“All right. You want to know why I’m not clever enough to clear off.” The silence lasted. “All right,” said the minstrel, “I’ll tell you. We’re actually going the same way.”
“Which way is that?”
“Oh, come on. The way any of your calling was bound to go, this year or next. Of course, it may only be a legend. In which case, it’s still my business. I can still make a song of it. I’m referring to Ghyste Mortua.”
“Someone you know,” said Parl Dro.
“A
place
we
both
know. If it exists. I’ve been roaming up and down these parts quite a few days, trying to suss it out. Or find someone who knows the way. I’d take a gamble you do.”
“Would you?”
“You see, in my sort of career, you need a song to make your name. One unique, marvelous, never-to-be-successfully-plagiarized song. It came to me, one night when I was really down—I mean
really
down—on my luck, that my song was in Ghyste Mortua. Not that I’m one of these courageous idiots who’ll run his neck into a noose for a two-penny piece. Myal Lemyal, which is me, is the cautious type. And I know when I need guidance. As for you, you might like some music on the road.”
“And then again,” said Dro softly, “I might not.”
“And then again you might not. Incidentally, about that girl in the old house, I consider the trouble you’ve caused her stinks. I went down there with some of them. They were bellowing that you’d gone, but they hadn’t, and they were throwing stones at her door. You’re not a particularly splendid hero, are you?”
Dro smiled. “Compared with you?”
“Oh well, if you’re going to be offensive.”
Idly, Myal Lemyal sat up and picked the instrument off the grass. It was an eccentric package, the main portion being a body and sound box of grotesquely painted wood with chips of ivory set in, from which mass two necks extended, each strung with fine wires that crisscrossed each other midway. Across the top of these necks ran a bar to which tarnished silver pegs skewered certain of the sets of wire strings at apparently random points. Meanwhile, straight through the bar and into the sound box ran a wooden reed with a mouthpiece of ivory. The stops followed the reed down through the bole of the instrument in such a way that, as Myal Lemyal shortly demonstrated, agile fingers could manage both strings and stops simultaneously. The performance, analyzed, should have been quite impossible, additionally so when, with a precarious balance achieved against his shoulder, and eight fingers and two thumbs scuttling over each other in all directions, he set his lips to the ivory mouthpiece. His hair skidded at once into his eyes, which seemed to have crossed. He looked both maniacal and preposterous. While from the unholy instrument came the sounds of paradise. Of harps that were panpipes, of lutes that were also flutes, of mandolins that were also lyres and trumpets, of celestial, never-before-dreamed-of melody, harmony, counterpoint and rhythm.
When he finished, slipping off the string again, he laid the instrument in the grass once more, and peered at it melancholically. The slope seemed to go on singing to itself for quite some while.
“As you said,” Myal ventured, “you might not care for music.”
“I was only curious,” said Parl Dro, “as to why such genius needs to be out picking pockets in the wilderness.”
“Genius?” Myal smiled. The smile was angelic. He looked noble, even very beautiful, but the illusion vanished quickly. “Well, you know how it is.”
“Did you steal the instrument, too?”
“I? Oh no. My father did that. He killed a man to get it, and the man, I assume, put a bane on him, and on me, I shouldn’t wonder. My father used to beat sparks out of me every time he got drunk, which was pretty frequent. When he was sober, he’d teach me to play that. I hate my father. I’m not that keen on myself.”
He lapsed into a moody reverie, staring where the dark man, who looked like handsome Death, was still watching the village, the road, the mountain. Soon, Myal lay down in the grass again.
“What’ll you do about that girl, that Ciddey Soban?”
“What do you think?”
“Go back and make her miserable some more. Push her dead sister out of this world into the next, so they can both be nicely lonely and wretched.”
Something pecked at his hand. Fearing snakes, Myal jerked three feet backward, landed, and saw the flask Dro had been offering him. He accepted the flask gingerly, uncorked it and sniffed. An appreciative grin, unlike the smile, altered the desolation of his face.
“White brandy. Haven’t tasted that since I was on the Cold Earl’s lands.”
He tasted it, and kept on tasting it. Dro let him.
They said a few more things to each other, on Myal’s side progressively unintelligible. Bees came and went in patches of clover. Large grape-dark clouds with edges of gold tissue clotted together behind the mountain.
“Why’d you do it?” Myal Lemyal asked. “Why’d you send um out of thissorld wheney doan wanna go?”
“Why does a surgeon draw a man’s tooth when it’s decayed?”
“Issen the same. Not attall. I’ve heard of you, and your
kind.
Poor liddle ghosts driven sobbinganscreaming out’f the place they wanna be most.”
“It’s necessary. What’s dead can’t go on pretending it’s alive.”
“Anthasswhy you wannagetter Ghyzemortwa—”
When the light began to go, Myal Lemyal was already gone, blind drunk on white brandy and passed out in the clover. Senseless, however, one hand had fallen on the sling of the grotesque instrument, and mingled with it in a firm and complex clutch.
Of Parl Dro there was no longer any sign.
When he woke and saw the stars scattered like dice overhead, Myal knew he had made yet another mistake.
There was a clean fragrant wind blowing on the hills. It helped soothe his pounding headache. But it did not help much in the other matter. He had lost the King of Swords, handsome Death, Parl Dro the Ghost-Killer. Of course, it was inevitable that he would ruin this chance too. Myal considered his first slip-up had been in getting born. He had gone on wrecking his chances systematically ever since.
The worst thing was that he was still drunk. Despite the headache and an inevitable queasiness, he still felt inclined to roll about in the grass howling with insane laughter. His own inanity irritated him. He put the instrument on his shoulder and staggered down the slope, alternately giggling and cursing himself.
He was detouring by the village and stumbling across the fields to rejoin the road beyond it, making for the faintly glowing cutout of the mountain, before it dawned on him why. Though Dro had abandoned him, Dro would not have abandoned the leaning house and its two sisters, one quick, one dead. Sooner or later Dro would be revisiting that house. Myal had only to be in the vicinity to freshen their acquaintance. Perhaps another tack might be in order. “I never had a big brother. Never had anyone to look up to, learn from.” He could hear himself saying it, and winced. It was difficult to be sure how to get around someone like Dro.
The house was leaning there, in its accustomed position of decline, when he re-emerged on the road. Starlit, the moon still asleep, and dominated by its trees, it did look ghostly.
Myal shivered, scared and also romantically stirred by the idea. He had glimpsed the live sister, Ciddey, five evenings ago, when he first exhaustedly arrived here over the mountain. She was a true lady, like one of the Cold Earl’s women, or the Gray Duke’s, or a damsel of any of those endless succession of courts he had flitted in and out of, mothlike, scorching his wings. Ciddey was like a moth too. Pale, exquisite, fragile. And somehow inimical, eerie... abroad by night with unhuman glittering eyes—
Myal began to know the itching panic of a babe alone in unfamiliar darkness.
He looked at the house among its trees, and hugged himself in an infantile intuitive search for comfort. Naturally, Parl Dro would come along the road and find him this way, quivering with fright. But there was as yet no evidence of Dro or his inexorable exorcism.
Suddenly Myal had a wild impulse. He was accustomed to them; they were usually misguided and mostly led to mishap. Their phenomena had also commenced with him in childhood. The perverse directives the brain was sometimes capable of—to drop the tray loaded with priceless glass, to leap the too-wide gap between a pair of speeding wagons, to spit in the face of the landowner’s steward—such contrary notions, normally suppressed by the average person, had always proved irresistible to Myal. They were not caused by reckless bravery, either, for Myal was not brave, but merely by the same chemistry that had forced him, so unwisely, to be conceived.
The current impulse was driving him across the road, toward the iron gate, into the umber yard. That achieved, he sat, trembling slightly, on the edge of the stone well. He swung the instrument forward, and began to sing Ciddey (or was it Cilny?) a love song. His voice was an unpowerful but attractive tenor. In the silence it seemed very loud. The strings popped under his fingers, and the notes struck the walls like uncanny sideways rain.
When the shutter slapped open overhead, Myal’s heart practically stopped.
He glanced up, keeping the song going. A pallid bolt of light hung in the ivy, the shape of a single moth’s wing.
The girl leaned through the light. It was the live one—probably. Her braided hair was like moonshine.
Myal gasped and left off singing. He was half in love with her, and frozen with fear.
“What is it?” said the girl. She stared at the instrument. Slender little hands like fox paws gripped the sill. “What do you want?”
“I want,” Myal swallowed and lost his head completely. “I want to warn you.”
“Don’t trouble. I know the village. They’ll behave themselves. They still respect the name of Soban.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean the man called Dro.” He heard her catch her breath. She was lovely. He wished he was a thousand miles away. “He made out he was leaving, but he’ll be back—if he isn’t back already. He was going to Ghyste Mortua—I think. But he reckons he’s got dealings to settle with you first. You and—your sister.”
“Go away!” cried the girl in the window.
Myal jumped, but felt more familiar ground under his feet at her tone of anger and threat. “Only trying to be helpful. Sorry I spoke.”
“Wait,” said the girl. She was suddenly, appallingly defenceless. “What do you know about him?”
“Only that he’ll be back. If you want my advice, not that you do, you’d run for it”
“Where could I go?”
“Maybe—with me.”
He stared up at her, shivering at the romance of it all and wishing he could shut himself up. To his chagrin and his relief, the girl laughed at him.
“
You
. Who are
you
? Besides, what about my dead sister? Where is
she
to go? With you, too?”
“Perhaps,” Myal shuddered, “Parl Dro made an error there. Perhaps I don’t believe in ghosts.”