THE INNKEEPER

I watched him come toward me, exactly as I had watched him walk away that night when there were dead men all over the bathhouse. Sounds carry far and long on damp mornings here, and I could still hear the hoofbeats even after they had reached the main road. I said, “Wouldn’t take you along, heh?”

He answered nothing at all to that but, “I had to see to Tikat. I am sorry to be late. It was a bad night.”

“There’s naught in the least amiss with Tikat, and well you both know it,” I said. “Nothing wrong with anybody who can turn an addled gape and a tiny bruise on the neck into two full days’ eating at my expense. As for those women—ah, well, cheer up, keep at it. Bound to be a slave caravan or a bandit gang through here sometime soon, and you can run off with them. Steal a younger horse than Tunzi, though—he’d not make it past Hrakimakka’s orchard, if he got that far.” By this time, I was hitting him, or trying to: half-asleep, he was still all shrugs and sidesteps, catching blows on every part of his body that could possibly hurt me and not him. I don’t believe I ever landed one solid clout on that boy after he turned eight or so. I really don’t.

He kept mumbling, “I was not running away, I was not,” but I paid that no more attention than you’d have done. Who wouldn’t run from fat old Karsh and The Gaff and Slasher to follow two beautiful women adventurers away to the golden horizon? I hit him for thinking I’d believe anything different, and for not having the wit and the courtesy to imagine that I might have done the same myself. As well as he imagined he knew me.

“Shadry needs wood and water in the kitchen,” I said. “When he’s done with you, I want those drainage ditches below the stable cleaned out. They’re fouled again—I can smell them from here. Tikat’s to help you, if he plans to spend another night under any roof of mine. As for your plans”—and I bounced one off the point of his elbow that left my hand sore all that day—“next time, don’t let them hang on someone else’s yes or no. Next time, you’d best keep running as straight and far as you can go, for I’ll pulp every last drop of cider out of you if you try sneaking back. Do you understand what I am telling you, boy?”

He didn’t, not then. He gave me one dark, puzzled blink, and then ducked past me toward the woodshed. I shouted after him, “Stay away from the old man, do you hear me? And the girl, too—I don’t want you speaking a bloody word to that mad girl.” When I turned, because I felt someone watching me, it was the fox, grinning between the withes of a berry basket. He was gone, vanished, while my shout for Gatti Jinni was still echoing, but I know I saw him. I saw him, all right.

NYATENERI

Lal said, “I’m sorry you don’t like my singing. I don’t care, but I am sorry.”

We were walking the horses by then, letting the little Mildasi black lead, packhorse or not, because he understood this country: hardly a stone spurted backward under his feet, while our poor larger beasts flailed their way up the path like men floundering through a snowstorm. I said, “I never complained about your voice; it’s what you sing that I can’t abide. No tune, no shape, no end—just an everlasting melancholy whine quavering in my skull day after day. Meaning no mockery, this is truly what your folk call music?”

My horse flung back his head and balked, having winded the rock-targ I smelled a moment later. There’s no high range without them, not north of the Corun Beg, anyway. I spent the next few minutes reassuring him that it was dead scent from a last-year’s lair, which I certainly hoped was true. Lal waited for me a little way ahead. “So they do,” she answered me, “and history, too, and poetry and genealogy, for the matter of that. Ride on ahead if it troubles you to hear. Or sing something yourself—there would be an interesting change. Even Lukassa sings now and then, and I’ve often heard Rosseth humming about his chores, only the gods know why. Never you.”

“The air is thin here,” I said. “I save my breath for breathing.” We were four days out and up among the mountains above Corcorua, on a road that tacked constantly back and forth, as Lal said, like a boat trying to find the wind, at times veering three and four and five miles sidewise to climb less than one. For all that, we had scrambled high enough already to look down on the backs of coasting snowhawks, high enough that the foothills among which we had first sought our master looked as flat and pale as the farmlands they surveyed. The air was indeed thin, and chill, too, full summer or no, with a curious tang about it, rather like fruit about to go bad. Above us, the icy peaks leaned together, breathing grayness.

“To me, singing is breathing,” Lal said over her shoulder as we started on. “I don’t understand people who don’t sing.” She had been in a sideways quarrelsome mood since we set out—longer, really—never giving her disquiet proper voice, but neither allowing us a truly easy moment, even in silence. There are many who find deep contentment in such a situation, but Lal was not of them—I have known no one less comfortable with the common subtleties. Anger she could enjoy well enough; deviousness, never. I halted my horse a second time and stood where I was until she turned, hearing no one trudging behind.

“Are we no more to be companions, then?” I asked her. “Because of what occurred between weary and lonely friends who had endured much together, is there to be no friendship ever again between you and me?” My life has not led me easily to ask such questions, nor Lal’s taught her to answer them, and she did not. She said only, so low that I could barely hear her, “We must reach Simburi Pass by sunset.” This time she did not look back to see if I were following.

We did reach Simburi Pass—substantial name for what amounts to a goatherd’s trail up to summer grazing, hardly wider than the stream where we made our camp. We spoke little until the horses were seen to, and then we sat down and faced each other across a shallow pit in which a hundred or a thousand generations of goatherds must have built their cooking fires. Lal said presently, “Where do you think he picked up our track?”

“Trodai,” I said. “That place like a bit of lichen on a bit of stone, where we asked too many people if they knew of a river in these mountains. He caught up at Trodai.”

Lal shook her head. “You do yourself an injustice. No one’s taken that overgrown old path out of Corcorua in centuries, I’m sure of it. You gave us a day’s start with that, maybe two. He found us no earlier than last night or this morning.”

“What difference? Either way, at least we can have a fire. I’m tired of sleeping cold and going without my tea for his benefit. I’ll gather some wood—you see if there might not be a few fish in that stream.”

I started to rise, but Lal seized my arm and pulled me back, crying, “Fool, get down! Even Rosseth wouldn’t stand like that against the sunset!” The Mildasi horse, reacting to the furious panic in her tone, made a strange low sound in its throat, less a nicker than a questioning growl.

My laughter plainly offended Lal, but I couldn’t help that. “If he were within bowshot, and I think he is, he could have picked us off long ago. I told you, they never use weapons of any sort—it’s one-third religion, two-thirds a question of pride. Now that he is alone, he might strike from ambush, but I doubt it.” I stood up, deliberately raising my voice. “The one trouble with knowing that an armed warrior facing your bare hands is overmatched is that it leads to a certain vanity, a certain carelessness. That is exactly why his friends are dead. That is why he will join them in a while.”