Peter Beagle - Innkeeper's Song

For all the familiar and comforting testiness, there was an undertone to his voice that I had never heard before. It was not a note of fear or anxiety or plain uncertainty—it fell between all such words, such sounds. But I was frightened, and literally uncertain even of what was under my feet; and cold as well, rattling with it. I demanded, “What happened there, back with Arshadin? Where are we going now? And why, in the name of”—but I could find no god quite equal to the situation—“why are you sitting in the air?”

My friend laughed, but for once it did not comfort me to hear him. “Am I? I hadn’t noticed. Where are we going? Why, back to the inn, if I should be permitted to manage it without undue distraction. I have never liked this particular method of travel, and I don’t think I have a natural knack for it. Arshadin, now—Arshadin has the knack. He used to scurry about like this all the time, no matter what I said to him. Had it fetch his lunch sometimes.”

He was silent for a moment, his eyes squeezing a bit more tightly shut. He said, “It betrayed him this time, that knack. There was no way I could resist him when he used the time-bubble to bring me here; but it drains so much strength merely to hold such a thing in this world, let alone make it work for you, that I knew he could not possibly keep it and me and you two all under control at once. I have told him so often—all energy has its natural limits: all, even his. I did tell him.” The last words were spoken in a near-whisper, and not to us. ”And then you two caused your diversion—clumsily, if I may say so, but quite effectively—and he tried to kill me in the bubble, believing that I was manipulating you, which shows a certain touching faith in his old teacher, even now.” His half-laugh held more rue than triumph.

Nyateneri said, “He spoke of those who are waiting . Are they waiting for you?”

“They are indeed,” my friend replied with surprising cheerfulness. “But they may have to wait a little longer yet. Now, if nobody asks me any more questions, I think—I am very nearly sure—that I will be able to bring this unseemly anomaly to rest at Karsh’s dining table. Whether it will be the right Karsh, of course, or the right Karsh’s table—well, well, in any case we should all find it an instructive experience, especially Karsh. Lal, if you close your eyes, too, you will not shiver so much. Do as I say.”

He was right—the murderous cold receded once I could no longer see the grayness, as though the sight of it had been what was truly invading my bones—but I could not keep from stealing small glances around me, though nothing was visible except the tiny dark figures that never drew nearer and never quite disappeared. I said, “Those. Who are they?”

“The people whose time we are using,” he replied shortly. “Close your eyes, Lal.”

I shut them. I said, “Arshadin does not bleed. My sword went almost through him, and there was no blood.”

“Because there is no blood in him,” my friend answered. “Lukassa is quite right—he gave his life to the Others, that night in the red tower, and they gave him back a kind of aliveness for which blood is not necessary. I know of such bargains, very long ago, but I never thought to see one struck in my time. My poor Arshadin. My poor Arshadin.” And after that quiet, toneless wail, he said nothing at all.

How much more time passed—ours or someone else’s—I cannot say. I heard my friend humming to himself: a maddeningly repetitious up-and-down five-note pattern that came, after awhile, to seem like the drone of a great engine under us, tireless and strangely soothing. I think I slept a little.

No, I know I slept, because I remember jolting painfully awake at the tensing of Nyateneri’s arm around me. He was saying very quietly, close to my ear, “Lal. Something is happening.” Even through the grayness I could see how stiff and pale his face was.

“What is it?” I asked. Nothing seemed to have changed: we were still motionless in freezing nowhere, and my friend was still sitting in the air, humming the same notes over and over. The only difference, if it was a difference, was that the little shapes at the edge of my vision had finally vanished. Nyateneri’s hand tightened on my left arm, the bad one, and I did not notice at all; not until later, when I saw the new bruise. “ Look ,” he said.

The grayness was thinning slowly, down from mist to dirty bathwater, and there were people appearing through it, and they were us. How much more plainly, or more madly, can I say it? I saw the three of us—perfect duplicates, down to the ribbons in my friend’s beard and the river mud caked on Nyateneri’s feet—but they, the figures, they didn’t see us. They went on about their business, which was not here, and were followed by others—some of them were us again, but more were being Karsh and Marinesha, and there seemed to be more Tikats than anyone else. No two were identical: there were versions of my friend that had neither ribbons nor beard nor nightgown, and variations on Nyateneri that I might not have recognized but for the height and the changing eyes. As for me, it made me giddy and a little sick, seeing so many copies of myself obliviously passing two feet away. There were small differences enough between them, as well, in dress and mannerism; but to my mind they were all twins, and all too short, too wide-mouthed and pointy-chinned—the old goblin face I have learned to tolerate in the glass, but not in bloody dozens !—and every one of them walking with the same awful swaggering roll. Do I walk like that? I still cannot believe I really walk like that.

There were others, too, crowding around and past them, coming and going in the dissipating grayness. I recognized Rosseth—looking wide-eyed and kind in every translation, and stronger than any of them knew—and other servants or guests at The Gaff and Slasher; beyond those were countless faces I had never seen, or anyway could not remember having seen. They were opaque but not solid: they passed through one another as they did through the mist, without taking notice. What I noticed, gaping and shaking my head, was that not one of them was Lukassa.

Beside me Nyateneri said, quite loudly, “Master”—and then he pronounced what I had always believed to be my friend’s name—“enough mystification is enough. What are we seeing, and who are these?”

My friend’s eyes were still so grimly shut that the corners of his mouth squeezed up with them when he turned toward us, but in that instant his face was very terrible. I did not know that face at all, and I was frightened of it—of him—then. He said in a slow, light, almost dreaming voice, “We will now all proceed to be extremely glad that I have at least maintained sense enough never to tell either of you my true name. If you had spoken it here, now, the three of us would have been spread through time—no, across time, smeared over it like so much butter. Do you have the least notion of what I am telling you?”

Before that blind face and that even more terrifying voice, I cowered as silently as I had when he first found me; but it was worse now, because I was older and could almost conceive of what he meant. Nyateneri tried for a moment to face him down, then crouched humbly before him. The voice said, “No, of course not, what possessed me to ask you that? If you ever came anywhere near understanding what I just told you, that understanding would drive you mad. At present, I think I could endure that well enough, but sooner or later I would probably start to feel bad about it. Probably. Are all that lot gone yet?”