Kill the Dead Read online

  The fire was low. A crimson branch had broken open, whistling as the sap bled from it. The fortress wall hid the lights of the village from Parl Dro the man. Only the mild passage of the river at its summer low was audible, and sometimes a treacly chorus of frogs.

  He was thinking the endlessly repeated question. Did I simply curtail her dead-life because she would have robbed me of my human one?

  The answer came, as it always did, soothing him, never quite enough: He had not destroyed her in rage, not even merely in terror. He had grasped, or some part of him had, that this thing which would murder him, for whatever reason, could only be an echo, and a defiled echo at that, of the girl he had been companion to, the girl who had had such rights to love, whose human life he would have equated with his own. Wherever she had gone to, she had gone away from being that, that parody of herself.

  The moon was up. A vixen screamed, miles off. He heard the muffled scrunch of a boot scraping on the brick causeway he had crossed hours earlier.

  The imperative present had arrived.

  Parl Dro sat, back to the wall, not moving. The meadow contained the footsteps which would now be negotiating it. Once there was a brief stumble. If he had not known, Dro might have taken it for some night beast tussling with rival or prey in the grass. Then the feet shambled over the uneven ground where the outer walls had come down. The stumbling was very evident now. Abruptly a voice cried out to him.

  “Dro! Parl Dro! Are you here?”

  Pitching his voice to carry as well, or better, than that cry, Dro said, “I’m here, Myal Lemyal.”

  The feet erupted into an uncertain gallop. Suddenly, around the wall, the musician careered into view. His face was dead white, his eyes appeared as black as Dro’s. His hair streaked his forehead, plastered with sweat, and his sleeves flapped absurdly. Seeing Dro directly in front of him, he checked.

  “So you’re here.”

  “Unless, of course, you’re imagining me.”

  Myal Lemyal jerked his head crazily. He drew the instrument off his shoulders and laid it carefully down. Then, with a hoarse bleak howl, he ran through the fire at Dro. There was a sharp stone in his right hand, the other was a stranglehold aimed for Dro’s neck.

  Dro came to his feet, lightly and without hesitation, as if both legs were whole and worked on springs. As Myal collided with him, Dro was no longer there. Myal hit the wall with a frustrated moan. Turning awkwardly, he made a clutch for Dro’s sleeve. Dro allowed him to grab the sleeve. Myal raised the stone to smash it into Dro’s face. The face was intent, yet somehow uninvolved. The stone dived forward and came away from Myal’s hand uselessly. It whirred into the dark beyond the fire. They both heard it slam against another wall. The impetus of the abortive cast swung Myal over with it. He collapsed, tumbling against Dro, who caught him.

  “I’ll kill you,” mumbled Myal, his head on Dro’s shoulder. “You murdering bastard. I will. I’ll kill you. I will.”

  “Of course you will.”

  Dro let him down gently to the ground. Myal sprawled there. He shook in uncontrollable waves of fury and fever, rolling almost into the fire. Dro rolled him back. Searing heat came through Myal’s clothes. He was a furnace.

  “I’ll tear out your insides and tie them around your throat,” the furnace said to him. “In a bow.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Don’t know. I found you. I want to kill you. I came all this way to kill you. Why won’t you come over here and let me do it? Damn you, I came all this way.” Myal began to cry. “I can’t do anything right, I never could.” He buried his head in his arms. He cried as if his heart would shatter. Presently he said, “Don’t beat me. Don’t use the strap on me. Don’t.” Dro pulled more branches across and piled them on the fire. The flames soared up, and Myal lay still on his side, watching them with the tears running sideways out of his eyes and into his hair.

  “Next time,” he said, “next time, I’ll get it right. Don’t hit me, Daddy.”

  “No one’s going to hit you,” Dro said.

  “You will,” Myal said, “I know you. You will, Daddy, when you’ve finished that skinful of beer.”

  Dro sat and looked at him. The shaking fit was gradually passing off. Myal stared at the fire, delirious, objective.

  “It’s easy to follow you,” he said after a while. “You leave a kind of shadow behind you. I can’t see it with my eyes, but I know it’s there. I can find you simple as breathe.”

  “In other words, you’re gifted with powers beyond the normal.”

  “Lend me your knife,” Myal said slowly. “I can kill you with it. It won’t take a minute. I’ll clean it after.”

  Myal’s eyes shut. He sighed.

  “You ought to be exterminated,” he murmured. “I never had a big brother, someone to look up to. Someone I could kill.”

  “Go to sleep,” Dro said.

  “I wish I was dead.”

  “I wish you were, too.”

  Myal laughed.

  “Did I ever tell you about the Gray Duke’s daughter—?”

  He slept, relaxed, comforted, across the fire from the man he had come to kill.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Gray Duke’s daughter had made eyes at Myal. He had been flattered and afraid of her. She sidled up to him now with a wreath of lemon asphodel on her pale hair. Water ran out of her clothes and she was barefoot.

  “Get up,” she said, “you have only to walk twenty paces.” Her voice was wrong. It was dark and clear and very definitely masculine.

  “I don’t want to get up,” said Myal. “I don’t want to walk.”

  “Yes you do,” said the voice. The Duke’s daughter had gone. Death, the King of Swords, was wrapping Myal in a blanket. The musical instrument was on Myal’s shoulder and was being wrapped in the blanket too. Death was handsome, older by ten or twelve years, or maybe more, than Myal, and he had one scratched cheek. Women scratched. Down the back if they were in bed with you, on the face if they would not, or you would not, and they were angry.

  “I see she got you, then,” said Myal conversationally, “marked you. I’m glad she did.” He was not sure whom he meant. He was standing now but he had no legs. He was balanced on two columns of paper, which gradually buckled. Death grasped him. They began to walk. “You won’t get rid of me that easily,” said Myal.

  “I’m afraid I will.”

  They were in the open. An awful cold, or heat, smote Myal, disintegrating him. He fell forward dying, not caring that he died.

  After a while, he was not dead. He was lying over the back of a small horse, watching the ground—high grasses, small stones, wild flowers—jog by between its hoofs. On the other side from his dangling face, upside down, two long black-booted legs walked, unevenly, and a black mantle swung.

  “Where are we going?” asked Myal. He was having a lucid moment, he was fairly sure. He could tell the lucid moments, because they were the moments when he felt most ill. Yesterday—or had it been longer?—he had followed Parl Dro into the east. To start with, he had assumed Dro would stick to the road. Then, when Myal reached the track, he had been perplexed. It looked raw going for a lame man. On the other hand, the road ran off to the south. Stories of Ghyste Mortua tended to locate it east or north of east. By then, the itching, gnawing discomforts of Myal’s body had turned into a bright blaze. Though his head ached, he felt intelligent and eager for some kind of action. His unformed fantasies of murdering Dro, gray and sickening before, had grown courageous, inspiring. He bolted off onto the track almost without thinking. After sunset, lost in the wood, he shouted at the trees. But Dro seemed to have left an imprint of his warped and blackened soul on them, which, as the fever worsened, slowly emerged.

  When Myal saw the red spirit of the fire rising in a thin streamer from the fortress over the marsh, he picked up a sharp stone from the wayside. But something had gone wrong. Something always went wrong.

  “Ciddey,” he said to the ground.

  �
��That’s your reason, is it?” said the King of Swords.

  Myal looked at the king’s boots.

  “She was very young to die,” Myal said sentimentally. Tears ran out of his eyes. As each tear formed it blinded him, and then his sight returned as the drops dropped straight from the sockets onto the turf. One hit the upturned face of a flower. He could imagine it thinking: Ah! Now I have to contend with salt rain.

  “If you’d just left them alone,” Myal said. “She put her shoes on the bank. She fell back in the water. I tried to get to her, but when I got her out she was dead.”

  He abandoned himself once more to the fever. He lay, wrapped in misery, waiting for his consciousness mercifully to go out again. Then King Death was shaking him. Or seemed to be. The horse had stopped.

  “What did you say?”

  “What did I say? Don’t know. You sure I said anything? Maybe just a delirious babble. You shouldn’t take me too seriously–”

  “Ciddey Soban. Are you telling me she’s dead?”

  “Oh,” Myal yawned. Fresh tears dropped from his eyes. “She drowned herself. It was your fault, you damned bastard.”

  But something about Dro’s voice, though quite flat, quite expressionless, brought Myal to the realisation that of course the Ghost-Killer could not have known till now about Ciddey. It would have been stupid, after all, to slaughter a man for a crime he was unaware of having committed.

  “With her sister gone, she had nothing left to live for,” Myal explained.

  Dro stood, looking away into the spaces of the morning. By twisting his head, Myal could see him, but it was too much of an effort to retain this position. Eventually Dro said,

  “I’m glad for your sake your music isn’t as trite as your dialogue.”

  The horse began to move again.

  Myal sang the song he had made for Ciddey Soban, quietly, to the ground, until he fainted.

  The hostelry was one of seven, but the only such place in the river village run by priests. The religious building stood off to one side, a whitewashed tower and wooden belfry piled on top of it. The hostel itself stood within a compound, a single lone story of old brick. The priests came through a wicket gate into the compound to draw water at the well. Olive trees clawed in over the wall. There was a smell of the oil press, and of horses. Dro had hired the horse and the blanket from the priests. They were the only hospitalers in the district who would take in a sick man and care for him. Dro had been down at first light and found this out. And even the priests wanted paying. As he came through the dawn village and saw them, busy in their gardens and orchards, fishing in a pool, scurrying about with washing and baking, horses and dogs and cages of fowl, he wondered when, if ever, they made time to pray.

  When he got back to the fortress, leading the horse for Myal, Myal was obviously too sick to travel over the meadow and the causeway and along the village street.

  It was a sort of fever Dro had seen before, coming and going in tides. He waited for the next low tide, then hauled Myal into the meadow and shovelled him on the horse. It was almost noon by then.

  Dro’s plan had been straightforward. To offload the musician on the priests with enough cash to see ailment and convalescence out. That cancelled all guilts, real or invented; Dro could return to his interrupted journey. That was the original plan. Myal’s news altered things. If it were true. A delirious man might conjure innumerable dreams, believing each and all of them. But that was an insufficient blind. The sense in Parl Dro which judged such things had already credited the death of Ciddey Soban. Her death, and the ominous lacuna which followed it: the fact his premonitions had foreshadowed.

  The holy brothers had a stretcher ready at the compound gate. Three of them lifted Myal and laid him on the stretcher and carried him into the single-story hostel.

  Dro stood outside the open door, looking through into a room divided by wooden screens and shafts of sunlight. Bed frames were stacked in a corner. One bed had been prepared.

  The colour of the order was cream, the same colour as the faded whitewashed walls. Everything blended, brick and linen and men, into a positively supernal luminescence. Myal might come to and think himself in some bizarre afterlife peopled by ugly angels.

  One of the angels glided up to the man in black.

  “An act of laudable charity, my son,” said the priest, who was far younger than Dro. “To bring in the sick traveller and to pay for his lodging. Rest assured, your piety will not go unnoticed.”

  “Really? I thought I’d been fairly circumspect.”

  The priest smiled seriously.

  “I think you mentioned moving on today. We might be able to come to some arrangement about a horse. Generally, of course, we don’t buy and sell, but I’m sure we could agree on a price. Seeing your–er–your difficulty.”

  “What difficulty is that?”

  The priest stared at him.

  “Your affliction.”

  “Oh dear,” said Dro, “have I been afflicted?”

  “Your leg. I meant your lameness.”

  “Oh dear,” said Dro, “you meant my lameness.”

  The priest went on staring, suddenly aware his point was being wilfully missed. He folded his hands in his sleeves, afraid their work-a-day calluses and gestures revealed too much.

  “I’m certain you’d be better riding than walking about.”

  “Surely not inside the inn,” said Dro.

  He began to walk away, and the priest clicked his tongue at the limp. Dro stopped, turned and looked around at him. The priest involuntarily retreated a step and his hands fell back out of his sleeves.

  Dro walked out of the compound and across the stepping stones in the water course, to the other side of the street. But striding past the open front of a leather worker’s shop, he found the priest almost at his elbow again.

  “My son, we must part as friends.”

  “I don’t think it’s obligatory, is it?”

  “According to holy writ, it is,” said the priest smugly. “All that meet as strangers should part as friends.”

  “Pity it’s never caught on.”

  A woman leaned gracefully over a kiln where pots baked. Her hair was the colour of the clay. She watched Dro intensely, lovingly. She touched a chord of memory he did not want, but the priest plucked his sleeve, distracting him.

  “When you think about walking on, remember the horse. We can arrange it privately, if you wish. That way I can get you a reduction. Don’t forget.”

  “My apologies,” said Dro, “I seem to have forgotten.”

  He went through the door of the first inn.

  The priest stood outside with his mouth drooping. When he turned, the red-haired woman had vanished from sight.

  Twenty minutes later she came into the inn, voluptuous in a different dress, with copper leaves pendant from her ears. The room was all but empty save for a cat or two and Parl Dro drinking the local wine in a corner.

  She lifted a cup from the counter, crossed over to him and sat down facing him. He looked back at her silently.

  “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?” she inquired.

  “I’m not going to offer you a drink, but you can have a drink.” He moved the flask toward her.

  She filled the cup and drained it. Her skin was softly flushed by the sun. Her eyes were a foxy summer shade, catching flame from the metal leaves in her ears.

  She said quietly: “My man’s away.” Dro sat and looked at her. “I mean,” she said, “the house is empty. The bed’s empty.”

  “No,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “You don’t like the look of me.”

  “The look of you is very appealing.”

  “But not to you.”

  “I’m the one who said it.”

  “But the one who doesn’t want it. Or do I only remind you of someone else?” She smiled at him. “I’d like,” she said, “to sail a boat across the black pools of your eyes. You’re beautiful. Even better than they say. And muc
h younger. I know who you are, you see. Maybe it’s true, the other story.” She waited for him to ask her what other story. Of course, he did not. She said, “The story no ghost-killer ever sleeps with anyone. That unspent sex builds up a reservoir of power. Like the proverbial virgin being able to snare a unicorn. Not that I’m saying you’re a virgin. Or that there’re unicorns, for that matter.”

  There was a silken dappling on the street. Silver strings tautened past the open door. The woman glanced at the rain.

  “I think I know where you’ll be going. If it exists. When you get there, you might wish you’d been nicer to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, you’re interested now, are you? ‘Why?’ Because when I said my man was away, I was simplifying things. He left me two years ago, to try your business. He wasn’t so clever, and didn’t get so famous as you. I don’t think he lived as long as you have, either. He left me to look for the old town, the one they call the Ghyste Mortua. He never came back. I never thought he would. Maybe he found some woman he liked better, and that’s why he stayed away. Or maybe he found the town, on the side of the hill, or in the lake, where the landslide left it. The ghost town. And it killed him. He could never make me understand. He said the Ghyste was in this world, and not in it. That you could only find it at certain times of year, when particular stars were here, or there. But he was one for the lusts of the flesh, my man. Perhaps that’s why he was no good at your vocation. Parl Dro.” She got up, turning her face to the rain flicker.