The Crown of Dalemark (30 page)

Mitt came out of his thoughts to find he was warm—more than warm, almost too hot, for a wonder. He undid his jacket. There was light, white rain steaming over them, but he was too warm to care. This makes a change! he thought. It must be almost record heat for the North.

They had come out of the stretched valley and were now following the green path across a high gorse-grown heath. The mountains had melted to white-purple distance, and the one behind, Mitt saw, peering through the misty bands of rain, did indeed have snow on the top of it.

“Where is this? Why is it so hot?” he said. It was the first thing he had said since breakfast.

Moril grinned at him. “Welcome back. It's the Shield of Oreth.”

“It is a large upland that opens toward the South,” Hestefan explained from beside Moril on the driving seat. Schoolmaster again, Maewen thought. The warmth was making her feel better. “We'll be having the warm air from now until Kernsburgh. This used to be fine land. Even in the Adon's day it was full of people.”

Hang on! Maewen thought, coming properly out of her misery. If this was the Shield, she had looked out the train at it. There had been farmlands and factories, trees and towns. But Hestefan could be right. Up among the gorse and heather on either side there were piles of stone in faint, broken squares, which could have been ruined houses.

“Where did all the people go?” she asked.

“Fled in the wars after the Adon died,” said Moril.

“Who owns it now?” Navis asked, looking out over bracken and heather beyond the gorse bushes as if he would not mind owning some of it himself.

As Hestefan went into a complicated account that suggested that Hannart or Dropwater might have a claim, but nobody wanted this land, anyway, Maewen frowned. She rather thought Navis would be owning some of it before long. The Duke of Kernsburgh owned the big brewery here in her day. Would she dare change history to the extent of cutting Navis out of it?
Could
she? No, of course not. That was a relief. But that did not apply to Mitt or Moril, who were not really in history at all.

She looked sideways at Mitt. He was turning his head to watch a slightly bigger pile of stones with an old apple tree drooped over them. I could farm here, he thought. It would take a deal of hard work, but I reckon it would be peaceful.

The rain blew away into the mountains, leaving a tearful sort of blue sky overhead. Everyone steamed in the heat. And the cart went along in its own cloud made of wreathing spirals of steam. Flies came out of the heather and circled the horses. They made the Countess-horse restive, but Mitt rode along with his chin down, hardly noticing. That dream was nagging at him. Farming had not been in it anywhere. Something was wrong.

By this time they were seeing occasional small farms built of gray stone, with square fields around them scratched out of the heather. The Shield was not quite as derelict as Maewen had thought. The farms grew bigger and more frequent as they went on. By midday, when they stopped to eat, there was farmland all round, and walled lanes leading to distant farmhouses on both sides of the green road. There were even a few trees. They stopped to eat under a mighty old ash on a corner by a lane.

Navis reveled in the heat. While the horses crowded into the shade with Maewen and Hestefan, Navis sat against the drystone wall in the sun and stretched both arms out. “This is more like it!” he said to Mitt.

“It is and all,” Mitt agreed. “First time I've been warm since I came North. I'll be back in a moment.” He picked up a couple of pickled onions—better than those cherries—and a handful of the manky cheese and set off up the lane. That dream was now mixing in his mind with what he had heard this morning, and he wanted to be alone to think. Something was badly wrong.

He almost wondered whether he might not simply walk away. He came to another lane and turned into it because it was narrow and had no walls and he felt freer there. He climbed higher with it, until he was walking in the warm wind between low hedges with a field of grain on either side. Gray-green both fields were, like the sea over sand in dangerous shallows. The barley on the right surged in the wind, in green waves over silky white, as if it were the sea indeed. The wheat on the other side stood stiffer, and the wind rasped in it like sea over shingle. But the land smell was wrong for the sea, dusty and juicy.

Great homesickness overtook Mitt. “Flaming Ammet!” he said. “Why did I ever leave the coast?”

“You know you had no choice,” someone told him.

16

Mitt's head snapped up. A tall golden man came walking along the lane toward him and bent his head in a solemn nod of greeting as Mitt looked. At this season Old Ammet had a face that was neither young nor old. He could have been the same age as Navis, except that the long golden hair blowing about his head and shoulders made him seem young.

“Now it's you,” Mitt said. “Why do you Undying keep pushing me about?”

“It's not our fault, Alhammitt,” Old Ammet answered. “The times are pushing
us
. And I should remind you that when you chose the wind's road, you chose the green road, too.”

“I know, I know,” Mitt said. “Once I got on, there's never been a moment I could have got off. But I keep having to choose all the same! And every time I choose and try to get right, things turn round on me and try to make me go the other way. The One told Noreth to kill me this morning—and Navis and Moril. You tell me what I'm supposed to do about that!”

Old Ammet looked at him gravely, in a way that reminded Mitt of Wend all of a sudden, except that Old Ammet was blowing and rustling in the wind. “I am not here to tell you what to do.”

“No,” Mitt said bitterly. “You Undying never do give a straight answer. You just push.”

“It is not my place,” said Ammet, “to question our Grand Father, whom they call the One. His law is that we do not tell his mortal family what to do. That is to make people into puppets.”

“Then the One just broke his own law,” Mitt said.

“I am here to tell you to think about that,” said Ammet.

There was a silence full of the warm wind and the rustling and streaming of Ammet's white-blond hair, while Mitt digested this. “I don't get it,” he said at last. He found Old Ammet looking so kind that it made him feel terrible.

“I should remind you that we gave you our names to say at need,” Old Ammet said.

Mitt nodded. He felt his face screw up. There were indeed four names, the greater and lesser names of Old Ammet and Libby Beer, tucked away in the corner of Mitt's mind. That part of his head always felt like a sore tooth, where you kept putting your tongue even though you knew it would hurt. “You mean, I could say your biggest name at her?”

Ammet laughed. It felt as if the wind had turned to a warm gale. “That name is not to be used that lightly. It will be many a long year before you will need to say my Great Name. But you have three other names. I am here to tell you that if you use those names properly, the Shield of Oreth can be covered again with fields like these.”

His hand spread to show Mitt the surging barley and the stiff rustling wheat. Mitt looked wistfully, thinking of that farm he might have. “You'd like that, wouldn't you?” he said.

“We would, Alhammitt,” Old Ammet agreed. He smiled at Mitt, rather sadly, over his shoulder among his flying hair, as he walked away round a turn in the lane.

Mitt stood looking a moment. The lane ran straight as a ruler through the two fields. Then he sighed and turned to go back.

Moril was standing a few yards down the hill. The two of them simply stared at one another for a moment. Then Moril licked his lips and cleared his throat. Still, his voice came out scratchy with awe. “Wh-who was that?”

“Old Ammet,” said Mitt. “The Earth Shaker.” His voice was not in much better shape. “What are you doing here?”

“You forgot to take any bread,” Moril said.

“It was like a flaming gray rock this morning,” Mitt said. “There'll be critters in it by now.”

“Well, anyway, I brought—” Moril started to hold out the bundle in his hands. And stopped and stared at it. Then he unwrapped the cloth and held out a crusty new loaf. Mitt could smell the newness of it on the wind. He looked ruefully down at the cheese and onions he had not yet bothered to eat. The onions were the same but the cheese was now a fresh pale wedge. It smelled as wonderful as the bread.

He held it out to Moril. “Want some?”

Moril nodded. He arranged the cwidder on his back and sat down by the hedge. As Mitt sat down beside him, it occurred to him that this cwidder was as much of a sore place to Moril as those names were to him—and more of a nuisance, too. Moril had barely let go of the thing since Hestefan had threatened to take it away.

They tore the crusty fresh loaf in two, broke the cheese in half, and ate like wolves. “All the same,” Mitt said, going back to what Moril had first said, “it's not like you to run after me with bread.”

“I wasn't spying,” Moril said, with as much dignity as someone who is crunching a pickled onion can. “I only
saw
him. I didn't hear a word he was saying. And he must have known I was there, because of the bread.”

“So?” said Mitt.

“Something's wrong,” said Moril. “This morning I was on top of the rocks, trying to get warm. I heard that voice telling her to kill us.”

Mitt felt his appetite go. “And?”

Moril swallowed the pickled onion as if it was a lump in his throat. “I heard it before. I heard it tell her to find the Adon's gifts. It seemed all right then.”

Mitt went on eating although his appetite had gone. If you had once been poor in Holand, you never wasted a chance to eat. “So what do you think?”

Moril was eating in the same dutiful way. Singers met hard times, too. “I think,” he said, “that it isn't the One that speaks to her.”

Mitt knew this was why Old Ammet had looked kind. It was something he did not want to think about. “Who is it then?”

“Kankredin,” said Moril.

So it was out. Mitt nodded. “I think you're right. You know what this means, then?”

“He started talking to her when she was young and worked her up to this gradually,” Moril said, thinking about it. “He's disembodied, so he could pretend to be the One.”

“Probably, but I don't mean that,” Mitt said. “Just stop and think what it means if she got to be Queen.
She
may be all right, but she'd go every where with this voice telling her to do what Kankredin wants. And she'd do it, too. She does.”