The recitation paused for a moment, but Kelder and Asha waited without protest this time.
“We were together a little over a year, I think,” Ezdral said, resuming his tale. “I was nineteen, maybe twenty, by then. I started to think about maybe settling down somewhere, maybe having children someday. And one day I woke up and Irith wasn’t there. We’d been at her favorite inn in Shan on the Desert, a place called the Crystal Skull, and I still was, but she wasn’t.”
Kelder glanced down at Asha; she was sitting rapt, taking this all in. “Why did she leave?” the child asked.
Ezdral turned up an empty palm. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe she just got bored with me.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, I waited, at first — I waited a month, to see if she would come back. When she didn’t, I went out looking for her, going up and down the Great Highway and around to all the places we’d gone together, but I didn’t find her. I’d hear about her now and then — how she had flown over Angarossa Castle shouting insults, or been seen playing with the Queen of Ophera’s cats — but I never caught up to her, never saw her myself. And after a time I sort of drifted back to Shan, doing odd jobs or begging, and I stayed there and waited for her.”
“Why didn’t you just forget about her?” Kelder asked. “Find yourself another girl?”
“Because I couldn’t, damn it!” Ezdral shouted, in the first display of temper Kelder had seen from him. “I couldn’t! Don’t you think I tried? But I couldn’t go to sleep at night without thinking about her, couldn’t look at another woman without thinking that Irith was prettier... I was in love with her, so damnably in love — and I still am, damn it all to the Nether Void!” He pounded a fist on the sand, and then went on more calmly, “I started drinking to try and forget her, I just drank all the time, whenever I could get money, and it was even starting to work, a little, after twenty years or so — and then last night I looked up and there she was, I saw her walking past me, as big as life, looking just as she always had. And at first I thought I was dreaming, or that the wine was giving me visions, though I hadn’t drunk that much, and then I thought I was dead and had died and this was her ghost, and I could see her because I was a ghost, and then I finally realized it was real, she’d come back, and I called to her.”
He fell silent for a moment, and Kelder remembered the previous night’s events, not with satisfaction, but with a growing dismay, like a weight in his belly.
“I called to her,” Ezdral repeated, “and she said she didn’t know me, she ran away screaming, and then you hit me, and I fell down.”
“I’m sorry,” Kelder whispered.
“You didn’t know,” Ezdral said, waving it aside. “I knew, though. I knew she had been deliberately avoiding me all these years, that that was why she hadn’t come back to Shan, and I knew she’d leave again now that she knew I was there, but I had to talk to her, I had to tell her that I loved her, so I went to the gate and waited, and I hoped she wouldn’t just fly over the wall. And she didn’t, but you were with her, and I didn’t want a fight, so I followed, trying to think of what I could say, what I could do that would make her talk to me, make her stay with me.” He let his breath out in a long, shuddering sigh.
Asha didn’t know what to say. Kelder couldn’t say anything at all, and Ezdral had finished. For a time they all sat silently on the sand, thinking their own thoughts.
Chapter Eighteen
“Maybe it was her mother,” Asha suggested, “or her grandmother.”
Ezdral shook his head.
“But Irith is only fifteen,” Kelder pointed out. The thought that his intended bride was not just a Tintallionese runaway who had visited Shan as a child was deeply disturbing; the idea of his own Irith roaming the Small Kingdoms with another man, before Kelder had even been born, was intolerable, and he was groping for a way to deny it.
“Oh, yes,” Ezdral agreed, “she’s always been fifteen.”
Kelder sat back and considered that, and considered Ezdral, as well.
He looked every day of his claimed sixty-two years, and then some — his hair and beard were long, white, thinning, and uncombed; his face was rough and lined, his eyes sunken and bloodshot. His lips were a pale, unhealthy color, his skin yellowish. He wore a tunic that hung loose on his sunken chest; the garment had once been brown, but was now blotched, stained, and faded, so that it was black here, grey there, and a washed-out tan elsewhere. His breeches were tanned leather, with large shiny patches on the knees — and probably, Kelder guessed, on the backside as well. They ended in tatters just below the knee, and from there down, his legs and feet were bare.
His hands were thin and bony, and stayed curled and claw-like at all times, apparently involuntarily; the nails were cracked and blackened, the hairs on the back white and wirelike. When he lifted a hand to gesture, it shook. His wrists were bone and tendon and loose skin, with no fat at all, no muscle tone. He wore no ornaments of any kind, and his garments had no trim or embroidery and were of the plainest possible cut — not only were they decrepit, they hadn’t been much to start with. His belt was a twisted strip of rawhide, with a single pouch hung on it, a drawstring bag about the size of Asha’s head.
It was very hard to imagine him as a strong young man, adventuring with Irith.
On the other hand, why would he have made up such a tale? And he spoke with an unquestionable sincerity.
But it couldn’t be the same Irith as the one Kelder meant to wed. “Her grandmother, it must have been,” he said.
Ezdral shook his head. “I don’t think so. She’s magic, remember?”
“She’s only fifteen,” Kelder repeated.
Even as he said it, though, he was remembering all the puzzles and peculiarities about Irith — how she claimed to have done so much since leaving her apprenticeship, even though that couldn’t be more than a year or two; how she remembered an inn in Shan that had obviously been abandoned for years; all the other references to times and places and doings that she could scarcely have fit into fifteen years. The Tintallionese theory didn’t explain it all; in fact, it hardly explained any of it, really.
If she were actually sixty or seventy years old, her youth and beauty magically preserved, that would explain it.
But it wouldn’t explain her, Kelder thought. It wouldn’t explain the person that Irith was.
Kelder liked to think of himself as grown up, not a kid any more; compared to a few years ago, he was grown up. Realistically, though, he knew he was hardly a mature adult. It wasn’t a matter of size or strength, of gray hair or wrinkles — adults acted differently, presumably because they had learned better, had been changed by experience.
But Irith didn’t.
Irith acted like a girl of fifteen. And it wasn’t just acting, like players in the annual pageant taking the roles of ancient heroes — she was a girl of fifteen.