Kill the Dead (13 page)

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?”

“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.

“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.