The woman Lal let me know that she and her companions would be leaving at last, as soon as the wizard and the little Lukassa were fit to travel. She also expressed her regrets—pointlessly but quite prettily, I will say—for all the troubles that had come with them to plague The Gaff and Slasher. “All the troubles”—as if she could have understood the half of what her lot had done to my life. But it was a change to have someone ask my pardon, so I told her we’d say no more about it, and let it go. Miss Nyateneri never bothered with any apology of her own, but that’s as well. I couldn’t have dealt with any more shocks just then.
Rosseth stayed out of my way to a remarkable degree during those days. It’s not that he doesn’t try to avoid me as much as he can, in the normal run of things; but in the normal run we don’t go much more than a long afternoon without my having to shout at him about something. To be honest, I made no great effort to bump into him, either. I had charged up a collapsing stairway through a stampede of screaming idiots and broken down a perfectly good door, all because I couldn’t endure the thought of having to train another stable boy. You never know how people take these things. It can be awkward afterwards, that’s all.
I became certain that he was once again planning to run off with the women and the wizard, and didn’t want to face me because he knew I’d read him first glance. I took council with myself one night, consulting in my room with two bottles of that fermented harness polish they make east of the mountains—Sheknath’s Kidneys, the locals call it. What all of us decided eventually was, if he wanted that much to leave, let him leave and be damned. I had headed him off a dozen times when he and I were both younger; he was sharp enough now to give me the slip tomorrow, the day after, if not today. Well, let him, then, and good riddance, the best riddance—but before he showed me his heels, I had a thing or two to show him.
Thinking about that made the night go too slowly, and the Sheknath’s Kidneys far too fast, and I was moving a bit gingerly when I sought him out the next morning. He was rubbing a vile-smelling ointment that he makes himself into the flanks of a bay gelding whose owner obviously enjoyed owning a pair of spurs. Rosseth was talking to the horse as he worked—not in words, just murmuring quietly, smoothing his voice into the raw places with the ointment. I waited, watching him until he felt somebody there and whipped around fast, the way those women do. He said, “I’m almost through with him. I’ll get to the hogpen right away.”
Because there was a rail coming loose there, you see, and I’d been after him for a week to replace it. He finished with the gelding, forked some fresh hay into its manger, and then just leaned against it for a moment, the way horses will lean against each other, before he came out of the stall. We stood looking at each other, him braced for orders, keeping a careful eye on my hands; and me studying the size of his own stubby hands, and the two swirls of down on his upper lip. Won’t ever be as big as I am, but he might turn out stronger.
“I want to talk to you,” I said. Oh, that made his eyes go tight, flicking back and forth between me and the stable door. He said, “Well, the rail, the hogs might—” I nodded toward a bale of hay and said, “Sit.”
He sat. I wanted to keep standing, but my head was clanging too much for that, so I turned over a pail and sat facing him. “If you want to go with that old wizard and the rest of them,” I said, “you don’t have to sneak away. Go. I won’t beat you, and I won’t try to stop you. Just take what’s yours and go. Close your mouth,” for his jaw was sagging like that hog-pen rail giving way. “You understand me?”
Rosseth nodded. I couldn’t tell if he was joyous, relieved, angry, somehow disappointed—I can’t always tell. I said, “But there is something you have to hear. The only condition I’m making is that you have to sit there and listen to this. All of it. Close your mouth—you don’t have to look like an idiot! Do you hear me, Rosseth?”
“Yes,” he said. Chatters endlessly when you don’t want to hear one more word out of him, goes dumb as a fish when it really means something. My head got worse just meeting those blank, watchful eyes of his. Why did I bring up this whole damned business now? It could have waited. As long as it’s waited already, what’s another day, or another week, or the rest of my life? I said, “All right, then. A long time ago, I had to go to Cheth na’Deka, never mind why. It was a long journey there, and a worse one back. You know why?”
“Bandits?” Not much of a guess, considering that Cheth more or less means bandits, always has. “Bandits,” I said. “Or maybe there was a war going on—not much difference down there, except for the clothes. I never did find out which gang it was that had been through that village.”
Rosseth was listening. I got up, kicked the pail a bit to the right, walked around it, sat down again. “I was coming back alone and on foot, not by choice, but because I couldn’t hire a coach or a guide for any money. You still can’t, as far as I know. All I had for protection was a staff, my father’s, the kind with a big chunk of iron at one end. I traveled at night, and I stayed off the main roads, and the third evening I saw smoke far away. Black smoke, the kind you get when it’s houses burning.”
He kept his eyes absolutely still, flat as a stock pond, but he was leaning forward a little, hands gripping the edge of the hay-bale. “I didn’t go any further that night,” I told him. “I heard horses, a lot of them, passing close enough for me to hear men laughing. It wasn’t until noon the next day that I started on again, and I spent so much time hiding in the trees by the roadside that I didn’t reach the village until mid-afternoon. Tiptoeing slows you down a good deal.” I didn’t want him getting any idea that I was trying to sound like a hero. It was going to be bad enough as it was.
“What was its name?” His voice was so low I couldn’t make him out the first time. “What was the village’s name?”
“How should I know? There wasn’t a soul alive to tell me. Just bodies up and down the one street, bodies lying in their own doorways, bodies shoved down the well, floating in the horse-trough, sprawled across tables in the square. There was one crammed into the baker’s oven— his wife, his daughter, who knows? Split open like a sack of meal, like the rest of them.” I said it all hard and fast and as tonelessly as I could, to get it done with. I left some things out.
“There wasn’t anyone?” He cleared his throat. “There wasn’t anyone left alive.” It wasn’t a question. We could have been in a temple, with the priest lining out the invocation and the worshippers chanting it all back to him dutifully. I said, “I didn’t think so. Until I heard the baby.”
Well, he saved me the least little bit of it, anyway. He whispered, “Me. That was me.”
I got up again. I thought about really trying to tell him what it was like: the silence, the slow buzzing, the smell of blood and shit and burning, and the tiny, angry, hungry cry drifting upward with the last trails of smoke. Instead I stood with my back to him, hands in my apron pockets, staring at that mean little black horse of Tikat’s and wishing I’d had the sense to bring whatever was left of the Sheknath’s Kidneys with me.