Drowned Ammet (UK) Page 6

  Hobin was truly anxious for Mitt to learn, and to become what he called “a decent citizen”. Mitt had to wear better clothes – which were certainly warmer in winter, but which he despised on principle. He had to wash when they came up from work. Once a week he was forced to wash all over in front of the fire, in spite of his conviction that washing took the strength out of you. And every evening Hobin produced a book. It was called A Reader for the Poor, and it bored Mitt to tears. “If you won’t go to school, you must learn at home,” Hobin said, and he made Mitt read a page aloud every night after supper.

  Mitt’s only wonder was that he did not die of boredom in the first year. It seemed to him that he only came alive when he began to be able, at last, to take Dideo tiny packets of sulphur and saltpetre. Then it was even better than running errands for the Free Holanders. Mitt would lie to Hobin, as he told Milda, like a fishmonger’s scales, and slip off into the streets with his packet, knowing that if he was caught with it on him, there would be trouble indeed. It was a marvellous feeling of danger, and marvellous to know he was getting somewhere at last.

  He did not get on very fast, either as a gunsmith or a thief. Hobin was a patient man, but he sometimes grew irritated with Mitt. Mitt’s mind was wholly on filching powders. He did not intend to be a gunsmith, so he attended to Hobin as little as he attended to the plans Siriol insisted on making about a hiding place for him after his bomb was thrown. Meanwhile, Milda had a baby, and another the year after. Mitt was rather astonished to find himself with two sisters long before he had a bomb. They were rather a nuisance. They would cry, and they would cut teeth, and they would take up Milda’s time when Mitt needed her. But they would not believe they were nuisances. Whenever Milda dumped a sister in Mitt’s arms, the baby would start to laugh and gurgle, as if Mitt liked her.

  Mitt started to grow then. That astonished him too. He was used to being the smallest boy in the street. Now he was one of the bigger ones, with long, long, thin legs. The woman who had stolen the red and yellow cloth to make Mitt’s bomb-throwing clothes from had to steal more, and Milda put off making them until she was sure Mitt would not grow out of them.

  “All to the good,” Siriol remarked. “If you keep on this way, you’ll have changed so after a year’s hiding that even Harchad’s spies won’t know you.”

  The trouble was that Mitt needed a lot to eat, and Hobin became increasingly hard up. Hadd put the rents up again all over Holand. His guns had done very little good. Every other earl in South Dalemark had hastened to get guns too. Hadd was forced to bargain for peace, and bargains cost money. Hobin, Mitt was glad to see, grumbled just like everyone else. He led a petition from the Guild of Gunsmiths, asking to be allowed to raise the price of guns. Hadd refused.

  “Now don’t you think there’s some use to freedom fighting?” Mitt asked him.

  “It only makes things worse,” said Hobin.

  “No, see,” Mitt said persuasively, “you could set all the earls fighting one another, then have an uprising, and the North would come and help us. They’d have to!”

  “If the North did any such thing,” said Hobin, “you’d find the earls would stop fighting one another and start on the North. And you’d find yourself on their side, Mitt. You couldn’t help yourself. You’re born a Southerner. The North knows that better than you do. It’s history. It’ll take more than an uprising to make things better in Holand.”

  “The trouble with you is you’re so patient!” Mitt said.

  In spite of his patience, Hobin began to look a little worn by springtime. There were the babies and Mitt to feed. And Milda was still rushing out and “just happening to see” expensive things, though these days it was mostly furniture. Hobin began to talk seriously of moving back to Waywold.

  “We can’t do that!” Mitt told Milda in a panic.

  “I know. Not after I’ve trained you all these years,” said Milda. “But he’d stay if only Hadd was gone. Run and catch Siriol.” And she broke a whole bowl of eggs to give Mitt an excuse to go out.

  Mitt was lucky enough to catch Siriol just as he was boarding Flower of Holand. Siriol stood on the quayside and thought so long that Mitt wondered whether to suggest he would miss the tide. “Ah,” said Siriol. “Well. You better do it this autumn then.”

  “This autumn it is!” Mitt agreed, and the muscles at the back of his legs jumped with excitement. “And thank goodness! After three flaming years, I can’t wait much longer!”

  THERE WERE GREAT gales that spring. The sea broke the dykes in two places, and even in the harbour, boats blew this way and that and masts snapped. Siriol could not put to sea for a fortnight, and few people in Holand went out much because the wind in the street filled your face with sand and salt until you could barely see. Mitt was kept very busy. The old Earl of the South Dales died, and all the Earls of the South began to gather in Holand to invest the new Earl, as the custom was. People asked one another whether Hadd would manage to quarrel with them all or only half of them. Mitt thought Hadd must be determined to. Hobin was busy making and mending guns day and night. The Palace must have bristled with them. Mitt got little chance to look at any earls. He saw one windswept fine person, who looked as if he would very much rather have been indoors, but no one could tell Mitt if he was an earl or not.

  “Down with him, anyway!” Mitt muttered, and hurried back indoors.

  Then a strange boat was sighted, beyond the shoals, beating her way to the harbour. There was intense excitement. The boat was said to be a Northerner. Mitt could think of nothing else.

  “We’d best settle this for you before you ruin any more bullets,” Hobin said. He and Mitt put on pea jackets against the gale and went out to look, along with most of the rest of Holand.

  The ship was wallowing in the great waves outside the harbour wall, black in the yellow stormy light. Though all her canvas was in and she was riding only on the rags of a storm sail, Mitt saw at once that she was indeed a Northerner. She had the square rigging which few ships in the South used these days. People round Mitt shook their heads and said it was daft to go out in this gale with a little square-rigger like that, but then Northmen were all daft. And it was clear the ship was in bad trouble. For some minutes Mitt doubted that she would make the harbour at all. Then she rounded the wall, and it was clear she would be safe.

  The harbour was lined with soldiers to meet her. Behind them, a lot of ordinary people had come out with knives and stones. And Mitt watched with the most extraordinary mixed feelings. He was glad the ship was safe. But how dared they! How dared they put into Holand harbour like this! The ship wallowed her waterlogged way to the quayside. When some of the sailors on board saw the soldiers waiting, they dived into the harbour rather than be caught.

  “What cowards!” he said to Hobin.

  “They haven’t a chance, anyway,” said Hobin. “Poor devils.”

  The Northmen who stayed on board were taken prisoner as soon as soldiers could jump on to the ship. The crowd hid most of it from Mitt. But he had a glimpse of them being taken uphill to the Palace, a bunch of soaking, draggled fellows with fair hair and brown faces, who all had a thicker, healthier look than anyone in Holand, even though they were plainly almost too exhausted to realise what had happened to them. Mitt’s shaken thought was that they looked like people. He had expected them to look mysteriously free. But they held their heads low and shuffled along, just like anyone else taken by Harchad’s men.

  Their arrival caused quite as much excitement up at the Palace. Everyone had been in a ferment there, anyway, because of the investment of the new Earl. Feasts and fuss and arrangements had gone on for a week now. All the children were bundled out of the way and ordered to be seen and not heard – and not seen unless asked for. There was much excited peeping and giggling. To Hildy’s scorn, all the girl cousins decided that the new Earl of the South Dales was terribly handsome and spied on him whenever they could. They all wished they had been betrothed to him and not to whomever they were betr
othed to. Hildy herself thought Tholian looked rather unkind. She made the mistake of telling Harilla so.

  “All right, Lady Be Different!” said Harilla. “I’m not telling you my spyhole for that. Go and find your own.”

  Hildy did not mind. Ynen and she were better than any of them at finding places where they could see what was going on. They watched a great deal of the feasting and music, until it was obvious that the Lord of the Holy Islands was not going to arrive.

  “Why not?” Hildy wondered.

  “I don’t think he’s anyone’s hearthman,” said Ynen. “His job is to keep the North’s fleet out.”

  Then it was learnt that one Northern ship at least had slipped through. Half the earls were convinced that it was the first of an invasion. The messages, the orders and the bustling about made Hildy think of an ants’ nest stirred with a stick, and there were more still when the soaking prisoners were marched in. The prisoners were questioned. It came out that two of them were nobly born – and not only that, they were the sons of the Earl of Hannart himself. The excitement was feverish. The Earl of Hannart was a wanted man in the South. Ynen reported to Hildy that when he was a young man, the Earl of Hannart had come South and taken part in the great rebellion, just as if he were a common revolutionary.

  The fate of the Northmen was no longer in doubt. They were all put on trial for their lives.

  Now it is a fact that if you are brought up to expect something, you expect it. Hildy and Ynen were used to people being tried and hanged almost daily. It did not worry them particularly that the Northmen were going to be hanged. Most of the Palace people said they had asked for it by putting into Holand anyway. But Hildy and Ynen were very anxious to catch a glimpse of the Earl of Hannart’s sons while they were still alive to be seen. It was not easy to do. Hadd was afraid that some of the freedom fighters in Holand might attempt to set the Northerners free, and nobody was allowed near them who had no business to be. But on the last day of the trial Hildy and Ynen managed to stand in an archway near where the younger son was being kept prisoner.

  They saw soldiers come out. They saw their uncle Harchad in the midst of them, and with him the Earl’s son. When they came level with the archway, Hildy was astonished to see that the Earl’s son was quite young – no older than Harchad’s own son – just a big boy, really. And when they were beside the archway, Harchad suddenly turned and kicked the Earl’s son. Instead of glaring or swearing at Harchad, as Hildy herself or any of the cousins would have done, the boy cringed away and put one arm over his head. “Don’t!” he said. “Not any more!”

  Hildy stared after the soldiers as they marched the prisoner away to the courtroom. She had sometimes seen revolutionaries cringe like that. She had thought that was the way common people behaved. But that an Earl’s son should be brought to behave like that shook her to the core.

  “I wonder,” she said. “Is Uncle Harchad very cruel, do you think?”

  “Of course he is,” said Ynen. “Didn’t you know?” And he began telling her some of the things he had heard from the boy cousins.

  Hildy stared at him. Even though she realised Ynen was quite as shaken as she was, some of the things he said made her feel so sick and cold that she had to run at him with both arms stretched out and bang him against the side of the archway to shut him up. “Oh be quiet! Don’t you mind!”

  “Of course I mind,” said Ynen. “But what can I do?”

  The prisoners were hanged the following day. Hadd gave permission for the Palace children to watch if they wanted. Ynen said he did not want to. Hildy was trying to decide whether, after what she had seen, she wanted to or not when a message came from Navis. He forbade Hildy and Ynen to watch. Hildy found she was relieved.

  But in some ways a dreadful thing you do not see is more dreadful. Hildy tried not to watch the clock, but she knew the exact moment when the executions started. When a groaning sort of cheer came up out of the courtyard, Ynen covered his ears. What made it seem all the more dreadful was that their cousin Irana was carried out screaming, their cousin Harilla actually fainted, and all the rest, boys and girls alike, were sick as dogs.

  “It must have been horrible!” Hildy said, quite awed.

  After that neither she nor Ynen went near their uncle Harchad if they could help it.

  The gales dropped, and the earls all went home. Hildy’s cousin Irana Harchadsdaughter ran feverishly from window to window trying to get a last glimpse of the Earl of the South Dales.

  This sentimental behaviour so disgusted Hildy that she said, “I don’t know why you carry on like that. He hasn’t even looked at you. And I bet he’s twice as cruel as your father is. His eyes are even meaner.”

  Irana burst into tears. Hildy laughed and went out for the first sail of the year in the yacht Wind’s Road. But Irana went weeping to her cousin Harilla and told her how beastly Hildy had been.

  “She said that, did she?” said Harilla. “Right. It’s time someone taught Lady Superior a lesson. Come with me to Grandfather. I bet he doesn’t know she’s gone out sailing.”

  Hadd did not. He was in a very bad temper, anyhow, having quarrelled furiously with Earl Henda. And the coming of the ship from the North had brought home to him just how important it was to have an alliance with the Lord of the Holy Islands. The thought that this alliance was at that very moment in danger of drowning in a squall was almost too much for him. He was so angry that Harilla was almost sorry she had gone to him. She got her face slapped, as if it was her fault. Then Navis was summoned. Hadd raged at him for half an hour. And when Hildy came in, she found herself in the worst trouble of her life. She was utterly forbidden ever to go sailing again, in any kind of boat whatsoever.

  For three days after that, even Ynen hardly dared go near Hildy. She stole a fur rug from her aunt and sat wrapped in it, up on the leads of the roof, looking out over the lovely whelming sea, streaked grey, green-blue, and yellow where the sandbanks were, too angry even to cry. It’s just the alliance. He doesn’t care about me, she thought. Then, after two days, she remembered she would be able to sail once she got to the Holy Islands. I wish I could go now, she thought. Away from this horrible cruel place. She spent the rest of the day making a loving drawing of Wind’s Road. When it was finished, she cut it carefully in half and labelled one half “Ynen” and the other “Hildrida”. Then she crossed out “Hildrida” and wrote “Ynen” on that half too. After that, she came down from the leads and handed both halves to Ynen.

  “There you are. She’s all yours now.”

  Ynen sat holding both halves of the drawing. He was glad, but it seemed a shame. It was the high price Hildy had to pay for being important. Ynen reflected that this autumn he would at last be old enough to take part in the Sea Festival. He swore to himself that if he died in the attempt, he would catch his grandfather one on the nose with a rattle. Hadd deserved it if ever anyone did. Then he thought about the Earl of Hannart’s sons and hoped Uncle Harchad would be in the procession too. He would catch a whopper.

  Down in Holand, they were still talking about the Northmen. As Milda said, it seemed hard to hang them when they had only come in for shelter. Hobin said it was only to be expected. Mitt gradually forgot his mixed feelings. As time went on, he remembered more and more his glimpse of the Northerners shuffling like all prisoners. It came to something, he thought, when the tyranny of Holand could make free men of the North look so abject. In fact, as a free soul himself, he despised the Northmen a little for it. Come autumn, and I’ll show them! he thought.

  Most people were sorry for the Northmen. Feeling ran high against Hadd all that summer. Then rumours were heard that the North had defeated the South in a great battle and blocked the last of the passes in the mountains between them. After that even people who were in favour of Hadd began saying it was Hadd’s fault. He had let them in for a shameful defeat by hanging twenty innocent men.

  “Good,” said Siriol. “Things are going our way nicely.”

  The Free H
olanders were planning long and carefully all through that summer. Among other things it suddenly dawned on Mitt and Milda that no one must connect Hobin with Mitt when Mitt threw his bomb. Give Harchad’s spies half a clue, as Mitt said, and Hobin would be hanged. Mitt was confident that he could lie well enough to keep Hobin out of it. “I’ve had years of practice,” he said. “The wonder is that I know how to tell the truth these days. But will Hobin keep himself out of it?” That was the trouble. Hobin seldom bothered to watch the Festival. But he might take it into his head to do so, and if he saw Mitt being arrested, he was quite capable of going with Mitt and spoiling everything. “That’s the worst of him being so honest,” Mitt said.

  Mitt took this problem to the Free Holanders. They put their heads together. The result was that Ham, who had always liked Hobin, struck up a proper friendship with him. The two of them went for walks together, out in the Flate, all that summer. Ham managed surprisingly cunningly. He got Hobin used to longer and longer walks. By the end of the summer they were spending all day in the Flate, having supper at an inn, and not getting back to Holand until after nightfall.

  “See?” Ham said, with his big, slow grin. “Then on the day of the Festival, we go out to High Mill, twenty-odd mile, and we’ll be seen. I’ll make sure the innkeeper swears to us.”

  Then, to Mitt’s exasperation, another society of freedom fighters put its oar in. It was called Hands to the North. It tacked notices to the gates of the Palace and the barracks which promised, in crude writing and even cruder language, to kill Hadd during the Sea Festival. “AND AS MANY ER THE REST ER YU AS WE CAN GIT.”

  “That’s torn it!” Mitt said as soon as he heard the news. Milda broke the eggs again, and a jug of milk for good measure, and she and Mitt both seized a baby apiece and hurried round to see Siriol. “What shall we do?” said Mitt. “There’ll be spies and soldiers all over now. Who are these Hands to the North anyway?”