Cart and Cwidder

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “They are, aren’t they?” Brid said sadly. “And now—”

  “Moril,” said Kialan, appearing under Olob’s nose, “you can’t happen to remember Dagner’s songs, can you? Enough to play them yourself?”

  “I never thought of that!” said Moril. As soon as he had finished the harness, he fetched out the instruments. While Brid set to work polishing them, Moril took up the big cwidder and tried out the first song of Dagner’s that came into his head. For some reason, it was the song Dagner had never finished, the one Clennen had forbidden him to sing until they were in the North. Moril stopped after the first few notes, to make sure nobody was about. There seemed to be no one, so he went on. He found he wanted to finish it for Dagner. It seemed the only thing he could do for him.

  Dagner had only sketched out part of the tune. Since Moril had no idea what Dagner intended, he let the words take him, this way and that, through a melting blackbird phrase:

  “Come to me, come with me.

  The blackbird asks you, ‘Follow me.’”

  —and then to a kind of birdsong triumph in

  “Wherever you go, I will go.”

  Kialan seemed almost awestruck. But Brid, as soon as she realized what song it was, looked up the cliff and down the slope to make sure they were not overheard. Moril knew he was breaking the law. But he wanted to finish the song, so he went, rather defiantly, on to

  “The sun is up.”

  The cwidder produced a shrill and defiant sound. Moril, cross with himself for being scared, tried to recapture the first melting tone and only succeeded in making a scratchy, bad-tempered tinkle. Dagner would have hated it. Moril thought of Dagner and put in the first four lines again at the end, as Dagner had suggested he might. But he was not thinking very clearly of Dagner himself—more of Dagner as part of that happy family on a green road in the North that he had pictured the night before. And just as he had last night, he heard the cwidder making that odd, muzzy noise.

  Moril sprang up and sprang back. He could not help it. The cwidder fell on the turf with a melodious thump.

  “Moril!” said Brid. “You’ll break it!”

  “It was splendid!” said Kialan. “Don’t stop.”

  “I don’t care!” Moril said hysterically. “I’ve a good mind to jump on it! The blessed thing was playing my thoughts! It played the way I was thinking!”

  Brid and Kialan looked at one another, then at Moril. “Don’t you think,” Kialan said, “that that’s the way it works? It’s your thoughts that bring out the power.”

  “But it never did that for Father!” said Moril. “He told me! He said it only did it once.”

  “Well,” Kialan said, rather awkwardly, “he couldn’t really use it, could he? It wasn’t his kind of thing.”

  “Except just that one time,” said Brid. “Which proves it, Moril. Because it must have been when Father saw Mother in Ganner’s hall. And he wanted her to love him instead of Ganner so much that he managed to make the cwidder work, and she did love him enough to come away with him.”

  After that Moril went and put the cwidder away. Brid got it out again and polished it for him, but he pretended not to notice. When Olob, the cart, and all the instruments were gleaming with care, they set off again through the first Upland, toward the steep hill to the second. Brid drove. Moril sat beside her, trying out another of Dagner’s songs on his small treble cwidder. But it was no good. The treble cwidder just felt foolish and flimsy and shrill, and it sounded terribly ordinary. As Olob settled into a slow, heaving walk up the steep hill into the next Upland, Moril was forced to turn and ask Kialan to put the little cwidder away and pass him the big one.

  The matter-of-fact way Kialan handed it to him made Moril feel much better about it. Moril took the cwidder thankfully. It felt right. He was not sure now whether it was a comfort or a burden, but if Kialan could accept so easily that it was a powerful and mysterious thing, so could he. But he knew he was going to have to learn to control the thing. You could not earn your living with a cwidder that whined if you were miserable and croaked if you were cross. “How should I start?” he asked Kialan over his shoulder.

  Kialan hesitated, not because he did not understand Moril, but because he was not sure how Moril should start. “Understanding yourself, perhaps?” he asked. “I mean, I’ve no idea either, but try that. Er—why didn’t you stay in Markind, for instance? Was it just seeing Tholian there?”

  Moril, by this time, was sure that it was not. “Why didn’t you want to stay?” he asked Brid, as a start. “Duty to Father?”

  “Like Mother, you mean?” said Brid. “N-no. A bit of that. I do prefer Father’s outlook to Mother’s, but it was really almost more like the way Mother went back to Ganner. It’s what I’m used to—this—and nothing else felt right.”

  Moril felt that went for him, too. But there was more to it than that. He could have persuaded Brid to go back to Markind after Dagner was arrested, but he had not thought of it, even. He had not wanted to go back when he had found out how dangerous their journey North really was. And he was still going North, as if it was a matter of course. Why?

  “Why, Moril?” asked Brid.

  “I was born in the North,” Moril answered, rather slowly. “When I—er—dream of things, it’s always the North. And the North is right and the South is wrong.”

  “Bravo!” said Kialan.

  Moril turned to smile at him. He found himself turning from the towering unseeable hills of the North to a low, blue vision of the South, beyond Kialan’s head. “But I still don’t understand,” he said.

  At the top of the hill there was a village, a very small place, simply ten houses and an alehouse, clinging to the steep brow of the hill.

  “Don’t let’s perform here,” said Brid. “There’s a bigger place farther on, I know.”

  They went past the village into a wider Upland, full of grazing sheep. By the middle of the morning Moril’s cwidder was sounding melancholy. “I can’t see us getting much,” he said. “Not just the two of us.”

  “Would it help at all,” said Kialan, “if I were to pretend to be Dagner?”

  Both their heads whipped round his way. It was almost a marvelous idea.

  “Would they remember Dagner from last year?” said Kialan.

  “We didn’t perform in the Uplands at all last year,” said Brid. “But—”

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Kialan. “No one but the earls knows I’m in the South. And it’s so out of the way here that no one’s going to know Dagner was arrested unless we tell them. I think it would be safe enough—and a bit in your father’s style, too.”

  Moril made the obvious objection. “You can’t sing.” They looked at one another for a moment. Moril remembered Kialan listening in to his lessons with Clennen, appearing in the crowd whenever they gave a show, and seeming so knowledgeable the time the big cwidder went out of tune. “Or can you?” said Moril.

  “Not as well as you,” said Kialan, “but—may I borrow one of these cwidders for a moment?”

  “Go ahead,” said Brid.

  Kialan took up Dagner’s cwidder and tuned it without needing to be given a note. Moril and Brid looked at one another. Neither of them could do that. And from the moment Kialan started to play, they knew they were listening to a gifted person very much out of practice. If he did not sing as well as he played, it was merely because he was the age when his voice still moved troublesomely from low to high. Moril vividly remembered the trouble Dagner had had at the same age.

  What Kialan sang was a song of the Adon’s, one that Clennen never sang in the South.

  “Unbounded truth is not a thing

  Cramped to time and bound in place—”

  “Ooh!” said Brid, looking nervously round.

  “No one about. Shut up!” said Moril.

  Kialan did that part meticulously in the right old style. But then he gave Moril a bit of a wink and dropped into the same kind of different fingering Moril had used in Neathd
ale. The song seemed to come alive.

  “Truth strangely changes space,

  By right of its reality.

  It moves the hills containing me

  Wider than the world, or small

  As in a nut. Truth is free

  And laws are stones, or not at all,

  And men without it nothing.”

  “Oh, I liked that!” said Moril.

  “I took a leaf out of your book,” Kialan said, rather apologetically. “I don’t like the old style either, and I don’t see why old things should be sacred. Wow! I’m out of practice, though! Do you think I’ll be any use to you?”

  “You know you will,” said Brid. “You big fraud. If you’re that good, why on earth didn’t you say so before? Father would have put you in the show, instead of making you walk through all the towns.”

  “I know he would!” Kialan said feelingly. “He’d have dressed me in scarlet and flaunted me. I didn’t quite like to say anything at first—you were all so excellent—and as soon as I realized what your father was like, I’d have died rather than tell him. It was frightening enough walking.”

  The upshot of this was that Olob quietly pulled the gleaming cart onto the green of the village a mile or so on, and three people stood up to sing and play. Moril and Kialan were nervous, Brid, as usual, as confident as a queen. Moril did one or two of Dagner’s songs, but mostly they sang ballads, since those were Brid’s specialty and Kialan’s voice was not equal to anything more difficult. A scattering of people listened and clapped. Someone asked for an encore, and Brid gave them “Cow-Calling.” They got a little money, enough to buy eggs, milk, and butter, and a woman gave Brid a basket of somewhat withered apples. It was not a raving success, but it was no failure either.

  “We can do it!” said Brid.

  Moril smiled, and strummed his cwidder as they took to the road again. Every so often he played a tune in earnest, and Kialan would come in, too, on Dagner’s cwidder. Kialan was getting more in practice every moment. They experimented, and tried for effects and new settings. Moril had seldom enjoyed making music so much. He almost wished the distance to Hannart were twice as long.

  10

  They had a sort of cheese omelet for lunch, sitting on a point of green land between two brisk streams. Kialan would have it that what they were eating was scrambled eggs. Brid disagreed. Moril did not join in the argument because he was listening to the sound of the water. It made him think of the North. The sound of water running was never far away in the North. He was dreamily considering whether one could make a tune that captured the noise when Brid shook him sharply and told him they were moving.

  “You didn’t have to do that!” said Kialan.

  “Why not? You know how maddening he is when he goes into a dream,” Brid retorted.

  “Yes, but it’s just his way,” said Kialan. “He’s about six times as awake as most people, really. I bet he heard every word we said—didn’t you, Moril?”

  “I suppose I did,” Moril said, in some surprise.

  “Can I drive this next stretch?” Kialan asked.

  Neither Brid nor Moril objected. Letting Kialan drive Olob seemed the best way to show he was a full member of the company now and not a passenger any longer. So Kialan held the reins, and Olob clopped onward through the lonely Upland. Moril sat beside him, still strumming the cwidder, looking dreamily round at the hills, the flocks of sheep, and the occasional shepherd in the distance.

  They came to a steep rise to the third and last Upland. It was the highest and also the most beautiful of the three climbs, because it was clothed in trees the whole way up. The road, though it was the main road, dwindled to a rutty lane, damp and stony, boring its way upward through the woods. The sunlight fell in gay splashes through the bright leaves of springtime. All three of them looked upward and grinned at the way their faces became speckled and greenish.

  But Olob, whether he objected to Kialan’s holding the reins or to having to climb two steep hills in one day, became steadily more restive. At first it was simply tossing his head and stopping. Kialan persuaded him to move again, each time with more difficulty. But, as they went on upward, Olob took to trampling this way and that, so that the cart wheels caught in the hawthorns at the side of the road. Kialan grew exasperated. The fourth time Olob did it, Kialan lost his temper and swore at Olob. Olob promptly turned right across the road and seemed to be trying to climb the sheer bank into the woods. Moril thought the cart would overturn. The wine jar fell over and knocked Brid sideways, with a dreadful twanging of cwidders.

  “Let me take him,” said Moril.

  Kialan crossly handed him the reins. Moril propped the cwidder across his knees and worked with both hands and some shouting to persuade Olob back onto the road again. Olob refused to come out of the bushes.

  “What’s got into him?” said Kialan.

  “No idea,” said Moril. As he said it, two memories came to him. One was of almost exactly the same conversation, between himself and Lenina, just before Tholian came out of the wood and killed Clennen. The other was of Olob behaving like a colt in Neathdale, just before Dagner was arrested. “Quick!” he said to Kialan. “There are enemies near, and Olob knows. Get out and go through the woods until we’ve passed them.”

  “How can he know?” said Kialan, with his most fedup look.

  “I don’t know, but he does. Father always said he wouldn’t part with Olob for an earldom, and I think that’s why. Get out, I said!” Moril said urgently.

  “Do as you’re told, Kialan!” said Brid from the tilted bottom of the cart.

  Kialan, entirely unconvinced, swung himself grudgingly down from the cart. As Olob was halfway through a bush, up the right bank of the road, Kialan went up beside him by the space he had cleared, and vanished among the trees higher up. Moril could hear his cross footsteps swishing along the steep hillside.

  “Go quietly!” he said, but he could tell Kialan took no notice. Moril dumped the cwidder in the canted cart and went to Olob’s head. Olob was most unwilling to leave the bush. “I know, old fellow, but we’ve got to go on and look innocent,” Moril said. “Come on, now!”

  It took some time to get Olob back on the road. When he did consent to come, Brid had to lean on the cart to keep it upright. Then she climbed in and tried to set the wine jar and the instruments to rights. Olob reluctantly climbed onward. Above them in the woods, Kialan’s feet kept pace with the cart, swishing loudly and cracking twigs. Moril wished he would not make so much noise.

  Olob toiled round three corners and Brid still seemed to be busy in the cart. “What are you doing?” Moril asked.

  “Putting my boots on,” said Brid. “If there are enemies near, I’m going to look respectable. And I’m putting the sharp knife down the right boot.” She joined him shortly, looking flushed and determined, firmly booted. “I’ll drive,” she said.

  Moril gave her the reins and hung the cwidder round his neck by its strap, which, he supposed, was his way of looking respectable. His boots, by this time, were nothing like as new and smart as Brid’s. Brid was better at managing Olob. Olob put on a great act of this being the most difficult climb of his life and did everything in his power to suggest that they turn back, but Brid kept him going. Beyond the protesting clatter of his hooves, Moril listened for Kialan, but he could not hear him any longer. By this time they were near the top of the climb. They rounded what must have been the last corner, and Olob shied.

  “Clever Olob,” Brid remarked.

  There was a stout wooden trestle in the road. It did not fill the road, but it was placed so that there was no room for a cart to pass on either side. There were a number of men with it, one of them sitting on the trestle. To Moril’s dismay, they were all in full war gear. Each of them wore a steel cap and a steel breastplate with a pointed front—which gave them all chests like pigeons—over jackets and trousers of tough leather. They wore great black boots and long swords in black leather scabbards.

  Brid drew t
he alarmed Olob up. “Would you mind moving the trestle? We need to get by,” she said haughtily. She was frightened and daunted, but there were enough soldiers to make her feel as if she had an audience.

  Three of the men strolled forward. None of them made any effort to move the trestle. “What’s your business?” said one. The other two strolled on and looked over the sides of the cart to see what was in it.

  “Drunkards, by the look of this wine,” one said, and both of them sniggered a little.

  “We’re singers,” said Brid. “Can’t you see?”

  “In that case, let’s see your license,” said the first man, and held out his hand for it. Brid, after a moment’s hesitation, fetched the license out of the locker under the seat and handed it to him. He looked at it casually. “Which of you is Clennen?”

  “That’s my father,” said Brid. “He was killed four days ago.”

  “Then you haven’t got a license,” said the man. “Have you?”

  “Yes, we have,” said Brid. “We’re entitled to sing under that license for six months. That’s the law, and you can’t tell me it isn’t.”

  “That may be the law in the other earldoms, but not in the South Dales,” the man said, grinning. “You haven’t read the small print.” He unrolled the parchment and pointed vaguely to the bottom of it. When Brid leaned over to look, he took it out of reach and let it roll up again. “Too bad,” he said. “You’d better come and explain yourselves.”

  “It doesn’t say that at all!” Brid said furiously. “You’re just using it as an excuse. That license is perfectly in order, and you know it!”

  The man stopped grinning. “You’ll do as you’re told,” he said. He nodded to one of the other men, who took hold of Olob’s bridle. The rest moved the trestle aside. The one holding Olob hauled on him and Olob, passively resisting for all he was worth, was forced to move reluctantly on. Brid and Moril were towed after him, feeling quite helpless. It was clear that someone—Tholian, probably—had given orders that all travelers were to be stopped. Moril looked back to see the soldiers putting the trestle across the road again and sitting on it to wait for any other comers. He wondered about jumping off the cart and running. But there was a soldier walking on either side of it and it did not seem worth trying. Their only hope seemed to be to use Clennen’s method and appear as open and innocent as they knew how.