9

A mile or so beyond the village, Olob looked at the sun moving into the blue mountains and turned toward a cart track which led away to the left. Brid tried to stop him. “No, Olob. We must get on.”

“Let him find a place,” said Moril. “I told you. It’s no good looking guilty. Besides, we haven’t eaten a thing since this morning.”

“You had a pie, you lucky pig!” snapped Brid, but she gave in and let Olob pull the cart into a secluded grassy space under a cliff. A stream ran in a trickle of green mosses down the rock face. Moril came down from the cart, feeling shaky at the knees.

“If we’re going to camp this near the village,” said Kialan, emerging from hiding, “then we’d better set a watch tonight.”

“What for?” said Moril. “Nobody’s going to bother to come at night, not after three children. And if they come while we’re awake, we’ll hear them.”

“I’m going to watch, all the same,” said Kialan.

“No you’re not,” said Moril. “There’s no point.”

“Bossy, aren’t you, all of a sudden!” Brid snapped. Then she rounded on Kialan. “And if you make yourself ill staying awake every night, what are we supposed to do with you?”

Moril realized that Brid was angry because she was tired and miserable. So he said nothing and simply began to get Olob out of the shafts. Kialan must have realized it, too, because he said wearily, “Oh, all right. I give in,” and started collecting firewood.

Brid investigated the provisions Dagner had bought. “What am I supposed to do with all this flour?” she demanded. “And no eggs!”

It looked as if Dagner’s idea had been to stock the cart with enough food to last them until they reached the North. But as Brid said mournfully, his mind must have been on that message, for the only useful things he had bought were the bacon and a large cheese. Among the less useful things were lentils, candles, and a big bunch of rhubarb.

“Look at this!” said Brid, wagging the rhubarb about. “What was he thinking of?”

“Waste of money,” agreed Kialan. “Did he use all you earned?”

“Yes,” said Brid. “Every penny. And there’s not even any bread.”

They had a rather strange supper of fried bacon, cheese, and experimental pancakes made out of flour and water. Brid, after nibbling one, promptly put them in the frying pan that held the bacon, and Kialan thought of melting cheese over them to improve the taste. This left them still so empty that they finished the meal with about a quart each of stewed rhubarb; luckily, Lenina had left some sugar in the cart.

Moril felt better after that. He got up, fetched the bucket, and carefully cleaned the cart. It was looking very dusty and uncared for, and to his mind, it had a furtive, illegal look. He thought about Dagner as he worked. He wondered what he had to eat in prison and how soon he would be tried and hanged. Or did the questioning by the justice count as a trial? Moril feared that it did. He wondered again what Dagner had said when they questioned him. Then he thought of Dagner trying to carry on Clennen’s work in Dagner’s way. It had not seemed wise. Dagner had been nervous and secretive, and he had made a fatal mistake. But on the other hand, Dagner was so unlike Clennen that it was probably the only thing he could do. Moril thought about himself going back to Clennen’s way and wondered if that was wise. He was not like Clennen either. But he did not know what he was like. He supposed that sooner or later he would have to find out, and then do things in the way best suited to what he found.

Brid and Kialan were washing the pans. Kialan was looking exhausted. Tears kept coming into Brid’s eyes, and she angrily wiped them away with the back of her greasy hand. And they were both pretending they were cheerful.

“Do you think if we mixed the cheese in with the flour, they’d taste better?” Brid said.

“What about rhubarb? Sort of fritters?” said Kialan.

“Ugh!” said Brid. “When I see Dagner, I’ll—” She wiped off another set of tears and said brightly, “He must have had his reasons, I suppose.”

Moril tipped away the dirty water, wondering if there could be three more unhappy people in Dalemark. Kialan must know he was a danger to himself and his companions. His landfall in Holand must have been horrible. And since then, Moril realized, Kialan’s life had been one long, tense escape, which was not over yet. As for himself and Brid, they had seen their family simply dwindle away, until it was down to their two selves. And Kialan had been fond of Dagner, too—fonder than he had realized.

Moril stopped himself in the midst of a snuffle of self-pity. No. Last year, as soon as they were safely in the North, Clennen had told them some of the other things that happened in the South. Whole families had been arrested. The older ones had been hanged, and children younger than Moril had been left with nothing in the world, and nobody dared help them for fear of being arrested, too. Clennen had told them how Henda had calmly doubled his taxes last year and turned those who could not pay out to starve, and how old Tholian had hunted an old man with dogs for not raising his hat to him fast enough. Moril knew there must be hundreds of people in the South even worse off than he was. They had a horse and cart, and Clennen had left them with a means of earning a living and a license to do it. If it came to the worst, they could go back to Markind. Moril did not like the idea. He tried to tell himself that they could not go back, because of Kialan. But he knew that was not it. Lenina would help Kialan. The reason for his not liking it, he was forced to admit, was that he was not at all clear whether they had deserted Lenina, or she them. And it made him uncomfortable.

“We’ll give more shows,” he said, putting Lenina out of his mind. He went to the cart to polish the instruments and stopped at the sight of the wine jar taking up so much room inside. “Do you know anything about this wine jar?” he called to Kialan.

“No—oh, you mean the papers?” Kialan said, coming over to the cart. “Dagner had a look in Markind, because he had to find the message for Neathdale. They’re down inside its basket.”

Moril scrambled up to look. Kialan took down the tailgate and told him where to put his hand down between bottle and basket. Brid hurried over and watched Moril fish about, feel paper, and pull it out. “What are these?”

“Messages that weren’t so important,” said Kialan. “Lucky they didn’t search the cart, wasn’t it?”

Brid and Moril held the papers into the sinking sun and spelled out, in Clennen’s writing: “For Mattrick. Someone in Neathdale—I think Halain—smells of lavender. Dirty washing through Pali and Fander in future.”

“Lavender!” said Brid. “Really, Father!”

The other notes said the same, and were marked to be delivered to places between Markind and Neathdale.

“Go and put those all on the fire,” Moril said, handing them to Kialan. “Now do you believe we can read?”

Kialan grinned and took the papers. While he was stuffing them under the embers and the air was filling with the strong smell of burning paper, Moril busily worked his hand on round the wine jar. Halfway round, he felt more papers. He pulled them out and unfolded them.

These were all in different people’s writing. Some of them seemed to have come from parts of the South they had not visited in years. Others concerned the places they had passed through, and these were mostly in Lenina’s writing. Moril felt oddly glad to see his mother’s small, bold writing. He could see that whatever Lenina had thought, privately, of Clennen’s freedom fighting, she had most scrupulously done what Clennen wanted while he was alive—even at the risk of being hanged for spying. It was queer to find her so honorable, but Moril liked it. Among other things, she had written: “Crady—169 taken north to Neathdale” and “Fledden—24 pressed yesterday, with horses.” The other notes said much the same.

“What do you think this means?” said Brid.

Kialan came over to look. “Do you think,” he said, after some puzzling, “those might be for my father or someone in the North? It could be about the army Tholian’s gathering.”

“You know, I do believe that’s it!” said Brid. “They mean how many men went for soldiers from each place. Don’t you agree, Moril?”

“Probably,” said Moril. It seemed a bit boring to him. “We’d better take them North, then.” He put them back and, just to be on the safe side, went on working his hand round the other side of the jar. There were cold, hard things. He gripped one and pulled it out. “I say!” It was a gold piece. “Whose is this?”

They were all mystified. Brid suggested that it was payment for taking Kialan North, but, as Moril and Kialan rather scornfully pointed out, if Clennen had organized that, he would have been paying himself. No other explanation seemed likely, either.

“Anyway, that means we can buy food tomorrow,” Brid said. “Father couldn’t mind that.”

“Don’t be a big idiot!” said Moril. “When did we ever have a gold piece before? Someone’s going to think we stole it, and if we get arrested, the whole thing’s going to come out.” Carefully he slipped the coin back behind the basket again.

Brid sighed. “A whole bottleful of gold! Oh, all right. I suppose you’re right and it would look odd. I’m going to bed. Get out of the cart.”

Moril helped Kialan put up the tent. By then Kialan was so tired that he dragged a blanket into it and fell asleep before the sun set. Moril felt too agitated to go to sleep straightaway. He sat against the cliff, with Olob companionably cropping grass nearby, and strummed on the cwidder for comfort. He did not play any particular song, just snatches of this and a bar or so of that. It seemed to express the state of his feelings. He still found it hard to believe that his father had been a notorious agent. Of all the discoveries of the last few days, that one was hardest to take. He had thought he knew Clennen. Now he saw he had not. He wondered when Dagner had found out and how he had felt. And he made an effort to think of Clennen in this new light.

But somehow, he did not want to think of his father. He wanted to forget the blood gushing into the lake, and he did not want to consider how Clennen could be so public and so private at one and the same time. Instead, by degrees, Moril took refuge in hazy memories from much earlier. He thought of the cart rolling down a green road in the North. Clennen was singing in the driving seat, Lenina doing some mending beside him, and the three children were playing happily on the lockers. The sun shone—and, somewhat to his surprise, the cwidder began to produce a muzzy sound. It was a very queer noise. Moril did not like it, and Olob looked round at it disapprovingly.

“Time for bed,” Moril said to Olob. He got up and went to put the cwidder back in the cart.

Inside, the cart was hot, and Brid and the wine jar seemed to fill it. Moril hesitated, thinking of the active elbows and knees of Kialan. But he could not bear the heat, so he took a blanket and wriggled into the tent with Kialan.

Luckily Kialan was so exhausted that he did not move in his sleep. Both he and Moril woke feeling fresher and happier. Brid was the somber one, but she improved after a breakfast of bacon steaks fried by Kialan. Then Moril fetched Olob’s harness to clean. He was determined that their turnout should be as spruce and innocent as he could get it. Kialan, without being asked, went to groom Olob. And Moril realized that not only had Kialan done his full share of the chores ever since they left Markind, but nobody had either noticed or thanked him.

“You don’t have to do Olob,” he said. “I’ll do him.”

“Am I supposed to stand around and watch you wear yourself out, or something?” said Kialan. “Move, Olob, you lazy lump.”

“Well, you used to,” said Brid, scrubbing the frying pan. “And you’re an earl’s son.”

“I thought I’d get that sooner or later!” Kialan said with his most fed-up look. “I didn’t know what needed doing at first, and there always seemed loads of you to do it, anyway. But if you two are having to earn money now, it’s only fair you don’t do everything else.”

“Moril,” said Brid, going very somber again, “do you think we really can earn money? I mean, even with Dagner, we sounded so—so thin and pale, didn’t we?”

“No, you didn’t,” said Kialan, at work on the farther side of Olob. “You just gave a different kind of show. Only I think you made a mistake in not building it round Dagner more. You should have got him to sing again, Brid. He’d have done it in short bursts, and his songs are really good.”

“They are, aren’t they?” Brid said sadly. “And now—”

“Moril,” said Kialan, appearing under Olob’s nose, “you can’t happen to remember Dagner’s songs, can you? Enough to play them yourself?”

“I never thought of that!” said Moril. As soon as he had finished the harness, he fetched out the instruments. While Brid set to work polishing them, Moril took up the big cwidder and tried out the first song of Dagner’s that came into his head. For some reason, it was the song Dagner had never finished, the one Clennen had forbidden him to sing until they were in the North. Moril stopped after the first few notes, to make sure nobody was about. There seemed to be no one, so he went on. He found he wanted to finish it for Dagner. It seemed the only thing he could do for him.

Dagner had only sketched out part of the tune. Since Moril had no idea what Dagner intended, he let the words take him, this way and that, through a melting blackbird phrase:

—and then to a kind of birdsong triumph in

Kialan seemed almost awestruck. But Brid, as soon as she realized what song it was, looked up the cliff and down the slope to make sure they were not overheard. Moril knew he was breaking the law. But he wanted to finish the song, so he went, rather defiantly, on to

The cwidder produced a shrill and defiant sound. Moril, cross with himself for being scared, tried to recapture the first melting tone and only succeeded in making a scratchy, bad-tempered tinkle. Dagner would have hated it. Moril thought of Dagner and put in the first four lines again at the end, as Dagner had suggested he might. But he was not thinking very clearly of Dagner himself—more of Dagner as part of that happy family on a green road in the North that he had pictured the night before. And just as he had last night, he heard the cwidder making that odd, muzzy noise.

Moril sprang up and sprang back. He could not help it. The cwidder fell on the turf with a melodious thump.

“Moril!” said Brid. “You’ll break it!”

“It was splendid!” said Kialan. “Don’t stop.”

“I don’t care!” Moril said hysterically. “I’ve a good mind to jump on it! The blessed thing was playing my thoughts! It played the way I was thinking!”

Brid and Kialan looked at one another, then at Moril. “Don’t you think,” Kialan said, “that that’s the way it works? It’s your thoughts that bring out the power.”

“But it never did that for Father!” said Moril. “He told me! He said it only did it once.”

“Well,” Kialan said, rather awkwardly, “he couldn’t really use it, could he? It wasn’t his kind of thing.”

“Except just that one time,” said Brid. “Which proves it, Moril. Because it must have been when Father saw Mother in Ganner’s hall. And he wanted her to love him instead of Ganner so much that he managed to make the cwidder work, and she did love him enough to come away with him.”

After that Moril went and put the cwidder away. Brid got it out again and polished it for him, but he pretended not to notice. When Olob, the cart, and all the instruments were gleaming with care, they set off again through the first Upland, toward the steep hill to the second. Brid drove. Moril sat beside her, trying out another of Dagner’s songs on his small treble cwidder. But it was no good. The treble cwidder just felt foolish and flimsy and shrill, and it sounded terribly ordinary. As Olob settled into a slow, heaving walk up the steep hill into the next Upland, Moril was forced to turn and ask Kialan to put the little cwidder away and pass him the big one.

The matter-of-fact way Kialan handed it to him made Moril feel much better about it. Moril took the cwidder thankfully. It felt right. He was not sure now whether it was a comfort or a burden, but if Kialan could accept so easily that it was a powerful and mysterious thing, so could he. But he knew he was going to have to learn to control the thing. You could not earn your living with a cwidder that whined if you were miserable and croaked if you were cross. “How should I start?” he asked Kialan over his shoulder.

Kialan hesitated, not because he did not understand Moril, but because he was not sure how Moril should start. “Understanding yourself, perhaps?” he asked. “I mean, I’ve no idea either, but try that. Er—why didn’t you stay in Markind, for instance? Was it just seeing Tholian there?”

Moril, by this time, was sure that it was not. “Why didn’t you want to stay?” he asked Brid, as a start. “Duty to Father?”

“Like Mother, you mean?” said Brid. “N-no. A bit of that. I do prefer Father’s outlook to Mother’s, but it was really almost more like the way Mother went back to Ganner. It’s what I’m used to—this—and nothing else felt right.”

Moril felt that went for him, too. But there was more to it than that. He could have persuaded Brid to go back to Markind after Dagner was arrested, but he had not thought of it, even. He had not wanted to go back when he had found out how dangerous their journey North really was. And he was still going North, as if it was a matter of course. Why?

“Why, Moril?” asked Brid.

“I was born in the North,” Moril answered, rather slowly. “When I—er—dream of things, it’s always the North. And the North is right and the South is wrong.”

“Bravo!” said Kialan.

Moril turned to smile at him. He found himself turning from the towering unseeable hills of the North to a low, blue vision of the South, beyond Kialan’s head. “But I still don’t understand,” he said.

At the top of the hill there was a village, a very small place, simply ten houses and an alehouse, clinging to the steep brow of the hill.

“Don’t let’s perform here,” said Brid. “There’s a bigger place farther on, I know.”

They went past the village into a wider Upland, full of grazing sheep. By the middle of the morning Moril’s cwidder was sounding melancholy. “I can’t see us getting much,” he said. “Not just the two of us.”

“Would it help at all,” said Kialan, “if I were to pretend to be Dagner?”

Both their heads whipped round his way. It was almost a marvelous idea.

“Would they remember Dagner from last year?” said Kialan.

“We didn’t perform in the Uplands at all last year,” said Brid. “But—”

“I’ve been thinking,” said Kialan. “No one but the earls knows I’m in the South. And it’s so out of the way here that no one’s going to know Dagner was arrested unless we tell them. I think it would be safe enough—and a bit in your father’s style, too.”

Moril made the obvious objection. “You can’t sing.” They looked at one another for a moment. Moril remembered Kialan listening in to his lessons with Clennen, appearing in the crowd whenever they gave a show, and seeming so knowledgeable the time the big cwidder went out of tune. “Or can you?” said Moril.

“Not as well as you,” said Kialan, “but—may I borrow one of these cwidders for a moment?”

“Go ahead,” said Brid.

Kialan took up Dagner’s cwidder and tuned it without needing to be given a note. Moril and Brid looked at one another. Neither of them could do that. And from the moment Kialan started to play, they knew they were listening to a gifted person very much out of practice. If he did not sing as well as he played, it was merely because he was the age when his voice still moved troublesomely from low to high. Moril vividly remembered the trouble Dagner had had at the same age.

What Kialan sang was a song of the Adon’s, one that Clennen never sang in the South.

“Ooh!” said Brid, looking nervously round.

“No one about. Shut up!” said Moril.

Kialan did that part meticulously in the right old style. But then he gave Moril a bit of a wink and dropped into the same kind of different fingering Moril had used in Neathdale. The song seemed to come alive.

“Oh, I liked that!” said Moril.

“I took a leaf out of your book,” Kialan said, rather apologetically. “I don’t like the old style either, and I don’t see why old things should be sacred. Wow! I’m out of practice, though! Do you think I’ll be any use to you?”

“You know you will,” said Brid. “You big fraud. If you’re that good, why on earth didn’t you say so before? Father would have put you in the show, instead of making you walk through all the towns.”

“I know he would!” Kialan said feelingly. “He’d have dressed me in scarlet and flaunted me. I didn’t quite like to say anything at first—you were all so excellent—and as soon as I realized what your father was like, I’d have died rather than tell him. It was frightening enough walking.”

The upshot of this was that Olob quietly pulled the gleaming cart onto the green of the village a mile or so on, and three people stood up to sing and play. Moril and Kialan were nervous, Brid, as usual, as confident as a queen. Moril did one or two of Dagner’s songs, but mostly they sang ballads, since those were Brid’s specialty and Kialan’s voice was not equal to anything more difficult. A scattering of people listened and clapped. Someone asked for an encore, and Brid gave them “Cow-Calling.” They got a little money, enough to buy eggs, milk, and butter, and a woman gave Brid a basket of somewhat withered apples. It was not a raving success, but it was no failure either.

“We can do it!” said Brid.

Moril smiled, and strummed his cwidder as they took to the road again. Every so often he played a tune in earnest, and Kialan would come in, too, on Dagner’s cwidder. Kialan was getting more in practice every moment. They experimented, and tried for effects and new settings. Moril had seldom enjoyed making music so much. He almost wished the distance to Hannart were twice as long.