Yet nothing seemed to happen—nothing you could call happening, anyway, smells or no smells. The summer days creaked by, travelers came and went—Shadry’s wife ran off with one of them, the way she does most summers, just for the vacation from Shadry—horses got looked after, meals got cooked, dishes went on being washed, rooms were more or less swept out, carters lugged casks of red ale and Dragon’s Daughter into the taproom, and a family of Narsai tinkers left in the night without paying their score. My fault for not charging them in advance—my father was half-Narsai, and I know better than that.
The three women behaved almost like ordinary guests, taking the sun and buying trinkets and antiquities at Corcorua Market; though why they stayed on, except to nurse their wizard friend, I couldn’t fathom. Tikat seemed to have given up running after that daft white one, Lukassa—hardly looked at her these days, except to move out of the way when she passed by, more like a little wandering ghost than ever, with those eyes eating up her face. I’d have kicked him out, just to be kicking someone, but he was more than earning his keep between the stable, the house, and the kitchen garden. A silent, grim-faced lad, with a south-country brogue to curdle beer, but a good worker, I’ll say that.
In honesty, the only real complaint I could have mustered during that time had to do with the boy. And I couldn’t have put it in words, either, as well as I know him and myself. He was happy as bedamned to see those women back, of course—took on to unsettle your dinner, and was forever slipping off to see if any little chore of theirs wanted doing. Nothing new about that, certainly: no, what niggled at me was an idea that something was niggling at him, and growing worse by the day. Not that he said a word about it—not to me anyway, of course, he’d die first—but Gatti Jinni could have read that face, and that anxious way he was developing of looking quickly around him at odd moments, just as though he were sneaking off to bother Marinesha and heard me shouting for him. I thought it was the wizard then. I thought he’d taken to hanging after him, as he did with those women. It gave me a bit of a queer feeling.
ROSSETH
Part of it was the heat, surely. That part of the country, high as it is, turns hot as a forge in late summer. I grew up used to the weather, of course—I miss it now, to tell you the truth—but after the wizard arrived, every day felt stretched tight over a bed of white coals, as the people there scrape sheknath hides. The nights are usually a relief, because of the mountain breezes, but that summer they never came. Dogs and chickens lay in the dust and gasped; the horses hadn’t the energy to swish away flies; the guests sprawled in the taproom, keeping their gullets cool at any rate; and even Karsh stamped and roared a little less than usual, and had a few less orders for Tikat and me. Myself, I woke up sweat-soaked in the hayloft every smoldering dawn, already exhausted, with a head full of cinders. Nearly twenty years it’s been, and I can still recall exactly the strange, hopeless taste of those wakings.
Because it wasn’t really the weather—not that taste, not that sense of being under a glass: a lens that was focusing the heat of someone’s attention on The Gaff and Slasher. It got even worse when Lal and Nyateneri returned: there was rarely a moment, asleep or awake, when I couldn’t feel myself watched more and more intensely by a cold considering that had nothing to do with me—me, Rosseth, or whoever I am—nor with anything I understood or loved in this world. Sometimes it seemed far away; at others, close enough to share my bed-straw and finger over my dreams. In either case, there was no avoiding it, and no fighting off the evil dreariness that always attended it, that kept me constantly frightened in a vague, dull way, and truly tired to death. Sad to death, I suppose you could say.
If Tikat was suffering from the same complaint, I saw no sign of it. Not that I saw much of Tikat in those days: he had quietly taken over the nursing and guarding duties with which I had been entrusted, and now spent most of his free time with the old man upstairs, whom he called tafiya. I missed him sharply—until he came I’d never had a friend of almost my own age to work and talk with, mucking out stalls or lying awake in the loft—and I envied him terribly as well. Mainly, of course, because his closeness to the wizard brought him close to Lal, Nyateneri, and Lukassa every day; but I was jealous, too, that somebody valued his presence and asked for him often, which is different from being sent for. I could have gone on my own, I know that, but I didn’t, and there it is. I was very young.
The women kept even more to themselves than they had done before, whether they rode out or stayed shut in their room, or in the old man’s room. When I saw them at all, I always saw them together, which wasn’t what I wanted. Most particularly I wished to tell Soukyan—who still looked and moved and smelled like Nyateneri—that I liked him no less for the deception, and that I was not avoiding him out of anger or shame. I wanted to ask Lal why and how they had returned so soon, and to tell her that I had looked after her wizard as well as I was permitted. (The third assassin never turned up, by the way—to this day I don’t know what became of him.) And I wanted to say to Lukassa that every time Tikat heard her voice or saw her in the stair or crossing the courtyard, his heart cracked in one more place. Oh, I had a speech ready for Lukassa, I certainly did. I used to practice it aloud on the horses.
But none of all that ever happened, somehow: it was almost as though the three of them had never come riding around that bend beyond the spring, as though I had dreamed the trembling dimples in Lal’s shoulders, dreamed that I watched Nyateneri kill two killers singlehanded. All that was real was a loneliness I had never given name to before they came—that and the heat, and the fear.
Once I asked Marinesha how the wizard was faring, because I would not ask Tikat. She answered, not in her usual starling chatter, but in a subdued, hesitant mumble, “Well enough, I suppose.” When I pressed her further, she bridled at first, and then began to weep—not in mim silence, like a lady, as she always tried to shed her tears, but with great honks and sniffs, wringing my best noserag to shreds. What I made out of her misery was that she had hardly seen the old man since Lal and Nyateneri’s return—“but I hear him every night, Rosseth, all night every night, marching up and down the room till dawn, talking and chanting and singing to himself. He can’t be sleeping at all…”
I petted and quieted her as well as I could, saying, “Well then, he must sleep by day, that’s what it is. And he’s a wizard, Marinesha—wizards don’t need things like sleep and food and such, not the way we do.” But she pulled free of me and looked into my face, and there was a desperate sorrow in her eyes that I had never imagined they could show.
“There are others,” she whispered. “Sometimes there are others, and they answer him. They sound like little children.” She ran away then, back to the inn, still crying, taking my nose-rag with her.
Tikat knew nothing of any voices, and I believed him when he said so. I don’t think that gods, spirits, demons, monsters, or any of that lot will ever put in an appearance in Tikat’s presence. They’ll just wait patiently, as long as they have to, until he goes away. Karsh isn’t like that. You’d think he would be, if anyone would, but he isn’t. I will say that about Karsh—the monsters haven’t always waited for him to leave.
It was a day or two after I spoke with Marinesha that he came looking for me in the kitchen. Tikat was patching the rotting horse trough once again, and our most recent potboy had disappeared—Shadry beats and bullies his way through a dozen in a year; the best you can say is that they often run away without even stopping to collect their wages. After cursing Shadry for at least five minutes without once repeating himself, Karsh suddenly looked up as though noticing me by chance, as he always does, and grunted, “Outside. Wait.”