Kill the Dead (7 page)

He began to go down the stairs. He wondered if she would call out to him again. It seemed likely she would.

In fact, she waited till he was in the yard, going under the dead fig tree. He had hesitated briefly. Starlight filmed the well as on the previous night and, as on the previous night, there still lingered there that intangible aura of unnaturalness. Her voice drifted from the tower, gathering the aura about itself. The sentences fell like ugly fruits onto the ground. Her gutter vocabulary was better than he would have anticipated. When she finished, he had reached the gate, but though her voice was low, he had not missed a word.

Myal Lemyal had presumably taken to his heels at some juncture, or else concealed himself with exceptional cunning, for there was no hint of him within the yard or outside. Dro stepped back onto the road and turned eastward. The village, when he went by it again half a mile farther on, seemed unfamiliar and smaller than before; he saw it with a stranger’s eye. Since tonight he did not intend to stay there, it had acquired the closed and unwelcoming facade of a place that offered no shelter.

Myal Lemyal had certainly removed himself from the scene. In his own haphazard way, he was as sensitive to the atmosphere of deadalives as any ghost-killer, though failing to interpret them in positive terms, and with, very decidedly, no compulsion to engage them in battle.

His neurasthenic fascination with the whole venture had, however, increased. It was often the case with him that what frightened him most he would run headlong after—a habit he deplored but had been unable to break himself of.

Dro also fascinated and frightened him to a colossal extent. Myal, additionally, had convinced himself that Dro was an essential ingredient in the brilliant plan to find Ghyste Mortua, that—possibly—apocryphal domain of the undead.

So when the house’s sense of manifestation and emotional frenzy were epitomised in the supernatural shriek, Myal quickly pulled himself together and ran. But not very far. He had simply leaped up the nearest slope like a scared rabbit and dropped in the thick grass there, panting and appalled. Ten minutes later, when he had dared himself to raise his head, he realized with some self-blind surprise that he could still see the lopsided roof of the house below.

It seemed inspired, then, to set himself to watch the spot for further developments. The watch was not a long one. Parl Dro’s brandy and Myal’s nervous exhaustion, combined with the sprint up the slope, proved conclusive. About one minute before Dro walked out of the gate and back onto the road, Myal was sprawled, head on arms, soundly asleep.

A little after midnight, when the adolescent moon hung itself over his head like a piece of broken plate, Myal stirred, accepted the new mistake, cursed it, and fell asleep again. He too was not unused to slumbering on bare ground. But he dreamed first of his mother whom he had never known, and then of his drunken father and the leather strap known too well, and twitched and muttered and sighed.

Just before dawn, he rolled part of the way down the slope and came up against a young fir tree. Through the branches and the warp and woof of the grass, he saw a bank of pigeon-blue cloud barricading the eastern horizon, the light coming pale and mysterious above it.

There was no sound anywhere but the drift of the wind over the land, and the watery drips and trickles of birdsong. Then a door slammed like a wooden drum, below at the leaning house.

Myal stared down past the stem of the fir tree.

Ciddey Soban, white as porcelain, came out of the shadows and the trees and turned toward him. For a minute, he thought she meant to come straight up the incline, but then she went away from the house, the road and Myal’s slope, passing under the shoulders of the uplands, going north.

Myal’s heart thumped. He got up and combed his hair with his long fingers, and straightened the instrument on its frayed sling across his shoulders. With an awareness of vague dread, he walked around the curve of the hill, squinting forward until he had her pallid figure in sight again. Maintaining the distance between them, he followed her. He had a vile notion why he must, and his eyes were wet already.

She had sat in Cilny’s chair all night, and thought of Parl Dro the ghost-killer, and how she hated him.

     Sometimes thoughts of Cilny, or occasionally of her own self, would interrupt these reveries. Sometimes she thought even of their father, his absurd botching together of things to sell as strange artefacts. That was perhaps inevitable. But she did not consider any of these matters for more than a second or so.

     She began by wishing Parl Dro dead, and in her mind she constructed the way of it, now one way, now another. She pictured him stabbed and smothered, she pictured him buried alive in earth, or hanged, or torn in shreds by animals, wolves or bears or cats. In various of these fantasies she was physically present, instigating and directing them. Later he met deaths with slower and more subtle formulae, and then she was not there. Later still, she did not think of his death at all, only of him. He had been far younger than she had expected, from the stories. She imagined to herself his youth, his childhood, his birth even. She imagined his old age still to come; sickness and poverty, wealth and loneliness and joy—all his, and she was almost impartial now. She came, in the last descent of night, to behold him as a life, separate from her, a man, an entity. Her hate was no longer a force directed against him. Her hate had become Parl Dro. He stood like a black tree against a backdrop of pure nothingness. She could think of no other thing.

     When the birds began to tell off their notes to the lightening sky, Ciddey rose. For a moment, she was unsure of where she meant to go, and why. Then she recalled, with a dry ebbing at her heart, how everything was settled, that she had no need to concern herself with plans. She had only to act.

     Outside, a bar of cloud lay low on the horizon, like another hill behind the hills. The mountain glistened, cool and sculptured, in the preludes of the morning.

     As she walked along the rims of the slopes, treading north, the dark started to lift, in level sweeps, like flocks of birds flying up from the land. These things were so known to her. The lift and fall of day and night, the mountain, the country. She seemed only a figment of everything that was, only a memory of some other girl who had lived long in this place.

From a rise, quite soon, she saw the stream shining before her.

The yellow asphodel of the spring was gone from its banks. She glanced about bewilderedly, searching for some token flower, but there were only summer daisies in the grass. Nor was the stream as clear as in the spring. It was tinged with the brown clay that lined the channel. Nor did it flow so swiftly as when the melted snow, from the high shelves of its source, ran with it.

Ciddey took off her shoes, as if she meant to go wading in the stream. She set them neatly, side by side, on the bank.

The night chill, retained by the water, made her gasp as she stepped into it. For an instant, she felt incapable of continuing the deed. She stood shivering balanced against the syrupy freezing push of the current, looking wildly about her. Almost at once, a man appeared on the rise beyond the bank, about eighty feet away. It was the man who had sung under her window the night before, who must have done so at the order of Parl Dro to distract her. Fate had directed him.

She stared at the man and he at her. Suddenly he began to wave his arms, one green, one red, and to shout. Then he began to rush toward her down the slope, and the instrument jounced behind him.

He must not reach her in time.

Ciddey let herself fall directly back into the stream. The cold liquid came over her face, entering her nostrils and eyes. She did not strike the stream bed hard, the water was too buoyant. Already it raised her and bore her forward. She was not yet leaden enough to sink and to lie still.

Her braids were coming undone. She should have rebound them. She had not thought to.

She had held her breath, but now she breathed, and let the stunning cold darkness into herself. She was so cold now that she no longer felt it at all.

Somewhere far away she heard the man scrabbling in the stream, not at the right spot, for the current had moved her quite some distance.

     Everything slid away, almost gently now. All but one thing. She understood she must not let go of that.

     The very last sight she had, before all human seeing went out of her, was of the two black eyes of Parl Dro. They seemed to draw her from herself, right out of her bursting, suffocating flesh. Her consciousness, narrowed to a thread, passed through them as through the eyes of needles. Her hatred was so fine, she felt a pang of exultation. Then she was a feather floating on a tide in darkness. And then she died.

Upstream, Myal Lemyal, plunging knee-high in the icy water, drenched himself and thrashed the shallow race with his hands. By the time he found her, he was already half mad.

He dragged her out onto the bank. Her face was swollen and pop-eyed, as if she had been strangled. He retched with terror, but threw her on this bloated face and tried to squeeze the water out of her.

Finally he gave over. He left her lying face down in a veil of pale hair. The soles of her small bare feet, very clean and faintly pink, flushed pinker as the sunrise burned down on them.

Myal sat on the bank some yards away from her, gnawing his nails. He did not look at her beyond intermittent, furtive glances. Eventually, he swung the musical instrument around on its sling into the crook of his shoulder.

He made a song for Ciddey Soban. He did not know how beautiful it was. But the instrument had been wetted by his career through the stream, and some of the strings sagged and gradually became flat. If his father had been with him, Myal would have been beaten.

In the end, Myal stopped playing. He put his arms around the instrument, hugging it tightly, and watched the stream going by.

An hour or so later, the cold in his still dripping boots and shirt started to wriggle its way under his ribs and spine. He sneezed and rubbed his hand across his eyes and stood up. And found he was standing on one of Ciddey’s small shoes.

He walked away from the stream slowly.

He could hear cows mooing like bassoons across the curves of the land. The odour of turf and flowers became an irresistible series of irritations in the passages behind his nose and throat, and he sneezed again and cursed himself and the world, and trudged once more toward the eastern snarl of the road.

CHAPTER FOUR

Five miles east of the village, the landscape began to flow steadily downward. Deep valleys appeared and shimmering ravines. Trees like poles, each with a solitary rounded cloud of foliage smouldering at its top, led in avenues along the crests of ridges, or by the misty lanes of faraway, indeterminate rivers.

Somewhere in this country, by night, Parl Dro had slept, wrapped in his black mantle. The weather had been soft and warm, turning cold only as the dawn approached. But a few hours after sunrise, the heat came back, smilingly, as if its absence might be overlooked.

On the morning wall of a farm, a skinny child sat, dangling its legs among the vines. When it suddenly saw the black-clad man striding his long lame strides down the road, the child slunk into a thicket. It sprang out at him as he passed.

“Give me some money!”

Dro did not look at it. “Why?”

“I have the magic sight,” said the child. “I’ll tell your future. Give me a twenty-penny piece.”

Dro stopped. He looked at the child. It was a girl with sun-bleached hair. He threw her a twenty-penny piece, spinning it lazily from his height to hers. She caught the coin, and said, “I know who you are. I thought you were a legend. They said you’d be by this way sometime.”

“Who said?”

“They all did. For years and years. Now I’ll tell you. Watch out. Before and behind. You’ve got a lot of enemies.”

“Have I really?” said Dro.

“But not me,” said the child. “I think you’re lovely.”

She ran away along the wall. Rosy dust puffed from the ground as she went. The soil was more acrid here, and powdery.

At noon there was an inn that sold wine and golden cheese. Peaches ripened on the walls. A blind dog sunned itself, and whined when Parl Dro’s shadow slid over its back.

In the afternoon, the road shifted to the south. A thread of track beat on eastwards, but faded in a molasses-coloured wood as the sun began to wester. When he emerged from the wood, the land sloped down to a loop of one of the misty rivers. A ruined fortress stood dreamily in the loop, melting into the sky as sunset condensed the air. A village lay along the river’s edge. It had the usual wide street, supplemented by a couple of others almost as wide. The sewage-dispelling water courses appeared to discharge into an area of marsh that strained out of the river to the north. A dab of smoke coiled from the roofs. Some fishing boats lay, themselves like spread fish, side by side on the shore.

The premonition he had been having, inchoate but persistent, was now so strong Dro avoided the village completely. He walked instead diagonally, clipping the marsh. A causeway of pleached bricks went through mud and strips of water, out onto the baked meadow in the loop of the river where the fortress was.

The outer walls had crumbled. The inner had a lovely smoothness, sanded down by the elements. Some earl or princeling had lorded it here one or two hundred years ago, master of the river. Nobody much came here now. No paths were worn across the meadow. Not even goats or sheep had been pastured, for the grass was virgin and proud. Probably the village reckoned the fortress to be haunted. It had that look to it, secretive, smoky. Only a ghost-killer like Dro could have told for sure that there were no ghosts. It was just an empty shell.

A wind blew up along the river, and the chill came back with the dusk. Dro set a fire inside the lee of the inner wall, where a staircase went up into a vault of sky. A wild apple tree had rooted in the earth by the stair, with precocious green fruit on it. He put a couple to bake out their sourness in the ashes around the fire.

A huge owl, soundless, like a paper kite, sailed over the meadow to its hunting.

Parl Dro sat against the wall. He had only to wait awhile. He was alert, but very still. It was a knack of his, one of many disciplines, to be able to turn off awareness of time, and all superfluous senses, resting them, as he rested the crippled leg. Every day of walking on the roads was a day of fighting that pain, and every respite brought a dizzying relief. Done in, he paid little attention to either condition or cause.

Then, through half-closed eyes, he saw a woman mantled in gold hair, leaning to his firelight. She was very real, but when he raised his lids, no longer there.

The child at the farm had triggered certain memories, one familiar and crucial. He thought about it, turning the past over in his mind, as he waited for the present to catch up to him.

His father had been a soldier in some small border war big enough to kill him. Parl Dro’s mother had died a while later, when he was about four years of age. The local landowner kept a house where homeless children might grow up in reasonable conditions. When he was ten, Dro was already working in the fields. But, because he had shown some aptitude for learning, the landowner, much fairer than most, sent him twice a week into town, to be schooled.

The school was ramshackle. In winter, icicles formed high on the indoor beams under the attic where the roof leaked. The children would huddle around an iron pot with coals in it. There were fifty boys and about fifteen girls whose relatives thought them odd enough to need lessons. All but one of the girls were alien creatures, whose nurses always came with them. In winter, they brought their own iron firepots, too. The last girl was poor and came alone. She sat bolt upright in a clean ragged darned dress. Her hair was always clean, too, a long fair flag that hung down her back and onto the bench. The well-off little girls would not speak to her. They had remarked loudly to each other that she was a hussy, having no nurse to guard her. The poor girl remarked as loudly, to the air, that she, being virtuous and trustworthy, required no guard, as they plainly did.

Dro saw her twice a week, each of the two days that he came to the school, for three years. Then, one day when he was thirteen, he suddenly noticed her. She would play dice games with the boys, which she usually won, and run races with them, which sometimes she won. She would also climb trees, though not in company with the boys, for she expressed the opinion that this would be unseemly. The day Parl Dro noticed her was an evening in early summer. He came out into the field behind the school and saw her sitting in an apple tree. The sun spilled down her hair like molten honey. She was talking to herself, or to the birds, or the tree. He climbed an adjacent tree and sat and looked at her. She did not seem offended or abashed when she saw him. They began to converse quite easily. What they spoke about was unrecalled and meaningless. It might have been books or the state of the crops.

When he came back to the town on his next school day, he arrived early, and walked slowly by her house. It was a tiny hovel, held up mainly by two other hovels at either side of it. Yet it was the cleanest hovel for miles around. When she came out she did not seem amazed to see him. Her only kin was a grandmother, who that morning had been baking. The girl had two slices of warm crackling bread, spread with dripping, one of which she presented graciously to Parl with the compliments of the house.

She had a name, but he never called her by it. Her nickname, which her grandmother had given her for her hair, was “Silky.” Parl and the grandmother, but no one else, called her that.

Through the summer, they spent a lot of time together. Sometimes they played truant from the school. They roved about the hills. They talked of myths, legends bound up with the land, and ancient times when emperors had ruled empires there, and women with hot blood had ridden over it to battle. He showed her how to catch fish in the streams. She told him he was cruel to catch fish he did not need to eat. Later, when the grandmother suffered a setback in her meagre life style, Silky begged him to show her again how to catch fish. They took the catch back to the hovel together, the colour of river pebbles and fine to eat, particularly when starvation was the alternative. He stole bread for them, Silky and the grandmother, from the landowner’s ovens. When times grew fatter, Silky, by way of repayment, stole a knife for him from the steelsmith’s. Parl had a little trouble replacing it in the forge before it was missed. They were very young, and their sexuality was limited by their youth, their situation and their codes of honour regarding each other. But they learned certain lessons of fire together, light fierce kisses, the rapidity of a heartbeat, hands and bodies and the press of summer grass. There would have been more, if things had evolved differently.

When the harvest came due, the landowner called in all his workers to the fields. For three or four weeks, Parl would not see the school, the town, or Silky. They parted gravely, as if for a year, beneath the apple tree in the field behind the school.

The harvest went as it always did, which was back-breakingly, but well. The weather was hot and the sheaves like tinder, and men were posted to keep watch for fires. At night, Parl fell asleep in the open, the stars dazzling overhead. The air smelled of grapes and wine and scythed grain. Fireflies sprinkled the bushes. He hardly thought of Silky, comforted that he did not need to think of her, because she would be there for him when he returned.

In the last week of the harvest there was a storm. Roaring and trampling, it tore down on the fields like a gigantic animal. Great smacks of wind clapped the corn flat to the ground. Lightning drove steel bolts through the earth. A tree blazed up on a hill, exploding with white electric fire and noise.

They worked against the gale and the lightning. When the rain came, they worked against that. Purple and wailing in the wind, the fields surrendered themselves to destruction. The last of the harvest was taken by the storm.

Somehow worse than the material loss, the threat of reduced rations, cut wages, which must inevitably follow, was a primitive distress which fell over all of them. The storm was like some supernatural show of wrath, sent as if to punish them, as if to demonstrate that however settled life might seem, nothing was certain. It was no surprise to Parl when the landowner, riding by him through the sodden ruin of the stacks, tapped his shoulder. “No more school for you, boy. I’m sorry. I’ll need you here.”

It was another month before Parl could find the space or energy to make the two hours’ trek to the town. And then he had to set off two hours before sunrise, hoping he would not be missed when the other boys and men turned out soon after dawn. Probably he would get a beating. The idea of it seemed very distant. There had begun to be a feeling of depression, almost of fear inside him. In the swift importunate way of the young, he knew where salvation lay, and had come to care less and less for anything else.

He even ran some of the miles. The dawn was just a phantom smudge of light along the hills when he reached the town, the gate not even open. He did not wait for it, but climbed in at a place he knew of, illegal and urgent. Then, coming to the alley where the neat hovel sparkled between its far from immaculate supports, a sudden peculiar reluctance overcame him.

He loitered, undecided, on the street, until a woman came out of a door farther down, water bucket in hand. She glanced at him, and a half-startled look spread over her face. Something in the look unnerved him utterly, though why he did not know. He turned and ran.

He ran straight to the field that backed the dilapidated school. Again, he could not have said why, perhaps because it was a reference point, because he had come most often that way in the past.

In the field, he did not know what to do with himself. A dreadful uneasy restless exhaustion was coming over him. His hands buzzed and were full of nerves like needles. Insects seemed to crawl along his scalp, under the hair. Then, walking stupidly, he came on the apple tree and checked. It was still not quite true dawn, the sky silvery but nothing much lit up. For a moment the hideousness of the tree was more illusion than fact. As he was staring at it, he heard Silky’s voice call lightly across the twilight behind him.

He turned and there she was in her clean darned rags, her gossamer hair blowing.