“Well,” said the bending man, “what’s your idea, Ciddey?”
“My idea,” said the voice of Ciddey, “is that I rope him about the neck with a ribbon, and lead him in that way. You can follow.”
The men laughed. The laugh was dark and menacing.
“You’re bold, for a newcomer,” said one.
Ciddey did not laugh. She slipped from the second horse. She walked to where Myal lay, his head turned painfully to stare at her.
“What a pity, though,” she said, “I don’t seem to have a ribbon.”
Suddenly the bonds that held Myal to the horse’s neck gave way, untied or cut by one of the men. Myal lay, with his arms dangling, till one of the others pulled him upright.
“Are you bewildered, Myal Lemyal?” asked Ciddey Soban. She put her hand on his thigh. Her hand was cold as winter snow. “They didn’t kill me. It was a test. They do kill. But not—a friend.”
Then Myal looked ahead.
He saw the sloping crenellated walls, the sturdy gates, the light of lamps that overpowered the light of the stars and phantomised the moon. And far below, he made out the inner rim of a colossal water. Though from this vantage he could see only two of its starlike raying channels.
One of the men slapped him on the arm, a hard freezing slap. Myal knew it all by then. He did not need them to say to him, one by one, most courteously, “Welcome to Tulotef.”
After an interval of oblivion, Parl Dro opened his eyes.
He had told Myal to wake him after three hours, but Dro had not reckoned Myal would last so long. Dro’s inner clock roused him accordingly.
He woke silently and stilly, fully alert within seconds. Not yet moving, he let his eyes seek over the ridge. He had registered immediately that the musician was absent, but that the instrument remained, propped by a tree, trailing its sling like a frayed embroidered tail. Dro might have assumed Myal had stolen off for the usual private purpose of nature, save that, to Dro, the whole area seemed imperceptibly to sing and glow, as if some kind of mineral had fallen from the sky.
Presently Dro sat up, rose, walked across to the spot beside the instrument where Myal had been sitting. The grass was still flattened somewhat— not by a seated figure, but a prone one. Myal had slept at his watch as Dro had grimly predicted. Looking at it, Dro felt the familiar signals, the shift of hair on scalp and neck, the tiny ratlike beast which seemed to scuttle up his spine.
Parl Dro stood and looked toward the sea of forest that flooded the valleys below. The moon was high, but there was scarcely any wind to bring the muted sounds of the woodland up to the ridge.
Then he heard the thin clear note, like that of a bird, or even of a reed pipe, piercing acutely as a needle through the shadow and the foliage a mile below.
There was nothing else, or nothing else he heard.
The fire was almost dead. Dro killed it quickly and thoroughly with a couple of blows.
He picked up Myal’s musical instrument, held it a moment, then, unwillingly, slung it across his own shoulders. Its touch, weight, shape and aura—of another man’s inner world?—disturbed him.
Abruptly, Dro spoke one foul obscenity to the night. Then he swung himself off the ridge and onto the tricky ground that led almost vertically into the forest. Presently, in the bushes a couple of feet down the slope, he kicked against something, glanced at it, and found Myal Lemyal’s body.
He was lame, and now he carried the dead weight of a nightmarish hell-harp on one shoulder, the dead weight of a man over the other. The man, it was true, was thin and therefore light to carry. Even so, it was nothing he would have wished on himself.