The Magician of Karakosk, and Other Stories Read online

  He really could set four voices against each other on that battered old kiit, that’s no legend. Mostly for show, that was, for a finish—what I liked best was when he’d sing a line in one rhythm and the kiit would answer him back in another, and you couldn’t believe they’d come out together at the end, even when you knew they would. Six years traveling with him, and I never got tired of hearing him do that thing with the rhythms.

  The trouble started with “The Good Folk.” That bloody song can stir things up even today, insulting everybody from great lords to shopkeepers, priests to bailiffs to the Queen’s police; but back then, when it was new, back then most places you couldn’t get halfway through it without starting a riot. I don’t think Sirit Byar yet understood that, all those years ago in the Miller’s Joy. Maybe he did. It’d have been just like him.

  Anyway, he didn’t get anything like halfway through “The Good Folk,” not that night. As I recall it, he’d just sailed into the third stanza—no, no, it would have been the second, the one about the priests and what they do on the altars when everyone’s gone home—when the man who’d been crying so loudly stood up, wiped his eyes, and knocked Sirit Byar clean off the table. Never saw the blow coming, no chance to ward it off—even so, he curled himself around the kiit as he fell, to keep it safe. The crying man went right at him, fists and feet, and he couldn’t do much fighting back, not and protect the kiit. Then Kluj what’s-his-name got into it—he’d jump anybody when he was down, that one—and then my bloody father, if you’ll believe it, too blind drunk to know what was going on, just that it looked like fun. He and the crying man tripped each other up and rolled over Sirit Byar and right into the legs of the big miner’s table, brought the whole thing down on themselves. Well, the miner, he started kicking at them with his lumpy boots, and that got Mouli Dja, my father’s old drinking partner, “Drooly Mouli,” people used to call him—anyway, that got him jumping in, yelling and swearing and chewing on the miner’s knees. After that, it’s not worth talking about, take my word for it. A little bleeding, a lot of snot, the rest plain mess. Tavern fights.

  I told you I had near to my grown strength at eleven. I walked forward and yanked my father away from the crying man with one hand, while I peeled Mouli Dja off the miner with the other. Today I’d crack their idiot heads together and not think twice about it, but I was just a girl then, so I only dropped them in a corner on top of each other. Then I went back and started pulling people off Sirit Byar and stacking them somewhere else. Once I got them so they’d stay put, it went easier.

  He wasn’t much hurt. He’d been here before; he knew how to guard his head and his balls as well as the kiit. Anyway, that many people piling on, nothing serious ever gets done. Some blood in the white mustache, one eye closing and blackening. He looked up at me with the other one and said for the second time, “There you are, big girl.” I held out my hand, but he got up without taking it.

  Close to, he had a wild smell—furry, but like live fur, while it’s still on the shukri or the jarilao. He was built straight up and down: wide shoulders, thick waist, thick short legs and neck. A heavy face, but not soft, not sagging—cheekbones you could have built a fence, a house with. Big eyes, set wide apart, half-hidden in the shadows of those cheekbones. Very quiet eyes, almost black, looking black because of the white hair. He never smiled much, but he usually looked about to.

  “Time to go,” he said, calm as you please, standing there in the ruins of a table and paying no mind to the people yelling and bleeding and falling over each other all around us. Sirit Byar said, “I was going to spend the night here, but it’s too noisy. We’ll find a shed or a fold somewhere.”

  And me? I just said, “I have to get my father home. You go on down the Fors road until you come to the little Azdak shrine, it’ll be on the right. I’ll meet you there.” Sirit Byar nodded and turned away to dig his one sea-bag out from under Dordun the horse-coper, who was being strangled by some total stranger in a yellow hat. Funny, the things you remember. I can still see that hat, and it’s been thirty years, more.

  I did carry my father back to our farm—nothing out of the way in that, as I said. But then I had to sit him down on a barrel, bracing him so he wouldn’t go all the way over, and tell him that I was leaving with Sirit Byar. And that was hard—first, because he was too drunk and knocked about to remember who any of us were; and second, because I couldn’t have given him any sort of decent reason for becoming the second woman to leave him. He’d never been cruel to me, never used me the way half the farmers we knew used their daughters and laughed about it in the Miller’s Joy. He’d never done me any harm except to sire me in that high, cold, lonely, miserable end of the world. And here I was, running away to follow a bard four, five times my age, a man I’d never seen or even heard of before that night. Oh, they’d be baiting him about it forever, Mouli Dja and the rest of his friends.

  I don’t think I tried to explain anything, finally. I just told him I’d not be helping him with the farming anymore, but that he wouldn’t need to worry about feeding me either. He said nothing at all, but only kept blinking and blinking, trying to make his eyes focus on me. I never knew if he understood a word. I never knew what he felt when he woke up the next day and found me gone.

  There wasn’t much worth taking along. My knife, my tinder box, my good cloak. I had to go back for my lucky foreign coin—see here, this one that’s never yet bought me a drink anywhere I’ve ever been. My father was already asleep, slumped on the barrel with his head against the wall. I put a blanket over him—he could have them both now—and I left a second time.

  The Fors na’Shachim road runs straight the last mile or so to the Azdak shrine, and I could see Sirit Byar in the moonlight from a long way off. He wasn’t looking around impatiently for me, but was kneeling before that ugly little heap of stones with the snaggletoothed Azdak face scratched into the top one. “Azdak” just means stranger in the tongue I grew up speaking. None of us ever knew the god’s real name, or what he was good for, or who set up that shrine when my father was a boy. But we left it where it was, because it’s bad luck not to, and some of us even worshipped it, because why not? Our own hill gods weren’t worth shit, that was obvious, or they wouldn’t have been scrabbling to survive in those hills like the rest of us. There was always the chance that a god who had journeyed this far might actually know something.

  But Sirit Byar wasn’t merely offering Azdak a quick nod and a marketing list. He was on his knees, as I said, with his big white head on a level with the god’s, looking him in the eyes. His lips were moving, though I couldn’t make out any words. As I reached him, he rose silently, picked up the kiit and his sea-bag, and started off on down the Fors road. I ran after him, calling, “My name is Mircha. Where are we going?”

  Sirit Byar didn’t even look at me. I asked him, “Why were you praying like that to Azdak? Is he your people’s god?”

  We tramped on a long way before Sirit Byar answered me. He said, “We know each other. His name is not Azdak, and I was not praying. We were talking.”

  “It’ll rain before morning,” I said. “I can smell it. Where are we going?”

  He just grunted, “Lesser Tichni or a hayloft, whichever comes first,” and that was all he said until we were bedded down between two old donkeys in an old shed on very old straw. I was burrowing up to one of the beasts, trying to get warm, when Sirit Byar suddenly turned toward me and said, “You will carry the kiit. You can do that.” And he was sound asleep, that fast. Me, I lay awake the rest of that night, partly because of the cold, but mostly because what I’d done was finally—finally, mind you—beginning to sink in. Here I was, already farther from home than ever I’d been, lying in moldy straw, listening to a strange man snoring beside me. Tell you how ignorant a lump I was back then, I thought snoring was just something my father did, nobody else. I wasn’t frightened—I’ve never been frightened in my life, which is a great pity, by the way—but I was certainly confused, I’ll say th
at. Nothing for it but to lie there and wait for morning, wondering how heavy the kiit would be to shoulder all day. It never once occurred to me that I could go home.

  The kiit turned out to be bloody heavy, strong as I was, and bulky as a plow, which was worse. Those eighteen double courses made it impossible to get a proper grip on the thing—there was no comfortable way to handle it, except to keep shifting it around: now on my back, now hugged into my chest with both arms, now swinging loose in my hand, banging against everything it could reach. I was limping like Sirit Byar himself at the end of our first full day on the road.

  So it began. We stopped at the first inn after sunset, and Sirit Byar played and sang for men dirtier and even more ugly-drunk than ever I’d seen in the Miller’s Joy. That was a lesson to me, for that lot paid no attention at all to “The Ballad of Sailor Lal,” but whooped and cheered wildly for “The Good Folk,” and made him sing it twice over so they could learn it themselves. You never know what they’ll like or what they’ll do, that’s the only lesson there is.

  Two nights and a ride on a tinker’s cart later, we dined and slept in Fors na’Shachim—yes, at the black castle itself, with the Queen’s ladies pouring our tea, and the chamber that Sirit Byar always slept in already made up for him. Four of the ladies were ordered to bathe me and find me something suitable to wear while the Queen had to look at me. I put up with the bath, but when they wanted to burn my clothes on the spot I threw one of the ladies across the room, so that took care of that. It quieted the giggling, besides. So I’ve had royalty concerning itself with what nightgown I should wear to bed, which is more than you’ve ever known, for all your reading and writing. They’d probably have bathed you, too.

  And two days after that, we were on our way again, me back in the rags I’d practically been born in (they probably burned that borrowed dress and the nightgown), and Sirit Byar wearing what he always wore—they didn’t sweeten him up to sing for the Queen, I can tell you. But he had gold coins in his pocket, thirty-six new strings on the kiit, a silk kerchief Herself had tied around his neck with her own fair hands, and he was limping off to sing his songs in every crossroads town between Fors and Chun for no more than our wretched meals and dai-beetle-ridden lodging. I was a silent creature myself in those days, but I had to ask him about that. I said, “She wanted you to stay. They did.”

  Sirit Byar just grunted. I went on, “You’d be a royal bard—you could have that palace room forever, the rest of your life. All you’d ever have to do is make up songs and sing them for the Queen now and then.”

  “I do that,” Sirit Byar said. “Now and then. Don’t dangle the kiit that way, it’s scraping the road.” He watched me as I struggled to balance the filthy thing on my shoulder, and for the first time since we’d met I saw him smile a very little.

  “The singing is what matters, big girl,” he said. “Not for whom.” We walked a way without speaking, and then he continued. “To do what I do, I have to walk the roads. I can’t ride. If I ride, the songs don’t come. That’s the way it is.”

  “And if you sleep in a bed?” I asked him. “And if you sing for people who aren’t drunk and stupid and miserable?” I was eleven, and my feet hurt, and I could surely have done with a few more days in that black castle.

  Sirit Byar said, “Give me that,” and I handed him the kiit, glad to have it off my shoulder for a few minutes. I thought he was going to show me a better way of carrying it, but instead he retuned a few of the new strings—they won’t hold their pitch the first day or two, drive you mad—and began to play as we walked. He played a song called “The Juggler.”

  No, you don’t know that one. I’ve never yet met anyone who did. He hardly ever played it—maybe three times in the six years we were together, but I had it by heart the first time, as I always did with his songs. It’s about a boy from a place about as wretched as Davlo, who teaches himself to juggle just because he’s bored and lonely. And it turns out that he’s good at it, a natural. He juggles everything around him—stones, food, tools, bottles, furniture, whatever’s handy. People love him; they come miles to see him juggle, and by and by the King hears about it and wants him to live at the palace and be his personal juggler. But in the song the boy turns him down. He tells the King that once he starts juggling crowns and golden dishes and princesses, he’ll never be able to juggle anything else again. He’ll forget how it’s done, he’ll forget why he ever wanted to do it in the first place. So thank you, most honored, most grateful, but no. And it has the same last line at the end of every verse: Kings need jugglers, jugglers don’t need kings…. I can’t sing it right, but that’s how it went.

  He sang it to me, right there, just the two of us walking along the road, and it’s likely the most I ever learned about him at one time. Never any need to explain himself, not to me or anyone. I asked him that day if it bothered him when people didn’t like his songs. Sirit Byar just shrugged his shoulders as though my question were a fly and he a horse trying to get rid of it. He said, “That’s not my business. The Queen likes them; your father didn’t. No business of mine either way.”

  He really didn’t care. Set this down plain, if you botch all the rest, because it’s what matters about him. As long as he could make his songs and get along singing them, he simply did not care where he slept, or what he ate, or whom he sang to. I can’t tell you how much didn’t matter to that man. When he had money he bought our meals with it, or more strings—that old kiit went through them like my father through red ale and black wine—or once in a while a night at an inn, for us to clean ourselves up a bit. When there was no money, there’d be food and lodging just the same, most often no worse. For a man who could go all day saying no more than half a dozen words, he had friends in places where I’d not have thought you could even find an enemy. The beggar woman in Rivni: we always stayed with her, just as regular as we stayed at the black castle, in the abandoned henroost that was her home. The wind-witch in Leishai, where it’s a respectable profession, because of the sailors. The two weavers near Sam—brothers, they were, and part-time body-snatchers besides. That bloody bandit in Cheth na’Deka—though that one always kept him up singing most of the night, demanding first this song, then that. The shipchandler’s wife of Arakli.

  I’ll always wonder about her, the chandler’s wife. Her husband had a warehouse down near the river, and she used to let us sleep in it as long as we were careful to leave no least sign that we’d ever been there. She was a plain woman—dark, small, a bit plump, that’s all I remember. Nice voice. And what there was between her and Sirit Byar I never knew, except that I got up to piss the one night and heard them outside. Talking they were, fool—talking they were, too softly for me to make out a word, sitting by the water, not even touching, with the moon’s reflection flowing over their faces and the moon in Sirit Byar’s white hair. And I pissed behind the warehouse, and I went back to sleep, and that’s all.

  We had a sort of regular route, if you want to call it that. Say Fors na’Shachim as a starting point—from there we’d work toward the coast through the Dungaurie Pass, strike Grannach Harbor and begin working north, with Sirit Byar singing in taverns, kitchens, great halls, and marketplaces in all the port towns as far as Leishai. Ah, the ports—the smell, salt and spice and tar, miles before you could even see the towns. The food waiting for us there in the stalls, on the barrows—fresh, fresh courel, jeniak, boreen soup with lots of catwort. Strings of little crackly jai-fish, two to a mouthful. And the light on the water, and children splashing in the shadows of the rotting pilings, and folk yelling welcome to their “white sheknath” in half a dozen tongues. The feeling that everything was possible, that you could go anywhere in the world from here, except back to Davlo. That was the best, better than the food, better than the smells. That feeling.

  No, you’d think so, but he hardly ever sang sea-songs in the port towns. One, two, maybe, like “Captain Shallop and the Merrow” or “Dark Water Down”—otherwise he saved those for inland,
where folk dream of far white isles and don’t know what a merrow can do to you. In the ports he sang—oh, “Tarquentil’s Hat,” “The Old Priest and the Old God,” “My One Sorrow,” “The Ballad of the Captain’s Mercy,” “The Good Folk.” Now they always loved “The Good Folk,” the ports did, so there you are.

  From Bitava we usually headed inland, still angling north, but no farther than Karakosk, ever. I’ve been told that he sang often in Corcorua; maybe, but not while I was with him. He’d no mind at all to limp across the Barrens, and he disliked most of the high northland anyway for its thin wine and its fat, stingy burghers. So I never saw anything loftier than the Durli Hills in those days, which suited me well enough—I’ve never been homesick for mountains a day in my life. We’d skirt the Durlis, begin bearing back south around Suk’kai, and fetch up in Fors again by Thieves’ Day. A bath and a warm bed then—a few days of singing for the Queen and being made over by her ladies—and start all over again. So it was we lived for six years.

  Duties? What were my duties? How daintily you do put it, to be sure, chicken-wrist. Well, I carried the kiit, and l brewed the tea and cooked our meals, when we had something to cook. A few times, mostly in Leishai, I ran off pickpockets he hadn’t seen sliding alongside, and one night I broke the shoulder of a hatchet-swinging Bitava barber who’d taken a real dislike to “The Sand Castles.” For the rest, I kept him mostly silent company, talked when he wanted talk, went round with the hat after he sang, and kept an eye out at all times for that wicked west-country liqueur they call Blue Death. Terrible shit, peel your gums right back, but he loved it, and it’s hard to find much east of Fors. He drank it like water, whenever he could get it, but I can’t remember seeing him drunk. Or maybe I did, maybe I saw him drunk a lot and didn’t know it. There were things you never could tell about with Sirit Byar.