Cart and Cwidder (17 page)

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.

10

They had a sort of cheese omelet for lunch, sitting on a point of green land between two brisk streams. Kialan would have it that what they were eating was scrambled eggs. Brid disagreed. Moril did not join in the argument because he was listening to the sound of the water. It made him think of the North. The sound of water running was never far away in the North. He was dreamily considering whether one could make a tune that captured the noise when Brid shook him sharply and told him they were moving.

“You didn't have to do that!” said Kialan.

“Why not? You know how maddening he is when he goes into a dream,” Brid retorted.

“Yes, but it's just his way,” said Kialan. “He's about six times as awake as most people, really. I bet he heard every word we said—didn't you, Moril?”