Cart and Cwidder (UK)

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “How?” said Lenina.

  “Is there a spare board in the cart?” Kialan asked.

  “Find him one, Moril,” said Lenina.

  Moril managed to work free one of the spare boards Clennen always carried under the floor of the cart, and on Kialan’s instructions, he sawed off a piece about three feet long. Then he relieved Kialan at the digging for a while. Kialan took out his sheath knife and carved away at the board, quickly and competently, as if this were another thing he was good at. When he had finished, the board had letters deeply and neatly cut into it. CLENNEN THE SINGER.

  “That do?” said Kialan.

  “Very well,” said Lenina.

  When the grave was ready, Kialan, Dagner and Brid put Clennen into it. Moril did not like to see his father topple into the hole. Nor did he like to see the earth going in on top of Clennen’s face and clothes. Rather than watch, he fetched his own cwidder and stood back a little, playing another lament, a newer one that had been made for an earl of Dropwater killed in battle. He went on playing while Brid put the turf back in place and Kialan trenched his board in until it was standing upright at the head of the grave, as it should. And now that there was nothing but a grave to be seen, Moril began to feel that something was missing. They should all be feeling and doing something else. They should be angry. Clennen had been murdered. They should be trying to bring the murderers to justice. But none of them thought of it. It was out of the question, here in the South. The six men had been far too well dressed.

  “There,” said Kialan, wiping his hands on his coat.

  “Thank you,” said Lenina. “Now I must change. This dress has blood on it. And you too, Brid. Kialan, I think it would be a good idea if you changed your coat for Dagner’s old one.”

  Kialan agreed to this, although Moril did not think Kialan’s good coat was more than a little earthy. When everyone was changed and cleaned, Lenina told Dagner to catch Olob and harness him to the cart. Kialan picked up his bundle of rabbits.

  “Leave those,” said Lenina. “We don’t need them.”

  “Well, I don’t fancy them at the moment, either,” said Kialan. “But—”

  “Leave them,” said Lenina. Kialan did as he was bid. Now Lenina seemed to be definitely in charge. It was she who took the reins when Olob was ready and drove out of the valley.

  Brid and Moril looked back. It was a very beautiful valley. Probably, Moril thought, it was a good place to be buried, if one had to be. Brid cried. Dagner did not look back. He had sunk into a silence as profound as any of Lenina’s. He did not look at anything, and no one liked to speak to him.

  Lenina drove northwards for a mile or so, until she came to a road that turned off to the left. Then, to Moril’s surprise, she swung the cart into it.

  “Hey! Where are we going?” said Moril.

  “Markind,” said Lenina.

  “What? Not to Ganner!” demanded Brid, halting in the middle of a sob.

  “Yes. To Ganner,” said Lenina. “He said he would have me and mine if ever I was free, and I know he meant it.”

  “Oh, but no! You can’t!” said Moril. “Not just like that!”

  “Why not?” Lenina asked. “How do you think we shall live, without a singer to earn us money?”

  “We can manage,” said Moril. “I can sing. Dagner can – Dagner …” His voice tailed away as he thought of Dagner and himself trying to perform as Clennen did. He just could not see Dagner doing it. He did not know what to say, so he stopped, fearing he might be hurting Dagner’s feelings. But it looked as if Dagner was not listening. “Father wouldn’t like us to go to Markind,” Moril asserted. He was sure of that, at least.

  “I can’t see that your father has much say in the matter now,” Lenina answered drily. “Get this clear, Moril. I know well enough that your father was a good man, and the best singer in Dalemark, and I’ve done my duty by him for seventeen years. That’s half my lifetime, Moril. I’ve gone barefoot and learnt to cook and make music. I’ve lived in a cart in all weathers, and never complained. I’ve mended and cleaned and looked after you all. There were things your father did that I didn’t agree with at all, but I never argued with him or crossed him. I did my duty exactly in every way, and I’ve nothing to reproach myself with. But Clennen’s dead now, so I’m free to do as I choose. What I’m choosing is my birthright and yours too. Do you understand?”

  “I suppose so,” Moril mumbled. He had never heard Lenina say anything like this before. He was frightened and rather shocked to see that she must have been not saying it for longer than he had lived. He thought it was wrong of her, but he could not have said why. He thought she was altogether wrong, but he could not find any words to set against her. All he could do was to exchange a scared, helpless look with Brid. Brid said nothing either.

  It was Kialan who spoke. He sounded rather embarrassed. “It’s not my place to object,” he said. “But I do have to get to Hannart, Lenina.”

  “I know,” said Lenina. “I’ve thought of that. You can pose as my son for the moment, and I’ll find someone to take you North as soon as I can, I promise. Hestefan’s in the South, I know, and Fredlan may be too.”

  Kialan looked exasperated as well as embarrassed. “But Ganner must know how many children you’ve got!”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Lenina said calmly. “People who haven’t got children themselves never bother to count other people’s. If he wonders, I’ll say you’ve been ill and we’d left you at Fledden.”

  Kialan sighed. “Oh well. Thanks, anyway.”

  “Remember that,” Lenina said to Moril, Brid and Dagner, and Moril felt very queer, because “Remember that” was such a favourite saying of Clennen’s. “Kialan’s your brother. If anyone asks, he’s been ill in Fledden.”

  Olob plodded towards Markind. He did not look happy either, Moril thought, looking at the droop of Olob’s head. Moril was so miserable himself that he could almost hear it, like a droning in his ears, and he could not hide away in vagueness, much as he tried. He felt vividly and horribly attentive to everything, from the leaves in the hedge to the shape of Kialan’s nose. Kialan’s eagle nose was so different from Dagner’s, Brid’s, or Moril’s that surely anyone could tell at a glance he was no relation? Why did he have to be a relation, anyway? And had Clennen known he wanted to go to Hannart? Clennen would not have gone there because he never went to Hannart. And why had the six men killed Clennen? Who were they, and what were they looking for in the wood? And why, why, why above all, had Clennen given Moril a cwidder he did not want in the least?

  I shall never play it, Moril thought. I’ll polish it and string it, and maybe tune it from time to time, but I don’t want to play it. I know I should be grateful, because it must be very valuable – though it can’t be old enough to have belonged to Osfameron; he’s long ago in a story – but I don’t like it and I don’t want it.

  Markind came into view at the other end of a valley. Without meaning to, Moril looked at it as he always looked at a new town. Sleepy and respectable, he thought. Bad takings. Then he remembered he was supposed to be going here to live, not to sing, and tried very hard to look at the pile of yellowish-grey houses with interest. He found he was more interested in the villainously freckled cows which were grazing in the small green meadows outside the town.

  Lenina looked at these cows with pleasure. “I remember I always liked those speckles,” she said. She encouraged Olob to trot, and the grey and yellow houses approached swiftly. Moril’s heart sank rather – and he had thought it was low enough before.

  Soon they were winding up a gravelly street between quiet old houses. The houses were tall and cold and shuttered. There were very few people about. Even when they came to the main square and found a market going on under the high plane trees, there were still very few people, and these all sober citizens who looked at the gay cart with strong disapproval. Lenina drove past the stalls looking neither to right nor to left, and drew Olob up in front of a round-topped gatewa
y in a massive yellow wall. Two men who seemed to be on guard at the gate peered round it at the cart in evident astonishment.

  “Had you business here?” one of them asked Lenina.

  “Certainly,” Lenina answered haughtily. “Go and tell Ganner Sagersson that Lenina Thornsdaughter is here.”

  They looked at her in even more astonishment at that. But one of them went off into the spaces behind the thick yellow wall. The other stayed, frowning wonderingly at Lenina, the cart and her family, until Moril scarcely knew where to look.

  “What’s the betting we get a message back to say, Not Today, Thank You?” whispered Brid.

  “Be quiet, Brid!” said Lenina. “Behave properly, can’t you!”

  Brid would have lost her bet. The man who had gone with the message came back at a run, and they could hear a number of people behind the gate, running too. The two halves of the gate were flung wide open.

  “Please drive in,” said the man.

  Lenina smiled graciously and shook the reins. Olob plodded forwards, disapproval in every line of his ears and back, into a small deep courtyard lined with interested faces. Ganner was standing in the middle of it, smiling delightedly.

  “Welcome back, Lenina!” he said. “I never thought I’d see you so soon. What happened?”

  “Some men killed Clennen this morning,” said Lenina. “They looked like the pick of somebody’s hearthmen to me.”

  “Not really!” exclaimed Ganner. Then he looked a little worried and asked, “Does that mean it happened in my lordship then?”

  “Yes,” said Lenina. “At Medmere.”

  “I’d better send some hearthmen over to investigate,” said Ganner. “Anyway, come down and come in. Are these your children?”

  “My three sons and my daughter,” said Lenina.

  “What a lot of them!” said Ganner, looking a little daunted. But he smiled gallantly at all four. “I’ll do my best to look after you all,” he said. Moril could not find it in his heart to dislike Ganner, much as he had intended to. It was so plain he meant well. If, to someone who had been used to Clennen, he seemed a very ordinary person, then that was hardly Ganner’s fault, Moril supposed.

  “He doesn’t look much like a goose,” Brid whispered, in some disappointment. Kialan had to bite his lip. Moril looked at Ganner gallantly helping Lenina down from the cart and smiling at her in a way that showed he adored her. Apart from that smile, he really seemed perfectly normal and ungooselike.

  “Oh dear, oh dear!” Ganner exclaimed, as they all got down. “Shoes! Boots! Can you only afford one pair of boots?”

  Lenina glanced along their line of bare feet, interrupted by Kialan’s scuffed boots. “We don’t usually bother with them,” she explained. “But Collen has tender feet.”

  “I must make sure you all have shoes this instant!” Ganner exclaimed distractedly.

  “You know, I think he may be a goose after all,” Brid said, with considerable satisfaction.

  BY THAT AFTERNOON Moril was wondering if it was only that morning they had left Clennen buried by the lake. It felt like last century. There had been so many changes. After a good breakfast, followed by the attentions of a tailor, a bootmaker and Ganner’s old nurse, followed in turn by an astonishingly good lunch, Moril scarcely knew himself. He looked in a mirror – it was a thing he seldom had the chance of doing, so he looked long and often – and he saw a smoothly combed red-haired boy in a suit of good blue cloth and a pair of soft rust-coloured boots. The boots, to tell the truth, pleased him enormously. But he did not look in the least like his idea of himself. Dagner and Kialan had become spruce, gentlemanly figures in the same kind of blue clothes, and Brid a young lady in bright cherry colour. They were all four behaving very soberly and politely, not because Ganner insisted on it – because he did not – but simply because Markind was the sort of place where you could behave in no other way.

  The biggest change was to Lenina. She was splendidly dressed too, and she had done her hair the way ladies did. Her cheeks were pinker than usual, and she laughed and chattered and hurried about with Ganner on a hundred errands. Moril had not often seen her laugh, and he had certainly never seen her so talkative. She was like a different person. That troubled him. It troubled him far more than learning she was going to marry Ganner that same evening.

  Moril quite liked Ganner. Ganner told Moril he could do just what he liked and go anywhere he wanted, and obviously meant it. He was a very good-natured man. Moril quite liked the other people in the house too. He liked Ganner’s old nurse specially. She fussed rather, and she said rather too often that she had always known Lenina Thornsdaughter would come back to them, but she called Moril “My duck” and said he was a “blessing”. And while she was dressing him, she told Moril a story about a lord of Markind who had been outlawed. Moril had not heard the story before, and he drank it up. But he felt strange. Everything felt strange.

  Moril took Ganner at his word and explored the house. He found two gardens and the kitchens. He looked at the cellars and the small rooms under the roof, but in between each exploration he found himself drifting into the stableyard. The cart had been put away in a coach house there, just as it was, wine jar, cwidders and all, down to the string of onions under the driving seat. It was just the same, yet somehow it already looked smaller and dustier and a little faded. Moril spent a lot of time talking to Olob, who was standing dejectedly in a stall nearby and seemed glad of his company. Moril stole sugar for him from the kitchen, which was easy to do because everyone there was in a great bustle, preparing for the wedding feast. Olob ate it politely, but he looked sad, and he was sweating rather.

  “Poor fellow,” Moril said sadly. “I’m hot too. It’s being in a house.”

  As the afternoon drew on, Moril became hotter still. Being between walls so oppressed him that he wondered whether to go out and walk in the town. But Markind had not inspired him with any wish to see more of it. He wandered to the stableyard and then into one of the gardens. Brid was there. She was feeling much the same, for she had taken off her cherry-coloured boots and was sitting with her feet in one of the goldfish ponds.

  They exchanged sad, polite smiles, and Moril went on into the second garden. Behind him he heard Ganner’s voice.

  “My dear little girl! You’ll catch your death like that! Do please dry your feet and put your boots on. You’ll worry your mother.”

  Moril felt sorry for Brid. Then he suddenly felt even more – desperately – sorry for himself. He needed to be somewhere else, out in the open. He looked round wildly, upwards, everywhere. And a sturdy creeper growing up the thick yellow wall of the house gave him an idea. He slung himself on to it and started to climb.

  It was extremely easy, except for the last bit, which needed a long stride and a heave across some crumbly stonework. Then he was on the wide, leaded roofs. It was splendid. Moril looked round, into the town, out across the valley, and over to valleys beyond. He turned north and looked at the misty blue peaks there, where he had so longed to go, and Kialan – lucky Kialan! – was going soon. But that made him sad. So, presently, Moril began to patter about across the leads and among the chimneys. He skirted courtyards and looked down into the gardens. Then he ran along a narrow part to another wing and looked down into another court.

  And there was Ganner, horrified and gesturing below. “Come down! Come down at once!”

  Moril looked. There was a lead pipe and an easy flight of windows. Obediently he swung his legs over the edge of the roof.

  Ganner stopped him with a hoarse shriek. “No! Stop! Do you want to break your neck? Wait!” He ran away and presently ran back with a crowd of men carrying a ladder. With them ran a group of horrified maids and the old nurse, wringing her hands.

  “My duck! Oh, my duck!”

  Moril sat sadly on the edge of the roof, swinging his legs and watching them all pothering with the ladder. He knew what was wrong with Ganner now. He was a fusspot.

  The ladder finally thumped
against the wall beside him. “You can come down now,” Ganner called. “Go very carefully.”

  Moril sighed and got on to the ladder. He came down rather slowly out of sheer perverseness. He decided when he got near enough he would say to Ganner, “But you told me I could go anywhere I wanted.” When he judged he was low enough for it to be most effective, he turned round to say it.

  A man was just coming in through the door to the courtyard – a fair man with light, untrustworthy eyes, who checked for a moment when he saw Moril twenty feet up a long ladder, staring at him. Shrugging slightly, the man strolled over to Ganner and said something to him. Ganner replied. The man shrugged again, said another word or so to Ganner, and strolled out of the courtyard.

  Moril forgot what he intended to say. Instead, as soon as he was down on the ground, he said, “Who was that man here just now? The fair one, who spoke to you.”

  Ganner looked uneasy, so uneasy that Moril’s chest went tight and he felt sick. “Oh – er – just someone who’s my guest here,” said Ganner. “Now you are absolutely not to get on the roof again! It’s extremely high, and the leads are quite unsafe. You might have been killed!”

  “Killed, my duck!” said his nurse.

  Moril bore with a long scold from both Ganner and the nurse, without listening to a word. Both of them would have scolded anyway, but Moril was fairly sure that Ganner was scolding mostly as an excuse not to discuss the fair man. Moril did not want to discuss him. His one desire was to get away and find Lenina.

  Lenina was in the great hall of the house. Presumably it was the same place where Clennen had sung and then played the trick on Ganner seventeen years before. Lenina was gaily organising the tables for the wedding feast, and doing it as if she had done nothing else all her life. Moril had to pull her sleeve to get her to attend to him.