The Inn in the Storm

There were four of them, caught on the road by a winter storm that came down off the hills faster than any of them had bargained for. They were traders and drovers, used to sleeping rough, but this storm was not the kind a man waits out under a hedge. It bit. It found them where they crouched.

The inn appeared out of the snow the way such inns always appear in the tales: suddenly, and at the worst possible moment, and with a light in its window that might have been welcome if the travelers had not been so far from anywhere else.

The innkeeper was a farmer named Li, a small, red-eyed man who met them at the door with a lantern and looked them over as though he were weighing whether to let them in. At last he stepped aside. There is room, he said. There is no room to be choosy tonight.

He led them in, and the first thing they noticed was not the fire or the wine but the quiet. The inn was not full; there was no singing, no dice, no travelers arguing over their bills. The women of the house moved about in a silence that had nothing to do with courtesy, and every few moments one of them would stop, and listen, and then go on as though she had remembered a grief.

There was a sheet over the long table at the back of the room, and beneath the sheet, under the lamplight, the outline of a body. Li's daughter, he said, when one of the men asked. Taken by the fever this morning. We have not yet buried her. We wait for the ice to break.

The men crossed themselves and said the proper things. They were sorry for him, and they meant it; a dead daughter in the next room is a thing no man wishes on his landlord, however good his fire. But they were soaked and frozen, and the fire was real, and Li set bread and wine before them, and they ate.

They asked, as men do, what had been wrong with the girl. Fever, Li said, and would say no more. He sat with them a little while, and drank a cup, and his hands shook. The younger drover, who was a nervous man, watched the covered table the whole time and could not eat.

Li showed them to their rest. There was only one common room, with mats spread on the floor, and the men chose their corners as far from the covered table as the room allowed. The nervous drover chose the corner nearest the door, and lay down with his shoes on, as a man does who means to be ready.

The fire was banked for the night. The innkeeper and his women withdrew to their own quarters, and the last thing the drovers heard, before they settled, was the slow, regular sound of the women weeping in the back of the house. It went on a long time, and then it stopped, and after that there was nothing but the storm on the roof.

The oldest of the drovers, a man who had slept out in worse weather, told himself there was nothing in a dead body to fear. The dead are the dead, he said. They do nothing. It was a thing he had told himself all his life, and it had always served him. That night, in that room, it stopped serving.

The men settled one by one into their corners, and the fire burned low, and the storm went on. No one meant to sleep deeply. They were four men in a strange house with a dead girl in the next room, and every one of them meant to wake at the least sound. In the end, exhaustion, which is a cruel thing, did what the dead could not: it took them.