Cart and Cwidder (UK)

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Olob tossed his head and set off. He did not exactly run, but he took the cart briskly across the trampled earth to the road by which they had entered the valley. Moril looked over his shoulder as they went under the trees. Tholian was lying beside their heap of provisions. Beyond him, Moril thought he could see a faint haze vibrating quietly over the whole valley. The cwidder’s power still held.

  “What about those soldiers by the trestle?” Kialan said, as Olob clattered down the steep road.

  “I don’t know,” Moril said anxiously. He had no idea how far the cwidder’s power spread, and the trestle had been behind him as he played. When they came to the main road, Moril held his breath and Kialan craned sideways to get a sight of the trestle.

  Those soldiers were asleep too. Most of them were sprawled in the road, pigeon breastplates upwards, snoring. One was asleep with his arms on the trestle, in a most uncomfortable position. Kialan gave a wild little laugh. “He’ll be stiff when he wakes up!”

  IT WAS A short, steep climb up the last of the hill. Then they came out on to the green spread of the last Upland. They could see Mark Wood in the distance, gay green and bronzed by the afternoon sun, and beyond it, looking deceptively near, the grey bulk of the Northern mountains.

  “Now you must run, Olob,” said Moril.

  Olob ran. It could not be called a gallop – Moril had never known Olob to gallop in his life – but he ran, and ran as fast as Moril had ever seen him go. Behind him the lightened cart wove from side to side and bounded in the ruts of the road. Kialan wedged his feet against the side of the cart and tried to hold Brid in one place, but they nevertheless pitched and rolled and bounced until it was a marvel Brid did not wake up. But Brid slept on, stirring once or twice when she hit the side of the cart, but never coming out of her deep sleep. Moril began to hope that it would last until they reached Mark Wood. Once they were there, they could hide the cart among the trees, with a good chance of escaping Tholian.

  “How did you work it?” Kialan called jerkily above the rilling of wheels and banging of hooves. “The sleep.”

  Moril could not explain, any more than Dagner could explain how he made songs. “By thinking,” he said. “You said a lot of things that helped me.”

  They jounced and battered another half mile. “I had a weird dream,” Kialan called, “while I was tied up. I dreamt – wow, what a bump! – I dreamt you took me along to your father’s grave, by the lake, and opened that board I carved, just as if it was a door. Then you said, ‘Do you mind getting in here for a while? I’ll call you when it’s safe to come out.’ And – I say, what happens if we lose a wheel? – and I went in and went to sleep. What do you think of that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Moril. “I might have done. There’s no one behind, is there?”

  There was no one, though they could hardly believe it. The wide Upland seemed empty. They rattled, wagging this way and that, through a village, and that seemed asleep too. Olob pounded on, blowing now, and Brid still slept. The sun sank, and Mark Wood was nearer. Twilight seemed to come from the trees and soak into the green landscape around them. Big clouds were building up beyond the mountains. The sunset shot them with fierce pink and lakes of moist yellow.

  “You know,” jerked Kialan, “when I thought – in the valley – that we weren’t going to get away this time, I wanted to apologise. I was pretty awful when I first came into the cart, wasn’t I?”

  “We were too,” Moril called over his shoulder. “We didn’t know what had been happening to you. Was it horrible in Holand?”

  There was a bouncing, battering pause. “Ghastly,” said Kialan. “But it wasn’t only that. I didn’t understand. I thought you were all – beggars or something, and I thought – oh, of fleas and ignorance and so on for the whole way North. And I was fed up.”

  Moril laughed. “You looked it.”

  They reached the verge of Mark Wood almost as the sun set. Olob had not run so far for years. Moril could see steam rising off him in the thickening twilight. His sides were heaving under the scarlet harness, and there were flecks of foam along him. The road went upwards into the trees, under a sloping cliff, and, though it was not a steep rise, Olob slowed down.

  “I’ll have to let him walk,” Moril said, acutely sorry for him. “He’s had enough.”

  So Olob fell to a weary plod, and everything suddenly seemed ten times more peaceful. They could hear birds cawing and calling in the great beech trees above.

  “Good gracious!” said Brid, sitting up. “Where are we? Why do I feel so bruised?”

  Moril knew it was bound to happen, but he wished it had been further into the wood and not just when Olob was tired out. They explained to Brid. She was rather indignant.

  “Using me as a kind of sleep measure! I like that!”

  “It was a jolly good idea,” said Kialan, “though I says it as shouldn’t.”

  But Brid had realised that Tholian was probably after them by now and changed to being as nervous as a cat. She turned her head back over her shoulder and implored Moril to get in among the trees quickly. Moril looked over his shoulder too. Between the tree trunks, he could see the darkening green of the Upland and a long stretch of the road. It was empty.

  “I will when we get to the top of this hill. Olob’s tired.”

  The dark gathered quickly under the trees, but it was still light enough to see. Brid squawked faintly. There were people among the trees on horses, coming slowly down the hill on the cliff side. But Olob gave no sign of alarm. Moril trusted Olob and kept on the road, in spite of Brid’s imploring whispers. All the same, it was rather frightening the way that the horsemen, as soon as they saw the cart, turned towards it and increased their pace. They came fairly thudding down on them.

  There were three of them. They drew up beside the cart, and Olob stopped walking. Kialan stood up and stared at the foremost rider, and the rider stared back.

  “You blinking idiot! What did you have to come South for?” Kialan said, and burst into tears.

  Somehow, though they would never have dreamt of addressing Clennen as a blinking idiot, Brid and Moril had no doubt that the rider was Keril. They watched Kialan jump awkwardly down, and the man dismount and hug him, and they were sure of it.

  “Konian – they hanged him!” Kialan said.

  “I know. We heard from a fisherman,” said Keril. “It was you I came for. I was hoping Clennen might know— Where is Clennen?” he asked.

  “He’s dead,” said Brid, and began to cry too.

  Moril sat on the driving seat and felt tears trickling down his face. As far as he knew, he was crying for the whole situation, because he was on his own now, and always would be.

  “There’s an army,” said Kialan. “Tholian’s gathered an army to attack the North. In a valley over there. They’re probably after us now.”

  Keril exchanged glances with the two other riders. “We’ve a small force in the wood. How big is this army?”

  “Pretty big,” Moril said, sniffing. “There were five hundred men, divided into three troops, and a hundred horsemen in the part of the valley we saw. But that was probably only a quarter of it.”

  “How do you know?” said Kialan. “Did you count?”

  “No. I just know,” said Moril. “And recruits came in four batches, while we were there, twenty-three in the first, and thirty-two in—”

  “Too many for us, in fact,” said Keril. “Thanks, lad. Let’s get back to our camp and get fortified.”

  The Northerners’ camp was along the cliff, chosen with an eye to defence. When tired Olob dragged the cart up to it, there was already a bustle of preparation. The campfires were being put out and the two provision wagons dragged across the only place where it could be reached from the wood. These preparations should have made Moril feel alarmed, but in fact, he felt safer and happier than he had been for days. He could see by the light of the few lanterns that the mere fifty or so men bustling about had, many of them, the same dark-fair colour
ing as Kialan. Moril remembered now that it was something you only saw in the North. Keril was the odd man out, because he was dark, though his nose was the same shape as Kialan’s.

  They were taken into a tent, where they had the best meal they had had since Markind. While they were eating, Moril gathered that the Earl had been camping here for two days. The night before, he had ridden South almost to Neathdale in hopes of meeting Clennen and hearing news of Kialan, and he had been meaning to do the same that night too. It was Henda’s message offering to ransom Kialan that had brought him South. Up till then, everyone in Hannart had supposed that Kialan had been hanged too.

  In a tired and muddled way, they told their part, as far as Dagner’s arrest. Keril, who had been sad rather than astonished at Clennen’s death and not at all surprised to hear of Lenina returning to Markind, broke in angrily when he heard of Dagner. They felt sure he was thinking of Konian too, when he said, “Fancy hanging a boy that age! I wish I could do something – er, Moril – is that your name?”

  “Not really,” said Kialan. “His name’s Osfameron. And Brid’s Manaliabrid.”

  Keril forgot his anger and threw back his head and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” said Brid. She was sensitive about their names.

  “Well, history repeating itself, I suppose,” said Keril. “Kialan’s the Adon, you see.”

  “No, he isn’t,” said Moril. “The Adon lived two hundred years ago. Kialan told me.”

  “But the heir of Hannart is always called the Adon,” Keril explained, and was sad, thinking of Konian.

  Moril and Kialan looked at one another by the light of the carefully shaded lantern. Moril was thoroughly put out. If Kialan was the Adon, then he had been living the life of his dearest imaginings for nearly a month without realising it. It had not seemed like that at all. Yet, thinking of the weird dream Kialan had told him of, he suspected that it might have been history repeating itself indeed. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he said.

  “I didn’t sort of think,” said Kialan. “I was just me, trying to get home.” He was thinking about his dream too. He nodded towards his father. “Tell him about the cwidder.”

  Moril told Keril how he put Tholian and his army to sleep. Keril marvelled a little, and he asked Kialan to confirm it, but he took it, on the whole, in the same matter-of-course way that Kialan did. “May I see the cwidder?” he said.

  Moril felt his way out of the tent to the cart and came back with the cwidder. Keril took it and held it under the light of the lantern. He ran his fingers down the inlay, over the strange patterns. “Yes, this is the one,” he said. “I used to think Clennen was boasting when he said it was Osfameron’s, but I wasn’t much of a hand at the old writing in those days.” His square, practical-looking finger pointed to a line of swirls and dots made of slivers of mother-of-pearl. “Here it says, I sing for Osfameron, and there –” his finger moved to another line of signs – “it says, I move in more than one world”. He smiled at Moril and handed the cwidder back. “Be careful of it.”

  Moril fell asleep that night hugging the cwidder, and as far removed as he could from Kialan’s knees and elbows. They were a little crowded because Keril had given up his own tent to Brid. Moril had meant to do some more thinking, but he was far too tired. He awoke at dawn, because somebody came to talk to Keril, very annoyed with himself. For he was sure that, by reading the strange writing, Keril had really told him how to use the cwidder as Osfameron had used it.

  There was no time for thinking for a while. The man had come to tell Keril that a troop of riders had gone by on the road during the night and that the same troop had just come galloping back, probably on their way to report to Tholian. Both times they had been going too fast to notice the camp.

  It was clear the riders had been looking for the cart. Tholian must have assumed that Moril, Brid and Kialan were driving North as fast as they could. Since the riders had not found them, Keril knew Tholian would think Kialan had already reached the North, and his news with him. “And if I were Tholian,” he said, “I’d be on the march now, before the North can be ready for war. We’d better hurry.”

  They broke camp and went. The cart went too, with a strange youthful horse between the shafts, for more speed. Olob looked so disconsolate that Brid said she would ride him. “He’ll let me,” she said, “if no one puts a saddle on him. I hate him to feel neglected.” So she rode Olob bareback with her boots on – for, after all, she was in company with an earl – and Olob did not seem to object. He was just rather slow. Brid had some difficulty keeping up with the cart, where Moril sat with his cwidder, thinking. The cart was being driven by a large slow-spoken Northerner called Egil, and Kialan had borrowed Egil’s horse.

  “You know,” Brid said to Moril, “I do wish Kialan hadn’t turned out to be the Adon. I feel embarrassed about liking him.”

  Moril was very busy thinking, but he chuckled at this. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “You’re hopeless!” said Brid, not as angry as she meant to be.

  Kialan’s turning out to be the Adon was important to Moril’s thoughts too. It was one of three things he kept trying to put together in his mind. The other two were what the writing said on the cwidder and his own discovery about the way you had to tell the truth with it. He thought it was odd how easily one got used to new ideas. What had seemed an entirely new thing yesterday was an old idea today, which he could use to take him on somewhere else. He went on trying to put ideas together while the band of Northerners hurried through Mark Wood.

  They were not taking the road because Keril dared not risk being seen. There were clearings and villages all along the road and probably enough people in them to hold the small number of Northerners up until Tholian came to wipe them out. So they worked their way North through the trees. It was easy enough for the riders, but heavy going for the cart and the wagons. And everybody was worried about the final stretch, where they would have to come out of the trees in order to get to Flennpass. Once they were in the pass, they would be safe. It was guarded by Fort Flenn, which was the southernmost fort of the North.

  Night came before they were out of the wood. Keril was anxious at their slow progress, but they had been travelling all day and they were tired. They had to risk camping for the night. After supper, round a carefully shaded campfire, they told Keril their doings in more detail. Kialan said things which confirmed Moril’s feeling that his time in Holand had been more horrible than they had realised. Keril became so angry and sad that Kialan changed the subject and talked about the wine jar.

  “I regret leaving Tholian all that gold,” he said. “He can have the rhubarb with pleasure, and the papers, but we should have taken the money out.”

  “Set your mind at rest,” said Brid. “I did. I put it in the money locker.”

  Everyone laughed. Brid wanted indignantly to know what they took her for, leaving a sum like that in a wine jar.

  “But I wish I knew whose it was, and where Father got it from,” she said.

  “I think,” said Keril, “that it was probably the remains of what I gave him for expenses. I gave him a hundred gold every year in Dropwater. No,” he said when Brid offered to give it back. “Keep it. You deserve it. You can use it as pocket money when you’re living in Hannart.”

  In this way they gathered that Keril intended them to live with him in Hannart.

  “That’s frightfully nice of you,” Brid said awkwardly. “Because I don’t know what else we’d do, do you, Moril?”

  “It’s the least I can do,” said Keril. “I owe Clennen a great deal. If it hadn’t been for him, we’d have had no news from the South worth having.” Then he told them things about Clennen they had not known before. Keril had met Clennen in the South in the days when he was still only the Adon, and they had both helped in the uprising there. But Keril’s father died, and he had to go North. Clennen stayed in the South, until soon after he met Lenina. Then, what with old Tholian’s fury and the failure of the
uprising, Clennen found the South too hot to hold him. He went to Hannart and became singer to the court. Dagner, Brid and Moril had all been born in Hannart. It had been Clennen’s idea to go South again when they heard reports of what was going on. The Porter had been his idea too. But Keril had thought of staging the quarrel so that no one would suspect Clennen was Hannart’s agent.

  Moril sat staring into the fire, dreaming of Hannart.

  “What is it, Moril?” Kialan said jokingly. “Dreams coming true?”

  Moril looked up and grinned. He did not say anything, but he went to sleep sure that Kialan had just told him the way the cwidder really worked.

  He thought it out as he rode in the cart next day. It came to him first as a memory. It had rained in Crady, so Clennen had told one of the stories of the Adon indoors, and Moril had looked up to see Kialan in the audience. He had been annoyed, because he thought of Kialan as part of dreary, everyday life, and he had felt as if he had a foot in two worlds which were spinning apart from one another. Yet Kialan was the Adon – or an Adon – all the time. And the cwidder itself said, “I move in more than one world.”

  It came on to rain just then, though not as heavily as it had rained in Crady. Moril smiled and lifted his face into the wet. They were nearly in the North, and it rained a lot there. His smile became rather rueful as he realised that in none of his dreams of Hannart or hazy imaginings of the cart on green roads had he ever thought of it raining. The cwidder had made a muzzy sound. And that was the point. That kind of dream was not true. There were true dreams, but they had to be part of life as well, just as life, to be good, had to embody dreams, or a good song had to have an idea to it. The Adon’s song Kialan had sung had been saying that. But Osfameron’s song had gone one further and talked of the other worlds the cwidder moved in.

  Moril thought of the way life and dreams had met for him, willy-nilly, on this journey. But he knew they met in him naturally too, when he could be miles away, thinking, and yet count all the soldiers in that valley, or every beech tree they were passing at the moment. He saw that Clennen had not got it quite right. He had been too practical to see. The important thing was that Moril was in two halves. Provided he knew what was true in both, he could use the cwidder as it should be used. He could send ideas through it, into reality.