Kill the Dead(35)

Any compunction Parl Dro might have felt was inevitably tempered by the realisation that the crazy minstrel was even now probably less than a hundred feet off. Not that Dro was particularly inclined to compunction. From thirteen until he was fifteen, he had worked his way up and down various tracts of land, now as herder, now as farmhand, now as escort for or carrier of trade goods, and he had learned his own methods of survival. Myal Lemyal, from the look of things, had had a life as rough, dangerous and soul-destroying. His methods of survival were not Parl Dro’s, yet they were methods and he had survived. Dro had more respect for Myal’s abilities than Myal could guess. And less time for him than even Myal’s paranoia intimated. It was not aversion exactly, but simply that Dro’s singularity had grown to be a habit. He would break from it for a day, a night, now and then. But he was used to being companionless. Used to himself as seen only through his own implacable eyes.

At fifteen, when he was still capable of becoming reasonably gregarious, and exceedingly drunk, Parl Dro had accepted a bet, for a pound bag of silver, to sleep the night in a haunted barn. At the time he had done it for the cash, but also out of a sense of cultivated contempt. Something in him had, for two years, been vehemently denying that night when Silky had come back to him under the lightning-blasted apple tree. He did not believe in ghosts at fifteen.

He had reclined on the straw and the reeds in the barn, now and then drinking from the wineskin the men had provided, vaguely lit by a hanging lamp—the bargain had not stipulated a vigil in the dark. Just before the sun went, his hosts had shown him the place where the ghost came through out of nowhere. They had also shown Parl the cindery glove, pinned to a post in the floor. They had discovered the rudiments, and pointed to the glove, saying, “That’s why it comes.” Another told how a man had once tried to destroy the glove by throwing it in a hearth fire. But as soon as the thumb began to singe, the man had felt deathly ill. He snatched the glove from the flames before he knew what he was doing. Now they boasted about the deadalive revenant in the barn. They invited travellers to sleep there. The last man who had accepted the bet, they assured Parl, had gone stark mad. Parl had nodded, smiling. He expected tricks but nothing unworldly. He lay on the straw and thought about the bag of silver, which he had convinced himself he wanted. He ignored the sense of horror that lay over the barn. At midnight the ghost came.

It no longer much resembled anything human, though naturally by now it appeared solid and three-dimensional. The physical trauma of its death had stayed with it, which was unusual, and in this case, obscene, for it had been hacked to pieces by enemies. It came from thin air, shrieking with agony, its flesh in ribbons, its eyes put out.

Parl’s impulse was normal, and was to run away. Something would not let him. He found himself staggering to the post where the glove was pinned. And the awful, shrieking, eyeless thing came blundering after him. A moment before it collided with him, Parl cast the wineskin he discovered he was still holding straight up into the hanging lamp.

The lamp burst with a crack of glass, and fiery oil and wine splashed over the straw. In seconds, the barn was on fire, full of light and smoke and roaring. The live dead thing had by then seized Parl, screaming and pressing him into the terrible still-bleeding gaping of its wounds. Parl would have burned along with the linking glove, if somehow the extraordinary power of will that was in him—latent, yet stronger than any power he had known he had, stronger than muscle or brain or the drives of hunger, sex, ambition or fear—if somehow that power had not sprung from him and thrust the deadalive whining and snarling aside.

The glove flared a few instants later, and the dreadful noises stopped. The blinded rigid face of the ghost-thing suddenly relaxed, as if its searing hurt had gone away. It faded quietly in the smoke, and Parl Dro broke out of the barn and ran like a dog-fox for the wood.

He looked back when he was on higher ground, and saw the men out in a black silhouette-dance around the fire, trying to quench it. He never got their silver, only the name of an arsonist, and the assured knowledge once more that the dead did not always die.

The smaller fire between the stones was sinking. Dro leaned to put on more branches, and paused. Along the side of the ravine, the musician was playing his music.

Dro sat, the branches loose in his hand, listening. Fine as silk threads drawn through the dark, the notes sewed over and about each other. The melody was oblique, tragic, stabbing somewhere inside the heart with a sweet piercing pain, removed yet immediate. Like that of any excellent minstrel, Myal Lemyal’s music could find out emotions that did not belong in the humours or mind of the listener, and plant them there and let them grow while the song sang itself. But Myal was much better than excellent. Myal, playing the bizarre instrument his father had killed to get, was one of the lost golden gods returned from the morning of the earth.