Kill the Dead(7)

“The Sobans were the masters here five years ago. Old Soban and his two daughters. But they lost their money and the village bought the land.”

“They lost their money because the father drank it. He was drinking it before Ciddey was old enough to bite.”

“Then he’d sell things,” said the first man. “Botched-up rubbish—ridiculous stuff.”

“There was a wonderful thing, supposed to come from some foreign place, wasn’t there? And it was just a couple of old scythes welded together. He’d get the smith to help him, Soban would. The carpenter, the mason. Everyone—”

“Someone told me,” said another of the men, “he sold Ciddey’s baby teeth as a charm necklace.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Ciddey’s crazy too. Pity, because she’s nice-looking enough. We leave her to herself, for old time’s sake. She lives alone in that house.”

“Not quite alone,” said Dro.

“The father drank himself into the graveyard years before,” the first man said. “Do you mean him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“There was a story,” said the first man. “The girls played about with herbs. Witch charms, poisons maybe. They got sick of the father drinking and... saw to him.”

“And that’s a lie,” said someone.

Dro was aware of the singing group detaching itself from the hearth and swarming over. The minstrel who had played the exquisite music was beginning to appear in fragments, now a threadbare red sleeve, now a dirty green sleeve, now a dark gold head and a long nose, between the shoulders and gesticulations of the crowd.

They were excited, and nervous. An event was happening in the midst of uneventfulness. The musician, staying clear, carefully keeping his head down over retuning the peculiar instrument beside the spits, showed a desire to remain uninvolved, and thereby a derivation not of this village.

“There was the second daughter,” someone said finally, just behind Dro’s left ear.

“Ciddey’s sister? Nothing funny there.”

“Yes, there was. Didn’t Cilny Soban run off and drown herself in the stream the north side of the mountain? Not exactly what I’d call normal.”

“It’s true, Parl Dro,” the elderly boy said. “Two herders found her in the morning when they were taking the cows up to graze.”

“Cilny was lying at the bottom of the stream, she was,” said the first man dolefully, “but the water’s so clear in the spring you could see straight through. One of the boys is a bit simple. He thought she was a water spirit, lying there in her nightgown, with a wreath of flowers on her head and fish swimming about in her hair.”

“What do you think of that, eh, Parl Ghost-Killer?”

Dro removed his hand from the cup and let the boy fill it again. The crowd had got itself well into the informative stage, anxious to elicit a response from him. They had commenced pressing rumour and snippets of memory on him like gifts, waiting for him to crow. But the King of Swords merely sat and brooded, letting them heap the platter.

They were putting great emphasis on the stresses of the girls’ two names, telling him now how Sidd-dayy and Sill-nee had been, loving and near one hour, at each other’s throats the next. Once or twice, one sister might look at a village man, and then the other sister would go wild, shrieking that such a wooing, let alone marriage, was beneath the Soban blood. When Cilny had made away with herself the previous spring, nobody had dropped down in a fit of surprise. When Ciddey demanded the corpse be burned not buried and the ashes delivered to her in a stone pot, not even the priest had had much to say. The Sobans had always been a pagan tribe, amoral and unstable. Since the death of Cilny, Ciddey was rarely seen. Sometimes, someone might spot her by night, walking along the slopes below the mountain, or up in the tower window, staring out. In her pig-headed way, just like her father, she expected the village to put food and other essentials at her gate, free of charge, its tithe to her house. With a self-deprecating amused grimace, between shame and pride, the village admitted that it did so. Nobody had actually considered whether drowned Cilny might come back to haunt. But now that they did consider, they would not be amazed if she had.

Dro sipped from the third cup.

The stream-death might explain the ambience at the well, the pulse of supernatural force linked to water. The pot of cremated ashes was significant. It was coming time to reward the crowd with a reaction, and then to damp their fire. As he sat, picturing the flower-wreathed water maiden stretched under the glassy stream, he became aware that the musician had moved from the hearth, and was after all stealing closer. He slid through and into the crowd with a very practiced ease, attracting small notice. Intrigued but not astonished, Dro kept still.