“Not much, I only have one set of pipes. But if I could beg some food, first…?”
She had learned to make sure she got fed before she played. It was hard to fight the urge to play; the need was like a hot, dry feeling on the back of her neck, a weight in her fingers, but if she concentrated very hard she could avoid it for around an hour or so. The tavern keeper brought her hot onion soup, good fresh bread and, to Erren’s delight, a glass of berry-flavoured rum that reminded her sharply of her own impossibly distant home. But soon enough her fingers began to tingle, and the heat on her neck grew suffocating, like slim hands closing around her throat. She put the bowl and the glass to one side and reached into her pack for the pipes.
While she had been eating, the tavern had gradually filled with patrons until every seat was taken and more were standing, all eyes trained on her. They did not seem surprised by the pipes themselves, but then people rarely were. Erren often wondered if they assumed they were made of an especially pale wood, or a fine clay of some sort. Or perhaps they knew what they were, and didn’t care.
Not looking at the men and women gathered – and children, gods help her, children too – she lowered her mouth to the ends of the pipes and gathered her breath.
* * *
When she left, under the grey-pink skies of almost-dawn, all life and warmth seemed to have bled away from the place. Erren hurried towards the gate, her head down, trying to hear only her footsteps on the dusty ground, but somewhere nearby a man was sobbing, a pitiless, despairing sound, and then just as she passed out of the gate, she heard an angry shout, and an answering wail.
But it didn’t matter. Her feet were already calling her to her next destination, and she couldn’t have stopped, even if she had wanted to.
* * *
The next place was larger, a village clustered on the banks of a river. At some point in her long walk, Erren had passed over a border – there had been wooden signs, painted with sigils that looked half-familiar – and this place was more prosperous. There was a good brick wall made of red clay, and at the edge of the wide river there were lots of small boats tethered; a lively trade was happening there, even at dusk. Erren saw crates of fish being carried away to market, thick rolls of wool being pressed into sacks. She couldn’t see a tavern, although she was sure there must be one, so she headed to the little market square, following the ripe smell of river fish. It had been a long walk with no people in sight, and the urge to play now was overwhelming. There would be no food for her tonight, and no rest.
The setting sun had turned the sky a bruised orange by the time she found the little performance area. It was a wide square of flattened dirt, bordered on all sides by colourful bunting on poles, and within it a small, wiry man was standing on a stool while he juggled a set of wooden skittles. A couple of grubby children were watching him, identical expressions of boredom on their faces.
“Can I borrow your stool, friend?” asked Erren. The little man looked affronted, but he plucked his skittles from the air and stepped down onto the dirt.
“It’s not my stool,” he said, and then, “you won’t get anyone listening tonight, girl. It’s the wrong season for it, see. Everyone is down at the docks, getting the trade in.”
Erren nodded, and sat down anyway. A few moments later the two grubby children were joined by another family and a trio of men dressed like guards. A few more minutes passed, and the crowd grew larger; women with dusty aprons, young girls with their hair tucked up under red caps, old men with thick knuckles. Erren watched them, unsurprised. It was all a part of it. There would always be an audience for her, wherever she went.
Ignoring the rumbling of her stomach, she pulled her pipes from her bag and set them immediately to her lips. She didn’t want to look at these people, didn’t want to be able to picture their faces later. With the barest exhalation, a series of low, haunting notes floated out across the square. Immediately, the gentle murmur of the audience died away, and an eerie silence fell over the space, broken only by Erren’s lilting notes. Now, the music was building, growing more complex – a strange filigree of sounds, more than could have been produced by the breath of a single woman, perhaps – and the hush seemed to be breeding shadows. Despite the warm light of the early evening sky, pools of darkness were building at the feet of her audience, seeping out of the ground like oil. As yet, the people hadn’t noticed; they were too busy watching her. Their faces were still, faintly bemused, as if they didn’t understand what they were hearing.
Erren’s fingers flew over the tiny holes in the pipes, teasing out new sounds, darker ones. At the back of the crowd, a baby began to cry.
“What is happening?” someone said, but their voice was thick, slurred almost, as if they had just woken from a deep sleep. The shadows around the audience’s feet had bled together into one thing, becoming a kind of wide, dark stage between Erren and them. It was another thing Erren did not like to look at – that darkness was too flat, too unnatural under the good, sun-touched sky.
It was at that moment the first of the figures appeared. A bulge formed in the flat black stage, a crown pushing through to reveal a small, neat head. The girl had long, reddish hair, and she lifted her face up to the sky as if she had missed it, her thin lips parting to reveal small, yellowish teeth. Her skin was grey, and her eyes were empty sockets.
“What— What is…” The voice from the audience rose for a moment, struggling against the silence that had fallen over them, then fell silent again. The girl rose fully from the darkness and started to dance, twirling her arms around to the music, spinning on the spot. She danced as a child danced, and Erren guessed that she had likely been around nine years old, when she lived. Her dress was a drab brown thing but her feet were quick, and Erren thought it was possible she was even enjoying herself – she liked to tell herself that, when the nights were especially dark.
“Lizbet?” A woman with strawberry-blonde hair pushed abruptly to the front of the crowd, half-falling to her knees. “Gods help me. Lizbet?”
The music played on and another figure was rising from the black. This one came faster, as if he couldn’t wait to be free of the shadows; it was an old man, so painfully skinny that even Erren was shocked, despite everything she’d seen. Bones poked at skin that was a darker grey than the girl’s, and his knees looked swollen and strange, too large for the sticks they were supporting. Just like the girl, he had dark holes where his eyes should be. Despite all that he danced, his elbows thrust out and his chin held up. Meanwhile, the woman at the edge of the audience had shuffled forward, her arms stretched out towards the dancing girl, not quite daring to touch the black stage that lay between them.
“Lizbet, my sweet? What… What’s happening? Have you come back to us?”
The girl stopped dancing so abruptly it was as though she’d been struck. Her arms fell down to her sides, and she turned to the crowd, looking at them for the first time – or at least, her face was turned to them; she had no eyes to look at anyone. Erren’s fingers kept moving over the pipes, and the music kept coming. There was no stopping now.
“Mother.” Her voice was thin and reedy, a voice heard on the wind, half-imagined. “Did I like to climb?”
The woman lowered her arms. Behind the girl, the dead old man was still turning a jig, his long teeth bared at the sky.
“I… No, sweetheart. You liked to sit with your dolls, to talk to them. You didn’t like to get your dress dirty.” The woman’s voice broke, and Erren saw that there were tears pouring down her cheeks. “You were a sweet girl, my little flower girl.”
“Then why was I on that wall, Mother? Why was I up there at all?” She turned her head slightly, as if to address the slim, blond-haired figure standing next to her mother. The boy was rigidly still, all colour having drained from his face. “Perhaps you should ask Willem.”
The woman’s face seemed to collapse, and she turned to the boy next to her, but the girl was off dancing again, her slim grey arms turning and turn
ing. By this time other figures were rising up through the dark, their eyeless faces tilted upwards to greet the evening sky, and the crowd were beginning to cry out, a desperate moaning noise, like children caught in a nightmare. One large man with broad shoulders and an unshaven face pushed his way angrily to the front.
“What’s going on here?” bellowed the man, pointing a meaty finger in Erren’s direction. “What are you bloody playing at with this… this abomination?”
Erren kept her head down and continued to play. The skinny old man, though, the one who had followed Lizbet out of the dark, turned to the large man.
“Abomination? A big word from you, Samuel, a very big word.”
The man – Samuel, Erren assumed – curled his hands into fists, his face turning brick red.
“Shut up! You’re not supposed—”
“My lad there, my Samuel,” the skinny dead man raised his hands, fingers splayed, as if addressing the whole audience. “When I got ill, too ill to walk, to feed myself, he locked me in his backroom and let me starve. Left me to piss and shit myself, yes he did, until I died, starving and covered in filth.” His grey lips peeled back in what Erren supposed might have been a smile. “Good, brave Samuel. All you kind neighbours who brought round stew and potatoes and bread for me? He ate it all himself. Yes he did. And when my cries became too bothersome, he tore up strips of cloth and stuffed them in his ears. I ask you, good people, who is the real abomination here?”
A muttering of anger from the crowd.
There were more. More dead men and women and children rose, and with each of them, a handful of painful secrets, devastating truths. The audience – their families, their friends – were unable to leave, rooted to the spot until each of the dead had been granted their say. Erren played all through the long night, her fingers and chest aching and her limbs cold, until eventually the dark stage gave up its last ghost, and as one they all began to fade with the rising sun. It wasn’t over for the living though; already, fights had broken out, punctuated with screaming arguments and tearful confessions, and revenge had been sworn half-a-dozen times already.
When it was done, Erren stood up, wincing at the flood of tingling in her numb feet and legs, and shoved the pipes back into her pack. It was time to move on.
* * *
It was days until the next settlement, and finally she came to a clearing in a forest where she felt she could stop. Shaking with fatigue, Erren built a fire with the first twigs that came to hand, and soon she had a smoky flame going – enough to heat up some water, drink a small cup of something hot. In her pack were a few strips of dried meat, and she dunked these in the water until they were soft enough to chew. She sat mindlessly, staring at nothing. After a while, the shady clearing grew lighter. Soft yellow motes of light floated down from the treetops, and a warmth began to crawl across the mulchy ground. Erren squeezed her eyes shut briefly.
“No. Leave me alone. Isn’t what you did to me enough?”
The light grew brighter, the movement of the motes more frantic, until a figure stepped out of it. She was tall, and achingly beautiful. Her skin was as green as a new leaf in spring, and a pair of curling horns sprouted from her forehead.
“I like to see how you’re getting on, Erren.”
“It’s the same as it ever is,” she said. “I go to these places, I play for them, and they suffer. They hurt each other, because of what I show them.”
“All these little human cruelties.” The horned woman nodded, seemingly pleased. “There’s just so much of it, isn’t there? How do you feel, when you see what they’ve done? All these normal people, capable of such awful things.”
Erren didn’t answer. Instead she was looking down at her hands.
“Let me see him,” the horned woman said, her tone suddenly more serious. Erren, who could no more have disobeyed her than she could have flown up into the sky like a bird, removed the pipes from the pack and held them up. The green woman went to take them, then changed her mind. She stepped away instead, like an animal jumping back from an incoming blow, and Erren felt her own shame deepen despite her anger.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Sorry? What use is that to me?” The woman shook her head slightly, and Erren put the pipes away again. “You didn’t need any more meat, hunter. Not that day. Your pack was full.”
“I know.” It was a conversation they had had many times before. “But it was the most beautiful deer I had ever seen. I had to take it.”
“You see something beautiful and you kill it.” The horned woman looked at her now, and her eyes – yellow, like an unripe apple – were bright with anger. “I will show you what death means, mortal. What cruelty means.”
“Then kill me.” She forced herself to meet the horned woman’s furious gaze. She wanted to stand, to face her directly, but she was afraid her legs wouldn’t hold her after so many days of walking. “Bring this to an end.”
“I will not kill you.” She paused, then recited the old curse: “The dead shall dance, wherever you go, and the living shall never harm you. I can’t kill you, Erren Keeneye, even if I wanted to.”
“But you’re not mortal!” Erren did stand up then, knocking over her tin cup of hot water. “You’re a god! You can do whatever you like.”
“A wood-spirit is all I am, hunter. More than you’ll ever be, that’s true, but an untouchable god?” She gestured tersely to Erren’s pack, where the pipes lay hidden again. “My brother died easily enough, did he not? An arrow in his heart.”
Erren had nothing to say to that. The horned woman walked away from her, and her light faded into the soft shades of twilight.
* * *
Days crumbled into months. The moon grew fat and thin again, over and over, and the seasons ceased to make any sense, winter tumbling into summer, spring leaping into autumn, and back again. Erren walked and around her the world changed, yet her skin stayed smooth and her limbs remained strong. She ached all the time, but it was the deep, familiar ache of work, something she remembered keenly from her days spent as a hunter in the woods, not the ache of the infirm or the ageing. The living couldn’t touch her, and neither, it seemed, could life.
And the world changed. She passed over the remnants of battlefields, where the armour had yet to rust and the carrion birds were still enjoying themselves. The ghosts in the settlements near these places were rowdy and loud, full of their battle-rage and all the injustice of war. Buildings grew taller, more beautiful; she saw towers that seemed to pierce the sky, as thin as needles, and vast arenas where men and women raced in chariots. Wild woods and rocky landscapes gave way to cultivated fields and orchards, and on the people she saw clothes of all colours, fine silks and embroidery, gems and precious metals on fingers, at throats. Weapons, too, were changing: brittle swords became hardened steel, became impossibly lethal blades of a white metal she couldn’t name.
In the next settlement she came to, Erren played in a handsome hall with six fireplaces, each taller than her. She travelled across the sea and played for the captain of the ship; men and women rose up through the darkness with seaweed in their hair and eels nestled in their eye sockets. On an entirely new continent, she played her pipes within a ring of huge standing stones the colour of tree bark, and the people there reminded her of the horned woman; their eyes were too bright, and they were tall and long limbed. They were a beautiful people, yet when their dead rose up through the shadows their faces turned ugly, frightened and filled with fury. They drew silver knives and stabbed each other.
Deep inside a mountain, Erren played her music for people who seemed half-rock to her. Their faces were mottled like marble, and all of them, down to the smallest children, carried pickaxes on their belts. When the dead had finished their dancing, the fight that came after was as brutal as Erren had ever seen, and when she finally left that place, dragging herself out of a tunnel, she washed her face and hands in the snow and watched the white turn to pink with the blood of others. When that was don
e, she began to make her way back down the incline only to fall by the side of the path, her stomach abruptly emptying itself. The blood, and the smoke, the screaming…
“It’s too much!” She slumped against a boulder. It was freezing on the side of the mountain, but it didn’t matter. It couldn’t kill her. “I can’t go any further. I just can’t.”
“But you must, and you will.” A patch of warm sunlight to her left, and the horned woman was there. She stood close to her, looking down with an expression on her face that Erren hadn’t seen before. “Those are the terms of the curse you are under. To play forever.”
“How long has it been?” she asked, then swallowed. She was frightened of how broken her voice sounded. “Can you tell me that?”
“You mean, what small section of forever have you completed? Do you think knowing that would help you?” The forest spirit was frowning slightly, her hands held awkwardly behind her back.
“What of my family then? Everyone I left behind. What has happened to them?”
“Erren Keeneye, everyone you ever knew passed out of this world a very long time ago. I think that in your heart, you knew that already.”
Erren dropped her head. There was a time when she had been too proud to cry in front of the horned woman, but that time had also passed. Sobs forced their way up through her throat. Inside she felt herself inch closer to a deep black pit, and she reached towards it eagerly; it would be a relief to lose herself in that darkness, even temporarily.
“I shouldn’t be here,” Erren said eventually. “Even you must be able to see that. My time has gone. I don’t recognise this world anymore. Everything has changed so much. Surely this goes beyond the kind of punishment you imagined when you put this compulsion on me?”
The horned woman stepped back from her. Green and filled with her own summer light, she looked especially unreal against the grey and white and brown of the mountain. For the first time, she looked uncomfortable.
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