “Why? Because he’s a friend of theirs? That’s what it is, that’s why you’re going on like this, isn’t it?” But Rosseth just shook his head.
“Look at him, Marinesha,” he kept saying. “Look at him.” So finally I took my first real look at that old man’s face—I mean, past the smudgy, gappy old mouth, past the lines and wrinkles and scratches, and the dirt ground into them all, past the awful grayness, past everything, past the features themselves, if you understand me. And I don’t know—I don’t know—looking at him just started to make me happy, in a funny way. It made me want to cry, too, but it was the same thing. I don’t know, I just stared and stared, and Rosseth did too, and we didn’t talk any more.
By and by we heard Karsh shouting downstairs for Rosseth. I said, “You go on. I’ll just bide with him for a little.” So Rosseth looked at me a moment, and then he smiled and touched my shoulder, and he said, “Thank you,” and went out. And I sat there by the mattress, watching that old man, and presently I went and got a cloth to clean his face with a bit. Because there was no reason he ought to be dirty, even if he was old and sick and maybe dying. And while I was doing it, he opened his eyes.
“Oh,” he said. “Marinesha.” Just as though we’d known each other forever, and he was surprised to see me, but pleased, too. He had a thoughtful sort of voice, with just the least bit of an accent. He said, “My, I feel rather like a kitten getting its face washed by its mother. A refreshing way to wake up, I must say.” When he smiled, it didn’t matter that there were teeth gone.
I was very shy with him, all of a sudden. I couldn’t help wishing that he’d gone on sleeping, just a while longer. I stood up quickly, and I said, “Sir, are you feeling better? What can I do for you?” Just like Rosseth, after all.
He laughed then. I don’t know how to tell you about his laugh. A shaky little gasp of a laugh it was, this side of a cough, really, but you wanted to hear it again. He said, “Well, you could go on standing there in the sunlight—I wouldn’t ask for more than that—but I think my friends are on the stairs. I know you don’t much care for them, and I’d not want to shame you after such kindness.”
And the next thing, there they were, the three of them, banging the door open and filling the room with their clatter and swagger. They stood there with their mouths open and their eyes popping, exactly like a row of fish in the market, and then the black one stammered out, “Rosseth told us—” and Miss Nyateneri swung her shoulders and demanded, “Where have you been?” like the boldface she was. As for that other one, she went straight to him and dropped on her knees beside the mattress. She put her hands between his, showing off that great vulgar emerald she always wore. He touched it, and he smiled and said something like, “So, it finds its way home again,” which I didn’t understand. But she was crying, of all things, and then he said, “Be still, be still. You are where you should be. Be still now.”
Nobody gave me any more of a glance than they would a dish of dog scraps, of course, not when I opened the door and not when I closed it behind me. But I stood on the landing for a moment, not eavesdropping, just getting myself ready for what was waiting downstairs—dirt and smoke and food smells, Karsh and Shadry yelling, Gatti Jinni waiting his chance to get me in a corner, farmers and soldiers already laughing-drunk in the taproom, guests badgering me to do forty different tasks for them at once, and my own chores going on till midnight, longer if I wasn’t lucky. What I had to do, you see, was make myself forget how nice it was just being alone with that old man—at least until I could get off with it by myself somewhere. I mean, otherwise who’d ever go downstairs?
LAL
Of course we were jealous, both of us—how could we not have been jealous? Here we were, Nyateneri and I, having journeyed at great risk and labor to a far country to aid our dearest master, having searched for weeks longer after that, day on dreary day, just for some sign of his presence in the world—and then having to stand and watch while he ignored us to greet a stranger, Lukassa, as though she were his long-lost daughter. Yet how could it have been different? He always went where the need was greatest, immediately, without having to be told. My life is witness to this, as is Nyateneri’s.
Nevertheless, if he had called her chamata while all the soothing and comforting was going on, I think I might have hit him. That is my name, even if I don’t know what it means. (I did hit him once, by the way, very long ago, when I was flailing mad with fear, and so young that I truly expected him to kill me for it.) But he spoke another name entirely, looking at Nyateneri and me over Lukassa’s head, which was bowed in the hollow of his thin shoulder. He said, “His name is Arshadin.”
He loves to do that, to sail from one of your unasked questions to another, like a monkey somersaulting through the high branches. He never lies—never—but you must climb right after him if you want to keep up at all. It is exactly as maddening as he intends it to be, and at times the urge to make him scramble a bit himself is overwhelming. I nodded towards Nyateneri and replied, “His name is Soukyan. I don’t like it much.”
The smile was unchanged, as tender and secret as ever. “In that case, I should go on calling him Nyateneri. Unless he objects very strongly.” He looked solemnly back and forth from one to the other of us, as though he were settling a nursery dispute.
Nyateneri and I looked directly at each other, I think for the first time since that night we must all remember by different names. In the week since he and Rosseth and Lukassa and I had stumbled out of that battered, tipsy bed, we had trudged on about our everlasting search without saying more than we had to, communicating mostly by swift sidelong glances. Yet nothing much seemed to have changed, except that Nyateneri—his woman’s guise reassumed, largely for the sake of Karsh’s sanity—had taken over the tiny room next door, and that poor Rosseth could neither stay away from us nor speak to us. For Lukassa, as far as I could tell, the events of that night might have been no more than a sweet, lingering dream; for myself, they represented an annoying complication. I make love only with very old friends, of whom I have very few, and with whom there is no danger of falling in love, no chance of being distracted from the task or the journey at hand, and no need to guard my back. I do not sleep with recent acquaintances, traveling companions, professional associates, or people who are too much like me, and Nyateneri/Soukyan was all of these, as well as the most profound deceiver I had ever known in a life spent among liars. Whatever else might be between us— and I was not such a priggish fool as to imagine that there was nothing—there could never possibly be trust, not for a man who had tricked me so shamingly, and so dangerously.