Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain (10 page)

Toddy peered respectfully over the edge. The declivity was not sheer, after all, when seen from above, nor quite without vegetation. Apart from the centre of the slide, where the polishing of friction had smoothed away all irregularities, it would not have been impossible to climb down the slope. And there below, a pie-crust of heaped boulders and stones and dust, the talus leaned innocently against the mountainside, while its accumulated overspill of years lay desultorily about the bottom of the valley, a hundred and fifty feet below.

“Look at that!” Toddy forgot the ominous, slow slapping of the rain for a moment, and hung staring in fascination. “Wonder how long it took to build up all that lot?”

Christine took one quick glance below, and withdrew to the inner side of the path. “Longer than it’ll take to shift it, my boy, if you miss your step.”

“And do you realise the process grades all that stuff down there? Piles it up with the boulders as a base, and the finer stuff above. I read it once in some book by Norman Douglas about the Vorarlberg. And it builds up at the steepest angle maintainable. It looks as solid as a wall, and if you blew on it the whole lot would go.”

“Then don’t blow. Come on, the rain’s coming.”

In single file they paced cautiously across the level of the rock, and came thankfully out on to terraced, coarse grass and a milder slope, where they could take to their heels and go bounding towards the huts. A soft crackle of thunder and a lipping of lightning along the crests, beneath the spreading purple cloud, nipped at their heels and drove them as corgis drive cattle. The plunge of their descent carried them lower than the highest hut, and towards the cluster below. They were still a hundred yards from them when the cloud parted with a sound like the tearing of rhinoceros hide, and the rain came down in a slashing fall. They ran like hares. The nearest door was held wide open before them, and a long brown arm hauled the girls in. In the dark, warm, steamy interior, with the fodder-loft above one end, and rough wooden benches round the walls, six of the herdsmen were gathered already, and others came running hard on their heels, scattering water from their black felt hats and frieze capes as they shed them inside the doorway.

Broadly smiling faces loomed at them through the steamy air, weather-beaten faces of large-boned young men, seamed, teak faces of hawk-nosed old men. The entire upland population of Zbojská Dolina was gathering into shelter from the first thunderstorm of August. There could not be a better place for studying them, or a better time.

They made room for the foreigners on the most comfortable bench, close to the small iron stove. An old man with thin metal chains jingling round his hat, and the traditional cream-felt trousers still worn without affectation to his daily work, embroidered thighs and all, offered them mugs of coffee, and a young fellow brought out of his leather satchel soft, light buns filled with cream cheese and poppy-seed. The air was heavy with scent of clover and damp felt and garlic breath, and it began to feel like a party. Except that at a party you do not look steadily round at every face in the company, as Tossa was doing now, memorising their lines and measuring them against a remembered face that is not present.

They had now seen, surely, every soul who habitually frequented Zbojská Dolina. But they had not seen the man Tossa was looking for.

The rain stopped as abruptly as it had started. In a matter of seconds, before they had realised that the drumming on the roof had ceased, a finger of sunlight felt its way in at the open door, and the tatters of cloud melted magically from half the sky. They emerged into a washed and gleaming world, withdrawing themselves almost reluctantly from a discussion conducted in mixed German and Slovak, with an English word thrown in here and there, notably the now international word “folk-lore,” which the herdsmen batted about among them with a note of tolerant cynicism in their voices. The party clamour fell behind them, with their own thanks and farewells, and the hut emptied.

The four of them walked in silence in the wet grass, the eastern sky pale and clear as turquoise before them, the ring of crests picked out with piercing sunlight beneath a still ominous darkness to westward.

“Listen!” Christine halted, head reared. “What’s that?” She looked round the slopes of the bowl, and back towards the huts, but the sound that had caught her ear seemed to have no source.

Then they heard it, too; a sudden rippling, vibrating entry on a high note, that shook down a scale into a deep, still, slow melody, breathy and hushed, like a bass flute. Soft and intimate, and yet from no visible source, and therefore as distant as the summits, at least, and perhaps from beyond them. There are sounds that can whisper across ten miles of country, especially in mountain air, where slope gives back the echo to slope, and even a flung human voice can span valleys as lightly as the wind. This tune—it was a full minute before the procession of sounds became a tune to their unaccustomed ears—was muted and wild and sad, and the nature of the instrument, whatever it might be, seemed to determine that it must be slow.

“Some sort of a pipe,” said Dominic. “Maybe they’ve got a local version of the alphorn here. That’s modal, surely, that tune?”

“Mixolydian,” said Christine. “I think! I never heard anything like it before. That entry! Listen, there he goes again!”

Down from its first reedy, impetuous cry span the thread of sound, and settled low and softly, like a lark dropping. Full and deep the lament sang itself out, and was gone. They waited, but it did not come again.

“That’s all. What a pity!”

Tossa turned back once more, before they began to descend the valley path, and halted them again with an exclamation of delight. “Look, there go the goats!”

Sleek and dark and brilliant with rain, the chestnut goats minced daintily out of the grey of rocks along the skyline, into the beam of stormy sunlight, that turned each one into a garnet on a chain for a moment, out of it again through the narrow cleft of the southerly col, and so out of sight. Gaudy as players in a spotlight, they gleamed and passed. And after them, abrupt and tall and dazzling against the dark, a man walked into their vision.

Tiny and distant as they saw him, he filled the sky for a moment. A long, rangy figure, like most of them here, in the modified local dress that made them all look like Mirek’s brigand-patriot Janosík and his mountain boys. The brief glitter like a crown on his head must be the fine chains that ringed his hat, the light streaming down his body was the sheen of his rain-soaked frieze cloak. His swinging stride carried him into the gleam and out of it without pause; and they saw clearly, bright and ominous against the dark sky, the stock of the rifle projecting over his shoulder, and the inordinately long barrel swinging momentarily into sight below his hip as he turned through the col, and vanished in a swirl of his wet cloak, leaving the stage empty.

Below, near the Riavka hut, it had not rained at all. The meadows were dry and bright, the cloud had passed, torn its skirts on the summits, discharged its rage there, and dissolved in its own tears.

They lay in the blonde grass at the edge of the paddock, half asleep, reluctant to go indoors. And it was there that they heard the far-off pipe again. The notes came filtering into their consciousness like music heard in a dream, so distant they were, and so faint. If they had not heard them already once that day, they would probably not have been aware of them now; and even as it was, they had been listening to them inwardly for some minutes before they realised what it was that was stroking at their senses.

Dominic lay stretched out at ease, the breeze just stirring Tossa’s dark hair against his shoulder, and let his mind drift with the elusive sound rather dreamed than heard. That abrupt, cascading, improvised opening, hardly loud enough to be heard at all, and yet startling, and then the full, deep, remote air. He wondered how well Christine really knew her modes? “And ever against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs.” Or Mixolydian, what’s the odds? To follow the tune you had to relax and let it take you along with it, for its progress was deliberate and abstracted, running line softly into line. Not until he stopped consciously listening did he catch the form of it, and fall into the loose, plaintive cadence so smoothly that the words came of themselves.

Curious how the simplest doggerel folk-songs have a way of making themselves applicable everywhere.

Sometimes I am uneasy

And troubled in my mind…

Like Tossa, with her tender conscience, and her sense of obligation to a man she had cordially disliked. He turned his head softly, to study through the seeding grasses her unconscious face, turned up to the slanting rays of the sun with eyes closed, half asleep, but still anxious in her half-sleep, and still vulnerable. Her eyelids, loftily arched and tenderly full, were veined as delicately as harebells, and her mouth, now that she wasn’t on guard, was soft and sad and uncertain as a solitary child’s.

Sometimes I think I’ll go to my love

And tell to her my mind.

He was leaning cautiously over her on one elbow when she opened her eyes, looked up dazedly and blindingly into his face, and smiled at him without reserve or defence, out of the charmed place of her half-sleep. And suddenly, in the same instant that her open acceptance of him made his heart turn over, the true significance of his own ramblings stung his mind. He rolled over and sat bolt upright, his fingers clenched into the grass.

Sometimes I am uneasy

And troubled in my mind…

He wasn’t mistaken. That was the air he’d been hearing now for two minutes at least, and he’d known it, and never grasped what it meant, or how downright impossible it was. The pastoral mood was right, the loose form was right, and the music was certainly modal; but how could some shepherd piper here in the Low Tatras, in the heart of Central Europe, be playing an unmistakably English folk-song called “Bushes and Briars”?

The astonishing thing was that no one else had noticed anything odd; they lay placidly chewing grass-stems on either side of him, and gave no sign. Nobody but himself had caught and identified the air; and in a moment more it was gone, and even the distances were silent.

He debated uneasily whether he ought to call Tossa’s attention to his discovery, but the decision was taken out of his hands. He had no opportunity to speak to her alone before they were called in to their early supper; and midway through the pork and dumplings Dana appeared in the doorway to announce in a flat, noncommittal voice: “Miss Barber, someone is asking for you on the telephone.”

Tossa dropped her fork with a clatter, suddenly jerked back into her private world of pitfalls and problems. Her face was tight and wild for an instant.

“
Telephone
?” said Toddy incredulously. “What, here? What secret contacts have you got in these parts, Operator 007-and-a-half?” Dominic was beginning to marvel and chafe at the insensitivity of Toddy; he’d known the girl for years, he should have felt some response to her unbearable tension.

“Don’t be an ass,” said Tossa with a sigh, getting to her feet with a creditable pretence of boredom and resignation. “It’ll be my mother, of course.”

No one, fortunately, thought fast enough to observe that they had come to Zbojská Dolina only on the spur of the moment, and their address certainly could not be known to anyone in England, since Tossa’s card home had been posted only yesterday.

“I never thought your fond mama was fond enough to spend a guinea a minute, or whatever it is, talking across Europe to her darling daughter,” said Christine cynically.

“Don’t be silly, Paul will be paying the bill, of course.”

Dana, hovering in the doorway, said clearly and deliberately: “It is a man calling.” She cast one brief glance at Dominic, and hoisted her shoulder in a slight but significant shrug. She was a little tired of secrecy, and not altogether disposed to go on being discreet. Dana was taking no more responsibility for anything or anyone. It was up to him now.

“What did I tell you? Paul getting paternal!” Tossa walked away to take her call, the back view almost convincing, resigned and good-humoured, ready to report faithfully to her demanding family, and extricate herself from any further enquiries. Though of course, she knew, none better, that it was not Chloe Terrell on the line, or Paul Newcombe, either, or anyone else in far-off England, but somebody here in Slovakia, somebody from whom she had been half expecting a message all this time.

She came back a few minutes later, still admirably composed, if a little tense. She sat down with a sigh, and resumed operations hungrily on her pork and dumplings.

“Everything all right?” asked Christine cheerfully.

“Oh, sure, everything’s all right. They’re home, and no troubles. Just felt they ought to check up on the stray lamb.” She wasn’t too loquacious, because she never talked much about her relationship with her mother, and it wouldn’t ring true now. “Paul mostly, of course, they’re always like that. He means well.”

When she was lying with every word and every motion of her body she could still, it seemed, keep the secret from the Mather twins, but she couldn’t keep it from Dominic. A private geiger-counter built into his deepest being started a pulsating pain in response to the rising of the hackles of her conscience, and halved her pain. And she was aware of it, for she flashed one appraising look at him, and then resolutely evaded his eyes.

But repeatedly, he noticed, his senses perhaps sharpened by the pain, she was glancing now at her watch. She had an appointment to keep? Or she was counting the minutes until she could be alone and stop lying? It wasn’t her natural condition, it hurt her badly, she might well look forward to a respite from it.

But no, she had an appointment! She drank her coffee quickly, though it was scalding hot. She had one eye constantly on the time, and was calculating something in her mind, and frowning over it.

“You won’t mind if I run off and write a proper letter home?” she said deprecatingly, pushing her chair back. “It’s the one sure way to keep ’em quiet for the rest of the trip.”

“You could do it down here,” suggested Toddy obtusely, “and nod our way occasionally.”

“What, with television around? You don’t know how much concentration it takes. I’ll be down in an hour or so.”

She made her escape in good order; only the back view, as she left the room, somehow conveyed a sense of brittleness, excitement and tension. But she was right, they had television to divert their minds, compulsive here even before the sun was down, because they were on holiday from all cerebral engagements, because they had been out in the fresh air all day, and because, when it came to the point, the programmes were rather better than at home, and the picture very much better. They wouldn’t begin to miss Tossa for an hour or so, and they wouldn’t miss him, either.

He gave her two minutes start; he was afraid to make it longer. Then he made an easy excuse about bringing down the maps and surveying the route into Levoca, where there was a notable church and some splendid carving by Master Paul. They agreed cheerfully; they would have agreed to anything, provided it made no claim on them to-night.

He walked straight through the bar, across the terrace, and out to the edge of the trees. There he waited, because the light was still on in the girls’ room. If she didn’t come in a few more minutes, he would assume he could relax, and think about fetching the maps. And he would feel crazily happy to be owing her an apology; as though she wronged him by going her own way, and he injured her by feeling injured. The relationship between them was growing more and more complex and painful.

The light in the girls’ room went out.

He counted the seconds, hoping she wouldn’t come, ready to blame himself for all sorts of suspicions to which he had no right. Then he saw Tossa’s slight, unmistakable shape in the doorway, saw her close the door behind her and slip away from the house, heading towards the climbing path.

He stood motionless among the trees, and let her pass. It was still daylight, though the direct rays of the sun had forsaken the valleys, and were fingering hesitantly at the heights. In the bowl among the summits, where the chestnut goats habited with their elusive bandit-herdsman, it would still be broad day; here among the trees it was almost dusk already. She had the evening world to herself; she moved through it like a wraith.

Dominic stole out of his hiding-place and silently followed her.

Among the trees it was easy to keep relatively close to her, and still escape notice; but afterwards, when they came to the heath land and the scattered rocks, through which the track threaded bewilderingly, he had to hang back a little and slip from cover to cover with care. If she looked back at a turn of the path she might easily glimpse him, and he was reluctant to be caught shadowing her, however illogical that might seem. She hadn’t made any concessions, hadn’t invited him into this secret affair of hers, hadn’t asked him for anything. She had given him her commission without her confidence, and only when he asked for it; and his acceptance of it had given him no rights whatsoever, because he had bargained for none. But neither had he made any promises to withdraw, or cede any of his rights to act on his own. Principal and shadow, they maintained each his station. But he felt that there was, in a way, an obligation on him not to obtrude.

The bruised grasses underfoot, rich with dwarf heaths and wild thyme, sent up a heady sweetness in the cooling evening, and the small breeze that came with the change brought back to him the occasional light rustle of Tossa’s shoes on the loose stones. The most difficult bit was going to be the belt of open meadows, before the valley closed in on both sides in broken rock faces and drifts of rubble and scree, mingled with scattered copses and thickets of bushes. How far could she be going? Not up to the highest bowl, surely, where the huts were? At this hour, and without a coat?

She was out of the rock belt now, she set off boldly across the meadows, and he hung back in cover, and let her go. Once she looked round, and stood for a moment with head reared, watching and listening to make sure she was alone. Then, satisfied, she turned and hurried on, breaking into a run.

He dared not step into the open after her until she had vanished at the first turn of the path, where the outcrop rocks closed in upon it and twisted it, like fingers snapping off a thread. But then he set off across the thick, silent turf at a fast run, to make good the distance he had lost. Even if she looked back, now, she could not see him, and with this springy carpet under his feet she would not hear him. He reached the rocks, and began darting after her from bend to bend of the cramped path, until he heard a stone roll away from under her foot, somewhere ahead of him and not far away.

She had left the path; though narrow and winding here, it was almost level and partly grassed, a stone would not roll like that unless she had begun to climb again. By the sound, she had turned to the right from the track. That way there was at least one possible goal; he could see the roof of the little refuge, rose-coloured tiles against the backdrop of ashen scree. It was still in sunlight, a long ray pierced the open lantern tower like a golden lance. They had climbed a considerable distance already, and for a little while, at least, had outdistanced the twilight.

Yes, she was heading for the chapel. Quiet as she was, the small sounds she did make came down to him clearly, and he could trace her progress by them. The pathway up to the shelf had been laid, at one time, with flat stones, but many of them were unsteady now. And here there were thick bushes and even trees, encouraged by the shelter of the little promontory. Stones from the encroaching scree-slope behind had rolled right down among the bushes, and lay raw and pale in the grass. Then, as the track reached the edge of the level shelf, the trees fell back, and Tossa stepped out on to the plane of rock before the chapel door. Rubbish of scree had reached the wall on the inner side, and begun to pile up against the footings.

Tossa never hesitated. She walked quickly across the few yards of open space, towards the door that sagged sideways on its broken hinge. Dominic wormed his way to the edge of the trees, and watched her go. The place seemed private, silent and abandoned, surely safe enough. He found himself a secure spot in cover, and settled down to wait until she should reappear.

Tossa reached the door, laid her hand on the leaning timbers, and slid round them into the chapel. It seemed she might be a few minutes late for her appointment; at any rate, it was three minutes past eight by Dominic’s watch. She vanished. He began, almost unconsciously, to count seconds.

Four seconds, to be exact. Four seconds of silence from the instant when she disappeared round the sagging door into the dark interior. Then the sharp, small crack, that he took first for a dry twig snapping under a foot, and knew next moment for a gun-shot.

He discovered that he knew it when he found himself flat on his face, writhing like an eel out of the bushes and on to the grey, striated face of rock, wriggling frantically towards the door of the chapel. And it seemed that his senses were capable of splitting themselves into action squads, where the need was sharp enough, for he was simultaneously aware of recording the dull sound of a fall, and the faintest of muted cries, while his conscious hearing was busy with the sound of the shot, struggling to sort out its direction, and baffled by a multiplicity of echoes. Here in this confined and complex valley every explosion of sound ricocheted from plane to plane, repeated endlessly along the gorge, out to the open bowl to westward, and the lowland spaces to eastward.

Tossa had walked into the chapel erect and innocent. Dominic crawled, drawing up his feet behind him into the grateful shade of the doorway, and dragging himself up by the great iron latch. He scrambled round the obstruction, and the first thing that hit him was the slanting shaft of sunlight through the empty window-frame on his left hand. It blinded him for a moment, and then, before he regained his sight or took his sheltering arm down from his eyes, he grasped the significance of this late radiance, and dropped to the floor again in a hurry. His outstretched right hand lit upon something warm and rough-textured, a tweed sleeve, the roundness of an arm limp and still within it.

A yard before his face, and on the same level, Tossa’s face hung frozen and blank with shock, lips parted, great eyes stunned into dullness. That was the first thing he saw as his vision cleared again. The second was the young man who lay sprawled between them half on his face, one arm doubled under him, one flung out towards the doorway, with a blue-black hole oozing a sluggish glue of blood just to the right of the base of his skull, in the neatly cropped fair hair, and a small pool gathering underneath his throat, in the dust of the paved floor. A well-dressed young man, in good grey slacks and sportscoat, as English as brown ale. It was hardly necessary to stoop and examine the motionless, astonished face pressed against the dirty flagstones, but Dominic did it, all the same.

The man who ran the MG, the man who had drunk coffee in a corner of the kavarna at Zilina, and exchanged messages with Tossa by means of her comb-case, was never going to report on his mission, whatever it might be. There was no pulse detectable in the wrist on which Dominic pressed his fingers; there was not the faintest misting discernible on the watch-glass he held to the slack lips for want of a mirror.

X with diplomatic plates was unmistakably and irrevocably dead.

Tossa came out of her daze with a violence that almost shattered them both, broke into rending, tearless sobs, and tried to get to her feet, in a horrified recoil from the poor creature on the floor. Dominic dropped the heavy hand he had been holding, and caught her by the shoulders roughly, pulling her down again.

“Don’t get up! Don’t you understand? The window! The light!” He reached across the dead man, and drew her close to him, kneeling upright and holding her tightly in his arms. His back ached with her weight and his own, but that didn’t matter. Neither, for the moment, did the dead man over whom they leaned to each other thankfully and fearfully. “I’m here, I’m with you, I won’t leave you. Keep down, and keep hold of me. You’ll be all right. Tossa, you know me—Dominic. Now, take it easily, and we’ll pull out all right. I came to look after you. I said I’d be around.”