“Hey!” Myal yelled. “Hey!”
A bird shot out of a tree. Dro stopped, but did not turn. Myal shouted up at him, “I’m not going any farther. It’s getting dark.”
Then he realized Dro had not stopped because of any of his shouts.
Absurdly, ordered to leave the subject alone, Myal had almost succeeded in wiping it from his mind. A feeling of apprehension which came with the fading of day could be interpreted simply as normal antipathy to another night on hard ground, with possibilities of foraging bears and no supper. Ciddey Soban had been pushed into a corner of Myal’s consciousness. He had not wanted to dwell on her.
But now he recollected, and with good reason.
Dro was in front of him, about fifty feet away. Perhaps forty feet ahead of Dro a girl was stepping nimbly up the slope. She did not turn, or hesitate, or threaten, or mock. She was only there, walking, pale as a new star. Ciddey. Terrible, unshakable Ciddey.
Myal swallowed his heart as a matter of course. He went after Dro, prowling, delicate, as if travelling across thin ice. If the girl-ghost turned, he was ready to freeze, change into a tree, dive down a hole—
She did not turn.
He reached Dro. Through the closing curtains of darkness Myal peered at the ghost-killer’s impassive face.
“It’s not my fault,” Myal whispered.
Dro did not whisper, though he spoke softly.
“Maybe. She shouldn’t be able to manifest without a link. There doesn’t appear to be one. But she’s there.”
“Do you want me to play the song upside down again?”
“No. I don’t think there’s much point. I’d say she only left last time out of a kind of scornful sense of etiquette.”
“What do we do?”
“Follow her. That’s her intention. We might learn something by falling in with it.”
“Where’s—where’s she going?”
“Where do you think?”
“Tulo—the Ghyste.”
“The Ghyste. She’d know the road. That’s not illogical.”
“In every story I ever heard,” said Myal, “a vengeful spirit pursues, it doesn’t
lead
. Suppose she stops?”
“Shut up,” Dro said, still softly. “Start walking.”
Myal, forgetting the burning ache in his muscles, walked. They both walked, and Ciddey Soban, not turning, walked before them, into the black cavern of night.
And then the black cavern of night parted seamlessly to let her through, and she was gone.
At first they waited, glancing about for her. Trees grouped together on the slope ahead, hiding what lay beyond. After an unspeaking minute, they went on and through the trees. Nothing stirred, the dark was empty once more. At the edge of the trees, the ground levelled and brimmed over into a great velvet moonless void, like the end of the world, but which was most probably woods.
They looked down at it.
“She’s gone,” announced Myal. He thought of something. “If she used me to come through, I didn’t feel it this time, or last. Only that time in the priests’ hostel, when I was sick.”
“You’re getting accustomed to giving her energy, that’s why. That’s when it becomes most dangerous.”
“Thanks. I feel so much happier now.”
Myal sat on the turf, put his arms across his knees and his head on his arms. Despite his words, he was exhausted, and dully afraid.
“We’ll see the night out here,” said Dro.
“What stupendous fun.”
“I mean to watch for three hours. Then it’s your turn.”
“I’m not watching. I might see something and scare myself to death.”
“If you see anything, you wake me. You’re watching.”
“All right. I’m watching.”
An hour later, the moon came up in a long stream of cloud.
Myal was twitchily asleep. Dro stared across the land, keeping quite incredibly motionless, seldom blinking, as if it were his curse, as with certain guardians in myth, to watch forever.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Oh, Myal,” said a girl, licking his ear tenderly. “Oh, Myalmyalmyal.”
Myal woke up, already excited and apprehensive.
“Someone call?”
“Oh, Myal,” said the girl. “Ohmyal.”
She lay on her elbow at his side. Her ash-blonde hair fell across both their faces. He knew who it was, and wondered why he was not petrified. Then it came to him. The simple, obvious solution. Dro had been mistaken, and so had Myal himself. Ciddey was not dead.
When he had dragged her out of the water, he had saved her, just as he desperately meant to do. That she had not revived at once was not utterly surprising. He had been wrong about the strangulated face—a trick of light, and his alarm, the impending fever. No, Ciddey lived, and she had somehow caught them up. She was playing with Dro, punishing him. But she had decided to reveal the truth to Myal, who had rescued her.
“You’re not dead,” he murmured, vocalising his thoughts.
“You say the nicest things.” She kissed his cheek lightly.
He shivered, with pleasure and nervousness. And then it occurred to him to look about for Parl Dro. Presently he located a dark inconclusive shape, stretched across the base of a tree, which had to be Dro. So much for watching. Or... had it been Myal’s watch, and had Myal fallen asleep?
“I want you to come with me,” said Ciddey Soban, touching him once more with her real live icy lips.
“Well, I really ought—”
“Don’t argue. You know you like me. Let’s go for a walk together. Wouldn’t you like that? Down into the wood. It isn’t far.”
“Well, all right.”
He had gone walking in a wood with the Gray Duke’s daughter. The walk had ended in a pile of leaves, and ultimately, a few months later, in an escape by night, with thirty of the Duke’s men, drunken and murderous and equipped with mastiffs, in headlong pursuit. Somehow, Myal had got away. Somehow, he always did. Maybe he was not so unlucky as he generally believed himself.
With feigned debonair nonchalance, he let the girl draw him, by her small cold hand, down the slope. Almost inadvertently, he had slung on the instrument as he came to his feet. Now, as they picked their way among roots and channels in the earth, the weight of the wood unbalanced him, and he and she would bump into each other, which was not necessarily displeasing. Minute by minute, Myal grew more excited and more apprehensive. By the time they entered the first arching avenues of the woods that walled the end of the slope, he was feverish and stupidly laughing, clinging to the girl whenever he could, his heart noisy in his ears, an awful leaden murmur of warning droning, ignored, in the pit of his brain.
She, too, undrowned Ciddey, seemed a little fevered. In the soft, faintly luminescent cave of the wood, she turned and embraced him. The long, long kiss was cold and marvellous. Their bodies melted into one another and clamoured never to draw away. In the act of sex, they might literally be turned into a quivering, gasping, ever-orgasmic tree.
But then she broke away, teasing him. She laughed, and ran off along the aisle of living columns. He ran after her, naturally. The shadows of trunks striped over her paleness, so she seemed to flare on and off like a windblown lamp. Then suddenly she disappeared.
He had forgotten the supernormal aspect of her former visitations, and dashed toward the spot where she had been, calling her name, partly in anger, and partly because he knew she had meant him to. She would make him desperate, flaunt, tease, elude. When he had reached a stage of sufficient confusion and actual physical discomfort, she would give in.
In a moment, he found her. She had elaborated upon the process of teasing and eluding and flaunting to a unique degree.
A pool lay amid the trees, black and shiny as a slice of highly polished night sky fallen down there. Glancing up, sure enough there was half a white hole in heaven where the piece of sky had come away.
The moon burned on Ciddey at the pool’s centre, standing in the water, which coiled passively about her knees. She seemed to have grown from the pool, a slender stem, with a flower of face. Her hair was wet, darkened by water at its ends, but she peeled it from her and draped it behind her shoulders. Her dress was all wet and had grown thin and transparent as paper, so he saw her nakedness through it, smokily, unmistakably. Her lips were parted, and smiling, and her eyes heavy. She beckoned to him, urgent as the urgency that now was stabbing through him. Even so, he hesitated, eager to get to her, but not liking the sheen of the water, so cold, so oddly still though she rose from it, smoothing her hair, stirring her limbs a little, beckoning.
“In there?” he asked, hoarse and stupid.
“Yes, oh, yes,” she moaned.
At her voice a pang went through him so great that he could no longer bear to keep away. He splashed into the water, clenching his teeth and fists at the cold of it He thought, in an ecstasy of frustration, she might start to move away from him again as he got closer, but instead she strained her arms to him, though not moving her feet, as if she could not, as if they had grown into the sucking mud on the pool’s floor.
He reached her abruptly, and grabbed her. The instrument thumped him on the back. Congratulations. As her snake-like arms curled around him, he knew a moment’s horror of the inevitable aftermath, the entanglement, the trap, the complications, but the horror could not keep pace with the anguish of pleasure. The second horror—the possibility of disappointing, failing—had yet to come. It might ruin the supreme moments, or everything might be well, but as yet he did not care. Even the dreary nervous consideration as to how they would manage, nowhere to lie or lean, only the mud and the water underfoot, had not yet taken hold.
Groaning, he submerged, arms, eyes, flesh, mind, full of the girl. All his sight was paleness and darkness, and he could only smell fragrant skin and hair. Her pressure against him was unendurable and he would die without it, and his hands made magic, passing over her, and hers magic in his hair, along his sides, locking him with a fierce strength into the single position he wished to obtain, retain, remain in, cry out in, perish in—
The water exploded.
Thunder caught him by the hair, the shoulder. He was dragged backward. Where he had adhered to her, his body seemed to tear like rent cloth. He yelled insanely, hearing himself. He flailed with his empty arms, sprawled, went down. Water sprang over his head; he gulped it, trying to drink his way back to the air. Something pulled him from the water, turned him. A savage clout across the head rocked him. He half fell again into another hard resilient mass, which in turn dragged him once more.
Crowing for breath, blinded, crazy, he landed on his knees on iron-like earth. He hung his head and coughed water. And the instrument also coughed water from its sound box. As his eyes cleared, he beheld four slender horse legs, shod in metal, pecking at the soil in front of him. And behind those, another four, and another four.
Delight had turned to a dull physical ache. He felt sick. He was afraid. Gradually, he heard the silence of the girl in the pool, and half turning, he glimpsed her. Her face was raw with rage and terror.
Out of his own terror, Myal made himself look up, beyond the legs of the horses.
They wore mail, the three men, and great cloaks, furled like wings. A murky jewel flashed on a hand or wrist. Another smouldered muddy red. Unfriendly faces made of marble and framed by unfriendly courtly wavelets of hair glared at Myal, then at the pool, the girl.
“You,” one of the men said, not looking at Myal.
“Me?” asked Myal.
“You are a fool, to go with
that
.
Don’t you know live flesh from necrophilia?”
Myal choked. He crawled into a bush and attempted to throw up. None of them interfered with him. He heard a dim ominous exchange over his dry spasms. The three riders, some duke’s bodyguard or earl’s men from the look of them, were haranguing the girl in the pool. They called her filthy names, the word “deadalive” was mingled contemptuously among them. They did not fear her, so much was obvious. They spat on the ground, saying she was a thief. They promised her weird punishments that had to do with graves, worms, flames, wheels. And she, she shrieked back at them, her voice high as a bat’s.
Myal slumped on his side, the instrument wedged under his shoulder blade, his knees under his chin. He had some vague incentive to crawl away, to get out of the wood and up the slope, to Parl Dro. Before he could realise the ambition, one of the riders came over, leaned from the saddle, and yanked Myal back again onto open turf. The rider glared at Ciddey.
“There are punishments for those who consort with stray ghosts. The forest hereabouts is rife with bloody undead. Didn’t you know? Those who harbour them or encourage the deadalive, deserve to join them. Not gently, either. Like to know some penalties?”
“No, thank you,” said Myal politely.
“I’ll tell you anyway. There’s one school of thought which advocates slashing off the offending part—a hand, say, if you gave them a hand to hold; an ear, if you listened to them, and a tongue if you spoke to them. In your case, rather a nasty amputation, in view of what you were considering doing.”
It was so vile, it had to be a joke.
Myal laughed queasily. The men laughed, loud and long, riding around and around him, making his head spin. Then one spurred his horse straight into the pool. The animal looked fearsome as it leaped, eyes rolling, mane flying, the ivory counters of its teeth bared. As the forehoofs hit the water, the rider’s hand whirled up, gripping a cleaver of sword. Myal saw Ciddey’s white face flung back and the sword crashing down on it. He imagined the impact of skin and bone, green-cinder eyes, kissing mouth, with honed excruciating steel. Someone threw a colourless bag over his head and her scream became a long thin whistle, or a long thin wire, and ceased to matter.
He came to, lying face down in a horse’s mane, legs either side in an uncomfortable riding posture, hands securely tied under the beast’s neck.
The horse was running. Two other horses ran, one on each side. The right-hand horse had two riders, the left seemed strangely overcrowded too, but its nearer rider held the reins of Myal’s horse firmly in his fist.
Everything had ended, inevitably, in misery, mistake and injustice.
Surely when they killed the girl, they had become aware she was not a ghost? Maybe that made them more dangerous. Was it her corpse over the second horse? Supposedly, any who lived at all close to such a legend as the Ghyste, would be unreasonably wary of apparitions. Myal should have thought of that, so should Ciddey.
Ciddey....
The idea of her filled him with fright. Not because of her death by the sword, suddenly, but because—because—
Could
it be these madmen had been
correct
? Perhaps the sword was holy in some way and could effect exorcism—Myal had heard, even sung, of such things. If she had been dead.... He felt himself on the verge of passing out again, and struggled to keep hold of reality.
“Where are we going?” he asked the men, those courtly riders. The question was familiar. He had asked Dro, the morning he had had the fever, also slung over a horse, the same thing. Dro had not answered. One of the men did, in his fashion.
“It’s a surprise. Excited?”
The horse bounced over a gap in the ground. Myal slid, the instrument slammed him in the spine and the animal’s withers slammed him in the face.