Rosseth spoke rapidly. “Sir, this is Tikat. He comes from the south, looking for work.” The sweet blue eyes considered me, the thin mouth hardly parted; the fat man’s voice rasped its way through the dinner noise. “Another of your midden-heap strays? This one doesn’t look as though it could empty a chamberpot.” The blue eyes forgot me.
Rosseth patted my arm, winked, and moved quickly to put himself back into Karsh’s line of sight. “He’s weary, sir, travel-worn, I’m not denying that. But give him a meal and a night’s sleep, and he’ll be ready for any task you set him, in or out of doors. I promise you this, sir.”
“You promise.” The voice was heavy with dismissal, but he did look at me again, longer and more thoughtfully, finally shrugging. “Well, let him get his meal and his sleep where he likes and see me tomorrow. There might be something for him, I can’t say.”
“He can sleep in the loft with me—” Rosseth began, but Karsh’s head turned toward him and his voice cracked and dried. Karsh said, “A day’s work for a night’s lodging. I said, let him come back tomorrow.” The thick, wrinkled eyelids almost hid the little boy’s eyes.
Rosseth started to say something further, but I put him aside. My head was still swinging in and out, vast and clanging one minute, a withered pignut the next. I said, “Fat man, fat man, listen carefully to me. I have not come as far and hard and lonely as I have come to sleep and eat in your sty. I will work well for you, better than anyone you have, until my Lukassa returns, and then we will go home together. And while I work for you, beginning this night, I will sleep in your stable and eat as good a meal as you serve anyone.” Rosseth was desperately converting his grin into a coughing fit, muffling it in his sleeve. “If you do not agree to this, say so and be damned—I could find better quarters with no money than the best this midden-heap can offer. But I will be back for Lukassa tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, so you might as well get some use out of me, don’t you think?” There was more I said, but the echoes in my head drowned out the words. Rosseth’s hands were under my shoulders again, easing me down into a chair.
When I could open my eyes, the innkeeper was still studying me, his sagging white face as blank as the meal-sack it resembled. I heard Rosseth saying earnestly, “Sir, we do need the extra help just now, with the two new parties staying as long as they’ll be—” and then the slow reply, like a keel grating over stones, “I had no need to be reminded. Be quiet and let me think.” Doubtless it was only my exhaustion, but it seemed to me that the clamor of the dining hall softened slightly at his words. I had disliked Karsh the innkeeper on sight—I still do—but there was more to him than bread pudding.
“Take him away with you,” he said to Rosseth after a time. “Feed him in the kitchen, let him sleep where he will, and in the morning set him to cleaning the bathhouse and stopping those holes you haven’t yet touched, where the frogs get in. After that, Shadry should have some use for him in the kitchen.” He opened his eyes wide for a moment and peered at me with some kind of wonder that I was too weary to understand, drawing a breath as though to say something further, important, something to do with Lukassa, with me. But instead he looked at Rosseth again, mumbling, “Those two, those men, anywhere about, have you seen them?” Rosseth shook his head, and Karsh turned without another word and disappeared into a back room. He moved gracefully, the way a wave swells and rolls from shore to shore, never quite breaking. My mother, who was also fat, moved that way.
Rosseth said, very quietly, “My,” and began to laugh.
He said, “I know what I told you, but I can’t believe—” and his voice trailed away a second time. “Come on,” he said, “you’ve earned as much dinner as you can eat. What is it, what’s the matter, Tikat?” At the drovers’ table they had begun singing a dirty song that every child in my village knows. It made me think of Lukassa, and I was ashamed. Rosseth said, “Come on, Tikat, we’ll go and have our dinner.”
ROSSETH
They came back just as Tikat and I were finishing our meal, which we ate outside, sitting under the tree where Marinesha liked to hang her washing. I heard them first—three plodding horses and the unmistakable squeak of Lal’s saddle, which no amount of soaping and oiling could get rid of. Tikat knew it too: he dropped his bowl and wheeled to see them passing in the dusk, turning into the courtyard, Nyateneri’s eyes and cheekbones catching the light as she leaned to say something to Lal. Lukassa rode some way behind them, reins slack, looking down. None of them noticed us as they went by.
In honesty, I forgot about Tikat for the moment. His concern with Lukassa was his concern; mine was to warn Nyateneri about the two smiling little men who had come seeking her. I jumped up and ran calling, and Lal as well as Nyateneri reined in to wait for me. Behind me I heard Tikat crying, “Lukassa!” and the sorrow and the overwhelming joy and thankfulness in that one word were more than I could understand then, or ever forget now. I did not look back.
Clinging to Nyateneri’s stirrup, I panted out everything: what the men had done and said, how they had looked, sounded, what it had felt like to be breathing the air they breathed—very nearly as terrible as strangling in their hands. I remember how vastly pleasant it was, when I got to that part, to hear Lal miss a breath and feel Nyateneri’s hand tighten on my shoulder for just a moment. She seemed neither frightened nor surprised, I noticed; when Lal asked her, “Who are they?” she made no reply beyond the tiniest shrug. Lal did not ask again, but from that point she watched Nyateneri, not me, as I spoke.
I was telling them how Karsh had gotten the men to leave the inn when there came a sudden wordless shout from Tikat, a rattling flurry of hooves, and Lukassa exploded into our midst as we all turned, her horse’s shoulder almost knocking Lal out of the saddle. Lukassa made no apology: it took Nyateneri and me to calm all three horses, while she gasped, over and over, “Make him stop saying that, make him stop! He must not say that to me, make him not say it!” Her eyes were so wild with terror that they seemed to have changed shape, because of the way the skin was stretched around them.
Tikat came up after her, moving very slowly, exactly as you do when you’re trying not to frighten a wild creature. His face, his whole long body, all of him was plainly numb with bewilderment. He said—so carefully, so gently—“Lukassa, it’s me, it’s Tikat. It’s Tikat.” Each time he said his name, she shuddered further away from him, keeping Lal’s horse between them.
Nyateneri raised an eyebrow, saying nothing. Lal said, “The boy is her betrothed. He has followed us a very long and valiant way.” She saluted Tikat with a strange, flowing gesture of both hands at her breast—I was never able to copy it, though I tried often, and I have never seen it made again. “Well done,” she said to him. “I thought we had lost you a dozen times over. You know how to track almost as well as you know how to love.”
Tikat turned on her, his eyes as mad as Lukassa’s, not with fear but with despair. “What have you done to her?” he shouted. “She has known me all her life, what have you done? Witch, wizard, where is my Lukassa? Who is this you have raised from the dead? Where is my Lukassa?” Three hours I’d known him, proud and stubborn and cranky, and my heart could have broken for him.
“Well, well, well, well, well,” Nyateneri said softly to nobody. Lal reached out and took hold of Lukassa’s hands, saying, “Child, listen, it’s your man, surely you remember.” But Lukassa jerked back from her as well, scrambling frantically down from her horse and rushing toward the inn. On the threshold she collided with Gatti Jinni, who went over on his back like a beetle. Lukassa fell to one knee—Tikat cried out again, but did not follow—then struggled up and stumbled through the door. The noise of the drovers’ singing swallowed her up.