Parl Dro’s fame, or perhaps infamy, tended to precede him. It was quite probable some here would surmise his identity. It seemed likely the girl in the leaning house had done so. But if the diners and drinkers of this inn divined who had come among them, they were not eager, or had no reason, to act upon it. Even the singing, which was concentrated at the far end of the room, about the hearth and its cumbersomely turning spits, had not faltered.
Dro let the door reel shut behind him. He stood a few extra seconds, allowing more determined gawpers to satisfy themselves. Then he walked, slow and scarcely lame, quietly to one of the long tables. As he seated himself, the slightest, softest, most involuntary of sighs escaped him as the turmoil in the crippled leg subsided to mere pain.
The others seated at the table shifted, like grass touched by a breeze, and resettled. They eyed each other over their cups and bowls, the bones they were chewing, the cards or dice or riddle-blocks they were gaming with. An elderly looking boy in a leather apron came up, a meat knife through his belt, a bottle and cup in his hand.
“What’ll you have?”
“Whatever there is.”
“There’s this,” said the boy. He dumped the cup on the table and poured a rough glycerine alcohol into it from the bottle. “And that,” he added, pointing to the spits, the stew pot, the shelves of hot loaves and baking onions stacked over them.
“Don’t waste your time,” said one of the gamesters at the table. “He doesn’t eat.” He picked up and showed the card he had just dealt. It was the King of Swords, its four black points painted on like thorns, the hooded high-crowned monarch brooding between them. The death card, Bad Luck.
“He means,” explained the elderly boy, “you look like Death.”
“I certainly feel like it,” said Dro. He pushed off his hood, picked up the cup and drained it. “The third of a loaf,” he elaborated to the boy, “and a couple of slices of that sheep you’re burning over the fire.”
“We always burn the sheep here,” said the boy wittily, “to be sure they’re properly dead before you eat them.”
“I’m relieved you take the same precautions with the bread.”
Somebody laughed. Somebody else mimed a man trying to acquire a bite out of a live loaf. The boy filled Dro’s cup again and went off to the hearth, shouldering his way, murderously flourishing the meat knife, through the singers. As some of the raucous chorus broke off, Dro caught a couple of bars of perfect music, sheer and fine as a shining fish glancing through river mud. The sources of the music were firstly strings, tuned high as clouds, then suddenly also a pipe tuned even higher. Dro partly inclined his head, waiting for the next exquisite bar, but the howling song started up again and the music submerged in it.
The boy was back and slapped down a platter.
“Stick this fork in it. If it goes baaa, I’ll put it back on the spit for a while.”
Dro pierced the mutton with the fork and a dozen voices bleated along the length of the table.
“Better fetch the shepherd,” said Dro, “before the wolf gets his flock.”
He began to eat, economically. A little silence gathered.
Eventually someone said: “It’d be a lame wolf, wouldn’t it?”
A neighbour jogged his elbow. “Shut up, idiot. I recognize who he is now.”
“Yes,” said another. “And I do, too. I thought he was a legend.”
Dro went on economically eating.
One of the men said to him: “We’ve guessed who you are.”
Dro sat back and smiled enigmatically at no one. “Am I to be the last to know?”
They shuffled. Somebody said, as somebody always said, “Don’t think I want to share this table with you.”
But none of them moved away. Indeed, one or two more were edging over from other parts of the room, drawn as if to the scene of a lurid crime.
Dro went on eating and drinking, slow, and oddly isolated from the whirlpool he was creating. He was as used to this as to rough ground, as to the pain that walked with him. Used to it, and able now and then to use it in turn.
The remarks came gently, cautiously, laying ripples of emotion over the warm air.
“What do you think of yourself, doing what you do?”
“How do you sleep nights?”
“He sleeps all right. There’ll be plenty with cause to thank him.”