Kill the Dead(43)

Presently Dro sat up, rose, walked across to the spot beside the instrument where Myal had been sitting. The grass was still flattened somewhat— not by a seated figure, but a prone one. Myal had slept at his watch as Dro had grimly predicted. Looking at it, Dro felt the familiar signals, the shift of hair on scalp and neck, the tiny ratlike beast which seemed to scuttle up his spine.

Parl Dro stood and looked toward the sea of forest that flooded the valleys below. The moon was high, but there was scarcely any wind to bring the muted sounds of the woodland up to the ridge.

Then he heard the thin clear note, like that of a bird, or even of a reed pipe, piercing acutely as a needle through the shadow and the foliage a mile below.

There was nothing else, or nothing else he heard.

The fire was almost dead. Dro killed it quickly and thoroughly with a couple of blows.

He picked up Myal’s musical instrument, held it a moment, then, unwillingly, slung it across his own shoulders. Its touch, weight, shape and aura—of another man’s inner world?—disturbed him.

Abruptly, Dro spoke one foul obscenity to the night. Then he swung himself off the ridge and onto the tricky ground that led almost vertically into the forest. Presently, in the bushes a couple of feet down the slope, he kicked against something, glanced at it, and found Myal Lemyal’s body.

He was lame, and now he carried the dead weight of a nightmarish hell-harp on one shoulder, the dead weight of a man over the other. The man, it was true, was thin and therefore light to carry. Even so, it was nothing he would have wished on himself.

Random, primitive tracks scattered through the forest, as if several balls of twine had been dropped, allowed to roll at will and then metamorphosed into pathways. The night had added a second forest to the first, having planted quick seedlings there at dusk, which rapidly shot up into tall, thick-boled trees made entirely of shadow, and which blocked every aisle and avenue.

Dro had gone by a dry watercourse, a chasm of moss and undergrowth where once there had shimmered a pool. The place shimmered still, a psychic shimmer. The cry Dro had heard on the ridge had come from this spot.

He began to follow a purely unphysical path, then. A kind of razor-edged blind brilliance only he could see.

The moon swung over and away behind him, barely noticed through the gloom and the foliage. Once a fox ran across the invisible track, narrowing its eyes, bristling with fear at the vibrations of the deadalive, which painted the tips of the grasses like fire.

Then, at last, the day began to come.

With sick relief, and with anger, Parl Dro felt the clue fading out on the ground, the air.

Ahead, the night trees planted between the real ones began to crumble and dissolve. Pink dawn sprang through instead. The world opened out into great new spaces; a blade carved the wood, and everything of night was gone, including the vile and shrilling road to Ghyste Mortua the dead had left behind them.

Dro cursed, the same curse as before. He eased the musician’s body off his back, and let it fall haphazardly, the musical instrument in its wake. Dro sat on a fallen tree, and slowly stretched out before him the biting, howling, shrieking torturer which his lame leg had become.

He sat and watched the forest as it flushed and brightened. Birds dived in and out of pools of light. But his agony was so huge it had temporarily deafened him, and he had not, nor could not, hear their voices.

Neither did he hear the crackling sound the sled made. Or rather, he heard it, but did not spontaneously react. When he finally convinced himself that someone was near, and he should care about the fact, he turned and found the woman standing ten feet away, the rough-made sled, loaded with branches, attached to her hands by two fraying corded ropes. The young sun hit her squarely, and she, by contrast, looked old as the hills. But, black-mantled and black-eyed, she might have been some ancient sister of his.

“Nice day,” she said, in a voice like a rusty bolt.

“Uh.”

She dropped the ends of rope and walked over.

“Not for you, though,” she said.

She kneeled, rusty as her voice, on the earth before him, reached out and clamped her two withered hands on the blazing shrieking leg. Anyone but Dro would have cried out. She said to him, just as if he had, “Keep faith. You’ll see.”

He saw. The intolerable agony cut up through guts and ribs into his throat, and went out. A slow cool warmth soaked from the old woman’s hands. She twisted and pummelled the muscles of his calf and the bones beneath. Great shocks of pain went off, and the cool warmth flowed in after them. He slumped back on the tree and started to go to sleep, but held himself just over the threshold into waking. After a long wonderful time, her hands went away. She sat on the ground, put off her hood and began to braid thin trails of dark gray hair.