Kill the Dead(34)

Dro was about two hundred yards away.

The mare had shifted her ground. Myal called to her, and she turned to gaze at him. In the copper light, she too was made of copper. When he called again and took a step in her direction, she tossed her head, kicked up her heels and bounded off, back the way they had come. In half a minute, she had vanished behind stands of trees. Possibly she had taken his yell as the homeward instruction, but to Myal it looked more like sheer perversity. The bag of provisions was still firmly tied to her saddle. Myal turned and looked at Parl Dro, small now as a black beetle again. Myal began to run after him, on legs that were uncertain and stiff from riding. His head sang. When Dro had grown back to the height of Myal’s hand, Myal decelerated into a shaky stride.

Presently Dro looked over his shoulder. He looked, and looked away, keeping moving. Myal put on another enforced burst of speed. The instrument thumped him on the back, as if encouraging him. Then either Dro had slowed his pace or Myal increased his beyond the speed he thought himself capable of, for abruptly he caught up to Dro, and they were walking alongside each other.

“Don’t mind me,” said Myal airily. “I just happen to be going the same way as you.”

“So I see.”

“The bloody horse ran off. All the bloody food was in a bloody bag tied on the bloody saddle. That’s bloody well gone too.”

Dro walked. Myal glanced at him and away.

“This seems quite a nice spot to bivouac for the night.”

“So bivouac.”

“Don’t you think,” said Myal, “we should stick together? There could be a lot of big animals about in a place like this after dark. Two of us together would stand a better chance of–fighting anything off.”

Dro walked. Myal set himself to the task of simply keeping up. The lame stride was powerful and set its own decided rhythm.

Side by side, unspeaking, they moved over the wild park, and the light closed like a door behind them.

Darkness swirled from the thickets, the trees, from pockets in the ground. The sky, a smooth sheet of dark lavender, put out a thousand stars.

There was a sudden break in the landscape. Around a wall of silent folded poplars, the earth tipped over into one more ravine, this time very shallow, some seven yards deep at most, about five feet across. A dense stream of night was already flowing there. On the far side, a bare humped hill ascended, with one towering oak tree flung up from it in a pagoda of leaves.

There was a thin noise of water, not in the ravine, but to one side, along the edge. A spring flickered from the rock and over, uselessly, into the gully.

Dro crossed to the spring and kneeled, presumably drinking or filling a flask; in the gathering dark it was hard to see. When Dro moved away and began to set a fire between the poplars, Myal went to the spring in turn and drank. Then he moved across to watch Dro. The fire was economically constructed. It made use of a natural scoop in the earth, a few stones to contain and conduct the heat, dry twigs for the base, those less dry set near to cook out moss or rain before being added.

“You’re very good,” said Myal admiringly.

Dro lit the fire and sat, his back against a poplar trunk, his hood pushed off. That shadowy king’s face, gilded by flame, intimidated Myal, who stood awkwardly, as if waiting to be asked to sit down. Without warning, Dro’s glowing black eyes fixed on him. The stare was profound, hypnotic, ruthless and inimical. Myal writhed under it, then snapped like one of the twigs.

“So this is the end of our beautiful friendship, is it? You really think I’m that much of a dead loss, do you?”

Dro’s eyes never moved, did not even blink. Just his mouth said, “I really think you are.”

“In that case, I’m off.” Myal added sarcastically, “I know when I’m not wanted.”

“Your life must be a series of departures.”

Raging and impotent, Myal turned on his heel and walked straight into a tree.

Having disengaged himself, he strode away along the side of the ravine, far enough to be out of Dro’s sight. He lay down where a boulder provided partial shelter and a partly reassuring anchor at his spine. He hugged the instrument and curled himself together around it. The earth was growing cold and magnetically still.

He lay like that some while, feeling alone and dwarfed under the wide night, inventing cutting rejoinders to Parl Dro’s comments, blaming his own status and person for all the ills life had showered on him.

He fell asleep and dreamed Cinnabar’s clay dog had got out of his pocket and was barking and frisking in the meadow, until one of its jumps broke it on a stone. Red blood flowed from the clay and Myal wept in his sleep. For comfort, his dream hands closed on wire strings and began to play them. It was the song he had made for Ciddey Soban.