I spent the night with my back against a boulder and the bow across my knees. I wondered what mischief the fox was most likely to be up to by now, and about the possible nature of Arshadin’s Others, and I thought often of Rosseth. Both Lal’s watches and mine passed without event; but he was very near, that third one, and he knew I knew it. Once, just before I woke Lal, a tharakki scuttled through the firelight and was gone again—it was the two-legged variety, you don’t find the other sort this high— and at that moment I could have thrown a stone into the dark and hit him. You have to work to startle a tharakki from its hole, night-blind as they are, but he must have thought the joke was worth the effort. There would be no attack, not with Lal at hand; time enough for that after we came to the river. He was only saying hello.
We found the Susathi a day and a half later, flowing serenely through a steep slice in the mountains that took us utterly by surprise. As I’ve told you, our progress had been far less dramatic than tedious and serpentine: we never hung from crumbling ledges by our fingernails or coaxed our horses to leap snowy chasms, but mostly plodded off to the left one more time to toil up another sky-filling field of rattling, tumbling stones. No descents to catch our breath in, none at alclass="underline" only one or two passes where the way was more or less level—keyholes between the mountains, half-choked by ancient ice-boulders and scree, harder to traverse than the slopes themselves. Then we trudged single-file around a bulging shoulder of stone and saw it, not that far below, a river as straight as a sword-cut, twinkling away, west to east, in the noonday sun.
Lal and I stood looking at each other, while the horses nudged our necks and stepped on our feet, smelling the water down there. I smelled it myself, a cool dance in my nostrils. Lal sighed presently and said, “Well. So much for the easy part.”
“No rapids that I can see,” I said. Her face took on that look again, so full of the knowledge of its own secret knowledge that she could hardly endure it herself. I felt much the same. She lowered one eyelid very slowly, let it float up again, then swung into her saddle and started down the trail. I mounted, caught the Mildasi horse’s reins, and followed. Once I looked back, but of course there was nothing behind us but stone and old, old snow. I wished I had not laid rough hands on Rosseth.
TIKAT
It took me longer to recover from the bare-hand touch of a man I never saw than it did from my journey through the Northern Barrens. Days afterward, no mark on me, and I was still coming over dazey and faint and trembling without warning, unable to trust my body anywhere. Rosseth, uncomplainingly doing half my work as well as his own, told me about those three men who had followed Nyateneri for years and finally caught up with her at The Gaff and Slasher. He said there was no shame in my falling without a fight, like a market animal, and that I should be proud of myself simply for having survived the encounter. I took his word for it.
He never once asked what I had been doing at that door, which was as kind in its way as the other, the work. In spite of the fact that I am not easy speaking of myself, while he seemed to be always clacking along like a little windmill, somehow he ended up knowing nearly as much about my life as I did about his. I don’t mean Lukassa and me—no hide-buyer or corn-merchant staying the night but knew that much by now—but about our village with its two priests and its one whore; about the blacksmith, whom everyone feared except Lukassa, and about my aunt and uncle and the weaver-woman who was teaching me her trade. I cannot say to this day how I came to tell him such things—even the story of my theft of dirigari fruit from my teacher’s orchard, which shames me still. He was only a boy, after all, Rosseth, two years younger than I, innocent as one of Shadry’s potboys— more innocent—and all the time thinking himself as knowing as an old bargeman. I do not know why I talked to him as I did.
“Tell me about your parents again,” he would urge me; and when I stumbled, forgetting my father’s favorite dish or the turn of a joke my mother liked to make, then an odd look would come into his eyes, almost reproachful, as though if he had known his parents he would have remembered everything; and perhaps he would have. His own first clear memory was of Karsh carrying him somewhere by the back of his neck—before that, there were only bits and shadows that might have been dreams, though you could tell Rosseth didn’t think so all the time. When I asked him how he came to be at The Gaff and Slasher, he told me that Karsh had taken him from a traveling Creeshi peddler, “in trade for three gamecocks and a bag of Limsatty onions. He complains about it to this day—says two of those birds were champions, and sweet Limsatties have never been as good since. Gatti Jinni says one cock was blind, but I don’t know.”
He talked of Lal and Nyateneri hardly at all now, which suited me well. He made up for that, though, with his endless stream of chatter about Lukassa. She was surely not herself, he kept reassuring me—clearly she had endured a great deal, and many times such suffering changes people so that they cannot even recognize those who love them best. But patience and endurance on my part would triumph at last, he was certain of it; every day he could see her gentling toward me, see her expression changing bit by bit when she looked at me. It was all so well-meant that I could never tell him—as I would have anyone else, the first time it happened—that he was not to speak of this. But neither could I bear to listen to him; so there was nothing for me to do but move away, if we were working together, or find some solitary chore that would keep me well out of earshot for hours. That is how I began to be so often with the old man.
He never told me his name. I called him first sir, and later on tafiya, which is what people in my village sometimes choose to call someone—man or woman, old or not so old—who is seen to have a certain kind of power, dignity, stature, whatever you want to call it. Hard to explain: my teacher is called tafiya, for instance, while the blacksmith is not and the one whore is not, but her mother is. One priest, not the other; two or three farmers and the brewer, but not the headman, not the doctor, not the schoolmaster. I cannot put it any better than that. I called him tafiya, and he knew the word and seemed pleased.
He was very weak at first: not so much in the body, though there was that, too, since he could keep down nothing but the thin soup with bread in it, and now and then some milk or wine. But the real frailness was elsewhere, and I cannot explain that any better than I can the real meaning of tafiya. Let it be a wind that puts your fire out, and often you can nurse it back to life, if you are patient enough and feed it and blow on it just so. But let it be a splash of rain, and you will build a new fire in a dry place or go without. I think the old man was waiting to learn, those early days, whether it was wind or rain in his heart, or in his spirit, as you will. I think that was what it was.
The women had paid for his room and care, and Karsh kept his word to them, so far as it went. Marinesha was supposed to be the only one looking after him—Karsh did his best to keep Rosseth too busy to go anywhere near that room—but she twisted her ankle slipping away from a pair of rope-dealers in the taproom. So, until she could climb stairs twenty times a day again, I was often told off to bring my tafiya his meals, arrange his new bedding, and empty out his chamberpot. I neither enjoyed the task nor minded doing it. It was all one to me then.
No, that is not true. I did mind doing it, very much, and I feared it as well, and of course he knew. I had not been attending him for more than three days when he said to me, as I was helping him into a nightshirt that Shadry thought was in a chest under his own bed, “I rather wish I smelled worse than I do. Perhaps then it would be harder for you to smell Lukassa when you come into this room.”