Cart and Cwidder

“No – I – Oh, that’s silly!” said Kialan, and to Moril’s relief, he drifted away. But he drifted back when Moril had finished and Brid took his place. Kialan caught Moril’s sleeve. “I say, you all know all this music, but I suppose you can’t even read and write, can you?”

Moril removed his sleeve. “Of course I can,” he said. “My mother taught us.” Before Kialan could ask any more impertinent questions, he scurried off among the gorse bushes to the stream. He stayed there, lost in vagueness, watching the bright water hurry over the different brightness of the stones beneath, until he heard Brid shouting.

“Supper! Wash, Moril!”

Supper was not very good, and what little bread they had was stale. “I say, this tastes peculiar!” Kialan said, pushing his share about on his plate.

Lenina’s face, which never had much expression, went quite blank. “I meant to buy bread and onions in Derent,” she said. “But there was no time.”

There was a heavy pause. Then Clennen said, “Look, lad, we’ve got to travel more than a hundred and fifty miles together, you and us. It needs a little give and take, don’t you think? I’d hate to have to break a good cwidder over your head.”

The sun was setting then, and the light was red. But Moril thought that this did not entirely account for the colour of Kialan’s face. Kialan, however, said nothing. He silently accepted some of the wine and drank it, but he did not speak again until much later. By then Clennen had become very jolly with the wine. Beaming in the firelight, he leant back against the wheel of the cart and said to Dagner, “Give us that new song of yours.”

“It’s not quite ready yet,” said Dagner. But, since this was not a performance, he willingly fetched his cwidder and picked out a sketch of what Moril thought was a very promising tune. And without a trace of nervousness, he half sang, half spoke the words.

“Come with me, come with me.

The blackbird asks you, ‘Follow me.’

No one will know, no one will know,

Wherever you go, I shall go.

Come with me. Morning spreads,

Clouds are high in milky threads,

The moon looks like a white thumbnail,

Larks are singing up the dale.

The sun is up, so follow me.

I’d like us to go secretly

Along the road, across the hill

Where water runs and woods are still.”

“And then I think the first four lines again,” Dagner said, looking up at Clennen.

“No,” said Clennen. “Won’t do.”

“Well, I needn’t have them again,” Dagner said humbly.

“I mean the whole thing won’t do,” said Clennen.

Dagner looked very dashed. Kialan seemed unable to stop himself saying indignantly: “Why? I thought it was going to be a jolly good song.”

“The tune’s all right, as far as it’s gone,” said Clennen. “But why spoil a tune like that with those words?”

“They’re jolly good words,” Kialan insisted. “I liked them.”

“It’s the words I seem to want,” Dagner said diffidently.

“I see,” said Clennen. “Then in that case don’t utter them again until we’re in the North – unless you want us taken up for rebels.”

Dagner tried to explain. “But I – it wasn’t. I was just trying to say how much I liked travelling in the cart and – and so on.”

“Were you?” said Clennen. “And haven’t you heard the songs the freedom fighters used to sing here the year of the rebellion – oh, it’ll be sixteen years ago now, the year you were born? They never dared say a thing straight out, so it was all put sideways – Follow the lark was one, Free as air and secret another went, and the best known was Come up the dale with me. The lords here still hang a man on the spot for singing words like that.”

“And I do think that’s ridiculous!” Kialan burst out. “Why can’t people sing what they want here? What’s the matter with everyone?”

Brid and Moril looked at his firelit face with interest. It began to seem as if Kialan might be a freedom fighter. They felt they could forgive him much if he was. Clennen, however, simply seemed amused.

“I hope there’s not someone behind the gorse listening to you,” he said. Kialan’s head jerked round towards the nearest looming bush. “See?” said Clennen. “That’s why, in one easy lesson, lad. No one can trust anyone any more. It comes of uneasy rulers paying uneasy men to make the rest uneasy too. It’s not always been like that, you know. Dagner, what did I say outside Derent?”

Dagner’s mind was woefully on his unsuitable song. “Oh – er – something about life being only a performance, I think.”

“I knew I could trust you to get the wrong saying – and the wrong saying wrong,” Clennen said tolerantly. “Anyone?”

“You said the South was once as free as the North,” said Brid. “You said it to me, really.”

“Then remember it,” said Clennen.

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AFTER ONE NIGHT attempting to share the smaller tent with Kialan and Dagner, Moril took to creeping into the cart along with Brid and the wine jar. As he told Brid, even the wine jar took up less space than Kialan, and it did not have knees and elbows. Moril had woken up three times to find himself out among the guy ropes in the dew. He resented it. He resented Kialan, and he wished Dagner joy of him. It was hard to tell if Dagner got on with Kialan or not, because he was such an untalkative person. Dagner was like Lenina in that way. It was quite impossible to tell what Lenina thought about Kialan – or, indeed, about anything else.

Kialan, in spite of Clennen’s rebuke, seemed unable to stop making outspoken remarks. “You know, that cart is really horribly garish,” he said, on the second morning. Perhaps he had some excuse. It was standing against the dawn sky, as he saw it, and Moril’s red head was just emerging from it. The effect was undeniably colourful, but Brid was keenly offended.

“It isn’t!” she said.

“I expect you’re too young to have much taste,” Kialan replied. Brid swore to Moril that she was Kialan’s enemy for life after that one.

What Moril resented most – apart from Kialan’s elbows and the fact that Kialan never made the slightest attempt to help with any of the chores – was the superior way Kialan stood by and listened in whenever Moril had a music lesson. Unfortunately he had them fairly frequently in the next few days. They were taking – perhaps for Kialan’s benefit – a more direct route to Flennpass and the North than usual. It meant that they did not pass through any large towns and only two villages. Lenina bought supplies in the first, but they did not perform in either. Clennen took the opportunity to grind away at the old songs with Moril, to keep Brid hard at the panhorn and to rehearse a number of songs with all of them.

Kialan stood by and put Moril off continually. Moril came so to resent it that he took refuge in more than usual vagueness. He would sit on his perch behind the driving seat, staring up the white road unreeling ahead between the grey-green slopes of the South, basking in the hot sun – which never tanned him however long he sat in it – and dream of his birthplace in the North. It always saddened Moril that his father would never go to Hannart because of his disagreement with Earl Keril. He longed to see it, and he had built up in his mind a complete image of what it was like. There was an old grey castle in it, rowan trees and blue hills of a certain spiky shape. Moril saw it clearly. He saw the whole North with it, spread over the grey-green Southern landscape as if it were painted on a window: dark woods and emerald dales, the queer green roads from olden days which led to places that were not important any longer, hard grey rocks, and the great waterfall at Dropwater. In it lived all the stories of magic and adventure that seemed to go with the North. The South had nothing to compare with them.

Hearing Kialan talking behind him, Moril thought that the North had one new advantage. Kialan would leave them there.

“I’ve said that six times now,” Kialan said. “Do you spend all your time a thousand miles away?”

Moril was annoyed. His family could accuse him of dreaminess if they wanted, but Kialan was a stranger. “You’ve no right to say that,” he said.

It was possible Kialan did not realise how annoyed Moril was. “You see,” Brid explained to him later, a good long way behind the cart, “even when you’re angry, you always look so sleepy and – and milky, that he probably didn’t even notice you were attending. Not,” she added tartly, “that he’d have noticed anybody’s feelings but his own, mind you.”

What Kialan had replied was: “Oh, good grief! I know you’re the fool of the family by now, but you don’t have to be rude as well as stupid!”