Gifts (18 page)

“In the chest in her room.” I still jealously thought of it as her room, though it was where Canoc had sat and slept for a year and a half now.

“I wonder if I could read them.”

“You’re the only person in the Uplands that could,” I said with the random bitterness that came into all my words now.

“I don’t know. It was always so hard. I can’t remember some of the letters now…But you could read them.”

“Oh yes. When I take the blindfold off. When pigs fly.”

“But listen, Orrec.”

“That’s the one thing I can do.”

“You could try reading. You could try just for a little while, just with one of the books. Not looking at anything else.” Gry’s voice had gone husky. “You aren’t going to destroy everything you look at! If all you look at is what your mother wrote! She wrote it all for you.”

Gry did not know that I had seen Melle’s face before she died. No one knew that but my father. No one knew what I knew, that I would never have hurt Melle. Would I destroy, now, the one thing she had left me?

I couldn’t answer Gry at all.

I had never promised my father not to lift the blindfold. There was no bond of words, but there was a bond, and it held me. Yet it had held me when there was no need for it—it had kept me from seeing my mother all the last year of her life, and made me useless to her, for no reason. Or rather, for the reason that my blindness was useful to my father, making me his weapon, his threat against enemies. But was my loyalty only to him?

I could not get any further than that for a long time. Gry said no more about it, and I thought I had put it out of my head.

But along in the autumn, as we were in the stable together, I rubbing liniment into Roanie’s knees and Canoc paring at a hoof that was giving Greylag trouble, I said abruptly, “Father, I want to see those books Mother wrote.”

“Books?” he said in a bewildered voice.

“The book she made me a long time ago, and the ones she wrote when she was sick. They’re in the chest. In the tower room.”

Out of a silence he said, “What good are they to you?”

“I want to have them. She made them for me.”

“Take them if you want.”

“I will,” I said, and Roanie stepped back, because in fighting my anger I had gripped her sore knee too hard. I hated my father. He cared nothing for me, nothing for the work my mother had spent her last energy on, nothing for anything but being Brantor of Caspromant and forcing everybody to his will.

I finished with the mare, washed my hands, and went straight to the tower room while I knew my father would not be there. Coaly led me eagerly up the stairs, as if she expected to find Melle there. The room was cold and had a desolate feel to it. I blundered about finding the chest, and put my hand out to find the footboard of the bed. The shawl lay folded on it, the brown shawl my grandmother had woven and my mother had worn when she was cold, when she was dying. I knew the feel of it, the rough softness of the homespun wool. I stooped and buried my face in it. But I did not breathe in the scent of my mother, the faint fragrance I remembered. The shawl smelled of sweat and salt.

“To the window, Coaly,” I said, and we managed to locate the chest. I raised the lid and felt the sheets of linen canvas stacked inside it. There was much more than I could carry one-handed. I felt down among the stiff pieces until I came to the bound book, the first she had made me, the
History of Lord Raniu.
I took it out and closed the lid. As Coaly led me out of the room I reached out and touched the shawl again, with a queer pinching at my heart that I didn’t try to understand.

All I had in mind was to have the book, to have the thing Mother had given me, made for me, left to me. That was enough. So I thought. I put it on the table in my room, where everything had its place and was never out of its place and no one was allowed to touch anything. I went in to supper, and ate in silence with my silent father.

At the end of the meal, he asked, “Did you find the book?” He said the word hesitantly.

I nodded, with a sudden spiteful pleasure, jeering at him in my mind: You don’t know what it is, you don’t know what to do with it, you can’t read!

And when I was alone in my room, I sat at the table for some while, and then deliberately and carefully slipped off the blindfold and took the pads from my eyes.

And saw darkness.

I almost screamed aloud. My heart beat with terror and my head spun, and it was I don’t know how long before I realised that somewhere in front of me hung a shape full of tiny blurred silver specks. I was seeing it. It was the window frame, and the stars.

There was, after all, no light in my room. I would have to go to the kitchen to fetch a flint and steel and a lamp or candle. And what would they say in the kitchen if I asked for such things?

As I grew a little more used to seeing, I could make out the whitish oblong of the book on the table in the starlight. I ran my hand over it, and saw the shadowy movement. To make the movement and to see it gave me such pleasure that I did it again and again. I looked up, and saw the autumn stars. I gazed at them long enough that I saw their slow movement to the west. It was enough.

I put the pads back over my eyes and tied the blindfold carefully, and undressed, and got into bed.

I had never thought for a moment, as I looked at the book and my hand, that I might destroy them; the thought of my perilous gift had not entered my mind; it had been filled with the gift of seeing. Because I could see, could I destroy the stars?

F
or many days it was enough to have the pages Melle had written for me, which I brought down to my room and kept in a carved box. I read them every morning at first light, waking when the cocks began to crow, getting up to sit at the table with the blindfold round my forehead, ready to pull it down over my eyes should someone enter the room. I was scrupulous not to look anywhere but at the written leaves, and—once at the beginning, once at the end—up at the window, to see the sky. I reasoned that I could do no harm reading my mother’s writing and looking up into the light.

I was particularly careful, though it was extremely difficult, not to look at Coaly. I longed to see her. If she was in the room, I knew I could not keep my eyes from her; and that idea sent a chill through me. I tried to sit with my hands cupped around my eyes so I could see only the writing, but it was not safe. I shut my eyes and shut poor Coaly out of the room. “Stay,” I told her outside my door, and I heard her tail give a small, obedient thump. I felt like a traitor when I shut the door.

I was often puzzled to know what I was reading, for the linen pages had been put away in the chest in no order and further confused by my carrying them away; and my mother had written down whatever she could remember as it came into her head, often only bits and passages without beginning or end or anything to explain them. When she first began to write, she had put in notes: “This is from the Worship of Ennu my Grandmother taught me, it is for women to speak,” or “I do not know more of this Tale of the Blessed Momu.” Several of the pages were headed “For My Son Orrec of Caspromant.” One of the earlier ones, a legend about the founding of Derris Water, was titled “Drops from the Bucket of the Well of Melle Aulitta of Derris Water and Caspromant, for My Dear Son.” As her ill-which I could see in the weakness and hastiness of the writing, there were no explanations and more fragments. And instead of stones there were poems and chants, all written out in cramped lines clear across the sheet, so that I only heard the poetry if I spoke it aloud. Some of the later pages were very hard to decipher. The last—it had been the topmost in the trunk, and I had kept it in place—had only a few pale lines written on it. I remembered how she said she was too tired, to write any more for a while.

I suppose it seems strange that, after the intense delight of reading these precious gifts my mother left for me, I was willing to close the darkness down on my eyes again and stumble through the day led by a dog. I was not merely willing, I was ready. The only way I could defend Caspromant was by being blind, so I was blind. I had found a redeeming joy to lighten my duty, but it was no less my duty.

I was aware that I hadn’t found this redemption for myself. It was Gry who had said, “You could read them.” It being autumn, she was busy at Roddmant with the harvest and could seldom come over; but as soon as she did, I took her to my room and showed her the box of writings and told her that I was reading them.

She seemed more distracted or embarrassed than pleased, and was in a hurry to leave the room. She had a keener sense than I did, of course, of the risk she ran. People of the domains were by no means strict with girls, and nobody in the Uplands saw anything unseemly in young people riding and walking and talking together outdoors or where other people might come; but for a girl of fifteen to go to a boys bedroom was going too far. Rab and Sosso would have scolded us savagely, and worse, some of the others, the spinning women or the kitchen help, might have gossiped. When this possibility finally dawned upon me, I felt my face turn red. We went outdoors without a word, and weren’t with each other till we had talked about horses for half an hour.

Then we were able to discuss what I had been reading. I recited one of the chants of Odressel for Gry. It exalted my heart, but she wasn’t much impressed. She preferred stories. I couldn’t explain to her how the poems I read fascinated me. I tried to work out how they were put together, how this word returned, or this sound or rhyme came back, or the beat wove through the words. All this hung in my mind as I went about the rest of the day in the darkness. I would try to fit words of my own into the patterns I had found, and sometimes it worked. That gave me intense, pure pleasure, a pleasure that endured, returning each time I thought of those words, that pattern, that poem.

Gry was low in spirits that day, and again the next time she came. It was rainy October by then, and we sat in the chimney corner to talk. Rab brought us a plate full of oatcakes and I slowly devoured them while Gry sat mostly silent. At last she said, “Orrec, why do you think we have the gifts?”

“To defend our people with.”

“Not mine.”

“No; but you can hunt for them, help them get food, train animals to work for them.”

“Yes. But your gift. Or Fathers. To destroy. To kill.”

“There has to be somebody who can do it.”

“I know. But did you know…Father can take a splinter out of your ringer, or a thorn out of your foot, with the knife gift. So neat and quick, it only bleeds one drop. He just looks, and it’s out…And Nanno Corde. She can make people deaf and blind, but did you know she unsealed a deaf boys ears? He was deaf and dumb, he could only make signs with his mother, but now he can hear enough to learn to talk. She says she did it the same way shed deafen somebody, only one way goes forward and the other backward.”

That was intriguing, and we discussed it a little, but it didn’t mean much to me. It did to Gry. She said, “I wonder if all the gifts are backward.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not the calling. You can use it forward or backward. But the knife, or the Cordes’ sealing—maybe they’re backward. Maybe they were useful for curing people, to begin with. For healing. And then people found out they could be weapons and began to use them that way, and forgot the other way…Even the rein, that the Tibros have, maybe at first it was just a gift of working with people, and then they made it go backward, to make people work for them.”

“What about the Morgas?” I asked. “Their gift isn’t a weapon.”

“No—It’s only good for finding out what people are sick with, so you know how to heal them. It doesn’t work for making them sick. It only goes forward. That’s why the Morgas have to hide out back there where nobody else comes.”

“All right. But some of the gifts never went forward. What about the Helvars’ cleaning? What about my gift?”

“They could have been healing, to begin with. If there was something wrong inside a person, or an animal, something out of order, like a hard knot—maybe it was a gift of untying it—setting it right, putting it in order.”

That had an unexpected ring of probability to me. I knew exactly what she meant. It was like the poetry I made in my head, the tangled confusion of words that fell suddenly into a pattern, a clarity, and you recognised it: that’s it, that’s right.

“But then why did we stop doing that and only use it to make people’s insides into an awful mess?”

“Because there are so many enemies. But maybe also because you can’t use the gift both ways. You can’t go backward and forward at the same time.”

I knew from her voice that she was saying something important to her. It had to do with her use of her own gift, but I wasn’t certain what it was.

“Well, if anybody could teach me how to use my gift to do instead of undo, I’d try to learn,” I said, not too seriously.

“Would you?” She was serious.

“No,” I said. “Not till I’d destroyed Ogge Drum.”

She gave a great sigh.

I brought my fist down on the stone of the hearth seat and said, “I will. I will destroy that fat adder, when I can! Why doesn’t Canoc? What’s he waiting for? For me? He knows I can’t—I can’t control the gift—He can. How can he sit here and not go revenge my mother!”

I had never said this before to Gry, scarcely to myself. I was hot with sudden anger as I spoke. Her reply was cold.

“Do you want your father dead?”

“I want Drum dead!”

“You know Ogge Drum goes about day and night with bodyguards, men with swords and knives, cross-bowmen. And his son Sebb has his gift, and Ren Corde serves him, and all his people are on the watch for anyone from Caspromant. Do you want Canoc to go striding in there and be killed?”

“No—”

“You don’t think he’d kill from behind—the way
he
did? Sneaking in the dark? You think Canoc would do that?”

“No,” I said, and put my head in my hands.

“My father says he’s been afraid for two years now that Canoc’s going to get on his horse and ride to Drummant to kill Ogge Drum. The way he rode to Dunet. Only alone.”