What happened next happened so quickly that it isn’t clear to me even now. There was the steam, of course, blinding me immediately—then a body banged into me, hard, utterly shocking, as though I had blundered straight into a wall. I went down flat on my back. The body came down with me, because our legs were tangled up together. Something hot and silent clawed at me, and I kicked out in wild panic, trying to free my legs. One foot found softness; there was a gasping whistle, and then another weight crushed the air out of my lungs in turn. Blue Eyes and Nyateneri were raging over me like storm winds, pinning me to earth, battering me so that I struggled in a helpless fury of my own, wanting in that moment to kill them both because they were hurting me. Somebody’s elbow caught my nose, and I thought it was broken.
Then it all stopped. I heard—I felt—a dry little sound, like someone unobtrusively clearing his throat. A body slid slowly off me when I pushed at it; a head wobbled in the dirt next to mine. Nyateneri’s quiet, tired voice said, “Thank you, Rosseth.”
I couldn’t stand up at first; she had to help me, which she did quite gently and carefully, even with one hand as limp as Blue Eyes’ neck. He lay so still, half-curled on his side, looking small and surprised. The blood from my nose was dripping all over him. I asked Nyateneri, “Is he dead?”
“If he isn’t, we are,” Nyateneri said. “You only get one chance at people like those.” Then she laughed very softly and added, “As a rule.” She reached inside the door to pick up her dagger where it lay, turning it a bit awkwardly in her right hand. “I have never been able to throw a knife properly,” she said, almost to herself, “not once. I don’t know what possessed me to try it this time. Until you opened that door, I was finished. Thank you.”
The pain in my nose made me feel sick, and the blood wouldn’t stop coming. Nyateneri had me lie down again, my head in her lap, while she held my nose with a soaked cloth in a particularly unpleasant way. When I honked, “Who were those men?” she pretended to mishear me, replying, “I know, we’ll have to tell Karsh—I don’t see any way out of it. I am just too weary to bury anybody right now.” She stroked my hair absently, and I gave myself up to the smell of her quieting body and my first understanding that nothing ever happens the way you imagined it. Here I was at last, lying with Nyateneri’s damp skin under my cheek, the breasts I had so earnestly spied on sighing in and out above me as she breathed, and all I had strength or ambition to do was wait for my nose to stop bleeding. Yes, you can laugh, it’s all right. I thought it was funny even then.
After a time, I was able to sit up, and Nyateneri went back into the bathhouse to find her robe. I said through the doorway, “They came looking for you, they meant to kill you. Why? What had you ever done to them?”
She did not answer until she came out again. I sat there in the calm dark, with a dead man at my feet, and liri-lith—what you’d call a nightcryer—already mourning for him away down in the orchard. I don’t understand how they can know death so instantly, but they always do; at least, that’s what I grew up believing in that country. Nyateneri leaned in the doorway, gingerly trying her left hand with her right. She asked me, abruptly but without expression, “How did you happen to be bringing the water and not Marinesha? I had asked for her.”
“I never saw her,” I said. “I met that old man—you know the one? with the white mustache?—and he told me that you had given him the message for me. Perhaps he got it mixed up. He’s really quite old.”
“Ah,” Nyateneri said, and nothing more until I asked her a third time about Blue Eyes and Half-Mouth. Then she came to crouch beside me again, looking into my eyes and putting her injured hand lightly on the side of my neck. She said, “Rosseth, if one thing goes against my nature more than another, it is lying to a person who has just saved my life. Please don’t make me do it.” Her own ever-changing eyes were silver half-moons in the moonlight.
“Secrets everywhere,” I answered, emboldened to mimic her. But I felt honored, like a child cozened with just the least fragment of an adult confidence, the least suggestion of a world beyond the nursery. “I won’t, then,” I said, “if you’ll tell me about them sometime.” She nodded very seriously, saying, “I promise.” Her hand was hot on me, hot as Blue Eyes’ hands had been when he held me up by my throat, so long ago. I asked her if it was much hurt, and she replied, “Badly enough, but not as badly as it could be. Like your nose,” and she kissed me there; and then, quickly, on the mouth. “Come,” she said, “we’ll have to help each other back to the inn. I feel really quite old.”
I went around the bathhouse to pick up my buckets. When I returned, she was standing with the dagger out again, holding it by the point and thoughtfully tossing it up high enough to let it turn one slow circle in the air before she caught it. “It’s not very well balanced, of course,” she said softly, not to me. “It wasn’t ever meant for throwing.” She turned and smiled at me, and I thought she might kiss me again, but no.
THE INNKEEPER
There is a queen in this country still, in her black castle down in Fors na’Shachim. Or perhaps it’s a king by now, or the army back again, no matter. The tax collectors stay the same, whoever rules. But king, queen, or jumped-up captain, one day I mean to travel there and seek audience. It will be a hard and tiresome journey, and any highwaymen will have to wait in line for whatever the coachmen and hostellers leave me; and then it will take the last coins hidden in my shoe-soles to bribe my way into line to make my complaint. But I will be heard. If it costs me my head, believe that I will be heard.
“Your Majesty,” I will say, “where in all your royal scrolls and parchments of law is it decreed that Karsh the innkeeper is to be forever denied a single moment of simple peace? Where have your noble ministers set it down that when I am not being racked by the daily balks and foils of running my poor establishment, I am to be plagued by an endless succession of zanies, frauds, incompetents, and maniacs? And please, just to satisfy an old man’s curiosity, sire, where do you get them? Where could even so great a monarch as yourself procure, all at the same time, three madwomen—none of whom is even remotely what she claims to be—an impossible bumpkin who claims to be betrothed to the maddest of the lot, a stable full of penniless actors who keep my guests’ horses awake with their goings-on, and a stableboy who was never worth much to begin with and lately shows real promise of becoming a complete liability? And that final touch of true genius, those two chuckling little assassins who ended up dead in my bathhouse—Your Majesty, my peasant palate isn’t sensitive enough to appreciate such brilliance. To me it’s all equal, all blankly vexatious; why waste such jewels of aggravation on fat, weary Karsh? Show me only where this is written, and I will trudge the long way back to The Gaff and Slasher and trouble you never again.“ I will say all that to someone on a throne before I die.
Not that it will change a thing—I have no illusions about that. My lot is my bloody lot, whoever inscribed it wherever, and if I were to doubt it for a moment, all I have to do is remember that evening when I stood looking dumbly down at two sprawled bodies by lantern-light, while that brown soldier-nun Nyateneri had the face to demand whether I sent such attendants to wait on everybody who bathed at my inn. The boy was standing as close to her as her skin would let him, glaring at me, defying me to send him about his proper business. And so I would have done, but for the way—no, let it go, it’s nothing to do with anyone, and besides, I had other affairs to think about. Dead men had put The Gaff and Slasher into my hands thirty years ago, long enough for me to have learned just how easily two more dead men could snatch it away again. And I am too old to start over as some other innkeeper’s Gatti Jinni.