One of the soldiers took a handful of Kialan’s hair. Brid, without really thinking what she was doing, plunged forward and tried to catch hold of Tholian’s arm. She got no farther than the nearest soldier, who pushed her sharply away. Brid staggered back and bumped into Moril, jolting his right hand on the cwidder, so that he accidentally struck a long humming note from the deepest string.
An extraordinary buzzing numbness filled the air and seemed to be eating up Moril’s brain. He could do nothing, and barely think. The noise pressed into his head and forced him down on his knees. Everything outside his head was gray and pulsating, burring and blurred, and the feeling went on and on and on. He thought he saw Tholian, looking a little bewildered, stand still and slowly sheathe his knife, while Kialan and the soldiers all shook their heads like people who have been hit. Brid pressed both hands to her eyes. Their movements made Moril feel sick. He knelt with his head bent, looking at the pulsing earth, and wondered if he was going to die.
Brid knelt down beside him. “Moril, are you all right? It was the cwidder, wasn’t it?” Moril shook his humming head at her, wanting her to be quiet.
Everyone except Moril seemed to have quite recovered, except that Tholian looked puzzled, as if he had forgotten a word that was on the tip of his tongue. “Tie him up for now,” he said to the soldiers, in a rather irritated way. “Get some rope, one of you.”
“You made Tholian forget!” Brid whispered. “Do attend, Moril. You might be able to do it again.” But Moril could not attend. His face was so white that Brid
became worried, which meant that she was very cross with him in a harsh, snapping whisper which hurt Moril’s numbed head. Then Brid suddenly jumped to her feet and dashed away from him. “You can’t do that!” she shouted. “It’s cruel!”
That jerked Moril to his senses. He looked up and saw Kialan had been tied with his hands behind him to one of the stakes that carried the tent ropes. The reason for Brid’s outcry was that Tholian, not satisfied with merely tying him, had put a noose round Kialan’s tied hands and was hoisting them up his back. The effect must have been like having both arms twisted at once. Moril could see Kialan was in agony.
Tholian turned to Brid as soon as he had made the rope fast. “Can’t?” he said. “Go back to your brother.” When Brid did not move at once, Tholian advanced on her, with his strange eyes blank. “Are you going to do as I said?”
Brid was frightened enough to turn and run back to Moril. As she came, she mouthed, “Do something!”
Tholian started off toward where several captains were hovering, wanting to speak to him. “Those two are not to move from there,” he said over his shoulder to the soldiers round Kialan.
“Moril,” whispered Brid. “The cwidder. Make it undo the rope.”
Moril wished he could. He was sure the cwidder was quite capable of releasing Kialan, if only he knew how to work it. Osfameron had made it move mountains. But Moril had not the slightest idea how to begin and was very much afraid of making a mistake and bringing that awful humming into his own brain again. Kialan tried to give him a brave look although he was grinning with pain. Moril could see him struggling to get into a more comfortable position when there was no way of doing so. And Tholian might leave him like that for hours. It was worth a try.
Remembering the way the cwidder seemed to play his thoughts, Moril set himself to imagine Tholian’s noose pulling and twisting Kialan into that unnatural position. It was horrible. His arms ached and sweat dropped out from under his hair. He thought fiercely, This must stop! and gently touched the slack bottom string.
It chimed like a soft, deep bell. Moril braced himself against the humming, but it did not come. Its effect, though it was not at all what he expected, was on Kialan alone. He saw Kialan’s head suddenly drop and his knees give. He did not move, and it was clear that only the ropes were holding him up. Terrified, Moril clapped his hand across the string and stopped it vibrating.
Brid rounded on Moril with tears whisking down her cheeks. “You stupid idiot! You’ve killed him!”
“Shut up!” Moril whispered, anxiously watching both Kialan and the soldiers just beyond him. “They’ll realize. Look. He’s breathing. He’s only passed out.”
“But what about the ropes?” Brid whispered.
Moril shook his head. “I can’t. I was trying to. I think I can only make it work on people.”
One of the soldiers turned and saw Kialan sagging. When Tholian came back from talking to the captains, they pointed Kialan out to him. Tholian simply shrugged and passed by on his way somewhere else.
“I hate Tholian!” said Brid.
Moril said nothing. He knelt on the ground, nursing his cwidder, thinking as he had never thought in his life before. The soldiers, meanwhile, looked at one another, looked around to see how far away Tholian was, and undid the noose from Kialan’s hands, so that Kialan slid to his knees with his head hanging almost upside down.
“Look, Moril,” Brid whispered. “You did undo the ropes, sort of.”
Moril had seen perfectly well, though he gave no sign of it. He was as alert as he had been in the jail in Neathdale. He could have told Brid exactly how many captains, troops, and horsemen there were in the part of the valley they could see. He was aware of every time a group of new recruits came marching in, and how many came in each group. Four groups arrived while he knelt and thought and while Kialan hung in a heap, head downward. Moril saw that they did not come by the road, but down through the woods, to keep their mustering secret. He also saw that almost every new arrival was miserable. They trailed their feet and held their heads at that sullen angle Kialan and Dagner had both held theirs when they knew they were caught. He could see that few of them had joined Tholian’s army willingly. But he was thinking, thinking. For he was sure that the cwidder he was hugging on his knees was capable of saving all three of them and getting them North with news of Tholian’s army. He knew how it could be done. The only thing he did not know was how to call up the power in the cwidder to do it.
Since it was his thoughts the cwidder responded to, Moril tried to understand how he might feed his entire self through it into the enormous power he knew was needed. His father had said Moril was in two halves. “Come together,” Clennen had said, “and there’s no knowing what you might do.” Moril supposed Clennen had meant the way Moril was incorrigibly dreamy and also unbelievably alert at times, just as he was now. But as Kialan had noticed, he was often both at the same time, unless he went vague in self-defense. Moril thought that could not quite be it.
But there was another way he was in two halves. His mother was a Southern aristocrat, and his father a freedom-fighting singer from the North. As Dagner had said, there was no doubt it was a weird mixture. It was cold and hot, strict and free, restrained and outspoken, all at once. The trouble was, this did not quite add up to Moril. He did not think he had inherited much from his Southern ancestry—certainly none of the unfeeling tyranny that made his distant cousin Tholian so detestable.
But Tholian’s calm cruelty had, in a horrible way, reminded him of Lenina. Moril remembered Kialan saying, “Your mother’s a cool one.” And that was it, of course. Lenina never lost her head, and neither did Moril. He knew that, if Brid had only let him, he could coolly have led Tholian to believe that none of them had ever set eyes on Kialan, just as Lenina might have done. Keeping your head was part of the strict standard of the South. It was the same strict standard that had kept Lenina so loyal to Clennen, even though she hated life in the cart and disagreed with the freedom fighting. And Moril saw that it was the same kind of strict loyalty that had brought him North—only, with him, it was loyalty to the North.
After this followed something very uncomfortable, which Moril would not have faced if he had not had such a pressing need to use the cwidder. He had to admit he had deserted Lenina. He had gone off and left her when she had been trying to make them happy. He hoped he had not made her too unhappy, because he knew that seeing Tholian in Markind had only given him the excuse he had been looking for to go North. And going off like that, he had been trying to deny the Southern part of him—all the strict, honorable things which were the good aspect of the South. It did not do to deny them, even though he thought he had been doing it out of loyalty to Clennen.
Then he tried to find out what he had got from Clennen. Goodness knew what strange blood the singers came from. They could all sing and play. They saw a little more than most people, and some of them dreamed dreams. But Moril knew that all he had got from Clennen himself were ideas of freedom and his love of the North. The rest was the common stock of the singers.
The puzzling part was that these two halves added up to three quite different people: Brid, Dagner, and Moril. Brid had Lenina’s sharpness and some of Lenina’s efficiency, and she had Clennen’s love of an audience, without Clennen’s gifts—though she thought she had them. Dagner had far more of the gifts, but he had all Lenina’s reserve, and more. In fact, it had been very much in Lenina’s manner that Dagner had set off North to finish Clennen’s work for him, knowing he had not the personality to do it. None of them had inherited the largeness that made Clennen what he was. And why had Clennen not told Brid or Dagner they were in two halves?
Moril found himself suddenly at a dead end. He saw he would have to get at the cwidder’s power some other way. He had to. The third batch of recruits had just arrived. The valley was filling with soldiers, and the North did not know. And the Earl of Hannart would not dare move because of Kialan. And Moril knew Kialan was actively in danger from Tholian. Tholian passed several times, and each time he looked at Kialan’s hanging body as if he wanted it awake and writhing.