The actors came in late and quarrelsome, but they didn’t wake Tikat. They didn’t wake me, either, for I hadn’t even tried to sleep. I was sitting up in the loft, watching the moon start down and Tikat trying to claw his way through the straw pallet I had fixed for him. Lisonje, the one I always liked, climbed the ladder and popped her bewigged head through the trapdoor to ask me, “How fares our sylvan swain?”
“Well enough, so’t please you, madam,” I answered, “in the body.” Every time the troupe came to stay with us—two or three weeks of every summer I could remember—I would be talking like them by the time they left again, and Karsh would spend the next week at least growling and grinding it out of me. I told Lisonje what had happened when Lukassa returned—no more than that—and she leaned on her elbows and regarded Tikat for a while without saying anything. She was still in her paint and costume as the wicked Lord Hassidanya’s mistress, and she looked like a child who has been up very late with grown people.
“Once,” she said finally, “and not too long ago, either, I would have shooed you down this ladder and lain down in that straw with him, for comfort’s sake. And I might even now, if he were someone else and would not hate me and himself so stupidly afterward.“ She thought about it a moment longer, then shook her head briskly and said, ”No, not even then, no, I wouldn’t. I’m done with comforting, must remember that.“ Patting my hand, she started back down, but she put her head in again to say, ”Rosseth, be watchful with him. I’ve seen that kind of heartbreak sleep before. If I were you, I’d wake him every so often. He doesn’t want ever to wake again.”
She slept quickly, as did the others. I did not move until I could identify every snore from every stall, from old Dardis’ whinnying blasts to Lisonje’s dainty chirpings. Then, as she had bid me, I shook Tikat by the shoulder until he blinked at me, whispering to him, “Something worrying the hogs, I must see to them. Go back to sleep.” He cursed me clearly and healthily, and was asleep again before he had turned over in the straw.
I had no choice. I know perfectly well that most people who say that mean only that they have no excuse for the choice, and more than likely I was no different. But I was truly anxious about Nyateneri—where else might she be bloodlessly wounded besides her sword hand?—and it seemed to me that it would do no harm to ask whether I could be of any further aid. As for what Lal had said to me, where had Lal been when Nyateneri and I were at grips with those laughing little men in the bathhouse? We had shared a battle and a kiss, we had faced death together—not shoulder to shoulder, perhaps, but together—and I was entitled, obliged, to see to my comrade’s comfort. Such reasoning it was that took me barefoot down the ladder, all the way to the inn and up the stairs to that room without waking so much as an actor, a hog, or Karsh snoring in the empty taproom, cheek pillowed in the crook of his elbow.
And yes, of course, so many years gone, of course I can say now that I stole up there for one reason alone, and that the old, blind, stamping one that’s had you chuckling so dryly and knowingly to yourself all this time. What else could it have been, eh, at his age? Yet there was more, it was more than only that, even at my age, if not at yours. Let it be. Her mouth and her round brown breasts—let it be that, for now.