“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 were 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—”