Cart and Cwidder

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “We’re going to let you go, boy,” said the younger one. “We’ve come to the conclusion you know nothing about this matter.”

  “Thank you,” said Moril. “Can I see my brother now?”

  The younger man glared at him and was obviously going to refuse. But the justice said irritably, “Oh, very well, very well. I said you should if you answered my questions. I wouldn’t like you to go away thinking we’re unjust here.”

  Moril thought Brid would have made the obvious answer to this. He held his tongue, with a bit of an effort.

  8

  The man who had fetched Moril before came back. He took Moril downstairs to a great gloomy room with guards at the door. In the middle of this room were two rows of benches about three feet apart. People were sitting facing one another at intervals along these benches. Those on the farther bench were all prisoners. Moril could see they were, because they all had a dingy, sullen, dejected look and held their heads hunched forward. He had once seen a dancing bear with the same look. And the people on the nearer bench were plainly visitors, from not having that look, and being brisker and more nervous. There seemed to be guards everywhere, standing about in a bored way, and the nervous looks of the visitors were mostly directed at the guards. The room rang and whispered with shuffling feet and sad conversations.

  The man told Moril to sit on the nearest bench. After a while two guards led Dagner through a door at the other end. Dagner had the same dingy, dejected look already. He looked unexpectedly small between the guards. Moril was sure he remembered him bigger.

  They sat Dagner down on the bench opposite Moril. “You can have ten minutes,” they told Moril. Then they left them to talk. Moril swallowed and could not think what to say.

  “Just a moment,” said Dagner. “Look at the room behind me, will you, and tell me if there’s anyone you think can hear what we say.”

  Moril looked. The nearest guard was a good way off, talking to another. “No. They’re two cart lengths away at least.” He was about to turn round and see if there was anyone behind him.

  “Don’t move, you fool!” said Dagner. “I can see it’s all right behind you.”

  “Then that’s all right,” said Moril. “I saw the justice and I told them it’s all a mistake. They can’t really think you were passing information, can they? It’s just not true.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Dagner. “I did.”

  Moril stared at him.

  “Father asked me to,” Dagner explained. “I had to give a message and some money to one of our men here. I didn’t manage very well,” he said sadly. “I wasn’t sure—anyway, I think the one I gave it to must have been the spy. And when I think how relieved I was once I’d got rid of them, I—well, it’s no use thinking of that, I suppose.”

  “But, Dagner!” Moril said, quite horrified. “They’ll hang you for that!”

  “You don’t think I don’t know that, do you?” Dagner said irritably. “Is there still no one near?”

  “No,” said Moril. “Dagner, it isn’t true, is it? You’re joking.”

  “I’m not joking,” said Dagner. “If you don’t believe me, take a look at that wine jar—unless they’ve searched the cart by now. But that’s not important. What is important is that you’ve got to get Kialan into the North. You and Brid just have to go on and get him to Hannart if you can. Can you do that, Moril?”

  “I suppose so,” said Moril. “But I think he sloped off when they arrested you.”

  “No, he didn’t,” said Dagner. “He’ll be waiting outside Neathdale, like he said.”

  “If you think so—Dagner, why is it so important?”

  “Ask Kialan,” said Dagner, with his eyes on someone behind Moril. “I ordered some flour and some more oats,” he went on, rather artificially. “And there was a friend of Father’s letting me have a side of bacon cheap. And onions. You can get bread on the way.”

  “And eggs,” agreed Moril. “And I’ll polish your cwidder for you, I promise.”

  “You needn’t bother,” said Dagner. “Right, he’s gone. Now, listen. There are two things I want you to tell Kialan. One is that Henda has asked a ransom for him—”

  “Ransom for Kialan?” said Moril. “But he’s—”

  “Never mind. Just tell him,” said Dagner. “And the other thing is far more important. Earl Tholian is gathering an army and—”

  “Tholian? He’s dead,” Moril objected, and he had a muddled and upsetting notion of an army of ghosts.

  “This is the new Earl. He’s called Tholian, too. Don’t keep interrupting. There’s someone on his way over behind you,” said Dagner. “The point is that nobody in the North knows, and there’s nobody going through but you and Kialan. Have you got those two things?”

  “Ransom and Tholian,” said Moril. “There’s somebody coming behind you now.”

  The guards behind Dagner came right up to him. “Come on. Time’s up.”

  “We haven’t had anything like ten minutes,” Moril pointed out.

  “Too bad. The justice wants to see him. On your feet, fellow,” said the guard.

  Dagner got up and climbed back over the bench. He made Moril a face as he was marched off, which Moril thought was intended for a smile. Moril himself, feeling utterly crushed, wandered to the door and was shown briskly through to the entrance again.

  “You’re out again, are you?” said the man on duty. “You’ve been lucky.”

  Moril had not the heart to reply. He did not think he was lucky, particularly as the first thing that met his eyes outside was the two dangling feet of the hanged man.

  Beyond the dangling feet, Brid was sitting in the cart looking haughty and impatient. The cart was still in a clear space, and the sack of oats had been joined by a number of other sacks and bundles, all of them too heavy for Brid to lift by herself.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded, as soon as Moril was near enough. “I thought you were never coming back! What’s the matter? You look like a jug of spilled milk.”

  Moril was feeling so lost and peculiar that all he could do was to go to Olob. He put his arms round Olob’s neck and rubbed his forehead on Olob’s nose.

  “Well, tell me!” said Brid. “Have you seen Dagner?”

  “Yes,” said Moril.

  “Did you tell him to say what I told you?”

  “No,” said Moril.

  “Why not? Moril, I shall hit you in a moment if you don’t tell me sensibly what happened!”

  “I can’t,” said Moril. “Not here.”

  “Why not?” Brid almost shouted.

  Moril realized that he must stop her attracting attention to them. “Please, Brid. Shut up,” he said, looking at her as meaningly as he could from beside Olob’s nose. “Let’s get these sacks loaded and get on.”

  Brid began to see that something terrible might have happened. “Without Dagner?” she said, in a more subdued voice. Moril nodded, tore himself away from warm, soft, friendly Olob, and began to heave at the nearest sack. Brid came down and joined him. “Moril, for goodness’ sake!” she whispered angrily. “It can’t be that bad! You’re behaving as if they’re going to hang Dagner.”

  “They are,” said Moril.

  Brid went white, but she did not really believe him. “Oh no!” she said. “Not on top of everything! Why?”

  “Get these things in, and I’ll tell you when we’re moving,” Moril said.

  They loaded the cart, and Brid drove out of the square. When they came into the cobbled streets, where the cart made sufficient clatter to cover up whispers, Moril told Brid what had happened. It turned Brid so sick and weak that had Olob been that kind of horse, he could easily have got out of control.

  “I can’t believe it!” she kept saying.

  She was still saying it when half a mile out of Neathdale, Kialan pushed his way out of a hedge and came to join them. When he first looked at them, he was smiling, as if he were relieved. Then he saw there were only two of them, and his smile vanished. H
e looked along the cart to make sure Dagner was not there, and then at their faces. When he climbed up to join them, his brown face was tired and yellowish. “What happened?” he said. “Better drive on.”

  “Moril says they’re going to hang Dagner for passing information,” said Brid. “He says Father told Dagner to do it. And I can’t believe it! I just can’t believe it!”

  “Oh,” said Kialan. “They got him for that, did they? I thought that was too much of a risk on top of everything else.”

  “You’re mighty cool, aren’t you?” said Brid. “But I suppose Dagner’s not your brother!”

  There was a pause, in which Kialan tried to control his feelings. But his natural outspokenness won. “All right,” he said. “So he’s not my brother. So you think I don’t know how you feel. You just thank your stars, my girl, that you don’t have to stand there and watch them hang Dagner, like I had to with my brother!” Brid and Moril turned round in the driving seat to stare at Kialan. But they turned back, because there were large, angry tears running past Kialan’s high-bridged nose, and more tears filling and reddening his light blue eyes. “I always thought the world of Dagner, anyway,” he said. “I remember him quite well from when we were small.”

  There was silence, except for horse and cart noises. Brid encouraged Olob to make the best speed he could up the first steep hill to the Uplands. It was horrible to be urging Olob away from Dagner. There were tears in Brid’s eyes, too.

  “Why did they hang your brother?” Moril asked at length.

  “No reason,” Kialan said angrily. “It was Tholian’s idea—that pale-eyed murdering swine who killed your father—but I didn’t hear Hadd or Henda or any of the others making much objection. They just had us put on trial first, to make it seem respectable. And then it came out that I was only fourteen—”

  “Oh! I thought you were older!” said Brid.

  “People do,” said Kialan. “But I was fourteen in March. Tholian was furious, because the rest of the earls said it was against the law to hang me for another year. But they hanged poor Konian, and the ship’s captain, and all the crew they could catch, and they made me watch. It was just like our luck to land when all the earls had got together to invest that brute Tholian! His grandfather died the week before.”

  They were now high enough above Neathdale to have, at that moment, an excellent view of the same Tholian’s mansion. Moril looked down at its long white front, peaceful and pompous and bowered among trees, and felt like a mouse running over the paws of a cat. He wished the cart was not so very pink and noticeable.

  “I’m beginning to think,” Kialan said miserably, “that I bring bad luck on people. First Konian, then your father, now Dagner—and goodness knows what happened to the people who helped me escape from Hadd!”

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” Brid said cautiously, “who are you exactly?”

  “My father’s the Earl of Hannart,” said Kialan. “And if you want to dump me out and drive off, I won’t blame you.”

  Moril looked round for Tholian’s mansion again. To his relief, it was now hidden by a bend in the road. He was glad. He felt as if this piece of news had put them suddenly in great danger. He was limp with terror, although he knew that they must have been in exactly the same danger from the moment Kialan joined them. Any earl of the South—not only Tholian—would have been overjoyed to get his hands on Kialan. His father was their chief enemy. Anyone found helping Kialan was bound to be savagely punished. Moril thought back, terrified, to Kialan walking through towns so as not to seem to belong to them, sharing the cart in full view of travelers on the road, and even being introduced to Ganner as one of them. And if that was Tholian he had seen in Markind, Moril could hardly bear to think what a risk it had been. Clennen could not have known who Kialan was. He would never have done it for the son of someone he had quarreled with. But it looked as if Lenina had known.

  “I should have known you were from the North,” Brid said ruefully, “when you said your name was spelled with a K. They don’t use K’s in the South, do they? I wondered why Mother told Ganner your name was Collen.”

  Kialan chuckled slightly. “Your mother’s a cool one, isn’t she?”

  “I suppose she is. But look here—” said Brid. “What were you and your brother doing in the South? Didn’t you know what would happen?”

  “It was an accident,” said Kialan. “Do you remember that storm at the end of April?”

  “Yes. We nearly lost the big tent. Remember, Moril?” asked Brid. Moril nodded.

  “Well, we nearly got drowned,” said Kialan. “We’d been to our aunt on Tulfer Island, and the storm hit us on the way home. We were blown all over the place, and the boat was sitting half under water with sea pouring in, and I don’t think the captain knew where we were any more than I did. He said we’d have to get to the nearest haven before we sank. And we did. And it turned out to be Holand. And there were all the earls of the South, smacking their lips at us. To tell you the truth,” Kialan said, “I didn’t even feel frightened at first. I was so glad to be on land again.”

  “We were near Holand then,” said Brid. “But we never heard—oh, yes, Father gave it out as news, didn’t he? Is that how Father came into it?”

  “Don’t you think he was bound to be in on it?” asked Kialan. “He didn’t tell me much, but I’m sure he arranged it all. I know the people who helped me escape seemed to spend all the time waiting for messages from the Porter to know what to do next.”

  “What? Father?” Moril said, puzzled.

  “Yes. Your father,” said Kialan. “You don’t mean to tell me you didn’t know he was the Porter?”

  “He was not!” Brid said angrily. “The Porter’s a spy with a price on his head.”

  “Yes, of course, in the South,” said Kialan. “They were mad to catch him here, because he was the main agent for the North. You must have known! He brought all the important messages and most of the refugees. They must have come in this cart. And he organized people here against the earls—I know that, because Konian told me. Konian sent a message to your father for help, during the trial, but it didn’t get to him quick enough.”

  There was a somber pause. Olob clopped patiently upward, zigzagging with the road across the steep hillside, while Brid and Moril tried to take in what Kialan had said. “I thought,” Moril said, “that your father had quarreled with ours?”

  “So did I,” said Kialan. “But I think that was a pretense. I found out last year—I wish people told me things!—because my father vanished and I needed him for something. And Konian told me to shut up, because he’d gone to meet Clennen the Singer like he always did, but no one was supposed to know. I think they arranged what to do next then.”

  “I refuse to believe that my father was a common spy!” said Brid. “Why didn’t he tell me? He ought to have told me! It’s so sneaky, somehow!”

  “Don’t shout!” Moril said, with an anxious look round at Tholian’s mansion, which had come into view again, lower down and farther off.

  Kialan laughed outright. “But he wasn’t sneaky! That was the splendid thing about him! I couldn’t believe he really was the Porter at first. I saw this fat man with a great big voice, who spent all his time trying to impress people, and I thought there’d been an awful mistake. Then I saw him go into towns, in this shocking bright cart, in a scarlet suit just to make sure people didn’t miss him, and sing his head off, and call out at the top of his voice that the price on the Porter’s head was two thousand in gold. It was incredible! Then he and your mother would call out messages and hand out notes, right in front of everyone, and I knew half of them were illegal. But no one would believe it, because it was all done so openly. Nobody thought he was anything more than a very good singer. And I really think Clennen thought that was the best joke about it.”

  Moril blinked a little at this view of his father. But Kialan had hit Clennen off in a way. Clennen had treated their shows as a rather serious joke. If he was really
the Porter all along, then that would be why. “I suppose that’s where Dagner went wrong,” he said sadly. “Trying to be secret.”

  “Dagner was awfully stupid to think he could carry on where Father left off, anyway,” said Brid.

  “He didn’t,” said Kialan. “Dagner wasn’t trying to do that for a moment. But Clennen asked him to finish off the important things if he could. Then he was to go North and stay there. And the message to Neathdale was important because it was about a spy who’d got in among them there.”

  Moril sighed. He did not say that Dagner thought he had given the message to that very spy. There seemed no point. He said, “Dagner said I was to tell you Henda has asked for a ransom for you. And Tholian is gathering an army.”

  “Oh damn!” Kialan said wearily. “Then I’ll have to get through somehow, won’t I? You saw Dagner? Tell me.”

  Moril told Kialan all that happened to him in the jail. He could not help speaking low and looking nervously at Tholian’s mansion each time it came into view. He was relieved when they crossed the brow of the first hill and could not see it anymore.

  “You were lucky, Moril,” said Brid. “If you’d known all the things Kialan’s just told us, we might be in jail at this moment.” Moril nodded soberly. He certainly could not have acted the surprise he felt when they told him what Dagner had been arrested for. But he knew it had been the merest good luck that he had not happened to mention Kialan.

  “I couldn’t think,” said Kialan, “why Clennen made such a point of not telling you two anything. He wouldn’t let me say who I was, and neither would Dagner. But I think it saved our skins. I wish it could have saved Dagner’s.”

  “You don’t think Dagner was really arrested because of you?” Moril asked.

  “I did at first,” said Kialan. “I thought we’d all had it, all the time I was sitting in the hedge. I could hardly believe it when I saw the cart coming. No. I think Dagner’s trouble is separate, and thanks to you, Moril, they think he just did a bit of freedom fighting on the side. But I hope it doesn’t get round to the Earl. Tholian will put two and two together all right.”