And the next thing, there they were, the three of them, banging the door open and filling the room with their clatter and swagger. They stood there with their mouths open and their eyes popping, exactly like a row of fish in the market, and then the black one stammered out, “Rosseth told us—” and Miss Nyateneri swung her shoulders and demanded, “Where have you been?” like the boldface she was. As for that other one, she went straight to him and dropped on her knees beside the mattress. She put her hands between his, showing off that great vulgar emerald she always wore. He touched it, and he smiled and said something like, “So, it finds its way home again,” which I didn’t understand. But she was crying, of all things, and then he said, “Be still, be still. You are where you should be. Be still now.”
Nobody gave me any more of a glance than they would a dish of dog scraps, of course, not when I opened the door and not when I closed it behind me. But I stood on the landing for a moment, not eavesdropping, just getting myself ready for what was waiting downstairs—dirt and smoke and food smells, Karsh and Shadry yelling, Gatti Jinni waiting his chance to get me in a corner, farmers and soldiers already laughing-drunk in the taproom, guests badgering me to do forty different tasks for them at once, and my own chores going on till midnight, longer if I wasn’t lucky. What I had to do, you see, was make myself forget how nice it was just being alone with that old man—at least until I could get off with it by myself somewhere. I mean, otherwise who’d ever go downstairs?
LAL
Of course we were jealous, both of us—how could we not have been jealous? Here we were, Nyateneri and I, having journeyed at great risk and labor to a far country to aid our dearest master, having searched for weeks longer after that, day on dreary day, just for some sign of his presence in the world—and then having to stand and watch while he ignored us to greet a stranger, Lukassa, as though she were his long-lost daughter. Yet how could it have been different? He always went where the need was greatest, immediately, without having to be told. My life is witness to this, as is Nyateneri’s.
Nevertheless, if he had called her chamata while all the soothing and comforting was going on, I think I might have hit him. That is my name, even if I don’t know what it means. (I did hit him once, by the way, very long ago, when I was flailing mad with fear, and so young that I truly expected him to kill me for it.) But he spoke another name entirely, looking at Nyateneri and me over Lukassa’s head, which was bowed in the hollow of his thin shoulder. He said, “His name is Arshadin.”
He loves to do that, to sail from one of your unasked questions to another, like a monkey somersaulting through the high branches. He never lies—never—but you must climb right after him if you want to keep up at all. It is exactly as maddening as he intends it to be, and at times the urge to make him scramble a bit himself is overwhelming. I nodded towards Nyateneri and replied, “His name is Soukyan. I don’t like it much.”
The smile was unchanged, as tender and secret as ever. “In that case, I should go on calling him Nyateneri. Unless he objects very strongly.” He looked solemnly back and forth from one to the other of us, as though he were settling a nursery dispute.
Nyateneri and I looked directly at each other, I think for the first time since that night we must all remember by different names. In the week since he and Rosseth and Lukassa and I had stumbled out of that battered, tipsy bed, we had trudged on about our everlasting search without saying more than we had to, communicating mostly by swift sidelong glances. Yet nothing much seemed to have changed, except that Nyateneri—his woman’s guise reassumed, largely for the sake of Karsh’s sanity—had taken over the tiny room next door, and that poor Rosseth could neither stay away from us nor speak to us. For Lukassa, as far as I could tell, the events of that night might have been no more than a sweet, lingering dream; for myself, they represented an annoying complication. I make love only with very old friends, of whom I have very few, and with whom there is no danger of falling in love, no chance of being distracted from the task or the journey at hand, and no need to guard my back. I do not sleep with recent acquaintances, traveling companions, professional associates, or people who are too much like me, and Nyateneri/Soukyan was all of these, as well as the most profound deceiver I had ever known in a life spent among liars. Whatever else might be between us— and I was not such a priggish fool as to imagine that there was nothing—there could never possibly be trust, not for a man who had tricked me so shamingly, and so dangerously.
Injured pride, certainly; but there was regret in it, too, which is even rarer than trust, in my life.
Nyateneri said stiffly, “I am used to the name. I will answer to it.” Then he went and knelt by the mattress, and my friend rested a hand on his head. I stood still, almost swaying with joy and relief, and irritated with everyone in the world. Even when my friend beckoned to me, I stood where I was.
“There’s my Lal,” he said without mockery. “My Lal, who must see everything, must think of everything, must be responsible for everything. Chamata, I teach those who come to me only what I am certain will be useful to them one day. I knew that you would always live close enough to Uncle Death to nod to him in the street, so I taught you a small trick of picking his pocket as you pass him by. As for your comrade here, he came flying from such hounds as even you have not yet known—hounds that will run on his track as long as he lives.” Nyateneri looked at no one, showed nothing. My friend’s voice went on, quavering with fatigue, and a little also with his old laughter. “Hounds can smell wonderfully well, but they see quite poorly. You might say that I taught Nyateneri a way of confusing their vision, at least for a while.” The last words bent upwards toward a question.
“For a while,” Nyateneri said. “The last ones hunted by scent. The third still runs loose.”
My friend nodded, unsurprised. “Ah, there’s the difficulty in depending on tricks—they never work all the time, even the best of them. And when you have used them all, there is truly nothing left, nothing of yourself before the tricks, or beyond them. He taught me that, Arshadin.”
The room was very still. I had to say something. I said, “Arshadin. The boy who came not long after I did, with the hill accent and the funny ears.” And almost at the same time, Nyateneri said, “I remember. Short, southern, kept a chikchi flute in his shirt all the time.” But my friend turned his head slowly from one side to the other, being too tired and weak even to shake it properly.
“You do not know Arshadin,” he said. “Neither of you. Nor did I.” He closed his eyes and was silent for a time, while Lukassa fussed about with pillows and Nyateneri and I stared at each other: wordlessly, grudgingly walking side by side through days and nights no less shared for falling years apart. Oh, you never could hurry him, never get anything out of him but in his own way. Do you remember, do you remember how he used to, over and over, did he ever say to you, I remember, yes, and didn’t that always drive you mad? I heard a fly buzz in a corner of the window as we stood there, and Rosseth’s pet donkey braying creakily for winter apples.
The pale, exhausted eyes, that had been so joyously green, came abruptly open. “I missed you after you were gone, chamata.” His voice was even and ruminative. “I was not prepared for that, missing someone, not at my age. As well start cutting new teeth or singing under young girls’ windows. It was”—he hesitated briefly—“it was disconcerting.”