Cart and Cwidder (4 page)

The sun was setting then, and the light was red. But Moril thought that this did not entirely account for the color of Kialan's face. Kialan, however, said nothing. He silently accepted some of the wine and drank it, but he did not speak again until much later. By then Clennen had become very jolly with the wine. Beaming in the firelight, he leaned back against the wheel of the cart and said to Dagner, “Give us that new song of yours.”

“It's not quite ready yet,” said Dagner. But, since this was not a performance, he willingly fetched his cwidder and picked out a sketch of what Moril thought was a very promising tune. And without a trace of nervousness, he half sang, half spoke the words.

“And then I think the first four lines again,” Dagner said, looking up at Clennen.

“No,” said Clennen. “Won't do.”

“Well, I needn't have them again,” Dagner said humbly.

“I mean the whole thing won't do,” said Clennen.

Dagner looked very dashed. Kialan seemed unable to stop himself saying indignantly: “Why? I thought it was going to be a jolly good song.”

“The tune's all right, as far as it's gone,” said Clennen. “But why spoil a tune like that with those words?”

“They're jolly good words,” Kialan insisted. “I liked them.”

“It's the words I seem to want,” Dagner said diffidently.

“I see,” said Clennen. “Then in that case don't utter them again until we're in the North—unless you want us taken up for rebels.”

Dagner tried to explain. “But I—it wasn't. I was just trying to say how much I liked traveling in the cart and—and so on.”

“Were you?” said Clennen. “And haven't you heard the songs the freedom fighters used to sing here the year of the rebellion—oh, it'll be sixteen years ago now, the year you were born? They never dared say a thing straight out, so it was all put sideways—‘Follow the lark' was one, ‘Free as air and secret' another went, and the best known was ‘Come up the dale with me.' The lords here still hang a man on the spot for singing words like that.”

“And I do think that's ridiculous!” Kialan burst out. “Why can't people sing what they want here? What's the matter with everyone?”

Brid and Moril looked at his firelit face with interest. It began to seem as if Kialan might be a freedom fighter. They felt they could forgive him much if he was. Clennen, however, simply seemed amused.

“I hope there's not someone behind the gorse listening to you,” he said. Kialan's head jerked round toward the nearest looming bush. “See?” said Clennen. “That's why, in one easy lesson, lad. No one can trust anyone anymore. It comes of uneasy rulers paying uneasy men to make the rest uneasy, too. It's not always been like that, you know. Dagner, what did I say outside Derent?”

Dagner's mind was woefully on his unsuitable song. “Oh—er—something about life being only a performance, I think.”

“I knew I could trust you to get the wrong saying—and the wrong saying wrong,” Clennen said tolerantly. “Anyone?”

“You said the South was once as free as the North,” said Brid. “You said it to me, really.”

“Then remember it,” said Clennen.

3

After one night attempting to share the smaller tent with Kialan and Dagner, Moril took to creeping into the cart along with Brid and the wine jar. As he told Brid, even the wine jar took up less space than Kialan, and it did not have knees and elbows. Moril had woken up three times to find himself out among the guy ropes in the dew. He resented it. He resented Kialan, and he wished Dagner joy of him. It was hard to tell if Dagner got on with Kialan or not, because he was such an untalkative person. Dagner was like Lenina in that way. It was quite impossible to tell what Lenina thought about Kialan—or, indeed, about anything else.

Kialan, in spite of Clennen's rebuke, seemed unable to stop making outspoken remarks. “You know, that cart is really horribly garish,” he said, on the second morning. Perhaps he had some excuse. It was standing against the dawn sky, as he saw it, and Moril's red head was just emerging from it. The effect was undeniably colorful, but Brid was keenly offended.

“It isn't!” she said.

“I expect you're too young to have much taste,” Kialan replied. Brid swore to Moril that she was Kialan's enemy for life after that one.

What Moril resented most—apart from Kialan's elbows and the fact that Kialan never made the slightest attempt to help with any of the chores—was the superior way Kialan stood by and listened in whenever Moril had a music lesson. Unfortunately he had them fairly frequently in the next few days. They were taking—perhaps for Kialan's benefit—a more direct route to Flennpass and the North than usual. It meant that they did not pass through any large towns and only two villages. Lenina bought supplies in the first, but they did not perform in either. Clennen took the opportunity to grind away at the old songs with Moril, to keep Brid hard at the panhorn, and to rehearse a number of songs with all of them.

Kialan stood by and put Moril off continually. Moril came so to resent it that he took refuge in more than usual vagueness. He would sit on his perch behind the driving seat staring up the white road unreeling ahead between the gray-green slopes of the South, basking in the hot sun—which never tanned him however long he sat in it—and dream of his birthplace in the North. It always saddened Moril that his father would never go to Hannart because of his disagreement with Earl Keril. He longed to see it, and he had built up in his mind a complete image of what it was like. There was an old gray castle in it, rowan trees, and blue hills of a certain spiky shape. Moril saw it clearly. He saw the whole North with it, spread over the gray-green southern landscape as if it were painted on a window: dark woods and emerald dales, the queer green roads from olden days which led to places that were not important any longer, hard gray rocks, and the great waterfall at Dropwater. In it lived all the stories of magic and adventure that seemed to go with the North. The South had nothing to compare with them.

Hearing Kialan talking behind him, Moril thought that the North had one new advantage. Kialan would leave them there.

“I've said that six times now,” Kialan said. “Do you spend
all
your time a thousand miles away?”

Moril was annoyed. His family could accuse him of dreaminess if they wanted, but Kialan was a stranger. “You've no right to say that,” he said.

It was possible Kialan did not realize how annoyed Moril was. “You see,” Brid explained to him later, a good long way behind the cart, “even when you're angry, you always look so sleepy and—and
milky
, that he probably didn't even notice you were attending. Not,” she added tartly, “that he'd have noticed anybody's feelings but his own, mind you.”

What Kialan had replied was: “Oh, good grief! I know you're the fool of the family by now, but you don't have to be rude as well as stupid!”

“And the same to you!” Moril retorted, and took Kialan completely by surprise by butting him in the stomach. Kialan fell backward heavily—and painfully, Moril hoped—onto the wine jar. Whereupon Moril found the prudent thing to do was to hop out of the cart double quick and scud off down the road behind it. And for the rest of the day he was forced to walk well in the rear for fear of Kialan's vengeance.

But it was Clennen who took the vengeance. When they camped for the night, he beckoned both Kialan and Moril up to him. “Are you two going to make up and apologize?” he inquired. Moril looked warily at Kialan, and Kialan looked most unlovingly back. Neither answered. “Very well then,” said Clennen, and banged their heads together. Nothing seems harder than another person's head. Moril could only hope that Kialan had seen as many stars as he had. He was rather surprised that Kialan did not say anything to Clennen. “Next time, I'll do it harder,” Clennen promised. Then, as if nothing had happened, he went on to give Moril a lesson. And to Moril's annoyance, Kialan stood by and listened just as usual.

The following day they reached a market town called Crady, and it came on to rain—big warm drops that seemed like part of the air and very little to do with the moist white sky. The raindrops made dark brown circles in the dust of the road and raised a delicious smell of wet earth. But it meant everyone crowding into the cart to change in great discomfort. Moril was not surprised that Kialan got out.

“I'm not really interested in your show,” he said to Clennen. “I'll meet you on the other side of Crady, shall I?”

“If you like, lad,” Clennen said cheerfully. Brid and Moril exchanged seething glances in the hot dim space under the cover and wondered why Clennen did not box Kialan's ears for him. But the only thing which seemed to perturb Clennen was the rain. “We shall have no audience in the open,” he said. “I'll see what I can do. We'll go in with the cover up.”

It was lucky that they did. By the time they came to the marketplace, the rain was coming in white rods and bouncing up off the flagstones. Olob was wearing his most long-suffering expression, and there was not a soul in sight. But Clennen had friends in Crady, just as he had everywhere else. Half an hour later they were installed under the great beams of a warehouse on the corner of the marketplace, and a crowd, damp but interested, was gathering into it.

They gave an indoor kind of show. After Clennen had told everyone about Hadd and Henda, the Waywold money, the price on the Porter's head, and the cost of corn in Derent, and the usual messages had been handed out, they sang songs with a chorus that the audience could join in. Dagner did his part early. Then, when good humor and attention were at their peak, Clennen told one of the old tales. This pleased Moril highly. He always felt rather too hot indoors, and playing the cwidder made him hotter still. But during a tale he was only needed once or twice. All the stories had places where there was a song. For the rest of the time Moril could sit on the dusty chaff of the floor with his arms wrapped round his knees and drink the story in.