“The bloody horse ran off. All the bloody food was in a bloody bag tied on the bloody saddle. That’s bloody well gone too.”
Dro walked. Myal glanced at him and away.
“This seems quite a nice spot to bivouac for the night.”
“So bivouac.”
“Don’t you think,” said Myal, “we should stick together? There could be a lot of big animals about in a place like this after dark. Two of us together would stand a better chance of–fighting anything off.”
Dro walked. Myal set himself to the task of simply keeping up. The lame stride was powerful and set its own decided rhythm.
Side by side, unspeaking, they moved over the wild park, and the light closed like a door behind them.
Darkness swirled from the thickets, the trees, from pockets in the ground. The sky, a smooth sheet of dark lavender, put out a thousand stars.
There was a sudden break in the landscape. Around a wall of silent folded poplars, the earth tipped over into one more ravine, this time very shallow, some seven yards deep at most, about five feet across. A dense stream of night was already flowing there. On the far side, a bare humped hill ascended, with one towering oak tree flung up from it in a pagoda of leaves.
There was a thin noise of water, not in the ravine, but to one side, along the edge. A spring flickered from the rock and over, uselessly, into the gully.
Dro crossed to the spring and kneeled, presumably drinking or filling a flask; in the gathering dark it was hard to see. When Dro moved away and began to set a fire between the poplars, Myal went to the spring in turn and drank. Then he moved across to watch Dro. The fire was economically constructed. It made use of a natural scoop in the earth, a few stones to contain and conduct the heat, dry twigs for the base, those less dry set near to cook out moss or rain before being added.
“You’re very good,” said Myal admiringly.
Dro lit the fire and sat, his back against a poplar trunk, his hood pushed off. That shadowy king’s face, gilded by flame, intimidated Myal, who stood awkwardly, as if waiting to be asked to sit down. Without warning, Dro’s glowing black eyes fixed on him. The stare was profound, hypnotic, ruthless and inimical. Myal writhed under it, then snapped like one of the twigs.
“So this is the end of our beautiful friendship, is it? You really think I’m that much of a dead loss, do you?”
Dro’s eyes never moved, did not even blink. Just his mouth said, “I really think you are.”
“In that case, I’m off.” Myal added sarcastically, “I know when I’m not wanted.”
“Your life must be a series of departures.”
Raging and impotent, Myal turned on his heel and walked straight into a tree.
Having disengaged himself, he strode away along the side of the ravine, far enough to be out of Dro’s sight. He lay down where a boulder provided partial shelter and a partly reassuring anchor at his spine. He hugged the instrument and curled himself together around it. The earth was growing cold and magnetically still.
He lay like that some while, feeling alone and dwarfed under the wide night, inventing cutting rejoinders to Parl Dro’s comments, blaming his own status and person for all the ills life had showered on him.