Peter Beagle - Innkeeper's Song

The Mildasis did not see me. I stood behind a rock, bracing myself against it, trying to think. I was sorry for the old man, but my pity seemed as quiet and faraway as all the rest of my feelings, even the hunger, even the understanding that I was dying. But my horse was already dead, and there were the four other Mildasi horses, waiting untethered like the black, and I did know that I needed one of those, because there was a place I had to go. I could not remember the place, or why I had to be there, but it was very important, more important than starving. So I made the best plan I could, watching the Mildasis and the old man and the setting sun.

I know about the Mildasis what everybody knows—that they roam and raid out of the barren lands, never surrender, and value their horses more than themselves—and perhaps one thing more, which my uncle Vyan told me. He had traveled with caravans when he was young, and he said that the Mildasis were a religious people in their way. They believe that the sun is a god, and they do not trust him to return every morning without a bribe of blood. Usually they sacrifice one of the beasts they raise for that purpose, but the god likes human blood much better, and they give it to him when they can. If my uncle was right, they would kill the old man just as the sun touched the furthest hills. I moved around the rock slowly, like a shadow stretching in the sun.

The horses watched me, but they made no sound, even when I was very close to them. I am not wise with horses, like some—I think it was my madness that made them take me for a friend, a cousin. Uncle Vyan said that Mildasi horses were more like dogs, loyal and sometimes fierce, not easy to frighten. I wanted to pray that he was wrong about that, but I had no room for prayer. The Mildasis had their backs to me, making ready for the sacrifice. They were not beating the old man anymore, or even mocking him—they seemed as serious as either of the priests in our village when they blessed a baby or begged for rain. First they smeared his cheeks with something yellow, then made marks in it with their fingers, so carefully. They made his mouth black with something else.

He stood quite still, not speaking, not struggling. One of the Mildasis was singing, a high, scraping song that quavered as though he were the one about to be killed. The same few notes, over and over. When he stopped singing, there was no more than a breath of wind between the sun and the hilltops.

The Mildasi who sang took a long knife from another one. He showed it to the old man, making him study it, pointing at the blade, handle, the blade again, like my teacher trying to make me understand the real life of a pattern. I would know that knife if I ever saw it again.

The horse I had chosen hours, days ago was gray, like a rabbit. He let me touch him. The Mildasi began to sing again, and I was up on the gray horse, shouting and waving my arms to terrify the others. They looked surprised, a little disappointed in me; they danced on their hind legs and glanced toward their masters, who were only now turning, gaping, as silently astonished as the horses, but two with their throwing axes already out. The Mildasis can bring down nightbirds with those, my uncle Vyan says.

It was the black horse who suddenly decided to be frightened, to rear and scream and bolt, knocking down the singing Mildasi and trampling the knife-man, who rushed in to help him. The two others jumped for the reins, but the black dashed past them, heading for the comfort of its friends. But now they caught the panic themselves, as though it were a torch bound to the black, setting their tails afire. My gray—the Rabbit, as I called him from that day—went up in the air, all four feet off the ground, and came down out of my control, running straight back toward the two Mildasis who barred the way, axes whirling red in their hands. I flattened myself along the Rabbit’s back, clutching him as I had held Lukassa in the river. I could not see the old man.

One axe sighed past my nose, taking nothing with it but a hank of gray mane. The second I never saw at all, but the poor Rabbit yelled to break your heart and shot away in a different course, as rabbits will do. The tip of his right ear was gone, blood spraying back on my hands.

I looked back once, in time to see all four Mildasis—two of them limping—scrambling madly after their horses, and those in no hurry at all to be sane and obedient ever again. Then, with my head still turned, a hand on the saddle, a hand in my belt, a grunt and a wheeze and me almost spilled to the ground, and the old man was up behind me, laughing like the wind. “Ride, boy,” he barked in my ear, “ride now!” and I felt him turn to shout back at the Mildasis, “Fools, imbecile children, to think you could kill me ! Because I chose to play with you a while, to think you had me—” The Rabbit flew over a narrow ravine then, and the old man yelped and clung to me, never finished his brag, which suited me just as well. If he would only be silent, perhaps I could pretend that he was not really there.

But he would not hush, not for five minutes together. When he was not prattling about the stupidity of the Mildasis and praising himself for escaping them, he was urging me to press the Rabbit harder, to put more distance between ourselves and our pursuers. I did not want to talk to him. I muttered that it was dark, that we had to go carefully, but he scoffed shrilly, “They have eyes in their feet, these Mildasi beasts, he will travel all night without stumbling once. As will they .” His voice hurt my head, and whatever his talk, he smelled of fear.

The Mildasis never caught us. I cannot say if they even followed, since I was paying no attention at all to signs, nor to the old man’s yapping, nor to anything but the trick of staying in the saddle and the harder trick of remembering the reason for it. We might be still on the track of Lukassa and the black woman; we might as likely have been circling back the way I had come. I was at the end of sense, the end of everything but hanging on. There was nothing to think about past hanging on.

The old man saved me, no arguing that. It was he who held me when I slept and toppled sideways, and it was he who guided the Rabbit across those smashed lands all night, surely chattering in my ear the whole time, not caring if I heard or no. I remember nothing of that night, no dreams, nothing, until I woke on a hard hillside, wrapped in the old man’s scarlet coat, with the high sun blinding me and the Rabbit nudging to get at some prickly sprigs under my arm. The old man was gone.

There was a waterskin slung to the Rabbit’s neck, and I drank from it, not too much. I was very weak, but I think not mad anymore. The morning sky was pale, almost white, and the air smelled of distant snow, a breath from beyond the mountains. I leaned against the Rabbit, looking far across the Barrens where birds like the one I had eaten were circling, sliding downwind, and I said to my little gray horse, “I will not die. There is water in this land, and I will find it—there is game to hunt and roots to dig, or the Mildasis could not live here. I will not die. I will follow Lukassa over the mountains and wherever more I have to go, until I speak with her and touch her again. And if she will not come home with me—well, then I will die, but not till then.” The Rabbit nibbled on my ragged sleeve.

He winded the fox before I did; not until he whinnied and shook his head to make his ears snap did I see it trotting boldly up the hillside toward us, a bird half its size dangling limp in his jaws. A small fox, but burly and handsome, with bright, bright eyes. It waited deliberately for me to make sure of it before it changed.

A sway in the air, no more, the way you can see it shiver above a flame, and it was the old man there, holding out the bird as he came up to me. The Rabbit stamped and snorted and ran off a little way, but I was too tired to be frightened. I said, “A man who can turn into a fox. A fox that can turn into a man. Which are you?”