The Magician of Karakosk, and Other Stories Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Avicenna Development Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Conlan Press, Inc. A previous version of this text (minus substantial editorial corrections) appeared in 1997 under the title Giant Bones (US) and The Magician of Karakosk (world). All current copyrights in the content are owned by and appear by permission of Avicenna Development Corporation.

  Cover art and type design by Ann Monn, used with permission. Cover layout by Connor Cochran.

  Conlan Press Ebook Release: 1.0

  Release Date: November 2015

  www.conlanpress.com

  ISBN-13: 978-1-62-29400-7-3

  Parts of this ebook were first published elsewhere:

  “The Last Song of Sirit Byar” copyright © 1996 by Peter S. Beagle. First appeared in Space Opera, edited by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (DAW: New York)

  “Choushi-Wai’s Story,” “Giant Bones,” “Lal and Soukyan,” “The Magician of Karakosk,” “The Tragical Historie of the Jiril's Players,” and “Places, Things, and Songs: The Innkeeper’s World Chronology” all copyright © 1997 by Peter S. Beagle. They first appeared in 1997 in Giant Bones (Roc: New York).

  For Julie Fallowfield,

  agent,

  fellow connoisseur of truly dreadful poetry,

  cherished friend,

  with love.

  THE MAGICIAN OF KARAKOSK:

  STORIES FROM THE INNKEEPER’S WORLD

  By Peter S. Beagle

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  The Last Song of Sirit Byar

  The Magician of Karakosk

  The Tragical Historie of the Jiril’s Players

  Lal and Soukyan

  Choushi-wai’s Story

  Giant Bones

  FOREWORD

  I don’t create epic trilogies culminating with elves, dwarves, wizards, and men standing at Armageddon and waving magic swords and assorted enchanted jewelry in hopeless defiance of this or that Dark (or anyway Grubby) Lord. Mind you, I have admired J.R.R. Tolkien, since I came across his work in the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in 1958, but he was one of a kind, as was his universe, fifty years in the building. The maps, the charts, the genealogies, the overnight histories, the unrelated snippets of half-invented languages—none of that adds up to Middle-earth. As many writers as I’ve worshipped and shamelessly imitated in my time, from Thorne Smith to T. H. White to Lord Dunsany, James Stephens to James Thurber to James Branch Cabell, Jessamyn West to my wife, Padma Hejmadi, it honestly never occurred to me to ape Tolkien. There didn’t seem to be much point to it.

  From the first, A Fine and Private Place, I wanted my novels to be as different from one another as I could make them, within the limitations of my skill and imagination. Setting more than one in the same world seemed to make that impossible—for me, anyway. I’ve always loved best stories that leave shadowy places, unplayed notes, stories that one can sense going on after one closes the book: never for a moment did I feel the least interest in exploring how Mr. Rebeck and Mrs. Klapper got on together once he left his refuge in the Yorkchester Cemetery, nor in what became of Molly Grue and Schmendrick the Magician, or whether Joe Farrell ever caught up again with the old goddess known in one California town as Sia. They all have their own lives and I have mine. If they drop a tacky picture postcard in the mail once in a while, that’ll be nice.

  But that was before The Innkeeper’s Song.

  My friend Edgar Pangborn took a long time to realize that many of his stories were taking place in the same postnuclear-holocaust world in which he had set his novel Davy. In the same way, I was never aware of creating a world with The Innkeeper’s Song, except as every artist creates a certain kind of continuum—an energy field, if you like—in which the story or the dance or the painting or the four-minute song works the magic it needs to work. The world of The Innkeeper’s Song was meant to exist only so long as its characters needed it to adventure in. My Lal, my Nyateneri, Lukassa, Rosseth, Tikat, the fox, the old wizard; my dear fat, surly, stubborn Karsh, whose voice was the first I heard in my head: these people whom I had never met, blooming and singing inside me one after another, all so intent on telling their fragments of a long story that I even began having their dreams—those voices, not their landscape, were what truly inhabited me. As long as the world of The Innkeeper’s Song gave them ground under their feet and a varyingly shared folklore and natural history to refer to, I couldn’t have cared less whether it even had a name, never mind a geography. I made it as convincing, as substantial, as I could, because that’s my job; but it was never supposed to be more than a backdrop, a stage set. It wasn’t intended to last.

  But it wanted to last. The voices that filled my head for two years arose from a real place, one that they knew intimately, if I didn’t. And at the last, with the book done and pruned and tidied and gone, I found myself missing their world as deeply as I missed them. I’d built it like a slapdash tree house, filled it with imaginary friends, each with a story to tell, and now it was gone—or I was gone from it—and I was curiously lonely for it. And that had never happened to me before.

  Hence these stories. Five of them have nothing at all to do with The Innkeeper’s Song: they happened in different corners of my nameless world, and might as easily have taken place before that other tale as afterward. It’s worth mentioning that the central character of “The Last Song of Sirit Byar” is based, freely and with old love, on a great French singer-songwriter named Georges Brassens; and, perhaps, that the entire plot of “Giant Bones” itself showed up one morning in the shower. I’m good in the shower.

  “The Tragical Historie of the Jiril’s Players” isn’t really a fantasy at all, as any theatrical manager can tell you. As for “Lal and Soukyan,” the one story involving characters from The Innkeeper’s Song, re-encountering each other long after the events described in the novel—well, I was very glad to see those two, that’s all. I’d missed them especially, and wondered about them, and I was happy to be on the road with them once more, and to savor their prickly partnership, their irritable tenderness for each other. And I miss them more acutely now, because this time I know I’ll never see them again.

  Because I really don’t do sequels. I’ll certainly set more tales in the world of The Innkeeper’s Song (that’s all I know to call it; Edgar Pangborn never named his anything but “Davy’s world”), but there will be other folk telling them, other shards of its history and legendry coming to light. I’m as much this figment’s archaeologist as its bard—maybe more so. Hard to tell, just at present.

  Then again, maybe it’ll yet turn out, even this late in the game, that I actually do sequels. What do I know? Forty years spent in arriving at an appreciation of Chaucer’s line, “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,” and here I am, still surprising myself on a regular basis, still sneaking up behind myself and waggling derisive donkey-ear fingers behind my own head. And still assuring myself that someday, when I’m a bit older, I’ll really, really know what I’m doing. I hope I’m wrong.

  —Peter S. Beagle

  Davis, California

  December 1996

  A NOTE ON NAMING BOOKS

  As Peter often does, he began this writing project without a title. Sometimes a really good one occurs to him before finishing, but more often he just slaps down a placeholder and gets on with the business of storytelling. A few such placeholders have made it into final print. Others have not. (Three notable examples: Peter’s nonfiction classic I See By My Outfit, which for the longest time he wanted to call How To Freeze; his first novel, A Fine and Private Place, which was originally The Dark City; and hi
s novel Tamsin, which was contracted with its publisher’s as Tamsin Willoughby, Mister Cat, and Me.) The collection you’re reading had no title at all when Peter finished. His New York publisher decided to name it Giant Bones, after the last story in the book, but all his foreign publishers opted for The Magician of Karakosk instead. With this edition, 18 years later, America joins the rest of the world.

  Which is not to say the title Giant Bones is no more—it’s just changed mediums. In 2010 San Francisco-playwright Stuart Bousel premiered a dazzling theatre piece based on four of the stories here. Because Stuart opted to call his play Giant Bones, on stage is how that name will sail on from here. (The cover art used for this ebook was originally created by designer Ann Monn as a promotional image for the play.)

  —Connor Cochran

  Bellingham, Washington

  December 2015

  THE LAST SONG OF SIRIT BYAR

  How much? How much to set down one miserable tale that will cost your chicken wrist an hour’s effort at very most? Well, by the stinking armpits of all the gods, if I’d known there was that much profit in sitting in the marketplace scribbling other people’s lives and feelings on bits of hide, I’d have spent some rainy afternoon learning to read and write myself. Twelve copper, we’ll call it. Twelve, and I’ll throw in a sweetener, because I’m a civilized woman under the grease and the hair. I promise not to break your nose, though it’s a great temptation to teach you not to take advantage of strangers, even when they look like what I look like and speak your crackjaw tongue so outlandishly that you’d mimic me to my hog face if you dared. But no, no, sit back down, fair’s fair, a bargain’s a bargain. No broken nose. Sit.

  Now. I want you to write this story, not for my benefit—am I likely to forget the only bloody man who ever meant more than a curse and a fart to me?—but for your own, and for those who yet sing the songs of Sirit Byar. Ah, that caught your ear, didn’t it? Yes, yes, Sirit Byar, that one, the same who sang a king to ruin with a single mocking tune, and then charmed his way out of prison by singing ballads of brave lovers to the hangman’s deaf-mute daughter. Sirit Byar, “the white sheknath,” as they called him out of his hearing—the big, limping, white-haired man who could get four voices going on that antiquated eighteen-course kiit other men could hardly lift, let alone get so much as a jangle out of it. Sirit Byar. Sirit Byar, who could turn arrows with his music, call rock-targs to carry him over mountain rivers, make whiskery old generals dance like children. All trash, that, all marsh-goat shit, like every single other story they tell about him. Write this down. Are you writing?

  Thirty years, more, he’s been gone, and you’d think it a hundred listening to the shit wits who get his songs all wrong and pass them on to fools who never heard the man play. The tales, the things he’s supposed to have said, the gods and heroes they tell you he sang for—believe it, he’d piss himself with laughing to hear such solemn dribble. And then he’d look at me and maybe I’d just catch the twitch at the right corner of his mouth, under the wine-stained white mustache, and he’d say in that barbarous south-coast accent he never lost, “What am I always telling you, big girl? Never bet on anything except human stupidity.” And he’d have limped on.

  I knew Sirit Byar from when I was eleven years old to his death, when I was just past seventeen. No, he didn’t die in my arms—what are you, a bloody bard as well as a mincing scribbler? Yes, I know no one ever learned what became of him—I’ll get to that part when I bloody well get to it. Don’t gape at me like that or I’ll pull your poxy ears off and send them to your mother, whatever kennel she’s in. Write—we’ll be all day at this if you keep on stopping to gape. Gods, what a town—back-country cousin-marriers, the lot of them. Just like home.

  My name is Mircha Del. I was born around Davlo, that’s maybe a hundred miles southwest of Fors na’Shachim. My father was a mountain farmer, clawing a little life from stone and sand, like everybody in this midden-heap. My mother had the good sense to run off as soon as she could after I was born. Never met her, don’t even know if she’s alive or dead. My father used to say she was beautiful, but all you have to do is look at me for the facts of that. Probably the only woman he could get to live with him up there in those starvation hills, and even she couldn’t stand it for long. No need to put all that in—this isn’t about her, or about him either. Now he did die in my arms, by the way, if that interests you. Only time I can remember holding him.

  At the age of eleven, I had my full growth, and I looked just as hulking as I do now. My father once said I was meant for a man, which may be so, though I’d not have been any less ugly with balls and a beard. That’s as may be, leave that out too. What matters is that I already had a man’s strength, or near enough—enough anyway to get a crop in our scabby ground and to break a team of Karakosk horses—you know, those big ones? The ones they raise on meat broth?—to do our plowing. And when our neighbor’s idiot son—yes, a real idiot, who else would have been my playmate even when I was little?—got himself pinned under a fallen tree, they sent for me to lift it off him. He died anyway, mind you, but people took to calling me “the Davlo sheknath” for a while. I told Sirit Byar about that once, the likeness in our nicknames, and he just snorted. He said, “You hated it.” I nodded. Sirit Byar said, “Me, too, always have,” so maybe there was our real likeness. It made me feel better, anyway.

  Well, so. There used to be a tavern just outside Davlo, called the Miller’s Joy. It’s long gone now, but back then it was as lively a pothouse as you could find, with gaming most nights, and usually a proper brawl after, and every kind of entertainment from gamecocks to shukri-fighting, to real Leishai dancers, and sometimes even one of those rock-munching strongmen from down south. My father spent most of his evenings there, and many of his mornings as he got older, so I grew in the habit of walking down to Davlo to fetch him home—carry him, more times than not. And all that’s the long way of telling you how I met Sirit Byar.

  It happened that I tramped into the Miller’s Joy one night to find my father—purely raging I was, too, because our lone miserable rishu was due to calve, and he’d sworn to be home this one night anyway. I delivered the calf myself, no trouble, but there could have been, and now I meant to scorch him for it before all his tavern mates. I could hear their racket a street away, and him bellowing and laughing in the middle of it. Wouldn’t have been the first time I snatched him off a table and out the door for the cold walk home. Grateful he was for it most times, I think—it told him that someone yet cared where he was, and maybe it passed for love, how should I know? He was lonely with my mother gone, and too poor for drink and the whores both, so he made do with me yelling at him.

  But that night there was another sound coming from the old den, and it stopped me in the street. First the fierce thump of a kiit strung with more and heavier courses than the usual, and then the voice, that voice—that harsh, hoarse, tender southern voice, always a breath behind the beat, that voice singing that first song, the first one I ever heard:

  Face it,

  if you’d known what you know today,

  you’d have done the same stupid fucking thing

  anyway….

  Yes, you know it, don’t you, even in my croak? Me, I didn’t even know what I was hearing—I’d never heard anything like that music before, never heard a bard in my life. Bards don’t come to Davlo. There’s nothing for even a carnival jingler in Davlo, never mind someone like Sirit Byar. But there he was.

  He looked up when I pushed the door open. There was a whole sprawl of drunken dirt farmers between us—a few listening to him where he sat cross-legged on a table with the kiit in his lap; most guzzling red ale and bawling their own personal songs—but Sirit Byar saw me. He looked straight across them to where I stood in the doorway: eleven years old, the size of a haywagon and twice as ugly, and mucky as the floor of that taproom besides. He didn’t smile or nod or anything, but just for a moment, playing a quick twirl on the kiit between verses, he said through the
noise, “There you are, big girl.” As though he’d been waiting. And then he went back to his song.

  Face it,

  if she’d been fool enough to stay,

  you’d be the same mean, stupid bastard

  anyway….

  There was one man crying, doubled over his table, thumping his head on it and wailing louder than Sirit Byar was singing. And there was a miner from Grebak, just sitting silent, hands clasped together, pulling and squeezing at the big scabby knuckles. As for my father and the rest, it was drinking and fighting and puking all over their friends, like any other night at the Miller’s Joy. The landlord was half-drunk himself, and he kept trying to throw out little Desh Jakani, the farrier, only he wouldn’t go. The three barmaids were all making their own arrangements with anyone who could still stand up and looked likely to have two coppers left in his purse at closing time. But Sirit Byar kept looking at me through the noise and the stink and the flickering haze, and he sang:

  Face it,

  if we all woke up gods one day,

  we’d still treat each other like garbage

  anyway….

  What did he look like? Well, the size of him was what I mostly saw that first night. Really big men are rare still in those Davlo hills—the diet doesn’t breed them, not enough meat, and the country just hammers them low—and Sirit Byar was the biggest man I’d seen in my life. But I’m not talking about high or wide—get this down now—I’m talking about size. There was a color to him, even with his white hair and faded fisherman’s tunic and trews; there was a purpose about him as he sat there singing that made everything and everyone in that roaring tavern small and dim and faraway, that’s what I remember. And all he was, really, was a shaggy, rough-voiced old man—fifty anyway, surely—who sang dirty songs and called me “big girl.” In a way, that’s all he ever was.

  The songs weren’t all dirty, and they weren’t all sad and mean, like that “Face It” one. That first night he sang “Grandmother’s Ghost,” which is just silly and funny, and he sang “The Sand Castles”—you know it?—and “The Ballad of Sailor Lal,” which got even those drunken farmers thumping the tables and yelling out the chorus. And there was a song about a man who married the Fox in the Moon—that’s still my favorite, though he never sang it much. I forgot about my father, I even forgot to sit down. I just stood in the doorway with my mouth hanging open while Sirit Byar sang to me.