Gifts (7 page)

It lay on the stone like a cast-off sock, limp and misshapen.

Alloc and I both sat on our horses staring, frozen, our left hands out stiffly pointing at the snake.

Canoc quieted Greylag and dismounted carefully. He looked at the ruined thing on the rock. He looked up at me. His face was strange: rigid, fierce.

“Well done, my son,” he said.

I sat in my saddle, stupid, staring.

“Well done indeed!” said Alloc, with a big grin. “By the Stone, but that’s a wicked great poisonous pissant of a snake and it might have bit the Brantor to the bone!”

I stared at my father’s muscular, brown, bare legs.

Alloc dismounted to look at the remains of the adder, for the red colt wouldn’t go near it. “Now that’s destroyed,” he said. “A strong eye did that! Look there, that’s its poison fangs. Foul beast,” and he spat. “A strong eye,” he said again.

I said, “I didn’t—”

I looked at my father, bewildered.

“The snake was unmade when I saw it,” Canoc said.

“But you—”

He frowned, though not in anger. “It was you that struck it,” he said.

“It was,” Alloc put in. “I saw you do it, Young Orrec. Quick as lightning.”

“But I—”

Canoc watched me, stern and intent.

I tried to explain. “But it was like all the other times, when I tried—when nothing happened.” I stopped. I wanted to cry, with the suddenness of the event, and my confusion, for it seemed I had done something I did not know I had done. “It didn’t feel any different,” I said in a choked voice.

My father continued to gaze at me for a moment; then he said, “It was, though.” And he swung up onto Greylag again. Alloc had to catch the red colt, which didn’t want to be remounted. The strange moment passed. I did not want to look at what had been the snake.

We rode on to the line fence and found where the Drum sheep had crossed; it looked as if stones had been pulled out of the wall recently. We spent the morning rebuilding the wall there and in nearby places where it could use a bit of mending.

I was still so incredulous of what I had done that I could not think about it, and was taken by surprise when, that evening, my father spoke of it to my mother. He was brief and dry, as was his way, and it took her a little while to understand that he was telling her that I had shown my gift and maybe saved his life by doing so. Then she, like me, was too bewildered to respond with pleasure or praise, or anything but anxiety. “Are they so dangerous then, these adders?” she said more than once. “I didn’t know they were so venomous. They might be anywhere on the hills where the children run about!”

“They are,” Canoc said. “They always have been. Not many of them, fortunately.”

That our life was imminently and continually in danger was something Canoc knew as a fact, and something Melle had to struggle reluctantly, against her heart, to believe. She was no fool of hope, but she had always been sheltered from physical harm. And Canoc sheltered her, though he never lied to her.

“They gave the old name to our gift,” he said now. “‘The adder,’ people used to call it.” He glanced at me, just the flick of an eye, grave and hard as he had been ever since the instant on the hillside. “Their venom and our stroke act much the same way.”

She winced. After a while she said to him, “I know you’re glad the gift has run true.” It took courage for her to say it.

“I never doubted that it did,” he replied. That was said as reassurance to her and to me also, but I am not sure either of us was able to accept it.

I lay awake that night as long as a boy that age can lie awake, going over and over what had happened when I saw the adder, becoming more and more confused and troubled. I slept at last, to dream confused and troubled dreams, and woke very early. I got up and went down to the stables. For once I was there before my father; but he soon came, yawning, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “Hello, Orrec,” he said.

“Father,” I said, “I want to—About the snake.”

He cocked his head a bit.

“I know I used my hand and eye. But I don’t think I killed it. My will—It wasn’t any different. It was just like all the other times.” I began to feel an aching pressure in my throat and behind my eyes.

“You don’t think Alloc did it?” he said. “It’s not in him.”

“But you—You struck it—”

“It was unmade when I saw it,” he said as he had said the day before, but some flicker of consciousness or question or doubt passed through his voice and eyes as he spoke. He considered. The hardness had come back into his face, which had been soft with sleep when I first saw him at the stable doors.

“I struck the snake, yes,” he said. “But after you did. I am sure you struck first. And with a quick, strong hand and eye.”

“But how will I know when I use my power, if it—if it seems just the same as all the times I tried to and didn’t?”

That brought him up short. He stood there, frowning, pondering. Finally he said, almost hesitantly, “Would you try it out, the gift, Orrec, now—on a small thing—on that bit of a weed there?” He pointed to a little clump of dandelions between the stones of the courtyard near the stable door.

I stared at the dandelions. The tears swelled up in me and I could not hold them back. I put my hands over my face and wept. “I don’t want to, I don’t want to!” I cried. “I can’t, I can’t, I don’t want to!”

He came and knelt and put an arm round me. He let me cry.

“It’s all right, my dear,” he said when I grew quieter. “It’s all right. It is a heavy thing.” And he sent me in to wash my face.

We spoke no more about the gift then, or for some while.

W
e went back with Alloc for several days after that to mend and build up the fence along our southwest sheep pastures, making it clear to the shepherds on the other side that we knew every stone of those walls and would be aware if one were moved. Along on the third or fourth day of the work, a group of horsemen came towards us up the long falling pastures below the Little Sheer, land that had been the Corde domain and now was Drummant. Sheep trotted away from the riders, blatting hoarsely. The men rode straight at us, their pace increasing as the hilltop leveled. It was a low, misty day. We were sodden with the fine rain that drifted over the hills, and dirty from handling the wet and muddy stones.

“Oh, by the Stone, that’s the old adder himself,” Alloc muttered. My father shot him a glance that silenced him, and spoke out in a quiet, clear voice as the horsemen cantered right up to the wall—“A good day to you, Brantor Ogge.”

All three of us eyed their horses with admiration, for they were fine creatures. The brantor rode a beautiful honey-colored mare who looked too delicate for his bulk. Ogge Drum was a man of about sixty, barrel-girthed and bull-necked. He wore the black kilt and coat, but of fine woven wool, not felt, and his horses bridle was silver-mounted. His bare calves bulged with muscle. I saw them, mostly, and little of his face, because I did not want to look up into his eyes. All my life I had heard ill of Brantor Ogge; and the way he had ridden straight at us as if in assault, reining in hard just short of the wall, was not reassuring.

“Mending your sheep fence, Caspro?” he said in a big, unexpectedly warm and jovial voice. “A good job too. I have some men good at laying drystone. I’ll send them up to help you.”

“We’re just finishing up today, but I thank you,” Canoc said.

“I’ll send them up anyhow. Fences have two sides, eh?”

“That they do,” my father said. He spoke pleasantly, though his face was as hard as the stone in his hand.

“One of these lads is yours, eh?” Ogge said, surveying Alloc and me. The insult was subtle. He certainly knew that Canoc’s son was a boy, not a man of twenty. The implication was that there was no way to tell a Caspro son from a Caspro serf, or so we three took it.

“He is,” my father said, and did not name or introduce or even look at me.

“Now that our lands border,” said Ogge, “I’ve had it in mind to come invite you and your lady to visit us at Drummant. If I rode by your house in a day or two, you’d be there?”

“I will,” Canoc said. “You are welcome to come.”

“Good, good. I’ll be by.” Ogge raised his hand in a careless, genial salute, wheeled his mare standing, and led his little troop off at a canter along the wall.

“Ah,” said Alloc with a sigh, “that’s a sweet little yellow mare.” He was as thorough a horseman as my father; the two of them longed and schemed to improve our stable. “If we could put Branty to her in a year or two, what a colt that might be!”

“And what a price it would carry,” Canoc said harshly.

He was tense and often sullen from that day on. He told my mother to make ready for Ogge’s visit, and of course she did so. Then they waited. Canoc did not go far from the Stone House, not wanting her to have to receive Ogge alone. It was half a month before he came.

He brought the same retinue with him, men of his and other lineages of his domain; no women. My father in his stiff pride took that, too, as an insult. He did not let it pass. “I am sorry your wife did not ride with you,” he said. Ogge then made apologies and excuses, saying his wife was much burdened with household cares and had been in ill health. “But she looks forward to welcoming you to Drummant,” he said, turning to Melle. “In the old days there was far more riding about and visiting from domain to domain. We’ve let our old Upland customs of cordiality lapse. It’s a different matter down in the cities, no doubt, where you have neighbors all about you thick as crows on carrion, as they say.”

“Very different,” my mother said meekly, eclipsed by his loud voice and big looming body, which seemed always to contain a repressed threat.

“And this would be your lad I saw the other day,” he said, suddenly turning on me. “Caddard, is it?”

“Orrec,” my mother said, since I was voiceless, though I managed a duck of the head.

“Well, look up, Orrec, let me see your face,” the big voice said. “Afraid of the Drum eye, are you?” He laughed again.

My heart was beating at the top of my chest hard enough to choke me, but I made myself hold my head up and look into the big face that hung over me. Ogge’s eyes were barely visible under heavy, drooping lids. From those creases and pouches they stared out steady and empty as a snake’s eyes.

“And you’ve shown your gift, I hear.” He glanced at my father.

Alloc of course had told everybody on our domain about the adder, and it is amazing how fast word travels from place to place in the Uplands, where it seems that nobody speaks to anybody but their closest kin and not often to them.

“He has,” Canoc said, looking at me not at Ogge.

“So it ran true, in spite of everything,” Ogge said, in such a warm, congratulatory tone that I could not believe he intended the blatant insult to my mother. “The undoing, now—that’s a power I’d like to see! We have only women of the Caspro line at Drummant, as you know. They carry the gift, of course, but can’t show it. Maybe young Orrec here will give us a demonstration. Would you like that, lad?” The big voice was genial, pressing. Refusal was not possible. I said nothing, but in courtesy had to make some response. I nodded.

“Good, then we’ll round up some serpents for you before you come, eh? Or you can clear some of the rats and kittens out of our old barn if you like. I’m glad to know the gift runs true”—this to my father with the same booming geniality—“for I’ve had a thought concerning a granddaughter of mine, my youngest sons daughter, which we might talk about when you come to Drummant.” He rose. “Now you’ve seen I’m not so much an ogre as maybe you’ve been told”—this to my mother—“you’ll do us the honor of a visit, will you, in May, when the roads are dry?”

“With pleasure, sir,” Melle said, rising also, and she bowed her head above her hands crossed at the fingertips, a Lowland gesture of polite respect, entirely foreign to us.

Ogge stared at her. It was as if the gesture had made her visible to him. Before that he had not really looked at any of us. She stood there respectful and aloof. Her beauty was unlike that of any Upland woman, a fineness of bone, a quickness, a subtle vigor. I saw his big face change, growing heavy with emotions I could not read—amazement, envy, hunger, hate?

He called to his companions, who had been gathered around the table my mother had set for them. They went out to their horses in the courtyard, and all went jangling off. My mother looked at the ruins of the feast. “They ate well,” she said, with a hostess’s pride, but also ruefully, for there was nothing left at all for us of the delicacies she had, with much care and work, provided.

“Like crows on carrion,” Canoc quoted very drily.

She gave a little laugh. “He’s not a diplomat,” she said.

“I don’t know what he is. Or why he came.”

“It seems he came about Orrec.”

My father glanced at me, but I stood planted there, determined to hear.

“Maybe,” he said, clearly trying to defer the discussion at least until I should not be there to hear it.

My mother had no such scruples. “Was he talking of a betrothal?”

“The girl would be of the right age.”

“Orrec’s not fourteen!”

“She’d be a little younger. Twelve or thirteen. But a Caspro through her mother, you see.”

“Two children betrothed to marry?”

“It is nothing uncommon,” Canoc said, his tone getting stiff. “It would be troth only. There’d be no marriage for years.”

“It’s far too young for any kind of arrangement.”

“It can be best to have these things secure and known. A great deal rides on a marriage.”

“I won’t hear of it,” she said quietly, shaking her head. Her tone was not defiant at all, but she did not often declare opposition, and it may have driven my father, tense as he was, farther than he would otherwise have gone.

“I don’t know what Drum wants, but if he proposes a betrothal, it’s a generous offer, and one we must consider. There is no other girl of the true Caspro lineage in the west.” Canoc looked at me, and I could not help but think of how he looked at colts and fillies, with that thoughtful, appraising gaze, seeing what might come of it. Then he turned away and said, “I only wonder why he should propose it. Maybe he means it as a compensation.”