Injured pride, certainly; but there was regret in it, too, which is even rarer than trust, in my life.
Nyateneri said stiffly, “I am used to the name. I will answer to it.” Then he went and knelt by the mattress, and my friend rested a hand on his head. I stood still, almost swaying with joy and relief, and irritated with everyone in the world. Even when my friend beckoned to me, I stood where I was.
“There’s my Lal,” he said without mockery. “My Lal, who must see everything, must think of everything, must be responsible for everything. Chamata, I teach those who come to me only what I am certain will be useful to them one day. I knew that you would always live close enough to Uncle Death to nod to him in the street, so I taught you a small trick of picking his pocket as you pass him by. As for your comrade here, he came flying from such hounds as even you have not yet known—hounds that will run on his track as long as he lives.” Nyateneri looked at no one, showed nothing. My friend’s voice went on, quavering with fatigue, and a little also with his old laughter. “Hounds can smell wonderfully well, but they see quite poorly. You might say that I taught Nyateneri a way of confusing their vision, at least for a while.” The last words bent upwards toward a question.
“For a while,” Nyateneri said. “The last ones hunted by scent. The third still runs loose.”
My friend nodded, unsurprised. “Ah, there’s the difficulty in depending on tricks—they never work all the time, even the best of them. And when you have used them all, there is truly nothing left, nothing of yourself before the tricks, or beyond them. He taught me that, Arshadin.”
The room was very still. I had to say something. I said, “Arshadin. The boy who came not long after I did, with the hill accent and the funny ears.” And almost at the same time, Nyateneri said, “I remember. Short, southern, kept a chikchi flute in his shirt all the time.” But my friend turned his head slowly from one side to the other, being too tired and weak even to shake it properly.
“You do not know Arshadin,” he said. “Neither of you. Nor did I.” He closed his eyes and was silent for a time, while Lukassa fussed about with pillows and Nyateneri and I stared at each other: wordlessly, grudgingly walking side by side through days and nights no less shared for falling years apart. Oh, you never could hurry him, never get anything out of him but in his own way. Do you remember, do you remember how he used to, over and over, did he ever say to you, I remember, yes, and didn’t that always drive you mad? I heard a fly buzz in a corner of the window as we stood there, and Rosseth’s pet donkey braying creakily for winter apples.
The pale, exhausted eyes, that had been so joyously green, came abruptly open. “I missed you after you were gone, chamata.” His voice was even and ruminative. “I was not prepared for that, missing someone, not at my age. As well start cutting new teeth or singing under young girls’ windows. It was”—he hesitated briefly—“it was disconcerting.”
I blinked speechlessly at him, recalling that he had neither embraced me nor so much as waited to watch me go, that day when I set out alone again into the world because he said it was time. I was still young, and he was all I had then, and I cried for him many a night, huddled in my blanket under dripping trees, no more than their branches between me and the wind. But it would never have occurred to me to wonder whether he felt at all lessened or lonely without me, and the idea seemed nearly as unnatural to me even now as it must have done to him. Nyateneri smiled slightly, without malice. It annoyed me anyway.
“Disconcerting,” my friend went on. “Either I am more sentimental than I knew, or else my vanity starves without someone to rescue and protect and teach. However that may be, Arshadin appeared at my door when I was, if you like, at a low ebb, a bit at loose ends. An ordinary-looking boy, without your fierce charm, Lal, without Nyateneri’s presence. Nor was he a fugitive of any sort, but a farmer’s second son, well-fed, moderately educated, and most calmly certain about what he meant to do with his life.” He paused, absently stroking Lukassa’s hair and looking with great deliberation from one to the other of us. I am the Inbarati of Khaidun, if I never see Khaidun again—and I never will—raised from infancy to tell tales, but I learned as much of the storyteller’s sly art from that man as I did from my mother and grandmother and all my aunts. I never told him that.
My friend said, “Arshadin’s simple, single ambition was to be the greatest magician who ever walked the earth. He achieved it.”
Rosseth’s donkey brayed again just at that moment, which set us all laughing too loudly. My friend fell silent again for a moment, and then resumed, speaking almost to himself. “You always wonder about it, you know, if you are one of those who cannot resist the enticement of teaching. What will happen when I meet someone with a greater gift than my own? It is easy enough to be kind and helpful to those who do not threaten me—but how will it be with one who is my master and does not yet realize it? How will I be in that day?”
Nyateneri and I began speaking at once, but he stilled me with a gesture that was no less commanding for being so frail and miniature. “If you don’t mind, we can leave out the part where you both assure me loudly that I could never have to face such a decision. We all meet our masters, all of us—why do you think we are in this world?— and I am telling you that I met mine one overcast afternoon when I went to the door with my mouth still full of tea-cake. I knew him on the instant—as you will know a greater swordsman one day, Lal, with the first salute of your blades. And I invited him in for tea.”
Nyateneri regarded him with a grave mock-frown. “That must indeed have been centuries ago. You insisted that I learn to make proper tea, just so, but you never would drink it. I nearly went mad trying to make tea that was at last fit for you.”
“By that time I had given up other things besides tea,” my friend replied very quietly. “By the time you came, I had long been occupied in making my lamisetha.” We gaped at him dumbly, and he smiled. “It is an old word, a wizards’ word. It means, more or less, ‘road of departure.’ If you are a wizard, nothing in your life is more important than how you die. Do you know why that is so? Nyateneri?” He might have been our teacher again, prodding and provoking us with riddles that seemed to have only one answer, and that one always wrong. “You used to be curious about that sort of thing, more than Lal ever was.” But Nyateneri shook his head silently.
My friend said, “A magician must die in peace. I am not talking about temporal peace with his neighbors or the local ruler, or of what most people call spiritual peace, meaning that he has performed all the proper observances of whatever gods he may have served. What I speak of is truly of the spirit—a drawing-in, a particular sitting still that requires great preparation and that a magician can only attain by means of a long, motionless journey. That is the lamisetha. As I said, it translates poorly.”
A knock sounded then, and I went to answer. I expected to see Karsh, but it was only Gatti Jinni, who had already begun backing away before I opened the door. He was notably afraid of both Lukassa and me, though he looked for excuses to attend loweringly on Nyateneri. He muttered, “Karsh. If the old man stays the night, more money.”
“He stays the night,” I said, “and longer, and in a better room than this. I will arrange it with Karsh. Meanwhile, send up bread and soup and wine for him, and not Dragon’s Daughter, either.” But Gatti Jinni had already scuttled off down the corridor. I turned back as Nyateneri was saying, “And yet you took me in. No holy calmness after that, certainly, but no question about it, not ever.”