The Piper on the Mountain

Chapter 5

THE MAN ON THE SKYLINE

« ^ »

She gave him one flaring glance, bright and tense at the edge of panic, and then dropped her gaze to the torn half-sheet of paper, and sat staring at it with painful concentration for a long minute. Once she read through the few scrawled lines of verse and scanned the twenty bars of music without taking in a word or a note. The second time, frowning fiercely, she grasped at least the sense of the words, and in a moment she turned the page, and surveyed the columns of figures. With no change in her expression she looked up at Dominic, and stared him fairly and squarely in the eye.

He expected her to say flatly: “What is this, a joke? I wasn’t looking for anything, except the map. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” For a moment, indeed, she had intended to do just that, but when he stared back at her with that intent and sombre face, waiting for her to lie to him, and disturbed and disappointed in advance, she found that she couldn’t do it. What was the use, anyhow, if she couldn’t be convincing? She couldn’t guess what he knew, but it was enough to make him quite sure of himself. She hadn’t been aware of pursuit until now, and suddenly it seemed as if she had been running to evade him ever since they left England.

“Thank you!” she said, and with a deliberation somewhat spoiled by the unsteadiness of her fingers she folded the paper away into her writing-case. She waited, and there was silence, but he didn’t go away and accept his dismissal; she had never thought he would. “Now I suppose you’re going to ask me why I was looking for it, and what it is?”

“I know what it is,” said Dominic bluntly. “It’s the paper Ivo Martínek happened to have in his pocket the day your stepfather watched him and his friends playing cards in the Hotel Sokolie. He used it to keep the score on. And I know why you were looking for it. Because your stepfather picked it up afterwards in curiosity, and got so excited about it he left the lake and came over here, to find out more about it. Where it had come from, or who owned it, or who wrote those few lines of ‘Come Heavy Sleep’ on it, and the few bars of music. Not Ivo, that’s certain, but somebody Ivo rubs shoulders with pretty casually. Or was it that he knew who was involved, as soon as he saw the handwriting?”

Tossa closed her writing-case with a slam. “Have you been spying on me long?” she asked in a viciously sweet tone.

It didn’t hurt as much as he’d expected, because he was ready for it; he knew how she felt, and was even disposed to be on her side. He couldn’t afford to stand on his dignity, since he’d kicked it from under him, perforce, the moment Tossa’s safety and well-being became more important.

“Quite a time, ever since Siegburg, when you first gave yourself away. Call it spying if you want to, I don’t mind. I don’t care what you call it, or how badly you think of me for it, just as long as it’s effective when the pinch comes. Because if you can’t see that you’re running head-down into trouble,” he said urgently, “for God’s sake wake up! Whatever you’ve got on your mind, quit trying to carry it alone. What do you think friends are for?”

“I can’t tell you anything,” she said defensively, shaken by the warmth of his tone.

“All right, I’m not asking you to, not yet. I’ll tell you, instead. Ever since your stepfather got killed, you’ve been steering us steadily towards this place. First you suggested a carnet for the van, then Czech visas, then at Siegburg you started talking about coming straight into Slovakia, here, to the Tatras. That was when I began to get the idea, and after that it wasn’t so hard to follow up the later developments. Suddenly you knew about a wonderful little place in Zbojská Dolina, that you’d never mentioned before. And when we were here, you took us off the path up the valley, just at the right place to locate the spot where Terrell fell and was killed. I know, I asked Dana, last night, and she told me just what she’d told you. And then you suggested a trip over into the High Tatras, and took us straight to the right resort, the one where Terrell was staying before he moved here, and even to the right hotel. And that’s something you didn’t get from Dana, because she said she didn’t know, and I believe her. But you know. You had it from somebody else, before we ever came here.”

“Dana must have known,” Tossa said involuntarily. “It was her brother who…” She caught herself up too late, jerking her head aside to evade his eyes.

“Who was there playing cards in the Hotel Sokolie, and left behind that bit of paper? Yes, evidently Terrell noticed him, all right, but that doesn’t prove he ever noticed Terrell. He was with three friends, drinking coffee and playing cards, he wasn’t bothered about the foreigner who came and looked on. And in any case, you didn’t ask Dana about the hotel. You didn’t have to, you knew it already.”

“You seem,” said Tossa with a tight smile, “to be pretty well-informed yourself.”

“I listen at windows. Toddy ought to have warned you.”

They were beginning to hate and blame each other for the stone wall between them. He was catching her tone, and that wouldn’t help anyone. He dragged the dressing-table stool across the room and plumped it down close beside her chair, and leaning forward with desperate earnestness, closed his hands hard over hers. She quivered, but she didn’t draw away.

“Look, Tossa, you’ve got to listen to me. We’re not in England now. We’re in Central Europe, in a Communist country. If our people think we haven’t all that much reason to trust the Czechs, how much reason do you think the Czechs have to trust us? Historically, a hell of a lot less! How do you think it would look at home, if a chap with a Czech passport came poking around one of our small towns, asking a lot of nosy questions about a death that was officially accidental, cornering waiters in hotels and trying to pump them, and searching rooms for hidden bits of paper? Just give it a thought! Yes, I was listening under the window, I heard you talking to the waiter. That’s the only time, but I don’t give a damn, anyhow, you can call it what you like. What I want is for you to stay out of trouble. The way you’re going on, you’re going to end up in gaol. No, wait a moment!” he checked abruptly. “Let’s have it quite straight. There was one other time when I spied on you. At Zilina, when we were leaving the hotel. I saw you drop your comb-case for that fellow with the MG to pick up and return. You sent him a message that way, didn’t you?”

Tossa’s hands lay still in his. She looked at him helplessly, and shook her head, without vehemence this time, but no less conclusively. “I’m sorry, I can’t answer questions. I can’t tell you anything.”

“No, I beg your pardon, I said I wouldn’t ask. All right, I think you did send him a message. And he sent one back to you the same way. I know you knew him before—or at least that he knew you. Maybe he’s the one who started you on this hunt. The one who told you where your stepfather stayed in Strbské Pleso. The one who told you there was something wrong about the way he died. X with diplomatic plates. And then you begin drawing attention to yourself here by asking questions all over the place! Do you seriously think an English diplomat can make a move in this country without the authorities knowing all about it? It works much the same way in any country, they have to know where these people are and what they’re doing. Don’t you see, Tossa, why you frighten me to death? If you have to go on with this, why alone? If we knew what you were after we could try to help you at least, and you wouldn’t have to expose yourself even further, and make yourself more conspicuous, by having to evade us, too. Wouldn’t it be better?”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, her voice a little unsteady. “I can’t tell you anything. I haven’t said yes to any of this, you’re only guessing.”

“All right, I’m only guessing, but they’re pretty safe guesses.”

“I’m sorry, I really am sorry… but I can’t tell you. Not won’t—can’t.” Her hands turned suddenly in his, warmly returned his grip for a moment, and then struggled free in outraged shyness. “I don’t admit to anything. You’ll just have to let me take my chance.”

“That’s something I can’t do,” said Dominic, letting her go regretfully but hastily. He caught her eye, and the gleam of a smile passed between them, and foundered in the sea of their gravity. “Not won’t—can’t. I’m sticking close to you, and if you ever do want me, I’ll be around.”

“I shan’t need you. Nothing’s going to happen to me.

Do the others… I mean, they haven’t noticed anything, have they?”

“No, I’m sure they don’t realise there’s anything going on. And I shan’t tell them. Only you can do that.”

The air between them had cleared, they could look at each other again almost hopefully, and with a new curiosity. “There isn’t anything going on,” she said firmly, presenting the formal untruth with the assurance that it would be understood as it was offered. “Thanks, Dominic, all the same.”

“Then, look, is there anything I can do to help you? Without asking any questions? You don’t have to tell me why, just what I have to do.”

She looked up at him intently for a moment, a deep spark kindling in her eyes. Then she ripped open the zipper of her writing-case, and drew out from the rear pocket a four-inch square of newsprint.

“Yes! If you really mean that, there is. You can help me to find this man. He’s here somewhere, in this valley or near it. Take a good look at him, so you’ll know if you do see him around. And if you do, tell me.” She pushed the newspaper clipping across the table to him. “I stole it from the files,” she said, “the day before we left England. It was the best I could find.”

Dominic noted, even before he looked at the face, that the caption had been cut off. It was sharply printed for a newspaper photograph, almost certainly from a studio portrait. A man leaned forward across a desk, his jaw propped on linked hands. He might have been about thirty-five years old; a tapered face, broad across eyes and brow, lean of cheek and long of chin, with a thin, high-bridged sword of a nose, and a cool, long-lipped, sceptical mouth. The hands linked under his chin were large, broad-jointed and calm. They looked capable of anything. Light-coloured hair drew back at high temples, duplicating the arched, quizzical line of his brows. The eyes were deep-set, probing and lonely, and looked out from the page with an aloof, almost a hostile, composure.

Dominic forgot for a moment his promise to ask no questions. “Who is he?” he asked curiously, looking up across the photograph into Tossa’s face.

“By all the indications,” said Tossa, grimly and quietly, “he’s the man who murdered my stepfather.”

Above the chapel on its shelf of rock there were sudden moist meadows, and a wealth of brilliant green pasture. Beyond, again, lay the final great, irregular bowl, green in the base, rimmed round on all sides with paling slopes of grass and ashen slides of scree. Laborious zigzag paths climbed to two cols, where the snag-toothed rim of rocks dipped to let them through; and all the sides of the bowl were circled by contour paths, along which the hill sheep trotted confidently, and sometimes dark-red, handsome goats, chestnut-coloured like Dominic’s hair.

They had probed every corner of the valley itself, and discovered every cottage. They were known, now. One of the herd-boys brought Christine edelweiss from some secret place on the summits, and a woman at the highest cottage below the huts gave them an armful of flowers from her garden. Many of the faces were becoming familiar. But they had never yet caught a glimpse of the face in Tossa’s stolen photograph.

They climbed the more northerly of the two cols, and emerged among high, windy wastes of pale turf, billowing away towards more folded valleys beyond. There were no houses in sight here, only the true open, rolling, rounded crests of the Low Tatras.

They climbed the more southerly col, and beyond the crest the path traversed a broken slope of rocks, and brought them down into a high green bowl not unlike the one they had left, but smaller and more sheltered. There was a single, isolated farm here, too remote to be incorporated in any collective, and therefore still operated privately. There were smoky brown cows in the pasture, and poultry in a paddock behind the house. A handsome old woman, tall as a man, and coiffed elaborately in lace, was scything clover in a meadow. A middle-aged man came striding through the yard with two large milking pails; but he was short and gnarled like a mountain tree. A plump woman shrilled at him from a window of the house. They saw no one else there.

Two of them, of course, were not looking for anyone in particular. Toddy and Christine walked and scrambled and bathed, and sunned themselves, and saw nothing constrained or secretive in their companions. Everything was as open and candid as the day to them.

They were on their way back into the highest bowl of Zbojská Dolina, lunging down the scree, when the first heavy, solitary drops of rain fell. Ten minutes previously the sky had been clear and blue, now a curtain of heavy purple was being drawn slowly over the crests behind them.

“We’re going to get caught,” said Toddy, and paused to look round for the quickest way to shelter. The huts lay nearer to the path from the other col. “Let’s cut a corner. If we traverse from here to the other track we may make it to shelter. There’s a contour path, look—it cuts off a long run in the open.”

The thin grey ribbon danced its way round the side of the bowl, threaded a few clumps of stunted bushes at the edge of an outcrop of rock, and balanced along the rim of a fifty-foot face of sheer, fluted cliff. At the foot of this expanse a shelf of rock jutted out irregularly, some twelve to fifteen feet wide, and below that the level dropped again, though less abruptly, sliding away down open rock and rubble and scree into the bottom of the bowl.

They saw, when they had tramped smartly along the sheep-path in single file, and brushed through the bushes suddenly fragrant with the first spurt of rain, that this whole face of the bowl, the only one scoured clear of vegetation from top to bottom, formed a slightly hollowed channel, a groove not much more than twenty yards wide down the side of the basin. Where they stepped out on the rock itself, the path was solid and not even very narrow but polished and sloping, so that they checked and trod carefully. Looking up on their left hand towards the crests, they could see the reason. Two or three pale slides of rubble and scree, chalk-lines on the greyer rock, converged upon this ledge, and for centuries had been sending the detritus of their weathering slithering down by this route into the valley. The ledge on which the path crossed, too narrow to check the slide, had been honed into steely glossiness by its onward passage. The broader ledge below had collected the rubble as in a saucer, stacking it up neatly in a talus against the cliff.

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”?