by Tanith Lee
Dro wondered briefly who came here. Presumably there was a village or a town adjacent, though he had seen no sign of one piercing the forest, from the ridge above. Or maybe the town had been abandoned, encroached on by the trees, by poor living, by famine or a plague. And only the old woman remained, somehow keeping alive, though how was rather a mystery.
She thrust open the door, and motioned Dro to drag the sled and the death-tranced man inside. It was a dark room, still full of the night. It smelled of damp and the low smoky fire, and soon of the two fat-tallow candles she lit in the walls. There was a herbal smell also, and pots, buckets and urns were stacked in all directions. A bundle of rags in the corner was the bed, and here Dro was instructed to set Myal.
Sable—that was, one assumed, her name—came over and peered down at Myal, who looked as dead as any dead man Dro had ever seen, and yet was not.
“Was he skilled at trancing himself?” Sable inquired.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“You knew him well?”
“No. But well enough to know that, I think.”
“It isn’t any ghost brought him to this,” said Sable. “It was a live one. Healer. Herbalist. Meet anyone like that, eh?”
“Only one who played with it, and she’s dead.”
“There’s a drug can do this,” said Sable. “It turns life down low, like a lamp, just a spark left burning. And with a psychic talent, that lets the spirit out. You know what that means, ghost-killer? It means you have the ghost of a man that’s still alive.”
“All right. But how did she do it?”
“I’ll tell you how. In a minute. Got a knife?”
Dro studied her, then took out the knife and handed it to her, hilt first. The courtesy made her laugh soundlessly. Then she bent and ripped the knife along Myal Lemyal’s chest. In the dull light, it took Dro a moment to realize it was the shirt, not the man, she was quartering. With careful delicacy she picked off the leaves of cloth with the knife, not touching them with her fingers. A pocket had been torn and certain obtuse items dropped from it onto Myal’s skin: a copper coin with a hole through it, a defaced die, a coil of wire that might have had to do with the musical instrument, a little clay dog.
Dro knew the dog at once, and could not remember from where. First he pictured it tied to the wheel of a wagon. Then he saw Cinnabar in the glint of her oven, pinching the dog from clay.
Sable shifted the dog aside, using the knife. There was a faint transparent mark on Myal’s flesh where the dog had rested. The torn cloth of the pocket was damp.
Involuntarily, Dro leaned forward.
“Don’t touch,” said Sable. “The little animal’s clay, and the clay’s been made porous. The drug’s been poured inside, and then seeped out after a while, right through clay and cloth and skin. Tactile poison. Doesn’t need to be drunk, just touched. Carried over the heart, where he carried it, it did very nicely. Gradual, you understand, bit by bit—then whoof! Out like a candle, and the spirit gone away. He must have done something she didn’t like. Lady’s man, was he?”
“Not exactly. Can you wake him up?”
“Not exactly. I’ll move the clay animal and the drug will stop seeping into him. We know he’s psychic. If he’s strong enough, the spirit can try to get back. Or if he isn’t, it won’t. In any case, it’ll take days. Days and nights.”
CHAPTER NINE
The sun moved and increased its fire, and came to stream through the hovel’s open door.
Sable brewed herbal tea, which she trickled into a little iron cup and handed to Dro. There seemed to be no food in the hovel, or possibility of food outside. Not even mushrooms, let alone a chicken, a cow, apple trees or vines. Probably she lived on the tea.
As he drank it, a green sweet-sore memory passed through Parl Dro. He identified it reluctantly. Sable’s brew was like the tea Silky’s grandmother had concocted, in that spick-and-span town hovel almost thirty years in his past
They did not speak for a long while, keeping as silent and almost as quiet as Myal on the bed of rags. Matter-of-factly, Sable had stripped the musician and worked over his body, massaging with her extraordinary hands. She displayed none of the easily tickled, impotent lust of the elderly, nor much concern. Twice, she asked Dro to turn the younger man’s body. Finally, she had him placed on his back, his head slightly averted toward the right shoulder, and a ragged, not unduly filthy sheet, pulled up over him.
The sunlight, creeping like a cat, had almost reached Myal, when Dro spoke to her.
“Tell me about Ghyste Mortua.”
She looked at him, and sucked her tea.
“You know all you need to.”
“You live on the doorstep,” he said. “You’d know more.”
“The woods are full of noises by night,” she said. “Riders, horses, yellings. They don’t bother with me. I’m too old, too near the edge, the gate out. Too ugly. They don’t bother.”
“Your village,” said Dro. “Is the Ghyste what drove your people away?”
“That, and other things. But if you’re asking have the deadalive got stronger in these parts, yes, they have. Stronger, and stronger still. I haven’t got the seventh sense, but when I was a girl,” she said, “I’d see shapes in the wood like milk, pale, showing the trees through them. Now, the dead look like men. I’ll tell you, when I spotted you in the dawn, I wondered.”
“They’re strong enough to manifest after sunrise?”
“They’re strong.”
“But only at certain seasons,” said Dro.
“Of course. What’d you expect? The psychic time that corresponds with the time of the landslide. Not a calendar day or month or year. But moon times, star times, seasons of conjunction and the zodiac. One is right now. That’s why you’re here, eh? And him—somehow he knew the right time, too. So he’s cleverer than you think.”
“Or than he thinks.”
“Solved your mystery yet?” she inquired. “I mean the woman who made the clay dog, and put the drug into it, and why.”
“Maybe.”
“What’ll you do?”
“What will I do?”
“It’s easier,” said Sable. “Her way, it’s easier. Especially for you, Parl Dro.”
“So you know my name,” he said flatly.
“I guessed your name,” she said. “People always said, one day you’d come.”
The old pain gnawed sullenly on the bones of his leg. Pain like fear.
And the memory began to come he had been trying to keep at bay. He had shoved the memory out of sight in some attic of the mind. He had thrust other memories in its way, between himself and it. Memories of childhood, of youth. Even of Silky. Rather be wounded than made a fool, perhaps.
But now, he slipped back toward it. The herb tea, the pain, Myal’s half death, the message Cinnabar had sent, all these things pushed Dro back along the highway in his brain. Not far. He found himself glancing over five years, then over more than twenty. At himself, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five. The years of growing and learning, by trial and error, by thought and reading and dialogue, his inescapable trade. He glimpsed two or three old men, professional exponents of exorcism, those who had taught him. He had never really needed their lessons. Somehow he had known. Always known, and always had the strength, psychic, metaphysical, to put the knowledge to its terrible, essential work. Silky, when he was thirteen, had found the truth of his calling in him, just as, if she had not died, she would have found for him other truths, better, sweeter, less precious. And if she had lived, how would he have lived? A farmhand to this day, perhaps. Or a minor landowner if he was lucky. Sons and daughters, a wife, a gradual, gentle, back-breaking, marvellously simple life. If she had lived, and not come to him in the rain with her cold hands and her elemental wickedness. But he could not linger with Silky. The memory he was avoiding was nearer than that. Very, very near. Not a boy of thirteen, a man dressed in black. And yet, of course, Silky was in this memory, too. Had almost been the cau
se of it.
He could see the mountain with absolute clarity. It was ahead of him in the memory, poking up in the dusk to the northeast, like a chimney, smoking a single cloud and a scatter of spark-bright early stars. Over the mountain lay the lands that drew away into the legend, the mirage that pulled at him, Tulotef, Ghyste Mortua. He knew the season for it was coming, as every few years it did, the time of manifestation. Philosophers and charlatans had all instructed him, and he had believed in it with a dry matter-of-fact mysticism.
Strange, though, how dim and amorphous that initial belief in the Ghyste seemed to him now, as he recollected it. More a casual interest than a driving goal, not the dedication it had become.
Probably what happened, the trouble before he crossed the mountain, had influenced him. He was contrary enough that to have obstacles apparently put in his way made him more determined to press on.
The slopes of the south side of the mountain were lightly wooded, the trees folding back to those farther mountains south and west, that had grown so vague in the dusk, as if they were only paintings, which ran.
A clearing dipped through the wood. A bit of the sun had fallen into it during the sunset and now burned on a nest of wood. A firelit wagon hulked nearby, with a scrawny, moth-eaten dog tied to the wheel, but no horse in sight. Dro had come on the scene abruptly, and paused. The dog, scenting or hearing him belatedly, set up a racket, trying to offset its aberration by sheer volume. Dro was faintly amused by this, also alert to see some man come around the wagon or between the trees, brandishing axe or knife or staff. Instead, a woman appeared, and empty handed.
She stood and looked at Parl Dro across the forty-foot space between them, and gave him one of the great shocks of his existence. For she was Silky, Silky to the life—or would it be the death? And worse than seeing a mere child again, this was Silky as she might have grown to be, a woman of early middle years, a little coarsened, a little fined, but the scintillant hair still like molten honey in the firelight, spilled over her back, her breasts.
Before he knew it, he had begun to walk toward her, not even really wanting to, but impelled.
The dog dropped its histrionics to a guttural growling, and the woman who was Silky retreated to the wheel, and put her hand out ready to loosen the rope that kept the dog tied.
When Dro came on, she shouted at him.
“Who are you? How dare you sneak up on me? Don’t you know my man’ll soon be here and see to you?”
Obviously a bluff. The dray horse was gone, and the man with it. That meant a longish journey at best.
“I don’t mean you any harm,” Dro called.
He breathed more easily since she had shouted, for her voice was not like Silky’s voice, even allowing for the intervening years.
Yet her face—the closer he got, the more it seemed to him that Silky was here. Between one step and the next, he had the terrifying meditation that maybe a ghost could not only cheat death, solidify, appear to all the senses to be mortal flesh, but, into the bargain—the ultimate cheat—could appear to mature, to age. Why not? If a ghost could survive, blotting out the nature of its death, swindling itself eventually into crediting its own “true” life, then surely it must be capable of supposing itself into growing up and growing old, along with the rest of living humanity.
But he had destroyed Silky’s link. Released her—murdered her—
The woman was beautiful. Richly beautiful. There was a heavy abundance to her, despite her lean and fragile build, that found its utmost expression in the welter of honey hair. Her skin, summer-tanned, was honey too, the small lines like cracks over gold leaf. On her hand was a brass ring. There really was a man somewhere, then. But not here.
Dro slipped off the hood of his cloak. Walking slowly, his lameness was minimised, and he was graceful. He kept his hands loose, free of the mantle, showing that he himself had no weapon ready or considered.
The woman stared hard in his face, then suddenly relaxed. She took her hand off the dog’s rope and looked down at it.
“Hush,” she said. “It’s all right.”
“Thank you,” said Dro, “for taking me on trust.”
“Only a fool would judge you a robber,” she said boldly. “As for rape, would you ever have to?” She coloured at her own words, but met his eyes as she said it. “Where are you making for?”
“Over the mountain.”
She said, “My man’s gone that way. Gone to do business with another man. Buy something, or steal it, the bastard. He won’t be back till tomorrow. If he comes back then. If he isn’t lying blind drunk in some inn somewhere with some woman somewhere. If he isn’t too drunk to have a woman. I’m sorry.”
The dog had stopped growling and lay down with its sad muzzle on its thin paws. The woman walked away to the fire and used a long skewer to pick a meaty bone out of a pot which sizzled there. The dog rose, salivating pathetically as the woman waved the bone to cool it. Presently she placed the bone on the ground before the dog, and as it began to gnaw its meal, she caressed it with a painful tenderness.
“Poor thing,” she said to Dro, speaking of the dog as if about a child. “My man beats him, starves him. He’d do better on his own in the woods. He’d turn into a wolf and be happy. I tell him, the dog, I promise him, one night I’ll let him go, untie him and send him off. Then I’ll get the beating. But I will, one night. Won’t I, dog?” She glanced at Dro, who had stood there motionless all this while, watching her. “You’ll think I’m daft, I expect.”
“No.”
“You will. But you’re welcome to share the stew with me. I can’t feed the dog and not offer something to you.”
“You could.”
“I’d rather you didn’t go,” she said. “He just left me here, but I’d rather there was a man by. We came up from the south, do you see. This country’s new to me.” She straightened and looked at him. Her throat was delicate as if carved, the skin stretched taut, yet silken. Through it he could see her heart thudding.
“I’d like to stay, if you want me to,” he said.
She smiled, and said, “Yes, but that’s not an invitation, mind.” By which he knew it was.
He wondered stupidly if he in turn reminded her of some other, or if she were merely a slut, or simply lonely. Women were constantly attracted to him, and to the half-truth about celibacy and psychic power, and whether a ghost-killer would or not. Or did she not guess his calling.
They ate by the fire, and then she brought out a skin of beer, and they drank together. She began to comb her fingers through her hair until it became an electric crackling blizzard of golden smoke. She sang to the flames drowsily, her voice light and throbbing. She was making an intuitive magic, all of it for him. As Silky had done in the apple tree, sun in her hair, murmuring to birds or leaves... and when he spoke to her now, she gazed at him, unsurprised as Silky had been.
“Can I pay you for the meal?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
They spoke about the season for a while, and about the showman’s trade her husband intermittently practiced. She asked Dro nothing, not even his name. He did not ask hers either. He could not have called her by it. Just as he could never have brought himself to call her “Silky.” The whole episode was dreamlike, transient.
The dog slept on its side, turned also to gold by the firelight, then to ruby as the flames sank low.
When they each leaned to cast a branch on the fire, their bodies finally touched. The act of sex had become so inevitable and so desired between them that he seemed to have had her before, many times. Everything was familiar, without hesitation, awkwardness or apology. She was lovely, even what the years had softly faded, or etched with their gold, was lovely, in her.
Afterwards, they lay wrapped together by the fire. The wood breathed. Their own breathing lulled both of them asleep, and later woke them again.
About an hour before sunrise, the whining of the dog roused Parl Dro.
It was cold, the cle
ar wet chill that dripped through the trees before a summer dawn. The fire was out. The woman, showered over by her summer hair, lay sleeping on her side. Her face was cupped into one hand. One bare full breast gleamed out against her own tawny colour, startlingly snow-white. The dog stood, hackles raised. A horse cropped the turf nearby. Beside the wagon was a man.
He looked almost every inch the uncouth robber the woman had feared the night before. From that alone, Dro recognised him as her husband. Squat, dirty and dishevelled, he poised in a bizarre kind of half crouch, hair and clothes flopping, and a loose gut flopping before all that. Only the man’s hands were curious, thin and articulate, though crammed now into raw red fists.
“Well,” he said, slurred and drunken and all too lucid, “well, well, well.”
The situation was laughable, the pith of many an inn song and joke. Dro got to his feet slowly, pulling his clothes together as he did so, and the man winked malevolently, leering.
“Well, well, well.”
Dro said nothing, and then the man thought of some more words.
“Aren’t you going to say: It’s all a bad mistake? Aren’t you going to say: Just because you found me lying between your wife’s legs, I don’t actually have to have been doing anything with her? Well?”
“I’ll say all that, if you like,” Dro said.
“Like? Like?” The man straightened. He stepped over a leather sack on the grass—robber’s booty? As he passed the dog, not looking at it, it cowered. He came walking through the ashes of the fire. “You forced her,” said the man. “Right? She was unwilling and you raped her.”
“Yes. I raped her.”
“She looks raped. I must say. Definitely raped.”
Dro was aware the woman had woken and sat up, but he did not turn to her. The man was now close enough that the stench of ill-digested alcohol on his breath struck Dro’s nostrils. Dro moved an inch or so, coming between husband and wife in the only manner left.