by Tanith Lee
The rain clouds were gone. The moon was leisurely sliding down the slope to the belfry.
The woman called Cinnabar sat at the front of the potter’s shop. Queen of Fires. A dull glow lingered in the eye of the kiln, and she was in its way, catching the light on cheek and breast and hair, and on her moving hands.
She was pinching out a little clay dog by moonlight. She glanced up and saw Parl Dro standing by the unlocked gate, watching her.
“You look tired to death,” she said.
“Aren’t we all.”
“Sometimes.”
“Can I come inside?” he said.
She looked down, almost shyly.
“Didn’t I say you could?”
He stepped into the shop. It smelled of baked clay, and of some warm subtle perfume she was wearing. He had not noticed it on her before.
“I’ll offer you my bed again,” she said to the dog. “This time, just to sleep in. It’s a rare bed. Feather mattress deeper than sixteen seas piled one on the other. It’ll do you good. You look properly done up. But I remind you of someone, don’t I?”
He stood by her. Her fingers were very agile with the dog. It looked quite real, almost familiar, as if it might wag its tail, cock a leg or bark at any minute. He leaned down and gently kissed her temple. Her hair had a gold edging from the fire, and the marvelous scent came from her hair.
“You’re very talented, Cinnabar,” he said, “and you have a beautiful smell.”
Her fingers left the dog.
“My man gave me a comb from some foreign place. The scent’s in the wood, and when I comb my hair, my hair takes the scent, too.”
“I’m sorry you lost him,” he said.
“You’re not,” she said. She rose and turned and looked at him. Her eyes were bright with tears. “Or maybe you are. I’m ashamed of myself,” she said. “Making up to a stranger. Or am I a stranger to you? Am I so very like her?”
“You’d prefer me to go.”
“No,” she said. “The beds at the inn are full of vermin.”
“Perhaps suitable company.”
“Oh, you,” she said. Her tears seeped away again into their fount.
He kissed her in a rich dark forest of hair. The unique comfort of human flesh bound both of them tightly together for some while after the kiss had finished.
“Tomorrow, before you leave,” she said, “there’s something–I’ll tell you. Is your companion well enough to travel?”
“What companion?”
“The boy at the hostel. The man the ghost was visiting.”
“He’s nothing to me.”
“Ah,” she whispered, “don’t be too sure.”
She kissed him this time, smoothing his hair in long, repeated, serene and sensuous caresses. Presently she took his hand, and led him up the little stair, along the passageway, and into the feather bed sixteen seas deep.
The strains of music spearing out of the hostel door were wonderful to the extent almost of sorcery. They fell in the compound in shards, like the morning sunlight. Pigeons paraded, cooing in bemused fascination. A cat lay not far off, eyes narrowed, belly tilted to the sun, apparently a music lover and not hungry.
As he made the music, a sense of glorious well-being invaded the musician. When he left off, high waters of debility swept back in on him. Panting and dizzy, he set the instrument aside and curled on the bed. Silence. A cat leaped past the door, and the pigeons leaped into the air. A woman with terracotta hair came over the threshold.
Myal looked at her uneasily. Most women intrigued and scared him. Quite a few men too, for that matter. But then he relaxed. The woman had a sweet and satiated look. Her heart belonged somewhere that was not here. She was totally unobtainable: safe.
“You’ve a great knack with music,” she said.
“Oh, thank you.” Myal smiled modestly.
“Parl Dro,” said the woman, “left the village an hour before sunup.”
Myal’s face flattened with dismay. He sat up, went white, and lay down again. “That’s that then.”
“Not necessarily. If you were fit to travel by tomorrow.”
“I won’t be, anyway. Anyway, I can’t catch him up again. Anyway, what’s in it for you?”
He could guess what had been in it for her. So this was the type that attracted King Death. Very nice too. But why was she interested in Myal?
“I read the blocks. They showed the two of you. There’s a balance that needs you both.”
“Did he tell you about–?”
“Ghyste Mortua? I know about it. I have reason to bear a grudge against the deadalive in that place.”
“It’s all a story,” said Myal slyly.
“Like the thing in here last night?”
Myal involuntarily glanced behind him. Despite the unguents of the priests, despite the exorcism, he had not slept easily in this room. Only illness had let him sleep at all, drugging him with inertia.
“Well, a good story. Maybe true.”
“There was a town,” she said, low, staring at him, seeing not him, but images in her mind. Myal, lying dizzily watching her, began to see them too.
The name of the town had been Tulotef. It stood on the side of a tall hill, above a valley where a wide river ended in a curious star-shaped lake with four subsidiary stretching channels. Forest bloomed over the uplands. Distant crags, pale as winter, towered from the trees. The ways to Tulotef were limited and occult. It was, besides, a town good to itself alone. Other towns it had greeted with swords and fusillades; retaliatory armies came to have the boiling juice of almonds and olives dashed on their heads. The walls of Tulotef, sloping, slaty, crenellated, might be opened only voluntarily and only where there were gates. Those within were declared to be witches. From the highest to the lowest, all had some smattering of spells, and many, a large compendium. That was the legend. The vernacular said: When we dance in Tulotef. Which meant: Never. Then something did get into Tulotef, something did bring it down, towers, roofs, walls, gates. One summer night, there was an earth-tremor, not in itself unheard of, nor in itself disastrous. But there was, so the tale went, a fault that ran around the upper gallery of the hill on the side of which Tulotef was built. Unseen, the fault had lain in wait, weathering the sun, the snow, the wind, and all the shocks of the earth, for hundreds of years, like a dragon under water. Then came this ultimate tremor, slight in itself, which sliced through the last hair-fine joists that remained to hold the hill. Not long past midnight, when the town was loud with bells and processions and feasts for some occasion sacred to itself, the watchmen spied a vast black bird that lifted from the hilltop, spreading enormous wings.
To picture the moment was not hard. The sudden cessation of all sound, the lifted heads, raised faces, pointing hands, all in the glitter of lamps and candles, the dying notes of bells, the sparkle of ornaments and eyes. Then the gigantic thunder, the unconscionable geographic growl, as the top of the hill snapped off, disintegrated, burst. A rain of particles, boulders, rubble crashed on Tulotef. Onto the screaming faces, dainty fires. Then the inexorable tons of granite and stone and streaming earth itself, marched down the hill against the city. It was the last army. It gushed like a tidal wave against the walls and broke them, the gates and splintered them. It rolled through the town and the town was gone, its life crushed and its fires put out. And then, a huge burial mound, the town itself began to move. It slipped from its foundations, and fell away down the hill into the star-shaped lake.
Not one living thing survived.
And yet, if the legend were a fact, all had survived. In a way. Now the spot was called Ghyste Mortua, for on particular nights the dead came back to the void where Tulotef had been, some thousands of witch-gifted, hating, evil ghosts. And in the lake below, held pristine and inviolate, their linkage to the world, every link they could desire; their treasures, their bones, the bricks and mortar of their town.
They abducted the living, enticed the living, fed from them, slew them. They to
re up graves, they worked spells. The very land stank of wickedness.
If any of it was true.
“I know this,” said the red-haired woman, “whoever goes that way, never comes back.”
“Rather stupid to go there, then,” remarked Myal. His hands trembled, though it was really only what he had heard before.
“Parl Dro is going there. And you.”
“Me? You’re joking. I wouldn’t be seen dead there. Oh. What I mean is—’’
“It’s a compulsion. I know. I’ve seen it before. There’s always a reason you find for yourself, an excuse—a legend to prove or disprove, a battle to engage, a poem or a song to create—but it’s the place itself, issuing a challenge. A war game. It used to call armies to fight it. Now it calls certain men. At certain times. Certain women, too.”
“You’re not–” said Myal.
“Not me.”
Myal pulled the musical instrument to him by the sling and put his arms around the wooden body.
“I knew,” she said, “he would leave today, before he knew it. And you’ll leave tomorrow. You owe him a debt, don’t you? He paid the priests for your care.”
“I owe him a knife in the ribs,” said Myal.
The woman laughed. Myal glanced at her in astonishment.
“Rest well,” she said. “Tomorrow at first light I’ll bring you a horse. Not one of the priests’ horses, but my own. I’ll set you on the way as well; I know the start of it. You’d probably find him anyhow, but to be sure. If you give the horse her head, you’ll catch up to him before tomorrow’s sunset.”
“I can’t afford a horse,” said Myal.
“I’m not selling a horse. When you reach him, you must let her graze a while, then turn her and send her back to me. She knows the way, too.”
“I can’t afford to hire a horse, either,” said Myal pompously. He held the instrument as tightly as if someone were trying to drag it away from him. His arms quivered with the tension.
“No fee, no hire. A loan.”
“What’s the snag?”
“You’re very suspicious.”
“I’ve learned to be.”
“Then unlearn it.”
She smiled at him. Her smile was like a ray of sun. She went out.
He lay stiff as a knotted twig, for about an hour, terrified of everything, and of himself. Then the terror went off. Securely alone, he bragged to himself. The woman liked him after all. She wanted to help him because she fancied him. As for Dro, who could be so useful being so famous, Myal could get around him. As for Ghyste Mortua, that was just a wild romantic fantasy, the sort a minstrel had to have, had to pretend to believe in. And the wonderful song he would make of the ghostly town, its shrivelled towers, the greenish fireflies spinning in its endless dusks–the song was already partly formed in his head, his fingers. The quest was all he needed. To travel hopefully. Certainly, not to arrive.
He dozed, and woke at early evening to the priests’ supper bell. No one had bothered to bring him anything to eat, but he felt fine. Fit and self- assured.
He swaggered over to the refectory and strode in on long, reasonably steady legs.
The priests looked up nervously, their pudgy faces bulging with food.
Myal sauntered along the tables, tore off a wing of roast chicken, took up a brimming mug of yellow cider.
“Really, my son,” they remonstrated, “guests do not eat in the refectory.”
“This was paid for, wasn’t it,” Myal demanded, frowning at them, “by my friend Parl? Before he had to go on ahead of me. Pass me that loaf. And the salt.”
He caught a glimpse of himself in a polished ewer. He had moved abruptly into one of his handsome phases. His hair was burnished, his features were chiselled. He looked just like the prince he had always known he really was. That man with the strap—how could that thing have been the genetic father of Myal?
Myal lounged in a chair. He had some ham, ordered a bath. He stole three purses out of two habits.
In the middle of the night, happily bleary from a soak in hot water and a liver soaked in cider, he wandered back across the compound for the purposes of nature. Then, with a sense of his own ridiculous generosity, he returned the purses, though not exactly into their owners’ pockets. He threw them instead nimbly on the compost heap, at its jammiest section.
He woke feeling virtuous and well. Even the cider had not gone sour on him.
He took the instrument, went to the well, drew some water and splashed around in the bucket for a while. When he looked up, the sky was lifting into light, and the red-haired woman stood at the gate. He knew her name by then. He had asked one of the priests. The priest had been shocked. Simply saying a woman’s name had seemed to shock him.
She came across the compound, and gave Myal an apple. The immemorial symbol did not alarm him. It would have, if it had not been her. He ate the apple, enjoying it, though the Gray Duke’s daughter had once insisted he and she simultaneously devour an apple hung by cord from a rafter. It had been a rough enterprise. Their teeth had clashed once or twice and he had been afraid of being bitten. It was a forfeit. Whoever ate least of the apple lost. Myal lost. If he had won, the punishment would actually have been the same.
But he was at ease with Cinnabar. She must admire him very much, but apparently chastely, wanting nothing.
Outside the compound, a roan mare stood docilely. He had not ridden in months, years, but the mare had a tender pretty face. He liked her at once, and shared the last of the apple with her lovingly.
When he was mounted, the instrument on his shoulders, Cinnabar showed him a bag of provisions tied to one side of the saddle.
“You can keep that. But send my horse back to me.”
“Of course I will,” he said very sincerely.
Cinnabar took his hand and placed in it an amazing little clay dog. It looked so realistic, Myal laughed. It was still faintly warm from the firing. He gazed at Cinnabar, and swallowed. Whenever anyone gave him anything, truly gave it, he was emotionally, almost agonisingly, touched.
“Go on,” she said. She was crying slightly, and smiling at him. Myal, also crying a little and grinning foolishly, nodded several times, and tapped the mare.
She took off at a mercurial gallop that surprised and almost unseated him.
After he got used to the savage galloping of the roan mare and they were far from the village, Myal recalled Cinnabar had offered him no directions. That he had found Dro previously was evidence of Myal’s brilliant powers of deduction. But now he ran blind, or the horse did. Then it occurred to him that Cinnabar had told him that the horse knew the road. When he considered it, their direction seemed correct, for they plunged toward the rising sun.
At first, there were tracks running parallel along the loop of the river, then veering away.
Low hills flowed up from the land to the left. On the right hand the river plain spread into limitless distances, shining transparently in the young morning, through a soft powder of mist.
Then a wood swept down on horse and rider. River and hills and tracks were gone.
Leaves whipped by. Birds flirted across Myal’s face. The horse slowed, and began to pick her way at a fast delicate trot.
Myal was struck by a picture of himself.
He brought the instrument around on its sling and rested it on his chest. The rough material of the sling, the scrawls of paint on the wood and the uneven chips of ivory sunk in it excited him with a still, reassuring excitement. The bite of the wires into the old calluses on his fingers filled him with a wild pure wave of peace. He improvised, using the strings only, a dance for the horse.
Sometimes he marvelled when he thought about the complexity of the instrument. It was so simple to him, yet who else on earth would ever be able to play it? Two only that he knew of, its inventor, and the strap-brandishing father—who had never properly mastered it. Myal watched his fingers curiously. The secret lay in some mysterious affinity between prediction, inner ear an
d action. Each touch on any string of one neck supplied not only a note, but the pressure to tune in the note on the opposite neck—which supplied, vice versa, its own note and simultaneous pressure for the first note. When the reed was blown, the fingers that caused these pressures, coincidentally stopped the various holes, activating in turn other notes. But how could one man carry three or more opposing harmonies, all interrelating, dependent upon each other, in his brain at once. In fact, when Myal played the entire assemblage of the instrument at once, six or seven or even eight lines of melody could emanate from it, chords, descants and contrapuntal fugues.
The mare liked the music.
Sunlight rained through the leaves.
He stayed in the saddle until they came out of the wood on a rocky slope up in the air.
A huge landscape sprawled away on all sides. He was high enough to observe the strange natural quarterings of the land, divided like a board game by dim smoke lines of trees, the slashes of ravines, troughs of valleys. The river, a last partition, spilled to the south, slender as a tear. There were no roads that Myal could see. Dismounted, he peered down the craggy slope.
“Lost the way yet?” he asked the horse.
She pulled forward against the reins.
When they reached the bottom of the slope, he found they were in a dry stream bed, and went on leading her over littered pebbles and moss. The stream opened out, just after noon, into a park-like flatness with the trees elegantly poised at intervals in courtly groups. He investigated the provision bag and ate. The horse neatly clipped the grass, gardening restfully.
They rode on at a medium pace over nearly flat ground, which still sloped at an infinitesimal angle downward. The walls of rocky hills ran alongside northeast and south, but miles off. Great clouds swam over, like the keels of enormous ships in the sky. The afternoon became full-blown, and one by one its petals started to drop away.