Drowned Ammet (20 page)

“Unlike you, we were brought up to be lawful,” Hildy called. “Can I light the lamp in the cabin at least?”

Mitt came out of the cupboard and fumbled his way through the cabin. It was certainly getting dark. He felt sour and grim, and he ached all over. The red and yellow breeches would not do up properly after his great meal. He came out of the cabin and flopped down on the lockers. “Please yourself,” he said. He was horribly weary.

Hildy smiled slightly and went into the cabin, where she was some time fiddling about before the lamp came on, as yellow as the sky outside. Then she moved on to the fat little water barrel, which was clamped to a special shelf above the stove. She undid the clamps and shook it. The barrel was completely full, so full that it did not even slosh. It took all Hildy's strength to shake it convincingly, but she had been prepared for that, because it was always kept full. No one dared let Hadd's family go thirsty.

“Oh dear!” Hildy said. She was surprised how convincing she sounded. “There's no water in this at all! I'm horribly thirsty, too.” This was true, but she thought she could bear it in a good cause.

As soon as she said this, Mitt realized that one of the many things wrong with him was an appalling thirst. It was all those highly spiced pies he had eaten. The thought of going without water for all the time it took to get North nearly made him burst into tears. Ynen was almost equally dismayed. His mouth suddenly seemed quite dry, and he had a moment when he would have liked to report those negligent sailors to Uncle Harchad. He licked his sandpapery lips and said, “They sometimes keep wine in the lockers over the starboard bunk. Have a look, Hildy, for Old Ammet's sake!”

Hildy turned round to hide a triumphant smile and fetched the two bottles she had already found there. One was a half-full bottle of wine. The other was a square bottle of arris. It had been full before Hildy had poured a generous dollop of it into the wine. One way or another, she thought she had done for this wretched boy.

“Which will you have?” she said, showing Mitt the bottles in the twilight.

Mitt knew the rough, foul drink was arris. But he hated it too much. “I'll have the wine,” he said, and he snatched the bottle from Hildy, feeling he could make up on roughness and foulness that way, and took a long, guggling swig from it before Hildy could get him a cup from the cabin. He intended to drink the lot. But it tasted rather unpleasant. He passed Hildy back the bottle, a good deal less than a quarter full.

Hildy distastefully wiped the neck of the bottle and shared the rest into two cups for herself and Ynen. They sipped it and settled down to wait, while twilight grew into night.

Shortly, Ynen began to feel cheerful and Hildy slightly dizzy. As for Mitt, the wine, on top of his weariness, on top of his huge meal, had the inevitable effect. The low black humps of land kept spreading under his eyes like inkblots. The stars came out and looked fuzzy. His head kept dropping forward. At length he stood up unsteadily.

“Going to have a lie-down,” he said. “No stunny fuff, now. Got ears in the back of my head.” He staggered off into the cabin, while Hildy and Ynen each stuffed a fist into their mouths in order not to scream with laughter, and flopped heavily down on the port bunk.

Hildy nudged Ynen meaningly and sat down with her back against the lockers, where she could see into the cabin. They waited for Mitt to fall asleep. But, with the best will in the world to do so, Mitt could not go to sleep. The movements of
Wind's Road
and the movements the wine had set up in his head seemed to be in direct conflict. Sometimes he was convinced the boat had got into a whirlpool. Sometimes he was sure his legs were high above his head. He sat up several times to see what was going on. And each time the elegant gilded cabin was exactly as it should be, gently rising and falling, and the lamp swinging. At length he realized the queer things only happened when he had his eyes shut. So he kept them open.

The result was a set of horrible, half-waking dreams. Mitt stared at Harchad's face in a gilded porthole, paralyzed with terror. He ran endlessly from soldiers. He struggled through innumerable dikes. Several times he was shot in the stomach. Once he threw his bomb in front of Hadd, and Poor Old Ammet bent down, put out his straw arms, and threw the bomb in Mitt's face. “You're in really bad trouble,” he said, and he sounded just like Hobin. Then he fell to pieces like Canden. Mitt sat up with a yell of horror. After this, when he lay down again, things got a little quieter, until it was Libby Beer's turn. She ran at Mitt, with her fruity eyes wobbling on stalks, and kicked the bomb at him. “I brought you up to do this, Mitt,” she said reproachfully. Then the bomb exploded, and Mitt started up with a scream.

Hildy and Ynen wished he would stop yelling and go to sleep. They wanted to turn round and sail home. The yells perturbed them. The boy must be disgustingly sinful. And the sounds made them think of the things they had heard about Uncle Harchad, and that terrible day the Northmen had been hanged. Meanwhile, true night came on, and Ynen became frankly terrified. By this time he had been at the tiller longer than he had ever been in his life. He had never sailed at night before. He was cold and cramped and tired, and scared of shoals he could not see. What he could see scared him even more. It was not dark the way it was in a closed room. The sea was there, faintly, all round, heaving and swelling limitlessly. The sky was a huge empty bowl, dark blue, covered with a littering of stars, and the land was only a feeling, far away to the right. The sail noises, and the swish and fizz of waves passing, only seemed to show how small and lonely
Wind's Road
was. Ynen suddenly became aware of fathoms and fathoms of empty water underneath them, too. He was hanging all alone in the middle of nowhere. Ynen clenched his teeth and kept the Northern Cross grimly over
Wind's Road
's bowsprit, and it was all he could do not to yell out the way the boy in the cabin kept doing.

It was midnight before Hildy dared signal that Mitt was asleep. In fact, he had been asleep all along, but so restlessly that Hildy had not realized. She pulled the cabin door quietly shut and shot the elegant little bolt home.

“Thank goodness! You go to the foresails,” Ynen whispered.

Hildy crept forward, round the starboard side, to avoid any noise near Mitt. Ynen could see her clearly against the pallor of the sails. As soon as she was ready, he put the tiller over hard.
Wind's Road
surged round. Her sails ran out to the end of their ropes and swung back. The wind seemed suddenly twice as strong. Ynen kept his foot against the tiller and hauled in the mainsail frantically. Hildy collected the clapping foresails and dragged them the other way.
Wind's Road
stood still, head on to the wind, and seemed to flap and tremble in every part. Then she was round, tipped over much farther, and apparently rushing through the water, but actually making very little way against the current. Ynen hauled in the mainsail as close as he could, in order not to waste time tacking, and they were now headed back to Holand. Hildy came back to the well, and they both sagged with relief.

Holand meant safety and bed and warm rooms. They had got the better of that dreadful boy. That was their first thought. Then they both remembered the trouble they would be in once they were back. That could not be helped, but they did wish the thought of the trouble did not go along with an empty, forsaken feeling. It was no good pretending Navis would defend them from the uncles. On the other hand, Uncle Harchad might forgive them a great deal if they brought him the boy who had thrown the bomb.

Hildy and Ynen peered at one another's faces, trying to see what the other thought about that. The boy was a criminal. He had tried to murder their grandfather. Perhaps he was a friend of the man who had actually done so. But all the same, he was a human being, much the same age as they were, and having bad dreams in the cabin. They both thought of Uncle Harchad kicking the Earl of Hannart's son, and the Earl's son cringing. It was easy enough to replace the Earl's son with a picture of that skinny, cocksure boy, and quite as unpleasant.

“We could put him off at Hoe Point, couldn't we?” Ynen whispered, and relieved Hildy's mind considerably.

Mitt, as he slept, was encountering Poor Old Ammet and Libby Beer at once. They rushed at him, one from either side. The world spun about and went wrong somehow. When Mitt opened his eyes, he knew the world was still wrong. It was going with a blunt, blundering, bucking motion, and tipping the wrong way. Those early years with Siriol had put some things deep in Mitt's brain. Funny, he thought. Close-hauled against a current.
Flaming Ammet!
He snatched up Hobin's gun and burst out of the cabin. He did not even notice the door had been bolted.

Outside, he had only to feel the wind on his face to know he was right. The children's smitten faces in the lamplight confirmed it. So did the Northern Cross low down behind them.

“Turn her back round!” he yelled. “You sneaking idle rich, you! You think you can do just as you like, don't you! Go on, turn her back round!”

At this, despite the waving gun, Hildy lost her temper. He spoiled her entire scheme, and then he shouted insults. “Don't you talk to me about doing just as we want!” She was so angry that she stood up and yelled in Mitt's face. “You sneak aboard our ship, and order us about like dirt, and eat our food, and make us go where
you
want to go, and then you have the nerve to say
we
always do what we want! You're worse than—than Grandfather! He was honest about it at least!”

“Honest!”
bawled Mitt. “Haddock honest! Don't make me laugh. He was robbing all Holand for years!”

“So you try to murder him, and order us about like dirt on top of that!” Hildy screamed.

“You
are
dirt, that's why!” Mitt thundered, waving the gun. “Turn this boat back round!” Ynen clutched the tiller and feared for Hildy's life. In fact, neither he nor Mitt noticed that Mitt had not even remembered to cock the gun. He had not spun the empty barrel on either.

Hildy did not know and did not care. “If we're dirt, I shudder to think what your family is!” she roared.

“Oh shut up!” Mitt pointed the gun at Ynen. “Turn this boat round, I said!”

For the second time that night Ynen thought he was about to be shot. It gave him a cool kind of resignation. “You did try to murder our grandfather,” he said. “Give me one good reason why we should do anything to help you.”

Mitt noticed he was pointing the gun at Ynen and realized that Ynen did not regard the gun as a good reason. It sobered him rather. He felt considerable respect for this smooth-faced, hawk-nosed little boy, though, as for his sister—! “Well then,” he said, “your precious grandfather bust up my family. Is that a reason?”

“How did he do that?” Ynen asked, shivering with cold and weariness.

Hildy added angrily, “Whatever he did,
we
didn't do anything to you!”

“I'll tell you,” said Mitt. He rested his arm on the cabin roof and began to talk, jerkily and angrily at first, and then more reasonably, as he realized neither of them was trying to interrupt. He told them how he had been born at Dike End, and how the rent had been doubled, and how this had forced his father to work in Holand and then forced them out of the farm. He told them how his father had never found proper work and so joined the Free Holanders, and how he had been betrayed over the warehouse—though he did not mention names—and disappeared, leaving Milda and himself to manage alone. He described how they had lived after that, and he could not help thinking, as he talked, that this was a funny kind of way to tell your life story, with
Wind's Road
bucking through the water in the dark, and the half-lit faces of Hadd's grandchildren staring up at him as he talked. He told them about Hobin. “And if it hadn't been for him,” he said, “we'd have been turned out into the street when they knocked the houses down to make the Festival safe.”

“They didn't just turn them out, did they?” Hildy said. “I thought—”

“Father had houses built for them,” said Ynen. “But I don't think anyone else was going to bother. All the same,” he said to Mitt, “you and your mother weren't there then. You were all right. You still haven't given me a reason.”

“Isn't that a reason?” Mitt demanded. “There was Hobin never daring to put a foot wrong for fear of the arms inspectors, and us near on as hard up as ever because Hadd would put the rents up all the time. But never the price of guns—not he! We had to pay through the nose to support those soldiers, so that they could make us scared to stir hand or foot. You don't understand—can't you think how it feels when everyone you know is scared sick all the time? You couldn't trust people. They'd turn round and tell on you, anytime, even if it weren't you done it, because they didn't want to get marched off in the night themselves. That's not how people should be.”

“It isn't,” Hildy agreed.

“I grant you that,” said Ynen. “But you're talking about everything. You haven't told me one thing Grandfather did to
you
. I still don't see why we should help you. But I've heard things about Uncle Harchad. I don't mind landing you at Hoe Point, so you'll have a chance to get away.”

Yes, Mitt thought, in full view of all the ships coming out to look for them. Very safe. Talking to this boy was like bashing down a weak little plant that kept springing up again in your face. “You might as well take me back to Holand and be done,” he said. “If I'm not caught landing, I'll be caught in the Flate straight after.”