These were all in different people’s writing. Some of them seemed to have come from parts of the South they had not visited in years. Others concerned the places they had passed through, and these were mostly in Lenina’s writing. Moril felt oddly glad to see his mother’s small, bold writing. He could see that whatever Lenina had thought, privately, of Clennen’s freedom fighting, she had most scrupulously done what Clennen wanted while he was alive—even at the risk of being hanged for spying. It was queer to find her so honorable, but Moril liked it. Among other things, she had written: “Crady—169 taken north to Neathdale” and “Fledden—24 pressed yesterday, with horses.” The other notes said much the same.
“What do you think this means?” said Brid.
Kialan came over to look. “Do you think,” he said, after some puzzling, “those might be for my father or someone in the North? It could be about the army Tholian’s gathering.”
“You know, I do believe that’s it!” said Brid. “They mean how many men went for soldiers from each place. Don’t you agree, Moril?”
“Probably,” said Moril. It seemed a bit boring to him. “We’d better take them North, then.” He put them back and, just to be on the safe side, went on working his hand round the other side of the jar. There were cold, hard things. He gripped one and pulled it out. “I say!” It was a gold piece. “Whose is this?”
They were all mystified. Brid suggested that it was payment for taking Kialan North, but, as Moril and Kialan rather scornfully pointed out, if Clennen had organized that, he would have been paying himself. No other explanation seemed likely, either.
“Anyway, that means we can buy food tomorrow,” Brid said. “Father couldn’t mind that.”
“Don’t be a big idiot!” said Moril. “When did we ever have a gold piece before? Someone’s going to think we stole it, and if we get arrested, the whole thing’s going to come out.” Carefully he slipped the coin back behind the basket again.
Brid sighed. “A whole bottleful of gold! Oh, all right. I suppose you’re right and it would look odd. I’m going to bed. Get out of the cart.”
Moril helped Kialan put up the tent. By then Kialan was so tired that he dragged a blanket into it and fell asleep before the sun set. Moril felt too agitated to go to sleep straightaway. He sat against the cliff, with Olob companionably cropping grass nearby, and strummed on the cwidder for comfort. He did not play any particular song, just snatches of this and a bar or so of that. It seemed to express the state of his feelings. He still found it hard to believe that his father had been a notorious agent. Of all the discoveries of the last few days, that one was hardest to take. He had thought he knew Clennen. Now he saw he had not. He wondered when Dagner had found out and how he had felt. And he made an effort to think of Clennen in this new light.
But somehow, he did not want to think of his father. He wanted to forget the blood gushing into the lake, and he did not want to consider how Clennen could be so public and so private at one and the same time. Instead, by degrees, Moril took refuge in hazy memories from much earlier. He thought of the cart rolling down a green road in the North. Clennen was singing in the driving seat, Lenina doing some mending beside him, and the three children were playing happily on the lockers
. The sun shone—and, somewhat to his surprise, the cwidder began to produce a muzzy sound. It was a very queer noise. Moril did not like it, and Olob looked round at it disapprovingly.
“Time for bed,” Moril said to Olob. He got up and went to put the cwidder back in the cart.
Inside, the cart was hot, and Brid and the wine jar seemed to fill it. Moril hesitated, thinking of the active elbows and knees of Kialan. But he could not bear the heat, so he took a blanket and wriggled into the tent with Kialan.
Luckily Kialan was so exhausted that he did not move in his sleep. Both he and Moril woke feeling fresher and happier. Brid was the somber one, but she improved after a breakfast of bacon steaks fried by Kialan. Then Moril fetched Olob’s harness to clean. He was determined that their turnout should be as spruce and innocent as he could get it. Kialan, without being asked, went to groom Olob. And Moril realized that not only had Kialan done his full share of the chores ever since they left Markind, but nobody had either noticed or thanked him.
“You don’t have to do Olob,” he said. “I’ll do him.”
“Am I supposed to stand around and watch you wear yourself out, or something?” said Kialan. “Move, Olob, you lazy lump.”
“Well, you used to,” said Brid, scrubbing the frying pan. “And you’re an earl’s son.”
“I thought I’d get that sooner or later!” Kialan said with his most fed-up look. “I didn’t know what needed doing at first, and there always seemed loads of you to do it, anyway. But if you two are having to earn money now, it’s only fair you don’t do everything else.”
“Moril,” said Brid, going very somber again, “do you think we really can earn money? I mean, even with Dagner, we sounded so—so thin and pale, didn’t we?”
“No, you didn’t,” said Kialan, at work on the farther side of Olob. “You just gave a different kind of show. Only I think you made a mistake in not building it round Dagner more. You should have got him to sing again, Brid. He’d have done it in short bursts, and his songs are really good.”
“They are, aren’t they?” Brid said sadly. “And now—”
“Moril,” said Kialan, appearing under Olob’s nose, “you can’t happen to remember Dagner’s songs, can you? Enough to play them yourself?”
“I never thought of that!” said Moril. As soon as he had finished the harness, he fetched out the instruments. While Brid set to work polishing them, Moril took up the big cwidder and tried out the first song of Dagner’s that came into his head. For some reason, it was the song Dagner had never finished, the one Clennen had forbidden him to sing until they were in the North. Moril stopped after the first few notes, to make sure nobody was about. There seemed to be no one, so he went on. He found he wanted to finish it for Dagner. It seemed the only thing he could do for him.
Dagner had only sketched out part of the tune. Since Moril had no idea what Dagner intended, he let the words take him, this way and that, through a melting blackbird phrase:
“Come to me, come with me.
The blackbird asks you, ‘Follow me.’”
—and then to a kind of birdsong triumph in
“Wherever you go, I will go.”
Kialan seemed almost awestruck. But Brid, as soon as she realized what song it was, looked up the cliff and down the slope to make sure they were not overheard. Moril knew he was breaking the law. But he wanted to finish the song, so he went, rather defiantly, on to