Kill the Dead(38)

Dro started off with no apparent preparation, just rising and walking away. Myal uneasily followed, keeping to the rear, subservient, dog-like and self-hating.

They moved along the side of the ravine, which narrowed and finally closed together. They picked a way down into a valley, and through the valley, and into another valley.

The land had all the same smooth blankness. No smoke rose, there was no stone that had not fallen naturally upon another. There was not even a field which had gone to seed. Not even a ruin. If anyone had ever passed that way he had not lingered, and all trace had been obliterated.

Myal grew jumpy with uneasiness. All his roaming had been at the periphery of towns, villages, courts. He was so ill-prepared for anything like this. He did not even have a bottle to collect drink from springs or streams, having lost the one he had had in an unsuccessful fight half a year before. That he had never thought to replace it was indicative of its unessential quality. Yet, he had gone searching for Ghyste Mortua. For Tulotef.

Where had he first heard of it? Where had the notion of a song of the undead first caught his fancy? He could not recall.

Now, in any case, he had no choice.

And having dogged Dro, begging to accompany him, once Dro was determined that he should, Myal longed to run away. Though run where, and with what ghastly ghostly thing in pursuit?

A wide escarpment floated up from the valley, long dusty concaves of parched and whitened grass, periodically steepled with dark green trees. Near the top, biscuit-coloured slashes and streaks of clay daunted Myal with their elevation. Yesterday’s ride had knotted the muscles of his legs. At first he had walked the stiffness out. Gradually, it was returning.

Some early currants were beaded along a wild fruiting hedge. Myal tore them off and ate them ravenously. Then he gathered others and advanced on Dro, catching him up for the first time, and offering the gift ingratiatingly.

Rather to Myal’s surprise, Dro accepted the currants and ate them, as if he had not noticed them himself.

“It’s past noon. When do we rest?” wondered Myal.

“Come now,” said Dro, very nearly playfully, “you’re not bored with this lovely bracing walk we’re having?”

“It beats me why you don’t ride with that–with your–well, it beats me. You could afford a horse.”

“If I started riding, I’d cease being able to walk anywhere again,” said Dro. “The only way I can keep the damn thing from seizing up forever is to work the hell out of it most days.”

“Oh.” Awarded this personal revelation, Myal felt pleased and almost flattered. Emboldened, he said, “You seem to know the direct route to Tulotef.”

“I practically do. But leave the name alone. Why do you think it got a nickname instead?”

“That other thing,” said Myal, “the girl–”

“No,” Parl Dro said. “Leave that alone, too.”

Puzzled and insecure, Myal did as he was told.

The escarpment went on, up and up. Looking back, the descending lands they had negotiated earlier had become another country, ethereal and far away, perhaps impossible to regain.

Myal’s mother had died six months after his birth. Another mistake, getting himself born to a woman who died, probably because of him. Inadvertent matricide thereby added to his crimes. He had been brought up, or dragged up, by the bestial father. At twelve he had run away. He was still running. Still thieving too; his first proper theft had been the stringed instrument–the second time it had been stolen. Before that he had only attempted small robberies, at his strap-wielding father’s suggestion.

When the sun fell, and the light began to go, and they were still climbing the inward-curving upland they had first got on to an hour before noon, the analogy of life itself as a hopeless climb occurred to Myal. Though they had rested somewhere, under trees, for a while, his back and his legs screamed. He could not understand how Dro, the cripple, kept going with such seeming indifference, with such a peculiar lurching grace. Myal began to think Dro forced himself on merely in order to spite his companion.

If I stop dead, what then?

Myal stopped dead. Dro did not appear to note the cessation. He went on, walking up into the forerunning brushwork of the dusk.

“Hey!” Myal yelled. “Hey!”

A bird shot out of a tree. Dro stopped, but did not turn. Myal shouted up at him, “I’m not going any farther. It’s getting dark.”

Then he realized Dro had not stopped because of any of his shouts.