Peter Beagle - Innkeeper's Song

I bathed and cleaned her as was necessary, washed myself in the river, slept a little, fished again, and spent most of the time in studying our one remaining possession. I had never seen such a boat before; indeed, it seemed more kite than boat to me. It cannot have been longer than twelve feet, and in its broadest section hardly as wide as I am tall; and finally it was nothing more than round and flat sticks fitted so tightly together that you could scarcely see the grooves between. Some of the sticks—the mast, for example—were actually a sort of hollow reed, and many must have telescoped to allow them to fit in a traveler’s pack. The wood itself was far lighter than any wood I knew; the sails were like silk, but not silk. Two people could have lifted the entire affair out of the water, but it was plainly made to carry one deadly passenger alone. I could not imagine how Lal had assembled it unaided, nor how we should manage the rest of our journey downriver—and just how far was that to be?—on a miniature that marvelously delicate. The sun slipped back down behind the mountains while I brooded on this, and the small breeze sharpened. Night comes early in the high country.

I have said that Lal did not move all day, unless I moved her, neither before drinking the fasska nor after. When I lay down by her that second night, she was unchanged: heart steady, breath even enough, but her body distinctly colder than before. The firm pulse lied—she was slowing, she herself, in a way that I could do absolutely nothing about, if the drink could not. Her skin felt terribly dry, like the husk of an insect, and there was a sweet, faraway fragrance to it that alarmed me even more than the coldness. Someone’s childhood may perhaps smell like that, in memory, or someone’s dreams of an afterlife. Lal-Alone, Sailor Lal, does not.

But in the night, sometime after midnight, she began to turn fitfully, waking me, and to mutter words in the language of her long private songs. Her voice grew louder, sounding frightened at first and then increasingly angry, and she struggled in my arms with her eyes staring. I held her as strongly and as carefully as I could, fearful that she would do one of us an injury if I let her go. For all that, she scratched my face more than once and bit her mouth bloody, crying out to someone whose name I did not know. That was nothing at all; what made it difficult to hold on was that the strange new scent of her body had become as unbearably sweet as the fasska’s smell was vile.

Then the sweat came. Between one moment and the next, the cold dry fever had broken, and she was running with ordinary human sweat, soaking, sluicing with it, gasping and crying like a newborn, her head thrown back as though she were bathing under a waterfall. The drink had done its work—her smell was her own again, spicy and tart, almost bitter, her own, and there was Lal, slipping through my damp grip to sit up and announce shakily, “My swordcane smells of fish guts.”

I had set it beside her, like a familiar toy, in case she woke. Now I gaped at her as she sniffed the thing a second time, made a face, and tried the blade against her thumb. Instantly she rounded on me—naked, shivering, barely able to hold herself erect—demanding fiercely, “What have you been doing with it? You’ve bloody ruined it, do you know that? Damn you, Soukyan, you’ve ruined my sword!”

I took it out of her hand—already feeling her strength returning as she resisted me—and wrapped the entire sail around her to keep her from a chill. She struggled and swore, but I made her lie back down and sat by her, saying, “I needed an edge. Your sword was all we had.”

“Edge? Edge? Do you know how long it took me to put that edge on that blade? I’ll never be able to get it decently sharp again! What possessed you, what were you using it for, chopping stove logs?” Weak as she yet was— once she was down, she could barely lift her head to rail at me, and from time to time her voice cracked into inaudibility—she was also angrier than I had ever seen her. “Marinesha would have known better— Shadry would have known better!”

“Shadry and Marinesha didn’t have to feed you and physic you,” I said. “I did, and I used what there was. If you hadn’t left our packs behind—”

“ I had to kill a man, build a boat, and save your stupid, pointless life! That stupid raft was about to catch fire, sink, I didn’t know when—I didn’t know if you were alive or dead, I wasn’t going to waste time hauling those bloody packs to the boat! He kept saying, ‘ It’s burning, it’s burning .’” Her voice did not break then, nor were there tears in her eyes, but I felt as strange and uncertain as I had when she called me by my true name. She was so angry at me, and she looked eleven years old.

I told her what had happened since she pulled me out of the river. She listened very quietly, never taking her eyes from my face. The sweat had stopped running—even her hair was drenched and her small ears dripping—and I realized for the first time how much weight she had lost in only two days. When I finished, she looked at me for a moment longer, then shook her head and blew her breath out softly. “Well,” she said. “Well. Thank you.”

“You remember nothing of this?” I asked. “Not even the fasska ? I can’t imagine that anyone could ever forget having drunk fasska .”

“I remember nothing,” Lal said flatly. “I don’t like that.” She was silent again for a time before she smiled, and now she looked easily fifteen. She said, “But whatever you gave me, it was the right thing. I don’t know whether it saved my life, but it brought me back from”— she faltered briefly“—I think from a place where a gardener’s rhyme would not have reached me. Thank you, Soukyan.”

“Thank you, Lalkhamsin-khamsolal,” I said. “Sleep now.”

I dried her face and body with my shirt, and she was asleep before I finished, or seemed so. But as I lay down once more, settling my arm over her waist just as though we were veteran bedfellows, comfortable old campaigners, she mumbled drowsily, “Tomorrow we will be off downriver.”

“No, we certainly will not,” I said into her ear. “You wouldn’t get as far as the boat.” My answer was a snore as delicate as lace. I lay awake for a little, listening to the water and watching stars disappear behind Lal’s shoulder.

We had words before we had breakfast. She was entirely serious about taking up our journey immediately, and I nearly had to wrestle her down to persuade her even to listen to any contrary proposal. Which would have been difficult, incidentally: I have never known anyone, man or woman, with Lal’s recuperative powers. One rib cracked, the muscles beneath another badly bruised; left arm all but useless, right thigh too tender to touch, the rest of her body clearly shrieking in sympathy—all that, and she was on her feet before I was, inspecting the boat and trying to resharpen her swordcane against different sorts of rocks. We had words about that, too.

Eventually we came to a compromise, aided perhaps by a brief dizzy spell on Lal’s part. We would be on our way on the following morning, come wind, come weather, and in addition she would continue to wear the sail-bandage around her battered ribs. For myself, I swore to treat her with no more consideration than I had since we left Corcorua, and never, never , to ask how she was feeling. On that understanding, we fished, dozed and talked through the day, discussing with some chagrin that third assassin who had so humiliated us both, and making what plans we could for our utterly futile assault on Arshadin’s home.

I want to make that very clear to you. Between us, Lal and I have a good deal more experience than most of strange combats in stranger places. But neither of us had ever had the least illusion that we were about to overcome a wizard powerful enough to make a desperate fugitive of our master. As I had told Rosseth, we were a diversion at very best, nothing more, and we could only hope that my Man Who Laughs would be able to make good use of whatever breath we might buy him. Assuming, of course, that Arshadin ever bothered to notice that he was under attack. Part of our experience has to do with knowing when you have attracted the attention of such things as wizards, and I had no sense at all that we were being observed as we bathed in the river, dried ourselves in the afternoon sun, and spoke of the days to come. Which shows you exactly what experience is worth.