Drowned Ammet

6

There were great gales that spring. The sea broke the dikes in two places, and even in the harbor, boats blew this way and that and masts snapped. Siriol could not put to sea for a fortnight, and few people in Holand went out much because the wind in the street filled your face with sand and salt until you could barely see. Mitt was kept very busy. The old Earl of the South Dales died, and all the earls of the South began to gather in Holand to invest the new Earl, as the custom was. People asked one another whether Hadd would manage to quarrel with them all or only half of them. Mitt thought Hadd must be determined to. Hobin was busy making and mending guns day and night. The Palace must have bristled with them. Mitt got little chance to look at any earls. He saw one windswept fine person, who looked as if he would very much rather have been indoors, but no one could tell Mitt if he was an earl or not.

“Down with him, anyway!” Mitt muttered, and hurried back indoors.

Then a strange boat was sighted, beyond the shoals, beating her way to the harbor. There was intense excitement. The boat was said to be a Northerner. Mitt could think of nothing else.

“We’d best settle this for you before you ruin any more bullets,” Hobin said. He and Mitt put on pea jackets against the gale and went out to look, along with most of the rest of Holand.

The ship was wallowing in the great waves outside the harbor wall, black in the yellow stormy light. Though all her canvas was in and she was riding only on the rags of a storm sail, Mitt saw at once that she was indeed a Northerner. She had the square rigging which few ships in the South used these days. People round Mitt shook their heads and said it was daft to go out in this gale with a little square-rigger like that, but then Northmen were all daft. And it was clear the ship was in bad trouble. For some minutes Mitt doubted that she would make the harbor at all. Then she rounded the wall, and it was clear she would be safe.

The harbor was lined with soldiers to meet her. Behind them, a lot of ordinary people had come out with knives and stones. And Mitt watched with the most extraordinary mixed feelings. He was glad the ship was safe. But how dared they! How dared they put into Holand harbor like this! The ship wallowed her waterlogged way to the quayside. When some of the sailors on board saw the soldiers waiting; they dived into the harbor rather than be caught.

“What cowards!” he said to Hobin.

“They haven’t a chance, anyway,” said Hobin. “Poor devils.”

The Northmen who stayed on board were taken prisoner as soon as soldiers could jump onto the ship. The crowd hid most of it from Mitt. But he had a glimpse of them being taken uphill to the Palace, a bunch of soaking, draggled fellows with fair hair and brown faces, who all had a thicker, healthier look than anyone in Holand, even though they were plainly almost too exhausted to realize what had happened to them. Mitt’s shaken thought was that they looked like people. He had expected them to look mysteriously free. But they held their heads low and shuffled along, just like anyone else taken by Harchad’s men.

Their arrival caused quite as much excitement up at the Palace. Everyone had been in a ferment there, anyway, because of the investment of the new Earl. Feasts and fuss and arrangements had gone on for a week now. All the children were bundled out of the way and ordered to be seen and not heard—and not seen unless asked for. There was much excited peeping and giggling. To Hildy’s scorn, all the girl cousins decided that the new Earl of the South Dales was terribly handsome and spied on him whenever they could. They all wished they had been betrothed to him and not to whomever they were betrothed to. Hildy herself thought Tholian looked rather unkind. She made the mistake of telling Harilla so.

“All right, Lady Be Different!” said Harilla. “I’m not telling you my spyhole for that. Go and find your own.”

Hildy did not mind. Ynen and she were better than any of them at finding places where they could see what was going on. They watched a great deal of the feasting and music, until it was obvious that the Lord of the Holy Islands was not going to arrive.

“Why not?” Hildy wondered.

“I don’t think he’s anyone’s hearthman,” said Ynen. “His job is to keep the North’s fleet out.”

Then it was learned that one Northern ship at least had slipped through. Half the earls were convinced that it was the first of an invasion. The messages, the orders, and the bustling about made Hildy think of an ants’ nest stirred with a stick, and there were more still when the soaking prisoners were marched in. The prisoners were questioned. It came out that two of them were nobly born—and not only that, they were the sons of the Earl of Hannart himself. The excitement was feverish. The Earl of Hannart was a wanted man in the South. Ynen reported to Hildy that when he was a young man, the Earl of Hannart had come South and taken part in the great rebellion, just as if he were a common revolutionary.

The fate of the Northmen was no longer in doubt. They were all put on trial for their lives.

Now it is a fact that if you are brought up to expect something, you expect it. Hildy and Ynen were used to people being tried and hanged almost daily. It did not worry them particularly that the Northmen were going to be hanged. Most of the Palace people said they had asked for it by putting into Holand anyway. But Hildy and Ynen were very anxious to catch a glimpse of the Earl of Hannart’s sons while they were still alive to be seen. It was not easy to do. Hadd was afraid that some of the freedom fighters in Holand might attempt to set the Northerners free, and nobody was allowed near them who had no business to be. But on the last day of the trial Hildy and Ynen managed to stand in an archway near where the younger son was being kept prisoner.

They saw soldiers come out. They saw their uncle Harchad in the midst of them, and with him the Earl’s son. When they came level with the archway, Hildy was astonished to see that the Earl’s son was quite young—no older than Harchad’s own son—just a big boy, really. And when they were beside the archway, Harchad suddenly turned and kicked the Earl’s son. Instead of glaring or swearing at Harchad, as Hildy herself or any of the cousins would have done, the boy cringed away and put one arm over his head. “Don’t!” he said. “Not anymore!”

Hildy stared after the soldiers as they marched the prisoner away to the courtroom. She had sometimes seen revolutionaries cringe like that. She had thought that was the way common people behaved. But that an Earl’s son should be brought to behave like that shook her to the core.

“I wonder,” she said. “Is Uncle Harchad very cruel, do you think?”

“Of course he is,” said Ynen. “Didn’t you know?” And he began telling her some of the things he had heard from the boy cousins.

Hildy stared at him. Even though she realized Ynen was quite as shaken as she was, some of the things he said made her feel so sick and cold that she had to run at him with both arms stretched out and bang him against the side of the archway to shut him up. “Oh be quiet! Don’t you mind!”

“Of course I mind,” said Ynen. “But what can I do?”

The prisoners were hanged the following day. Hadd gave permission for the Palace children to watch if they wanted. Ynen said he did not want to. Hildy was trying to decide whether, after what she had seen, she wanted to or not when a message came from Navis. He forbade Hildy and Ynen to watch. Hildy found she was relieved.

But in some ways a dreadful thing you do not see is more dreadful. Hildy tried not to watch the clock, but she knew the exact moment when the executions started. When a groaning sort of cheer came up out of the courtyard, Ynen covered his ears. What made it seem all the more dreadful was that their cousin Irana was carried out screaming, their cousin Harilla actually fainted, and all the rest, boys and girls alike, were sick as dogs.

“It must have been horrible!” Hildy said, quite awed.

After that neither she nor Ynen went near their uncle Harchad if they could help it.

The gales dropped, and the earls all went home. Hildy’s cousin Irana Harchadsdaughter ran feverishly from window to window trying to get a last glimpse of the Earl of the South Dales.

This sentimental behavior so disgusted Hildy that she said, “I don’t know why you carry on like that. He hasn’t even looked at you. And I bet he’s twice as cruel as your father is. His eyes are even meaner.”

Irana burst into tears. Hildy laughed and went out for the first sail of the year in the yacht Wind’s Road. But Irana went weeping to her cousin Harilla and told her how beastly Hildy had been.

“She said that, did she?” said Harilla. “Right. It’s time someone taught Lady Superior a lesson. Come with me to Grandfather. I bet he doesn’t know she’s gone out sailing.”

Hadd did not. He was in a very bad temper, anyhow, having quarreled furiously with Earl Henda. And the coming of the ship from the North had brought home to him just how important it was to have an alliance with the Lord of the Holy Islands. The thought that this alliance was at that very moment in danger of drowning in a squall was almost too much for him. He was so angry that Harilla was almost sorry she had gone to him. She got her face slapped, as if it was her fault. Then Navis was summoned. Hadd raged at him for half an hour. And when Hildy came in, she found herself in the worst trouble of her life. She was utterly forbidden ever to go sailing again, in any kind of boat whatsoever.

For three days after that, even Ynen hardly dared go near Hildy. She stole a fur rug from her aunt and sat wrapped in it, up on the leads of the roof, looking out over the lovely whelming sea, streaked gray, green-blue, and yellow where the sandbanks were, too angry even to cry. It’s just the alliance. He doesn’t care about me, she thought. Then, after two days, she remembered she would be able to sail once she got to the Holy Islands. I wish I could go now she thought. Away from this horrible cruel place. She spent the rest of the day making a loving drawing of Wind’s Road. When it was finished, she cut it carefully in half and labeled one half “Ynen” and the other “Hildrida.” Then she crossed out “Hildrida” and wrote “Ynen” on that half, too. After that, she came down from the leads and handed both halves to Ynen.

“There you are. She’s all yours now.”

Ynen sat holding both halves of the drawing. He was glad, but it seemed a shame. It was the high price Hildy had to pay for being important: Ynen reflected that this autumn he would at last be old enough to take part in the Sea Festival. He swore to himself that if he died in the attempt, he would catch his grandfather one on the nose with a rattle. Hadd deserved it if ever anyone did. Then he thought about the Earl of Hannart’s sons and hoped Uncle Harchad would be in the procession, too. He would catch a whopper.

Down in Holand, they were still talking about the Northmen. As Milda said, it seemed hard to hang them when they had only come in for shelter. Hobin said it was only to be expected. Mitt gradually forgot his mixed feelings. As time went on, he remembered more and more his glimpse of the Northerners shuffling like all prisoners. It came to something, he thought, when the tyranny of Holand could make free men of the North look so abject. In fact, as a free soul himself, he despised the Northmen a little for it. Come autumn, and I’ll show them! he thought.

Most people were sorry for the Northmen. Feeling ran high against Hadd all that summer. Then rumors were heard that the North had defeated the South in a great battle and blocked the last of the passes in the mountains between them. After that even people who were in favor of Hadd began saying it was Hadd’s fault. He had let them in for a shameful defeat by hanging twenty innocent men.

“Good,” said Siriol. Things are going our way nicely.”

The Free Holanders were planning long and carefully all through that summer. Among other things it suddenly dawned on Mitt and Milda that no one must connect Hobin with Mitt when Mitt threw his bomb. Give Harchad’s spies half a clue, as Mitt said, and Hobin would be hanged. Mitt was confident that he could lie well enough to keep Hobin out of it. “I’ve had years of practice,” he said. “The wonder is that I know how to tell the truth these days. But will Hobin keep himself out of it?” That was the trouble. Hobin seldom bothered to watch the Festival. But he might take it into his head to do so, and if he saw Mitt being arrested, he was quite capable of going with Mitt and spoiling everything. “That’s the worst of him being so honest,” Mitt said.

Mitt took this problem to the Free Holanders. They put their heads together. The result was that Ham, who had always liked Hobin, struck up a proper friendship with him. The two of them went for walks together, out in the Flate, all that summer. Ham managed surprisingly cunningly. He got Hobin used to longer and longer walks. By the end of the summer they were spending all day in the Flate, having supper at an inn, and not getting back to Holand until after nightfall.

“See?” Ham said, with his big, slow grin. “Then on the day of the Festival, we go out to High Mill, twenty-odd mile, and we’ll be seen. I’ll make sure the innkeeper swears to us.”

Then, to Mitt’s exasperation, another society of freedom fighters put its oar in. It was called Hands to the North. It tacked notices to the gates of the Palace and the barracks which promised, in crude writing and even cruder language, to kill Hadd during the Sea Festival. “AND AS MANY ER THE REST ER YU AS WE CAN GIT.”

“That’s torn it!” Mitt said as soon as he heard the news. Milda broke the eggs again, and a jug of milk for good measure, and she and Mitt both seized a baby apiece and hurried round to see Siriol. “What shall we do?” said Mitt. “There’ll be spies and soldiers all over now. Who are these Hands to the North anyway?”

“Not any lot I know,” said Siriol. “This is bad. It could have the Earl stopping the Festival.”

“He’d better not!” said Milda. “I’ve trained Mitt for this for years. And the clothes won’t fit him if we have to wait another year.”

Siriol thought, in his customary unhurried way. “If the Palace thinks of staying at home,” he said, “we’ll hear it soon enough on the grapevine. Meanwhile, it wouldn’t do no harm to see if we couldn’t start a bit of a panic. Go round letting on that it’ll be terrible bad luck for Holand to stop the Festival, and that kind of thing.”

So the Free Holanders dropped a word here and another there. Most of them were content simply to hint at dire bad luck. But Mitt felt he could not leave things so much to chance. Whenever Hobin was not by to listen, Mitt would whisper passionately to anyone who happened to be in the workshop, of floods, fires, famines, and plagues. “And that’s just the least of what’ll happen if old Hadd’s too scared to hold the Festival, ‘’ he would conclude, and pull a dreadful face to suggest all the other unspeakable kinds of bad luck. When Milda was out shopping, she said things even more highly colored.

Four days later the rumor came back to Mitt when the arms inspectors called on their weekly visit. “Hear what they’re saying?” said one. “They say if Hadd stops the Festival, the sea rises up and spews out monsters over Holand, and all manner of ignorant nonsense.”

“Yes,” said the other. “Monsters with heads like horses and horns like bulls. I mean, I know it makes you laugh, Hobin, but you must admit it shows how much happier everyone would be to know there is going to be a Festival this year.”

Hobin was still laughing after they had gone. “Monsters!” he said. “Don’t let me catch you listening to that sort of nonsense, Mitt.”

“No fear!” said Mitt. Secretly he was awed by the way the rumor had grown.

Next day Hadd announced that the Festival would be held as usual. Hadd was no coward, and no fool either. The news Harchad’s spies brought him showed him well enough how much, he was hated in Holand. He knew that to cancel the Festival might be the thing that could spark off a real revolution. So he did not cancel it. But he forbade any of his grandsons to take part in the procession. The procession, this year, was to consist of servants and merchants and their sons—all people who did not count.

The news was a great blow to Ynen. He had looked forward to the Festival for months. He had counted on hitting Hadd with a rattle. He had dreamed of himself whirling the rattle round and round under Hadd’s great pointed beak, closer and closer, and at last, bash. But now… It did not console Ynen in the least that he was allowed to come to the feast afterward. And it was the last straw to learn that his father was to be in the procession. Harl was quite content to stay in the safety of the Palace. Harchad, of course, would be busy supervising the soldiers and spies posted to keep Hadd safe. But someone in Hadd’s family had to carry Libby Beer, and Hadd chose Navis. Navis was his most expendable son. Besides, Hadd did not like Navis much.

“It’s not fair!” Ynen said to Hildy out of his disappointment. “Why is Father allowed in the procession, and not me?”

“Now you know how I feel,” Hildy said unsympathetically. Girls were never allowed in the procession at all.

When this news filtered down through devious ways to the Free Holanders, Siriol was rather pleased than otherwise. “Less chance of our Mitt being recognized,” he said.

The other safety measures were much more disturbing. In the week before the Festival, all boats were ordered to the far side of the harbor. Siriol had to move Flower of Holand to a distant mooring, where she was bumped and rubbed by six other boats crammed in round her. He grumbled furiously. He grumbled even more when, for two days before the Festival, no boats were allowed in or out of the harbor, and all were searched by soldiers every few hours. At the same time Harchad had all the tenements on the waterfront knocked down, and a large rubbly space cleared in front of the harbor. This was more serious. The street where Mitt was supposed to join the procession vanished. They had hastily to choose the next inland. Milda and Mitt were furious. They had lived in one of those tenements.

“The whole lot down, just to keep his nasty old pa safe!” said Mitt. “Talk about callous tyranny!”

“They should have come down years back,” said Hobin. “They were nothing but rats and bedbugs. And ‘callous tyranny’ is the kind of talk I’m not having.”

“But those poor people are turned out in the street!” Milda protested.

“Well, it’s cleaner there,” said Hobin. He was combing his hair and getting ready for a Guild meeting. “Anyway, to my certain knowledge, three trades have offered them room in their guildhalls, Gunsmiths included. But there’s new houses being built for them, back in the Flate.”

“The Earl’s building them houses?” Mitt asked incredulously.

“No,” said Hobin. “Would the Earl do a thing like that? No. It’s one of the sons—Navis, I think.” He put on his good jacket and went away downstairs, as far as Mitt could see, rather annoyed with Navis for stealing the Gunsmiths’ thunder.

“He’ll come back talking of Waywold,” Mitt said as the door slammed. “You see. Still, it won’t matter you going back there after tomorrow.”

“Mitt, I’m nervous!” said Milda. “All our planning!”

Mitt felt pleasantly excited, no more. “Don’t you trust me or something?” he said. “Come on. Let’s have a look at those clothes.”

Milda laughed excitedly as she fetched the red and yellow costume from its hiding place under her newest carpet. “I don’t think you know the meaning of fear, Mitt! Honest, I don’t! Here, now. See if they fit.”

It was a strange and rather ridiculous costume. The breeches, which came halfway down Mitt’s thin calves, had one yellow leg and the other red. The jacket was red and yellow in the opposite halves. Mitt was a bit thin for the jacket. But he buttoned it up and added the jaunty cap, which had a double crown like a cock’s crest. “How do I look?”

Milda was delighted. “Oh, you do look handsome! You look just like a merchant’s son!”

Mitt looked in the little mirror, all prepared to agree. He felt very fine. And he had rather a shock. He looked good, it was true. But there were things in his face one never saw in the smooth faces of wealthy boys— lines which made it look old and shrewd. It was the knowing face of the poor city boys who ran about in the streets, fending for themselves. And yet—this was the thing which shocked Mitt most—it was a babyish face, too. Under the lines there were empty curves, emptier than in any boy’s face he had ever seen, and his eyes stared as round and wide as his baby sisters’. Mitt made haste to alter it by putting on his most joky smile. The empty cheeks puckered, and the eyes leered long and sly. Mitt flipped the crest of his cap. “Cock-a-doodle-do!” he said. “Roll on, Festival!” Then he turned away from the mirror and did not look in it again.

7

On the day of the Festival, Ham called for Hobin soon after dawn. That’s got rid of him! Mitt thought, hearing them clattering away downstairs. To tell the truth, he had not slept as well as usual. But since this was a holiday, he stayed in bed another good hour. I reckon they’ll be questioning me all tonight, he thought. I better get all the rest I can. But when Milda called him, he was very glad to jump up and put his own holiday clothes on, on top of the Festival costume. They were supposed to be spending the day at Siriol’s house. So they went there first, Milda, the two babies, and Mitt, very bulky and warm in his double set of clothes. They were not to go to the side street until word came that the procession had already left the Palace.

The procession left the Palace a little before midday. Ynen watched it from the upstairs window of a merchant’s painted house. He was crowded round with hearthmen and hearthmen’s sons, all of whom had strict instructions to keep Ynen safe. Ynen could hardly see for them. His was the first and worst position anyway. The other boy cousins were all in houses from which they could see the cleared space by the harbor. Ynen could see it only if he craned, and if he craned, someone was sure to take hold of the back of his jacket and pull him respectfully back inside.

Ynen could hardly bear it, even before the first of the procession came past. When at last he heard the thump, thump, thump of the horsehair drums, followed by the squealing of scarnels and joined finally by the groaning of cruddles, his frustration was almost boundless. Perhaps he was not very musical. It struck him as the most exciting sound in the world. Then he heard shouting. Then the lovely, lovely din of the rattles. And at last came the first of the procession, ribbons fluttering from silly hats, banging and blowing and scraping as they marched, with a beribboned bull’s head bobbing among them, and the lucky boys with rattles tearing in and out between their legs. Lucky red and yellow boys.

“Oh, why can’t all the revolutionaries drop dead!” wailed one of the hearthmen’s sons.

Ynen wished they would, too. But for Hands to the North, he would be down there in the stirring din and the bright colors. And here came Grandfather, looking strange and rather silly. Ynen had an excellent view of Hadd’s cantankerous old face under a hat loaded with fruit and flowers. On Hadd’s shoulders, and trailing behind him, was a magnificent creamy mantle, embroidered with scarlet and cherry red and gold. Over that was draped a garland of wheat-ears and grapes. Not much of the rest of Hadd was visible, because Old Ammet was in the way. Ynen had very little attention to spare for Old Ammet. All he saw was ears of wheat bristling at head, hands and feet, cherry ribbons, and a girdle of apples. Ynen was chiefly impressed with Hadd’s skinny legs, cased in scarlet stockings, strutting underneath Old Ammet. Ynen giggled at the important way those legs walked. He had not realized before how vain his grandfather was and how much he enjoyed being an earl. At the sight of those red, strutting legs, Ynen longed to seize a rattle and whirl it in his grandfather’s face. To his annoyance, the red and yellow boys were on their best behavior. None of them dared wave a rattle at Hadd. If only they would! Ynen thought, craning, and being pulled back.

Navis came next. Ynen giggled again. His father’s feet were in buckled boots, so his legs did not look as ridiculous as Hadd’s. But he had ribbons at his knees and fruit in his hat. And juice was coming out of Libby Beer and running into Navis’s ribboned sleeves. Flies were following her. Navis was looking hot and bothered—most unusual for him—and obviously wondering if he could get Libby Beer to the harbor still in one piece.

Behind Navis were two merchants who had been pressed into the procession. One wore a hat with ears, the other a hat with horns. They looked right idiots, and they knew they did. All the boys at the window shrieked with laughter. Ynen leaned out again and yelled insults, which were drowned by the next batch of cruddle players. After that the procession was all music, things on sticks, boys with rattles, until it got smaller and smaller and wound downhill out of sight. Ynen sat back with a sigh. He desperately envied Hildy. She and the girl cousins, as the most important of Hadd’s grandchildren, had seats at the window of a house on the very edge of the cleared space.

Mitt was by now in the side street, with Milda, Siriol, and Dideo, hastily climbing out of his own clothes. In front of them were the backs of the crowd lining the main street. They were solidly Free Holanders and their families. Most of them had been there since dawn to make sure of the position. Mitt could already hear the thumping and skrawking of the procession, very near. As he passed his jacket to Siriol and put the crested cap on his head, a bull’s head on a stick went by above people’s heads. The noise was deafening.

“Be careful, Mitt,” said Siriol. “And remember you say, ‘I’ve come to meet Flind’s niece, ’ to the one that meets the cart at Hoe. If he says, ‘She’s expecting another little one, ’ then it’s all right to go with him. Got that?”

“Yes, all in my head,” Mitt said, attending to this no more than he usually did when Siriol talked of such arrangements. The din of the scarnels was making the back of his legs jump.

“Old Ammet’s coming!” said someone in the crowd. “Pass it back.”

“Old Ammet in sight.”

Siriol handed Dideo the lighted taper. Dideo bent over the bundle he was carrying.

“Oh, Mitt, be careful!” Milda said. She was smiling and looking sad, both at once. Mitt looked from her to the sister in her arms, and then down at the other sister, unsteadily standing and holding Milda’s hand. They upset him. He could not think of anything to say to them.

He was glad when Dideo passed him a bundle on a strap. It was scarlet to match Mitt’s left side, and it had a stiff twist of paper coming out of it, which sent off little puffs of smoke. “There,” said Dideo, and his face was netted in smiles. “That’s long enough to last to the cleared space.” He patted Mitt’s shoulder as he hung the bag on it.

Siriol passed Mitt a rattle and banged his other shoulder. “Off you go. Good luck.”

Mitt slipped in among the crowd, and they parted to let him through. He was on, after years of waiting, and he could hardly believe it. He came to the soldiers, who stood in a line in front of the crowd. They ought to stop him.

A soldier glanced down and saw the red and yellow suit. “Sorry, sonny,” he said, and moved to let Mitt by.

Mitt was in the roaring, skirling, streaming procession. For just one second, he was small and sort of blunt and did not believe he was really there. But he was. And there was Hadd. Mitt had not seen Hadd close to before, but he knew him by Old Ammet in his arms. The bad-tempered old face was exactly what he expected. That face, Mitt told himself, is asking to have a rattle under its nose before it gets blown up. And he was off to do it, whirling from one side of the procession to the other, rattle spinning, crested cap flopping, and keeping a wary eye on the puffing bundle under his arm as he went.

He caught up with Hadd just on the edge of the cleared space. Hildy saw him clearly, from where she sat at the window jammed in among her five cousins. They had soldiers in the room with them, soldiers downstairs, and soldiers lining the new open space by the harbor. They were safe. Nevertheless, the cousins were very nervous and disposed to scream at things. They screamed when the first musicians came between the soldiers and straggled across the open. They screamed at the bull’s head.

“Oh, look!” screamed Irana, as Mitt ran in front of Hadd, whirling his rattle neatly under Hadd’s irascible nose as he went.

Mitt checked after he had done that. Holand looked so strange with no waterfront buildings and all the shipping cleared to one side of the harbor, that he had another moment when he could hardly believe it was real. But the bundle under his arm fizzed. Sparks puffed out with the smoke. Mitt knew the time had come to get rid of it. He turned and plumped it down at Hadd’s scarlet feet. Then he did not know quite what to do next.

Hadd’s legs stopped walking. His bad-tempered look did not alter. He simply stopped and stood like a statue, with Old Ammet beneath his chin. Both of them stared at Mitt, and Mitt stared back. And the cousins round Hildy screamed in earnest at the sight of the smoking bundle on the ground. Behind Navis, everyone in the procession began to run into the backs of the people in front, and still Hadd stood, and so did Mitt. Hildy could not think what the boy thought he was doing. It seemed stupid behavior, even for a revolutionary. Old Ammet seemed to be staring at him, unblinking as a cow over a gate, from under raised wheat-ear eyebrows, as if he shared Hildy’s wonder.

Sparks poured out of the bundle. Navis saw that nobody else was going to do anything. He hoisted Libby Beer to his shoulder and dashed forward. This was more what Mitt had expected. He got ready to pretend to run. But to his astonishment, Navis took no notice of Mitt. Instead he aimed a great kick at the fizzing bundle. Mitt saw the ribboned leg go out, the buckled boot connect, and the bundle, in an arch of smoke, sail away behind into the open space.

And the fellow hasn’t a hair out of place! Mitt thought, rather astonished. He wanted to shout to Navis, “Hey! I dedicated a lifetime to this lot! And you just wasted it!”

By this time the merchant with ears on his hat had pulled himself together, too. He made a rather dubious grab for Mitt. Mitt dodged him easily.

This made Mitt think: Might as well give them a run for their money.

He turned to run. As he did so, the explosion came and sent him reeling. The force of it rattled all the windows and sent a gust into Hildy’s face. The cousins screamed again. The rest of the procession came jostling out from behind Navis, some of them demanding to know what had happened, some of them after Mitt. Hadd turned and made a sign to one of the captains that Mitt should be taken alive. Since Hildy now knew that this was the worst way to be taken, she shivered a little as she watched the boy running. He ran like a deer, ribbons fluttering, dropping his rattle as he ran, straight toward the soldiers coming out from the edge of the crowd to meet him. Hildy thought that if it had been her, she would have run to the edge of the harbor and jumped in.

So would Mitt have done if he had meant to escape. But he was supposed to be caught. His ears hurt from the explosion. They seemed to be plugged with wool. He saw the soldiers mouthing as they came but could not hear a word. Mitt dodged and swerved as only someone brought up in the poorer parts of Holand could. Looks more natural, he thought. A huge hand snatched at his face. Mitt ducked under it and twisted sideways. A blurry face mouthed curses. A bevy of big boots clodhoppered at him from all directions. This way and that went Mitt, that way and this. He leaped a boot, dodged another, missed an enormous stretching arm, and tripped over another great boot. A jerk and a sudden coldness on his back told him—where his furred-up ears could not—that his jacket had been grabbed and torn. He was flat on his face and up again in one moment. But he was still not caught. He felt his jacket leave him, jerk, jerk, and he was still sprinting forward. Too good to last, Mitt thought, and he dived, pushing and shoving, among the big bodies of the ordinary people crowded behind the soldiers.

Come on, some of you! Stop me! he thought. But no one succeeded, though Mitt thought some of them tried. Just barely, he could hear their voices now: “Stop him! Don’t let him get away!”

Ah. Ears come to their senses again, Mitt thought. Good. Couldn’t see myself lip-reading all the questions I’m going to be asked.

He pushed on, very glad he was not deaf. And shortly, the voices round him were saying, quite loudly, “What’s happened then?” and, “Who are you shoving?”

Mitt, to his extreme astonishment, plunged out from the back of the crowd into a narrow street.

Hey! he thought. This won’t do. He stopped. He turned round and saw the backs of the people filling the street heaving and bumping about as the soldiers tried to force their way through after him. He cast a longing look up the narrow street. He could really almost get away. They would not run fast in those boots.

Better make it easier for them, Mitt thought, sighing. And he went back into the crowd.

Out in the open space, the procession had re-formed and was straggling toward the water’s edge. Hadd behaved as if nothing had happened at all. As soon as Mitt vanished among the soldiers, he went on walking as if the whole thing were not worth thinking about. Hildy could not help admiring him. That was how an earl should behave! Hadd’s behavior was so dominating that Hildy and every body else were soon watching the procession going up and down the quays, drumming and droning and skirling, as if Mitt had never existed.

Mitt was in the crowd just beneath Hildy’s window. He found he was still wearing one red and one yellow sleeve. They were a nuisance, so he took them off and threw them on the ground. He seemed to have lost his cap. He stood there in his threadbare undershirt, hoping the soldiers would recognise him by his two-colored breeches. But he was surrounded by tall citizens and nobody saw him. Above the noise of the procession he could hear the boots of the soldiers hammering away up the narrow street.

Right fools, some people are! Mitt thought. Better make myself obvious.

He squirmed his way along the painted wall of the house until he came to its front door. It had six steps up to it, for fear of flooding, as did most houses in Holand. People were crowded on the steps, staring out toward the harbor. Mitt climbed up and squeezed in among them. He was easy enough to see, had anybody been looking his way. But everyone was watching the Festival.

The procession had formed into a line along the jetty, with Hadd and Navis in the center. The heads on poles were lowered. Garlands were taken off. Everyone waved these downward, pretending to beat the water. In fact, the water was too far below to reach, but the Festival went back to the days when Holand harbor was just a low ring of rocks and none of it had been altered since. The same old words were said:

This was repeated three times by everyone in the procession. It was a growling, ragged chorus.

Yet, by the third repetition, Hildy’s arms were up in goose pimples from sheer awe—she did not know why. Mitt’s eyes pricked, as they always did, and he was annoyed at himself for being so impressed by a load of out-of-date nonsense. Then the musicians gave vent to a long groaning chord. Hadd raised Poor Old Ammet above his head, ready to throw him in the harbor.

A little star sparkle of flame blossomed for a second on one of the ships tied up at the side of the harbor. Hadd jerked, half turned, and slid quietly to the ground. It looked at first as if he had suddenly decided to lay Poor Old Ammet carefully at Navis’s feet. Then came a tiny, distant crack.

Nobody understood for a moment. One of Hildy’s cousins laughed.

After that there was a long, groaning uproar. Mitt’s voice was in it. “Flaming Ammet! I been diddled!” The fat woman beside him was saying, over and over again, “Oh, what bad luck! What terrible bad luck!” Mitt had no idea whether she meant bad luck to Hadd or to Holand. The ladylike girls overhead somewhere were screaming. Mitt leaned his head against their painted front door and cursed. All he could think of was that the unknown marksman had cheated him. “Half my life, and now it’s wasted!” he said. “Wasted. Gone!”

Overhead the cousins hung on to Hildy and to one another, whimpering and crying. Hildy found herself saying, “Ye gods, ye gods, ye gods!”

A soldier in the room behind shouted, “He’s in that boat— Proud Ammet! Run, you, and we’ll get him!”

“They mustn’t leave! We’re not safe!” screamed Harilla.

They had already left. The door behind Mitt burst open, and soldiers pelted out of it. Mitt leaped clear. But he had no chance to make himself obvious. Everyone on the steps was pushed off and toppled in all directions. The fat woman landed almost on top of Mitt and knocked him sprawling. By the time he had picked himself up, and then her, the soldiers had pelted off.

“Shut up!” Hildy snapped at Harilla. She was trying to see what was happening on the water-front. Navis was bending over Hadd, and the rest of the procession was crowding round. Soldiers were running. People from the crowd were surging forward to see. Uncle Harchad, keeping prudently among a crowd, was running, too. Hildy saw her father stand up and point to the boat where the shot had been fired, wave to the soldiers, and wave the crowd back. Then he stooped again, and stood up holding Poor Old Ammet. He turned this way and that with him, showing people what he was doing, and then threw him into the harbor with the traditional shout. Then he picked up Libby Beer and slung her after.

Hildy felt a mixture of pride and horrible embarrassment. She could see her father was trying to assure the citizens of Holand that this did not mean unmitigated bad luck. But it was doubtful if any body noticed. People were surging about. Numbers were leaving. Soldiers were running out to Proud Ammet along the curving harbor wall. There were screams and shouts which drowned Navis’s voice. Nevertheless, the rest of the procession followed his lead. In a ragged, unconvinced way, garlands began to loop out from the quay and fall on the water. By this time Uncle Harchad had reached the waterfront. Hildy watched him and Navis kneel down beside her grandfather, with red and yellow garlands sailing around them, until the harbor seemed full of bobbing fruit and wet flowers, and wondered what they were feeling. She could see Hadd was dead, but she seemed to have no feelings about that at all.

8

The fat woman was very grateful to Mitt. She clung to him, and he had to help her to the street beyond the house. “You’re a sweet boy,” she kept saying. “Come on up to the stalls, and I’ll buy you something.”

Mitt refused. He had to be where the soldiers were. It was the only thing left for him to do. Half his life’s work had fallen to someone else’s bullet. Hands to the North, curse them! he thought. He knew he would never get a chance to be revenged on Hadd now. But the other half remained. He had to get caught and get questioned and, with the utmost reluctance, let out that it was Siriol, Ham, and Dideo who set him on to plant the bomb. So, as soon as he had shaken off the fat woman, he went back to the waterfront.

By the time he got there, the other murderer had very thoroughly stolen his thunder. Soldiers were shouting to people to get back and get home, while other soldiers tried to open a path for what was left of the procession, carrying Hadd’s body. More soldiers were in and out of the house where the screaming girls were. The place was full of groups of people hurrying purposefully this way and that, in uniform, in Festival dress, or in holiday best. The result was utter confusion. The only thing which did not seem to be happening, Mitt thought bitterly, was the revolution the Free Holanders had confidently expected once Hadd was dead.

Mitt shrugged. For lack of any better plan, he did as he used to do three years back and joined a hurrying group of total strangers. With them, he was swept right across the waterfront to the other side of the harbor. And when we’re there, I bet we hurry all the way back again, he thought.

He was right. An officer stopped them near the harbor wall. “Only authorized persons past this spot.”

Mitt’s group obediently turned away. “Alham must have gone up Fishmarket then,” someone said, in a worried, busy voice, and they all set off again in the opposite direction.

Mitt lagged and let them hurry away. He could see the masts of the smaller boats from here, sawing the sky as heavy soldiers jumped from one to another, hunting the murderer. Even the masts of the big ships were swaying sedately, so many were the soldiers searching them. A group of seamen who had been on the ships were being herded and prodded roughly along the harbor wall. They’ll catch him all right, Mitt thought resentfully!

A new group of people surged up beside him.

These were clearly important. They were officers in braid, well-nourished men in good cloth, with, in their midst, a tall, thin man with a pale jagged profile. The man’s clothes had a wonderful sober richness. Mitt saw the sleek glint of velvet, and fur, and the flicker of jewels, worn where they did not show, because the man was too used to having them to bother with their value. Mitt knew that pale, jutting face, though he had never, to his knowledge, seen the fellow before. It had the same bad-tempered lines as Hadd’s. The nose was the one he had whirled his rattle under. The rest of the features were like the ones he had seen advancing on him behind Libby Beer to kick the bomb away. This could only be Harchad.

Proper flinty flake off the old block, he is, Mitt thought, looking up at him with interest. Wearing six farms and ten years’ fishing on his back, and he don’t care!

“Oh, stop bleating, man!” Harchad snapped at the man with the most braid. “Those seamen are to be questioned till we get something. I don’t care if you kill them all. And I want the brat who threw the bomb, too. He was obviously an accomplice. I want him brought to me when you find him.”

Mitt’s stomach, for the first time in his life, gave a cold little jolt. He lowered his eyes from Harchad’s face and gently backed away. Wonder how he’d look if he knew I was right beside him, he thought. Accomplice, was I? O flaming Ammet! I think everything’s gone wrong. He tiptoed hurriedly sideways to join the nearest group of hurry ing citizens.

The man in braid shouted. “There he is now! That’s him!”

“Who?”

“The brat who threw that bomb.”

Mitt had the merest glimpse of them all staring at him. Harchad’s face jutted out of the rest in a way that dried Mitt’s mouth, tongue and all, and almost wrung a scream out of him. It was as horrible as his nightmares about Canden. He turned and ran, mindlessly. His only idea was to make his legs go faster than their fastest. He had to get away from the gathering shouts behind him. He had to escape from that face. He shot across the water-front, not knowing whether he hit people or avoided them as he ran. He dived into the nearest road and ran there for all he was worth. It filled with banging feet behind him. Mitt ran harder still, turned a corner and ran, and ran again, and went on running. The only thing in his mind was the shouting and ringing feet behind him, and he did not stop running until they had grown faint and died away.

When his breath came back, he wandered wearily round a corner into the next street. He was deeply ashamed of himself. What had got into him? What had made him, the free soul, fearless Mitt, who had never turned a hair during, all the errands he had run for the Free Holanders— what had possessed him—to panic at the mere sight of Harchad and run away? Mitt could not understand it. What had made everything go so wrong?

“Here, love. Have hold of this and cheer up.”

Mitt looked up to find himself in an airy, respectable street, quite some way above the waterfront. It was full of handsomely painted houses. Mitt dimly remembered the one just up the hill from him, with the double gable and the two stiff figures painted on it. The street was full of quiet, cheerful people in respectable holiday clothes, who were buying things at the stalls which lined the street. It did not seem as if a whisper of the events at the harbor had reached this far. All was peace and sober enjoyment.

The person who had spoken to Mitt was a woman behind one of the stalls. She was leaning forward across rows of little Ammets and Libbys, holding a toffee apple out toward Mitt. She smiled when he looked, and waggled the apple invitingly on its stick. “Here. Take this for luck. Your face is as long as Flate Dike, my love.”

Mitt did his best to grin. Running had filled his mouth with thick, bitter juice. He did not want a toffee apple. But he could see the woman meant to be kind. “Oh, no, thanks, lady. I just lost a lifetime’s work, see, and I’m off my food a bit.”

“Well, then, you need an appetiser,” said the woman, and she tried to push the toffee apple into Mitt’s hand.

Mitt found he really could not bear the thought of sticky toffee and sour apple, and he backed away. “No, thanks, lady. Honest. Much obliged.”

“Please yourself,” she said. “But I’ve got to give you something now I’ve started, or it’s bad luck for both of us. Here.” She picked up one of the little images of Libby Beer from the line on the front of the stall and held her out to Mitt. “You can have her then. I’m just clearing up to go, anyway.” Mitt did not know if the woman really wanted luck or if she was simply trying to cheer him up, but he took the little image and tried to grin again. “And don’t try eating her. She’s made of wax,” said the woman. “The year’s luck to you.”

“Luck to you, ship and shore,” Mitt said politely, just as he should. He wandered on down the street, clutching the knobby little figure and wondering what to do with it. Perhaps I could make Harchad a present of her, he thought.

He was three stalls lower down when boots hammered on the flagway behind him. Six soldiers with an officer at their head swung round the corner the way Mitt had come and halted by the woman’s stall. “Hey, you. Anyone. Seen a boy in Festival breeches, no jacket, very skinny?”

The sober respectable hum in the street died away completely. Nobody moved. Mitt froze, bending over the stall beside him, pretending to look at little Ammets. He tried to will himself to make a dash down the street and bring the soldiers after him. But there was no question of that, somehow. He could only wait for the woman who had given him Libby Beer to give him away.

“Yes, indeed, I have seen him, sir,” she said. “Just this minute. I offered him a toffee apple, and he went away down the street.”

The soldiers nodded and came on down the street.

Mitt stood with a bright imitation Libby Beer in one hand and the other stretched out to touch the plaited corn of an Ammet and still could not move. He did not blame the woman. Other people had seen her talking to Mitt, and she dared not deny it. In the old days it used to make him amused and rather scornful, the way even respectable people like these went in dread of Harchad’s soldiers. It made him think he must be the only free soul in Holand. But now he did not seem to be a free soul any longer. He dared not move. He had to stand there till the soldiers saw him.

The boots clomped by. Mitt could see and feel everyone’s eyes moving between him and the green uniforms. But nobody said a word. The boots clomped on to the end of the street and faded out of hearing. There was sighing and shifting all round. Someone behind Mitt, who must have blocked the soldiers’ view of him, said, “Go on, lad. Run while the going’s good.” Mitt did not see who said it, but he ran.

Isn’t that Holand people all over! he thought as he ran back round the corner and plunged downhill toward the harbor again. Where they could be, they were kind. But you could never count on it. Yesterday this kindness had amused him. Now there did not seem to be anything left to laugh at. Tears trickled across Mitt’s cheeks as he ran, as he thought of all those years of planning gone to waste.

I wonder if there’s something wrong deep inside of me, he thought. It don’t surprise me. He tried to wipe the tears off his face and found he was brushing it with something knobbly. He looked, and there was the little Libby Beer, made of wax cherries and rose hips and miniature apples, glistening with his tears. “Goh!” said Mitt, and stuffed her angrily in his scarlet pocket. Crying did no good. Next time he met any soldiers, there would be no mistake. He was going to get caught.

He came down into the old town, through a street of peeling houses breathing the smell of the poor quarters out through their open front doors— the smell of too many people, dirt, damp plaster, and cheap food. All the children from the houses were playing in the road. There was hopscotch nearest, marbles a little way on, and then two of the running, shouting kind of games. And through the shrill yells, Mitt sensed more soldiers coming. The rhythm of their boots was in the very air.

Mitt did not decide what to do. He moved without thinking, round the hopscotch to the game of marbles, and dropped down to squat in the ring of smaller boys. It was a trick he had often played three years back. Unless the boys were doing some thing very secret, they usually did not mind. But as he hurriedly wiped the tears off his face with his wrist, Mitt was amazed at himself. Here, he thought. What am I doing?

The rhythm of boots beat in the dirty pavement under him and a green block of soldiers swept round the corner. When they saw the children, the clump-clump of their boots slackened and became a slow puttering. They had broken step and were coming slowly down the street, looking very carefully indeed.

The yelling and the games stopped. The children stood in awkward rows, staring. The small boys round Mitt were not really playing marbles any more. They were waiting for the soldiers to pass. And Mitt crouched with them, in such terror that he could hardly see or feel. He had not known it was possible to be so frightened. He knew he stuck out like a sore thumb among these children. He was half as big again as any of them. His red leg blazed and his yellow leg shone. And he could not trust little kids like these not to give him away, either by accident or on purpose, for spoiling their games. At any moment a shrill voice might say, “That’s the one you want, mister.”

As the soldiers puttered toward him, Mitt no longer had any doubt what he was doing. He was trying not to be caught. And as wave after wave of pure fear swept over him, he knew he was going to go on trying. By the time the soldiers were level with him, his terror was worse than the worst pain he had ever known. Mitt crouched down over his blazing legs, squeezing himself into himself to look as small as possible, and forced himself to put out a hand, take a marble, and roll it casually into the middle of the ring. He had to fight his terror every inch in order to move at all. He thought he could have rolled Siriol’s boat across the pavement more easily. The effort made him weak.

As soon as the marble left his hand, he was sure he had done the wrong thing. The boy next to him shot him a nasty look. The puttering boots went slower, as if the movement had attracted their attention. Mitt almost lost his senses, he was so terrified. Time swam forward, sickeningly slow and blurred.

The boots puttered down past the hopscotch, stopped, and started again, in step this time. Clump-clump-clump, they went, away into faintness.

“Buzz off,” said the boy. “You spoiled my go.”

Mitt stumbled to his feet. He felt dizzy, and as cramped as if he had spent a winter night fishing. He had to limp down the street. None of the games started again. The children watched Mitt as they had watched the soldiers. Bad, that was bad. They would tell of him to someone. Mitt hoped they would not tell too soon because he felt far too tired to run. He felt like curling up in the nearest doorway and crying himself to sleep.

Get a hold of yourself! he thought angrily. You’re on the run, that’s all. People go on the run all the time in this place. I don’t know how it keeps happening, but it’s like I can’t help myself from running. What’s gone wrong with me? This was a question Mitt simply could not answer. He only knew that he had got up this morning, intending, as he had intended for the last four years, to finish Hadd and the Free Holanders at one stroke. And now he had failed to finish Hadd, his one idea seemed not to be caught.

Oh, now, wait a minute! Mitt stopped and pretended to loiter in a yard doorway. There were still the Free Holanders. If he was too scared to get himself caught, he could easily just go to Siriol’s house, or Dideo’s. Where Mitt went now, Harchad’s spies would swiftly follow. It was just as good a way of getting the Free Holanders caught. But the reason Mitt stopped, leaning on the doorpost and gaping at nothing, was that he was not even tempted. “Not even tempted!” he repeated to himself. And it was true. It was nothing dramatic. Mitt could not tell himself he would rather die than go to Siriol’s house—he knew he would do anything rather than die—but he was still not going there. Or to Dideo. “What do you think they are then? Friends?” Mitt asked himself derisively.

It seemed as if they were. He remembered the smile on Dideo’s netted face when Mitt brought him the first little packet of saltpeter, and Siriol glowering at him over a rope’s end but never hitting him more than just that once. And I reckon he ought to have done, Mitt thought. He ought to have knocked me through a Mitt-shaped hole in the side of Flower of Holand, over and over. He found himself smiling a little. Siriol always understood his jokes, and Ham scarcely ever did. Then there was Alda, puffing arris at everyone, and Lydda going to marry that sailor off Lovely Libby. I got to know them too well, Mitt thought.

It did no good to stand there, smiling and staring. Mitt walked on. He supposed his best plan was to use the escape arrangements Siriol had so carefully made for him.

“No!” Mitt exclaimed. It was not that he did not want to use them. He did. He would have given his ears to. But he could not remember a thing about them. Thinking he would not need to escape, he had attended to Siriol’s plans probably even less than he had listened to Hobin telling him about guns. He had a vague idea there was a cart somewhere and a password. But that was absolutely all he knew. Of all the fools!

But what was he to do? He could not spend the rest of his life sneaking round the streets of Holand. If he looked for all the carts he could find, he would certainly be caught. The soldiers would think of that. He dared not go home. That would get Hobin and Milda arrested, too. The only thing he dared do was take to the Flate, like so many freedom fighters before him. But he knew a bit about that. You got hunted down there. And it was a miserable life unless you were lucky enough to have a gun and could shoot marsh birds for food. Mitt had no gun. He knew where guns were, though: locked up in Hobin’s workshop. And he dared not go near there. Oh, it went round in circles. “Why hadn’t he attended to Siriol? Mitt knew why, really. He had simply not thought of anything beyond the moment when he was to plant that bomb. I must be flaming insane! Mitt said to himself. Do some thing, can’t you!

He wanted to go home, that was what he wanted to do. And he dared not.

Or dared he? Hobin was out for the day. Milda was at Siriol’s with the babies. If Mitt went there, spies would follow. But spies would probably go there, anyway, because Hobin had gunpowder. Suppose Mitt were to go there, take gun and ammunition, and make it look like a burglary? It would have to look like a burglary, anyway, because he would have to break locks and the seals of the inspectors to get anything. Hobin could not be blamed for being burgled. It would be a way of keeping suspicion from him. In fact, the more Mitt thought about it, the more it seemed his duty to go and burgle Hobin. Then do what? Go out in the Flate and try to get North, Mitt supposed.

It made a considerable difference to have a purpose again. Mitt felt far less tired. Flate Street was quite near. Mitt purposely doubled the distance to it. He wanted to be seen in as many places as possible, to confuse the spies. When he finally arrived behind the high greasy wall which cut the light off the back of the workshop, Mitt was fairly confident that any spy trying to trace him would not arrive until tomorrow. He thought two days was more likely. But he said tomorrow, because it never paid to underestimate Harchad’s spies.

The wall made one side of an alley, with another sightless wall opposite. Mitt stood facing it, breathing deeply. He had to reckon on being seen going over the top of the wall. If he allowed time for whoever saw him to fetch help and break down the front door of the workshop—or fetch soldiers to do it—there should just be time to take what he wanted and then break the place up a bit. But it was only a very short time. Mitt knew it might be a close thing. He wished his knees would not tremble and his heart knock so. He was not used to being frightened like this.

9

And I missed everything!” was Ynen’s disgusted comment when at last Hildy arrived back at the Palace and he managed to find her.

The Palace was all doubts and hushed voices and indecision. Only one thing was certain: Hadd was dead, and Harl was now Earl of Holand. But when you had said that, you had said everything. Nobody knew if there was an uprising, or whether to take off the Festival clothes, or what would happen about the feast which had been prepared. Harl did nothing but sit in his room. He had not given one order. Harchad came and went and gave orders perpetually, but nothing seemed to come of them.

“Well, in that case there can’t be an uprising,” Hildy said rather snappishly when Ynen told her what it had been like. “We didn’t see anyone but soldiers all the way back.” She felt as if she wanted to be alone, but Ynen looked so lost that she stayed with him. They wandered stairs and corridors together, among people who had as little idea as they had what to do.

Ynen told Hildy some of the rumors about the murderer. He had been caught; he had not been found. He was a discontented seaman; he was a dangerous revolutionary and an agent for the North. He was a superb marksman; he was a fool who had fired a lucky shot; he had used a new secret weapon from the North. He had poisoned himself; he had jumped into the harbor and escaped. No one knew what the truth was. “Now tell me what it was like, by the harbor,” Ynen said.

“I don’t know,” Hildy said, quite honestly. “Anyway, you know what it’s like when Harilla has hysterics.” But she did try to describe what had happened. It was not Ynen’s fault he had missed it.

“Did Father really do all that?” Ynen asked. “I didn’t know he could move fast enough.” He added wistfully, “I wish I could have seen that boy twirl a rattle under Grandfather’s nose.”

“It wasn’t as funny as you think,” said Hildy. “It— it was queer. He didn’t run away. I suppose he’s caught by now.” Then she found she really did need to be alone and went to her room. But Ynen came with her, and she had not the heart to tell him to go away. He sat curled up on the window seat, while Hildy sat cross-legged in the middle of her big square bed.

Here Hildy tried for the hundredth time to sort out how she felt. It was a very shocking thing that her grandfather had been murdered. That she knew. And it was a shocking time to kill him. Everybody said it meant terrible bad luck. Hildy found she was still far more embarrassed than proud at the way her father had tried to save the day. It was the way nobody had noticed that made her so uncomfortable. But about the actual murder, she simply felt awed and respectful—and subdued all over, so that she moved gently and quietly and wanted to be alone. She could not manage to feel strongly about it. And this was odd, because she knew that somewhere, about something, she felt very strongly indeed. She was raging with feelings, but she did not know what about. It reminded her of the way she had felt when her father had told her she was engaged to Lithar.

Here Hildy sprang up. “Wait,” she said to Ynen when he sprang up, too. Ynen sat down with a sigh, and Hildy sped to her father’s rooms.

She knocked at the heavy door. There was no answer. Hildy, a little hesitantly, turned the handle and went in. There was no one in the first room. She went on to the second.

Navis was sitting by the window, still in his Festival clothes. Perhaps he was trying to sort out how he felt, too. At any rate he was not reading the book he had in his hand. He was staring out into the Flate.

Hildy saw at a glance that he had gone back to being cold, idle, and proud. There was little chance of anybody making him do anything which was not absolutely necessary. Hildy ground her teeth with fury. How could he rise to the occasion at the waterfront and then sink from it like this? And if he was still mourning about her mother, Hildy had no sympathy for him whatsoever. He had been like this far too long!

“Father,” she said.

Navis jumped slightly. “Did I forget to lock my door?”

“I’ll go away in a minute,” said Hildy. “Are you sorry Grandfather’s dead?”

“Er,” said her father. “He was an old man.”

Hildy thought angrily that that was no way to speak. She wondered whether to flatter him by saying she thought he had behaved extremely well by the harbor. But it was beside the subject, it was not true, and she did not think it would rouse Navis, anyway. “I came to ask you,” she said, champing at the words because she was so angry, “if I need to marry Lithar now.”

“What’s that got to do with the situation?” Navis asked.

“Grandfather arranged it,” Hildy said, trying to be patient. “But I don’t want to marry him. So will you cancel it, please?”

Navis looked at his book as if he would rather attend to that than Hildy. “I think you’ll find the alliance is prized quite as much now.”

“What does that mean? Can’t you cancel it?” Hildy demanded.

“I doubt it,” said her father.

“Don’t you care?” said Hildy.

“I fancy I do,” Navis admitted. “But with things in this state of upheaval—”

Hildy lost her grip on her temper. “Ye gods! Nobody cares in this place! You’re the worst of the lot! You just sit there, after all that happens, and you don’t even care that nobody even knows if there’s going to be a feast or not!”

“Don’t they?” Navis asked, rather surprised. “Really, Hildy, there is nothing to do at the moment but sit. I’m very sorry—”

“You’re not sorry!” raved Hildy. “But I’ll make you sorry! You just wait!” She turned to storm out of the rooms.

Navis called after her. “Hildy!” She turned round to find him looking oddly anxious. “Hildy, will you make sure you and Ynen stay where I can find you?”

“Why?” Hildy said haughtily.

“I may need you in a hurry.”

This was such an unlikely thing that Hildy simply made a scornful noise and crashed out of her father’s rooms, slamming each door behind her as hard as she could. She was so angry, and so determined to make Navis sorry, that she reached the gallery outside her uncle Harl’s rooms on a surge of blind fury and had almost no idea how she got there. She was fetched back to her senses by running into her cousins Harilla and Irana. They were hurrying the other way. Harilla’s face was still streaked with red from her recent hysterics. Irana’s was red all over.

“It’s no good,” Irana said. “If you’re going where I think you’re going. They’re both pigs.”

Harilla gasped, “I wish I was dead!” and burst into tears. Irana led her away.

Hildy wondered what was the matter with them this time. When she saw that there were guards outside her uncle’s rooms, she supposed that meant Harl had refused to see them. She marched up to the guards, prepared for battle. But they stood aside, most respectfully, and one opened the door for her. Hildy marched on into the antechamber, rather puzzled. The servants there bowed. She heard her uncle Harl’s voice from the room beyond.

“I tell you I owe the fellow a favor! He killed old Haddock, didn’t he? Let him get away.”

“Don’t be an ass, Harl!” snapped Uncle Harchad’s voice.

“With my blessing,” added Harl.

“Look, Harl, if we don’t catch him—” Harchad broke off irritably as Hildy came in.

Harl looked at her and let out a great guffaw. He was sitting in great comfort, with his shoes off and his feet on a chair. A table under his beefy elbow was crowded with wine bottles. He seemed very happy. He was grinning and sweating with happiness all over his big, bluff face. Harchad, on the other hand, was sitting tensely on the edge of his chair, nervily twiddling a full glass of wine. His face was paler than usual.

“Ha! Ha!” bellowed Harl. “Now it’s Hildrida. That makes the full set of them. We haven’t any more, have we, Harchad? Daughters and nieces and things?”

“No,” said Harchad. He did not seem to find it funny. “If you please, Hildrida. We are trying to talk business. Say what you have to say quickly, and then go.”

Hildy stared at them. She had never paid much attention to her uncle Harl before. He had always been a lazy, sober, silent man—and so ordinary. Nothing he said or did was ever remarkable. But now Uncle Harl was drunk, drunker even than the soldiers got on their nights off. And he was not drowning his sorrow either. He was celebrating. And Uncle Harchad was no more sorry about Grandfather than Harl was. But he was frightened: scared stiff in case he got shot next.

Harl pointed a drunken finger at Hildy. “Don’t say it. We know. All the rest said it.” He put on a high, squeaky voice. “ ‘Please, Uncle, will you break off my betrothal, please?’ Who’s she betrothed to?” he asked Harchad.

“Lithar,” said Harchad. “Holy Islands. And the answer’s no, Hildrida. We need all the allies we can get.”

“So it’s no good asking,” said Harl. He wriggled his stockinged toes at Hildy and produced strange cracking sounds.

At this Hildy’s anger blazed up again. “You’re quite wrong,” she said haughtily. “I wasn’t going to ask. I was going to tell you. I am not marrying Lithar or anyone else you try to choose for me. I’m quite determined about it, and you can’t make me.”

Her two uncles looked at one another. “She’s quite determined, and we can’t make her,” said Harl. “This one had to be different. Her father’s Navis.”

“I’m afraid you’ll find you’re mistaken, Hildrida,” said Harchad. “We can make you. And we will.”

“I shall refuse,” said Hildy. “Utterly. There’s nothing you can do.”

“She’ll refuse utterly,” said Harl.

“She will not,” said Harchad.

“She can if she wants,” said Harl. “She’ll be married by proxy, anyway. Can’t expect Lithar to come all this way. You refuse, my dear girl,” he said to Hildy. “Refuse all you want if it makes you happy. It won’t bother us.” He wriggled his toes at Hildy again, and once more they cracked. Harl was impressed. “Hear that, Harchad? That noise was my toes. Wonder why they do that.”

Hildy clenched her teeth in order not to scream at him. “Lithar might bother if I refuse.”

Harl bawled with laughter. A small smile flitted on Harchad’s face. “Well, it’ll be you he takes it out on, won’t it?” said Harl. “That doesn’t worry me!” He lay back in his chair and grinned at the idea.

“All right,” said Hildy. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She swung round and swept out, with her back very straight and her chin up, willing herself not to let the tears in her eyes fall until she was past the attendants, and then the soldiers. Then she ran. She ran to find Ynen. He was the only person in the Palace who was kind.

She could not find him. She dried her tears on her sleeve and searched grimly, high and low, right down to the kitchens. The cooks there were cursing. Hildy discovered that Navis had bestirred himself sufficiently to cancel the feast. She was angrier than ever. To think that out of what she had said to him, this was the one thing he had attended to! She wanted to bite something and tear things up. She stormed to her own room, wondering if a sheet or a curtain would be best to tear.

Ynen was there, still curled up on her window seat. By this time he was feeling very doleful. Hildy was a little ashamed to think she had clean forgotten telling him to wait.

“Hildy,” he said plaintively before he noticed her state of mind. “Why is it all so miserable?”

“Can’t you think why?” Hildy snapped. She seized the coverlet on her bed, a good handful in each hand, and wrenched. It gave way with the most satisfactory ripping noise.

Ynen’s eyes widened. He wished he had not spoken. Now he knew he would have to say something else, or Hildy would turn on him for sitting there like a dumb idiot. “Yes,” he said. “It’s because nobody’s even pretending to be sorry Grandfather’s dead.”

“How right you are!” Hildy snarled. Carefully, almost with enjoyment, she tore a long strip off the coverlet.

Ynen watched her anxiously and kept talking. “People are more sorry about the Festival being messed up. They go on about bad luck. And the awful thing,” he said hurriedly as Hildy began on another strip, “is that I don’t care about Grandfather either. I just feel sort of shocked. It makes me think I’m wicked.”

Hildy finished the second strip. Then, fists up and elbows out, she began on a third. “Wicked! What a stupid way to talk! Grandfather was a horrible old man, and you know he was! If people didn’t do exactly what he wanted, he had them killed, or tried them for treason if they were lords.” She dragged the third strip down to the selvage and wrenched to tear that. She began on a fourth. “The only people who dared argue with him were other earls, and he quarreled with them all the time. Why should you be sorry? Even so,” she said, rending the fourth strip loose, “I felt sick when I heard Uncle Harl calling him old Haddock.”

Ynen judged that Hildy’s temper was cooling. He risked laughing. “Everyone called him that!”

“I wish I’d known,” said Hildy. “I’d have said it, too.”

This encouraged Ynen to believe she was almost calm again. “Hildy,” he said, “that was rather a good coverlet.”

It had been a good one. It was blue and gold, and worked in a pattern of roses. The sewing women down in Holand had taken a good month to embroider it. Hildy’s four furious strips had left it a square of ragged, puckered cloth about four feet long. “I don’t care,” said Hildy. Her rage flared up again. She seized the puckered square and tore it and tore it. “I hate good things!” she raged. “They give us good coverlets, and golden clocks, and beautiful boats, and they don’t do it because they like us or care about us. All they think of is whether we’ll come in useful for their plans!”

“Nobody thinks I’m useful at all,” Ynen said. That was the reason for his misery, but he had been ashamed to say it before.

Hildy glared round at him, and he shrank. “I could murder them for thinking that!” she raved. “Why do you have to be useful? You’re nice. You’re the only nice person in this whole horrible Palace!” Ynen went pink. He was very flattered, but he would like to have been told he was useful, too. And he wished Hildy would realize that she was quite as alarming raging for him as she was raging at him. “I intend to teach them a lesson,” Hildy proclaimed.

“They probably won’t notice,” Ynen said. “I wish we could go and live somewhere else. Somebody told me Father preferred living in the country. Do you think if I asked him—?”

Hildy interrupted him with a squawk of angry laughter. “Go and ask one of the statues in the throne room! They’ll pay more attention.”

Ynen knew she was right. But now he had talked about going away from the Palace, he knew it was the one thing he really wanted to do. “Hildy, couldn’t we go out for the rest of the day? I hate the Palace like this. Couldn’t we go sailing—oh, I forgot. You’re not allowed to anymore, are you?”

“Don’t be a fool! The place is full of revolutionaries. They won’t let us go out,” said Hildy. But she could see from the window behind Ynen that it was perfect weather for sailing. “Won’t all the sailors have a holiday today?”

Ynen sighed. “Yes. I wouldn’t have a crew.” Still, it had been a good idea. “Suppose we rode out to High Mill then?”

But Hildy stood looking from the window to the ruins of her coverlet. There was going to be trouble about that. It was a silly thing to get into trouble about on its own. She ought to do something worse. She was aching to do something really terrible and show everybody. She remembered Navis had asked them to stay where he could find them. That decided her. “Let’s go sailing, Ynen,” she said. “And let’s give them a fright. Let’s knot the coverlet and hang it out of the window, and make them think we’ve run away.” Ynen looked at her dubiously. “I can crew,” said Hildy. “You can be captain because it’s your boat.”

“You don’t mind getting into awful trouble?” said Ynen.

“I do not,” said Hildy.

Ynen jumped up, so full of pleasure and mischief that he looked like a different boy. “Come on then! We’ll need warm clothes, and we’d better pinch some food, too. We’ll have to sneak out past the kitchens, anyway.”

Hildy laughed at the change in him as she snatched up two strips of coverlet and knotted them together. She pulled the knot tight. There was an ominous ripping noise. “It wouldn’t bear a sparrow, this stuff,” she said.

“It’s only got to look used,” Ynen pointed out. “Pull it as tight as you can without tearing it.” He helped her make the knots and then to tie the fraying strip to the window frame and let it down outside. It did not reach very far. “It’ll do,” Ynen said hopefully. “We could have jumped down onto the library roof.”

Hildy leaned out beside him. Their rope dangled a pitiful sixteen feet. The library dome was twenty feet or more below that. “They’ll wonder how we didn’t break our necks,” she said. “Go and get warm clothes. I’ll come to your room when I’ve changed.”

Ynen raced off, hardly the same boy who had sat miserably on Hildy’s window seat half the afternoon. Hildy, as she changed into a short woolen dress, sea boots, socks, and a pea jacket, told herself she was doing right. Ynen was so happy. She still felt wonderfully rebellious, but she was also just a little scared. There were people in Holand with bombs and guns. She had seen them.

“They won’t know who we are,” she told her reflection in the mirror. “And I’m sick of being important.” She took her hair down and did it in pigtails, to look as ordinary as possible, and collected dust from all the corners where she could find it and rubbed it on her face. Then she threw her good clothes to the back of a closet and set off for Ynen’s room.

Her cousins Harilla and Irana were coming along the passage. Hildy dodged behind a grand china vase. She heard them go into her room. Harilla was saying: “Well, Hildy, did they let you break off your betrothal? You needn’t think—Oh!”

Hildy dodged out from the vase and ran, as quietly as she could in sea boots. “Quick!” she told Ynen. “Harilla found the coverlet.”

“It would be her, wouldn’t it?” said Ynen.

They could tell the alarm was up as they crept down toward the kitchens. There was a great deal of noise and running about. But everyone seemed to believe that Hildy and Ynen would be found in the direction of the library. It was easy to avoid the people running there from the kitchens, and once they reached the kitchens, there were very few people left there. They heard someone whistling and dishes clattering, but the sounds echoed with emptiness. Ynen risked opening the door of a pantry.

“Look at that!” he said. The pantry was full, from floor to ceiling, with pies—glazed pies, golden pies, puffy pies, tarts, flans, pasties, and pies with flowers and birds on them. “Pass us a couple of those sacks,” said Ynen. “Let’s make it look as if we took enough for a week.”

They pulled the pantry door to behind them and, in the half-dark, seized what pies came first to hand and stuffed the sacks with them. While they were doing it, footsteps hurried outside, backward and forward. They waited for whoever it was to go away, and took the opportunity to eat a pasty each.

“Seems quiet now,” Hildy whispered.

They wiped gravy and crumbs off their mouths and tiptoed out. The kitchen gate was just beyond. The footsteps had been Uncle Harchad’s. He had done them a favor. The soldiers who should have been on guard at the gate were standing stiffly just inside the kitchen door up the passage, listening to Harchad, along with the scullions left in the kitchen.

“And you’re absolutely sure neither of them has gone past?” they heard Harchad saying.

“Quite sure, sir.”

“If you see them, I want them brought to me, understand? Not to Earl Harl,” said Uncle Harchad.

Nobody saw or heard Ynen and Hildy tiptoe to the gate, open the small postern carved in the big door, and slip out of it with their sacks.

10

Mitt took a last deep breath, hurled himself across the alley, and ran up the wall. If you are light and strong and determined, you can get a long way up a wall like this. Mitt’s feet scrambled, his breath sawed, and his fingers caught and slipped in the greasy bricks overhead. His right hand managed to clench in a crumbly crack. He threw the other arm over the top of the wall. Then, with a rasping slide and a slither, he was over and down, in his own backyard, terrified at the noise he had made.

It was queer. It looked like a strange backyard already. Mitt had not remembered it so small and grimy, or the target on the wall so pitted, or the mangle so rusty. As he stole over the slippery earth, he could hardly believe that just as usual, he would be able to slide up the workshop window and unlatch the back door. Yet just as usual, he put his arm in and the cold latch clicked upward under his fingers. He pulled open the door, creeeak, and slipped round it into the grimy, gloomy workshop. Remember to break that window, Mitt thought.

Noisy. Pity. Do it last. He crept across the room and picked up a crowbar. He looked at the rack of finished guns—locked, with the seal of Holand dangling from the lock—and the chests of powder—each kind separate, and locked, with the seal of Holand dangling there, too. He wished Hobin was not so careful. He was going to have to break everything, mix his own powder, make his own cartridges.

There was a soft, purposeful movement behind him. Mitt’s heart hammered, and his tongue suddenly grew too fat for his mouth. He whirled round, with his hand wet on the crowbar. Hobin was just latching the door which led upstairs to the house.

“That you, Hobin?” Mitt said weakly. Cold despair set in. Everything was going wrong. Hobin should have been out at High Mill, but he was here instead, and wearing his good clothes, as if he had never been out for a walk at all.

Hobin nodded. “I was hoping you’d be along. You’ve got some sense left, I see.” He walked deliberately across the workshop, even more solid and grave than usual. Mitt could not help backing away, even though he knew he would be cut off from the back door. And he was. Hobin stationed himself by the back window, and Mitt knew he was doing it on purpose.

“But you went out,” said Mitt. “With Ham.”

“And I came back,” said Hobin. “Without him.”

“And—” Mitt pointed jerkily upward with the crowbar. “My mother. She in?”

Hobin shook his head. “At Siriol’s, isn’t she? We’d best keep her out of this. Mitt, what kind of fool do you think I am to get taken in by someone like Ham? And what did you think you were aiming to do?”

Mitt swallowed. “I—I came for a gun. I was going to make it like robbers broke in. Honest, Hobin, I wasn’t meaning to get you into trouble.”

“No, I mean out there on the waterfront,” said Hobin.

“Oh,” said Mitt.

“You do take me for a fool, don’t you?” said Hobin. “I can tell my gunpowder to a grain. I knew it was you taking it, but I never thought it was you who was going to use it. Who was the one that shot the Earl? Another of your precious fishermen?”

“I don’t know. Hands to the North, I suppose. Hobin,” said Mitt, “let me have a gun. Then I’ll go away and never bother you again. Please. Everything went wrong.”

“I saw it go wrong,” said Hobin. “I was right by you when you chucked your fizz-bang. And it was lucky for them, after that Navis kicked it away, that none of them caught you. Then there was nothing I could do but hope you’d have the sense not to trust those fishermen to get you away. Because you’re in really bad trouble, Mitt. And it’s not funny. Not this time.”

“I know!” said Mitt. “I know! There’ll be spies here by tomorrow asking for me.”

“Tomorrow!” said Hobin. “You must be joking! They’ll be here by sundown. I give them till then to notice it was one of my guns shot the Earl.”

“One of yours? How can you tell?” Mitt wished Hobin would come away from the back door. He felt trapped.

“It had to be one of mine to throw straight over that distance,” said Hobin. “And it fired first time. Now do you see why I keep well in with the arms inspectors? Or was that what you were counting on?”

“No, I was not,” Mitt said wretchedly. “Why do you think I set Ham on you? What did you do with Ham, anyway?”

“Nothing, only gave him the slip,” said Hobin. “Being the fool he is, he’s still walking round in the Flate looking for me. No, I didn’t see you thinking that way, but I couldn’t help being riled over Ham. I could see through Ham easier than through that window.” Hobin pointed to the grimy glass and came away from the back door at last. Mitt eyed the distance and was wondering whether to dash for it when Hobin said, “What did you aim to do when you’d pinched a gun?”

Mitt heard keys jingle. He looked round to see Hobin unlocking the rack of guns. He could hardly believe it. He knew the risk Hobin was running. “Go out on the Flate,” he said. “See here, I don’t want you in trouble. Make it look as if I stole it.”

Hobin looked at him over his shoulder, almost as if he was amused. “You keep taking me for a fool, Mitt. I’m not giving you one of these. If a man can make one gun, he can make two, can’t he?” The whole rack of guns swung out from the wall. Hobin took two loose bricks out of the wall where it had been and reached into the space they left. While he was fumbling inside it, he said, “I wish you’d tell me what made you start on this freedom fighting nonsense, Mitt. Was it your father, or what?”

“I suppose it was,” Mitt admitted. It seemed like confessing to one spot when you had measles, but it was the best he could do. Like an admission of failure, he laid the crowbar gently down.

“I thought that was it.” Hobin wriggled the bricks back into place and swung the rack back to its usual position. He turned round carefully, carrying a strange, fat little gun. “And I hoped you’d grow up, Mitt,” he said. “You’ve got your own life to live.” Gently he spun the strange fat barrel of the gun round. Mitt had never seen a gun like it before. “Have you ever thought,” Hobin asked, “what kind of man leaves you and Milda on your own like that?”

This was such an untoward question that Mitt was quite unable to answer it. “What kind of gun is that?” he said.

“The one I had in my pocket while you were planting your banger,” said Hobin. “In case of trouble. I kept it loaded for you. But I can only let you have the six shots in it, so go easy on them. I can’t cheat the inspectors much more than you can.”

“Six shots?” said Mitt. “How do you do for priming?”

“You don’t. Ever thought what I did with those percussion caps I set you making?” Hobin said. “They’re in here, see, on the end of the cartridges, and the hammer fires them off. There’s a barrel for each shot. You spin the next one up after you’ve fired. It doesn’t throw far, or I wouldn’t let you have it. This is to get you out of trouble, not get you in it, see. If it wasn’t for Milda and the girls, I’d have kept you with me and sworn myself blue in the face you were with me all along, like I used to for Canden. But there’s them to consider, too. There you are.”

He put the gun in Mitt’s hands. Like all Hobin’s guns, it was beautifully balanced. Mitt hardly felt the weight of the chubby six-holed barrel at all. “What did you make this for?”

“Experiment,” said Hobin. “And because one of these days there’s going to be a real uprising here in the South. The earls can’t hold people down forever. So I’ve made ready. I hoped you’d be patient and be ready, too. But there. You’ll find your pea jacket on the stairs, and my belt to carry the gun in.”

Mitt went to the stair door. There, sure enough, were his old pea jacket and the belt. “You—you had this all ready,” he said awkwardly.

“What did you expect?” said Hobin. “Sometimes I think I’d make a better freedom fighter than any of you. I put a bit of thought into it. And I’ll give you some advice, too. Don’t go out in the Flate.”

Mitt stopped in the middle of fastening Hobin’s belt round himself. “Eh?”

“Eh?” said Hobin. “You’re all the same. Do what the other man did. You’ve got a brain, Mitt. Use it. They’ll expect you out in the Flate. You’ll be caught by tomorrow lunchtime if you go that way. What you want to do is go up along the coast and see if you can’t get a boat at Hoe or Little Flate. Or it’s worth looking at the West Pool.”

“Over those mucky dikes?” said Mitt.

“That won’t kill you, and it’s nearest. But I don’t know what guard they set over their boats there. See how you go. And if you get anywhere in Canderack or Waywold where there’s a gunsmith, go to him and tell him I sent you. They’ll all know me. Come on,” said Hobin. “I’ll give you a lift up over the wall.”

Mitt pushed the gun into the belt and put on his jacket “But what are you going to tell them when they come—these spies?”

“Nail up this window for a start,” said Hobin. “Then you may have tried to break in, but you didn’t manage it. I’ll be very grieved and disappointed in you, Mitt. You’ll never darken my door again.”

Though Hobin smiled slightly as he said that, Mitt knew that he was not likely to see Hobin again. As he went across the yard with him, Mitt felt unexpectedly wretched about it. He had never treated Hobin right, never even thought of him in the right way. He wanted to apologize to Hobin. But there seemed no time to say anything. Hobin had his hands joined ready for Mitt to tread in. Mitt sighed and put his foot on them.

“Happy birthday,” Hobin whispered. “Luck ship and shore.”

There had been so much else on Mitt’s mind that he had clean forgotten it was his birthday. He wanted to thank Hobin for remembering. But Hobin heaved. Mitt went upward. He had only time for a hasty grin down at Hobin, before he was on top of the wall and slithering over the other side.

No one seemed to have seen him. Mitt set out into the depressed corner of Holand between the causeway to the West Pool and the dunes. It was not far. Flate Street was some way west to start with. And Mitt saw Hobin had been right to tell him to go this way. He only saw one party of soldiers, and these he hid from in a doorway, fingering the fat little gun as they passed and thinking: Better not come too near. Hobin gave me a birthday present you won’t like.

The soldiers passed without seeing him. Mitt went on. The town petered out into marsh and shacks made of pieces of boat. There was no one about at all. Mitt, the seagulls, and the rubbish thrown into the pink marsh plants had it all to themselves. Mitt was glad of his coat. There was a fresh wind ripping over the dunes on his left, from the sea, which brimmed to the horizon above the dunes and looked higher than the land. Ahead was a bright green stretch where a network of brackish dikes broke through the dunes. Mitt would have to cross those in order to get to the seawall of the West Pool. He was still not too keen on the idea. But beyond that black line of wall there were masts—several hundred pleasure boats, large and small, awaiting Mitt’s pleasure.

Good old Hobin! Mitt thought, making squelching strides through the pink marsh.

Then he came to the dikes. They were gray green muddy ditches, just too wide to jump, threading the squashy green turf in front of the wall as intricately as the patterns Milda used to embroider on hangings for the Palace. Once they had been simply sea marsh. Now they were where the Palace sewers came out. As the tide was going out, they were running sluggishly, with scummy bubblings and a foot of gray mud above the waterline.

“Yuk!” said Mitt, and looked rather desperately toward the causeway, wondering whether he dared go that way instead. There were people on it. He could see them moving between the trees. Once again that awful, unusual fear seized him. He was afraid to move at all. I better wait for dark, he thought.

But the people, whoever they were, continued flickering slowly to and fro between the trees. Mitt, with his hands shaking, tore up an old stake and prodded the nearest ditch with it. The nasty water was only knee-deep.

I’ll have a go, thought Mitt. He slithered down into the sour, salty mud. “Oh yuk! Shershplottleshloosh! What filthy filth!” said Mitt. He waded through and climbed out. “Careful of that gun, now,” he warned himself. A couple of yards on was another ditch. “Second sewer,” said Mitt, sliding in with a shudder. “And now”—as he climbed out— “here comes another.”

He was struggling out of that ditch when there were shouts from the causeway. Figures ran between the trees and leaped gingerly down on the green morass—green figures, darker than the marsh. Harchad had thought of the West Pool, too. Mitt went down, through and up out of that next dike quicker than the rats through the garbage on the waterfront. He was through the next two before the running soldiers reached their first. As he plunged down yet another slimy bank, he saw them stop there, about a hundred yards away.

Take them a while to bring themselves to go in, he thought. The wall of the Pool was about a hundred yards away, too. Mitt knew he would never get there. It was hopeless. He doubled over and ran along the ditch, splashing and squelching, keeping one hand over his coat and the gun. “Keep it dry. You might get one or two with it,” he said to himself.

The ditch bent and joined another one. When Mitt looked up, the wall of the Pool was quite a bit nearer. There was a buttress he might climb up. But he would have to come out of this ditch to get to it. Mitt rolled out and dived across the moist green turf.

Something went pheeew past his head and thudded smick into the bank of the dike beyond.

Mitt found himself up and running. He was so frightened that he felt as if he had got some dreadful disease. His legs hurt, his breathing hurt, and he felt giddy. Bullets were going pheeew-smick all round him now. He thought he was like a chicken, running about with its neck wrung. He was sure he was dead.

Hey! thought Mitt. He was on the edge of another dike. Pheeew-smick. He threw up both arms, spun round, and fell. While he was falling, he had time to hoik Hobin’s belt round him, so the gun was at his back, out of harm’s way. He fell on his face on the cold, salty turf and let himself slide over sideways into the bubbling slime in the dike. He hardly noticed the smell.

There was one more shout from the distance, then businesslike silence.

Good, thought Mitt, and began to claw his way along below the bank on hands and knees.

“There are a lot of people,” Ynen said uneasily when he and Hildy were halfway along the causeway. “Soldiers, I think. By the Pool gate.”

They stopped, confounded, and humped their sacks of pies to the side of the road, where the trees hid them.

“It must be the uprising,” said Hildy. “Do you think they’d let us past if I offered them a gold piece? I’ve got one.”

“I don’t know. There are an awful lot of them.”

They loitered forward, under the trees. It was hard to know what to do. The soldiers might not stop them. On the other hand, Uncle Harchad had told the guards by the kitchen to bring them to him. He could have sent the same message to these soldiers.

“And it would be the most terrible waste if they sent us back now,” said Hildy.

Before they were near enough to see or be seen clearly, they saw the figures at the end of the road flicker to the side of it, one after another, and disappear through the trees. It looked as if they had jumped off the causeway.

“Don’t they want us to see them?” Hildy said, and stopped, thinking of bombs and revolutionaries.

“Oh come on!” said Ynen, and began to run. “Quick! While they’re away.”

Hildy caught him up, and they ran hard, with the pies butting at their shoulders and the trees flicking past on either side. There was a salvo of little blunt bangs down below the road. Between the flicking trees they saw puffs of smoke and a flash or so. It sent both Hildy and Ynen over to the other side of the road, where they ran still, but more slowly. Neither of them wanted to run straight into a battle.

But the firing stopped after a round or so. Ynen panted to Hildy to hurry, to get to the gate before the soldiers came back. But no soldiers appeared. They reached the big pitch-painted gates before they saw them. There were about twenty soldiers, all down in the marsh to the left, jumping and slithering among the smelly dikes there. They were peering into each one they came to, and shouting to one another to cover the next one. Some had poles and were prodding the mud.

“They’re looking for someone,” Ynen said, greatly relieved. “I bet it’s the murderer.”

“I suppose they shot him,” Hildy agreed. “Ynen, how lucky! They’ve left the gates open. They must have been searching the Pool.” It did not really occur to them that someone’s misfortune had caused their good luck.

Mitt slithered up that buttress. Like a horrible great slug, I am, he thought. He rolled onto the top of the wall. Left a slimy trail like one, too, he thought, looking at the wide smear of gray-green mud behind him. Below, the soldiers were prodding at ditches, convinced he was dead. Mitt rolled off the wall and thumped onto the jetty beyond before any of them chanced to look up and find reason to revise their opinion. He lay propped on his elbows, panting, clammy and almost tired out, and wondered which of these many little boats he had better get into. He knew it would have to be one he could manage easily alone. For that reason he rejected the beauty moored about ten yards down. “Too big, my lovely,” he told her. “One of them Siriol used to spit at, too.”

He looked round the rest. Some were big, some tubby, some the merest cockleshells. They all gleamed with splendid paint. Mitt thought he was weighing each one up as he looked at it, but in fact, all he was doing was comparing them with that blue beauty ten yards away and finding them trash in comparison. He did not have time to make himself decide reasonably. A soldier down in the marsh yelled. Mitt bolted on hands and knees like a monkey. He was rolling across the blue beauty’s cabin roof before he had time to think. She had a steering well—purest pleasure boat stuff, Mitt thought, dropping down into it. At least it hid him from the soldiers.

But not for long. Before Mitt had believed it possible, footsteps were pattering on the jetty outside. He tore open the double cabin doors and dived inside. If he had not been in such a hurry, he would have stopped then and stared. He never could have imagined a ship’s inside could be so beautiful—blue blankets and blue plush, a charcoal cooking stove, white paint and gold, and everything carved and ornamented and cleaned until it was more like a floating palace than a boat.

Ah, I always said the best wasn’t good enough for me! Mitt thought, tiptoeing in a trail of green slime to the far end of the cabin. The boat’s name was embroidered on all the blankets. Mitt could not resist pausing to spell out the name all this luxury went under. Wind’s Road, he read. Very suitable. Suits me fine.

The next second Wind’s Road dipped and swung under people’s feet. “Isn’t she beautiful!” Ynen said, dumping his sack on a locker. Mitt fumbled open a gilded cupboard, sweating with panic, and found himself confronting a bucket with a gilded seat. The bucket seemed to have roses painted all over it.

Flaming Ammet! thought Mitt. There really is nothing but the best on this ship! He shot the polished brass bolt to the cupboard with slimy, shaking fingers, and leaned against the gilded wall, listening to feet scampering and shrill, haughty voices calling overhead.