But in the middle of the night I went back. The inn was shuttered and locked, of course, and the dogs roaming, but they knew me now, and Rosseth had shown me a way to get in through a loose window-sash in the root cellar. No one awake except a journeying Mazarite priest and his body-servant: they aren’t supposed to do anything at all with their hands, those Mazarites, not so much as comb their beards or scratch an itch, but I could have led a regiment past that door, instead of creeping all the way to the other one, as I did.
His eyes were open, glinting in the moonlight, but I had already seen him sleeping like that. I stood in the doorway, unable to speak to him, unable to turn away. He said, “Come in, Tikat.”
So I took a three-legged stool from the corner and sat down by his bed. It was hard for me to talk, but I said, “I want to know what you meant. About Lukassa, about me going to her. I have already followed her beyond death, across deserts and mountains to this place which is—” I could not find words—“which is so much not our place that I think as long as we are here she cannot know me. But if she were to come home, to come home with me—”
“It would be no different.” His voice was gentle and merciless, comforting. “I told you that you would have to go where she is now, and that place is neither here nor there. It is a country where Lal and Nyateneri have always been her older sisters, where I am, if you will, her grandfather, and where you never existed. Do you understand me, Tikat? No long, long river afternoons, no dreaming in the willows; no tall, sweet boy who played boats with her, and told her stories, and kept the other boys from teasing her. It never happened, Tikat, none of it—she never rescued you from the wild pigs, nor put the cool leaves on your back when your uncle beat you for drinking his featherberry wine. You cannot go back to a world and a life that never was.”
How did he know what he knew? How do I know? He was my tafiya. I did not weep—no one but Lukassa has ever seen me weep—but there seemed to be a very long time before I could speak as I wanted. I said at last, “What must I do to be with her?”
He rolled his eyes, mimicking me brutally. “ ‘What must I do, O master? Advise me, direct me, think for me, greatest, wisest of wizards.’ Whose wisdom got you this far, yours or mine? Who loves that child best, you or me?” He slapped his hands down so violently on the blankets that the gesture shot him upright, glaring at me in utter disgust. “The older I become, the more I wish I had a reputation for total, transcendent idiocy. Perhaps that would mean even a few less idiots whining for my magical counsel. Get out of my sight—there is a particular kind of intelligent stupidity that I cannot abide, and you embody it absolutely. Get out of my sight!”
If it was a real rage or not, I could not tell, but I paid it no heed at all, because I am far more stubborn than I am either foolish or clever. When I did not move from the stool, he grew calm almost as suddenly as he had become furious with me. “Never ask me what you must do, Tikat. Tell me what you will do—then at least we can argue properly. Tell me now.”
I said slowly, “If I am to begin as a stranger—if I am to begin all over, everything, with no history between Lukassa and me, no childhood, no love from the moment we crawled into each other’s vision—why, then so be it, so be it. I will go to her tomorrow and speak to her as gently as I would any stranger, assuming nothing, hoping for nothing but to assure her that I am a friend and no madman. This is what I will do tomorrow—beyond tomorrow, who knows? And so be it.”
I did not look at him as I spoke, but at my cupped hands; it was all I could do at the last not to ask, “Is that well? Is that the right way for us to begin the rest of our lives? Will you help me now?” But I did not—not that it would have been any use just then, for he had fallen quite asleep. I sat beside him almost until dawn, when I slipped off back to the stable so that Rosseth could rouse me to begin our day’s work. In all that time he never stirred, but snored away sweetly and politely, even when I dabbed a bit of dried soup from a corner of his mouth. I said aloud, “I am becoming Lukassa, finicking over you so,” but he did not awaken.
Above the woodlot there is a little shrubby slope where Karsh has built a shrine, as innkeepers are required to do, for the use of all such holy wanderers as that Mazarite priest. Just for a moment, as I was going into the stable, I thought I saw Redcoat squatting by a thornbush halfway up the hillside. He was smiling with his mouth closed and his eyes almost shut, and Lukassa’s locket glinting between his dreaming fingers. I stopped for a better look, but if he was really there I lost him in the dazzle of the morning rising behind him, pale blue, palest silver.
LAL
“Downstream.”
“How can you know?” I bent my head a second time to the river water cupped in my hands. I made a bit of a spectacle out of it, more than a bit, letting the water trickle over my lips and throat and smiling lingeringly as I sipped it. Finally I said, “Human life leaves a taste. In the air, in the water, in the ground. One house—not a village, only a single house, with a few people, an animal or two, coming and going, fishing, eating, using the river—it changes the flavor. It just does.” I sampled the water once more and nodded. “There’s no one living anywhere upstream. Try it, you can tell.”
Nyateneri said thoughtfully, “How nice to hear the most ridiculous statement of my entire life while I am still young enough to appreciate it.” He crouched beside me, scooped up a few drops, licked at them impatiently and stood up at once, looking abruptly angry and embarrassed. Only when we were well into the mountains had he let his woman’s form dissolve again, showing himself lean and gray; heavy-boned, yet more graceful than he should be for his size, the hair as ragged as ever (he chopped it periodically into the same scorched-earth monastery cut, for no reason that he would ever tell), and the eyes still as slowly changeable as twilight skies. A gentle mouth still, in a hard, tired face.
“This is stupid,” he said. “I know all the stories, I am quite ready to believe that Lal-Alone can give a lizard two weeks’ start and track it across any desert you like, blindfolded if you like. But one fisherman pissing out of a skiff—no, no, I am sorry, I spent my youth in a cloister, my trustfulness is not what it should be. No.”
Well, it served me right for making such a grand show of my skills. “No rapids further up, either—no taste of white water at all.” Nyateneri snorted. I wiped my hands on my breeks and pointed to the sky as I stood up myself. “Very well, consider our friends there. Name them for me. If you like.”
Nyateneri gave the black-and-white birds circling just upstream of us a brief glance, and answered, “Vrajis. In the south we call them priest-catchers. Why?”
I said, “Because even in your country it is surely known that these birds do not nest where men are. If there were a settlement within fifty miles, you wouldn’t see a vraji here until the village had been ashes for fifty years. Tell me I am mistaken.”
No chance of that, anyway—there must be jokes and proverbs in a hundred tongues about the vrajis’ antipathy to human beings. One of my own folk’s nastier religions is based upon it. Nyateneri sighed, rubbed his neck, stared at the birds, walked away from me, walked back, rubbed his neck again and said, “So. Not one house.” It was not exactly an agreement, but it was not a question either.
“You really can tell by the taste,” I said. “It doesn’t take as much practice as you might think.” Nyateneri had wandered off again, morosely studying the stony, sloping quarter-moon of shore where we stood, and the dark trees beyond. I raised my voice slightly. “The real question is not where Arshadin’s house is, but how distant it is, and how we plan to get there. Having completely exhausted my legendary woodcraft, I would welcome any suggestions.”