Gifts (3 page)

“Then when Caddard was seventeen a war party came down from the Carrantages led by the Brantor of Tibromant. They were after men and women to work new fields they’d cleared. Our people came running here to the Stone House for protection, fearing to be taken under the rein, made to follow that brantor and die toiling for him with no will but his left to them. Caddard’s father Orrec hoped to withstand the raid here in the Stone House, but Caddard, not telling him what he planned, went out alone. Keeping to the edge of the forest, he spied out one highlander and then another, and as he saw them he unmade them.”

I saw the rat. The soft sack of skin.

“He let the other highlanders find those bodies. Then carrying the parley flag he came out on the hillside, facing the Long Cairn, alone. He called to the raiders, ‘I have done this across a mile of distance, and farther.’ He called to them over the valley, as they stood up there behind the great rocks of the Cairn, ‘The rocks do not hide you from me.’ And he destroyed a standing stone of the Cairn. The Brantor of Tibromant had taken shelter behind it. It shattered and fell into chips and dust. ‘My eye is strong,’ Caddard said.

“He waited for them to answer. Tibro said, ‘Your eye is strong, Caspro.’ Caddard said, ‘Do you come here seeking servants?’ The other said, ‘We need men, yes.’ Caddard said, ‘I will give you two of our people to work for you, but as servants, not under the rein.’ The brantor said, ‘You are generous. We will take your gift and keep your terms.’ Caddard came back here to the house and called out two young serfs from different farms of our domain. He took them to the highlanders and gave them over to them. Then he said to Tibro, ‘Go back to your highlands now, and I will not follow.’

“They went, and since that day they have never come raiding from the Carrantages as far west as our domain.

“So Caddard Strong-Eye was the talk of all the Uplands.”

He stopped to let me think about what I’d heard. After a while I looked up at him to see if I could ask a question. It seemed to be all right, so I asked what I wanted to know—“Did the young men from our domain want to go to Tibromant?”

“No,” my father said. “And Caddard didn’t want to send them to serve another master, or lose their labor here. But if power is shown, a gift must be offered. That is important. Remember it. Tell me what I said.”

“It’s important, if you show your power, to offer a gift too.”

My father nodded approval. “The gift’s gift,” he said, low and dry. “So, then, a while after that, old Orrec went with his wife and some of his people to our high farms, leaving the Stone House to his son Caddard, who was the brantor now. And the domain prospered. We ran a thousand sheep in those days, they say, on the Stony Hills. And our white oxen were famous. Men came up from Dunet and Danner, back then, to bargain for our cattle. Caddard married a woman of the Barres of Drummant, Semedan, in a great wedding. Drum had wanted her for his own son, but Semedan refused him, for all his wealth, and married Caddard. People came to that wedding from all the domains of the west.”

Canoc paused. He slapped the roan mare’s rump as she switched her snarled tail at him. She shuffled, nudging against me, wanting me to get back to combing the tangles out of her.

“Semedan had the gift of her lineage. She went on the hunt with Caddard and called the deer and elk and wild swine to him. They had a daughter, Assal, and a son, Canoc. And all went well. But after some years there came a bad winter and a cold dry summer, with little grass for the flocks. Crops failed. A plague came among our white cattle. All the finest stock died in a single season. There was sickness among the people of the domain too. Semedan bore a dead child and was ill for a long time after. The drought went on a year, another year. Everything went badly. But Caddard could do nothing. These were not matters in his power. So he lived in rage.”

I watched my father’s face. Grief, dismay, anger swept over it as he told of them. His bright eyes saw only what he told.

“Our misfortune made the people of Drummant grow insolent, and they came raiding and thieving here. They stole a good horse from our west pastures. Caddard went after the horse thieves and found them halfway home to Drummant. In his heat and fury he did not control his power, but destroyed them all, six men. One of them was a nephew of the Brantor of Drummant. Drum could not ask bloodright, for the men had been thieving, they had the stolen horse with them. But it left a greater hatred between our domains.

“After that, people went in fear of Caddard’s temper. When a dog disobeyed him, he unmade it. If he missed his shot hunting, he’d destroy all the thickets that hid the game, leaving them black and ruined. A shepherd spoke some insolence to him, up on the high pastures, and in his anger Caddard withered the mans arm and hand. Children ran from his shadow, now.

“Bad times breed quarrels. Caddard bade his wife come call to the hunt for him. She refused, saying she was not well. He ordered her, ‘Come. I must hunt, there is no meat in the house.’ She said, ‘Go hunt, then. I will not come.’ And she turned away, with a serving maid she was fond of, a girl of twelve who helped her with her children. Then in a rage of anger Caddard came in front of them, saying, ‘Do what I say!’—and with eye, hand, breath, and will, he struck the girl. She sank down there, destroyed, unmade.

“Semedan cried out and knelt over her and saw she was dead. Then she stood up from the body and faced Caddard. ‘Did you not dare strike me?’ she said, scorning him. And in his fury, he struck her down.

“The people of the house stood and saw all this. The children cried out and tried to come to their mother, weeping, and the women held them back.

“Then Caddard went out of the hall, to his wife’s room, and no one dared follow him.

“When he knew what he had done, he knew what he must do. He could not trust his strength to control his gift. Therefore he blinded his eyes.”

The first time Canoc told me that story, he did not say how Caddard blinded himself. I was too young, too scared and bewildered already by this terrible history, to ask or wonder. Later on, when I was older, I asked if Caddard used his dagger. No, Canoc said. He used his gift to undo his gift.

Among Semedan’s things was a glass mirror in a silver frame shaped like a leaping salmon. The merchants that used to venture up from Dunet and Danner to bargain for cattle and woollen goods sometimes brought such rare toys and fancies. In the first year of the marriage, Caddard had traded a white bull for the mirror to give to his young wife. He took it in his hand now and looked into it. He saw his own eyes. With hand and breath and will he struck them with the power in them. The glass shattered, and he was blind.

No one sought bloodright against him for the murder of his wife and the girl. Blind as he was, he served as Brantor of Caspromant till he had trained his son Canoc in the use of his power. Then Canoc became brantor and Blind Caddard went up to the high farms, where he lived among the cattle herders rill he died.

I did not like all this sad and fearful ending of the story. The first time I heard it, I soon put most of it out of my mind. What I liked was the first part, about the boy with the mighty gift, who could frighten his own mother, and the brave youth defying the enemy and saving his domain. When I went out alone on the open hills, I was Caddard Strong-Eye. A hundred times I summoned the terrified highlanders and called, “I have done this across a mile of distance!”—and shattered the boulder they hid behind, and sent them crawling home. I remembered how my father had held and positioned my left hand, and time and again I stood staring with all my eyes at a. rock, and held my hand so, in just that way—but I could not recall the word he had whispered to me, if it had been a word.
With the breath, not the voice,
he had said. I could almost remember it, yet I could not hear the sound of it or feel how my lips and tongue had formed it, if they had formed it. Time and again I almost said it, but said nothing. Then, impatient, I hissed some meaningless sound and pretended that the rock moved, shattered, dropped into dust and fragments, and the highlanders cowered before me as I said, “My eye is strong!”

I would go look at the boulder then, and once or twice I was sure there was a chip or crack in it that had not been there before.

Sometimes when I had been Caddard Strong-Eye long enough, I became one of the farm boys he gave to the highlanders. I escaped from them by clever ruses and woodcraft, and eluded pursuit, and led my pursuers into the bogs I knew and they didn’t know, and so came back to Caspromant. Why a serf would want to return to servitude at Caspromant having escaped it at Tibromant I didn’t know. I never thought to ask. In all likelihood that is what such a boy would do: he would come home. Our farm people and herders were about as well off as we in the Stone House were. Our fortunes were one. It wasn’t fear of our powers that kept them with us, generation after generation. Our powers protected them. What they feared was what they didn’t know, what they clung to was what they knew. I knew where I’d go if I were carried off by enemies and escaped. I knew there was nowhere in all the Uplands, or in the broad, bright, lower world my mother told me of, that I would ever love as I loved the bare hills and thin woods, the rocks and bogs of Caspromant. I know it still.

T
he other great tale my father told me was of the raid on Dunet, and I liked all of that one, for it had the happiest of endings. It ended, as far as I was concerned, in me.

My father had been a young man in need of a wife. There were people of our lineage at the domains of Corde and Drum. My grandfather had taken pains to keep on good terms with the Cordes and tried to patch over the old ill feeling between Caspros and Drums, not joining forays against them or letting his people do any cattle raiding or sheep stealing from them; this was out of fellowship with his relations at those domains, and because he hoped his son might find a wife among them. Our gift went from father to son, but no one doubted that a mother of the true line strengthened the gift. So, there being no girl of the true line at the home domain, we looked to Cordemant, where there were a number of young men of our family, though only one marriageable woman. She was twenty years older than Canoc. Such a marriage has been made often enough—anything to “keep the gift.” But Canoc hesitated, and before Orrec could force the issue, Brantor Ogge of Drummant demanded the woman for his own youngest son. The Cordes were under Ogge’s thumb, and gave her to him.

That left only the Caspros of Drummant to furnish a bride within the lineage. There were two girls there who would have done well enough, given a few years more to grow up. They would have been glad to marry back into the domain of their kinfolk. But the old hatred between the Drums and the Caspros was strong in Brantor Ogge. He turned away Orrec’s advances, scorned his offers, and married the girls off at fourteen and fifteen, one to a farmer and one to a serf.

This was a deliberate insult to the girls, and to the lineage they came from, and worse yet, a deliberate weakening of our gift. Few people of the domains approved of Ogge’s arrogance. A fair contest between powers is one thing, an unfair attack on power itself is another. But Drummant was a very strong domain, and Brantor Ogge did as he pleased there.

So there was no woman of the Caspro blood for Canoc to marry. As he said to me, “Ogge saved me from the old lady at Cordemant and the poor chicken-faced girls at Drummant. So I said to my father, ‘I’ll go raiding.’”

Orrec thought he meant raiding the small domains in the Glens, or maybe north into Morgamant, which had a reputation for fine horses and beautiful women. But Canoc had a bolder venture in mind. He gathered a troop, stout young farmers of Caspromant, a couple of the Caspros of Cordemant, and Ternoc Rodd, and other young men from one domain or another who thought a little serf snatching or booty taking was a fine idea; and they all met one May morning down at the Crossways under the Sheer and rode down the narrow track to the south.

There had been no raid into the Lowlands for seventy years.

The farmers wore stiff, thick leather jackets and bronze caps and carried lance and cudgel and long dagger, in case it came to blood-fighting. The men of the lineages wore the black felt kilt and coat and went bare-legged and bare-headed, their long black hair braided and clubbed. They carried no weapon but a hunting knife and their eyes.

“When I saw the lot of us, I wished I’d gone first and stolen some of the Morga horses,” Canoc said. “We’d have been a fine sight but for the creatures most of us had to ride. I had King”—Roanie’s sire, a tall red horse that I could just remember—“but Ternoc was on a droop-lipped plowmare, and all Barto had to ride was a piebald pony with a blind eye. The mules were handsome, though, three of the fine ones Father bred. We led them. They were to carry home our loot.”

He laughed. He was always light-hearted, telling this story. I imagine the little procession, the grim, bright-eyed young men on plodding horses, jingling in file down the narrow, grassy, rock-strewn track, out of the Uplands into the world below. Mount Airn would have risen up behind them when they looked back, and Barric with its grey crags, and then at last, looming higher than all, the Carrantages, white-crowned and huge.

Before them as far as the eye could see lay grassy hills—“green as beryl,” my father said, his eyes looking back into the memory of that rich, empty land.

On the first day of riding they met no one, saw no sign of man, no cattle or sheep, only the quail and the circling hawk. The Lowlanders left a wide margin between themselves and the mountain folk. The raiders rode all day at the slow pace of Barto’s purblind pony and camped on a hillside. Only late in the morning of the next day did they begin to see sheep and goats on stone-fenced hills; then a farmhouse far off, and a mill down in a stream valley. The track grew to a cart road, and to a highroad that ran between plowlands, and then before them, smoke-wreathed and red-roofed on its sunny hillside, stood the town of Dunet.