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.And abruptly he was in their grasp.They were lifting him, swinging him up, and he was silently struggling and fighting to no avail.One last glimpse he had of the lady’s smile and her spreading hair before he fell into the carriage.Why was it so airless, so lightless, so muffled? And why did the door now seem to open in the top, not in the side as with other vehicles? And the interior was extraordinarily narrow—Suddenly he knew, and as he knew, the door slammed down over him, blotting out everything.Kachil writhed and strained.He was shut in a coffin, shut in with heat and blind smother.He was stifling—and at that moment he felt something stir, soft against his neck and chin, a moving blanket coming to cover him.Kachil chittered with terror.It felt like—like hair… A strand settled gently, ticklingly, on his lips, then another.Now it was snowing hair in the dark.He thrashed out, he choked.He tried to fill his bursting lungs, and the blackness exploded in his chest and brain.There seemed to Havor to be no margin between waking and sleeping.Suddenly his warm bed was gone, and he had forgotten it.He was riding on an empty road at midnight.Only the wind had followed him into the dream, the cold, yearning, wolf-voiced wind.There was no other sound.A white light sailed high; he looked up at it, thinking to see the moon, but saw instead a pearly skull set in the sky, grinning, ribboning worms of clouds threading its eye-sockets.He glanced back then.Behind him on the pale road was a funeral procession: black banners, a gilded hearse with a canopy of inky velvet, jet-black horses with ice-white manes, striking sparks from their stamping hooves.Fear swelled over Havor, a fear to which he could put no name.He urged his own horse to flight, but it could not, or would not, move, only stamped with its feet like the others, while its own dun mane bleached slowly to the colour of salt.The wind screamed.The screaming woke him.And he found it was not part of the dream but a man’s voice somewhere in the house, wailing in horror.“Kachil,” he said aloud.The memory of the dream clung round the room like a broken, floating web.Havor left the bed and dragged up his cloak.The inn seemed dankly cold now.Kachil’s fever must be worse to make him scream like that.Havor had seen such fevers before, and realised the man would need watching if he were to get through to morning.Havor did not relish the task, but he had come across a deal of pain and loneliness, and his own nature had imposed a certain duty on him towards others.He struck flame and lit a candle stump.Huddled in the cloak, he pushed open his door and went out.Kachil had fallen quiet now, and the whole inn was thick with silence, as before.It was black outside the door, a blackness the little flickering tallow seemed incapable of piercing.Kachil’s chamber lay around a turn in the passage, just past the place where a crack of window opened in the wall.The grey glass was on fire with moonlight, yet, like the candle, seemed unable to cast its light beyond itself into the dark.Havor was a yard or so away when a figure moved out of the shadow and up against the window pane—a girl’s figure, slender, unmistakable, though all a flat black cut-out on the moon-flare.He thought it must be the innkeeper’s daughter, the fair-haired, frightened, dumb maid, roused, as he had been, by Kachil’s cries.So he called out to her softly, “Don’t be afraid.I’ll see to him.”The silhouette seemed to flicker as shapes will when set against strong light.Then it slipped sideways and vanished back into the dark.When he passed the window the shadows were empty.Even so, he thought he should come up with her when he turned the corner.When he did not, an odd creeping unease beset him.He put it aside like the wisps of the dream, and eased open Kachil’s door.The feeble light drew out a muddled form on the bed, a man’s arm outflung on the pillow, and, as Havor set down the lump of wax on the stool, a long glinting paleness on his own sleeve.He picked it off.The flame slid stickily on its thinness.A single golden hair.When he let go of it, it spiralled down on to the rugs of the bed.Havor checked.He lifted up the candle again, examining the rugs closely.He was remembering the horse-dealer’s dog, in the East, which had slept every night across his master’s legs, and left in the morning, as a token of its presence, a sheen of coarse brindled hairs on the old rogue’s trousers.Now it seemed a great dog had been sleeping across Kachil, an impossibly huge dog, covering him from crown to toe.A dog with hairs as fine and long and golden as those from the head of a fair young girl.The candle flame fluttered, and passed over Kachil’s face.His eyes and mouth were wide open, but his body was as cold and as lifeless as the night.The Road« ^ »Dawn had watered the darkness to a sullen ivory, and the sun rose like a dim cheap jewel of glass.There seemed no one stirring at the inn, and Feluce, despite his boast, appeared to have slept very deep, and still to be sleeping.In the taproom the great fire had become a heap of ashes.Chill morning light washed through the wide windows, making the room seem larger, emptier, unnaturally colourless and grim.“Landlord!” Havor called.To his own ears his voice sounded flat and uncarrying.But after a while the man came through into the big room, and his face was blank as paper, as before.“What can I do for you, sir?”Havor said, “One of my companions died in the night.” Curiously, he had expected no surprise or any other emotion from the innkeeper, no distress or half-hidden sour gladness.And indeed, the man folded his arms and stared back at Havor as if he had merely spoken of the day or the state of the road.“Do you have a priest in Axa?”“Yes.”Havor waited some moments for him to go on, then asked, “Where can I find him?”“You won’t.Not unless you go the twenty miles to Osil.He’s there at present on church business, and not due back till next holy day.You’ll get no priest-burial in Axa.”“Then we must make our own, and beg spades.”The innkeeper said quietly, “You’ll get neither spade to dig nor earth to put him in, here.”“Let’s be clear,” Havor said.“The soldier I refer to wasn’t the one who caused you trouble at supper.It was the red-haired man, who had the fever.He died of it.”“You think so?”The dry wind beating at the house seemed to catch Havor coldly between the shoulder blades.“Yes, landlord, I think so.What is it you think?”“I think Axa will be glad to see you gone, you and your friends, quick or dead.”“Your daughter,” Havor said.“What was she after in the passage in the dark? A look at what we carry?”“My daughter? She never stirred out.”“Some other maid of the house, then.I saw a girl by the window, near the sick man’s room, last night.”For the first time the innkeeper’s face betrayed itself.He smiled, a twisted stone-eyed smile.“Very likely,” he said.Havor looked at him and said no more.He went instead to rouse Feluce, and then out into the town to buy a spade with which to dig Kachil a resting place.The sky was now a blowing mass of white curded cloud, and the wind had teeth in it.The crow in the brass cage by the inn door was huddled into a ragged clot of feathers.On the streets nothing moved.Havor walked for some while.Sometimes he glimpsed a face peering from an upper window, hastily vanishing as he glanced up at it.Once he came upon a solitary child playing a game with smooth pebbles in an alley, but it sprang up and darted away when it saw him.News, it seemed, went fast in Axa, and now he was shunned.He had seen lepers treated so, or the sick in time of plague.His skin crept and the wind gnawed on him.Eventually he heard start up the dull yet piercing strokes of a smith’s hammer [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]