Dro did not reply. He sat on the wall half a yard away and presently began to speak in a low still voice that did not hurry or slur a single word.
Parl Dro, from the age of seventeen a practicing exorcist, had turned forty when he walked into the wood below the mountain in the dusk, and found a woman with Silky’s golden hair, a woman who was Silky, still alive and matured to an age that was just a few years less than his own. He had not loved her, but he had found her. And she, responding to some resonance of that finding, or to the simple hunger of her own sparse existence, had come to meet him on the inevitable road. The outcome might have been anything, a parting, or a continuance. But the outcome had not been permitted to create itself, it had been forced by the arrival of the showman with the drunkard’s face and belly and the inappropriately stylish musician’s hands. He had been away that night, bargaining for the unique musical instrument which that other drunkard, Soban, had offered him. The showman had meant to bed in a brothel, but in the end the price of drink, and the price of the instrument, had taken all his cash. With the prize in a leather sack, he careered home, all the while wondering if he had been a fool, to his wagon and his wife. And discovered someone had called in the night. “Come on, I don’t care,” the showman had said. Maybe in those moments, with the philosophical detachment of liquor, he did not. But sobering and caring caught him up. He climbed into the wagon then and selected a weapon. It was actually a meat cleaver. He got back on the horse and went after Parl Dro, up the mountain, tracking him by pure animal instinct born of hate. And when he reached Dro, the showman swung the cleaver with an unerring intuition, attacking the weakest point, Dro’s crippled leg. The razor-like blade sheared straight through flesh, sinew and bone, as it was its job to do. The leg was severed just below the knee.
Parl Dro did not know it, knew only agony. He fell away from his assailant, and in a sudden panic, the assailant let him go. He turned his horse and fled and soon enough had the wagon on the road again, driving back into the south country. The gold-haired woman, whom he had struck unconscious as his very first deed, before even going for the cleaver, regained her senses in that moving wagon. By then the blood and the weapon had been tidied. She assumed her man’s vengeance had been visited on her alone, or had wished to assume so.