Kill the Dead(18)

Somewhere in this country, by night, Parl Dro had slept, wrapped in his black mantle. The weather had been soft and warm, turning cold only as the dawn approached. But a few hours after sunrise, the heat came back, smilingly, as if its absence might be overlooked.

On the morning wall of a farm, a skinny child sat, dangling its legs among the vines. When it suddenly saw the black-clad man striding his long lame strides down the road, the child slunk into a thicket. It sprang out at him as he passed.

“Give me some money!”

Dro did not look at it. “Why?”

“I have the magic sight,” said the child. “I’ll tell your future. Give me a twenty-penny piece.”

Dro stopped. He looked at the child. It was a girl with sun-bleached hair. He threw her a twenty-penny piece, spinning it lazily from his height to hers. She caught the coin, and said, “I know who you are. I thought you were a legend. They said you’d be by this way sometime.”

“Who said?”

“They all did. For years and years. Now I’ll tell you. Watch out. Before and behind. You’ve got a lot of enemies.”

“Have I really?” said Dro.

“But not me,” said the child. “I think you’re lovely.”

She ran away along the wall. Rosy dust puffed from the ground as she went. The soil was more acrid here, and powdery.

At noon there was an inn that sold wine and golden cheese. Peaches ripened on the walls. A blind dog sunned itself, and whined when Parl Dro’s shadow slid over its back.

In the afternoon, the road shifted to the south. A thread of track beat on eastwards, but faded in a molasses-coloured wood as the sun began to wester. When he emerged from the wood, the land sloped down to a loop of one of the misty rivers. A ruined fortress stood dreamily in the loop, melting into the sky as sunset condensed the air. A village lay along the river’s edge. It had the usual wide street, supplemented by a couple of others almost as wide. The sewage-dispelling water courses appeared to discharge into an area of marsh that strained out of the river to the north. A dab of smoke coiled from the roofs. Some fishing boats lay, themselves like spread fish, side by side on the shore.

The premonition he had been having, inchoate but persistent, was now so strong Dro avoided the village completely. He walked instead diagonally, clipping the marsh. A causeway of pleached bricks went through mud and strips of water, out onto the baked meadow in the loop of the river where the fortress was.

The outer walls had crumbled. The inner had a lovely smoothness, sanded down by the elements. Some earl or princeling had lorded it here one or two hundred years ago, master of the river. Nobody much came here now. No paths were worn across the meadow. Not even goats or sheep had been pastured, for the grass was virgin and proud. Probably the village reckoned the fortress to be haunted. It had that look to it, secretive, smoky. Only a ghost-killer like Dro could have told for sure that there were no ghosts. It was just an empty shell.

A wind blew up along the river, and the chill came back with the dusk. Dro set a fire inside the lee of the inner wall, where a staircase went up into a vault of sky. A wild apple tree had rooted in the earth by the stair, with precocious green fruit on it. He put a couple to bake out their sourness in the ashes around the fire.

A huge owl, soundless, like a paper kite, sailed over the meadow to its hunting.

Parl Dro sat against the wall. He had only to wait awhile. He was alert, but very still. It was a knack of his, one of many disciplines, to be able to turn off awareness of time, and all superfluous senses, resting them, as he rested the crippled leg. Every day of walking on the roads was a day of fighting that pain, and every respite brought a dizzying relief. Done in, he paid little attention to either condition or cause.

Then, through half-closed eyes, he saw a woman mantled in gold hair, leaning to his firelight. She was very real, but when he raised his lids, no longer there.

The child at the farm had triggered certain memories, one familiar and crucial. He thought about it, turning the past over in his mind, as he waited for the present to catch up to him.

His father had been a soldier in some small border war big enough to kill him. Parl Dro’s mother had died a while later, when he was about four years of age. The local landowner kept a house where homeless children might grow up in reasonable conditions. When he was ten, Dro was already working in the fields. But, because he had shown some aptitude for learning, the landowner, much fairer than most, sent him twice a week into town, to be schooled.

The school was ramshackle. In winter, icicles formed high on the indoor beams under the attic where the roof leaked. The children would huddle around an iron pot with coals in it. There were fifty boys and about fifteen girls whose relatives thought them odd enough to need lessons. All but one of the girls were alien creatures, whose nurses always came with them. In winter, they brought their own iron firepots, too. The last girl was poor and came alone. She sat bolt upright in a clean ragged darned dress. Her hair was always clean, too, a long fair flag that hung down her back and onto the bench. The well-off little girls would not speak to her. They had remarked loudly to each other that she was a hussy, having no nurse to guard her. The poor girl remarked as loudly, to the air, that she, being virtuous and trustworthy, required no guard, as they plainly did.