Cart and Cwidder. Diana Wynne Jones
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thought – as he had when he was little – that this cwidder was an extra, special part of Clennen, more important than his father’s arm or leg – something on the lines of a wooden soul.
“Let’s have that song of Osfameron’s,” said Clennen.
Moril liked the old songs so little that he was making very heavy weather of learning them. Clennen corrected him, made him go back to the beginning, and twice stopped him in the middle of the second verse. To make matters worse, Kialan came over and stood himself in front of Moril, listening. Moril, in self-defence, went into a dream between two notes, and stopped. He was with the Adon, on a green road in the North.
“Do you really need to teach him?” said Kialan.
“How else,” asked Clennen, “do you think he’d learn?”
Kialan seemed a bit confused. “Well – I sort of supposed they picked it up–from giving shows,” he said.
“Or it grew naturally, along with hair and fingernails?” Clennen suggested.
“No – I – Oh, that’s silly!” said Kialan, and to Moril’s relief, he drifted away. But he drifted back when Moril had finished and Brid took his place. Kialan caught Moril’s sleeve. “I say, you all know all this music, but I suppose you can’t even read and write, can you?”
Moril removed his sleeve. “Of course I can,” he said. “My mother taught us.” Before Kialan could ask any more impertinent questions, he scurried off among the gorse bushes to the stream. He stayed there, lost in vagueness, watching the bright water hurry over the different brightness of the stones beneath, until he heard Brid shouting.
“Supper! Wash, Moril!”
Supper was not very good, and what little bread they had was stale. “I say, this tastes peculiar!” Kialan said, pushing his share about on his plate.
Lenina’s face, which never had much expression, went quite blank. “I meant to buy bread and onions in Derent,” she said. “But there was no time.”
There was a heavy pause. Then Clennen said, “Look, lad, we’ve got to travel more than a hundred and fifty miles together, you and us. It needs a little give and take, don’t you think? I’d hate to have to break a good cwidder over your head.”
The sun was setting then, and the light was red. But Moril thought that this did not entirely account for the colour of Kialan’s face. Kialan, however, said nothing. He silently accepted some of the wine and drank it, but he did not speak again until much later. By then Clennen had become very jolly with the wine. Beaming in the firelight, he leant back against the wheel of the cart and said to Dagner, “Give us that new song of yours.”
“It’s not quite ready yet,” said Dagner. But, since this was not a performance, he willingly fetched his cwidder and picked out a sketch of what Moril thought was a very promising tune. And without a trace of nervousness, he half sang, half spoke the words.
“Come with me, come with me.
The blackbird asks you, ‘Follow me.’
No one will know, no one will know,
Wherever you go, I shall go.
Come with me. Morning spreads,
Clouds are high in milky threads,
The moon looks like a white thumbnail,
Larks are singing up the dale.
The sun is up, so follow me.
I’d like us to go secretly
Along the road, across the hill
Where water runs and woods are still.”
“And then I think the first four lines again,” Dagner said, looking up at Clennen.
“No,” said Clennen. “Won’t do.”
“Well, I needn’t have them again,” Dagner said humbly.
“I mean the whole thing won’t do,” said Clennen.
Dagner looked very dashed. Kialan seemed unable to stop himself saying indignantly: “Why? I thought it was going to be a jolly good song.”
“The tune’s all right, as far as it’s gone,” said Clennen. “But why spoil a tune like that with those words?”
“They’re jolly good words,” Kialan insisted. “I liked them.”
“It’s the words I seem to want,” Dagner said diffidently.
“I see,” said Clennen. “Then in that case don’t utter them again until we’re in the North – unless you want us taken up for rebels.”
Dagner tried to explain. “But I – it wasn’t. I was just trying to say how much I liked travelling in the cart and – and so on.”
“Were you?” said Clennen. “And haven’t you heard the songs the freedom fighters used to sing here the year of the rebellion – oh, it’ll be sixteen years ago now, the year you were born? They never dared say a thing straight out, so it was all put sideways – Follow the lark was one, Free as air and secret another went, and the best known was Come up the dale with me. The lords here still hang a man on the spot for singing words like that.”
“And I do think that’s ridiculous!” Kialan burst out. “Why can’t people sing what they want here? What’s the matter with everyone?”
Brid and Moril looked at his firelit face with interest. It began to seem as if Kialan might be a freedom fighter. They felt they could forgive him much if he was. Clennen, however, simply seemed amused.
“I hope there’s not someone behind the gorse listening to you,” he said. Kialan’s head jerked round towards the nearest looming bush. “See?” said Clennen. “That’s why, in one easy lesson, lad. No one can trust anyone any more. It comes of uneasy rulers paying uneasy men to make the rest uneasy too. It’s not always been like that, you know. Dagner, what did I say outside Derent?”
Dagner’s mind was woefully on his unsuitable song. “Oh – er – something about life being only a performance, I think.”
“I knew I could trust you to get the wrong saying – and the wrong saying wrong,” Clennen said tolerantly. “Anyone?”
“You said the South was once as free as the North,” said Brid. “You said it to me, really.”
“Then remember it,” said Clennen.
AFTER ONE NIGHT attempting to share the smaller tent with Kialan and Dagner, Moril took to creeping into the cart along with Brid and the wine jar. As he told Brid, even the wine jar took up less space than Kialan, and it did not have knees and elbows. Moril had woken up three times to find himself out among the guy ropes in the dew. He resented it. He resented Kialan, and he wished Dagner joy of him. It was hard to tell if Dagner got on with Kialan or not, because he was such an untalkative person. Dagner was like Lenina in that way. It was quite impossible to tell what Lenina thought about Kialan – or, indeed, about anything else.
Kialan, in spite of Clennen’s rebuke, seemed unable to stop making outspoken remarks. “You know, that cart is really horribly garish,” he said, on the second morning. Perhaps he had some excuse. It was standing against the dawn sky, as he saw it, and Moril’s red head was just emerging from it. The effect was undeniably colourful, but Brid was keenly offended.
“It