Reaper Man (32 page)

I’
M SORRY
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
.

“This big diamond’s a bit heavy. Nice, though,” she added, grudgingly. “Where’d you get it?”

F
ROM PEOPLE WHO THOUGHT IT WAS THE TEAR OF A GOD.

“And is it?”

N
O
. G
ODS NEVER WEEP
. I
T IS COMMON CARBON THAT HAS BEEN SUBJECT TO GREAT HEAT AND PRESSURE
,
THAT IS ALL
.

“Inside every lump of coal there’s a diamond waiting to get out, right?”

Y
ES
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
.

There was no sound for a while, except the clip-clop of Binky’s hoofs. Then Miss Flitworth said, archly:

“I do know what’s going on, you know. I saw how much sand there was. And so you thought ‘She’s not a bad old stick, I’ll show her a good time for a few hours, and then when she’s not expecting it, it’ll be time for the old cut-de-grass’, am I right?”

Death said nothing.

“I am right, aren’t I?”

I
CAN’T HIDE ANYTHING FROM YOU
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
.

“Huh, I suppose I should be flattered. Yes? I expect you’ve got a lot of calls on your time.”

M
ORE THAN YOU COULD POSSIBLY IMAGINE
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
.

“In the circumstances, then, you might as well go back to calling me Renata again.”

There was a bonfire in the meadow beyond the archery field. Death could see figures moving in front of it. An occasional tortured squeak suggested that someone was tuning up a fiddle.

“I always come along to the harvest dance,” said Miss Flitworth, conversationally. “Not to dance, of course. I generally look after the food and so on.”

W
HY
?

“Well, someone’s got to look after the food.”

I
MEANT WHY DON’T YOU DANCE
?

“’Cos I’m old, that’s why.”

Y
OU ARE AS OLD AS YOU THINK YOU ARE
.

“Huh! Yeah? Really? That’s the kind of
stupid
thing people always say. They always say, My word, you’re looking well. They say, There’s life in the old dog yet. Many a good tune played on an old fiddle. That kind of stuff. It’s all stupid. As if being old was some kind of thing you should be glad about! As if being philosophical about it will earn you
marks!
My head knows how to think young, but my knees aren’t that good at it. Or my back. Or my teeth. Try telling my knees they’re as old as they think they are and see what good it does you. Or them.”

I
T MAY BE WORTH A TRY
.

More figures moved in front of the firelight. Death could see striped poles strung with bunting. “The lads usually bring a couple of barn doors down here and nail’em together for a proper floor,” observed Miss Flitworth. “Then everyone can join in.”

F
OLK DANCING
? said Death, wearily.

“No. We have
some
pride, you know.”

S
ORRY
.

“Hey, it’s Bill Door, isn’t it?” said a figure looming out of the dusk.

“It’s good old Bill!”

“Hey, Bill!”

Death looked at a circle of guileless faces.

“H
ALLO
,
MY FRIENDS
.

“We heard you’d gone away,” said Duke Bottomley. He glanced at Miss Flitworth, as Death helped her down from the horse. His voice faltered a bit as he tried to analyze the situation.

“You’re looking very…sparkly…tonight, Miss Flitworth,” he finished, gallantly.

The air smelled of warm, damp grass. An amateur orchestra was still setting up under an awning.

There were trestle tables covered with the kind of food that’s normally associated with the word “repast”—pork pies like varnished military fortifications, vats of demonical pickled onions, jacket potatoes wallowing in a cholesterol ocean of melted butter. Some of the local elders had already established themselves on the benches provided, and were chewing stoically if toothlessly through the food with the air of people determined to sit there all night, if necessary.

“Nice to see the old people enjoying themselves,” said Miss Flitworth.

Death looked at the eaters. Most of them were younger than Miss Flitworth.

There was a giggle from somewhere in the scented darkness beyond the firelight.

“And the young people” Miss Flitworth added, evenly. “We used to have a saying about this time of year. Let’s see…something like ‘Corn be ripe, nuts be brown, petticoats up…’ something.” She sighed. “Don’t time fly, eh?”

Y
ES
.

“You know, Bill Door, maybe you were right about the power of positive thinking. I feel a lot better tonight.”

Y
ES
?

Miss Flitworth looked speculatively at the dance floor. “I used to be a great dancer when I was a gel. I could dance anyone off their feet. I could dance down the moon. I could dance the sun up.”

She reached up and removed the bands that held her hair in its tight bun, and shook it out in a waterfall of white.

“I take it you
do
dance, Mr. Bill Door?”

F
AMED FOR IT
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
.

Under the band’s awning, the lead fiddler nodded to his fellow musicians, stuck his fiddle under his chin, and pounded on the boards with his foot—

“Hwun! Htwo! Hwun htwo three four…”

Picture a landscape, with the orange light of a crescent moon drifting across it. And, down below, a circle of firelight in the night.

There were the old favorites—the square dances, the reels, the whirling, intricate measures which, if the dancers had carried lights, would have traced out topological complexities beyond the reach of ordinary physics, and the sort of dances that lead perfectly sane people to shout out things like “Do-si-do!” and “Och-aye!” without feeling massively ashamed for quite a long time.

When the casualties were cleared away the survivors went on to polka, mazurka, fox-trot, turkey-trot and trot a variety of other birds and beasts, and then to those dances where people form an arch and other people dance down it, which are incidentally generally based on folk memories of executions, and other dances where people form a circle, which are generally based on folk memories of plagues.

Through it all two figures whirled as though there was no tomorrow.

The lead fiddler was dimly aware that, when he paused for breath, a spinning figure tap-danced a storm out of the mêlée and a voice by his ear said:

Y
OU WILL CONTINUE
, I
PROMISE YOU
.

When he flagged a second time a diamond as big as his fist landed on the boards in front of him. A smaller figure sashayed out of the dancers and said:

“If you boys don’t go on playing, William Spigot, I will personally make sure your life becomes absolutely foul.”

And it returned to the press of bodies.

The fiddler looked down at the diamond. It could have ransomed any five kings the world would care to name. He kicked it hurriedly behind him.

“More power to your elbow, eh?” said the drummer, grinning.

“Shut up and play!”

He was aware that tunes were turning up at the ends of his fingers that his brain had never known. The drummer and the piper felt it too. Music was pouring in from somewhere. They weren’t playing it. It was playing them.

I
T IS TIME FOR A NEW DANCE TO BEGIN
. “Duurrr
ump
-da-dum-dum,” hummed the fiddler, the sweat running off his chin as he was caught up in a different tune.

The dancers milled around uncertainly, unsure about the steps. But one pair moved purposefully through them at a predatory crouch, arms clasped ahead of them like the bowsprit of a killer galleon. At the end of the floor they turned in a flurry of limbs that appeared to defy normal anatomy and began the angular advance back through the crowd.

“What’s this one called?”

T
ANGO
.

“Can you get put in prison for it?”

I
DON’T BELIEVE SO
.

“Amazing.”

The music changed.

“I know this one! It’s the Quirmish bullfight dance! Oh-lay!”

“W
ITH MILK
”?

A high-speed fusillade of hollow snapping noises suddenly kept time with the music.

“Who’s playing the maracas?”

Death grinned.

M
ARACAS
? I
DON’T NEED
…
MARACAS
.

And then it was now.

The moon was a ghost of itself on one horizon. On the other there was already the distant glow of the advancing day.

They left the dance floor.

Whatever had been propelling the band through the hours of the night drained slowly away. They looked at one another. Spigot the fiddler glanced down at the jewel. It was still there.

The drummer tried to massage some life back into his wrists.

Spigot stared helplessly at the exhausted dancers.

“Well, then…” he said, and raised the fiddle one more time.

Miss Flitworth and her companion listened from the mists that were threading around the field in the dawn light.

Death recognized the slow, insistent beat. It made him think of wooden figures, whirling through Time until the spring unwound.

I
DON’T KNOW THAT ONE
.

“It’s the last waltz.

I
SUSPECT THERE’S NO SUCH THING
.

“You know,” said Miss Flitworth, “I’ve been wondering all evening how it’s going to happen. How you’re going to do it. I mean, people have to die of
something
, don’t they? I thought maybe it was going to be of exhaustion, but I’ve never felt better. I’ve had the time of my life and I’m not even out of breath. In fact it’s been a real tonic, Bill Door. And I—”

She stopped.

“I’m
not
breathing, am I.” It wasn’t a question. She held a hand in front of her face and huffed on it.

N
O
.

“I
see
. I’ve never enjoyed myself so much in all my life…ha! So…when—?”

Y
OU KNOW WHEN YOU SAID THAT SEEING ME GAVE YOU QUITE A START
?

“Yes?”

I
T GAVE YOU QUITE A STOP
.

Miss Flitworth didn’t appear to hear him. She kept turning her hand backward and forward, as if she’d never seen it before.

“I see you made a few changes, Bill Door,” she said.

N
O
. I
T IS LIFE THAT MAKES MANY CHANGES
.

“I mean that I appear to be younger.”

T
HAT’S WHAT
I
MEANT ALSO
.

He snapped his fingers. Binky stopped his grazing by the hedge and trotted over.

“You know,” said Miss Flitworth, “I’ve often thought…I often thought that everyone has their, you know,
natural
age. You see children of ten who act as though they’re thirty-five. Some people are born middle-aged, even. It’d be nice to think I’ve been…” she looked down at herself, “oh, let’s say eighteen…all my life. Inside.”

Death said nothing. He helped her up onto the horse.

“When I see what life does to people, you know, you don’t seem so bad,” she said nervously.

Death made a clicking noise with his teeth. Binky walked forward.

“You’ve never met Life, have you?”

I
CAN SAY IN ALL HONESTY THAT
I
HAVE NOT
.

“Probably some great white crackling thing. Like an electric storm in trousers,” said Miss Flitworth.

I
THINK NOT
.

Binky rose up into the morning sky.

“Anyway…death to all tyrants” said Miss Flitworth.

Y
ES
.

“Where are we going?”

Binky was galloping, but the landscape did not move.

“That’s a pretty good horse you’ve got there,” said Miss Flitworth, her voice shaking.

Y
ES
.

“But what is he
doing
?”

G
ETTING UP SPEED
.

“But we’re not going
any
where—”

They vanished.

They reappeared.

The landscape was snow and green ice on broken mountains. These weren’t old mountains, worn down by time and weather and full of gentle ski slopes, but young, sulky, adolescent mountains. They held secret ravines and merciless crevices. One yodel out of place would attract, not the jolly echo of a lonely goatherd, but fifty tons of express-delivery snow.

The horse landed on a snowbank that should not, by rights, have been able to support it.

Death dismounted and helped Miss Flitworth down.

They walked over the snow to a frozen muddy track that hugged the mountain side.

“Why are we here?” said the spirit of Miss Flitworth.

I
DO NOT SPECULATE ON COSMIC MATTERS
.

“I mean here on this mountain. Here on this geography,” said Miss Flitworth patiently.

T
HIS IS NOT GEOGRAPHY
.

“What is it, then?”

H
ISTORY
.

They rounded a bend in the track. There was a pony there, eating a bush, with a pack on its back. The track ended in a wall of suspiciously clean snow.

Death removed a lifetimer from the recesses of his robe.

N
OW
, he said, and stepped into the snow.

She watched it for a moment, wondering if she could have done that too. Solidity was an awfully hard habit to give up.

And then she didn’t have to.

Someone came out.

Death adjusted Binky’s bridle, and mounted up. He paused for a moment to watch the two figures by the avalanche. They had faded almost to invisibility, their voices no more than textured air.

“All he said was ‘W
HEREVER YOU GO
,
YOU GO TOGETHER
.’ I said where? He said he didn’t know. What’s happened?”

“Rufus—you’re going to find this very hard to believe, my love—”