Kill the Dead(6)

“He means,” explained the elderly boy, “you look like Death.”

“I certainly feel like it,” said Dro. He pushed off his hood, picked up the cup and drained it. “The third of a loaf,” he elaborated to the boy, “and a couple of slices of that sheep you’re burning over the fire.”

“We always burn the sheep here,” said the boy wittily, “to be sure they’re properly dead before you eat them.”

“I’m relieved you take the same precautions with the bread.”

Somebody laughed. Somebody else mimed a man trying to acquire a bite out of a live loaf. The boy filled Dro’s cup again and went off to the hearth, shouldering his way, murderously flourishing the meat knife, through the singers. As some of the raucous chorus broke off, Dro caught a couple of bars of perfect music, sheer and fine as a shining fish glancing through river mud. The sources of the music were firstly strings, tuned high as clouds, then suddenly also a pipe tuned even higher. Dro partly inclined his head, waiting for the next exquisite bar, but the howling song started up again and the music submerged in it.

The boy was back and slapped down a platter.

“Stick this fork in it. If it goes baaa, I’ll put it back on the spit for a while.”

Dro pierced the mutton with the fork and a dozen voices bleated along the length of the table.

“Better fetch the shepherd,” said Dro, “before the wolf gets his flock.”

He began to eat, economically. A little silence gathered.

Eventually someone said: “It’d be a lame wolf, wouldn’t it?”

A neighbour jogged his elbow. “Shut up, idiot. I recognize who he is now.”

“Yes,” said another. “And I do, too. I thought he was a legend.”

Dro went on economically eating.

One of the men said to him: “We’ve guessed who you are.”

Dro sat back and smiled enigmatically at no one. “Am I to be the last to know?”

They shuffled. Somebody said, as somebody always said, “Don’t think I want to share this table with you.”

But none of them moved away. Indeed, one or two more were edging over from other parts of the room, drawn as if to the scene of a lurid crime.

Dro went on eating and drinking, slow, and oddly isolated from the whirlpool he was creating. He was as used to this as to rough ground, as to the pain that walked with him. Used to it, and able now and then to use it in turn.

The remarks came gently, cautiously, laying ripples of emotion over the warm air.

“What do you think of yourself, doing what you do?”

“How do you sleep nights?”

“He sleeps all right. There’ll be plenty with cause to thank him.”

“And plenty who won’t thank him.”

“Plenty who curse him, eh, Ghost-Killer? How many curses fly down the roads with you? Is that what keeps you looking young?”

“You were lamed by a malediction, isn’t that so?”

“No. Not that way. One of his victims stuck a claw in him at the gate out. He hasn’t aged since then.”

All around the spinning currents of these unanswered sallies, the room grew quieter and quieter. Dro heard the singing fade out, but the music went out too. He did not look about, just waited for the cue that must inevitably come. He finished what he wanted of his meal, and was drinking the last stinging mouthful from his cup when the cue dropped into the pool.

“Well, you’ve had a wasted journey to this place, Parl Dro. We haven’t any deadalive here.”

“Oh, but you’re wrong,” he said, and they jumped at his immaculate voice, which had been silent such a while. “Half a mile back along the road. The leaning house with the stone tower.”

He could have portioned the silence with the boy’s meat knife after he said that. It was not exactly that they knew and had been withholding it from him, more that they had suspected, and the confirmation chilled them. Of course, there was no need to tell them it had been another place he was making for altogether, that this was an unscheduled task.

The first of the men who had baa-ed, said very low, “He means the Soban house.”

Another of the men added, “That’s Ciddey’s house. There’s nothing there. Except poverty, a little kiss of madness.”

The boy in the leather apron was at Dro’s shoulder, leaning to refill Dro’s cup. Dro put his hand over the cup. The boy poured words instead.