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  He paused a moment, letting her words hang. Then he said, pitching his own voice to carry level and clear, “Can’t I draw a drink of water from your well, first? I did knock. I thought there was no one home.”

  He had a beautiful voice, marvellous diction that often worked like a charm on people, particularly women. Not on this one.

  “Get out, I said. Now!”

  He paused again, then let the handle go abruptly. The chain unwound with a screech and the bucket plummeted under. He did it to startle her, and so it did. The seventh sense was alert as a nerve, bristling. He walked around the well and back toward the door, toward her. He wanted to be sure, and that meant eliminating other explanations for her unfriendliness. As he went, he slipped the hood off his head. As he walked slowly, his lameness was minimized, and he was graceful. He kept his hands loose, free of the mantle, showing he had no weapon ready or considered.

  Parl Dro was a remarkable looking man. Not as young, maybe, as he had been ten years before, but with an extraordinary handsomeness that had laid a velvety sombre bloom across a concert of strong features. Lips and nose, cheekbones and jaw were those of some legendary emperor on a coin. The eyes, with their fabulous impenetrable blackness, were an exact match with the long straight black fringes of hair. Characteristics, both physical and immaterial, hinted a zodiacal latitude somewhere between the earth sign of the bull and the fire sign of the serpent.

  As he strolled into the light of the small lamp, the girl must see all this. See, too, the slightly cold and acid twist to the mouth that dismissed sexual immoderation and therefore threat of it, the invisible yet quite precisely ruled line that seemed to link the balance of both eyes—a mark of calculation, intelligence and control above and beyond the normal. Only a fool would judge this man robber, rapist or similar practitioner. And the girl did not seem to be a fool. Yet she was afraid, and menacing. And remained so.

  As suddenly as she had thrown open the door, she slashed out with the knife in her hand.

  Parl Dro stepped back, a sloping lame man’s step, but perfectly timed, and the blade carved the air an inch from his side. He was somewhat above average height, and the girl not tall. She had been aiming as close to his heart as she could.

  “Now will you take yourself off!” she cried, in a panic apparently at her own intentions as much as the missed stroke. “You’re not welcome.”

  “Obviously.”

  He stood beyond her range, continuing to look at her.

  “What do you want?” she spat at last.

  “I told you. A drink of water.”

  “You don’t want water.”

  “How odd. I thought I did. Thank you for putting me right.”

  She blinked. Her long lashes were almost gray, her eyes a hot, dry tindery color, nearly green, not quite.

  “Don’t try word games with me. Just go. Or I’ll call the dogs.”

  “You mean those dogs I’ve heard snarling and barking ever since I came through the gate.”

  At that, she flung the knife right at him. It was a wide cast, after all; he judged as much and let it come by. It brushed his sleeve and clattered against the side of the well. He had had much worse to deal with a few days back.

  “Too bad,” he said. “You should practice more.”

  He turned and walked off and left her poised there, staring. At the gate he hesitated and glanced around. She had not moved. She would be shocked, but also dreaming that she had got rid of him. It was too soon for that.

  “Perhaps,” he called, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Leaving her knife lying by the well, she flashed back into the house and slammed the door. In the stillness, he heard the sound of bolts.

  He pulled the hood over his head.

  His face was grim and meditative as he turned again onto the road and started toward the village.

  The village was like a hundred others. One broad central street which branched straight off the road. The central street had a central watercourse, a stream, natural or connived, that carried off the sewage, and in which strange phosphorescent fish swam by night. Stepping stones crossed the water at intervals, and at other intervals alleys as narrow as needles ran between the houses. Most of the buildings facing on the main thoroughfare were shops, their open fronts nocturnally fenced in by locked gates. Houses on the thoroughfare had blind walls, keeping their windows to the rear, save for the rare slit that dropped a slender bar of yellow gold onto the ground.

  The three inns, however, made up in light and noise what the village, mute and dark amid its grain fields and orchards and the vineyard scent of late summer, otherwise lacked.

  The first inn Dro bypassed. It was too loud and largely too active for his requirements. The second inn was but two doors away, and plainly served also as the village brothel. There had been enough trouble with women. As he went by, a sly-eyed curly girl shouted from the open entrance the immemorial invitation, and, when he ignored her, screamed an insult connecting virility, or lack of it, to a limp. That made him smile a moment. The final inn stood on a corner formed by the central street and an adjacent alley. It too was loud and bright, but to a lesser degree. He found the writing on the sign was virtually illegible. The door was also shut, as if to say: I am not actually inviting any of you to enter.

  When Dro pushed the door wide enough to be admitted, the entire roomful of occupants turned to see who was coming in. Their reaction on learning was disturbed, but vague.

  Parl Dro’s fame, or perhaps infamy, tended to precede him. It was quite probable some here would surmise his identity. It seemed likely the girl in the leaning house had done so. But if the diners and drinkers of this inn divined who had come among them, they were not eager, or had no reason, to act upon it. Even the singing, which was concentrated at the far end of the room, about the hearth and its cumbersomely turning spits, had not faltered.

  Dro let the door reel shut behind him. He stood a few extra seconds, allowing more determined gawpers to satisfy themselves. Then he walked, slow and scarcely lame, quietly to one of the long tables. As he seated himself, the slightest, softest, most involuntary of sighs escaped him as the turmoil in the crippled leg subsided to mere pain.

  The others seated at the table shifted, like grass touched by a breeze, and resettled. They eyed each other over their cups and bowls, the bones they were chewing, the cards or dice or riddle-blocks they were gaming with. An elderly looking boy in a leather apron came up, a meat knife through his belt, a bottle and cup in his hand.

  “What’ll you have?”

  “Whatever there is.”

  “There’s this,” said the boy. He dumped the cup on the table and poured a rough glycerine alcohol into it from the bottle. “And that,” he added, pointing to the spits, the stew pot, the shelves of hot loaves and baking onions stacked over them.

  “Don’t waste your time,” said one of the gamesters at the table. “He doesn’t eat.” He picked up and showed the card he had just dealt. It was the King of Swords, its four black points painted on like thorns, the hooded high- crowned monarch brooding between them. The death card, Bad Luck.

  “He means,” explained the elderly boy, “you look like Death.”

  “I certainly feel like it,” said Dro. He pushed off his hood, picked up the cup and drained it. “The third of a loaf,” he elaborated to the boy, “and a couple of slices of that sheep you’re burning over the fire.”

  “We always burn the sheep here,” said the boy wittily, “to be sure they’re properly dead before you eat them.”

  “I’m relieved you take the same precautions with the bread.”

  Somebody laughed. Somebody else mimed a man trying to acquire a bite out of a live loaf. The boy filled Dro’s cup again and went off to the hearth, shouldering his way, murderously flourishing the meat knife, through the singers. As some of the raucous chorus broke off, Dro caught a couple of bars of perfect music, sheer and fine as a shining fish glancing through river mud. The sources of the music w
ere firstly strings, tuned high as clouds, then suddenly also a pipe tuned even higher. Dro partly inclined his head, waiting for the next exquisite bar, but the howling song started up again and the music submerged in it.

  The boy was back and slapped down a platter.

  “Stick this fork in it. If it goes baaa, I’ll put it back on the spit for a while.”

  Dro pierced the mutton with the fork and a dozen voices bleated along the length of the table.

  “Better fetch the shepherd,” said Dro, “before the wolf gets his flock.”

  He began to eat, economically. A little silence gathered.

  Eventually someone said: “It’d be a lame wolf, wouldn’t it?”

  A neighbour jogged his elbow. “Shut up, idiot. I recognize who he is now.”

  “Yes,” said another. “And I do, too. I thought he was a legend.”

  Dro went on economically eating.

  One of the men said to him: “We’ve guessed who you are.”

  Dro sat back and smiled enigmatically at no one. “Am I to be the last to know?”

  They shuffled. Somebody said, as somebody always said, “Don’t think I want to share this table with you.”

  But none of them moved away. Indeed, one or two more were edging over from other parts of the room, drawn as if to the scene of a lurid crime.

  Dro went on eating and drinking, slow, and oddly isolated from the whirlpool he was creating. He was as used to this as to rough ground, as to the pain that walked with him. Used to it, and able now and then to use it in turn.

  The remarks came gently, cautiously, laying ripples of emotion over the warm air.

  “What do you think of yourself, doing what you do?”

  “How do you sleep nights?”

  “He sleeps all right. There’ll be plenty with cause to thank him.”

  “And plenty who won’t thank him.”

  “Plenty who curse him, eh, Ghost-Killer? How many curses fly down the roads with you? Is that what keeps you looking young?”

  “You were lamed by a malediction, isn’t that so?”

  “No. Not that way. One of his victims stuck a claw in him at the gate out. He hasn’t aged since then.”

  All around the spinning currents of these unanswered sallies, the room grew quieter and quieter. Dro heard the singing fade out, but the music went out too. He did not look about, just waited for the cue that must inevitably come. He finished what he wanted of his meal, and was drinking the last stinging mouthful from his cup when the cue dropped into the pool.

  “Well, you’ve had a wasted journey to this place, Parl Dro. We haven’t any deadalive here.”

  “Oh, but you’re wrong,” he said, and they jumped at his immaculate voice, which had been silent such a while. “Half a mile back along the road. The leaning house with the stone tower.”

  He could have portioned the silence with the boy’s meat knife after he said that. It was not exactly that they knew and had been withholding it from him, more that they had suspected, and the confirmation chilled them. Of course, there was no need to tell them it had been another place he was making for altogether, that this was an unscheduled task.

  The first of the men who had baa-ed, said very low, “He means the Soban house.”

  Another of the men added, “That’s Ciddey’s house. There’s nothing there. Except poverty, a little kiss of madness.”

  The boy in the leather apron was at Dro’s shoulder, leaning to refill Dro’s cup. Dro put his hand over the cup. The boy poured words instead.

  “The Sobans were the masters here five years ago. Old Soban and his two daughters. But they lost their money and the village bought the land.”

  “They lost their money because the father drank it. He was drinking it before Ciddey was old enough to bite.”

  “Then he’d sell things,” said the first man. “Botched-up rubbish—ridiculous stuff.”

  “There was a wonderful thing, supposed to come from some foreign place, wasn’t there? And it was just a couple of old scythes welded together. He’d get the smith to help him, Soban would. The carpenter, the mason. Everyone—”

  “Someone told me,” said another of the men, “he sold Ciddey’s baby teeth as a charm necklace.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Ciddey’s crazy too. Pity, because she’s nice-looking enough. We leave her to herself, for old time’s sake. She lives alone in that house.”

  “Not quite alone,” said Dro.

  “The father drank himself into the graveyard years before,” the first man said. “Do you mean him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “There was a story,” said the first man. “The girls played about with herbs. Witch charms, poisons maybe. They got sick of the father drinking and... saw to him.”

  “And that’s a lie,” said someone.

  Dro was aware of the singing group detaching itself from the hearth and swarming over. The minstrel who had played the exquisite music was beginning to appear in fragments, now a threadbare red sleeve, now a dirty green sleeve, now a dark gold head and a long nose, between the shoulders and gesticulations of the crowd.

  They were excited, and nervous. An event was happening in the midst of uneventfulness. The musician, staying clear, carefully keeping his head down over retuning the peculiar instrument beside the spits, showed a desire to remain uninvolved, and thereby a derivation not of this village.

  “There was the second daughter,” someone said finally, just behind Dro’s left ear.

  “Ciddey’s sister? Nothing funny there.”

  “Yes, there was. Didn’t Cilny Soban run off and drown herself in the stream the north side of the mountain? Not exactly what I’d call normal.”

  “It’s true, Parl Dro,” the elderly boy said. “Two herders found her in the morning when they were taking the cows up to graze.”

  “Cilny was lying at the bottom of the stream, she was,” said the first man dolefully, “but the water’s so clear in the spring you could see straight through. One of the boys is a bit simple. He thought she was a water spirit, lying there in her nightgown, with a wreath of flowers on her head and fish swimming about in her hair.”

  “What do you think of that, eh, Parl Ghost-Killer?”

  Dro removed his hand from the cup and let the boy fill it again. The crowd had got itself well into the informative stage, anxious to elicit a response from him. They had commenced pressing rumour and snippets of memory on him like gifts, waiting for him to crow. But the King of Swords merely sat and brooded, letting them heap the platter.

  They were putting great emphasis on the stresses of the girls’ two names, telling him now how Sidd-dayy and Sill-nee had been, loving and near one hour, at each other’s throats the next. Once or twice, one sister might look at a village man, and then the other sister would go wild, shrieking that such a wooing, let alone marriage, was beneath the Soban blood. When Cilny had made away with herself the previous spring, nobody had dropped down in a fit of surprise. When Ciddey demanded the corpse be burned not buried and the ashes delivered to her in a stone pot, not even the priest had had much to say. The Sobans had always been a pagan tribe, amoral and unstable. Since the death of Cilny, Ciddey was rarely seen. Sometimes, someone might spot her by night, walking along the slopes below the mountain, or up in the tower window, staring out. In her pig-headed way, just like her father, she expected the village to put food and other essentials at her gate, free of charge, its tithe to her house. With a self-deprecating amused grimace, between shame and pride, the village admitted that it did so. Nobody had actually considered whether drowned Cilny might come back to haunt. But now that they did consider, they would not be amazed if she had.

  Dro sipped from the third cup.

  The stream-death might explain the ambience at the well, the pulse of supernatural force linked to water. The pot of cremated ashes was significant. It was coming time to reward the crowd with a reaction, and then to damp their fire. As he sat, picturing the flowe
r-wreathed water maiden stretched under the glassy stream, he became aware that the musician had moved from the hearth, and was after all stealing closer. He slid through and into the crowd with a very practiced ease, attracting small notice. Intrigued but not astonished, Dro kept still.

  “What do you say, Parl Dro?” the boy in the apron asked.

  “I say there’s a ghost at the leaning house,” Dro said, virtually what he had said at the start, but a little eddy of satisfaction drifted up. The musician, instrument across his back now, was filtering through the throng like a curl of colour-stained steam.

  “What’ll you do?”