Kill the Dead(11)

“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?”