Cart and Cwidder. Diana Wynne Jones

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СКАЧАТЬ I know, and Fredlan may be too.”

      Kialan looked exasperated as well as embarrassed. “But Ganner must know how many children you’ve got!”

      “I shouldn’t think so,” Lenina said calmly. “People who haven’t got children themselves never bother to count other people’s. If he wonders, I’ll say you’ve been ill and we’d left you at Fledden.”

      Kialan sighed. “Oh well. Thanks, anyway.”

      “Remember that,” Lenina said to Moril, Brid and Dagner, and Moril felt very queer, because “Remember that” was such a favourite saying of Clennen’s. “Kialan’s your brother. If anyone asks, he’s been ill in Fledden.”

      Olob plodded towards Markind. He did not look happy either, Moril thought, looking at the droop of Olob’s head. Moril was so miserable himself that he could almost hear it, like a droning in his ears, and he could not hide away in vagueness, much as he tried. He felt vividly and horribly attentive to everything, from the leaves in the hedge to the shape of Kialan’s nose. Kialan’s eagle nose was so different from Dagner’s, Brid’s, or Moril’s that surely anyone could tell at a glance he was no relation? Why did he have to be a relation, anyway? And had Clennen known he wanted to go to Hannart? Clennen would not have gone there because he never went to Hannart. And why had the six men killed Clennen? Who were they, and what were they looking for in the wood? And why, why, why above all, had Clennen given Moril a cwidder he did not want in the least?

      I shall never play it, Moril thought. I’ll polish it and string it, and maybe tune it from time to time, but I don’t want to play it. I know I should be grateful, because it must be very valuable – though it can’t be old enough to have belonged to Osfameron; he’s long ago in a story – but I don’t like it and I don’t want it.

      Markind came into view at the other end of a valley. Without meaning to, Moril looked at it as he always looked at a new town. Sleepy and respectable, he thought. Bad takings. Then he remembered he was supposed to be going here to live, not to sing, and tried very hard to look at the pile of yellowish-grey houses with interest. He found he was more interested in the villainously freckled cows which were grazing in the small green meadows outside the town.

      Lenina looked at these cows with pleasure. “I remember I always liked those speckles,” she said. She encouraged Olob to trot, and the grey and yellow houses approached swiftly. Moril’s heart sank rather – and he had thought it was low enough before.

      Soon they were winding up a gravelly street between quiet old houses. The houses were tall and cold and shuttered. There were very few people about. Even when they came to the main square and found a market going on under the high plane trees, there were still very few people, and these all sober citizens who looked at the gay cart with strong disapproval. Lenina drove past the stalls looking neither to right nor to left, and drew Olob up in front of a round-topped gateway in a massive yellow wall. Two men who seemed to be on guard at the gate peered round it at the cart in evident astonishment.

      “Had you business here?” one of them asked Lenina.

      “Certainly,” Lenina answered haughtily. “Go and tell Ganner Sagersson that Lenina Thornsdaughter is here.”

      They looked at her in even more astonishment at that. But one of them went off into the spaces behind the thick yellow wall. The other stayed, frowning wonderingly at Lenina, the cart and her family, until Moril scarcely knew where to look.

      “What’s the betting we get a message back to say, Not Today, Thank You?” whispered Brid.

      “Be quiet, Brid!” said Lenina. “Behave properly, can’t you!”

      Brid would have lost her bet. The man who had gone with the message came back at a run, and they could hear a number of people behind the gate, running too. The two halves of the gate were flung wide open.

      “Please drive in,” said the man.

      Lenina smiled graciously and shook the reins. Olob plodded forwards, disapproval in every line of his ears and back, into a small deep courtyard lined with interested faces. Ganner was standing in the middle of it, smiling delightedly.

      “Welcome back, Lenina!” he said. “I never thought I’d see you so soon. What happened?”

      “Some men killed Clennen this morning,” said Lenina. “They looked like the pick of somebody’s hearthmen to me.”

      “Not really!” exclaimed Ganner. Then he looked a little worried and asked, “Does that mean it happened in my lordship then?”

      “Yes,” said Lenina. “At Medmere.”

      “I’d better send some hearthmen over to investigate,” said Ganner. “Anyway, come down and come in. Are these your children?”

      “My three sons and my daughter,” said Lenina.

      “What a lot of them!” said Ganner, looking a little daunted. But he smiled gallantly at all four. “I’ll do my best to look after you all,” he said. Moril could not find it in his heart to dislike Ganner, much as he had intended to. It was so plain he meant well. If, to someone who had been used to Clennen, he seemed a very ordinary person, then that was hardly Ganner’s fault, Moril supposed.

      “He doesn’t look much like a goose,” Brid whispered, in some disappointment. Kialan had to bite his lip. Moril looked at Ganner gallantly helping Lenina down from the cart and smiling at her in a way that showed he adored her. Apart from that smile, he really seemed perfectly normal and ungooselike.

      “Oh dear, oh dear!” Ganner exclaimed, as they all got down. “Shoes! Boots! Can you only afford one pair of boots?”

      Lenina glanced along their line of bare feet, interrupted by Kialan’s scuffed boots. “We don’t usually bother with them,” she explained. “But Collen has tender feet.”

      “I must make sure you all have shoes this instant!” Ganner exclaimed distractedly.

      “You know, I think he may be a goose after all,” Brid said, with considerable satisfaction.

      

      BY THAT AFTERNOON Moril was wondering if it was only that morning they had left Clennen buried by the lake. It felt like last century. There had been so many changes. After a good breakfast, followed by the attentions of a tailor, a bootmaker and Ganner’s old nurse, followed in turn by an astonishingly good lunch, Moril scarcely knew himself. He looked in a mirror – it was a thing he seldom had the chance of doing, so he looked long and often – and he saw a smoothly combed red-haired boy in a suit of good blue cloth and a pair of soft rust-coloured boots. The boots, to tell the truth, pleased him enormously. But he did not look in the least like his idea of himself. Dagner and Kialan had become spruce, gentlemanly figures in the same kind of blue clothes, and Brid a young lady in bright cherry colour. They were all four behaving very soberly and politely, not because Ganner insisted on it – because he did not – but simply because Markind was the sort of place where you could behave in no other way.

      The biggest change was to Lenina. She was splendidly dressed too, and she had done СКАЧАТЬ