Kill the Dead Page 11

  “If you want my advice... you’d run for it.”

  And she, “Where would I go?”

  And he, “Maybe—with me.”

  He did not say them aloud, but Dro seemed to read them off his guilty flinching face.

  “You’d better understand,” said Dro, “you didn’t see her last night, because you weren’t near me.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Myal. But he did.

  And, “Think about it,” Dro said. “You will.”

  Somehow Myal had given Ciddey a path back into the world, and she utilised him for that purpose. Myal was the means of her manifestation. But Dro, whom she hated, with whom she had a score to settle, Dro was the reason for her return. Now, while she had little strength, she might only trouble them. But when she grew stronger, when Myal, and her returning phases themselves, had fed her sufficiently—

  Dro reached the fire and began to put fresh wood on it. Myal went after him, uneasily skirting each dark thicket and shrub, looking often at the oak tree on the hill.

  But in the firelight, Myal relaxed somewhat. Dro had taken up again his position as watchman, though seated, his shoulders resting on a trunk.

  Myal sat on the grass, glad to be near the fire. Dro’s carven, seemingly immovable figure was a shield between Myal and the night.

  “How long are you going to watch?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Worry about remembering what you may have inadvertently picked up, whatever it is she’s using to come through. Rack your brains. It shouldn’t be hard with such a limited number.”

  Myal did not react to that. He was disorientated, so relieved to be no longer alone, he was almost happy. Eventually he asked, in a contrite voice, very aware of its inappropriate request: “You don’t have anything to eat, do you?”

  Myal emerged from a thicket, flicking burrs off his sleeves with pedantic elegance—the cover for embarrassment—lacing his shirt and hopping, half in his boots, half out.

  “I stripped and turned my clothes over.”

  Dro stood and looked at him.

  “I didn’t find anything that could have come from her. Nothing. Not even a hair.”

  “All right,” Dro turned away.

  “Of course, you don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you.”

  Brashly, Myal said, “Maybe she gave you something.”

  “All she gave me was a claw mark down the side of my face. Which has healed.”

  “Yes. Heal quickly, don’t you? Anything you can’t do?”

  They ate the portion of bread that was left and drank water from the spring. Myal felt a constant urge to apologise, and started to whistle to prevent himself. Then he became conscious he was whistling Ciddey’s song, and went cold to his groin.

  Dro started off with no apparent preparation, just rising and walking away. Myal uneasily followed, keeping to the rear, subservient, dog-like and self-hating.

  They moved along the side of the ravine, which narrowed and finally closed together. They picked a way down into a valley, and through the valley, and into another valley.

  The land had all the same smooth blankness. No smoke rose, there was no stone that had not fallen naturally upon another. There was not even a field which had gone to seed. Not even a ruin. If anyone had ever passed that way he had not lingered, and all trace had been obliterated.

  Myal grew jumpy with uneasiness. All his roaming had been at the periphery of towns, villages, courts. He was so ill-prepared for anything like this. He did not even have a bottle to collect drink from springs or streams, having lost the one he had had in an unsuccessful fight half a year before. That he had never thought to replace it was indicative of its unessential quality. Yet, he had gone searching for Ghyste Mortua. For Tulotef.

  Where had he first heard of it? Where had the notion of a song of the undead first caught his fancy? He could not recall.

  Now, in any case, he had no choice.

  And having dogged Dro, begging to accompany him, once Dro was determined that he should, Myal longed to run away. Though run where, and with what ghastly ghostly thing in pursuit?

  A wide escarpment floated up from the valley, long dusty concaves of parched and whitened grass, periodically steepled with dark green trees. Near the top, biscuit-coloured slashes and streaks of clay daunted Myal with their elevation. Yesterday’s ride had knotted the muscles of his legs. At first he had walked the stiffness out. Gradually, it was returning.

  Some early currants were beaded along a wild fruiting hedge. Myal tore them off and ate them ravenously. Then he gathered others and advanced on Dro, catching him up for the first time, and offering the gift ingratiatingly.

  Rather to Myal’s surprise, Dro accepted the currants and ate them, as if he had not noticed them himself.

  “It’s past noon. When do we rest?” wondered Myal.

  “Come now,” said Dro, very nearly playfully, “you’re not bored with this lovely bracing walk we’re having?”

  “It beats me why you don’t ride with that–with your–well, it beats me. You could afford a horse.”

  “If I started riding, I’d cease being able to walk anywhere again,” said Dro. “The only way I can keep the damn thing from seizing up forever is to work the hell out of it most days.”

  “Oh.” Awarded this personal revelation, Myal felt pleased and almost flattered. Emboldened, he said, “You seem to know the direct route to Tulotef.”

  “I practically do. But leave the name alone. Why do you think it got a nickname instead?”

  “That other thing,” said Myal, “the girl–”

  “No,” Parl Dro said. “Leave that alone, too.”

  Puzzled and insecure, Myal did as he was told.

  The escarpment went on, up and up. Looking back, the descending lands they had negotiated earlier had become another country, ethereal and far away, perhaps impossible to regain.

  Myal’s mother had died six months after his birth. Another mistake, getting himself born to a woman who died, probably because of him. Inadvertent matricide thereby added to his crimes. He had been brought up, or dragged up, by the bestial father. At twelve he had run away. He was still running. Still thieving too; his first proper theft had been the stringed instrument–the second time it had been stolen. Before that he had only attempted small robberies, at his strap-wielding father’s suggestion.

  When the sun fell, and the light began to go, and they were still climbing the inward-curving upland they had first got on to an hour before noon, the analogy of life itself as a hopeless climb occurred to Myal. Though they had rested somewhere, under trees, for a while, his back and his legs screamed. He could not understand how Dro, the cripple, kept going with such seeming indifference, with such a peculiar lurching grace. Myal began to think Dro forced himself on merely in order to spite his companion.

  If I stop dead, what then?

  Myal stopped dead. Dro did not appear to note the cessation. He went on, walking up into the forerunning brushwork of the dusk.

  “Hey!” Myal yelled. “Hey!”

  A bird shot out of a tree. Dro stopped, but did not turn. Myal shouted up at him, “I’m not going any farther. It’s getting dark.”

  Then he realized Dro had not stopped because of any of his shouts.

  Absurdly, ordered to leave the subject alone, Myal had almost succeeded in wiping it from his mind. A feeling of apprehension which came with the fading of day could be interpreted simply as normal antipathy to another night on hard ground, with possibilities of foraging bears and no supper. Ciddey Soban had been pushed into a corner of Myal’s consciousness. He had not wanted to dwell on her.

  But now he recollected, and with good reason.

  Dro was in front of him, about fifty feet away. Perhaps forty feet ahead of Dro a girl was stepping nimbly up the slope. She did not turn, or hesitate, or threaten, or mock. She was only there, walking, pale as a new star. Ciddey. Terrible, unshakable Ciddey.

  Myal swallowed his heart as a matte
r of course. He went after Dro, prowling, delicate, as if travelling across thin ice. If the girl-ghost turned, he was ready to freeze, change into a tree, dive down a hole—

  She did not turn.

  He reached Dro. Through the closing curtains of darkness Myal peered at the ghost-killer’s impassive face.

  “It’s not my fault,” Myal whispered.

  Dro did not whisper, though he spoke softly.

  “Maybe. She shouldn’t be able to manifest without a link. There doesn’t appear to be one. But she’s there.”

  “Do you want me to play the song upside down again?”

  “No. I don’t think there’s much point. I’d say she only left last time out of a kind of scornful sense of etiquette.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Follow her. That’s her intention. We might learn something by falling in with it.”

  “Where’s—where’s she going?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “Tulo—the Ghyste.”

  “The Ghyste. She’d know the road. That’s not illogical.”

  “In every story I ever heard,” said Myal, “a vengeful spirit pursues, it doesn’t lead. Suppose she stops?”

  “Shut up,” Dro said, still softly. “Start walking.”

  Myal, forgetting the burning ache in his muscles, walked. They both walked, and Ciddey Soban, not turning, walked before them, into the black cavern of night.

  And then the black cavern of night parted seamlessly to let her through, and she was gone.

  At first they waited, glancing about for her. Trees grouped together on the slope ahead, hiding what lay beyond. After an unspeaking minute, they went on and through the trees. Nothing stirred, the dark was empty once more. At the edge of the trees, the ground levelled and brimmed over into a great velvet moonless void, like the end of the world, but which was most probably woods.

  They looked down at it.

  “She’s gone,” announced Myal. He thought of something. “If she used me to come through, I didn’t feel it this time, or last. Only that time in the priests’ hostel, when I was sick.”

  “You’re getting accustomed to giving her energy, that’s why. That’s when it becomes most dangerous.”

  “Thanks. I feel so much happier now.”

  Myal sat on the turf, put his arms across his knees and his head on his arms. Despite his words, he was exhausted, and dully afraid.

  “We’ll see the night out here,” said Dro.

  “What stupendous fun.”

  “I mean to watch for three hours. Then it’s your turn.”

  “I’m not watching. I might see something and scare myself to death.”

  “If you see anything, you wake me. You’re watching.”

  “All right. I’m watching.”

  An hour later, the moon came up in a long stream of cloud.

  Myal was twitchily asleep. Dro stared across the land, keeping quite incredibly motionless, seldom blinking, as if it were his curse, as with certain guardians in myth, to watch forever.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Oh, Myal,” said a girl, licking his ear tenderly. “Oh, Myalmyalmyal.”

  Myal woke up, already excited and apprehensive.

  “Someone call?”

  “Oh, Myal,” said the girl. “Ohmyal.”

  She lay on her elbow at his side. Her ash-blonde hair fell across both their faces. He knew who it was, and wondered why he was not petrified. Then it came to him. The simple, obvious solution. Dro had been mistaken, and so had Myal himself. Ciddey was not dead.

  When he had dragged her out of the water, he had saved her, just as he desperately meant to do. That she had not revived at once was not utterly surprising. He had been wrong about the strangulated face—a trick of light, and his alarm, the impending fever. No, Ciddey lived, and she had somehow caught them up. She was playing with Dro, punishing him. But she had decided to reveal the truth to Myal, who had rescued her.

  “You’re not dead,” he murmured, vocalising his thoughts.

  “You say the nicest things.” She kissed his cheek lightly.

  He shivered, with pleasure and nervousness. And then it occurred to him to look about for Parl Dro. Presently he located a dark inconclusive shape, stretched across the base of a tree, which had to be Dro. So much for watching. Or... had it been Myal’s watch, and had Myal fallen asleep?

  “I want you to come with me,” said Ciddey Soban, touching him once more with her real live icy lips.

  “Well, I really ought—”

  “Don’t argue. You know you like me. Let’s go for a walk together. Wouldn’t you like that? Down into the wood. It isn’t far.”

  “Well, all right.”

  He had gone walking in a wood with the Gray Duke’s daughter. The walk had ended in a pile of leaves, and ultimately, a few months later, in an escape by night, with thirty of the Duke’s men, drunken and murderous and equipped with mastiffs, in headlong pursuit. Somehow, Myal had got away. Somehow, he always did. Maybe he was not so unlucky as he generally believed himself.

  With feigned debonair nonchalance, he let the girl draw him, by her small cold hand, down the slope. Almost inadvertently, he had slung on the instrument as he came to his feet. Now, as they picked their way among roots and channels in the earth, the weight of the wood unbalanced him, and he and she would bump into each other, which was not necessarily displeasing. Minute by minute, Myal grew more excited and more apprehensive. By the time they entered the first arching avenues of the woods that walled the end of the slope, he was feverish and stupidly laughing, clinging to the girl whenever he could, his heart noisy in his ears, an awful leaden murmur of warning droning, ignored, in the pit of his brain.

  She, too, undrowned Ciddey, seemed a little fevered. In the soft, faintly luminescent cave of the wood, she turned and embraced him. The long, long kiss was cold and marvellous. Their bodies melted into one another and clamoured never to draw away. In the act of sex, they might literally be turned into a quivering, gasping, ever-orgasmic tree.

  But then she broke away, teasing him. She laughed, and ran off along the aisle of living columns. He ran after her, naturally. The shadows of trunks striped over her paleness, so she seemed to flare on and off like a windblown lamp. Then suddenly she disappeared.

  He had forgotten the supernormal aspect of her former visitations, and dashed toward the spot where she had been, calling her name, partly in anger, and partly because he knew she had meant him to. She would make him desperate, flaunt, tease, elude. When he had reached a stage of sufficient confusion and actual physical discomfort, she would give in.

  In a moment, he found her. She had elaborated upon the process of teasing and eluding and flaunting to a unique degree.

  A pool lay amid the trees, black and shiny as a slice of highly polished night sky fallen down there. Glancing up, sure enough there was half a white hole in heaven where the piece of sky had come away.

  The moon burned on Ciddey at the pool’s centre, standing in the water, which coiled passively about her knees. She seemed to have grown from the pool, a slender stem, with a flower of face. Her hair was wet, darkened by water at its ends, but she peeled it from her and draped it behind her shoulders. Her dress was all wet and had grown thin and transparent as paper, so he saw her nakedness through it, smokily, unmistakably. Her lips were parted, and smiling, and her eyes heavy. She beckoned to him, urgent as the urgency that now was stabbing through him. Even so, he hesitated, eager to get to her, but not liking the sheen of the water, so cold, so oddly still though she rose from it, smoothing her hair, stirring her limbs a little, beckoning.

  “In there?” he asked, hoarse and stupid.

  “Yes, oh, yes,” she moaned.

  At her voice a pang went through him so great that he could no longer bear to keep away. He splashed into the water, clenching his teeth and fists at the cold of it He thought, in an ecstasy of frustration, she might start to move away from him again as he got closer, but instead she straine
d her arms to him, though not moving her feet, as if she could not, as if they had grown into the sucking mud on the pool’s floor.

  He reached her abruptly, and grabbed her. The instrument thumped him on the back. Congratulations. As her snake-like arms curled around him, he knew a moment’s horror of the inevitable aftermath, the entanglement, the trap, the complications, but the horror could not keep pace with the anguish of pleasure. The second horror—the possibility of disappointing, failing—had yet to come. It might ruin the supreme moments, or everything might be well, but as yet he did not care. Even the dreary nervous consideration as to how they would manage, nowhere to lie or lean, only the mud and the water underfoot, had not yet taken hold.

  Groaning, he submerged, arms, eyes, flesh, mind, full of the girl. All his sight was paleness and darkness, and he could only smell fragrant skin and hair. Her pressure against him was unendurable and he would die without it, and his hands made magic, passing over her, and hers magic in his hair, along his sides, locking him with a fierce strength into the single position he wished to obtain, retain, remain in, cry out in, perish in—

  The water exploded.

  Thunder caught him by the hair, the shoulder. He was dragged backward. Where he had adhered to her, his body seemed to tear like rent cloth. He yelled insanely, hearing himself. He flailed with his empty arms, sprawled, went down. Water sprang over his head; he gulped it, trying to drink his way back to the air. Something pulled him from the water, turned him. A savage clout across the head rocked him. He half fell again into another hard resilient mass, which in turn dragged him once more.

  Crowing for breath, blinded, crazy, he landed on his knees on iron-like earth. He hung his head and coughed water. And the instrument also coughed water from its sound box. As his eyes cleared, he beheld four slender horse legs, shod in metal, pecking at the soil in front of him. And behind those, another four, and another four.