About an hour before sunrise, the whining of the dog roused Parl Dro.
It was cold, the clear wet chill that dripped through the trees before a summer dawn. The fire was out. The woman, showered over by her summer hair, lay sleeping on her side. Her face was cupped into one hand. One bare full breast gleamed out against her own tawny colour, startlingly snow-white. The dog stood, hackles raised. A horse cropped the turf nearby. Beside the wagon was a man.
He looked almost every inch the uncouth robber the woman had feared the night before. From that alone, Dro recognised him as her husband. Squat, dirty and dishevelled, he poised in a bizarre kind of half crouch, hair and clothes flopping, and a loose gut flopping before all that. Only the man’s hands were curious, thin and articulate, though crammed now into raw red fists.
“Well,” he said, slurred and drunken and all too lucid, “well, well, well.”
The situation was laughable, the pith of many an inn song and joke. Dro got to his feet slowly, pulling his clothes together as he did so, and the man winked malevolently, leering.
“Well,
well
, well.”
Dro said nothing, and then the man thought of some more words.
“Aren’t you going to say: It’s all a bad mistake? Aren’t you going to say: Just because you found me lying between your wife’s legs, I don’t actually have to have been doing anything with her? Well?”
“I’ll say all that, if you like,” Dro said.
“Like?
Like
?” The man straightened. He stepped over a leather sack on the grass—robber’s booty? As he passed the dog, not looking at it, it cowered. He came walking through the ashes of the fire. “You forced her,” said the man. “Right? She was unwilling and you raped her.”
“Yes. I raped her.”
“She looks raped. I must say. Definitely raped.”
Dro was aware the woman had woken and sat up, but he did not turn to her. The man was now close enough that the stench of ill-digested alcohol on his breath struck Dro’s nostrils. Dro moved an inch or so, coming between husband and wife in the only manner left.
“I think,” said the man, smiling down at his wife, “she was slightly willing.”
Dro moved, his fist already rising, left arm already extending to block any move the other man might make. But the woman was on her feet, catching back Dro’s arm.
“No,” she panted. “No. It’s all right.”
“Of course it is,” said the man. “Why should I care? I’ve been with a whore all night.” He beamed at Dro. “Both been with whores. Yours any good? Mine was.”
The woman began to push Dro fiercely.
“Go away. Please. Go away now.”
She was breathless. Dro said, “You’d better come with me.”
“Who’ll cook my breakfast?” asked the man aggrieved. “Come on, I don’t care.” He sat down by the dead fire and took off his boots carefully. “Let’s have some service,” he said.
The woman, holding her dress together over her white breasts with her brown hands, took up the beerskin and handed it to her husband.
“Thanks,” he said. He drank noisily.
“Go away,” the woman said to Dro. “I’m begging you.”
“All right. But you—”
“
Go
.”
In the deadly still quarter dark Parl Dro started to walk away. At the clearing’s edge, he looked back and she was lighting the fire. The man drank from the skin. The dog lay like a rock, and the horse plodded about the turf.
Dro walked out of sight, and waited. Nothing happened. At last the sun rose. The woman appeared out of the trees when he had given her up. She stood some yards from Dro and cried in a low wild voice: “Didn’t I say you must go? If you get off, he’ll be all right. He’s only a great baby. Go now, like I told you. Damn you, you’re nothing to me. He’s my man.”
For a while, Dro walked slowly, listening for her to scream. The wood rustled and chirped with birds. Nothing else. He began to be able to convince himself she had known what she did, and that everything would be well. She had had, after all, a choice. Dro could have protected her. She was not obliged to stay with such a man as the drunkard.
She ceased to resemble Silky. She became a woman he had spent a night with. The circumstances of discovery were embarrassing and futile.
By the time he reached the track that led up from the trees to the mountain, it was noon. He had swallowed the incident down like bitter medicine. And, in the way of solitary unique events, it had become unreal.
He was about half a mile away from the pass, when the woman’s man caught up to him.
Dro heard the clatter of hoofs on the slate and stone of the track, knew, and turned around. But the man seemed to burst out of the very air. There had been time to gain an advantage, yet Dro had not tried for one. His contempt for the man, his contempt for the woman who would stay with such a brute, and his contempt for himself, tangled, however briefly, between them, made Dro stand there arrogantly at the wayside, waiting, in full view.
Of course, he was remembering the absence of weapons, the balled, empty weakling’s fists. But this time the man had armed himself with a long dull swerve of violence which Dro never properly saw. Because, unspeaking, preplanned, malicious in cunning and in accuracy, the man swung and delivered his blow in the exact moment he came level with Parl Dro. Nor did he aim where he might have been expected to—at head or heart, or even, with an obscene aptness, at the groin. Yet the target of the blow was, nevertheless, both obscene and apt. He hurled the unidentified weapon with all the force of his fermented compost-heap hate, at Dro’s crippled left leg.
One second then, Parl Dro was a thinking man, astonished, out-manoeuvred in the quiet afternoon. Next second he was a howling mindless thing flung down into a hell that knew neither night nor day, nor any time at all save the hour of his agony.
He understood after, he had fallen over and away, rolling off the side of the track, through stone defiles, gaunt thickets, along the mountain’s hollow flanks, in a cascade of shale. He fetched up in a narrow channel with one broken wall, and if he had gone farther it would have been off the mountain entirely, into space and presumably annihilation. In any event, he knew none of that till much later.
He came to once, in a roar of pain. He had been dreaming of the pain, even unconscious, dreaming that the ghost-thing on the bridge was at work on him once more. He seemed soaked in hot water, or sweat. The avenger had not followed him, had been unable to, or unable to discover him. But he had forgotten that, too. The pain was not localised. It was a sea, and he floundered in it, screaming. And then he died again. He went on like that, dying and waking, dying and waking, for a long while, or rather a timeless while. He never positively knew, when at last he began to reason again, how long he had lain in that channel of the mountain.
When eventually he was able to think, he was amazed, for the leg was not even broken—every bone had seemed splintered, and the splinters mashed.
When he got free of the channel, it was night, and the moon was shining. From the shape of the moon, and certain horrible, barely recalled revivals, he deduced he had been lying there two or three days.
The hurt in the leg had subsided to a blaze, as if the muscles and tendons were merely on fire. It was the damaged nerves of the previous wounding, ill-equipped to endure another wound, which had so incapacitated him.
His return to consciousness was marked by a frantic feverish compulsion to get to the woman. He had incoherently realised by then, naturally, that her pleas that he go away had been entirely for his sake. She had known what “her man” was capable of, and foolishly had put Dro first. If she had instead appealed to him for help, they might both have fared so much better.
Scrambling down from the mountain was difficult. The agony it cost him went almost ignored, save when he fell and lay in the slate dust, the stars darkening with the blood behind his eyes. In the end, the descent grew more facile. He became used to staggering on the blazing stick of leg.
Night, and somehow another day were gone, before he reached the clearing in the wood. The wagon was gone, too. In the dark he could not find the wheel ruts traced over the turf and summer-hard soil. He could not even find the remains of the fire.
He began to search, idiotically, about the wood, wandering in circles mostly. Day and night blended. He came on a deserted farm at the wood’s edge. A few roots and other vegetable stuff were coming up wild in the garden patch, and there was a well. It was enough to keep him alive, and gradually to bring him back to logic and fatalism.
He lost track of time again in the farm ruin. Not for many years had he been so indecisive, so plainly lost over the horizons of his own self. The days seemed very hot, the nights interminable. The old house looked out southward from the wood, into the slender valleys that lay between the claws of the southern mountains. Seen mainly by night, they did not seem real either. Indeed, nothing did.
In the end, the idea of the Ghyste came back to him, supplanting other ideas or regrets. To travel across the northern mountain again became imperative—to go after the legend.
The memory of the woman who was like Silky became frankly an embarrassment. Whatever had been done to the crippled leg, it had healed into its usual awful acceptable state. The same could occur with memory.
As he came over the mountain pass, down the steel-blue road in the dusk, toward that leaning macabre house with its stone tower—the house of Ciddey Soban, the house of the ghost—he had a wonderful sharpened sense of returning to reality, and to purpose. The golden woman slipped away from him like a dream.
He could have done nothing for her. Trouble had caged her. He could not have set her free. He had not loved her, certainly. He had never loved, woman or man, place or beast or object. Not even Silky. Silky had only been a part of himself.
CHAPTER TEN
Sable was plaiting her thin iron hair again, as she came into focus for him across the hovel, but the sun no longer shone on the rag bed where Myal Lemyal lay immobile on his back, head still averted toward the right shoulder, the grimy sheet pulled to his Adam’s apple, unruffled by any movement.
“You’ve been away a long while,” said Sable. “Thinking, or else you sleep with your eyes wide open. I could count the times you blinked on the fingers of one hand. Practicing?”
Dro watched her pointlessly busy, agile and magical paws.
“You mean I’d prefer to use my own will, rather than Cinnabar’s drug, to get there? That was always the plan.”
“Then don’t you wonder why she sent this boy in ahead of you?”
“She thought she saw something in the cards she cast. She told me. She insisted Myal must go with me. She persuaded him after me. He had some supernatural baggage with him I could have done without.”
He had grasped Cinnabar’s scheme with slight surprise. That she foisted the musician on him by the means of loaning Myal a horse was eccentric enough. The drug in the clay dog, which had subsequently tranced Myal and loosed his astral body, as near equivalent to a ghost as a live man could go, was a ridiculous ploy.
Cinnabar must have learned from her lover, that ghost-killer who never returned, that the ultimate way into Ghyste Mortua had to be in spirit alone. Those who were dragged in live through the manifested ghost gates of Tulotef invariably died, so the story went. That death would be inevitable to a human taken there quick, with so many deadalive feeding their unflesh hungrily on his life force—even if they did not actually lay their claws on his skin and bones. So, only by releasing astral from physical could a man get in that place and hope to survive. By becoming as near a ghost as the ghosts of the Ghyste. To this end, there were disciplines to be learned, and Dro, who also knew the story, had accordingly learned them, a smattering here, a smattering there, all knotted together by his will. That will of pure iron, which carried him mile after mile, striding on a raging ruin called, euphemistically, a leg. That same iron will, he had believed, could put to sleep Dro’s body’s life and let the spirit out. Could hold the body intact in its trance, and, if any were able to achieve it, could bring the spirit back into the body, when he was done with Tulotef.
But Myal. Flung out in spirit like a handful of dust on the air. Caught by the deadalive, no doubt of that, and by the virgin, the Maid of Vessels, with her fish-cool hate and her illusory streams—Cinnabar had consigned Myal to that, because she had been sure his proximity was in some form vitally necessary to Parl Dro. If Dro must enter Tulotef, then Myal must be there before him. It would have been good to judge Cinnabar as mad, to be irritated by her conviction and methods. But, with unease, Dro had recognized in her one of those mysterious guides the psychic road was liable to produce. And she had reminded him of the golden woman in the wood. Queen of Fires, Queen of Leaves—
The Queen of Swords, his eldritch elderly sister, was brewing more tea. The aromatic steam curled across the hovel, and vanished as if passing through the walls: the ghost of tea.
“So you’ll trance yourself without a drug, and get into Ghyste Mortua. And then you’ll destroy Ghyste Mortua,” said Sable, “like all the other ghost-killers were going to. But they never managed it, did they, eh? What’s
your
idea?”
“Wait and see.”
Parl Dro wondered then if she could see, past the iron, the steel, the self-denying, cynical, adamant desire to kill the dead which symbolized his existence so bleakly, see by all that to the sombre terror in his heart, lying there immovable as Myal on the bed.
Myal Lemyal did not know his body lay miles away under a sheet in a hovel. Myal’s psychic body seemed as actual to him as actuality had ever seemed, and was even plagued by the same ills of nervousness and exhaustion. But then, the town of Tulotef seemed also actual. The town, and the girl.
And the three riders who had escorted them to the gate.
In the end, these men had not beaten Myal. They had not even let him ride the horse. At the last instant, as the irrevocable gateporch leaned over them—high, wide, echoing—they had pulled him down. As he landed on the paving, the instrument catching him again an almighty thump between the shoulders, a man had leapt for the vacant saddle. Spurs dug in, the horses shrilled. In a skirl of sparks and reverberant, gate-magnified hoofbeats, the riders dashed away into the heart of the unearthly town.
Myal rose, dabbing at fresh bruises. Ciddey Soban stood nearby. She was so completely normal, and mortal, that he caught his breath again in a whirling doubt of all facts and fantasies. White, bad-tempered, her eyes blazing, she slashed the dank atmosphere in the gate with her cat’s tongue.
“Scum! Villains!”
And then a host of detrimental words Myal was vaguely shocked—though not astounded—she knew.
After delivering these epithets, she stood simmering, like any spoiled noble girl who had not got the masculine treatment she supposed was her right.
It all seemed so real. The hollow gate, wide open and unguarded, yet like a score of similar town gates Myal had gone in and out of. The angry female. The soft cool vapours of night. The gauzy sounds of people and action going on in the vicinity: hoofs, feet, metalware, voices, wheels and occasional bells; a dog barked somewhere, lusty and demanding. There was even a vague smell like baking bread—
The only wrong note was the half-mooned darkness. All this clamour of an industrious town in the forenoon, carried on at midnight.
“As for you—”
Myal turned automatically. Ciddey Soban glared at him.
“Damn it,” said Myal defensively, “what was I supposed to do? You’re all ghosts.”
“Be quiet.”
He quailed at the venom in her eyes, and said, fawningly, “Well,
they
were—”
“You offered me your protection,” she snarled.
“Did I?”
“And you let them molest me, threaten me with a sword.”
“And you wanted to lead me into town by a ribbon.”
“That’s all you’re good for. Someone’s lapdog.”
“They’d have beaten me up, while you—”
“I’d have laughed.”
“I think,” said Myal, turning from the gateway, “I’ll just—”
“No you won’t. As a protector, you’re ridiculous, but you’re all I have. You’ll stay with me. You, and that silly stringed instrument.”
She walked in the gate. She was imperious. It would be simple to retreat, dodge away into the forest that stretched from the slope, pressed like a huge crowd against the causeway, rank on rank of bladed darkness which was trees. Simple to retreat. Or was it simple? Something which was more than the willpower of the ghost girl was enticing him toward that gate.
A sudden uncanny notion struck Myal, unformed yet menacing. He had remembered the way the riders had threatened him by the pool, stating the penalties for those who consorted with the deadalive. Of course, they had been threatening him. But the odd thing was, they had spoken many of the words as they stared at Ciddey. As if they were grinningly, nastily unsure which of the two, the girl or the musician, was the ghost.
And then again, why had they abruptly abandoned Myal to his own—or Ciddey’s—devices at the gateway? As if he did not really matter to them. The undead needed the living to feed from, was that not Parl Dro’s enduring philosophy? So why—
“Myal Lemyal,
will
you do as I say?”
Ciddey was glaring again, from the town side of the gate.
“Why should I?” Myal asked, obeying her.
Once he was in the town, a sense of total helplessness overcame him, not physical, but mental; not even truly unpleasant. Ciddey and Tulotef had got the better of him. Small surprise. He gave in.
Ghyste Mortua was not as he had been picturing in the part-assembled song. Not dusk. Not dim and shrivelled. No fireflies. And yet, so strange.
The stone street inclined upward, narrow and closed in by houses with blind walls. It was pitch dark there, but somehow everything was visible, in a thousand shades of black, even the bricks or the stones. While over the tops of roofs the gust of light dazzled into the sky, dousing the stars, which he had taken to be the light of the lamps of Tulotef—or was it rather the light of Tulotef
itself?
A glow like phosphorous on a bone. Myal braced himself to shudder, and the shudder did not come.
The sound was curious too, for noise was everywhere, yet no figures were directly apparent. Then, suddenly, gazing at a blank yard, you saw a man definite as your own hand seen by daylight. A cobbler mending a shoe, a smith hammering. Or two children playing with a cat.
Ciddey was prowling ahead of him, and he, dutiful page or bodyguard, or dog, or whatever he was supposed to be, remained about a respectful yard behind her. A large building blocked the head of the street, but with an arch through and a flight of steps. The first lamp burned in the arch, and Myal regarded it warily. It was a ghost lamp, for certain, a pale greenish-lemon moth light fluttering quietly in its smoky glass, clear and evident as a flower or a jewel in the gloom. And yet casting no brightness and no colour from itself on anything. Not on the wall, not on the stair. Not even on Ciddey as she passed under. Nor on Myal. And when he held his hand against it, no blood showed in his fingers, and he felt no warmth.
“Come on,” she snapped, ten steps above him. “Don’t play with that. If you must play, play the instrument.”
“No,” he said stubbornly.
He followed her up the steps and she flounced haughtily ahead of him again. They emerged on a platform and beheld all the town spilled down the hill, about three quarters of a mile of it. There were towers, as the story said, slim and tall, with crenellated baskets of stone at their tops. Alleys wound and roofs overlapped each other in slaty scales. Everything was lightless yet dotted by yellowish swarms of lamps, and everything was also apparent in enormous detail, as if illumined by a cool black sun of vast radiance. Beyond Tulotef, the drama of the landscape. The star-channelled lake was opened by the moon, or by the supernatural effulgence of the town, a plate of silver chains, flickering, winking, as if under the flare of a midsummer noon—and yet colourless. The same occult rays hit the blades of distant mountains which rose from the forest beyond. White as winter they were, as described. And the forest was a black snow which had carpeted the rest of the earth.
The country was silent as—yes, as the grave. But the grave itself banged and sang and laboured, cascades of noise flowering up from the streets below. And now that he looked, Myal could see a colossal procession winding through the broad lower thoroughfares. Flatly red-winged torches, the stagnant flash of brazen vessels giving off a gray-gold shine, as if in a picture, light without
light.
There were priests in the concourse, women in gowns of silver tissue, perhaps the lord of the town himself. Bells rattled the night off their clappers and out of their pear-shaped sound boxes.
“I’m cold,” said Ciddey Soban.