Kill the Dead (12 page)

He dozed, and woke at early evening to the priests’ supper bell. No one had bothered to bring him anything to eat, but he felt fine. Fit and self- assured.

He swaggered over to the refectory and strode in on long, reasonably steady legs.

The priests looked up nervously, their pudgy faces bulging with food.

Myal sauntered along the tables, tore off a wing of roast chicken, took up a brimming mug of yellow cider.

“Really, my son,” they remonstrated, “guests do not eat in the refectory.”

“This was paid for, wasn’t it,” Myal demanded, frowning at them, “by my friend Parl? Before he had to go on ahead of me. Pass me that loaf. And the salt.”

He caught a glimpse of himself in a polished ewer. He had moved abruptly into one of his handsome phases. His hair was burnished, his features were chiselled. He looked just like the prince he had always known he really was. That man with the strap
—
how could that thing have been the genetic father of Myal?

Myal lounged in a chair. He had some ham, ordered a bath. He stole three purses out of two habits.

In the middle of the night, happily bleary from a soak in hot water and a liver soaked in cider, he wandered back across the compound for the purposes of nature. Then, with a sense of his own ridiculous generosity, he returned the purses, though not exactly into their owners’ pockets. He threw them instead nimbly on the compost heap, at its jammiest section.

He woke feeling virtuous and well. Even the cider had not gone sour on him.

He took the instrument, went to the well, drew some water and splashed around in the bucket for a while. When he looked up, the sky was lifting into light, and the red-haired woman stood at the gate. He knew her name by then. He had asked one of the priests. The priest had been shocked. Simply saying a woman’s name had seemed to shock him.

She came across the compound, and gave Myal an apple. The immemorial symbol did not alarm him. It would have, if it had not been her. He ate the apple, enjoying it, though the Gray Duke’s daughter had once insisted he and she simultaneously devour an apple hung by cord from a rafter. It had been a rough enterprise. Their teeth had clashed once or twice and he had been afraid of being bitten. It was a forfeit. Whoever ate least of the apple lost. Myal lost. If he had won, the punishment would actually have been the same.

But he was at ease with Cinnabar. She must admire him very much, but apparently chastely, wanting nothing.

Outside the compound, a roan mare stood docilely. He had not ridden in months, years, but the mare had a tender pretty face. He liked her at once, and shared the last of the apple with her lovingly.

When he was mounted, the instrument on his shoulders, Cinnabar showed him a bag of provisions tied to one side of the saddle.

“You can keep that. But send my horse back to me.”

“Of course I will,” he said very sincerely.

Cinnabar took his hand and placed in it an amazing little clay dog. It looked so realistic, Myal laughed. It was still faintly warm from the firing. He gazed at Cinnabar, and swallowed. Whenever anyone gave him anything, truly
gave
it, he was emotionally, almost agonisingly, touched.

“Go on,” she said. She was crying slightly, and smiling at him. Myal, also crying a little and grinning foolishly, nodded several times, and tapped the mare.

She took off at a mercurial gallop that surprised and almost unseated him.

After he got used to the savage galloping of the roan mare and they were far from the village, Myal recalled Cinnabar had offered him no directions. That he had found Dro previously was evidence of Myal’s brilliant powers of deduction. But now he ran blind, or the horse did. Then it occurred to him that Cinnabar had told him that the horse knew the road. When he considered it, their direction seemed correct, for they plunged toward the rising sun.

At first, there were tracks running parallel along the loop of the river, then veering away.

Low hills flowed up from the land to the left. On the right hand the river plain spread into limitless distances, shining transparently in the young morning, through a soft powder of mist.

Then a wood swept down on horse and rider. River and hills and tracks were gone.

Leaves whipped by. Birds flirted across Myal’s face. The horse slowed, and began to pick her way at a fast delicate trot.

Myal was struck by a picture of himself.

He brought the instrument around on its sling and rested it on his chest. The rough material of the sling, the scrawls of paint on the wood and the uneven chips of ivory sunk in it excited him with a still, reassuring excitement. The bite of the wires into the old calluses on his fingers filled him with a wild pure wave of peace. He improvised, using the strings only, a dance for the horse.

Sometimes he marvelled when he thought about the complexity of the instrument. It was so simple to him, yet who else on earth would ever be able to play it? Two only that he knew of, its inventor, and the strap-brandishing father
—
who had never properly mastered it. Myal watched his fingers curiously. The secret lay in some mysterious affinity between prediction, inner ear and action. Each touch on any string of one neck supplied not only a note, but the pressure to tune in the note on the opposite neck
—
which supplied, vice versa, its own note and simultaneous pressure for the first note. When the reed was blown, the fingers that caused these pressures, coincidentally stopped the various holes, activating in turn other notes. But how could one man carry three or more opposing harmonies, all interrelating, dependent upon each other, in his brain at once. In fact, when Myal played the entire assemblage of the instrument at once, six or seven or even eight lines of melody could emanate from it, chords, descants and contrapuntal fugues.

The mare liked the music.

Sunlight rained through the leaves.

He stayed in the saddle until they came out of the wood on a rocky slope up in the air.

A huge landscape sprawled away on all sides. He was high enough to observe the strange natural quarterings of the land, divided like a board game by dim smoke lines of trees, the slashes of ravines, troughs of valleys. The river, a last partition, spilled to the south, slender as a tear. There were no roads that Myal could see. Dismounted, he peered down the craggy slope.

“Lost the way yet?” he asked the horse.

She pulled forward against the reins.

When they reached the bottom of the slope, he found they were in a dry stream bed, and went on leading her over littered pebbles and moss. The stream opened out, just after noon, into a park-like flatness with the trees elegantly poised at intervals in courtly groups. He investigated the provision bag and ate. The horse neatly clipped the grass, gardening restfully.

They rode on at a medium pace over nearly flat ground, which still sloped at an infinitesimal angle downward. The walls of rocky hills ran alongside northeast and south, but miles off. Great clouds swam over, like the keels of enormous ships in the sky. The afternoon became full-blown, and one by one its petals started to drop away.

Myal saw Dro suddenly conjured before him, walking, a tiny black figure, like a speck, then a beetle.

Myal’s reaction was reflexive. He pulled on the reins and the mare halted. Myal shivered, his stomach turned over and sank, all of which annoyed him. He tapped the horse, and she broke into a whirlwind sprint.

If Dro heard him coming, which seemed likely, he did not look around or even bother to get out of the way.

Myal raced past him in a spray of speed and kicked-up clods. He wheeled the mare about and stopped her in Dro’s path. Myal raised his brows and stared at Dro in the midst of the wide and uninhabited land.

“Well,
fancy
meeting you.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Where did you steal the horse?”

Dro had given no evidence of any particular reaction, and his voice was noncommittal.

Myal sat in the saddle, suddenly depressed.

“I didn’t steal it. It’s on loan from your girl friend.”

Dro said nothing.

Myal began to feel tired and weak. He remembered he had been delirious with fever only two days ago, and a wave of shocked self-pity swept over him.

“It wasn’t my idea,” said Myal, “to follow you. Your redhead persuaded me. She seemed to think you might need me.”

Dro laughed, short and sharp.

“All right,” said Myal. “Screamingly funny.”

He slid off the horse and stroked her dejectedly. She lowered her head and bit at the grass. The light was solidifying, fragrant with currents of wind that tasted of clover or trees. The imminent end of day brought to Myal an imperative desire to communicate. He looked at Dro.

“I have to send the horse back to the village.”

“Why not go back with her?”

“I told you. I’m heading for Ghyste Mortua. Just like you.”

Dro made a briefly theatrical sweeping gesture to the east, offering Myal the freedom of the nonexistent road: “Please.”

“Put it this way,” said Myal desperately. “I owe you some money. Debts worry me.” He broke off. He wondered why he was so desperate. Probably it was a simple fear of being left alone by night in this weirdly self-sufficient open country, no trace of a human presence anywhere, save here.

“I release you from your debt,” said Dro. He walked by Myal and away. Myal stood and stared after him, struggling for arguments, and against his own absurd panic. The black figure grew small again, and smaller, and the light reddened. Myal glanced westward. The sun had lowered in a group of trees. The trees were on fire, but did not burn, and inch by inch, the sun slipped through the bottom of their cage of branches.

Dro was about two hundred yards away.

The mare had shifted her ground. Myal called to her, and she turned to gaze at him. In the copper light, she too was made of copper. When he called again and took a step in her direction, she tossed her head, kicked up her heels and bounded off, back the way they had come. In half a minute, she had vanished behind stands of trees. Possibly she had taken his yell as the homeward instruction, but to Myal it looked more like sheer perversity. The bag of provisions was still firmly tied to her saddle. Myal turned and looked at Parl Dro, small now as a black beetle again. Myal began to run after him, on legs that were uncertain and stiff from riding. His head sang. When Dro had grown back to the height of Myal’s hand, Myal decelerated into a shaky stride.

Presently Dro looked over his shoulder. He looked, and looked away, keeping moving. Myal put on another enforced burst of speed. The instrument thumped him on the back, as if encouraging him. Then either Dro had slowed his pace or Myal increased his beyond the speed he thought himself capable of, for abruptly he caught up to Dro, and they were walking alongside each other.

“Don’t mind me,” said Myal airily. “I just happen to be going the same way as you.”

“So I see.”

“The bloody horse ran off. All the bloody food was in a bloody bag tied on the bloody saddle. That’s bloody well gone too.”

Dro walked. Myal glanced at him and away.

“This seems quite a nice spot to bivouac for the night.”

“So bivouac.”

“Don’t you think,” said Myal, “we should stick together? There could be a lot of big animals about in a place like this after dark. Two of us together would stand a better chance of–fighting anything off.”

Dro walked. Myal set himself to the task of simply keeping up. The lame stride was powerful and set its own decided rhythm.

Side by side, unspeaking, they moved over the wild park, and the light closed like a door behind them.

Darkness swirled from the thickets, the trees, from pockets in the ground. The sky, a smooth sheet of dark lavender, put out a thousand stars.

There was a sudden break in the landscape. Around a wall of silent folded poplars, the earth tipped over into one more ravine, this time very shallow, some seven yards deep at most, about five feet across. A dense stream of night was already flowing there. On the far side, a bare humped hill ascended, with one towering oak tree flung up from it in a pagoda of leaves.

There was a thin noise of water, not in the ravine, but to one side, along the edge. A spring flickered from the rock and over, uselessly, into the gully.

Dro crossed to the spring and kneeled, presumably drinking or filling a flask; in the gathering dark it was hard to see. When Dro moved away and began to set a fire between the poplars, Myal went to the spring in turn and drank. Then he moved across to watch Dro. The fire was economically constructed. It made use of a natural scoop in the earth, a few stones to contain and conduct the heat, dry twigs for the base, those less dry set near to cook out moss or rain before being added.

“You’re very good,” said Myal admiringly.

Dro lit the fire and sat, his back against a poplar trunk, his hood pushed off. That shadowy king’s face, gilded by flame, intimidated Myal, who stood awkwardly, as if waiting to be asked to sit down. Without warning, Dro’s glowing black eyes fixed on him. The stare was profound, hypnotic, ruthless and inimical. Myal writhed under it, then snapped like one of the twigs.

“So this is the end of our beautiful friendship, is it? You really think I’m that much of a dead loss, do you?”

Dro’s eyes never moved, did not even blink. Just his mouth said, “I really think you are.”

“In that case, I’m off.” Myal added sarcastically, “I know when I’m not wanted.”

“Your life must be a series of departures.”

Raging and impotent, Myal turned on his heel and walked straight into a tree.

Having disengaged himself, he strode away along the side of the ravine, far enough to be out of Dro’s sight. He lay down where a boulder provided partial shelter and a partly reassuring anchor at his spine. He hugged the instrument and curled himself together around it. The earth was growing cold and magnetically still.

He lay like that some while, feeling alone and dwarfed under the wide night, inventing cutting rejoinders to Parl Dro’s comments, blaming his own status and person for all the ills life had showered on him.

He fell asleep and dreamed Cinnabar’s clay dog had got out of his pocket and was barking and frisking in the meadow, until one of its jumps broke it on a stone. Red blood flowed from the clay and Myal wept in his sleep. For comfort, his dream hands closed on wire strings and began to play them. It was the song he had made for Ciddey Soban.

Any compunction Parl Dro might have felt was inevitably tempered by the realisation that the crazy minstrel was even now probably less than a hundred feet off. Not that Dro was particularly inclined to compunction. From thirteen until he was fifteen, he had worked his way up and down various tracts of land, now as herder, now as farmhand, now as escort for or carrier of trade goods, and he had learned his own methods of survival. Myal Lemyal, from the look of things, had had a life as rough, dangerous and soul-destroying. His methods of survival were not Parl Dro’s, yet they were methods and he had survived. Dro had more respect for Myal’s abilities than Myal could guess. And less time for him than even Myal’s paranoia intimated. It was not aversion exactly, but simply that Dro’s singularity had grown to be a habit. He would break from it for a day, a night, now and then. But he was used to being companionless. Used to himself as seen only through his own implacable eyes.

At fifteen, when he was still capable of becoming reasonably gregarious, and exceedingly drunk, Parl Dro had accepted a bet, for a pound bag of silver, to sleep the night in a haunted barn. At the time he had done it for the cash, but also out of a sense of cultivated contempt. Something in him had, for two years, been vehemently denying that night when Silky had come back to him under the lightning-blasted apple tree. He did not believe in ghosts at fifteen.

He had reclined on the straw and the reeds in the barn, now and then drinking from the wineskin the men had provided, vaguely lit by a hanging lamp—the bargain had not stipulated a vigil in the dark. Just before the sun went, his hosts had shown him the place where the ghost came through out of nowhere. They had also shown Parl the cindery glove, pinned to a post in the floor. They had discovered the rudiments, and pointed to the glove, saying, “That’s why it comes.” Another told how a man had once tried to destroy the glove by throwing it in a hearth fire. But as soon as the thumb began to singe, the man had felt deathly ill. He snatched the glove from the flames before he knew what he was doing. Now they boasted about the deadalive revenant in the barn. They invited travellers to sleep there. The last man who had accepted the bet, they assured Parl, had gone stark mad. Parl had nodded, smiling. He expected tricks but nothing unworldly. He lay on the straw and thought about the bag of silver, which he had convinced himself he wanted. He ignored the sense of horror that lay over the barn. At midnight the ghost came.

It no longer much resembled anything human, though naturally by now it appeared solid and three-dimensional. The physical trauma of its death had stayed with it, which was unusual, and in this case, obscene, for it had been hacked to pieces by enemies. It came from thin air, shrieking with agony, its flesh in ribbons, its eyes put out.

Parl’s impulse was normal, and was to run away. Something would not let him. He found himself staggering to the post where the glove was pinned. And the awful, shrieking, eyeless thing came blundering after him. A moment before it collided with him, Parl cast the wineskin he discovered he was still holding straight up into the hanging lamp.

The lamp burst with a crack of glass, and fiery oil and wine splashed over the straw. In seconds, the barn was on fire, full of light and smoke and roaring. The live dead thing had by then seized Parl, screaming and pressing him into the terrible still-bleeding gaping of its wounds. Parl would have burned along with the linking glove, if somehow the extraordinary power of will that was in him—latent, yet stronger than any power he had known he had, stronger than muscle or brain or the drives of hunger, sex, ambition or fear—if somehow that power had not sprung from him and thrust the deadalive whining and snarling aside.

The glove flared a few instants later, and the dreadful noises stopped. The blinded rigid face of the ghost-thing suddenly relaxed, as if its searing hurt had gone away. It faded quietly in the smoke, and Parl Dro broke out of the barn and ran like a dog-fox for the wood.

He looked back when he was on higher ground, and saw the men out in a black silhouette-dance around the fire, trying to quench it. He never got their silver, only the name of an arsonist, and the assured knowledge once more that the dead did not always die.

The smaller fire between the stones was sinking. Dro leaned to put on more branches, and paused. Along the side of the ravine, the musician was playing his music.

Dro sat, the branches loose in his hand, listening. Fine as silk threads drawn through the dark, the notes sewed over and about each other. The melody was oblique, tragic, stabbing somewhere inside the heart with a sweet piercing pain, removed yet immediate. Like that of any excellent minstrel, Myal Lemyal’s music could find out emotions that did not belong in the humours or mind of the listener, and plant them there and let them grow while the song sang itself. But Myal was much better than excellent. Myal, playing the bizarre instrument his father had killed to get, was one of the lost golden gods returned from the morning of the earth.

Then a cold sighing came over the ravine, and stars scattered along Parl Dro’s spine.

Very slowly, he turned his head, looking beyond the firelight and the freckling leaves of the poplars.

Under the oak on the hill the far side of the gully, glowing a little, like a fungus, shadow-eyed, smiling, still as a stone, sat Ciddey Soban.

Dro got to his feet. She was looking exactly at him, and now, mostly unmoving, she merely followed him with a serpentine turning of her head. She was scarcely transparent any more. Only one limb of the tree showed faintly through the drift of her skirt. Her skin, her hair, were quite opaque. Unlike her sister, this one was strong.

He walked, not fast, along the ravine side, toward Myal’s music.

Presently he came to a boulder and saw Myal Lemyal lying against it, sound asleep, and playing the instrument in his sleep.