Peter Beagle - Innkeeper's Song

Rosseth was listening. I got up, kicked the pail a bit to the right, walked around it, sat down again. “I was coming back alone and on foot, not by choice, but because I couldn’t hire a coach or a guide for any money. You still can’t, as far as I know. All I had for protection was a staff, my father’s, the kind with a big chunk of iron at one end. I traveled at night, and I stayed off the main roads, and the third evening I saw smoke far away. Black smoke, the kind you get when it’s houses burning.”

He kept his eyes absolutely still, flat as a stock pond, but he was leaning forward a little, hands gripping the edge of the hay-bale. “I didn’t go any further that night,” I told him. “I heard horses, a lot of them, passing close enough for me to hear men laughing. It wasn’t until noon the next day that I started on again, and I spent so much time hiding in the trees by the roadside that I didn’t reach the village until mid-afternoon. Tiptoeing slows you down a good deal.” I didn’t want him getting any idea that I was trying to sound like a hero. It was going to be bad enough as it was.

“What was its name?” His voice was so low I couldn’t make him out the first time. “What was the village’s name?”

“How should I know? There wasn’t a soul alive to tell me. Just bodies up and down the one street, bodies lying in their own doorways, bodies shoved down the well, floating in the horse-trough, sprawled across tables in the square. There was one crammed into the baker’s oven— his wife, his daughter, who knows? Split open like a sack of meal, like the rest of them.” I said it all hard and fast and as tonelessly as I could, to get it done with. I left some things out.

“There wasn’t anyone?” He cleared his throat. “There wasn’t anyone left alive.” It wasn’t a question. We could have been in a temple, with the priest lining out the invocation and the worshippers chanting it all back to him dutifully. I said, “I didn’t think so. Until I heard the baby.”

Well, he saved me the least little bit of it, anyway. He whispered, “Me. That was me.”

I got up again. I thought about really trying to tell him what it was like: the silence, the slow buzzing, the smell of blood and shit and burning, and the tiny, angry, hungry cry drifting upward with the last trails of smoke. Instead I stood with my back to him, hands in my apron pockets, staring at that mean little black horse of Tikat’s and wishing I’d had the sense to bring whatever was left of the Sheknath’s Kidneys with me.

“I couldn’t find the place right away,” I said. “Get off the street and it was all just ruts and holes, break your ankle like that. It was a one-room cottage—clay walls and a peat thatch, the usual. There were a few sweet-regrets around the front step, I remember that. And a little bundle of dika thorns hanging on the door.”

They do that to keep away evil, in that country. He didn’t speak. I said, “The door was on the latch, and there was something jammed against it. I knocked and I pushed, and then I called out.” I turned back around. “I did, Rosseth. I called four, five, six times.” I don’t know why I so much wanted him to believe that. What did it matter if he believed me or no? It seemed to matter then. “I called, ‘Hello, is anyone there? Is anyone there? Can you hear me?’ But there was no answer, none—nothing but the crying.”

He tried to say, “Me” again, but it didn’t come out— only his mouth shaping the word. I heard footsteps outside, and voices, and I waited, hoping to be interrupted, even by Shadry, even by the bloody fox. He hadn’t shown his face at the inn since the night everything went to hell, but by now I saw him in every shadow and under every bush, and I’d have been happy to see him swaggering into the barn just then. But there was no one but me, and my head, and my throat getting drier, and my voice going on. And Rosseth’s eyes.

“I went to the window,” I said. “Forced the catch with my staff and climbed over the sill. It was dark inside there, Rosseth, because of being shut up so tight and me coming out of the sunlight. I could hear the baby—you— but I couldn’t see you, or anything else. I just had to stand still until I got used to the darkness.”

He knew what was coming now. Not the way I knew, but you could tell. He wouldn’t look at me, but kept wetting his lips and staring down at the barn floor. My face and hands were cold. I said, “Somebody hit me. Hard, here, on the side of my head. I thought it was a sword. I went straight down, and they were all over me. Not a sound out of them—it felt like a dozen people hitting me everywhere at once, kicking, pounding me like mashing up a tialy root. A dozen people, killing me, I couldn’t see even one of them. I swear, that’s what it was like.”

“But there were only two,” Rosseth said. His face had gone as white as Lukassa’s, and so small. He said, “There were only two.”

“Well, I didn’t know that, did I? They never said a word, I told you that. All I knew was, I was being fucking murdered.” I didn’t realize that I was shouting until a couple of the horses nickered in alarm. “Rosseth, I couldn’t see for the blood, I thought they’d split my head. Look, right here, it’s still tender after fifteen years. I thought I was dead as that thing in the oven, do you understand?“

He did not answer. He got up off the hay-bale and turned in a circle, arms hanging, eyes vague, still not looking at me. After a bit of that, he wandered back toward the horse he’d been doctoring, but then he turned again and just stood there. I said, “I had my staff. I got my legs under me somehow, and I just struck out, left, right, swinging blind in the dark, trying to keep them off. That’s all I wanted to do, keep them off me.”

I had to sit down again. I was dripping and reeking with sweat, and beginning to wheeze as though I’d been for another brisk stroll up those stairs. Rosseth stayed where he was, looking down at me. He said, “My mother and my father.”

I nodded, waiting for the next question, the one I hear in my sleep most nights, even now. But he couldn’t ask it, he could not make the words come out. Trust him, I had to say it all myself, and me with a load of mortar hardening in my chest. “I killed them,” I said. “I never meant to. I didn’t know.”

In the dreams he usually comes for me, screaming, trying to tear me apart with his hands. I was ready for that, or for him crying, but he didn’t do either. His knees folded slowly, and he dropped to the floor and stayed there, kneeling with his arms wrapped tight around himself and his head bowed. He was making a tiny dry sound. I’d never have heard it in that burned-out village.

“They must have thought I was one of the killers coming back,” I said. “Soldiers, outlaws, whoever it was.” I told him that I had buried his parents, that I didn’t leave them to rot with the other murdered ones, and that I could take him right to the village and the grave, if he ever wanted to go there. Which is certainly the truth—I could find that terrible place again if the sea had rolled over it.

He was rocking back and forth on his knees, just a little. Without looking up he whispered, “And you took me with you. You buried them, and you took me with you.”

“What else could I do? You were weaned, thank the gods. I bought a goat in the next town, and I used to dip bits of bread in her warm milk and feed you like that, all the way.” I tried to make a joke, to get him to stop that rocking. I said, “Heavy as a little anvil you were, too. Lugging you along with one arm, dragging that goat with the other—I don’t know how women do it. If you’d weighed an ounce more, I’d have had to leave you where I found you.”