Cart and Cwidder (11 page)

While they practiced, Kialan lay full length on a rock above them, listening and also, Moril suspected, acting as lookout. This elaborate caution began to irritate Moril. After all, it was Moril and Brid who stood to lose if Ganner found them, not Dagner and Kialan. In the morning he was exasperated to see that they had been on watch again. Both of them looked tired out.

Brid was furious. “How on earth do you think you're going to give a performance, Dagner, if you can hardly keep your eyes open? I've never known you so silly! We
depend
on you!”

“All right,” Dagner said wearily. “You drive and I'll have a sleep in the cart. But wake me if—if—”

“If
what
?” snapped Brid.

“If anything happens,” said Dagner, and lay down beside the wine jar with a groan. Kialan flopped down on the other side of the jar, and both of them fell asleep before Olob had the cart in motion.

It was left to Brid and Moril to find the way to Neathdale. They did it, too, half cross and half proud of themselves. The map did not help much. They were forced to follow their noses across country, turning into any road that seemed to go northwest and hoping for the best. Once they arrived in a farmyard and had to back out of it, pursued by the barking of dogs and the squalling of hens and roosters. Kialan and Dagner did not even stir. “Stupid fools,” said Brid. They were still asleep when the cart came out on a rise above Neathdale.

“We did it!” said Moril.

“Unless Olob knew the way,” Brid said, trying to be fair. “But I don't think even he can have come to it this way before.”

Neathdale was a big cheerful-looking town lying across the main road north to Flennpass, in the last level ground before the Uplands. They could look across even its tallest buildings from where they were to where the South Dales mounted like stairs to the Mark Wood plateau.

“Say four days, and we'll be in the North,” Moril said yearningly.

“Four days,” said Brid promptly.

The scuffle that followed on the driving seat woke Dagner and Kialan at last. “What's the matter? What's going on?”

“Nothing. Only Neathdale,” said Brid. Dagner's sleepy face at once became pinched and tense and mauvish. Brid set herself to soothe him. “We always used to get good takings here,” she said. “There must be hundreds of people who remember us and know Father. I'm going to do the talking, mind, and I shall talk about Father and say who we are—though they can read that on the cart anyway.”

“The cart ought to be repainted with Dagner's name,” Moril observed. He did not think Brid was soothing Dagner in the slightest, but he did not mind helping.

“You'd hardly get the name on,” Brid said brightly. “Dastgandlen down one side and Handagner up the other, I suppose.”

“Isn't Neathdale the seat of Earl Tholian?” Kialan asked, tactlessly cutting through the soothing.

“Not really. His place is outside a bit, over to the east,” Dagner said. He pointed with a hand that shook noticeably. A great white house was just visible, among trees, on the other side of Neathdale.

“Blast you, Kialan!” said Brid. Kialan looked at her in surprise. “Oh, it doesn't matter,” said Brid. “Just if this show goes wrong, I'll blame you. Dagner, I think we'd better put on our glad rags now.”

“No,” said Dagner.

“What do you mean?” said Brid.

“Just no,” said Dagner. “We'll give the show as we are. We're quite respectable.”

“Yes, but we always change,” Brid protested. “It gives you a feel.”

“That was Father's idea,” said Dagner. “And he was right in a way. It went with his style to come rolling in, singing and glittering. He could live up to it. But if I go in dressed in tinsel and singing my head off, people are just going to laugh.”

“You think that because you're nervous,” Brid said persuasively. “You'll feel better once you're changed.”

“No, I won't,” said Dagner. “I'll feel ten times worse. Brid, I just haven't got Father's personality, and I can't do the same things. I'll have to do them my way, or not at all. See?”

Brid, by this time, was near tears. “Do you mean you're not going to give a show at all then?”

“Not Father's kind,” said Dagner, “because I can't. We'll give a show all right, because we'll starve if we don't, and you can introduce us and explain what's happened, and maybe it'll be all right. But if I find you boasting and ranting about us—that goes for you, too, Moril—I'll stop. We'll just have to be plain, because we're not Father.”

Brid sighed heavily. “All right. But I'm going to put my boots on, anyway. I need a feel.” She brightened a little. “I've always hated the color of your suit, Moril. You look nicer like that.”

“Thank you,” Moril said politely. Dagner had suddenly brought it home to him that, for the first time in their lives, they were about to give a show entirely on their own. He had never, as far as he knew, been nervous before. Now he was. As Brid drove downhill toward Neathdale, Moril sat clutching the big cwidder with hands that were icy cold and sweating at once, and it would have been hard to say whether he or Dagner was the more nervous. The houses came nearer. Quite desperate, Moril laid his cheek against the smooth wood of the cwidder. “Oh, please help me!” he whispered to it. “I'll never manage. I can't!”

“Can you stop a moment?” said Kialan.

Brid drew up. Kialan immediately swung down from the cart to the road. Brid looked at him somberly. “Now you're going to give us that about not being interested in our shows, aren't you? Well don't. I won't believe you. I've seen you listening to every show we've given.”

Kialan looked up at Brid's stormy face and seemed nonplussed. Then he laughed. “All right. I won't give you that. But I'm going to meet you on the other side of Neathdale all the same. See you.” He set off at a good swinging pace toward the town, with his hands in his pockets, whistling “Jolly Holanders.”

“I give up!” said Brid. But both her brothers were too nervous to reply.

7

The main square at Neathdale was always busy. It was not very large, but it had a handsome fountain in the middle and four inns on three of its sides. There was also a corn exchange and two guildhalls, which added to the coming and going. The fourth side was occupied by the gray frowning block of the jail. When Brid drove the cart into the square, it seemed busier even than they had remembered. It was packed with people. The reason, they saw, as Olob patiently shouldered his way toward the fountain, was that there had been a public hanging that morning. The gallows was still there, outside the jail, and so was the hanged man. A number of people outside the inns were raising tankards jeeringly in his direction.

The dangling figure made them all feel sick, although it meant a good crowd. Dagner turned green. Moril clutched his cwidder hard and swallowed. Brid could not resist leaning down and asking the nearest person who it was who had been hanged.

“Friend of the Porter's,” was the cheerful reply. It was a cheerful whiskery man Brid had chosen to ask, and he looked as if he had enjoyed every second of the hanging. “Some say he
was
the Porter,” he added, “but you can't tell. He wouldn't admit to anything. Taken up last week, he was, on the new Earl's orders.”

“Oh, is there a new Earl?” Brid said blankly, trying to keep her eyes from the swinging criminal.

“Sure,” said the man. “Old Tholian died more than a month back. The new Earl's the grandson. Got a real nose for the Porter and his like, he has. Good luck to him, too!”

“Oh yes. Very good luck,” Brid said hurriedly, terrified of being arrested for disloyalty to the new Earl.

“Leave off, Brid, and let's get started,” Dagner said irritably.

Brid smiled rather falsely at the whiskery man and hitched up the reins so that Olob knew to stand still. Then she blew a blast on the panhorn for attention. When sufficient people had turned their way, she stood up and spoke. Moril marveled at how cool she was. But Brid was like Clennen that way. An audience was meat and drink to her.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she called, “please come and listen. You see the cart I'm standing in? Many of you will know it quite well. If you do, you'll know it belongs to Clennen the Singer. You'll have seen it coming through Neathdale, year after year, on its way North. Most of you will know Clennen the Singer—”

She had aroused people's interest by then. Moril heard someone say, “It's Clennen the Singer.”

“No, it isn't,” said someone else. “Who's the pretty little lass?”

“Where's Clennen, then? It isn't Clennen,” said other people. Finally, someone was puzzled enough to call out, “Where is Clennen, lass? Isn't he with you?”

“I'll tell you,” said Brid. “I'll tell you all.” Then she stopped and simply stood there, upright and conspicuous in her cherry dress. Moril could see she was trying not to cry. But he could also see she was making it plain to the crowd that she was trying not to cry. He marveled at the way she could use real feelings for what was in fact a show. He knew he could not have done it.

Brid stood there silent long enough for murmurs of interest to gather and grow but not long enough for them to die away. Then she said: “I'll tell you. Clennen—my father—was killed two days ago.” And she stood silent again, struggling with tears, listening attentively to murmurs of sympathy. “He was killed before our eyes,” she said. At the height of a loud murmur, she came in again, loudly, but in such a calm way that Moril and most of the people present thought she was speaking quietly. They hushed to hear her. “We are the children of Clennen the Singer—Brid, Moril, and Dastgandlen Handagner—and we're doing our best to carry on without him. I hope you'll spare time to listen to us. We know our show will not be the same without Clennen, but—but we'll try to please you. We hope you'll forgive any faults in—in memory of my father.”

She got a round of applause for that. “Put your hat out, then, and let's hear you!” someone shouted. Brid, with tears running down her cheeks, picked up the hat she had ready and tossed it on the ground. Several people put money into it at once, out of pure sympathy for them. Brid could not help feeling pleased with herself. She had made a considerable effect without boasting once—in fact, she had done the opposite, which, she thought, ought to please Dagner.