The Crown of Dalemark (27 page)

“Unkind, isn't it?” Navis said. “Her parents made a serious miscalculation there. Not that she's
un
beautiful, poor girl. Just too big for one to see it.”

Maewen wondered how anyone could be so cool with the stolen cup in his pocket. Mitt tried to match Navis in coolness. He said, “I found out where Ynen is. It seems like bad news, but it could just be good—very good.”

“Later. Hush,” said Navis.

They came round a corner in a covered walk and found themselves at the top of wide steps overlooking the biggest courtyard. People were crowded on the steps below them, serious, parently people, all looking across to the main school building, where a line of gray-coated teachers stood. One stood out in front in a blue and gray gown. In front of them the courtyard was filled with rows and rows of uniformed pupils in bright white collars.

They had missed quite a bit of the ceremony. The gowned teacher was saying, in a voice that carried almost as well as Hestefan's, “For those who now go out into the world, this is a solemn leave-taking. For those who will return here next Harvest, it is a temporary parting, accompanied, I hope, by new resolves and higher endeavors. I would like you all seriously to consider…”

Maewen let the strong voice fade to a drone in her ears. I don't believe it! she thought. Headmasters must have made this speech ever since schools were invented!

Something scuffled behind. She and Mitt both jumped round. But it was only Moril, tiptoeing toward them. He looked white and worried. Mitt, at the sight of him, self-consciously rubbed at his chest again. “What's up?”

“The cup!” Moril whispered back. “I went to get it and it wasn't there!”

“Never fear,” Navis murmured. “The sacrilege has been committed already.”

“Is that why you all look so worried? Why don't we just go, then?” Moril said.

People on the steps turned round and said, “Hush!” Navis put a finger to his lips. Maewen pulled herself together enough to take hold of Moril's arm and tow him back round the corner.

“We have to leave with everyone else or they'll know exactly who's got it,” she whispered.

Moril was no fool. She saw him realize this as she was telling him. “Sorry,” he said. “But I told Mitt
I'd
get it. He—”

“It wasn't Mitt. It was Navis.”

This obviously astonished Moril. Well, it astonished Maewen, too, now she came to think of it. Navis was an adult and a sensible person. If he thought it was necessary to take the cup, this somehow made the whole matter more serious.

When they came back round the corner, the headmaster was saying, “We will now sing our customary prayer to the One, who is the special guardian of our school. What comes after that is something my staff and I know nothing about.”

For some reason almost everyone laughed. Then the gray rows of pupils broke into song. It was a solemn and simple invocation to the One and like nothing Maewen had heard before. Mitt was as startled as she was. The song was beautiful. The strange old tune swelled and mounted, warm and chilling at the same time, and full of reverence. While it lasted, something seemed to fill the vast courtyard that was not of this world. Maewen's back prickled. Navis has done an awful thing! she thought. But Navis never turned a hair.

Moril listened critically. “I never care for those old tunes,” he said. “What's going—Oh, I remember.”

The headmaster and the other teachers had vanished from the front of the building as if the ground had swallowed them up, and the ranks of gray-uniformed pupils were suddenly seething. Nearly every one of them was pulling over his or her head a colored hood of some kind, and most were putting on clumsy gloves, too. Quite a number of the hoods were gray, or gray with a blue or orange tuft on top. As soon as Maewen saw them, she understood how her attacker had managed to be so thoroughly disguised. He must have raided a cloakroom. The hoods covered faces except for the eyes. Sober pupils had now become blob-faced monsters, with formless gray, green, or red heads. The sight upset her.

There was confused shouting, muffled and strange, from under the hoods. It sounded like “Bad on” and “Herry's gone.”

After a second Kialan came sauntering down the steps at one side, trying, from the look of him, not to look as silly and sheepish as he felt, and stopped slightly to one side of the milling monsters.

“They always ask the most important visitor to start it,” Moril explained.

“Eye, eye, eye,” came the muffled shouts. “Owe it eye.”

Kialan nodded. Someone on the steps tossed him a great brown ragged ball. Kialan took it in one hand, bent over sideways with it, and heaved it high into the sky. He probably intended it to come down somewhere in the middle of the crowd, but either the thing was weighted oddly or Kialan miscalculated his throw. The ball came down again almost where he was standing. Kialan saw it come and simply ran for his life.

“Nor don't I blame him!” Mitt said.

The whole crowd of monsters closed on the spot, fighting like maniacs. Many fought with fists and feet. But weapons appeared, too, which must have been hidden under the sober uniforms. There were clubs, whips, and sticks, and at least one person was wielding a short plank. It looked as if someone would be maimed or trampled to death any second.

After a stunned minute Navis said, “This, I take it, is grittling?”

“That's right,” said Moril.

“How comforting to know,” Navis said, “that the South is, after all, a comparatively peaceful place. And here was I thinking that all the bloodshed happened south of the passes.”

“Yes, but what are the
rules
?” Mitt wanted to know.

The rest of the spectators were shouting, “Up the reds!” and “Yellow, yellow, yellow!” as if they knew what was going on. Moril was not very sure, but he thought each of the colors was a team, and the aim was for one team to get the ball into its own special place round the edge of the big court. There were lots of places. There seemed to be at least seven teams. The fight rushed this way and that.

“I hope they don't make a mistake and score with someone's severed head instead of the ball,” Navis murmured. “How long does it usually take, and how many deaths result?”

“I don't know,” Moril confessed. “Brid doesn't do it.”

It seemed to take hours. Hours of yelling, battling, and thwacking, of giant surges and furious counterattacks. Long before it was over, Maewen was hiding her eyes. The sight of all this fighting, after someone had twice tried to kill her, was just too much. She wanted to leave. But as she had sensibly told Moril, they dared not leave.

Moril was not happy either. “It reminds me of Flennpass,” he said.

Mitt, on the other hand, had discovered that it was easy to pick Biffa out in the fray, and he was yelling with the rest. “Come
on
, Biffa! Hit him! Ammet, that girl's strong. Go to it, Biffa! Go it!”

And eventually the ball went into someone's goal area in a tumble of gray bodies and a great deal of shouting.

Shortly after that Hildy and Biffa joined them on the steps. They were both dangling blue hoods and were very flushed. The hoods were padded all over, particularly across the nose, and they must have been boiling hot in them.

“Well?” said Navis. “Did you win?”

Hildy's chin lifted haughtily. “
Of
course. You must have seen.”

“I saw murder, mayhem, and confusion,” Navis retorted. “Are either of you seriously maimed?”

“Of course not—not with Biffa as our surnam,” Hildy said.

“It was great!” said Mitt. “Don't mind him. Hildy, Ynen sends you his love.”

Hildy glanced at Mitt as if it were very tiresome to have to answer. “Thanks,” she said, and turned back to her father. The look settled on Mitt's face again. It was not so much hurt as mortally wounded, Maewen thought. She wished someone
had
maimed Hildy.

“Father,” Hildy said, “I've come to a decision. I intend to be a really good law-woman and—”

“An excellent intention,” said Navis. “Is this recent? Did it come upon you during the grittling?”

Hildy stamped her foot. Maewen hardly blamed her. Navis could be maddening. “Oh, I wish you wouldn't be so—so
unserious
all the time! You always try to stop me doing things by making me look silly!”

“Let us get this clear, Hildy,” Navis said, almost angrily. “I have never, ever wanted to prevent you being a lawyer. I am not trying to stop you now.”

“Yes, you
are
!” Hildy cried out. “If what you told me goes wrong, then we'd be on the run and I'd
never
get back here. I'd have to sacrifice what
I
want to politics, just like I have done all my life! I'm not going to. I refuse to come with you. I'm staying
here
!” She spun round and marched away down the steps, angrily swinging her blue hood.

Navis watched until she was lost in the surging, mingling crowd. His eyes were narrowed. He looked vicious and wretched.

“Excuse me, sir,” Biffa said, looming shyly over him.

Navis jumped and looked up at her. “Didn't anything I said get through to her?” he asked Biffa.

“Not really,” Biffa admitted. “But it got through to me. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. I know she ought to be away from here, somewhere where no earls will think to look, and I thought—Anyway, if I asked her to come home to our mill with me for the summer, I
know
she'd come, and no one would expect that, because we're poor. But—but the trouble is I only have the hire for one horse.”

Navis's face relaxed. “May the One bless you, my child!” he said. “That would solve the summer. But I was talking about an autumn campaign, if you remember. Can you think of a way to stop her coming back here?”

Biffa shyly twisted her hood. “That's the other thing I wanted to tell you, sir. We get the autumn storms real terribly in from the Marshes, over in Ansdale. Sometimes you can't get down to the valleys until weeks after Harvest. I was over a month late getting here last autumn. That's how I came to know Hildy. We were both latecomers, as well as on scholarships. But Hildy came a month after me, and she won't know.”

“Aha!” said Navis. “This is deep cunning, my dear!” Biffa went very pink and shot a flustered smile at Mitt, then at Maewen and Moril. “Well, if you think you can keep my thankless daughter safe,” Navis went on, briskly undoing his money belt, “here is the hire of a horse for her and money for her keep. Is this enough?”

Biffa looked at the pile of gold coins he pushed into her hand, and her eyes went large. “It would do me a year, sir—or two, if I went steady. I'll give it Hildy now, not to be tempted. That's the third thing I wanted to tell you: We ought to go
now,
in among everyone else, so that when those Hannart people look round for Hildy, she's gone. Wouldn't you say so, sir?”

“Absolutely right,” said Navis. “Biffa, you are an extremely intelligent young woman.”

Biffa went an even brighter pink. “Yes, I know,” she said. “But me being so big, people never think of me as clever. I trade on it quite a lot.” Everyone laughed. It was too much for Biffa. She turned and ran.

“Quite a character,” Navis said.

“Do you
trust
her?” Mitt said.

“I think it's all right,” Moril said. “She sort of worships Hildy—you know the way girls do.”

“But all that money!” Mitt muttered as they joined the shuffling mass of people trying to get through the garden and out of the school gate. “I wouldn't trust
myself
with that lot. And she said she traded on her size.”

It was a nerve-racking time. They shuffled and stopped and shuffled again, and the garden lawn got trampled under many feet. They were too far from the gate to tell if the cup had been missed, or if the many holdups were because Hannart hearthmen were waiting at the gate for Hildy or Maewen. And that gate was the only way out.

“I think it's merely the confusion of so many departures,” Navis said. He was completely cool. He seemed to be one of those people who just got cooler the more danger there was.

As they shuffled nearer the gate, it began to look as if Navis was right. The opening was crammed with parents and pupils and younger brothers and sisters, all with luggage and lunch baskets. Pupils kept forgetting things and shoving back into the school to find them. Many families had hired porters to carry the pupils' trunks, so the way was constantly being blocked by men with handcarts, shouting, “Porter for Serieth Gunsson!” as they came in and, “Por-ter! Mind your backs!” as they shoved their way out again.

After a while Moril said quietly, “Biffa and Hildy are in the crowd behind us.”

Maewen wished she was taller. It took her five minutes of twisting and standing on tiptoe to see the two girls. Both carried bulging bags. Very sensibly they had mixed themselves up with a family of tall men who were fetching home a boy pupil even taller than Biffa and were talking busily with them as if they belonged.