Peter Beagle - Innkeeper's Song

My friend answered him, infuriatingly calm as ever. “Do not preen yourself quite yet, Arshadin. Great as you are, and weak as I am, still it took you long and long to pry the sun from my grasp and force it down into darkness. And even now you cannot kill me, but must await the new moon. I would have brought a book, or a bit of needlework, if I were you.”

But there was no baiting Arshadin, not this time. Bleakly placid, he replied, “I can wait. You know better than any how I can wait. It is the others who cannot.”

“Then they will have to learn,” my friend retorted. “I am better acquainted than you with those others of yours, and there’s not one would dare try conclusions with me as I lie here. Come, draw up a chair, let’s talk a little last while. Indulge an old pedant,” he added, and I caught my breath, thinking, he has a plan, oh he has, I must be ready . Even then I would have believed that he knew something Uncle Death did not know.

There was a stool, but Arshadin never looked at it, nor at anyone else in the room. He remained standing, blank and heavy and damp as so much cheese; but his attention was such a physical reality that it seemed a visible beast, crouching red-jawed over my friend on the bed. He said stolidly, “What have we to talk about, you and I? I know what you know, and you must finally understand what I have been trying to tell you since the first day I was your student.” The word broke free of his taut, flat lips with such force that my friend put up a hand as though to ward it off. “Your student,” Arshadin said again. “Your disciple, your apprentice, your anointed crown prince, your inheritor. I would have sold myself gladly to the vilest west-country slaver to be rid of those wondrous birthrights forever. Do you hear me now, now, at last, my master? Do you hear me now?“

My friend did not answer. Soukyan growled very softly and took a step toward Arshadin. I caught his arm. Rosseth kept glancing at the door, plainly needing Tikat to come through it. As for Lukassa, she never took her eyes off Arshadin: their expression was so rapt that she might have been gazing at her lover, if you ignored the set of her mouth. She looked far older than she was.

Arshadin did not notice her. Beyond the window, the last stains of twilight had already bled away into a strange, pale dark: not the transparent summer night of the north, but a watery false dawn, gray and evasive as quicksilver. There was a light bent through it, faintly brightening the room though no candle had been lit. Rosseth’s body was utterly rigid, his eyes too wide and still. I put my arm around him, so that he could let himself tremble against me.

On the bed, my friend mumbled, “I had very little to teach you, Arshadin, but that little will cost you dear when you learn it at last, at other hands.” His voice was fraying, his words beginning to blear into each other. He said, “You were never my student—that was the mistake. I should have mocked and browbeaten you, riddled you without letup, insulted you, challenged you morning to night, just as I treated Lal and Soukyan and all the others. But they were students— you were my equal, from that first day, and I let you know it. That was the mistake.” He had no strength even to shake his head, but barely managed to turn it from this side to that. “Yet what else should one do with an equal? I had no practice at it— perhaps you will deal more wisely in your turn.” The last words might have been drops of rain in dry leaves.

I thought he might be dead then, but Arshadin knew better. He leaned down over him and shouted at his closed eyes, “If you thought me your equal, why did you never trust me with those things I needed to know? Why were you so sure that I would use them for ill? I was young, and there were choices yet before me—there were other ways, other journeys, there were !” Once again, for an instant, I saw his thick, empty face turn almost incandescent with old pain, almost beautiful with bitterness. Then he caught himself and went on stiffly, “Much could have been different. We were not doomed to end here.”

My friend opened his eyes. When he spoke this time, his voice was different: weary beyond telling, but calm and clear and strangely young, as the nearness of death often makes voices sound. He said, “Oh, yes, yes, we were, Arshadin. There was never but the one road for you, being who you are. Being who I am, I loved you because of what you are. So we were doomed to this, you see, it did indeed have to happen so.” He reached up and took sudden frail hold of Arshadin’s right hand. He said, “And yet, knowing, I did love you.”

Arshadin snatched his hand away as if the old man’s touch had seared it through. “Who ever cared about that?” he demanded. “Your love was your own affair, but I had a right to your faith. Deny it and you’ll die lying.” He was screaming now, more human in his fury and pettishness than I could have imagined him. “By every filthy god and demon, I had a right to your faith!”

“Yes,” my friend answered him softly, “yes, you did. Yes. I am sorry.” I had never heard him say such a thing before. “But I must tell you even so, you were a fool to trade your heart’s blood for your heart’s desire. It is an old bargain, and a bad one. I expected you to make a better deal.”

Arshadin made no reply. My friend beckoned Soukyan and me closer, and we came, standing together across the bed from Arshadin. I could smell Soukyan’s hair and the unmistakable cold fragrance of my friend’s dying. Arshadin was sweating heavily, but there was no smell to it at all.

My friend looked toward the window and nodded, greeting the new moon. To Soukyan he said only, “Remember about the flowers,” and to me, more sharply, “ Chamata , whatever you may be plotting, give it up right now.” Lukassa and Rosseth pushed in between us, clutching blindly for his hands. He used the last of his earthly strength to push them away, whispering, “No, no, no, don’t come near me, no.” We moved back from his bedside, even Arshadin, and he said a name I did not know, and died.

I recall certain things very clearly from that moment. I recall that the four of us immediately stared, not at his body, but at Arshadin, as though—logically enough—he were the one bound to change into a demon. He looked strangely startled and uncertain himself at first, but then he sketched a couple of hasty signs over the bed, and gabbled some words that made my skin prickle and my ears ache down inside, the way such things always seem to do. Rosseth put his hands to his own ears, poor child. I pushed him further behind me.

Over Arshadin’s shoulder, out of that pallid night, eyes began to glitter at the window: first two, then four, then many on many, like frost forming on the glass. Not one pair was like another, except in the shining malice of their gaze. Arshadin turned and spoke to them—to them, and to something else, something surging deep below and beyond them, the great wave that was dashing these wicked sparklings at the window. He cried out, “Behold, he is yours, he is in your power for all time! I have done as I pledged, and our covenant is ended. Give me back my blood, as you promised!” If there was an answer, I never heard it, because it was then that my friend , who was dead, stirred and muttered and slowly opened his eyes.

We looked away instantly, as we had been warned. I cannot speak for the others, but I looked back just as quickly, sideways, because I had to. He—no, it , I have trouble saying that even now—stood up on the bed and stretched itself, making a soft, thoughtful sound. It might have been a child in a nightgown waking to a new day.