Gifts Read online

  "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 ve
ry 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.

  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 in
to 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.