Drowned Ammet

Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)

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PEOPLE MAY WONDER how Mitt came to join in the Holand Sea Festival, carrying a bomb, and what he thought he was doing. Mitt wondered himself by the end.

Mitt was born the day of the Holand Sea Festival, and he was called Alhammitt after his father. Perhaps the first sound Mitt heard as he burst bawling into the world was his parents laughing about both these things.

“Well, he took his time,” said Mitt’s father, “and chose his day all right. What does this make him? A man of straw, born to be drowned?”

Milda, Mitt’s mother, laughed heartily at this, because the Sea Festival was something of a joke. On that day, every autumn, Hadd, the Earl of Holand, was required by tradition to dress up in outlandish clothes and walk in a procession down to the harbour carrying a life-size dummy made of plaited wheat. The dummy was known as Poor Old Ammet. One of Hadd’s sons walked after him carrying Poor Old Ammet’s wife, who was made entirely of fruit, and her name was Libby Beer. The procession that went with them was both noisy and peculiar. When they reached the harbour, they said traditional words and then threw both dummies into the sea. Nobody knew why this was done. To most people in Holand the ceremony was just an excuse to have a holiday, eat sweets and get drunk. On the other hand, everyone would have thought it horribly unlucky not to have held the Sea Festival.

So Milda, even though she was laughing until her dimple was creased out of existence, bent over the new baby and said, “Well, I think it’s a lucky birthday to have had. He’ll grow up a real free soul, just like you – you wait! That’s why I’m calling him after you.”

“Then he’ll be common as dirt,” said Mitt’s father. “Just like me. You go into town and shout ‘Alhammitt’ in the street, and half Holand will come to you.” And they both laughed at the thought of the common name they were giving their baby.

Mitt’s early memories were full of his parents’ laughter. They were very happy. They had the good luck to rent a smallholding on the Earl’s land in what was known as the New Flate, only ten miles from the port of Holand. It had been reclaimed from sea marsh by Earl Hadd’s grandfather and grew lush emerald grass, big vegetables and corn in narrow yellow stripes between the dykes. Dyke End holding was so fertile and the market of Holand so near that Mitt’s parents had plenty to live on. Though Earl Hadd was said to be the hardest man in Dalemark, and other farmers in the Flate were always being turned out of doors for not paying their rent, Mitt’s parents always had just enough money to go round. They laughed. Mitt grew up running carelessly along the paths between the crops and the dykes. It never occurred to anyone that he could drown. When he was two, he taught himself to swim by falling into a dyke when his parents were busy. Since no one was there to help him, he had to help himself. He struggled to the bank and got out, and his clothes dried in the stiff breeze as he ran on.

The sound of that breeze was as much part of his early memories as his parents’ laughter. Apart from the hill where Holand stood, the Flate was flat as a floor. The wind blew straight across from the sea. Sometimes it came storming in, laying the grass over, chopping the sky reflected in the dykes into grey Vs, and hurling the trees sideways so that their leaves showed white. But most days it simply blew, steadily and constantly, so that the dykes never stopped rippling and the leaves of the poplars and alders went rattle-rattle up and down the banks. If the wheat was ripe, it rustled in the wind, stiffly, like straw in a mattress. The constant wind sighed in the grass and hummed in the chimney, and kept the sails of the big windmills always turning, creak-thump, creak-thump, to pump the water to the dykes or grind the flour. Mitt used to laugh at those windmills. It was the way their arms pawed the air.

Then one day, shortly after Mitt had taught himself how to swim, the wind suddenly dropped. It did that sometimes in early summer, but it was the first time in Mitt’s life that he had known the Flate without wind. The sails of the windmills creaked and stood. The trees stopped moving. There was blue sky in the dykes, and trees upside down. Everything went quiet and unexpectedly warm. Above all, there was suddenly an extraordinary smell. Mitt could not think what was happening. He stood on the bank of the dyke nearest the house with his ears tipped to the silence and his nose lifted to the smell. The smell was cow dung and peat and trampled grass, mixed with smoke from the chimney. But that was only in the foreground. Beyond that was the smell of fresh things growing – cow parsley, buttercups, a hint of may, and strongest of all, the heaven-like scent of willows budding. While, at the back of it, there and not there, so that Mitt almost missed it, was the faint boisterous bite of the distant sea.

Mitt was too young to think of it as smells, or to realise that the wind had simply stopped. He thought it was a place. It seemed to him that he had got an inkling of somewhere unspeakably beautiful, warm and peaceful, and he wanted to go there. Yes, it was a land. It was not far off, just beyond somewhere, and it was Mitt’s very own. He set off at once to find it while he still remembered the way.

He trotted to the end of the dyke, crossed the footbridge, and continued trotting, northwards and inland. He passed all the places he knew, impatiently – they were obviously not his land – and trotted on until his legs ached. Even then he was still in the New Flate, lush and green, with its dykes, poplars and windmills. Mitt knew his land was different from the Flate, so he was forced to toil on. And after a mile or so, he came out into the Old Flate. Here it was different, all right. The ground was wide and treeless and covered with pinkish marsh plants. In some places, long lines of rushes and green scum showed where there had once been dykes and farms, but now it was all flat and blank. Nothing seemed to be alive there but mosquitoes and plaintive marsh birds. In the wide distance, it was true, there were one or two islands of higher ground with trees and houses on them. The roads to them crossed the pink waste on causeways, raised up like the veins on an old man’s hand. Otherwise there was nothing until, away on the edge of the distance, there was what Mitt took for a line of clouds but was in fact the beginning of the land above sea level, where Holand joined Waywold.

Mitt was a trifle daunted. This was not the kind of land he had in mind. His vision of his perfect place faded a little, and he was no longer sure this was quite the way to it. Nevertheless, he set forwards bravely into the dismal landscape. He felt he had come too far to turn back now. After a while he thought he saw something moving, out in the marsh. He set his eyes on the movement and waded towards it. It was extremely dangerous. There were snakes in the Old Flate. And if Mitt had walked into one of the scummy pools, he could have been sucked down into it and drowned. Fortunately he had no idea. And even more fortunately the moving things he could see were a troop of the Earl’s soldiers combing the Flate for a runaway revolutionary.

Mitt could see they were soldiers before long. He stood on a clump of rubbery plants, with the marsh sucking and gobbling around him, and wondered whether he ought to go near them. When people in the New Flate talked about soldiers, they talked as if soldiers were something to be afraid of. There was a causeway quite near Mitt. He wondered if he ought to climb up on it, out of the soldiers’ way. While he was wondering, a muddy horse heaved itself on to the causeway from the marsh behind it. The young officer on its back reined in and stared at the sight of such a very small boy standing all alone in the middle of the Flate.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” he called to Mitt.

Mitt was rather pleased to have company. “I’m looking for my home,” he told the officer chattily. “I come a long way too.”

“I can see you have,” said the officer. “Where is your home?”

“There.” Mitt pointed vaguely northwards. He was busy examining his new acquaintance. The gold on the officer’s coat took his fancy. So did the officer’s face, which was very smooth and pale and narrow, with a nose that went out much more sharply than any noses Mitt had known before and a mouth which Mitt somehow thought of as clean. Altogether Mitt felt he was a person worthy of knowing about the perfect place. “It’s all quiet, with water,” he explained, “and it’s my place where I’m going to, but I can’t find it yet.”

The officer frowned. His own small daughter had been found marching out into the Flate only yesterday, saying she had a house on a hill that was hers and she had to find it. He thought he knew the signs. “Yes, but where do you live?” he said.

“Dyke End,” Mitt said impatiently. It was unworthy of the officer to ask such things. “Of course. That’s where I come from, and I’m going to my home.”

“I see,” said the officer. He waved at the distant soldiers. “Come here, one of you!”

The several troopers who came running at his shout were somewhat astonished to find not a full-grown revolutionary but an extremely small boy. “He shrank with the wet,” one suggested.

“He says he lives in Dyke End,” said the officer. “One of you take him home and tell his parents to take more care of him in future.”

“Dyke End’s not my home. It’s where I live!” Mitt protested.

Nevertheless, he was taken back to the New Flate almost dangling from the hand of a huge trooper in the Earl’s green uniform. Mitt was sullen at first, disappointed and vaguely humiliated. And he was deeply disillusioned about the officer. Mitt had told him a valuable secret, and the officer had barely even listened. But the trooper was a cheerful man. He had children of his own, and it had been hot, wet work, hunting the revolutionary in the windless Flate. The trooper was pleased to have a rest. He was very jolly to Mitt, and before long Mitt cheered up and chatted happily about how far he had walked and how he thought he would like to be a soldier too, when he grew up, and a sea captain as well and sail the Earl’s ships for him.

When they came to the New Flate, people came to doors and gates to stare at Mitt trotting along with his hand stretched above his head in order to reach the great warm hand of the trooper. The stares were unloving. Earl Hadd was a hard man and a vindictive one. The soldiers were the ones who carried out the Earl’s harsh orders. And lately the Earl’s second son, Harchad, had taken command of the soldiers, and he was even harder than his father, and a good deal more cruel. But since, all over Dalemark, an earl in his earldom had more power than a king, in the times when there were kings, Harchad and his soldiers did exactly as they pleased. Therefore, soldiers were hated heartily.

Mitt understood none of this, but he saw the looks. “Don’t you look like that!” he kept crying out. “This is my friend, this is!”

The trooper became steadily more uncomfortable. “Take it easy, sonny,” he said every time Mitt cried out. And after a while he seemed to feel the need to justify himself. “A man’s got to live,” he told Mitt. “It’s not work I enjoy, but what can a poor boy off the harbour edge do? When I get my bounty, I aim to take up farming, like your dad does.”

“Did you fall in the harbour?” Mitt asked, fixing on the only part of this he understood.

They came to Dyke End. Mitt’s parents had missed Mitt about half an hour before, and they were by then in a panic. Mitt’s father received him with a great thump, and his mother hugged him frantically. Mitt did not understand the reason for either. The vision of his perfect land had faded by then. He was not sure what he had gone away to do.

The trooper stood by, very stiff and correct. “Boy was found out in the Old Flate,” he said. “Said he was looking for his home, or some such story.”

“Oh, Mitt!” Milda cried joyously. “What a free soul you are!” And she hugged him again.

“And,” said the trooper, “Navis Haddsson’s compliments and would you keep more of an eye on him in future.”

“Navis Haddsson!” exclaimed both Mitt’s parents, Milda in considerable awe, and Mitt’s father with surprise and resentment. Navis was Earl Hadd’s third and youngest son.

“Big of Navis Haddsson,” Mitt’s father said sarcastically. “Knows all about bringing up boys, I suppose?”

“Can’t say, I’m sure,” said the trooper, and he made off, having no wish to get into an argument with such a thickset and aggressive person as the elder Alhammitt.

“Well, I think it was very kind of Navis to send us our Mitt back like that!” Milda said when he had gone.

Mitt’s father spat in the dyke.

All the same, Milda remained extremely impressed by the kindness of Navis. She told people about it whenever her husband was not by to resent it, and most people she told were impressed too. Earl Hadd and his family were not, as a rule, kind to anyone. After that Milda took a great interest in Navis for a while and found out everything about him that she could. There was not very much known. The Earl’s eldest son, Harl, and his second son, Harchad, were the Earl’s favourites and the ones people heard most about. But about the time Navis sent Mitt home, Navis was enjoying a little more of the Earl’s favour. The reason was that three years or so before, the Earl had chosen Navis a wife, as he had chosen wives for his other two sons. Milda heard that Navis and his wife adored each other and went everywhere together. Then Navis’s wife gave birth to a daughter. That was the reason the Earl was pleased with Navis.

The Earl valued granddaughters. He did not like girls in the least, but he needed granddaughters because he was an extremely quarrelsome man. Granddaughters could be married off to other earls and lords, who would then become Hadd’s allies in his quarrels. But so far only Harl’s wife had had a daughter. So when Navis’s wife, too, had a daughter, Hadd was delighted with them. Milda learnt that Navis’s wife was expecting a second child shortly, and Hadd was gleefully expecting another marriageable granddaughter.

The baby was born the following month. He was a boy, and Navis’s wife died having him. It was said that Navis was so stricken with grief that he could not be bothered to find a name for his son. The nurses were forced to ask Earl Hadd to think of a name, and Hadd was so annoyed at not having a granddaughter that he called the boy Ynen, which was the name of a lord he particularly disliked. Hadd was consoled later on that year when Harl’s wife and Harchad’s both had girl babies. As for Navis, he gave up his commission in the Earl’s army and fell into total obscurity. It was soon quite impossible to learn anything about him or about his children, Hildrida and Ynen.

Mitt did not quite forget his perfect land. He remembered it, though a little fuzzily, next time the wind dropped, but he did not set off to look for it again. It was plain to him that soldiers only brought you back again if you went. It made him sad. When an inkling of it came to him in silence, or in scents, or, later, if the wind hummed a certain note, or a storm came shouting in from the sea and he caught the same note in the midst of its noise, he thought of his lost perfect place and felt for a moment as if his heart would break. But then he would shake off the feeling and laugh with his parents.

It seemed to Mitt that the three of them could laugh at anything. He remembered laughing with Milda one evening during a rainstorm. Mitt was trying to learn his letters. He found them so difficult that he had to laugh. Then the door came clapping open in a gust of rain, blowing everything in the house to the end of the room, and there stood Mitt’s father, soaking wet and laughing, shouting above the gale that the cow had calved. At that the door came off its hinges and fell on Mitt’s father. And they all laughed till they ached.