“Someone told me,” said another of the men, “he sold Ciddey’s baby teeth as a charm necklace.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Ciddey’s crazy too. Pity, because she’s nice-looking enough. We leave her to herself, for old time’s sake. She lives alone in that house.”
“Not quite alone,” said Dro.
“The father drank himself into the graveyard years before,” the first man said. “Do you mean him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“There was a story,” said the first man. “The girls played about with herbs. Witch charms, poisons maybe. They got sick of the father drinking and... saw to him.”
“And that’s a lie,” said someone.
Dro was aware of the singing group detaching itself from the hearth and swarming over. The minstrel who had played the exquisite music was beginning to appear in fragments, now a threadbare red sleeve, now a dirty green sleeve, now a dark gold head and a long nose, between the shoulders and gesticulations of the crowd.
They were excited, and nervous. An event was happening in the midst of uneventfulness. The musician, staying clear, carefully keeping his head down over retuning the peculiar instrument beside the spits, showed a desire to remain uninvolved, and thereby a derivation not of this village.
“There was the second daughter,” someone said finally, just behind Dro’s left ear.
“Ciddey’s sister? Nothing funny there.”
“Yes, there was. Didn’t Cilny Soban run off and drown herself in the stream the north side of the mountain? Not exactly what I’d call normal.”
“It’s true, Parl Dro,” the elderly boy said. “Two herders found her in the morning when they were taking the cows up to graze.”
“Cilny was lying at the bottom of the stream, she was,” said the first man dolefully, “but the water’s so clear in the spring you could see straight through. One of the boys is a bit simple. He thought she was a water spirit, lying there in her nightgown, with a wreath of flowers on her head and fish swimming about in her hair.”
“What do you think of that, eh, Parl Ghost-Killer?”
Dro removed his hand from the cup and let the boy fill it again. The crowd had got itself well into the informative stage, anxious to elicit a response from him. They had commenced pressing rumour and snippets of memory on him like gifts, waiting for him to crow. But the King of Swords merely sat and brooded, letting them heap the platter.
They were putting great emphasis on the stresses of the girls’ two names, telling him now how Sidd-
dayy
and Sill-
nee
had been, loving and near one hour, at each other’s throats the next. Once or twice, one sister might look at a village man, and then the other sister would go wild, shrieking that such a wooing, let alone marriage, was beneath the Soban blood. When Cilny had made away with herself the previous spring, nobody had dropped down in a fit of surprise. When Ciddey demanded the corpse be burned not buried and the ashes delivered to her in a stone pot, not even the priest had had much to say. The Sobans had always been a pagan tribe, amoral and unstable. Since the death of Cilny, Ciddey was rarely seen. Sometimes, someone might spot her by night, walking along the slopes below the mountain, or up in the tower window, staring out. In her pig-headed way, just like her father, she expected the village to put food and other essentials at her gate, free of charge, its tithe to her house. With a self-deprecating amused grimace, between shame and pride, the village admitted that it did so. Nobody had actually considered whether drowned Cilny might come back to haunt. But now that they did consider, they would not be amazed if she had.
Dro sipped from the third cup.
The stream-death might explain the ambience at the well, the pulse of supernatural force linked to water. The pot of cremated ashes was significant. It was coming time to reward the crowd with a reaction, and then to damp their fire. As he sat, picturing the flower-wreathed water maiden stretched under the glassy stream, he became aware that the musician had moved from the hearth, and was after all stealing closer. He slid through and into the crowd with a very practiced ease, attracting small notice. Intrigued but not astonished, Dro kept still.
“What do you say, Parl Dro?” the boy in the apron asked.
“I say there’s a ghost at the leaning house,” Dro said, virtually what he had said at the start, but a little eddy of satisfaction drifted up. The musician, instrument across his back now, was filtering through the throng like a curl of colour-stained steam.
“What’ll you do?”
“Oh, I think I’ll go to bed. That is, if you have a room here I can use.”
Confounded, the crowd muttered. They had expected him to leap at once out through the door again, no doubt.
“But aren’t you going to call on Ciddey Soban?”
“Apparently not,” he told them. He rose, paying no heed to the blazing chord that was struck in his crippled leg. The musician had halted, about a foot away, moulded exactly between two burly labourers, just as if he had grown there from a tiny seed planted in the floor. He was only an inch or two shorter than Dro, but lightly built as a reed.
Dro regarded the boy in the apron.
“The room?”
“I’ll show you. What about Cilny deadalive?”
“What about her?”
There were angry murmurs now. As he began to walk through, Dro felt the new hardening and congealing of the press around the table, not wanting to let him go this casually after he had worked them to such a pitch. Even in the thick of that, however, Dro was entirely conscious of the featherweight grip that delicately flickered out the coin bag from the inner pocket of his mantle. Dro did not glance the musician’s way. A pickpocket’s skill was not one he necessarily despised, nor did he necessarily grudge its reward.
The boy led Dro to the stair.
“Straight up. Door to the left. Aren’t you going to do
anything
about Cilny? You’re supposed to be a legend.”
The crowd surged sulkily, not looking at Dro, like a woman who thought herself slighted. The musician was tuning the instrument again, leaning on a table, engrossed, dull gold hair falling in his eyes, innocent.
The elderly boy assumed a sneer as he watched Dro begin the lame man’s crow-like hopping up the stair.
“Well, what a disappointment you turned out to be.”
Dro paused on the landing and turned on the boy the most dazzling and friendly smile he was ever likely to have received. The Ghost-Killer seemed to be waiting again. Unnerved, the boy jeered: “A real disappointment. I hope I never have to see a worse one.”
“Keep away from mirrors,” said Dro, “and you won’t.”
He stepped through the left-hand sinister door.
CHAPTER TWO
An hour before dawn, Parl Dro was on a narrow wooden bridge above a savage river. Swollen by melted upland snow, the water crashed about the piled stone pylons of the bridge, snapping its jaws hungrily at those who passed over. But there was something on the bridge that was worse than the river. It had been a man once. Now it was a fleshless, long-nailed shape, solidified by years of post-mortem manifestation, capable of appearing solid and real as the river below. More real, actually, than the bridge, whose timbers were in parts rotted away. Hate had kept it there, a hatred of all who remained alive after it had died.
There had been a conflict of wills since moonrise, a battle that had kept the ghost to one end of the bridge, Parl Dro at the other. Only very gradually had each been able to beat a way through the other’s aphysical defences. Only very gradually had each been able to draw nearer to the other and thus to the ultimate fight which would decide between them. Dro was certain that the psychic link was to be found somewhere at the centre of the bridge, the spot at which the ghost generally laid hold of those who came there, biting at them with its long teeth from which the gums had shrivelled away, clawing the organs out of their bodies. For hours, since moonrise, Parl Dro had been wrenching his way toward that area, while trying simultaneously to hold the ghost off from it. The ghost roared and sizzled its rage and sick hurt as it fought him. The man, drenched in sweat and psychosomatically bruised as if from a physical beating, fought back. It had been like climbing a vertical precipice while in the crisis of an unremitting fever. Now, he was a mere three inches from the tilted plank where he had reasoned the link must be.
To summon the final strength to rip the plank away and come at that link, brought a new dimension of horror and strain, which sent a whirling piercing nausea through him, body and soul. Nevertheless, he felt his hand grab hold of the wood, the muscles of arm and shoulder activated as if by remote and magical control. He tore up the plank, and his fingers thrust through the soft rot beneath and touched the single bone embedded there. It had belonged to the ghost, when the ghost had been a man, mislaid on the bridge when the ghost had violently died there. Through the concrete essence of that bone, the ghost, unwilling to depart, had kept its hideous link with the condition of life. A hundred persons had since died because of it. It had exulted in their screams of terror and agony. It would have killed the rest of the world if it could. Now it was as approximate to extinction, or at least to metamorphosis, as Parl Dro’s two hands were approximate to each other. For one hand now held the bone, and the other the small but lethal vise which would crush that bone into a thousand meaningless splinters.
But in those instants, when all Dro’s considerable powers had been focused on securing the link, the deadalive thing had found the space to win through.
Even as Dro raised the bone toward the jaws of the vise, the ghost was on him. Made corporeal by its long pseudo-existence, it had the energy to drag him down and to fling him over.
Dro heard the clamour of shattered timbers far off, at the same time as thunder passed through his skull. He realized dimly, as a storm of water spat in his eyes, that the ghost had smashed him bodily through the rotten struts of the bridge. Now he hung upside down, but still miraculously caught by knees and calves in the wood above. His body rocked against one of the stony pylons from the gush of the river, which every fourth breath or so went over his head, blinding him and causing him to swallow its fluid. He somehow had not lost the bone, for he could feel it embedded in his hand, but the vise was gone; he had let go of it in the shock of falling.
It seemed a year, but it was less than a minute before he came to understand the brittle texture of the bone, the hard surface of the pylon against which the river was ramming him over and over again. His head was full of choked water, his very brain seemed full of it, and the drumming of his own blood. He swung like a dead crow from a post, into and out of pain, unconsciousness and drowning, but he still remembered enough to start to hammer the brittle psychic bone against the stone of the pylon.
Ridiculously, stunned, he had forgotten about the creature he was fighting. When the blade of a new torture went through his left leg, he stupidly wondered if it was broken.
The dead who lived, like the mirror image, right hand in reverse, tended to attack leftward or sinister. Which made the hearts of men very vulnerable to them. It occurred to Dro quite abruptly that the ghost had fastened its teeth and nails into the calf of his left leg, ripping and gnawing at him.
Knowledge of the true facts of the pain made it unbearable. He began to utter strange long-drawn hoarse hymns of agony. Through these, the ghost kept up its labour upon his flesh, and he, mindless and screaming, clubbed the bone again and again into the stones of the pylon, his hand with it, till both were gaudy with blood.
The bone splintered suddenly, but the agony in his leg did not go away. He thought the ghoul still gnawed on him long after he had destroyed it. And long after the men had carried him away from the bridge, with a white sun scalding in his eyes, he thought so.
And quite often, as now, he would think so again, living through the sequence in the precise recurring format of a dream.
At one time it would have taken him an hour or more, sweating and shivering, to recover from this dream. Now recovery was swift. A minute: less. The only curious result was an impulse to reach down and touch his calf, as if to make sure it was still attached to him. But that was quickly over. Familiarity again. Contempt again. In any case, the crack of window showed a pale blue lake lying placidly in the middle of the village, between the eastern roofs, which was not a lake but the initiation of sunrise.
Nothing and no one but he seemed to be stirring at the inn. He utilized what facilities it had to offer, including the flat, iron-tasting water tapped from a cask in the room below, and another piece of burned loaf. He had left a handful of money, enough to cover his account generously, lying on the mattress where the ghoul had gnawed him in his sleep. Dro was no shorter of cash than he had anticipated. What the minstrel-thief had stolen from him with such artistry was a bag of smooth pebble clinkers. Nor would he be the first pickpocket to be edified by such a haul from Parl Dro’s ill-omened black mantle.
Outside, a scatter of birds were whistling and piping to entice the sun. The lake had mounted higher and overtopped the roofs without spilling. A water rose was unfolding in the bottom of it.
Dro walked up the main street toward the steel-blue road. At one point, where an alley ran off into a yard with a public well, some women were gossiping in hushed voices over their buckets. He meant to be seen, and they saw him, and pointed him out needlessly to each other. A young one, with lily skin, stared at him, then blushed and looked away.
He was glad to have been noticed. It would save him the business of advertising his departure in any other manner.
The lily girl, pursuing him at a safe distance, even beheld him take the curve of the road which led eastward away from the village, and, more importantly, from the house with the tower.
Presently the road climbed up into some low hills. Beyond lay a rolling map of long, softly-pleated lands, tending first through dove pastels and then startling greens as the sun winged higher up the sky; eventually into the dream-like blue masks of distance. That was the route he had been going, would be going on to. But not just yet. Not now.
He sat on a slope where a colonnade of trees stalked, like furled plumes, back toward the upland valley and the village. The trees gave colour, shade and a pleasant noise of air swimming through leaves. He could see the village, quite small but very clear, below him. Also the switch of the road, leading around the old house and up the mountain, which was a smooth marble cone by day.
As the morning matured, Dro saw the village come fully alive. Miniature figures filled the street, little toy animals were herded out to pasture. When the warm breeze blew the right way, he could hear cows lowing, sheep which sounded more like cats, dogs barking, a hammer striking on metal, the wheels of a cart.
A short while before noon, a party of men and women went along the street, onto the road, and walked to the house with the tower. They stood about there for some minutes. When the wind blew on this occasion, Parl Dro caught a far off curdle of yells and what sounded like stones landing hard on wood.
He was not particularly in favour of this, nor did it worry him unduly. Just as Ciddey’s beauty, insidious and not instantly apparent, had interested, but not spontaneously moved him.
On the return journey of the witch-hunting party to the village, Dro identified for the first time the thief-musician’s varied regalia in their midst. As soon as they reached the juncture where the village thorough-fare branched off from the road, the musician swung aside. Some of the villagers appeared to be arguing with him, but it looked good-natured enough. After a moment or so, the minstrel moved on into the fields that lined the opposite side of the road. Dro lost sight of the man cutting south through a strand of young wheat.
Afternoon streamed over the landscape, tinting everything with its unmistakable changes of light.
Relaxed, yet unsleeping, Dro sat with his back to a tree, watching the village with a long-lidded gaze. His mantle was laid aside, revealing that trousers, boots, shirt were also black, black as his eyes, though his hair had mellowed a shade under the sun. He looked exotic, foreign and dangerous. Only a fool would have stolen up on him from behind. It appeared the man prowling up the south side of the slope was not quite such a fool as that.
The drab green lost itself in the grass, the poppy red did not. If he had been attempting surprise, the musician had obviously accepted his inadequacy at the game. He emerged quite flamboyantly to Dro’s left, and stood studying him with frank accusation.
“I suppose you were expecting me,” he said.
Dro looked at him. The look was neither baleful nor encouraging.
“You could
pretend
to be astounded,” said the musician. “It wouldn’t kill you.”
“It might have killed you,” said Dro.
The musician shrugged and trudged the rest of the way up the slope. When he stood directly over Dro, he produced the bag of pebbles he had thieved the previous night. He threw it dramatically at Dro’s feet.
“That was a nasty trick,” said the musician.
“Stealing isn’t particularly wholesome, either.”
“You could survive it. You’re famous. I’d never thieve from someone who couldn’t afford to lose a few coins. How was I supposed to pay for my supper? You think I had credit there? They wanted me to play songs and pay money too.”
Parl Dro sat looking down the slope.
The musician slung the musical instrument off his back on its frayed embroidered sling, and set it in the grass. He sat down about a foot from Dro.
“In the end,” he said, “I had to make up to some girl to get a bed for the night. And I was worn out, so
that
wasn’t a good idea. But I’d better stop. I can see I’ll have you in tears in a minute.”
Dro went on gazing at the village.
The musician lay back in the grass and gazed at the leaves overhead, spotted sheer green against sheer blue. His face, with its long nose and cap of darkly gilded hair, was basically a rather sad and very worried face, from some angles quite ordinary, from others extremely good-looking, from others still, simply mournful.
“You probably want to know why I’m here,” he said at length.
“Not especially.”