Peter Beagle - Innkeeper's Song

“I have never pretended to be a sailor,” I said, “but I will never trust any boat that fits in somebody’s pack. Even I know that’s wrong.”

“It’s beautiful,” Lal said. “An absolutely beautiful design. I wish you knew more about boats, or about your old religious colleagues, either would do. I became so fascinated, trying to learn how it went together, I almost forgot that I was hurt and you were in danger. Anyway, I promise you that it won’t sink under us. I really don’t think it can. Amazing.”

She was as delighted with that wretched boat as though we had already completed our mission and destroyed Arshadin. I felt at once guilty at having to remind her of reality and angry at her for making me feel guilty. I said, “It had better be amazing. It had better be able to shoot a bow, climb a wall, fight off rock- targs, nishori , and magicians, sew clothes, forage for game, and practice medicine. Because all our stores and all our weapons are back there up the river, with a dead man to guard them. All we can hope for, as far as I can see, is that Arshadin may laugh so hard at us that he hurts himself. I am told it happens.”

I expected Lal to flare out at me again when I spoke so, but she remained placid for once, even seeming a bit amused. “All we need do is annoy him,” she answered, “and if you and I cannot make ourselves thoroughly disagreeable with nothing but our fingernails, then we should retire and help old Karsh to run The Gaff and Slasher. Now help me take this sail down, I want to try a different rigging.” As we worked, she began singing to herself in her usual tuneless, monotonous manner. I was almost glad to hear her.

That night, when I thought she was asleep, she turned suddenly and pressed herself against me, holding me as hard as one working arm would allow. Even at the inn, that one evening, she had not embraced me in that way. I stroked her hair awkwardly, and tucked the sail closer around her shoulders. I said, “What is it? Are you feeling ill?” Then I remembered that I had promised not to ask that question, and I said, “I never meant to alarm you about our chances. We will deal with Arshadin as we deal with him.” But that sounded as foolish and condescending as it was, and I did not finish saying it. Lal made no answer, but held onto me a moment longer, and then rolled away from me in one abrupt, violent movement and was instantly asleep. I could feel her arm around my back for a long time afterward.

At least we had no trouble loading our pocket boat in the morning. There was nothing on deck but the pair of us, one dulled swordcane, and as much fish as Lal had managed to smoke in the last two days. Now she ran up the sail while I pushed the boat away from the bank and scrambled hastily aboard, clinging to the mast and her undamaged ankle. Waist-deep is as far as I go voluntarily.

As you might imagine, I never became comfortable on that tiny, slippery deck, not in the three days that it was all my existence. I dreaded standing up, clung frantically to the mast when I did, and most often moved from one place to another by sliding along on my rump, like a baby. When we tied up and camped on shore, my dreams were an unending procession of nightmares about drowning. The smoked fish was not only dry and tasteless, but gave me gas, so that when I was not merely terrified I was embarrassed, angry, and constantly hungry. Being useless baggage was a new experience for me, very nearly as bewildering and maddening as being on a boat. And still I remember those three days with a wondering affection.

Idyllic? Hardly. Whenever my arms were around Lal during that time, it was to keep myself from falling into the Susathi, or to retie her bandage after washing it. If our intimacy was total, it was also enforcedly discreet. We afforded each other such privacy as two people isolated on a twelve-foot bit of driftwood have to give, turning our backs without being asked, somehow making place for solitude. One day passed almost wordlessly, I recall, except when it came my turn to replace Lal at the tiller. (There was a dainty procedure, by the way, invariably unnerving for me, since the rear of the boat was too narrow for us to trade places in safety. It quickly became simpler for Lal to slip into the water to let me by, and then ease herself back aboard, or sometimes hold onto a rope and trail behind for a while, testing her injuries against the river.) Apart from our few words then, the only sounds were birdsong and sometimes a wind ruffling the water. Our boat, built for silence, moved downstream like the shadow of those little sharp winds.

Yet that same night Lal woke gasping and shouting out of one of her nightmares, which had not happened since we left The Gaff and Slasher. She calmed herself very quickly, but she did not want to go back to sleep, so we talked until nearly dawn, lying close together beside a fire too small to be easily noticed and far too small to warm us.

What did we talk about: two scarred, skilled, and decidedly aging wanderers in the dark? The past, more than anything, and our childhoods most of all. Lal has two brothers, older and younger, whom she has not seen since she was taken from her home at the age of twelve. I had an older sister, whom I loved very much, more than anyone, and who died because the man she loved was a stupid, careless man who loved no one. He was the first man I ever killed. I was also twelve at the time.

Lal spoke of friends and playmates, all of whom she remembered perfectly, down to the way they dressed and the games they favored. I had no such companions, except my sister, but once I knew a woodcutter. He must have been middle-aged then: a south-country peasant, illiterate, superstitious, completely honest, completely ruled by petrified fears and customs. Yet he always shared his meals with me when we chanced to meet in the forest, and he told me long, long stories about trees and animals; and when the family of the man I killed hunted me to his door, he took me in and hid me and lied to them, though they would have burned us both in the house if they had known. I fled on the next day, not to endanger him further, and I never saw him again. But every morning when I wake, I say his name.

Out on the river we could hear the leeltis coming up to feed in the moonlight. They are sleek black fish with webby forelegs, and they splash the water to stir up insects—sometimes they even startle a fledgling out of its nest. Lal said, “Tell me about your parents.”

“They sold my sister,” I said. Lal put her arm over me. After a while I said, “I will hate them until I die. That must seem terrible to you.”

Lal did not speak for a long time, but she did not take her arm away. At last she said, “I will say something to you that I have never said aloud, even to myself. When I was sold and stolen, I was desperately frightened, truly almost out of my mind. All I had to cling to was my absolute sureness that my parents would come and find me; that while these—things—were happening to me, my wonderful mother and father were hours, minutes away, following, following, that they would never again rest until I was safe and home and avenged. Perhaps it kept me sane, believing that. I used to think so.”

I could barely hear the last words. I said, “But they never found you.”

“They never found me,” Lal whispered against my side. “Damn them, damn them, they never found me.”

Her eyelids were so hot to my lips. “They were looking for you all that time,” I said. “They hunted for you everywhere. I know they did.”

“ They could have tried harder !” She turned her face away and muffled the one long howl in the sail, grinding her jaws on the fabric like a trapped beast madly determined to bite itself free of its own foot. Indeed, she bit me hard when I kissed her, so that her mouth tasted of dust and tears and my blood, and of the two of us sleeping under that sail for five nights. Yet we made love very gently, as we had to do, because Lal’s body could not bear my weight, nor her arms and legs hold me as she desired. It went on for a long, teasing, murmurous time, for that reason; and when it was over she said, “Bad water tomorrow,” and fell asleep on top of me with her nose in my left ear. And that was how I slept, too.