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.”
I blinked speechlessly at him, recalling that he had neither embraced me nor so much as waited to watch me go, that day when I set out alone again into the world because he said it was time. I was still young, and he was all I had then, and I cried for him many a night, huddled in my blanket under dripping trees, no more than their branches between me and the wind. But it would never have occurred to me to wonder whether he felt at all lessened or lonely without me, and the idea seemed nearly as unnatural to me even now as it must have done to him. Nyateneri smiled slightly, without malice. It annoyed me anyway.
“Disconcerting,” my friend went on. “Either I am more sentimental than I knew, or else my vanity starves without someone to rescue and protect and teach. However that may be, Arshadin appeared at my door when I was, if you like, at a low ebb, a bit at loose ends. An ordinary-looking boy, without your fierce charm, Lal, without Nyateneri’s presence. Nor was he a fugitive of any sort, but a farmer’s second son, well-fed, moderately educated, and most calmly certain about what he meant to do with his life.” He paused, absently stroking Lukassa’s hair and looking with great deliberation from one to the other of us. I am the Inbarati of Khaidun, if I never see Khaidun again—and I never will—raised from infancy to tell tales, but I learned as much of the storyteller’s sly art from that man as I did from my mother and grandmother and all my aunts. I never told him that.
My friend said, “Arshadin’s simple, single ambition was to be the greatest magician who ever walked the earth. He achieved it.”
Rosseth’s donkey brayed again just at that moment, which set us all laughing too loudly. My friend fell silent again for a moment, and then resumed, speaking almost to himself. “You always wonder about it, you know, if you are one of those who cannot resist the enticement of teaching. What will happen when I meet someone with a greater gift than my own? It is easy enough to be kind and helpful to those who do not threaten me—but how will it be with one who is my master and does not yet realize it? How will I be in that day?”
Nyateneri and I began speaking at once, but he stilled me with a gesture that was no less commanding for being so frail and miniature. “If you don’t mind, we can leave out the part where you both assure me loudly that I could never have to face such a decision. We all meet our masters, all of us—why do you think we are in this world?— and I am telling you that I met mine one overcast afternoon when I went to the door with my mouth still full of tea-cake. I knew him on the instant—as you will know a greater swordsman one day, Lal, with the first salute of your blades. And I invited him in for tea.”
Nyateneri regarded him with a grave mock-frown. “That must indeed have been centuries ago. You insisted that I learn to make proper tea, just so, but you never would drink it. I nearly went mad trying to make tea that was at last fit for you.”