Gifts

♦ 16 ♦

Emmon left soon after that. Though Canoc’s hospitality would not permit any lapse in courtesy, it was clear that his welcome was wearing thin. And in fact life in the Stone House in late winter and early spring was thin, with the hens not laying, and the sausages and hams long since eaten, and no beef cattle to slaughter. We lived mostly on oat porridge and dried apples; our one meat and luxury was smoked or fresh trout or salmon-trout caught in the Spate or the Ashbrook. Having heard our talk of the great, wealthy domains of the Carrantages, Emmon maybe thought he’d eat better there. I hope he got there. I hope they did not use their gifts on him.

Before he left he talked seriously with Gry and me, as seriously as such a light-souled, light-fingered man could talk. He told us we should leave the Uplands. “What is there here for you?” he said. “Gry, you won’t do as your mother wishes and bring the beasts to the hunters, so you’re considered useless. Orrec, you keep that damned bandage on, so you are useless, for anything to be done on a farm like this. But if you went down into the Lowlands, Gry, with that mare of yours, and showed off her paces, you’d get a job with any horse breeder or stable you liked. And you, Orrec, the way you remember tales and songs, and the way you make tales and songs of your own, that’s a skill of value in all the towns, and in the cities too. People gather to hear tellers and singers, and pay them well, and rich people keep them in their household, to show off with. And if you have to keep your eyes shut all your life, well, some of those poets and singers are blind men. Though if I were you, I’d open my eyes and see what I had within hand’s reach.” And he laughed.

And so he went off northward on a bright April day, waving a jaunty farewell no doubt, wearing a good warm coat Canoc had given him, and carrying his old pack, in which were a couple of silver spoons from our cabinet, a brooch of jasper and river-gold which had been Rab’s great treasure, and the one silver-mounted bridle from our stable gear.

“He never did clean it,” Canoc said, but without much rancor. If you take in a thief, you expect to lose something. You don’t know what you may gain.

While he was with us all those months, Gry and I had not talked as we used to, in complete frankness. There were matters we hadn’t spoken of at all. It had been winter, a time of waiting, a suspension. Now all we had kept back burst out.

I said, “Gry, I’ve seen Coaly.”

Coaly’s tail thumped once at her name.

“I forgot to put her out. I looked down and she was there, and she saw me see her. So…since then…I haven’t put her out.”

Gry thought this over for a long time before she spoke. “So you think… it’s safe… ?”

“I don’t know what I think.”

She was silent, pondering.

“I think that when I—when my gift went wrong, when it was out of my control—I’d been trying to use it, my power—trying and trying, and not able to. And it made me angry, and ashamed, and my father kept pushing me and pushing me, so I kept trying, and getting angrier and more ashamed, till it broke out and went wild. So, if I never try to use it, maybe… It might be all right.”

Gry pondered this too. “But when you killed the adder— You hadn’t been trying to use your gift then, had you?”

“Yes, I had. I worried all the time about it, about not having it. Anyhow, did I kill the adder? Listen, Gry, I’ve thought about that a thousand times. I struck at it and Alloc did and my father did, all almost at once. And Alloc thought it was me, because I did see it first. And my father—” I paused.

“He wanted it to be you?”

“Maybe.”

After a while I said, “Maybe he wanted me to think it was me. To give me confidence. I don’t know. But I told him, I said I did what I was supposed to do, but it didn’t feel as if I did anything. And I tried to make him tell me what it was like when he used his power, but he couldn’t. But listen, you must know it when the power goes through you! You must! I know it when the power comes into me when I’m making a poem. I know what it’s like! But if I do as Father taught me, if I try to use that power, use eye and hand and word and will, nothing happens, nothing! I’ve never felt it then!”

“Even… Even there, by the Ashbrook?”

I hesitated. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was so angry, with myself, with my father. It was strange. It was like being caught in a storm, in a gust of wind. I tried to strike and nothing happened, but then the wind struck, and I opened my eyes, and my hand was still pointing, and the hillside was all writhing and melting and turning black—and I thought Father was standing there in front of me, where I was pointing, that he was shrinking and shrivelling—but it was the tree. Father was standing behind me.”

“The dog,” Gry said after a while, in a whisper. “Hamneda.”

“I was on Branty, and he spooked when Hamneda came running at him. All I know I did was try to keep on Branty and keep him from rearing. If I looked at the dog, I didn’t know it. But Father was on Greylag. Behind me.”

I suddenly fell silent.

I put my hands up to my eyes as if to cover them, though they were covered with the blindfold.

Gry said, “It could…” and stopped.

“It could have been Father. Every time.”

“But…”

“I knew that. I knew it all along. But I didn’t dare think it. I had to—I had to believe it was me. That I had the gift. That I did those things. That I killed the adder, that I killed the dog, that I can make Chaos. I had to believe it. I have to believe it so other people will believe it, so they’ll be afraid of me and keep away from the borders of Caspromant! Isn’t that the good of the gift? Isn’t that what it’s for? Isn’t that what it does? Isn’t that what a brantor does for his people?”

“Orrec,” Gry said, and I stopped.

She asked, low-voiced, “What does Canoc believe?”

“I don’t know.”

“He believes you have the gift. The wild gift. Even if—”

But I broke in. “Does he? Or did he know it was himself, his gift, his power, and he was just using me, because I didn’t have it, didn’t have the gift? I couldn’t destroy anything, anybody. All I’m good for is being a bogey. A scarecrow. Better keep away from Caspromant! Keep away from Blind Orrec, he’ll destroy everything he sees if he doesn’t wear a blindfold! But I wouldn’t. I don’t, Gry. I don’t destroy everything I see. I can’t! I saw Mother. I saw her when she was dying. I saw her. I didn’t hurt her. And the—books— And Coaly—” But I could not go on. The tears I had not cried all through the dark years caught up with me, and I put my head in my arms and wept.

With Coaly on one side of me, pressed against my leg, and Gry on the other, her arm round my shoulders, I cried it out.

WE DID NOT TALK more that day. I was exhausted by my weeping fit. Gry bade me goodbye with a little soft kiss on my hair, and I told Coaly to take me to my room. When I was there, I felt the blindfold, hot and soaking wet, pressing on my eyes. I pulled it off, and the wet pads with it. It was an April afternoon, a golden light I had not seen for three years. I stared dumbly at the light. I lay down on my bed, and closed my eyes, and slipped back into the dark.

Gry came back the next day, about midday. I was standing blindfolded in the doorway letting Coaly have a run, when I heard Star’s light hoofs on the stones.

We went back to the kitchen gardens and into the orchard, a good way from the house. We sat on the log of an old tree there that was waiting for the woodsman to saw it up.

“Orrec, do you think that… that you don’t have the gift?”

“I know it.”

“Then I want to ask you to look at me,” Gry said.

It took me a long time to do it, but I lifted my hands at last and untied the blindfold. I looked down at my hands. The light dazzled me for a while. The ground was full of lights and shadows. Everything was bright, moving, shining. I looked up at Gry.

She was tall, with a thin, long, brown face, a wide, thin mouth, and dark eyes under arched eyebrows. The whites of her eyes were very clear. Her hair was shining black, falling loose and heavy. I put out my hands to her, and she took them. I put my face down into her hands.

“You are beautiful,” I whispered into her hands.

She leaned forward to kiss my hair, and sat up straight again, serious, stern, and tender.

“Orrec,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

I said, “I’m going to look at you for a year. Then I’m going to marry you.”

She was startled; her head went back and she laughed. “All right!” she said. “All right! But now?”

“What about now?”

“What do we do? If I won’t use my gift, and you…”

“Have none to use.”

“Then who are we now?”

That I could not answer so easily.

“I have to talk to Father,” I said at last.

“Wait a little. My father rode over with me today to see him. Mother came home yesterday from the Glens. She says that Ogge Drum and his older son have made peace with each other, and the younger son’s the one he’s quarreling with now. And the rumor is that Ogge’s planning a foray, maybe to Roddmant or maybe to Caspromant—to get back the white cows that he says Canoc stole from him three years ago. That means, to raid our herd, or yours. Father and I met Alloc, coming.

They’re all in your north fields now, planning what to do.”

“And how do I come into their plans?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the good of a scarecrow that doesn’t scare the crows?”

But her news, bad as it was, could not darken my heart, not while I could see her, and see the sunlight on the sparse flowers of the old, split-trunked apple trees, and the far brown slopes of the mountain.

“I have to talk to him,” I repeated. “Until then, can we go walking?”

We stood up. Coaly stood up and stood with her head a little on one side and a concerned look, asking, “And how do I come into your plans?”

“You walk with us, Coaly,” I told her, unhooking her leash. So we walked on up into the glen, along the little rushing stream, and every step was a joy and a delight.

Gry left in time to be back at Roddmant by dark. Canoc did not come home till after dark. Often, when he was out late like this, he stopped at one farmhouse or another of the domain, where they welcomed him and pressed him to eat and talked over the work and worries of the farming with him. I had used to do that sometimes with him, before my eyes were sealed. But these last years, he had gone out always earlier and come home always later, riding farther and working harder than ever, taking too much on himself, wearing himself out. I knew he would be tired, and that after hearing about Ogge Drum he would be in a grimmer mood than ever. But my own mood had turned reckless at last.

Canoc came in and went upstairs without my knowing it, while I was in my room. I had lighted a fire in the hearth, for the evening had turned cold. From it I lighted a candle stolen from the kitchen at my hearth fire, and sat defiantly reading the Transformations of Denios.

Realising the household had gone silent and the women had probably left the kitchen, I pulled on my blindfold and asked Coaly to take me to the towel room.

What the poor dog thought of me being blind one-moment and seeing the next I don’t know, but being a dog she asked only questions that needed a practical answer.

I knocked at the door of the tower room, and getting no reply, I pulled off my blindfold and looked in. An oil lamp on the mantel gave a tiny, smoky light. The hearth was dark and smelled sour, as if it had not been lit for a long time. The room was cold and desolate. Canoc lay fast asleep on the bed, on his back, in his shirtsleeves, having thrown himself down and not moved since. All he had for a blanket was my mother’s brown shawl. He had pulled it up across himself, and his hand was clenched in the fringe, on his chest. I felt that pinch at my heart that I had felt when I found the shawl across the footboard. But I could not afford to pity him now. I had a score to settle and no courage to spare.

“Father,” I said, and then his name, “Canoc!”

He roused, sat up leaning on his elbow, shaded his eyes from the lamp, stared vaguely at me. “Orrec?”

I came forward so he could see me clearly.

He was nearly stunned with weariness and sleep, and had to blink and rub his eyes and bite his lip to come alive; then he looked up again and said, wonderingly, “Where’s your blindfold?”

“I won’t hurt you, Father.”

“I never thought you would,” he said, a little more strongly, though still in that wondering tone.

“You never thought I would? You never were afraid of my wild gift, then?”

He sat up on the side of the bed. He shook his head and rubbed his hair. Finally he looked up at me again. “What is it, Orrec?”

“What it is, Father, is I never had the wild gift. Did I? I never had any gift at all. I never killed that snake, or the dog, or any of it. It was you.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you tricked me into believing I had the gift and couldn’t control it, so that you could use me. So you wouldn’t have to be ashamed of me because I have no gift, because I shame your lineage, because I’m a calluc’s son!”

He was on his feet then, but he said nothing, staring at me in bewilderment.

“If I had the gift, don’t you think I’d use it now? Don’t you think I’d show you the great things I can do, the things I can kill? But I don’t have it. You didn’t give it to me. All you gave me, all you ever gave me, was three years of blindness!”

“A calluc’s son?” he whispered, incredulous.

“Do you think I didn’t love her? But you didn’t let me see her—that whole year—only once—while she was dying— Because you had to keep up your lie, your trick, your cheat!”

“I never lied to you,” he said. “I thought—” He stopped. He was still too surprised, too appalled, for anger.

“There at the Ashbrook—you believe I did that?”

“Yes,” he said. “I have no power such as that.”

“You do! You know it! You drew that line through the ash grove. You destroyed men at Dunet. You have the gift, you have the gift of unmaking! I don’t. I never did. You tricked me. Maybe you tricked yourself because you couldn’t stand it that your son wasn’t what you wanted. I don’t know. I don’t care. I know you can’t use me any longer. My eyes or my blindness. They’re not yours, they’re mine. I won’t let your lies cheat me any more. I won’t let your shame shame me any more. Find yourself another son, since this one’s not good enough.”

“Orrec,” he said, like a man hit in the wind.

“Here,” I said, and tossed the blindfold onto the floor in front of him.

I slammed the door, and ran down the turning stairs. Utterly bewildered, Coaly chased after me, barking her sharp, warning bark. She caught up with me at the foot of the staircase and took the hem of my kilt in her teeth. I put my hand on her back and worked it in the soft fur to calm her. She growled once. She came along with me back to my room. When we got there and I shut the door, she lay down in front of it. I don’t know whether she was guarding me from whoever might enter, or preventing me from going out again.

I built up the fire a little, relighted my candle, and sat down at the table. The book lay open, the book of the great poet, the treasure of joy and solace. But I could not read it. I had my eyes back, but what was I to do with them? What good were they, what good was I? Who are we now? Gry had asked. If I was not my father’s son, who was I?