Gifts

♦ 15 ♦

For many days it was enough to have the pages Melle had written for me, which I brought down to my room and kept in a carved box. I read them every morning at first light, waking when the cocks began to crow, getting up to sit at the table with the blindfold round my forehead, ready to pull it down over my eyes should someone enter the room. I was scrupulous not to look anywhere but at the written leaves, and—once at the beginning, once at the end—up at the window, to see the sky. I reasoned that I could do no harm reading my mother’s writing and looking up into the light.

I was particularly careful, though it was extremely difficult, not to look at Coaly. I longed to see her. If she was in the room, I knew I could not keep my eyes from her; and that idea sent a chill through me. I tried to sit with my hands cupped around my eyes so I could see only the writing, but it was not safe. I shut my eyes and shut poor Coaly out of the room. “Stay,” I told her outside my door, and I heard her tail give a small, obedient thump. I felt like a traitor when I shut the door.

I was often puzzled to know what I was reading, for the linen pages had been put away in the chest in no order and further confused by my carrying them away; and my mother had written down whatever she could remember as it came into her head, often only bits and passages without beginning or end or anything to explain them. When she first began to write, she had put in notes: “This is from the Worship of Ennu my Grandmother taught me, it is for women to speak,” or “I do not know more of this Tale of the Blessed Momu.” Several of the pages were headed “For My Son Orrec of Caspromant.” One of the earlier ones, a legend about the founding of Derris Water, was titled “Drops from the Bucket of the Well of Melle Aulitta of Derris Water and Caspromant, for My Dear Son.” As her illness grew worse, which I could see in the weakness and hastiness of the writing, there were no explanations and more fragments. And instead of stories there were poems and chants, all written out in cramped lines clear across the sheet, so that I only heard the poetry if I spoke it aloud. Some of the later pages were very hard to decipher. The last—it had been the topmost in the trunk, and I had kept it in place—had only a few pale lines written on it. I remembered how she said she was too tired to write any more for a while.

I suppose it seems strange that, after the intense delight of reading these precious gifts my mother left for me, I was willing to close the darkness down on my eyes again and stumble through the day led by a dog. I was not merely willing, I was ready. The only way I could defend Caspromant was by being blind, so I was blind. I had found a redeeming joy to lighten my duty, but it was no less my duty.

I was aware that I hadn’t found this redemption for myself. It was Gry who had said, “You could read them.” It being autumn, she was busy at Roddmant with the harvest and could seldom come over; but as soon as she did, I took her to my room and showed her the box of writings and told her that I was reading them.

She seemed more distracted or embarrassed than pleased, and was in a hurry to leave the room. She had a keener sense than I did, of course, of the risk she ran. People of the domains were by no means strict with girls, and nobody in the Uplands saw anything unseemly in young people riding and walking and talking together outdoors or where other people might come; but for a girl of fifteen to go to a boy’s bedroom was going too far. Rab and Sosso would have scolded us savagely, and worse, some of the others, the spinning women or the kitchen help, might have gossiped. When this possibility finally dawned upon me, I felt my face turn red. We went outdoors without a word, and weren’t easy with each other till we had talked about horses for half an hour.

Then we were able to discuss what I had been reading. I recited one of the chants of Odressel for Gry. It exalted my heart, but she wasn’t much impressed. She preferred stories. I couldn’t explain to her how the poems I read fascinated me. I tried to work out how they were put together, how this word returned, or this sound or rhyme came back, or the beat wove through the words. All this hung in my mind as I went about the rest of the day in the darkness. I would try to fit words of my own into the patterns I had found, and sometimes it worked. That gave me intense, pure pleasure, a pleasure that endured, returning each time I thought of those words, that pattern, that poem.

Gry was low in spirits that day, and again the next time she came. It was rainy October by then, and we sat in the chimney corner to talk. Rab brought us a plate full of oatcakes and I slowly devoured them while Gry sat mostly silent. At last she said, “Orrec, why do you think we have the gifts?”

“To defend our people with.”

“Not mine.”

“No; but you can hunt for them, help them get food, train animals to work for them.”

“Yes. But your gift. Or Father’s. To destroy. To kill.”

“There has to be somebody who can do it.”

“I know. But did you know… Father can take a splinter out of your finger, or a thorn out of your foot, with the knife gift. So neat and quick, it only bleeds one drop. He just looks, and it’s out… And Nanno Corde. She can make people deaf and blind, but did you know she unsealed a deaf boy’s ears? He was deaf and dumb, he could only make signs with his mother, but now he can hear enough to learn to talk. She says she did it the same way she’d deafen somebody, only one way goes forward and the other backward.”

That was intriguing, and we discussed it a little, but it didn’t mean much to me. It did to Gry. She said, “I wonder if all the gifts are backward.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not the calling. You can use it forward or backward.

But the knife, or the Cordes’ sealing—maybe they’re backward. Maybe they were useful for curing people, to begin with. For healing. And then people found out they could be weapons and began to use them that way, and forgot the other way…Even the rein, that the Tibros have, maybe at first it was just a gift of working with people, and then they made it go backward, to make people work for them.”

“What about the Morgas?” I asked. “Their gift isn’t a weapon.”

“No— It’s only good for finding out what people are sick with, so you know how to heal them. It doesn’t work for making them sick. It only goes forward. That’s why the Morgas have to hide out back there where nobody else comes.”

“All right. But some of the gifts never went forward. What about the Helvars’ cleaning? What about my gift?”

“They could have been healing, to begin with. If there was something wrong inside a person, or an animal, something out of order, like a hard knot—maybe it was a gift of untying it—setting it right, putting it in order.”

That had an unexpected ring of probability to me. I knew exactly what she meant. It was like the poetry I made in my head, the tangled confusion of words that fell suddenly into a pattern, a clarity, and you recognised it: that’s it, that’s right.

“But then why did we stop doing that and only use it to make people’s insides into an awful mess?”

“Because there are so many enemies. But maybe also because you can’t use the gift both ways. You can’t go backward and forward at the same time.”

I knew from her voice that she was saying something important to her. It had to do with her use of her own gift, but I wasn’t certain what it was.

“Well, if anybody could teach me how to use my gift to do instead of undo, I’d try to learn,” I said, not too seriously.

“Would you?” She was serious.

“No,” I said. “Not till I’d destroyed Ogge Drum.”

She gave a great sigh.

I brought my fist down on the stone of the hearth seat and said, “I will. I will destroy that fat adder, when I can! Why doesn’t Canoc? What’s he waiting for? For me? He knows I can’t—I can’t control the gift— He can. How can he sit here and not go revenge my mother!”

I had never said this before to Gry scarcely to myself. I was hot with sudden anger as I spoke. Her reply was cold.

“Do you want your father dead?”

“I want Drum dead!”

“You know Ogge Drum goes about day and night with bodyguards, men with swords and knives, cross-bowmen. And his son Sebb has his gift, and Ren Corde serves him, and all his people are on the watch for anyone from Caspromant. Do you want Canoc to go striding in there and be killed?”

“No—”

“You don’t think he’d kill from behind—the way he did? Sneaking in the dark? You think Canoc would do that?”

“No,” I said, and put my head in my hands.

“My father says he’s been afraid for two years now that Canoc’s going to get on his horse and ride to Drummant to kill Ogge Drum. The way he rode to Dunet. Only alone.”

I had nothing to say. I knew why Canoc had not done so. For the sake of his people who needed his protection. For my sake.

After a long time, Gry said, “Maybe you can’t use your gift forward, only backward, but I can use mine forward.”

“You’re lucky.”

“I am,” she said. “Though my mother doesn’t think so.” She got up abruptly and said, “Coaly! Come for a walk.”

“What do you mean about your mother?”

“I mean she wants me to go back to Borremant with her for the winter hunts. And if I won’t go with her and learn to call to the hunt, she says then I’d better find myself a husband, and soon, because I can’t expect the people of Roddmant to support me if I won’t use my gift.”

“But—what does Ternoc say?”

“Father is troubled and worried and doesn’t want me to upset Mother and doesn’t understand why I don’t want to be a brantor.”

I could tell that Coaly was standing, patient, but ready for the promised walk. I got up too, and we went out into the drizzling, windless air.

“Why don’t you?” I asked.

“It’s all in the story about the ants. —Come on!” She set off into the rain. Coaly tugged me after her.

It was a disturbing conversation, which I only half understood. Gry was troubled, but I had no help for her, and her reference to finding a husband had brought me up short. Since my eyes had been sealed, we had said nothing of our pledge made on the rock above the waterfall. I could not hold her to it. But what need to? I could dismiss all that. We were fifteen, yes. But there was no need to rush into anything, no need even to talk about it. Our understanding was enough. In the Uplands, strategic betrothals may be made early, but people seldom marry till they are in their twenties. I told myself that Parn had been merely threatening Gry. Yet I felt the threat hung over me as well.

What Gry had said about the gifts made some sense to me, but seemed mostly mere theory: except for her own gift, the calling. It went both forward and backward, she said. If by backward she meant calling wild beasts to be killed, forward meant working with domestic animals—horsebreaking, cattle calling, training dogs, curing and healing. Honoring trust, not betraying it. That was how she saw it. If she saw it so, Parn could not move her. Nothing could move her.

But it was true that training and horsebreaking were thought of as trades that anyone might learn. The gift of the lineage was calling to the hunt. Indeed she could not be a brantor at Roddmant or anywhere else, if she did not use that gift. If—as Parn saw it—she did not honor her gift, but betrayed it.

And I? By not using my gift, by refusing it, not trusting it—was I betraying it?

SO THE YEAR went on, a dark year, though now each day had that one bright hour at its dawn. It was early winter when the runaway man came to Caspromant.

He had a narrow escape, though he didn’t know it, for he came onto our land from the west, down in the sheep pastures where we had met the adder, and Canoc was riding the fence there, as he rode our borders with Drummant and Cordemant whenever he could. He saw the fellow hop over the stone wall and come, as he said, sneaking up the hill. Canoc turned Branty and charged down on him like a falcon on a mouse. “I had my left hand out,” he said. “I thought sure he was a sheep thief, or come after the Silver Cow. I don’t know what stayed my hand.”

Whatever it was, he didn’t destroy Emmon then and there, but reined up and demanded who he was and what he was doing. Maybe he’d seen even in that flick of an eye that the man was not one of us, not a cattle thief from Drummant or a sheep thief from the Glens, but a foreigner.

And maybe when he heard how Emmon spoke, that soft Lowland accent, it softened his heart. In any case, he accepted the man’s story, that he had wandered up from Danner and was quite lost and was seeking nothing but a cottage where he might spend the night and some work if he could find it. The cold misty rain of December was coming over the hills, and the man had no proper coat, only a scanty jacket and a scarf that amounted to nothing.

Canoc led him to the farmhouse where the old woman and her son looked after the Silver Cow, and said if he liked he could come on up to the Stone House next day, where there might be a bit of work for him to do.

I have not told of the Silver Cow before. She was the single heifer who was left there when Drum’s thieves took the other two. She had grown into the most beautiful cow in the Uplands. Alloc and my father brought her up to Roddmant to be bred to Ternoc’s great white bull, and people all along the way admired her. In her first breeding, she dropped twin calves, a bull and a heifer, and in her second, twin heifers. The old woman and her son, mindful of their carelessness with her sisters, looked after her as if she were a princess, kept her close in, guarded her with their lives, curried her cream-white coat, fed her the best they had, and sang her praises to all who passed by. She had come to be called the Silver Cow, and the herd Canoc had dreamed of was well started, thanks to her and her sisters’ calves. She thrived there where she was, and he took her back there; but as soon as her calves were weaned, he took them up to the high pastures, keeping the herd far from his dangerous borders.

The next day but one, the wanderer from the Lowlands arrived at our Stone House. Hearing Canoc greet him civilly, the people of the house took him in without question, fed him, found him an old cloak to keep warm in, and listened to him talk. Everybody was glad to have somebody new to listen to in winter.

“He talks like our dear Melle,” Rab whispered, going teary. I didn’t go teary, but I did like to hear his voice.

There was really no work at that time of year that needed an extra hand to do, but it was the tradition of the Uplands to take in the needy stranger and save his pride with at least the semblance of work—so long as he hadn’t given any sign of belonging to a domain you were feuding with, in which case he’d probably be lying dead somewhere out on your borders. It was plain that Emmon knew absolutely nothing about horses, or sheep, or cattle, or farm work of any kind; but anybody can clean harness. He was set to cleaning harness, and he did so, now and then. Saving his pride was not a great problem.

Mostly he sat with me, or with me and Gry, in the corner of the great hearth, while the women spinning over on the other side droned their long, soft songs. I have told how we talked, and what pleasure he brought to us, merely by being from a world where what troubled us so made no sense at all, and none of our grim questions need even be asked.

When we came to the matter of my blindfold, and I told him that my father had sealed my eyes, he was too cautious to ask any further. He knew a bog when he felt it quake, as they say in the Uplands. But he talked to the people of the household, and they told him how Young Orrec’s eyes had been sealed because he had the wild gift that might destroy anything and anyone that came before him whether he willed it or not; and they went on and told him, I’m sure, about Blind Caddard, and how Canoc had raided Dunet, and maybe how my mother had died. All that must have tried his disbelief; and yet I can understand how it still could have seemed to him the superstition of ignorant country folk caught in their own fears, scaring themselves with talk of witchery.

Emmon was fond of Gry and me; he was sorry for us and knew how much we valued him for his company; I think he imagined that he could do us good— enlighten us. When he realised that although I’d said my father had sealed my eyes, it was I who kept them blindfolded, he was really shocked. “You do that to yourself?” he said. “But you’re mad, Orrec. There’s no harm in you. You wouldn’t hurt a fly if you stared at it all day!”

He was a man and I a boy, he was a thief and I was honest, he had seen the world and I had not, but I knew evil better than he did. “There’s harm in me,” I said.

“Well, there’s a little harm in the best of us, so best to let it out, admit it, not nurse it and keep it festering in the dark, eh?”

His advice was well meant, but it was both offensive and painful to me. Not wanting to give a harsh answer, I got up, spoke to Coaly, and went outdoors. As I left I heard Emmon say to Gry, “Ah, he could be his father just now!” What she said to him I don’t know, but he never tried to advise me about my blindfold again.

Our safest and most fruitful subjects were horse-breaking and storytelling. Emmon didn’t know much about horses, but had seen fine ones in the cities of the Lowlands, and he said he’d never seen any trained as ours were, even old Roanie and Greylag, let alone Star. When the weather wasn’t too bad we went out, and Gry could show off all the tricks and paces she and Star had worked out together, which I knew only from her descriptions. I heard Emmons shouts of praise and admiration, and tried to imagine Gry and the filly—but I had never seen the filly. I had never seen Gry as she was now.

Sometimes there was a tone in Emmon’s voice as he spoke to Gry that caught my ear; a little added softness, propitiating, almost wheedling. Mostly he spoke to her as a man does to a girl, but sometimes he sounded like a man speaking to a woman.

It didn’t get him far. She answered him as a girl, gruff and plain. She liked Emmon but she didn’t think much of him.

When it rained and blew or the snow flurries swept over our hills, we stayed in the chimney corner. Running short of other matters to talk about, since Emmon was such a poor hand at telling us about life in the Lowlands, one day Gry asked me for a story. She liked the hero tales of the Chamhan, so I told one of the stories about Hamneda and his friend Omnan. Then, seduced by the eager listening of my audience—for the spinning women had stopped their singing, and some had even stopped their wheels to hear the tale—I went on and spoke a poem from the scriptures of the Temple of Raniu, which my mother had written down. There were gaps in it where her memory had failed, and I had filled them in with my own words, keeping to the complex meter.

The language lifted up my heart whenever I read it, and as I spoke it, it possessed me, it sang through me. When I ended, I heard for the first time in my life that silence which is the performer’s sweetest reward.

“By all the names,” Emmon said in an awed voice.

There was a nice little murmur of admiration from the spinning women.

“How do you know that tale, that song?— Ah, of course, through your mother— But she told you all that? And you remember it?”

“She wrote it down for me,” I said, without thinking.

“Wrote it? You can read?— But not with a blindfold on!”

“I can read, but not with a blindfold on.”

“What a memory you must have!”

“Memory is a blind man’s eyes,” I said, with a certain malice, feeling that I was fencing and had best be on the offensive, having nearly dropped my guard.

“And she taught you to read?”

“Gry and me.”

“But what have you got to read, up here? I’ve never seen a book about.”

“She wrote out some for us.”

“By all the names. Listen, I have a book. It was… given me, down in the city. I hauled it about in my pack all this way, thinking there might be some value to it. Not up here, eh? But to you, maybe. Here, let me get the thing.” He soon returned, and put into my hands a small box, no deeper than a finger joint is long. The lid lifted easily. Under it, instead of a hollow space, I felt a surface like silk cloth. Under it were many more cloths, leaves, held at one edge, as in the book my mother had made, fine and thin yet delicately stiff, so that they turned easily My fingers marveled to touch them. And my eyes yearned to see them, but I handed the book back to Emmon. “Read a little,” I said.

“Here, Gry, you read,” Emmon said promptly.

I heard Gry turning the leaves. She spelled out a few words, and gave up. “It looks so different from what Melle wrote,” she said. “It’s small, and black, and more straight up and down, and all the letters look alike.”

“It’s printed,” Emmon said knowledgeably, but when I wanted to know what that meant, he couldn’t tell me much. “The priests do it,” he said vaguely. “They have these wheels, like a wine press, you know…”

Gry described the book for me: the outside of it was leather, she said, probably calfskin, with a hard shiny finish, stamped round the edges with a scroll design in gold leaf, and on the back, where the leaves joined, was more gold leaf and a word stamped in red, and the edges of the leaves were gilt. “It’s very, very beautiful,” she said. “It must be a precious thing.”

And she gave it back to Emmon, as I knew by his saying, “No: it’s for you and Orrec. If you can read it, do. And if you can’t, maybe somebody will happen by someday who can, and they’ll think you great scholars, eh?” He laughed his merry laugh, and we thanked him, and he put the book back in my hands. I held it. It was indeed a precious thing.

In the earliest, greyest light of morning I saw it, the gold leaf, the red word Transformations on the spine; I opened it and saw the paper (which I still took for cloth of incredible fineness), the splendid, bold, large, curling letters of the title page, the small black print thick as ants crawling across every white leaf…Thick as ants. I saw the ant hill by the path above the Ashbrook, the ants crawling in and out about their business, and I struck at them with hand and eye and word and will, and still they crawled on about their business, and I closed my eyes…. I closed my eyes, and opened them. The book lay before me, open. I read a line: So in his heart in silence he foreswore his vow. It was poetry, a story in poetry. I turned the pages slowly back to the first one and began to read.

Coaly shifted position at my feet and looked up. I looked down at her. I saw a middle-sized dog with a close, curly, black coat that grew very short and fine on her ears and face, a long nose, a high forehead, clear, intent, dark-brown eyes looking straight up into mine.

In my excitement of anticipation, I had forgotten to put her out of the room before I took off the blindfold.

She stood up, without ceasing to look into my eyes. She was very much taken aback but far too dignified and responsible to show it in any way except by that intense, puzzled, honest stare.

“Coaly,” I said in a shaky voice, and put out my hand to her muzzle.

She sniffed it. It was me all right.

I knelt down and hugged the dog. We did not go in much for displays of affection, but she pressed her forehead against my chest and kept it there a while.

I said, “Coaly, I will never hurt you.”

She knew that. She looked at the door, however, as if to tell me that though this was much pleasanter, she was willing to go and wait outside, since that was the custom.

I said, “Stay,” and she lay down beside the chair, and I went back to my book.