Kill the Dead Page 10

  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 f
or 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.

  Dro kicked him in the side. Myal grunted softly, his hands falling over each other and back to the strings, playing on. Dro leaned and slapped him hard across the jaw. The music sheered off, and Myal threw himself into a sitting position, plainly terrified.

  “I haven’t done anything,” he cried, barely awake, the automatic protest of a hundred wrongful, and rightful, apprehensions and beatings.

  “Look across the ravine. Then tell me you haven’t done anything.”

  Myal started to look, and then would not “What is it?”

  “You asked me that on the previous occasion. The answer is the same as then.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Myal, refusing to look.

  Dro leaned down to him again, quiet and very dangerous.

  “Whether you believe it or not, she’s used you. You summoned her with the song. I take it it’s a song you composed for her. Now, tell me what else you stole from her corpse.”

  “Nothing!”

  “You insist I search you?”

  Myal slithered away backwards along the ground.

  “Leave me alone. I tell you, I didn’t bring anything, just her shoe–and you burned that.”

  “You didn’t remember the shoe at first. Think.”

  “I am thinking. There isn’t anything.”

  “There has to be something. She’s there. She needs a link to be there.”

  “Well, I haven’t got anything.”

  “Back away any farther,” said Dro, “and you’ll fall down the ravine.”

  Myal halted himself. He was about a foot from the brink. He hauled himself farther in and, warily watching Dro, stood up.

  “I still know I haven’t got anything else of hers.”

  “Then you picked something up without knowing it.”

  Myal looked as though he might glance across the ravine, but he switched his back to it again.

  “Why did she wait till dark?”

  “They need the darkness. It’s the only canvas they can draw their liars’ pictures on. Daylight is for truth.”

  “I’ve heard of ghosts being seen by daylight.” Dro ignored this. Ridiculously, inappropriately, with death just across the ravine, Myal insisted, “Well, I have."

  “It’s dark now,” Dro said, “and she’s there.”

  “Is she really?”

  “Look for yourself.”

  “No, I’ll take your word for it. I’m scared. I didn’t bring anything but the shoe. I haven’t...”

  “We’ll argue it out later.” Dro shifted as if searching for a firmer place to stand. “Tell me, are you right- or left-handed?”

  “Both,” said Myal. ‘To play that thing, you have to be.”

  “She,” said Dro, “was left-handed, what I recall of her, as any witch is inclined to train herself to be. That song you played her, have you got it straight in your head?”r />
  “You don’t want me to play it? You said—”

  “I want you to play it. Backwards.”

  “What?”

  “You heard. Can you do it?”

  “No,” Myal raised the instrument and studied it. “Maybe.”

  “Try.”

  “What happens if I succeed?”

  “You get a prize. Her kind are more superstitious even than the living. Reflection, inversion of any sort, might get a response. If it works, she’ll go away. Start.”

  Myal coughed nervously. He settled the instrument. Dro stared across the ravine.

  Abruptly Myal began to play furiously, the notes skittering off his fingers. Reversed, the melody was no longer poignant, but of a hideous and macabre jollity, a dance in hell.

  Myal, even over the sound of the strings, heard the sudden female laugh, high and clear as a bell. The noise almost froze his hands. The hair felt as if it rose on his head at a totally vertical and ridiculous angle. He shuddered.

  “All right,” Dro said, “stop now.”

  “Did it—Is she—?”

  “Yes. She’s gone.”

  For the first time, Myal cast a frantic glance across the ravine into the steeping of empty shadows.

  Even he could not hide from himself that it had been too easy. Far, far too easy.

  “Last night,” said Myal, “I didn’t see her then.”

  “No,” Dro said. He began to walk back along the ravine side toward the low throbbing on the poplar trunks that was the fire. Myal hung about, terrified of being left alone, but not attempting to follow. After a moment, Dro looked around at him. “We’ll be travelling together after all,” he said. “I need to keep an eye on you. In case you remember what it is you did to give her this power through you. The music helps. But it’s more than the music.”

  Myal held his ground. Angrily he said, “I told you I didn’t see her yesterday. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  Dro said, in that curious voice of his which carried so softly and so perfectly across the atmosphere of night, “What did you say to her when she was alive?”

  Myal’s thoughts poured over. The words stuck up sharp as flints. He wished they did not. He did not say them aloud.