Cart and Cwidder

Once Moril was changed, he emerged from the cart as a very flamboyant figure, for his suit was the same peacock as Brid’s dress and his hair was red – a bright, wild red. He had inherited Lenina’s paleness. His face was white, with a few red freckles.

“You know, Mother,” Brid said, as she had said before every show since they left Holand, “I don’t think I like that colour on Moril.”

“It makes people notice him,” said Lenina, and went to take the reins while Clennen and Dagner changed in their turn.

Moril went to walk in the damp springing grass on the roadside, which was rough-soft under his toes, where he could have a good view of the cart that was his home. It was painted in a number of noticeable colours, principally pink and gold. Picked out in gold and sky blue along the sides were the words Clennen the Singer. Moril knew it was garish, but he loved this cart all the same. It moved softly, because it was well sprung and well oiled, and ran easily behind Olob, the glistening brown horse. Clennen always said he would not part with Olob for an earldom. Olob – his real name was Barangarolob, because Clennen loved long names – was harnessed in pink and scarlet, with a great deal of polished brass, and looked as magnificent as the rest of the turnout. Moril was just thinking that his mother and Brid on the driving seat looked like two queens – or perhaps a queen and a princess – when Clennen stuck his head out of the canvas at the back.

“Admiring us, are you?” he called cheerfully. Moril smiled and nodded. “It’s like life,” Clennen said. “You may wonder what goes on inside, but what matters is the look of it and the kind of performance we give. Remember that.” His head popped back inside again.

Moril went on smiling. His father was always giving them odd thoughts to remember. He would probably want this one repeated to him in a day or so. Moril thought about it – in the dreamy way in which he usually gave his attention to anything – and he could not see that their turnout was like life. Life was not pink and gold. At least, some of theirs was, he supposed, but that was only saying the cart was life.

He was still pondering when they came under some big trees covered with pale buds, and the canvas cover went down with a bit of a clatter, revealing Clennen and Dagner dressed in scarlet and ready for the show. Moril scampered back and climbed up with them. Clennen smiled jovially. Dagner, whose face was tight and pinched, as it always was before a show, pushed Moril’s cwidder into his hands and Moril into the right place without a word. He handed the big old cwidder to Clennen and the panhorn to Brid, and took up a pipe and a long, thin drum himself. By the time they were all settled, Olob was clopping smoothly into the main square of Derent.

“Ready,” said Clennen. “Two, three.” And they struck up.

Derent was not a big place. The number of people who came into the square in response to their opening song was not encouraging. There was a trickle of children and ten adults at the most. True, the people sitting outside the tavern turned their chairs round to get a better view, but Moril had a vague feeling, all the same, that they were wasting their talents on Derent. He said so to Brid, while Lenina was reaching past him to receive the hand organ from Dagner.

“All your feelings are vague!” Lenina said, overhearing. “Be quiet.”

Undaunted by the sparse crowd, Clennen began his usual patter. “Ladies and gentlemen, come and listen! I am Clennen the Singer, on my way from Holand to the North. I bring you news, views, songs and tales, things old and things new. Roll up, draw up chairs, come near and listen!” Clennen had a fine rolling voice, speaking or singing. It rumbled round the square. Eyes were drawn to him, for his presence matched his voice. He was a big man, and not a thin one, though the scarlet suit made his paunch look bigger than it really was. He had a good sharp curl of ginger beard, which made up for the bald patch at the back of his head – now hidden by his scarlet hat. But the main thing about him was his enormous, jovial, total good humour. It seemed to fetch people by magic or multiply those there out of thin air. Before his speech was over, there were forty or fifty people listening to it.

“So there!” Brid said to Moril.

Before the performance could start, however, someone pushed up to the cart, calling, “Have you got any news from Holand, Clennen?” So they had to wait. They were used to this. Moril thought of it as part of the performance – and it certainly seemed to be one of their duties – to bring news from one part of Dalemark to the others. In the South particularly, there were few other ways in which people could get to know what was happening in the next lordship, let alone the next earldom.

“Now, let’s see,” said Clennen. “There’s been a new earl invested for the South Dales – the old one’s grandson. And they tell me Hadd has fallen out with Henda again.” This surprised nobody. They were two very quarrelsome earls. “And I hear,” said Clennen, stressing the hear, to show that he was not trying to stir up trouble, “I hear the cause of it had something to do with a shipload of Northmen that came into harbour at Holand last month.” This caused confused and careful muttering. Nobody knew what to make of a ship from the North coming into Holand, or whether they were breaking the law to think of it at all. Clennen passed on to other news. “The Earl of Waywold is making new money – copper and goodness knows what else in it – worth nothing. You get more than two thousand to one gold. Now the price on the Porter – you’ve all heard of the Porter, I suppose?” Everyone had. The Porter was a notorious spy, much wanted by the earls of the South for passing illegal information and stirring up discontent. Not one of the earls had been able to catch him. “The price on the Porter’s head now being two thousand gold,” said Clennen, “it’s to be hoped that he’s not taken in Waywold, or you’ll have to collect your reward in a wagon.” This caused some cautious laughter. “And the storm last month carried off the lord’s roof in Bradbrook, not to speak of my tent,” said Clennen.

Lenina, by this time, had sorted out the strips of paper on which she had written messages from people in other places to friends and relatives in Derent. She began calling them out. “Is there someone called Coran here? I’ve a message from his uncle at Pennet.” A red-faced young man pushed forwards. He confessed, as if he were ashamed of it, that he could read, and was handed the paper. “Is there a Granny Ben here?”

“She’s sick, but I’ll tell her,” someone called.

So it went on. Lenina handed out messages to those who could read, and read them out to those who could not. More people hurried into the square, hearing there was news. Shortly there was a fair throng of people, all in great good humour, all telling one another the latest news from Holand.

Then Clennen called out: “Now I’m putting my hat on the ground here. If you want a song of us too, do us the favour of filling it with silver.” The scarlet hat spun neatly on to the cobblestones and waited, looking empty and expectant. Clennen waited too, with rather the same look. And after a second the red-faced Coran, grateful for his message, tossed a silver coin into it. Another followed, and another. Lenina, watching expertly, muttered to Brid that it looked like good takings.

After that the performance began in earnest. Moril did not have much time even for vague thinking. Though he did not do much of the singing, his job was to play treble to the low sweet notes of his father’s big cwidder, and he was kept fairly busy. His fingers grew hot and tingly, and he leant over and blew on them to cool them as he played. Clennen, as he had promised the crowd, gave them old favourites and new favourites – ballads, love songs, and comic songs – and some songs that were entirely new. Several of these were his own. Clennen was a great maker of songs. Brid and Dagner joined him for some of them, or played panhorn, drum and third cwidder, and Lenina played stolidly on the hand organ. She played well – since Clennen had taught her – but always rather mechanically, as if her mind were elsewhere. And Moril fingered away busily, his left hand sliding up and down the long, inlaid arm of his cwidder, his right thrumming on the strings until his fingertips glowed.

Every so often Clennen would pause and send a cheerfully reproachful look towards his hat. This usually caused a hand to come out from the crowd and drop a small, shamed coin in with the others. Then Clennen would beam round at everyone and go on again. When the hat was more than half full, he said: “Now I think the time has come for some of the songs out of our past. As you may know, the history of Dalemark is full of fine singers, but, to my mind, there have never been two to compare with the Adon and Osfameron. Neither has ever been equalled. But Osfameron was an ancestor of mine. I happen to be descended from him in a direct line, father to son. And it was said of Osfameron that he could charm the rocks from the mountains, the dead from their sleep and the gold from men’s purses.” Here a slight raising of Clennen’s sandy eyebrows in the direction of the hat called forth an apologetic penny and a ripple of laughter from everyone. “So, ladies and gentlemen,” said Clennen, “I shall now sing four songs by Osfameron.”

Moril sighed and leant his cwidder carefully against the side of the cart. The old songs only needed the big cwidder, so he could have a rest. In spite of this, he wished his father would not sing them. Moril much preferred the new, full-bodied music. The old required a fingering which made even the big mellow cwidder sound cracked and thin, and Clennen seemed to find it necessary to change his deep singing voice until it became thin, high and peculiar. As for the words – Moril listened to the first song and wondered what Osfameron had been on about.

“The Adon’s hall was open. Through it

Swallows darted. The soul flies through life.

Osfameron in his mind’s eye knew it.

The bird’s life is not the man’s life.”

But the crowd appreciated it. Moril heard someone say: “I do like to hear the old songs done in the right way.” And when they were over, there was a round of applause and a few more coins.

Then Dagner, with his face more tight and pinched than ever, took up his cwidder. Clennen said, “I now introduce my eldest son, Dastgandlen Handagner.” This was Dagner’s full name. Clennen loved long names. “He will sing you some of his own songs,” said Clennen, and waved Dagner forwards into the centre of the cart. Dagner, with a grimace of pure nervousness, bowed to the crowd and began to sing. Moril could never understand why this part was such a torment to Dagner. He knew his brother would have died rather than miss his part in the performance, yet he was never happy until it was over. Perhaps it was because Dagner had made the songs himself.

They were strange, moody little songs, with odd rhythms. Dagner made them even odder, by singing now loud, now soft, for no real reason, unless it was nerves. And they had a haunting something. The tunes stuck in your head and you hummed them when you thought you had long forgotten them. Moril listened and watched, and envied Dagner this gift of making songs. He would have given – well – his toes, anyway, to be able to compose anything.

“The colour in your head

The colour in your mind

Is dead

If you follow it blind,”

Dagner sang, and the crowd grew to like it. Dagner was not remarkable to look at – he was thin and sandy-haired, with a large Adam’s apple – and people expected his songs to be unremarkable too. But when he finished, there was applause and some more coins. Dagner flushed pale purple with pleasure and was almost at ease for the rest of the show.

There was not much more. The whole family sang a few more songs together and wound up with Jolly Holanders. They always finished with that in the South, and the audience always joined in. Then it was a matter of putting away the instruments and replying to the things people came up to say.

This was always rather a confused time. There were the usual number of people who seemed to know Clennen well; the usual giggly girls who wanted Dagner to tell them how he composed songs, a thing Dagner could never explain and always tried to do; the usual kind people who told Moril he was quite a musician for a youngster; and the usual gentlemen who drifted up to Lenina and Brid and tried to murmur sweet nothings to them. Clennen was always very quick to notice these gentlemen, particularly those who approached Brid. Poor Brid looked older than she was in her show clothes – she was really only just thirteen – and she did not know how to deal with murmuring gentlemen at all.

“Well, you see, my father taught me,” Moril explained.

“They come into my head like – er – ideas,” Dagner explained.

“It is Lenina, isn’t it?” murmured a gentleman at the head of the cart.

“It is,” said Lenina.

“I didn’t quite hear what you said,” Brid said rather desperately to another gentleman.

“I don’t go to Hannart. I had a little disagreement with the Earl,” said Clennen. He swung round and, with one comprehensive look, disposed of the man Brid could not hear and also the one who thought Lenina was herself. “But I’m going through Dropwater and beyond,” he continued, turning back to his friends.

Lenina had collected the money and was counting it. “Good,” she said. “We can stay at the inn here. I fancy a roof over my head.”

Moril and Brid fancied it too. It was the height of luxury. There would be feather beds, a proper bath and real food cooked indoors. Brid licked her lips and gave Moril a delighted grin. Moril smiled back in his milky, sleepy way.

“No. No time,” said Clennen, when at last he was free to be asked. “We have to press on. We’re picking up a passenger on the road.”

Lenina said nothing. It was not her way. While Brid, Moril and even Dagner protested, she simply picked up the reins and encouraged Olob to move.

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“WHERE ARE WE picking up the passenger?” Brid enquired when they were three miles or so beyond Derent and her discontent had worn off somewhat. She was back in her everyday blue check and looked rather younger than she was.

“Couple of miles on. I’ll tell you where,” Clennen said to Dagner, who was driving.

“Going North, is he?” Dagner said.

“That’s right,” said Clennen.