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 and 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.