Cart and Cwidder (The Dalemark Quartet 1) - Page 38

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 traveling 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 realized. 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 a

s 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 realized that in none of his dreams of Hannart or hazy imaginings of the cart on green roads had he ever thought of its 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 farther 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.

About midmorning, they came to the end of Mark Wood. Moril looked past Egil’s broad back at the mountains at last, vividly close, and the deep V in them that was Flennpass. The rain had stopped, but the clouds over the mountains were heavy with more. It was a gray, threatening scene. Fort Flenn was out of sight, behind a sharp peak, since it was at the North end of the pass, but Moril could see the South’s answer to it. The wood had been cleared for a mile or so in front of the pass, so that no one could go in or out of it unseen. He looked at the mountains across a desolation of tree stumps, charred from frequent burning, with new bright green bushes and saplings springing up between, because it had not yet been cleared this year.

The Northerners stopped at the edge of the trees. Moril did not at first know why.

“The Lord of Mark, I think,” Keril said to his captain. “Tholian must have set him to watch for the cart.”

Moril leaned round Egil, and his stomach fluttered at the number of the horsemen drawn up across the pass in the distance. They were clearly Southerners, and in war gear, and there were at least twice as many of them as there were Northerners in Keril’s band.

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones The Dalemark Quartet Fantasy
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