Kill the Dead by Tanith Lee (beach read book txt) 📕

Thesituation was laughable, the pith of many an inn song and joke. Dro got to his feetslowly, pulling his clothes together as he did so, and the man winkedmalevolently, leering.

“Well, well,well.”

Drosaid nothing, and then the man thought of some more words.

“Aren’tyou going to say: It’s all a bad mistake? Aren’t you going to say: Just becauseyou found me lying between your wife’s legs, I don’t actually have to have beendoing anything with her? Well?”

“I’llsay all that, if you like,” Dro said.

“Like? Like?”The man straightened. He stepped over a leather sack on the grass—robber’sbooty? As he passed the dog, not looking at it, it cowered. He came walkingthrough the ashes of the fire. “You forced her,” said the man. “Right? She wasunwilling and you raped her.”

“Yes. Iraped her.”

“Shelooks raped. I must say. Definitely raped.”

Dro wasaware the woman had woken and sat up, but he did not turn to her. The man wasnow close enough that the stench of ill-digested alcohol on his breath struckDro’s nostrils. Dro moved an inch or so, coming between husband and wife in theonly manner left.

“Ithink,” said the man, smiling down at his wife, “she was slightly willing.”

Dromoved, his fist already rising, left arm already extending to block any movethe other man might make. But the woman was on her feet, catching back Dro’sarm.

“No,”she panted. “No. It’s all right.”

“Ofcourse it is,” said the man. “Why should I care? I’ve been with a whore allnight.” He beamed at Dro. “Both been with whores. Yours any good? Mine was.”

Thewoman began to push Dro fiercely.

“Goaway. Please. Go away now.”

She wasbreathless. Dro said, “You’d better come with me.”

“Who’llcook my breakfast?” asked the man aggrieved. “Come on, I don’t care.” He satdown by the dead fire and took off his boots carefully. “Let’s have someservice,” he said.

Thewoman, holding her dress together over her white breasts with her brown hands,took up the beerskin and handed it to her husband.

“Thanks,”he said. He drank noisily.

“Goaway,” the woman said to Dro. “I’m begging you.”

“Allright. But you—”

“Go.”

In thedeadly still quarter dark Parl Dro started to walk away. At the clearing’sedge, he looked back and she was lighting the fire. The man drank from theskin. The dog lay like a rock, and the horse plodded about the turf.

Drowalked out of sight, and waited. Nothing happened. At last the sun rose. Thewoman appeared out of the trees when he had given her up. She stood some yardsfrom Dro and cried in a low wild voice: “Didn’t I say you must go? If you getoff, he’ll be all right. He’s only a great baby. Go now, like I told you. Damnyou, you’re nothing to me. He’s my man.”

For awhile, Dro walked slowly, listening for her to scream. The wood rustled andchirped with birds. Nothing else. He began to be able to convince himself shehad known what she did, and that everything would be well. She had had, afterall, a choice. Dro could have protected her. She was not obliged to stay withsuch a man as the drunkard.

Sheceased to resemble Silky. She became a woman he had spent a night with. Thecircumstances of discovery were embarrassing and futile.

By thetime he reached the track that led up from the trees to the mountain, it wasnoon. He had swallowed the incident down like bitter medicine. And, in the wayof solitary unique events, it had become unreal.

He wasabout half a mile away from the pass, when the woman’s man caught up to him.

Droheard the clatter of hoofs on the slate and stone of the track, knew, andturned around. But the man seemed to burst out of the very air. There had beentime to gain an advantage, yet Dro had not tried for one. His contempt for theman, his contempt for the woman who would stay with such a brute, and hiscontempt for himself, tangled, however briefly, between them, made Dro standthere arrogantly at the wayside, waiting, in full view.

Ofcourse, he was remembering the absence of weapons, the balled, empty weakling’sfists. But this time the man had armed himself with a long dull swerve ofviolence which Dro never properly saw. Because, unspeaking, preplanned,malicious in cunning and in accuracy, the man swung and delivered his blow inthe exact moment he came level with Parl Dro. Nor did he aim where he mighthave been expected to—at head or heart, or even, with an obscene aptness, atthe groin. Yet the target of the blow was, nevertheless, both obscene and apt.He hurled the unidentified weapon with all the force of his fermentedcompost-heap hate, at Dro’s crippled left leg.

Onesecond then, Parl Dro was a thinking man, astonished, out-manoeuvred in thequiet afternoon. Next second he was a howling mindless thing flung down into ahell that knew neither night nor day, nor any time at all save the hour of hisagony.

Heunderstood after, he had fallen over and away, rolling off the side of thetrack, through stone defiles, gaunt thickets, along the mountain’s hollowflanks, in a cascade of shale. He fetched up in a narrow channel with onebroken wall, and if he had gone farther it would have been off the mountainentirely, into space and presumably annihilation. In any event, he knew none ofthat till much later.

He cameto once, in a roar of pain. He had been dreaming of the pain, even unconscious,dreaming that the ghost-thing on the bridge was at work on him once more. Heseemed soaked in hot water, or sweat. The avenger had not followed him, hadbeen unable to, or unable to discover him. But he had forgotten that, too. Thepain was not localised. It was a sea, and he floundered in it, screaming. Andthen he died again. He went on like that, dying and waking, dying and waking,for a long while, or rather a timeless while. He never positively knew, when atlast he began to reason again, how long he had lain in that channel of themountain.

Wheneventually he was able to think, he was amazed, for the leg was not evenbroken—every bone had seemed splintered, and the splinters mashed.

When hegot free of the channel, it was