Kill the Dead(32)

He swaggered over to the refectory and strode in on long, reasonably steady legs.

The priests looked up nervously, their pudgy faces bulging with food.

Myal sauntered along the tables, tore off a wing of roast chicken, took up a brimming mug of yellow cider.

“Really, my son,” they remonstrated, “guests do not eat in the refectory.”

“This was paid for, wasn’t it,” Myal demanded, frowning at them, “by my friend Parl? Before he had to go on ahead of me. Pass me that loaf. And the salt.”

He caught a glimpse of himself in a polished ewer. He had moved abruptly into one of his handsome phases. His hair was burnished, his features were chiselled. He looked just like the prince he had always known he really was. That man with the strap—how could that thing have been the genetic father of Myal?

Myal lounged in a chair. He had some ham, ordered a bath. He stole three purses out of two habits.

In the middle of the night, happily bleary from a soak in hot water and a liver soaked in cider, he wandered back across the compound for the purposes of nature. Then, with a sense of his own ridiculous generosity, he returned the purses, though not exactly into their owners’ pockets. He threw them instead nimbly on the compost heap, at its jammiest section.

He woke feeling virtuous and well. Even the cider had not gone sour on him.

He took the instrument, went to the well, drew some water and splashed around in the bucket for a while. When he looked up, the sky was lifting into light, and the red-haired woman stood at the gate. He knew her name by then. He had asked one of the priests. The priest had been shocked. Simply saying a woman’s name had seemed to shock him.

She came across the compound, and gave Myal an apple. The immemorial symbol did not alarm him. It would have, if it had not been her. He ate the apple, enjoying it, though the Gray Duke’s daughter had once insisted he and she simultaneously devour an apple hung by cord from a rafter. It had been a rough enterprise. Their teeth had clashed once or twice and he had been afraid of being bitten. It was a forfeit. Whoever ate least of the apple lost. Myal lost. If he had won, the punishment would actually have been the same.

But he was at ease with Cinnabar. She must admire him very much, but apparently chastely, wanting nothing.

Outside the compound, a roan mare stood docilely. He had not ridden in months, years, but the mare had a tender pretty face. He liked her at once, and shared the last of the apple with her lovingly.

When he was mounted, the instrument on his shoulders, Cinnabar showed him a bag of provisions tied to one side of the saddle.

“You can keep that. But send my horse back to me.”

“Of course I will,” he said very sincerely.

Cinnabar took his hand and placed in it an amazing little clay dog. It looked so realistic, Myal laughed. It was still faintly warm from the firing. He gazed at Cinnabar, and swallowed. Whenever anyone gave him anything, truly gave it, he was emotionally, almost agonisingly, touched.

“Go on,” she said. She was crying slightly, and smiling at him. Myal, also crying a little and grinning foolishly, nodded several times, and tapped the mare.

She took off at a mercurial gallop that surprised and almost unseated him.


After he got used to the savage galloping of the roan mare and they were far from the village, Myal recalled Cinnabar had offered him no directions. That he had found Dro previously was evidence of Myal’s brilliant powers of deduction. But now he ran blind, or the horse did. Then it occurred to him that Cinnabar had told him that the horse knew the road. When he considered it, their direction seemed correct, for they plunged toward the rising sun.

At first, there were tracks running parallel along the loop of the river, then veering away.

Low hills flowed up from the land to the left. On the right hand the river plain spread into limitless distances, shining transparently in the young morning, through a soft powder of mist.

Then a wood swept down on horse and rider. River and hills and tracks were gone.

Leaves whipped by. Birds flirted across Myal’s face. The horse slowed, and began to pick her way at a fast delicate trot.

Myal was struck by a picture of himself.

He brought the instrument around on its sling and rested it on his chest. The rough material of the sling, the scrawls of paint on the wood and the uneven chips of ivory sunk in it excited him with a still, reassuring excitement. The bite of the wires into the old calluses on his fingers filled him with a wild pure wave of peace. He improvised, using the strings only, a dance for the horse.