Drowned Ammet

11

Help me get the mainsail up, and then stand by to untie her,” Ynen said. “Oh, look at this! She’s all over mud! I knew those blessed sailors used her for lobsters when my back was turned!”

“I’ll wash it down when we’re sailing,” Hildy said. “But do let’s get going before those soldiers come. Most of the mud’s only on the sail cover.” She jumped on the cabin roof and helped Ynen unlace the cover.

Ynen unlaced busily beside her. He was not often angry, but he was now. Someone had been on Wind’s Road, the apple of his eye, the one lovely thing that was truly his own, and made a mess of her in his absence. He could not forgive them. “Honestly!” he said. “Green, smelly mud! You trust people, and they go and take advantage of you.”

“Father said you can’t blame people for that,” said Hildy. “I’ll fold from my end, and be quick! He said the poor see the rich as their natural prey.”

“Just the kind of thing he would say!” Ynen said irritably. “Fold it, don’t just scrunch it! Mind you, he was probably right. I’ll ask for a guard in future.”

“Some soldiers have just come through the gates,” said Hildy, causing Mitt to stand stiffly in his cupboard with his hands clenched. He had no idea who these arrogant fugitives could be or why they were in such a hurry, but he knew they could not be in too much of a hurry for him.

“Cast off the moorings and push her off, then,” Ynen called, “while I get the sail up. Make sure you don’t push us out of the deep channel, though.”

Yes, and hurry up about it, for Old Ammet’s sake! Mitt thought.

In a flurry of thumping, Hildy untied the mooring ropes and threw them on the planking, ready to be coiled later. Then she heaved on the jetty with all her might. Mitt gathered from the shifting and dipping what was happening. He heard the rhythmic rattle, rattle as Ynen sent the mainsail up, hand over hand, and then a further pounding of feet combined with a stiff tilting, as Ynen bounded to the bows to get the foresails up, and Hildy plunged to the tiller and turned Wind’s Road to catch the wind. After that came a slow ripple, ripple. Wind’s Road got gently under way and slid along the channel toward the open sea.

They won’t find us so easy to stop now, Mitt thought. Whoever these rich youngsters were, they could handle a boat all right. He supposed it was lucky they could. But he was still scared stiff. He could not see them getting away with it.

Hildy and Ynen anxiously watched the harbor wall glide by and wished it would glide faster. Four or five soldiers were now running along the jetty behind, stumbling among ropes and shouting.

“What are they saying?” Ynen wondered.

Hildy gave a nervous giggle. “Stop, I think.”

“What am I supposed to do? Pull on the reins?” Ynen said, and laughed, too.

Soldiers appeared on the harbor wall, struggling up from the marsh behind, most of them muddy and all in a great hurry. No sooner did they see Wind’s Road sliding proudly past and beginning to lean a little in the sea wind than they became quite frantic. They shouted to one another and yelled at Hildy and Ynen to come back. One or two raised their guns.

“They’re awfully close,” Hildy said.

“I know, but I daren’t leave the channel,” said Ynen. The soldiers seemed so angry that he thought he had better pacify them. He jumped up onto the seat of the steering well, with his foot on the tiller, and waved. “It’s all right,” he shouted cheerfully. “We’re only going out for a sail.”

A soldier sighted along a gun at him. Ynen overbalanced out of sheer astonishment and pitched down into the well, kicking the tiller as he went. As Wind’s Road veered, the shot fizzed slantwise across where Ynen’s head had been, only just missing the lovely whiteness of her mainsail.

“Ye gods!” said Hildy, and plunged for the tiller.

Wind was hard in the sail, and she could feel the deep keel dragging in the mud of the Pool. Another shot zinged across behind Hildy’s head.

Ynen rolled over as if he had been stung and stared anxiously up at the sail. “Filthy swine! If he’s holed my canvas, I’ll have his guts for garters!”

Hildy dragged the tiller across. Wind’s Road, her sail now properly filled, gathered majestic speed and foamed past the end of the wall. If the soldiers fired any more shots, they were lost in the sudden buffet of waves and the singing of the fresh wind. “They can’t possibly stop us now,” said Hildy. “But, Ynen, they fired at us! What did they think they were doing?”

“They must all be filthy revolutionaries, ‘” Ynen said. He was still very shaken. “I’ll make sure they’re all hanged when we get back.”

“I think it must have been a mistake,” Hildy said, almost equally shaken.

Mistake all right, Mitt thought, shaking all over. They thought one of you was me. Now you had a taste of the way the rest of us feel. Don’t like it, do you? What did I have to go and choose this boat for? I can’t do a thing right today, can I? If only I’d got on any of the other ones, I could have sat tight and let the soldiers think these two was me.

“It must have been a mistake,” Ynen agreed, recovering. “I was just furious in case they’d spoiled the boat. We can sort it out when we get back.”

“We might not be able to,” said Hildy. “Don’t forget we’ll be in awful trouble when we get back.”

“Oh, don’t let’s think of that now,” said Ynen. “Hand over the tiller. I want to stand well out to miss the shoals.”

It was beyond Mitt to imagine what these two thought they were doing. First they ran from the soldiers as fast as he had. Now they talked about going back. The one thing Mitt was certain of, was that he was going to change that idea for them. He wriggled the bolt quietly back and came out of his gilded cupboard. There he suddenly felt tired out. He stood listening to the sea frilling briskly past the hull and the creak and rattle of ropes. Feet batted the roof as Hildy began coiling ropes and resetting the foresails. Then came the clank and slosh of a bucket being dipped overboard. Rubbing and trickling sounds told Mitt that someone was washing off the mud he had brought aboard.

That’s right, he thought. Bustle about. Siriol taught me to keep my boats particular. Ah, I feel like a wet wash leather! And since it was obvious that neither of his companions was intending to come into the cabin, Mitt flopped onto the port bunk for a rest. He could wait a bit to change their plans. The cabin, as small places do, quickly got up a fug. The mud on Mitt, the blankets and the floor dried in big green flakes. Mitt drowsed.

When Hildy had washed the deck, she joined Ynen in the well. “I love the way the wind blows in your face and makes your eyes all cool,” she said.

“It’s my favorite feeling,” Ynen said.

Mitt hoped they would not go on like this. He did not want to hear their silly private thoughts. He was glad when Hildy said, “The land’s a long way off already.”

“The tide’s running out,” Ynen explained. “We’ll be past the shoals in a minute. Then we’ll turn north.”

“I like the south best,” Hildy objected.

“So do I. But the wind’s wrong. We’d be close hauled, and I wouldn’t dare tie the mainsheet when we had supper.”

“But there’s a current to the north, isn’t there? If we get into that, we’ll never get back before dark, not close-hauled,” Hildy pointed out.

“I wasn’t going that far,” said Ynen. “I want to be back in daylight because of the shoals. I thought we’d go north till slack water, and then have supper, and then come back when the tide turned.”

“Supper at slack water sounds a nice idea,” Hildy admitted. “And you are captain.”

Mitt thought supper at any time was a nice idea. And you’ll share it three ways, he thought. Two for me and one for you. Then we’ll see about who’s captain, and carry on up North. He bestirred himself enough to fetch out Hobin’s gun and see how it had fared in the dikes. To his relief, it was dry. He laid it by his head, within easy reach, and dozed again. Wind’s Road rose and fell. The wind creaked in her sails. The water splatted past. Ynen and Hildy did not talk much. They were too happy. Time and the land slid away.

The next thing Mitt knew, Wind’s Road’s motion was a more sluggish one. Hildy was saying angrily, “Why did you tell me you knew if you didn’t?”

Ynen answered patiently, in the overfirm way people use when they are trying to convince themselves as much as the other person, “I do know. That must be Hoe Point over there, and I’m sure Little Flate is in the dip beyond it. All I said was that we’d come a bit farther than I expected.”

Mitt blinked at the gilt and white portholes and was surprised to see it was still daylight, if they had come that far. Wind’s Road, even allowing for the tide which helped her, was a fine, fast boat. Unless it was tomorrow, of course. So much had happened to Mitt today that he felt as if it had gone on for a fortnight, even before he boarded this boat.

“Are you saying you think we’ve got into that current?” Hildy asked sharply. “Because, if so, we’d better turn straight round now.”

“No, no. It’s only slack water,” Ynen assured her anxiously. “I can tell it’s slack water by the way she’s sailing.”

Mitt thought about the new motion of Wind’s Road. It felt much more as if she were in a current to him, which suited him perfectly. In which case they were not where that flaming amateur at the tiller thought they were.

“Where does the current begin?” Hildy demanded.

“That’s the trouble,” Ynen admitted. “It may be Hoe Point, or it may not be till Little Flate. I’m not sure.”

Mitt cast his eyes to the elegant ceiling. The current began off Hoe Point, and Hoe Point came after Little Flate. I thought everyone knew that, he thought. Anyway, what’s the fuss about? You can go right out to sea and get out of it again.

But Wind’s Road was simply a pleasure boat. Ynen had never been out of sight of land in her. And he had always had sailors with him before who knew the coast. “I think perhaps you’d better fetch me the chart,” he said to Hildy. “It’s in the rack over the port bunk.”

“I think I’d better, too,” said Hildy, and she set off.

Whoops! thought Mitt, as he heard her coming. The time had come for him to act. He snatched up Hobin’s gun and cocked it as he scrambled off the bunk. Then he grabbed open the door and whirled through it, just as Hildy was trying to come in.

They collided heavily. Hildy was slightly taller than Mitt and weighed a great deal more. But Mitt was moving twice as fast. Hildy crashed over backward with a shriek. Mitt was thrown against the cabin. The gun went off with a bark and a jerk and all but kicked itself out of Mitt’s hand. It was like being hit over the wrist with a hammer. The shot, in a spatter of splinters, plowed across the deck and into the sea. The well filled with sharp-smelling smoke.

“Ye gods!” wailed Hildy. She thought her back was broken.

Mitt choked for breath against the cabin door and peered resentfully through the smoke at the gun. He thought Hobin might have warned him that it kicked like that. Then, as the smoke cleared, he saw Ynen in front of him, hanging on to the tiller and the rope from the mainsail, very white in the face, and staring at the long splintered groove in Wind’s Road’s beautiful planking. A right ninny, Mitt thought. Cares more about his boat being damaged than he does about his brother—sister, I mean. Hildy was painfully up on one elbow, glaring at Mitt. Mitt looked at both of them with the utmost contempt. They both had such a smooth look, with their skin well filled and their hair thick and dark and healthy. He could see neither had gone hungry in their lives. What aroused his dislike most—though he did not realize it—was that Hildy and Ynen both inherited their looks from their father. Mitt looked at Ynen and saw a gentle version of Hadd’s nose and at Hildy and saw the narrow, pale face of both Navis and Harchad, and though he did not recognize either, he detested them both on sight. And since his opinion of females was low, anyway, he encountered Hildy’s glare and thought: She makes me sick— worse than her brother!

It was not surprising that they felt much the same about Mitt. They stared at Mitt’s young-old face and his lank, dull-colored hair. They saw his bony hand was gripping a gun that looked like a collector’s piece, that his pea jacket was ragged, and that green mud was peeling from his long, skinny legs. They knew he must be riffraff from the waterfront. They suspected he was a thief, too. They thought he was disgusting.

“Well, we know what the soldiers were after. And where all the mud came from,” said Hildy.

“Are you badly hurt?” Ynen asked her. He felt very helpless. He dared not let go of the tiller to help Hildy, nor did he dare turn straight round and head back to Holand, much as he wanted to, for fear this disgusting stowaway loosed off with his gun again.

“No. I’m all right,” said Hildy, and struggled to her feet. “He missed me, of course.”

“I was not aiming to hit you,” Mitt said with great scorn. “You ran into me like a whole herd of cows. You want to look out. This is a hasty kind of gun.”

“I like that!” said Hildy.

“If it’s that hasty, why don’t you put it away?” Ynen suggested.

Mitt ignored him. He looked up at the sail and the streaming flag at the masthead. It was a fair wind for the North, all right. The land was low blue hummocks to his right. It took Mitt only one glance to spot Hoe Point nearly a mile astern. The hump Ynen had taken for Hoe Point was Canderack Head. Mitt was impressed. It was still an hour off sundown, too. He could not help grinning.

“Well, well,” he said. “A good fast boat you got here. All set for the North, aren’t we?”

Ynen’s face went rather whiter as he grasped what the stowaway might be planning. “We’re not going to take you North,” he said. “If that’s what’s in your mind.”

“Not got much choice, have you?” said Mitt. He pretended to rub the gun on his sleeve. He did not really rub it, because he was very much afraid it would go off again. “I’ve got this gun, haven’t I?”

“You can shoot me if you want,” said Ynen. “But I’m not taking you North.” He wondered if it would hurt very much and thought that it probably would. He could only hope he would die quickly.

“Ynen, don’t be an idiot!” said Hildy.

“He thinks I wouldn’t dare,” said Mitt. “Well, I would. Because I happen to be a desperate man.” That sounded good. And it had the advantage of being true. Mitt began to enjoy himself. “If you won’t take me North,” he said, “I wouldn’t kill you. I’d just put a bullet in your leg. Maybe both legs.” He was pleased to see Hildy glaring at him. “Then in her,” he said. “And then it would be rather a pleasure to knock this boat about a bit—scrape off the pretty paint, carve silly pictures in the decking, and so on.”

As Mitt had hoped it would, this threat truly upset Ynen. “You dare touch my boat, you guttersnipe!”

“He doesn’t know any better,” said Hildy.

“I thought that would worry you,” Mitt said in high glee. “All you’ve got to do to stop me is carry on as you are. Just keep sailing North.”

Ynen and Hildy exchanged a miserable look. They seemed to have gone from perfect happiness to a nightmare in a matter of seconds. Hildy wondered what had possessed her to lead Ynen into this. She had known there were revolutionaries at large. They should have stayed in the Palace. Ynen was thinking mostly of that current and how he could persuade the boy that Wind’s Road simply could not take him all the way North.

“Look here,” Ynen said, trying to sound fair and reasonable. “We can’t go North. We have to be back in Holand tonight or people will worry. What do you say to our landing you somewhere on the way back? How about—” Ynen looked over at the land and could not help feeling extremely uneasy about the shape of it. “Hoe Point?” he said doubtfully.

Mitt gave what he hoped was an evil laugh. “Go on! You couldn’t get back to Holand tonight even if you went this second! You’re in a nice fast northerly current, and in this wind you’ll be lucky if you make it back by morning. Hoe Point is where that current starts, and that’s Hoe Point back there, you flaming amateur! Look at your chart if you don’t believe me.” He saw he had demoralized them. Ynen’s face was warm pink, and he was staring at Hildy as if the end of the world had come. Mitt was so pleased that he added, “I was sailing out of Holand before you were born.” That was a mistake. Hildy gave him a jeering look. Mitt scowled at her. “Just sail North and don’t give me any trouble,” he said. “And you won’t have any trouble from me. I can’t say fairer than that, can I?”

Hildy sighed to cover up her thoughts. Unpleasant as this boy was, he did bluster rather. To judge by Ynen’s face, he was right about the current, but that did not mean he had thought of everything. “I suppose we’d better humor him, Ynen,” she said. She stared hard at Ynen, slowly shutting her eyes and opening them, to show him that the boy would have to sleep sometime.

Mitt knew that, too. Even a sweet boat like Wind’s Road would take three or four days to reach North Dalemark waters. No one could stay awake that long. Mitt was tired to death already. He felt his only course was to keep these children thoroughly intimidated by being as rough and dangerous and brutal as he could. He seemed to have made a fairly good start. So, while Ynen was nodding gravely at Hildy to show her he understood, Mitt roared out, “Right, then. Now that’s settled, go and get out your eatables. I’m starving. Hurry up!”

Hildy gave him a poisonous look. But it was fully suppertime, and she was hungry herself. She got up and dragged one of the sacks of pies out of the locker. Ynen took a careful breath, hoping it was not his last, and said, “I’d rather you didn’t speak to my sister like that.”

“What’s she done to deserve any better?” Mitt said nastily. “You watch it.” He was annoyed to see the two of them exchanging a look which was any thing but intimidated. “Come on. What’s in that sack?”

He was relieved to see it was pies. He had been wondering how he could eat and still keep hold of Hobin’s gun. He was afraid that if he let go of it for a moment, he would find himself being pushed overboard. But he could eat a pie with one hand.

The pies were scarcely as tempting as they had been. Gravy had run and juice had leaked, and then mingled and soaked back into other pastry. But Mitt was not in a state to care. He had not properly eaten anything since breakfast. He intended to go on with the intimidation by eating with great gobbling noises and huge slurpings, but as soon as he had a pie in his hand, he forgot everything but how hungry he was. He only thought of eating. He was hardly able to attend to the splendid, unusual tastes, he was so frantic for food. He ate five steak pies, a pheasant patty, six oyster puffs, a chicken flan, four cheesecakes, and nine fruit tarts. He thought, as he drew at last to a gentle halt, that his gluttony had served to intimidate the children almost as well as making noises. They were staring, looking thoroughly chastened. Mitt managed, with no effort at all, to produce a monstrous belch, to make sure they knew exactly how rough and foul he was.

In fact, Ynen and Hildy were simply awed. They had not known it was possible to be so hungry.

That explains those thin legs, Hildy thought, looking at them. The sun was melting down into the sea, in a buttery haze. By its strong yellow light, Hildy saw that most of the mud had flaked off the boy’s legs, showing him to be wearing odd oldfashioned breeches, with one leg red and the other yellow. The sight gave Hildy such a jolt that she burst out, “I know who you are! You threw that bomb Father kicked away!”

12

Mitt looked from Hildy to Ynen. He saw the likeness now. His huge meal had left him slow and almost unbearably sleepy. His first thought was that it was funny. Hadd ruined him. Navis spoiled all his plans. And now these were Navis’s children who were willy-nilly rescuing him. He chuckled. “Now that’s what I call justice,” he said. “Navis is your pa then?”

Hildy stuck her chin up and did her best to overawe Mitt. “Yes,” she said haughtily. “And I’ll have you know that I am betrothed to Lithar, Lord of the Holy Islands.”

“Oh, shut up,” Ynen said uncomfortably. “You sound just like the cousins.”

Hildy had been imitating her cousin Irana boasting of her betrothal. She was annoyed with Ynen for noticing. She turned her back on him and looked hopefully at Mitt, hoping she had upset him by it at least.

Mitt laughed. “Betrothed!” People got betrothed at Lydda’s age, when they were eighteen and grownup. Hildy was only a little girl in pigtails. “Bit young for that, aren’t you?” Then the implications struck him. He was quite as alarmed as Hildy could have hoped, but he kept on laughing. He dared not let them see he was upset. This girl was important, all right. He remembered Milda telling him about Lithar. That made certain that ships would pursue them from Holand, and more ships would be out to meet them from the Holy Islands. Mitt knew he was going to have to make them take this boat right out into the ocean. It was going to take days, and even then he might be caught. Just to think of it made him feel tired. “Well, it’s your business,” he said. “Doesn’t worry me.” He stood up. “I’m off for a visit to that silly bucket in the cupboard. The one with roses on. No tricks while I’m gone now.”

Ynen’s face was pink in the yellow light. “They aren’t roses. They’re poppies,” he said.

“Roses,” said Mitt. “And with a golden rim, too. Amazing the way your kind has to have things pretty!” He went into the cabin.

Ynen shouted after him, “Your kind built this boat!” Then, as soon as Mitt was at the end of the cabin, he whispered to Hildy, “What are we going to do?”

Now that Mitt had laughed at Hildy for being betrothed, she was determined to get the better of him. “I’ve got an idea,” she whispered, “to make him go to sleep.”

“Then we’ll turn round,” Ynen agreed. “What idea?”

“What are you whispering about?” Mitt yelled.

They dared not whisper anymore. Ynen looked at the long splintered groove in Wind’s Road’s planking and shivered. It was getting hard to see now. The sun had swum down below the horizon, leaving a yellow sky spread with straight black clouds. The sea was a melting, lighter yellow, as if the light had soaked into it. Hildy’s face was dark. “We’re saying we ought to have a light at the mast-head,” he called. “It’s the law.”

“Haven’t you noticed?” Mitt bawled. “I got nothing to do with the law.”

“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 liedown,” 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 failing, 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 realised 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 realised 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.”

“Well, you did throw a bomb,” said Ynen. “And I can’t see why you did. There must have been lots of people in Holand far worse off than you. Why did you do it?”

That was a home question. Twenty-four hours earlier Mitt could have given all sorts of answers. He could have told them at least that it was to be revenged on Siriol, Dideo, and Ham. But he had gone out of his way not to be revenged. And he had run and run and run. He did not know what he thought he had been doing. He was reduced to answering with another question. “Could you have seen things so wrong and not think you ought to do something about it?”

This in its turn was a home question to Ynen and Hildy. They had indeed seen things wrong. All Ynen had done was wish he could whirl a rattle in Hadd’s face. All Hildy had done was tear a bedspread and make empty threats. Then they had gone out sailing— a piece of defiance which had thrown them in the way of this boy. And he had not only told them more things that were wrong but had demanded that they help him. With the result that they were now sailing back to Holand to deliver him to Uncle Harchad.

“Ynen—” said Hildy.

“I know,” said Ynen. “All right. We’d better take you North. Hildy, could you go to the foresails again?”

Mitt was rather taken aback. He knew he had not given Ynen a reason. He felt dishonest, and shamed. What would happen to these two in the North? He thought of the Northmen shuffling through Holand to be tried and hanged. “See here,” he said. “All you got to do is land me near Kinghaven or whatsits— Aberath—and I’ll do nicely. Or you might try Tulfa. Then you go back to the Holy Islands. You’d be all right there if she’s betrothed to Lithar—What’s your name, by the way?”

“Hildrida,” said Hildy. “Hildy for short. And this is Ynen. What’s yours?”

“Mitt,” said Mitt.

“Oh, not another Alhammitt!” said Hildy. “That must make at least twenty I know!”

“Common as dirt,” agreed Mitt.

Ynen had been thinking over what Mitt had suggested. Tired as he was, he began smiling. “Let’s go to the Holy Islands, Hildy. I’d love to see them.”

Hildy just could not see herself sailing up to the Holy Islands and announcing she was Lithar’s future wife. The idea made her stomach squirm. But she looked at Ynen and decided he was too tired to be argued with.

Mitt could see how tired Ynen was, too. He remembered how he used to feel on a long stint aboard Flower of Holand. “How about you getting some rest, now we seem to know where we’re going?” he said. “I can sail her for you. Can she?”

“Naturally I can,” Hildy said haughtily.

So it was settled that they divide the rest of the night into three watches. Ynen reluctantly took his numb hand off the tiller and watched Mitt settle into his place. He felt very dubious as he stumbled off to the cabin. But he supposed that if Mitt could tell in his sleep when they turned the other way, he must be able to handle Wind’s Road. As Ynen lay down, he heard Hildy walking uncertainly forward over the roof, half blind from the light of the cabin. He saw Mitt’s bony hand pushing the tiller firmly over. Once more Wind’s Road surged round. Her sails ran out, clapped, and filled. Ropes rattled as Mitt and Hildy reset them. And shortly Ynen felt the tug and surge of Wind’s Road riding properly northward, and he knew Mitt could indeed manage her. He fell asleep, to the creak of ropes and the hurrying of dark water.

13

The night seemed extraordinarily long. Mitt stayed at the tiller for as much of it as he could. He wanted to get a good start Northward. It felt good to be handling a boat again, particularly a responsive racing boat like Wind’s Road. But with the good feeling went long, mindless boredom. There was nothing to do but watch the slowly wheeling stars and listen to the whelming of the huge sea. Mitt did make several honest efforts to decide just what he thought he had been doing back in Holand. But every time he started to think, he came to, some time later, to find he had been thinking of nothing at all. At length the stars began taking little jumps through the sky. Mitt did not know if he had been asleep while they moved or not, but he saw he had had enough. He hitched up the tiller and woke Hildy.

Hildy was so sleepy that she took her watch almost unconscious. It seemed a very long time. Then Hildy found herself doubled painfully over the tiller in a paler world. The sea was dark and glossy. A white wave fizzing past had woken her.

Hildy hobbled off like an old woman and woke Ynen.

Ynen, much more refreshed by six hours’ sleep than Hildy felt he had any right to be, went gaily out into whitening dawn. The bank of mist where the land was seemed too near. Ynen corrected their course and tightened ropes, and sang while the sun came melting red and yellow out of the mist. Now it was settled, and they were going North, it felt like the best holiday Ynen had ever had. When Mitt came out a while after, Wind’s Road was sailing briskly in a brisk wind, under a streaky gray sky. The land was a chalky smudge, and the vigorous gray waves were galloping North, too, dividing into two lines of white round Wind’s Road’s eager bows. Hildy crawled out later still, groaning. It was so early.

They got the pies out. They were staler, soggier, and much less appetizing. “I reckon,” Mitt said, “that they’ll be old enemies by the time we make Kinghaven—if they last till then.”

“They ought to. We’ve got two sacksful,” said Ynen, and could not help laughing at the look on Mitt’s face.

“Then it’s only water that’s the worry,” said Mitt.

“Well, actually, the water barrel’s full up,” Hildy confessed.

For a moment Mitt could hardly credit that he had been so taken in. Then, to Hildy’s relief, he shouted with laughter. “I bet you were mad when I didn’t have the arris!” he said. “Us rough fellows are supposed to love that, aren’t we?”

Hildy bent her head, embarrassed. She was even more embarrassed when Mitt tasted the water and remarked that it was some of the sweetest-tasting water he had ever drunk. She and Ynen were both shuddering at its musty wooden taste.

Ye gods! What must the water be like down in Holand! Hildy thought. She was so uncomfortable that she jumped up and fled across the cabin roof, babbling that she thought the foresails needed looking at.

“Want a hand?” Mitt called.

Hildy did not know what to say and did not answer. Mitt was just getting up to help her when Ynen said, in great surprise, “I say! What on earth are those doing here?”

Mitt looked. To his astonishment, a number of half-submerged apples were bobbing in the waves beside the boat. He watched them apparently climb a wave, then get left behind by it, the way floating things do. There were dozens of them—bright red and yellow water-sodden apples, all round Wind’s Road. And there were what looked like wisps of grass as well, and some almost waterlogged flowers.

“Oh, I know!” said Ynen. “Those must be the garlands from the Festival. I suppose the tide brought them out into the current.”

“No good to eat, are they?” Mitt wondered.

There was a scream of excitement from Hildy. She was pointing, jabbing her finger seaward, at something floating ahead. For a nasty second Mitt and Ynen both thought it was a drowned person. There was sodden flaxen hair and an outflung hand. Then it rolled and seemed simply a mat of white reeds.

“Can’t you see!” screamed Hildy. “It’s Poor Old Ammet!”

Wind’s Road veered and shivered in the excitement of that moment. Ynen almost let go of the tiller. Mitt ran from side to side. Whatever the differences between them, they were all three Holanders, and they knew this was the lucky chance of a lifetime.

“We’ll miss him, we’ll miss him! Hurry up, Mitt!” Hildy screamed. “Bring me the boathook!”

Mitt plunged round on Ynen and seized the tiller from him. “You go. I’ll bring her round for you.”

Ynen knew the maneuver was probably beyond him. He let go of the tiller almost before Mitt had it and shot up along the deck, snatching up the mop and the boathook as he went. He thrust the mop at Hildy, and the two of them, waving their implements, balanced jubilantly on the pointed prow. As Mitt took Wind’s Road racing past Old Ammet and then round again toward the wind, he was very much afraid either or both of them would join Old Ammet in the water. But they clung on. Mitt let the mainsail out with a long rattle, to take the speed off Wind’s Road, and she plowed on, bash-bash-bash, with waves smacking at her bows and spraying Hildy and Ynen thoroughly. When they were a few yards off the floating straw figure, Mitt turned Wind’s Road right into the wind, and she stood almost still, shaking and flapping. Hildy and Ynen both threw themselves on their faces and lunged at Poor Old Ammet.

Their efforts were agony to Mitt. They knew nothing about how to get things out of the sea, those two. Hildy prodded. Ynen was hanging right under the bowsprit like a monkey, wasting Mitt’s accurate work by pushing Old Ammet farther and farther away. It was so clear that they were going to lose him that Mitt hitched the tiller up and set off to help. Wind’s Road promptly jigged round sideways to the waves, where the strong wind threatened to fill her sails again. Mitt saw that she could capsize that way and hurried back to the tiller.

“Flaming mind of your own, you have!” he told Wind’s Road. “Sail me or I’ll drown the lot of you— that’s you!”

That jigging gave Ynen the extra foot he needed. He managed to get a grip on Old Ammet with the boathook. Hildy planted the mop on him to steady him, and together they tossed Poor Old Ammet aboard like the stook of corn he was.

Mitt marveled that he could have taken that intricate mass of plaited corn for a drowned man.

Old Ammet still had arms, legs, and a tufted head, but he was now more the shape of a starfish than a person. Most of his fine red ribbons were gone, and his face was cockeyed and blurred. He was a Poor Old Ammet indeed. All the same, they were delighted to see him. They all shouted, “Welcome aboard, Old Ammet, sir!” which they all knew was what you said. Mitt turned Wind’s Road joyfully back on her way again, while Hildy and Ynen first did an unsteady dance of triumph on the cabin roof and then set about fixing Old Ammet to the prow like a figurehead— which was the other thing you were supposed to do.

Poor Old Ammet was limp and waterlogged. It was no easy matter to make him into a figurehead. Ynen fetched rolls of twine and rope. Mitt called advice. Hildy ransacked the cabin for things which might support that weight of wet wheat. Mitt called so much advice that Hildy snapped, “Oh shut up! We all know you get Old Ammet out of the sea every year!”

There was really no answer to that. Mitt shut up, bitterly annoyed, and soothed himself by muttering, “Flaming females! They’re all the same. It goes right through.” He watched, haughtily, Old Ammet being threaded on a besom, a gilded picture rail, and two wooden spoons and then being lashed to half the door of the gilded cupboard that concealed the rose-covered bucket. Then he was tied very firmly across the bowsprit, where he lifted and fell proudly to the movements of the boat. Mitt knew he could not have done it better himself. So he said knowledgeably, “He’ll stiffen up. He’s full of salt. Mind you, he may niff a bit.” Then he gave way to honest pride. “Looks good, doesn’t he?”

Ynen and Hildy thoroughly agreed. “But,” Hildy said, “why doesn’t anyone ever find Libby Beer?” She lay down to peer under the mainsail, as if she expected to find Libby Beer just in the offing, in the other half of the gray, leaping sea.

“She’s all grapes and squashy berries,” said Ynen. “She must get waterlogged in no time. It would be a miracle if we had her, too.”

Mitt laughed and slapped the knobby pocket of his red and yellow breeches. “I clean forgot to this moment! Miracle it is. Here. Look.” He dragged the little wax model of Libby Beer out of his pocket. Like Poor Old Ammet, she was rather the worse for wear. The wax berries were flattened, with cloth marks imprinted on them, and the ribbons were muddy strings. But she could hardly have delighted Ynen and Hildy more had she been new and gay and gleaming.

“Oh, beautiful!” said Ynen. “We must be the luckiest boat in the world. May I lash her to the stern?”

“Carry on,” said Mitt.

“She’s lovely!” said Hildy, fingering Libby Beer while Ynen unrolled more twine. “I’ve always wanted one of these, but they won’t let us buy things at the stalls. Those little tiny rose hips. How did you get her?”

“While I was on the run,” said Mitt. “Lady at a stall gave her me for luck.”

“You mean she knew you were running away?” Hildy asked, reluctantly giving Libby Beer to Ynen to be tied behind the tiller.

“No,” said Mitt. He fixed his eyes on the gently heaving horizon and wished this silly female would understand what Holand was like for the likes of him. “She found out I was on the run just after, when the soldiers came asking. She gave me Libby Beer to cheer me up—I had a face as long as Flate Dike, see, not knowing where to go or what I dared do. Then, when the soldiers asked, she had to say she seen me. She didn’t dare not tell. That’s how people are. It’s different for you.”

Ynen considered this while he tied careful knots round the wax figure. “We’re on the run, too, now—in a way. Why is it different? If a fisherman sees Wind’s Road, he’ll tell. And I don’t feel miserable about it.”

Mitt knew Ynen had missed the point. He thought of Milda, Hobin, and the babies, of all the waterfront people who used to laugh at him selling fish, all the dozens of people he would never see again, and he was almost exasperated enough with Ynen to push him from the stern where he was crouching, into the sea. “But you’ve not put yourself outside the law, have you?”

“Yes, we have, in another way, “ Hildy said. She thought Ynen had missed the point, too, and the only way to cover it up seemed to be to let Mitt know that they had their difficulties as well. She told him about their pretended escape with the bed-spread and their real escape with the pies. Mitt tried not to grin. It was all a game to them.

It did not seem to Ynen that he had missed any point. He looked admiringly at the little Libby Beer, already shiny with spray, and proudly over at Old Ammet, lifting and falling at the bowsprit, while he thought over all he now knew about Mitt. It did not add up properly. He wanted to know why. “Look here,” he said. “You must have known you’d be on the run, and what it would be like, once you’d thrown the bomb. Didn’t you make any plans to get away?”

“Were you standing there waiting to be blown up?” Hildy asked, thinking this would explain Mitt’s odd behavior on the waterfront.

Mitt eyed the heaving horizon. He supposed he might as well tell them, if they could tell him about their silly escape with their pies. There was something odd about Hildy’s story, though—something not quite right. Mitt felt that as strongly as Ynen evidently felt it about his. “They made plans—the Free Holanders,” he explained, “but it wasn’t in me to listen, because I was planning to get myself taken. I was aiming to kill Hadd, and when they caught me, I was going to tell them the Free Holanders set me on, to pay them out for informing on my father. It was them that informed on him. I’ve been planning that half my life. You ought say my mother brought me up to do it. And your pa goes and spoils it in half a second. That’s what had me standing there—the waste!”

There was silence from Ynen and Hildy. Mitt did not wonder he had shocked them. He took his eyes off the horizon and caught them exchanging a look that was not shocked but deeply puzzled.

“And so it was a waste!” he told them aggressively. “Three years I saved gunpowder. Five years me and my mother planned it. And your pa kicks the bomb instead of grabbing me. Then I run straight at those fool soldiers, and they lose me. What was I supposed to do after that? Walk in the Palace gates and say, ‘Here I am’?”

“It’s not that,” said Ynen. “You keep saying everyone informs because they’re frightened—and I believe you—but why do you blame the Free Holanders for informing and not the woman who gave you Libby Beer?”

“She wasn’t a friend of mine, was she?” Mitt said gruffly.

There was a further silence, puzzled and uncomfortable, filled only with the sound of Wind’s Road’s ropes pulling in a wind that seemed to be slackening. Hildy and Ynen looked at one another. They were both thinking of the Earl of Harinart’s son and wondering how to say what they thought.

“I don’t understand about mothers,” Hildy said cautiously. “Not having one myself. But—” She stopped and looked helplessly at Ynen.

“You do know,” Ynen blurted out, “your mother does know, does she, the kind of things that happen when people get arrested for your kind of thing? Do you know about my uncle Harchad?”

Harchad’s face, and the terrible fear that had gripped Mitt when he saw it, seemed to have mixed in Mitt’s mind now with his nightmare of Canden shuffling to the door. Under his thick jacket, his skin rose in gooseflesh. But he was not going to let Hildy and Ynen know how he felt. “I’ve heard things about Harchad,” he conceded.

Hildy shivered openly. “I saw. One thing.”

“That’s why we said we’d take you North,” said Ynen.

“Thanks,” said Mitt, and he stared woodenly at the horizon. He was not sure quite what was the matter with him. He felt sick and cold. He shook Canden and Harchad out of his mind, but he still felt as if a load of worry had fallen on him, making his head ache and drawing his face into a strange shape. Ynen and Hildy stared, because Mitt’s face seemed all old, with scarcely any young left in it. “See here,” Mitt said, after a minute, “I feel wore out again. Mind if I go for a liedown?”

Hildy took the tiller without a word. Mitt plunged into the cabin, onto his favorite port bunk, and fell heavily asleep.

“Ynen, what did you have to go and say all that for?” Hildy whispered, wholly unfairly.

“Because I didn’t understand,” said Ynen. “I still don’t. Why has he gone to sleep like that?”

“I think it’s because you—we—upset him more than he wanted to think about,” Hildy answered. “He’s in an awful muddle. It must be lack of education.”

“He’s muddled me, too,” Ynen said crossly. “I don’t know whether to be sorry for him or not.”

The slackening wind brought a drizzle of rain. Ynen and Hildy found a tarpaulin and wrapped it round their heads and shoulders. The rain increased, and the wind strengthened slowly, until the sea was so choppy that Hildy found it hard to steer and hold the sail rope, too. The sail was yellow-gray and heavy with rain.

“Miserable!” she said. Water dripped off the end of her nose and chin.

“I wonder if we ought to take in a reef,” Ynen said.

Just before midday, the choppiness woke Mitt. Wind’s changed, he thought. Coming more off the land.

He stumbled muzzily out into the well to find a real downpour. Rain was battering down into the well and swirling along the planking, going putter, putter on the tarpaulin over Hildy and Ynen’s heads, and making myriad pockmarks in the yellow-gray waves alongside. Mitt was not sure he liked the angry tooth shape of all those pockmarked waves.

“I’ve been wondering if I ought to reef—just in case,” Ynen said to him.

Mitt looked at him, frowning sleepily against the cold water in his face. Beyond Ynen, the little figure of Libby Beer was shiny as new with rainwater. Beyond her, dim behind veil upon veil of silver rain, was what looked like a mountain walking up the sky from the land, monstrous, black and impending.

“What do you think about reefing?” Ynen asked.

Mitt stared at that mountain of black weather, aghast. Last time he had seen anything like it, Siriol had made for Little Flate as fast as Flower of Holand could move, and they had hardly got there in time. This was twice as near. There was no chance of making land. Those two had been sitting with their backs to it, but all the same! “Flaming Ammet!” said Mitt.

“Well, I thought I’d reef,” Ynen said uncertainly.

“What am I doing standing here letting you ask?” Mitt said frantically. “You should have woke me an hour ago. Three reefs we’ll need, and let’s be quick, for Old Ammet’s sake! I bet this boat handles real rough.”

Ynen was astounded. “Three?” Hildy was so surprised that she lost her hold on the wet tiller. Wind’s Road tipped about, and the boom swung over their heads. Mitt caught it, braced himself against the weight of wind and sopping sail, and tied it down with such haste that Ynen began to see he was in earnest. He slipped out from under the tarpaulin and scrambled onto the cabin roof in the hammering rain, to the ropes that lowered the mainsail. When he saw the weather the tarpaulin had been hiding from him, he did not feel quite so surprised at Mitt’s command. Ynen had never been out in any weather so black himself, but he knew when the sky looked like that, you saw all the shipping making for Holand as fast as it could sail. He let the huge triangle of the sail down a foot or so. Mitt began tying the resulting fold down against the boom by the little strings that dangled from the canvas, and tying as if for dear life. “We have got a storm sail,” Ynen called.

Mitt shook his head, knowing how long it would take two boys to get in this mass of great wet sail and bend on another. “We’d be caught with our pants down. Maybe we are, anyway. She rides awful high. Get tying. Quick!”

They tied cold, wet reef knots until their fingers ached. Hildy stood on the seat, with her foot on the tiller, and laced away at the sail over her head. Mitt and Ynen crawled up and down the cabin roof, tying knots there. They did it again with a second fold, and then all over again with a third. By this time, Wind’s Road’s sail was an absurd little triangle, with the long bare mast towering above it. The rain was coming in busting clouds now. They could see nothing much beyond a gray circle about thirty feet across. But, inside that circle, the waves were yellow-green, heaving high and pointed. The bare mast swept back and forth. The deck was up and down, sickeningly steep both ways.

“Don’t untie that boom till we got the foresails in,” Mitt shouted at Hildy. Somehow the weather was much louder, though it was hard to tell what was making the noise. Mitt and Ynen hauled and grappled at the clapping sails in the bows, slithering on the wet planks round Old Ammet. One moment they were skyward, soaring into lashing rain. The next Old Ammet was plunging, like a man on a toboggan, down and down a freckled tawny gray wave side.

Ynen swallowed giddily. “Is it going to be bad?” he yelled.

Mitt did not try to deceive him. “Real shocker!” he bawled back. But he thought it was just as well that he did not have breath to spare to explain to Ynen that these autumn storms sometimes went on for days. Mitt knew they would be drowned long before the day was out. Now he was fully awake, he knew, with nasty vividness, that Wind’s Road would capsize. He could feel it in the movement of her. She was only a rich man’s pleasure boat, after all. And as Old Ammet launched himself furiously down another freckled hill of water, Mitt was as terrified as he had been when he crouched among the marble-playing boys in Holand. He was blind with panic. It was as if he had run away from himself and left the inside of his head empty. Mitt knew this would not do. It was no use thinking Ynen could manage by himself. He had to run after himself, inside his head, and bring himself back with one arm twisted up his back before he was able to pick up an armful of soaking sail and stagger with it to the hatch. He thought, as he pushed and kicked it down and clapped the cover on and banged the bolt home, that there really was nothing left of the old fearless Mitt anymore. He had never been in charge of a boat before. He wanted to whimper because Siriol was not there.

He and Ynen crawled back across the seesawing cabin roof. Hildy, seeing them coming, obeyed instructions and started to untie the lashings round the boom. She knew they had been idiots, she and Ynen, sitting under that tarpaulin and letting the storm creep up on them. She had been trying to behave with smart efficiency ever since. She did not want people like Mitt thinking her a fool. But she had no notion how fierce the wind was now. She loosened the main knot.

The wind tore it all out of her hands. The sail slammed round sideways, jerking Wind’s Road broadside on to the next huge wave. The boom mowed across the cabin roof and caught the side of Ynen’s head with a thuck. It knocked him clean out. He was carried helplessly with it toward the side.

14

Hildy screamed. Mitt flung himself after Ynen and just managed to catch him round the ankle with both hands. Water thundered down over them, hard and heavy, and fell away, sucking and rilling, pulling Ynen against Mitt’s straining arms and dragging both of them down the tilted cabin roof. Mitt had no idea how they survived, any more than Hildy. Hildy knew Wind’s Road had gone like a bullet, slantwise through the top of that wave. But how she came to have the fighting tiller in one hand and the sail rope in the other she did not know.

“Ye gods! I’m sorry!” she screamed at Mitt when she saw him, drenched and horrified, sliding down from the cabin roof and heaving Ynen after him.

“Don’t dare do that again!” Mitt screamed back. Wind’s Road was plunging downhill now, and he made use of it to slide Ynen into the cabin. Ynen was alive, to his great relief, stirring and muttering miserably. Mitt did not dare linger with him. He wedged him hurriedly in place with blankets. “Don’t move!” he bawled, though the cabin was almost quiet. “You took a knock there.” Wind’s Road, trembling sickeningly, mounted upward again. Mitt threw himself downhill into the well and wrestled the tiller out of Hildy’s weak hand. The storm was too loud even for screaming now.

Mitt found he had arrived just in time. The huge autumn storm roared and howled and bashed around them. Wind’s Road was half sideways in the trough between two heaving walls of water, caught in the backwash of the last wave. Worse still, while she wallowed there, half the thundering gale was blocked by the water. The sail was coming smashing across and threatening to capsize her. Mitt, as he worked at the sluggish tiller, shrieked and made gestures at Hildy to pull the rope in and hold the sail. It seemed a lifetime before she understood and the rope came yelling over its blocks into her hands. She still had a silly, puzzled look on her face, but Mitt had no time to attend. He could only thank Old Ammet he was stronger since he was last in a boat. Wind’s Road was the hardest thing he had ever had to handle. She would not come about. They were creeping crabwise up a great slope of water, up and up, until they were hanging, almost over on one side, just beneath the raving crest of the wave. Wind’s Road had suicidal urges. Mitt felt her going over, and heaved on the flaccid tiller.

The full force of the storm hit them as he did so. Mitt and Hildy both screamed. Their voices burst out of their throats without their being able to help it. The wind hit with a roar and a crash. The sail rope yelled out from between Hildy’s fingers, nearly dislocating both her shoulders. Great lumps of water loomed and fell, smashing across the bows, banging down on the cabin, thundering over Hildy and Mitt, until they were as bruised as they were wet, and went fizzing and boiling away behind.

The man in the bows with the flying fair hair understood their danger and leaned into the wave, dragging at Wind’s Road’s forward rigging. Wind’s Road did not want to come, but Mitt thought the man dragged her round by main force. He saw him clearly for a moment, with his hair as white as the snarling spray, gesturing aside the horses that were trying to overwhelm Wind’s Road. Then Wind’s Road lashed herself over the edge and down another watery hillside, and Mitt had all his work cut out to hold her straight. Beside him, Hildy, to his relief, was trying to help the sail rope as it came rattling in again when Wind’s Road plunged.

Mitt could not hold her straight. Wind’s Road went down into that valley of water and wallowed sideways, with every intention of never coming up. But the man was there against the foam-laced surface of sliding black water, wrenching Wind’s Road straight for him. Mitt wanted to thank him, but by that time Wind’s Road was on her sickening way upward again to lay herself sideways to the next wave top.

And so it went on. Mitt thought they went from sudden death to sudden death so often that they lost count of how long. The world was a lathering uproar, and Wind’s Road hit and buffeted until she jerked all over. Mitt and Hildy were bashed by water until they hardly felt it. Water fizzed into the cabin and swirled round Ynen. The tarpaulin floated round the well, mashed up and neglected, and got in the way, but neither Hildy nor Mitt had time to get rid of it. Hildy’s attention was all for the rope, either yelling out or rattling in, and Mitt’s for battle with the tiller, Wind’s Road’s yawing death urges, and the gestures of the fair-haired man when the wind hit with a clap and a shout.

He and Hildy got quite used to seeing him, up there in the bows, either gray with storming rain or whiter against the black side of a wave. They were glad to see him there. But the horses bothered them both. They were beautiful gray horses galloping, arching their necks under flying manes, dashing up the slopes of waves, frolicking and rearing on the crests. Mitt and Hildy never had time to look at them properly, but they saw them all the time out of the corners of their eyes. They knew they were imagining things. Sailors told stories of horses playing round doomed ships, frolicking at the death of mortals. Mitt and Hildy would much rather not have seen them. They kept their eyes ahead on the next danger coming. But there were still horses galloping on both sides of the boat, though ahead there was nothing but fizzing foam and shuddering waves and occasionally the man with the flying light hair.

He’s doing us no harm, that’s for sure! Mitt thought

In the cabin Ynen got to his elbows and put a hand to the big tender lump on the side of his face. He could have sworn somebody had shaken him and told him to get up. But he was all alone, lying among sopping blankets. “Ugh!” he said. He could feel Wind’s Road yawing and staggering, and he wondered what was causing this awful sluggish movement.

The cabin door slammed open against the stove, and a wave of dirty water rushed down on Ynen, soaking him to the bone. He stared uphill at two pairs of slithering feet and more water bashing across them. Ye gods! he thought. The water we must be shipping! He scrambled up while he was thinking it and climbed uphill into the well.

The first thing that met his eyes was the lovely head of a thoroughbred gray horse, flying past among the rain and spray. It was gone at once, as if it was galloping faster than Wind’s Road could sail. Ynen was hit by the rain and gasped. It was lashing down. He could hardly see the withered and windwhipped figures of Mitt and Hildy, let alone the woman kneeling on the stern behind them. It was as much as Ynen could do to make out that this woman had long red-gold hair, flapping and swirling in the wind. He saw she was giving Hildy a hand with the rope— or he thought she was, until he realised she was pushing at the tiller as Mitt braced his feet and shoved it. The rain made Ynen very confused. But he realized the woman was pointing at the locker where the pump was.

“Yes, of course,” Ynen said to her. He was still dazed, but he clipped the lid of the locker up, moved the tarpaulin off the scuppers and began to pump.

The storm raved on for another hour or more. Ynen pumped away, without a hope of emptying the boat, but perhaps doing just enough to prevent Wind’s Road’s swamping. Sometimes he wished, in the fretful way one does in dreams, that the lady in the stern would help him, too, though he knew she had enough to do with Mitt and Hildy. Sometimes he thought the man up in front might come back and give him a hand. He knew this was an ungrateful thought. The man had stopped Wind’s Road from turning over several times, and he was keeping off the horses, too. But Ynen’s arms ached so.

At length the roaring and thundering grew less. Wind’s Road, from sliding up and down, went to heaving and lurching, and from that to a staggering slap-slap-slap, with only the odd spout of water coming aboard. They sailed through a brown light. The rain hissed down and seemed to flatten the tossing sea further. Then the rain stopped. Ynen, pumping and pumping, felt far too hot.

“We did it!” Hildy said. “It’s over.” As she said it, Ynen heard the squelching that meant the bilge was nearly dry. He straightened his back thankfully.

There was a blinding sun right in front of the bows, low on the edge of the sea. The storm clouds were above the sun in a heavy black line, getting smaller and smaller. It was hot. Wind’s Road had steam rising from her decking and salt crystals forming like frost on her. The small triangle of sail sagged. There was a mess of tangled ropes every where, and Wind’s Road was riding with a surge and swing unlike any Ynen or Hildy had ever experienced. Mitt knew it for the surge and swing of deep ocean. He looked back, across the little saltcoated figure of Libby Beer, away and away over empty sea. There was no land.

Weak and trembly though they all were, they burst out talking and laughing, in overloud hoarse voices, telling one another what each had thought the worst bit was. Ynen said it was when he saw the boom on its way to hit him. Hildy said it was the horses.

“No,” said Mitt. “It was that first time she tried to capsize, just before we saw the man.”

“I thought that, until the horses kept being there,” said Hildy. “And I tried to tell myself I was just imagining them because I was so scared and tired. But I knew they were there.”

“I saw one quite close to, just before Libby Beer told me to pump,” Ynen said. “Didn’t they go fast!”

“Hey, look,” said Mitt. “We haven’t all run mad, have we?”

“Of course not,” said Ynen. “Libby Beer was sitting behind you, helping you sail her, and Old Ammet was standing in the bows stopping her sinking and keeping the horses off. I saw both of them.”

Hildy looked anxiously at the big purple bruise on the side of Ynen’s face and then at the tiny, saltcoated figure of Libby Beer on the stern. “I didn’t get a chance to turn round, but isn’t she rather small?”

“Old Ammet got carried away in that first big wave, for sure,” Mitt said, and hoisted himself weakly on the cabin roof to see.

He could see a bundle of whitish straw, gently rising and falling in the bows. He crawled forward, hardly able to believe it. Old Ammet was still there, contrary to all reason, every plaited wheat stalk of him, miraculously in one piece. There were strips of seaweed wrapped about him and tangled in his wheaten hair, as if he had got his lost ribbons back, changed by the sea to green and brown. But round his neck, broken and sodden, was draped a garland made of wheat, burst grapes, and drooping flowers.

“Come and look at this!” Mitt yelled.

They left Wind’s Road to sail herself and stood in a row with their clothes steaming, looking down at Old Ammet and his garland from the Festival. “I think we ought to thank him, and Libby Beer,” said Hildy.

Mitt was very self-conscious at the idea, but he made himself growl, “Thank you, sir,” with Hildy and Ynen, and then turn round and say, “Thank you, lady,” to Libby Beer. After all, he had seen Old Ammet with his own eyes.

Then Hildy started to shiver violently. Mitt knew what was needed. He waded through the soaked blankets on the cabin floor and fetched the bottle of arris. He made Hildy and Ynen have a good swig and then took one himself. They stood about in the well going “Um-pwaugh!” and making awful faces.

“Shocking taste, isn’t it?” said Mitt. “Wait a moment, though. There comes a sort of boing inside, and then it warms the insides of your ears.”

The boing came. It made them feel so much better that they got out the pies and fell on them ravenously. Their hands shook as they ate, and their fingers were white, wrinkly, and blistered, even Mitt’s, which had got a little soft-skinned in Hobin’s workshop.

“I can’t sail all through the night,” Hildy said wearily.

“We’ve got a sea anchor,” said Ynen, and looked at Mitt to see what he thought.

Mitt was dog-tired, too. But he knew autumn storms could come one on top of the other. He did not know what to do.

“I know,” said Hildy, and she crawled forward to the mast. Mitt, with Ynen nodding and yawning beside him, stared at the soles of her feet and heard her say, “Please, Old Ammet, can you look after the boat tonight? But if there’s another storm, could you wake Mitt up and tell him, please?”

“That’s right! Pick on me!” Mitt called. “Tireless Mitt they call me. Think I don’t wear out or something?” He turned to the figure of Libby Beer. “Excuse me, lady. She wants you to wake me if there’s trouble. She thinks I’m made of the same stuff as what you are. So, if I’m needed, and you have to give me a nudge, do you mind waking her up, too? She can sit and feed me nips of arris.”

The cabin was crowded and close that night. Nobody needed blankets, so they hung them in the well to dry. They all slept like logs, even Hildy, who had the small forward bunk which had been designed for her when she was nine. If Old Ammet or Libby Beer had tried to call Mitt in the night, he did not hear them. But all seemed well in the morning. The sea was flat, and the sun made a liquid yellow path to the gently drifting Wind’s Road.

“I think I hate pies,” said Hildy.

“You want to try mixing about a bit,” Mitt told her. “You know—cherry flan and steak. Makes a change.”

“You’re cheating,” said Ynen. “Those were squashed together, anyway. Try oyster and apple, Hildy. It’s—well, it’s different.”

After this decidedly strange breakfast, they cleaned up Wind’s Road and got very hot doing it. The heat told them all that they could not yet be very far North. None of them had the slightest idea where they were. As there was no land in sight, no chart Ynen could produce was any use to them. The only thing they were sure of was that they had been blown out into deep ocean, probably more west than north.

“I’ll steer north and east,” Ynen said. “When we sight land, I’ll keep it just on the horizon, until we see somewhere we can recognize. Tulfa Island should be easy to find. And we know that belongs to the North. Let’s get the sails up.”

Shortly, with sails set again, in a light wind, Wind’s Road was sailing on. Mitt sat lazily just above Old Ammet, listening to the water running past her sides and admiring the way her bows cut the sea sweetly asunder. In fair conditions Wind’s Road was a beauty, he thought. He could hardly believe she had been doing her damnedest to drown them all yesterday.

“There’s something to port over there,” Ynen called. “Can you see what it is?”

Mitt looked too far, then too near, and finally saw a small dark thing lolloping on the swell, about a quarter of a mile away. “Could be a boat,” he called.

“That’s what I thought,” Ynen called back, and pushed the tiller over, with a fine ruckle-ruckle of water from Wind’s Road’s elegant bows.

“Hey! What are you doing?” Mitt called, jumping up.

“Going to look. If it’s a boat, it will have been in the storm,” Ynen said and, for the first time for over a day, he gave Mitt a frankly unfriendly look. Hildy, beside him, gave Mitt the same look.

Mitt felt hurt, and irritated. “You don’t have to look at me like that! I don’t want to get seen and caught, do I?”

“If there’s anybody in it, they can’t possibly hurt you,” said Ynen. “But I have to make sure. It’s the law of the sea.”

“Or weren’t you brought up to keep to any law?” said Hildy.

Mitt felt Hildy need not have said that. He knew the rule as well as she did. “Don’t talk so stupid!” he said. “Can’t neither of you get it in your heads this isn’t a pleasure trip?” Then, as Hildy went white and drew in her breath to make a powerful answer, Mitt added, “But please yourself—please yourselves. Don’t mind me. I’m only the passenger.” He could see the thing was a boat now, but only a small one. It looked to be just a ship’s cockboat, torn loose in the storm. No danger there, Mitt thought.

But when Wind’s Road had leaned nearer, in a pleasant riffling of water, they saw the boat was larger than that, about a third the size of Wind’s Road herself. There was a mast in it, still flying tag ends of rope and some fluttering pieces of sail. There was no sign of life in it.

“It was in the storm,” Hildy said, rather hushed.

“I’ll go alongside,” said Ynen.

Mitt stood up to offer to do that for him. Ynen pretended not to see. Wind’s Road was his. Mitt sat down dourly by the mast. So Ynen did not trust him not to sail straight past then? Very well. Mitt grinned as Ynen went about too soon and hit the smaller boat a fair old wallop. Ynen winced at the damage to Wind’s Road’s paint. The smaller boat simply bobbed about. It was salty, battered, and draped with seaweed. It had to be hard to sink, Mitt thought, to have survived the storm. It was empty, except for a tangle of tarpaulin in the bottom. Ynen had scraped Wind’s Road for nothing, by the look of it.

Hildy read the name painted on the stern of the derelict. “Sevenfold II.”

“Funny!” said Mitt, coming to look. “That’s a big merchant ship out of Holand. She was tied up in harbor there the day of the Festival. What’s her boat doing here with a sail in it?”

“She must have sailed out later and got caught in the storm,” Ynen suggested. “I suppose her crew took to the—Oh, dear!”

The tangle of tarpaulin heaved and humped. A wet and unkempt head was thrust out, as if its owner was shakily on his hands and knees. A hoarse and wretched voice said, “Take us aboard, for pity’s sake!”

No one had expected this. Hildy and Ynen were quite as dismayed as Mitt. In fact, it was Mitt who first pulled himself together and said, “Up you come, then. How many are you?”

“Just me, guvnor,” said the man, and seemed to fall flat on his face again.

Mitt exchanged a resigned and dubious look with Ynen and swung himself down into the bobbing derelict. The worst of it was it could be someone who knew him. He heaved back the tarry canvas. Underneath were several inches of water and, lying sprawled in it, a soaking, unshaven man in sailor’s clothes. He was a square, powerful sort of fellow—the kind of man you could trust to survive a storm, Mitt thought, taking the man under the arms and trying to heave him upward. He was no one Mitt knew. But when Mitt had wrestled the fellow to his knees, he thought the man had a faintly familiar look. He must have seen him around on the waterfront. One thing was certain about him. The man was a good deal better nourished than most people in Holand. Mitt simply could not lift him.

They only got him aboard Wind’s Road because the man seemed to come to his senses enough to help a little. Mitt boosted. Hildy leaned over and dragged. The man, groaning and feebly scrambling, pulled himself over the side into the well and collapsed again. It took them some time to pull and push him into the cabin and get him onto a bunk. Meanwhile, Ynen left Sevenfold II’s boat to bob by itself and sailed on.

“Would you like a drink of water?” Hildy asked, thinking the man must be parched with thirst.

The answer was a growl, in which the only words they caught were “little lady” and “arris.”

“Give him a nip of it,” Mitt said. “Bring him around.”

Hildy fetched the bottle and put it to the man’s pale, waterlogged lips. He took such a long drink that she was alarmed. When at length she managed to drag the bottle away, the man made a feeble pounce after it. “Arragh!” Hildy backed away quickly. He seemed like an angry wild beast. But he became calmer almost at once and mumbled some thing else with “little lady” in it. “S’some sleep,” they heard him say.

“That’s right. You drop off. Do you good,” Mitt said heartily. He took Hobin’s gun off the rack above the bunk, where he had left it, and put it in his belt, just to be on the safe side.

Hildy, in much the same spirit, put the arris bottle in a locker and shot the bolt. She looked back as they left the cabin and saw that the man’s eyes were wide open. He could have been watching. But he could also have been half unconscious. “Do you think he’s all right?” she whispered.

“You do get rough types,” Ynen said, very much wishing he had left Sevenfold II to drift.

“He’ll survive,” said Mitt, “if that’s what you were asking. Must be made of iron to be still alive. Let’s hope he’ll be more agreeable when he’s had some sleep.”

“So do I,” said Hildy. The man’s eyes were still wide open, staring from a broad pale face covered with long black stubble.

15

For the rest of that day, the new passenger slept, with his face turned to the wall.

Everyone felt this was the best thing he could do. They left him alone and almost forgot he was there.

Ynen stayed at the tiller. It was his way of claiming Wind’s Road back after the storm. He did not exactly resent Mitt’s taking charge then, but Wind’s Road was his. She was the loveliest and the luckiest boat out of Holand, and Ynen loved her passionately. This left Hildy and Mitt nothing much to do but lounge on the cabin roof. Hildy understood Ynen perfectly. Mitt was amused, though he had to admit that if he had had the luck to own Wind’s Road, he might well have been just the same. And a bit more careful of my paint, he thought.

Wind’s Road clipped her way elegantly northeast. No land came in sight. While they watched for land, they fell to talking, mostly about Holand. Mitt irritated Hildy because he would seem to think that life in the Palace was one of perfect bliss.

So she told him what it was really like. It was beyond her to describe properly the emptiness and the lonely, neglected feeling she and Ynen had lived with, but she could tell Mitt how Hadd was as much of a tyrant in his own home, as he was in his earldom.

“Everybody was so—so obedient that they’d no characters,” she said. “The aunts were just fine ladies. And those cousins! All ‘Yes, Grandfather,’ and ‘No, Grandfather,’ and pretty dresses and despising people who didn’t feel like being obedient.”

“The boys were worse,” Ynen said feelingly. “They had such a good opinion of themselves under the obedience.”

“Like the uncles,” said Hildy. “I don’t think Uncle Harl ever did anything but crawl to Grandfather while he was alive and go around looking smug and being boring. But when Grandfather got shot, Uncle Harl got drunk to celebrate. It made me feel awful. And I will say this for Father—he wasn’t like that.”

“Then what was—is he like?” Ynen asked resentfully. “You got more sense out of a fish on a slab!”

“Except fish don’t make jokes at your expense,” Hildy added.

“Ah, now I’ve had quite a bit of dealings with fish, on slabs and off,” Mitt said. “Sad look, they often have. And speaking as an authority, as you might say, I get to feel quite sorry for your pa, hearing you talk. Happy family, weren’t you?”

“Sorry for him!” said Hildy.

“I know. That’s a fine thing, coming from me, isn’t it?” said Mitt. “But as far as I can see, he’s not let do anything, except maybe play soldiers or go out for a shoot now and again. All he’s let do is sit about in the happy family and take orders, and since he’s not booked to be Earl or anything, he’ll be doing that till he dies. Not much of a life, is it? On a slab, you might say, until he’s under one.”

Hildy and Ynen sat digesting this unusual view of their father for some time. Even then, all Ynen could think of to say was, “Well, I don’t know,” which he said very dubiously indeed. They seemed so perplexed that Mitt tried to cheer them up by telling them stories from the time he used to fish with Siriol and how he used to sell the fish. He amused Hildy and Ynen mightily. Hildy nearly rolled overboard laughing, and Ynen doubled up over the tiller. But this led to another difficult moment.

Ynen straightened up, tenderly shifted Wind’s Road a point or so, and asked: “Is Siriol a Free Holander? He seems to have been very kind to you.”

“Yes.” Mitt went to pick at a blister the storm had raised on the cabin paint. He caught Ynen’s eye and stopped, trying to grin. The puzzled, serious look he was growing to dread was settling on Ynen’s face. “All right. He was one of them that informed,” Mitt said. “Only don’t start asking things again! I tell you straight I don’t know how I feel about him. So he was good to me. So I didn’t want to go near him after the bomb, for fear I brought the soldiers on him. That’s all I know.”

Ynen’s mouth opened to ask another question. Hildy saw Mitt’s face had gone elderly. She nudged Ynen and hastily got out the pies. The survivor from Sevenfold II was still asleep, so Hildy left a rather withered steak pie between his face and the cabin wall. When she came out into the well again, Mitt was still elderly, and she could tell from Ynen’s face that he was going to ask more questions any minute.

Hildy began to talk brightly about the Holy Islands. She was not sure why she did, except that it was clear to her that Mitt’s feelings were in a most painful muddle, and she knew a little how that felt. Perhaps the Holy Islands was not a good choice of subject. Hildy’s feelings about them and about Lithar were in as bad a muddle as Mitt’s about the Free Holanders. Because of this, and because she was so anxious to keep off Mitt’s feelings, Hildy began to boast. All through the long afternoon, while Wind’s Road ruckled her way gently through small blue waves, Hildy sat on the cabin roof and boasted about Lithar’s famous fleet and the beauty and the strangeness of the Holy Islands. She told Mitt about the magic Bull, the mysterious piping, and the old man of the sea and his horses. She told him the Holy Islands were the most favored place in Dalemark. Before long, she began to feel that she was indeed extremely lucky to be going there, and she told Mitt all over again about the fame and beauty of the Holy Islands, in even more glowing terms.

On the third repetition Mitt felt he had had enough. “All right,” he said. “You were so lucky to be betrothed, you ran away the first opportunity. So stop swanking.”

“Yes, do stop, Hildy,” said Ynen, who was as bored as Mitt.

Hildy was furious. “Why should I?”

Ynen looked at her whitening face and did not answer. Mitt could see Hildy was angry, too, but he did not see that was any reason for holding his tongue. “Because you said three times,” he said, “that you’re going to be Holy Hildrida. You’re going to ride about on a bull, blowing a little whistle and hopping from island to island, granting everyone wishes. Now tell us how poor old Lithar feels about it. Pretty sick, I shouldn’t wonder.”

Hildy stood up on the cabin, so blazing white that Ynen winced. How dared Mitt make fun of her! She had only been trying to help him, too! And he repaid her like the street boy he was. She was so angry that she wondered whether to jump down on him where he sat in the well and hurt him as much as she could. Mitt grinned up at her, not in the least dismayed. Hildy realized he was probably stronger than she was. “You,” she said, “are just a horrible little murderer, and don’t you forget it!” She turned on her seaboot and stalked to the bows of the boat.

Mitt saw he had gone too far. He was sorry at first. Then, as Hildy continued to sit, white and blazing, looking out over Old Ammet, he became resentful. “Give me the tiller,” he said to Ynen. “You need a rest, anyway. And go and tell that sister of yours to jump in.”

Ynen took Hildy a pie instead. She refused to speak to him. He took a pie to the man from Sevenfold II. The man had not eaten the first pie. Ynen was just going away when the man roused a little. When Ynen asked if he wanted a pie, he growled. The only word Ynen heard was “guvnor.” He leaned over, rather nervously, and asked the man his name. The man growled to call him Al, guvnor. Then he reached out and snatched the pie Ynen was just taking away again. Ynen retreated to the well, feeling he was the only good-tempered person aboard.

“He’s horribly hard to get on with,” he said to Mitt.

“He’s a right brute,” Mitt agreed. “Mind you, he may be better tomorrow.”

They settled the watches for the night, with Ynen having to run back and forward between Mitt and Hildy because Hildy would not speak to Mitt. Mitt took the dawn watch. He wanted to be on hand in case they reached land then.

But by morning there was still no sign of land. The wind was brisker, and the day promised to be clear. Mitt leaned against the side of the well, with his foot up on the seat, humming a tune and feeling fresher and calmer than he had felt for years. He wondered what he would do when he reached the North. Go back to fishing, he supposed, or get work on a farm. But he was sure there were a hundred other things, as yet unthought of, which he could do quite as well.

He was so cheerful and confident that he was really hurt when Hildy came out of the cabin and pushed past him without a word. “What am I supposed to have done—bar teased you a bit?” he demanded.

“And why should I put up with that?” asked Hildy. “It’s not your place to criticize me.”

“Oh, go and get a nice long drink of arris!” Mitt said disgustedly.

Hildy was looking at him, uncertain whether to laugh or fly at his throat, when Wind’s Road vibrated to a string of swearwords. Hildy had never heard the like. Even Mitt had seldom heard so many at once. Al stuck his head out of the cabin and gave Mitt a bloodshot look.

“Isn’t there a razor in this godforsaken tub?”

“There may be,” said Hildy. “The sailors often leave things. I’ll look.”

“I didn’t mean you, little lady. I meant him,” said Al. “Let him look.”

“I’m steering,” said Mitt. “And I don’t know where to look.”

Al gave him another bloodshot look. “Then she’d better do it,” he said, and went inside again. Hildy followed him, and found a razor. Mitt stood outside, scowling, hearing things like, “It’ll be none the worse for a bit of sharpening, little lady,” and the sound of Hildy stropping the razor. “This is all the soap you have, is it? Thank you, little lady, much obliged, but a man needs a bit of hot water to shave with.” That meant Hildy had to get the charcoal stove alight, draw water, set it to boil, and work away at the stove bellows. Mitt watched her working away with a set, cross look on her face, while Al sat at his ease on the bunk, and wished they had left that boat to rot.

When Ynen came out, he was wishing the same, though all he said was “No land yet?”

All Mitt said was “No. I reckon that storm blew us a good long way out.” But he could see Ynen knew how he felt.

Al emerged from the cabin at last, rubbing his smooth chin and looking satisfied. He climbed on the cabin roof and stretched. He was square and stocky. His face, now they could see it properly, was square, too, and unremarkable except for some bitter creases round the mouth and a general look of being well pleased with itself. His clothes, in spite of being faded and creased by the sea, were better than Mitt had realized, and he had a well-nourished look that made Mitt think he must have been mate or perhaps bosun on Sevenfold II.

“What are you staring at?” Al demanded. Hildy was looking at him resentfully. Ynen was puzzled because he had a feeling he had seen Al before somewhere. Al laughed and looked round Wind’s Road. “Lucky ship, eh?” he said, nodding from Old Ammet to the little Libby Beer. Then he nodded at Mitt. “Hand that tiller over, and let’s have some thing to eat.”

“I’ll do it,” Ynen said, opening the locker where the second sack of pies still lay untouched.

“Don’t you, guvnor,” said Al. “Let him.”

“It’s still Mitt’s watch,” said Ynen.

“Yes, but it’s his station,” said Al. “It’s not your place to cook.”

“Nobody’s cooking,” said Mitt. “And what do you take me for?”

Al shrugged his wide shoulders. “Servant. Body guard, by the look of that gun you got there.”

Mitt looked down in annoyance, wishing he had buttoned his coat over Hobin’s gun. “I’m no servant,” he said.

“Don’t tell me!” Al said, laughing loudly. “I suppose you come aboard and held the guvnor and the little lady up at gunpoint!”

Mitt could not look at anyone. Hildy seized the sack out of Ynen’s hands and dumped it on the cabin roof. “Help yourself,” she said. “That’s what every body else is doing on this boat.”

“Thank you kindly, little lady,” said Al. “After you. After the guvnor.” He would not touch a pie until Hildy and Ynen had each taken one. Then he took one himself, remarking that Mitt could eat when he came off duty. Ynen promptly passed Mitt his own pie and took another. But Al was clearly not a man to pick up hints. He waved a piece of oyster patty at Ynen and asked with his mouth full, “And where, may one ask, is this boat bound, guvnor?”

They munched in uneasy silence. They all realized that they had forgotten to invent a story to tell him. “Kinghaven,” Ynen said at last, in a haughty way he hoped would shut Al up.

Al ducked his head respectfully. “Sorry I spoke. Sorry I spoke, guvnor. Never wish to offend the gently born. Friends in the North, have you? Not many Holanders could say the same. I mean, I know you’ll pardon me for mentioning it, but I can see this boat’s from Holand by the images back and front. Not a deep-water boat, either, is she? Pleasure vessel, more like.”

Hildy drew herself up, as her aunts did when they were displeased. “Yours was hardly even that, was it?”

Al shut his eyes and muttered things. “Oh, it was horrible! Filthy little tub. Never been so sea-sick in my life!” That surprised them, in a sailor, but Al’s other remarks had so alarmed them that they all tried to look sympathetic. Al grinned. “I lay down in the bottom and let it all happen. Only thing I knew how to do. That was after I lost my gun. Damned wave took it off me. I regret that gun. It was as good as the one you got there.” Mitt found Al’s eyes open again, staring at Hobin’s gun in his belt. “Mind if I have a look?” said Al.

“Sorry,” said Mitt. “It’s got sentimental value. I never let anyone else touch it.”

“Fair enough,” said Al, to Mitt’s considerable relief.

Mitt finished his pie, handed the tiller to Hildy, and retired to the cabin, sick of Al already and hoping heartily that it would not prove far now to Kinghaven. They must all make sure to give Al the slip there. Mitt did not trust Al. He disliked his elaborate deference to Hildy and Ynen, his plain intention of not doing a hand’s turn, and, above all, his smug and prying manner.

Above him, Mitt could hear Al asking if they had anything to eat but pies. He added discontentedly that it seemed rather a rich diet. Yes, let’s have you seasick again, Mitt thought, and went up the cabin to the rosy bucket.

When he came out, Al’s voice was in the well, saying, “Oh, no offense, little lady. It’s not my place to question the provisions. I just thought you could get that lazy boy to catch a few fish now and then. His kind get above themselves if they’re let stay idle.”

“You can fish if you want,” Ynen said. “We don’t want you idle either.”

“That’s right, guvnor,” Al agreed heartily. “I’ll go and set him to it, shall I?”

There was a frustrated silence in the well. Al bent down and entered the cabin. Mitt braced himself against the remaining half of the cupboard door, ready to whisk past Al and out on deck. Al would soon find Mitt was nobody’s servant. Al advanced. Mitt waited his moment and shot forward. But instead of sliding by under Al’s elbow, Mitt found himself hurtling into Al’s solid body and grunting with the impact. He was seized in a punishingly strong grip. Al laughed in his ear. “No, you don’t!”

Nothing like this had happened to Mitt for years. He was as humiliated as he was angry. He struggled hard. They bashed against the cupboard, a bunk, and the cupboard again. “Let go of me!” panted Mitt as they bounced against the gilded door.

Al, by this time, had both Mitt’s hands helpless under one brawny arm. “Right you are,” he said. He plucked the gun out of Mitt’s belt and let go of Mitt the same instant. Mitt was flung against the bunk again.

“How dare you!” said Hildy.

“Give that back, please,” said Ynen.

Both of them had come into the cabin, too, which explained why Wind’s Road was tipping about so, Mitt realized, as he was rolled onto the floor.

Al raised the gun. “You see to the boat, guvnor,” he said, and walked toward the cabin door. Ynen, Hildy, and Mitt, too, backed out in front of him in a dismayed cluster, treading on one another along the tipping floor. Ynen seized the tiller and set Wind’s Road to rights again, while the other two crammed themselves beside him, as far as they could get from Al in the cabin doorway.

“That’s right,” said Al. “Now this is much more comfortable. I didn’t feel safe with this gun where it was. Went off once already, didn’t it?” he said, pointing to the splintered groove beside the well. He turned the gun over admiringly. “Where did you pinch this?” he asked Mitt. “This is one of Hobin’s—one of his specials.”

Mitt set his face sullenly. He was not going to discuss Hobin with Al.

“Well, it’s in good hands now,” Al remarked. “Five shots in it. Got any more?”

“No,” said Mitt.

In rippling, rope-creaking silence, Al swung himself up to sit facing them on the cabin roof, with his legs dangling and the gun laid across one knee. Mitt watched his square, smug face and was almost shamed enough to cry. He knew he was having a very vivid experience of exactly how Ynen and Hildy felt when he first came out of the cabin himself, and it made him feel sick. It seemed hard on Ynen and Hildy to be having it again.

“Now let’s make sure we understand one another,” Al said comfortably. “I’ve been having a good deal of trouble lately, and it’s made me nervous. I don’t want any more, understand—guvnor? Little lady? You?”

“The name’s Mitt,” said Mitt. “What trouble?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Al, “so you won’t get any wrong ideas about me. I’m a marksman. Best shot in the South—so do remember I don’t want more trouble, won’t you? That’s why I’d rather be on the right end of this gun— nothing personal. As for the trouble, I had the good fortune to be employed by a noble gentleman in Holand—well, let’s call him Harl, shall we?—to take one of my best shots at a certain Earl—let’s call him Hadd, not to beat around the bush—”

Hildy’s eyes and Ynen’s slid sideways to each other. Wind’s Road veered. Mitt had to nudge Ynen before he realized. Mitt felt nearly as bad himself, and the nature of the badness dragged his face elderly again.

“And I did,” Al said earnestly. “It was as sweet a shot as you ever saw and dropped Hadd like a stone. But then the trouble started because I had to get away, hadn’t I? Naturally, Harl had promised me I’d be safe, but I knew better than to trust that kind of promise. Noble gentlemen who make these arrangements always prefer you to be dead, too. You can’t blame Harl. I’d have done the same myself. So I made a little outlay of my own, on some soldiers, not to search a certain ship’s boat where I was. But there were so many soldiers, and they got so eager, that I had to knock a couple into the water and then cast that filthy tub loose. And I got shot at, and rowed after, and if I hadn’t happened to catch the tide, I wouldn’t be here now. So I don’t want more trouble this time. You don’t blame me, do you, little lady?”

“I can’t honestly say,” said Hildy, “that I don’t.”

Al blinked a little at this, and scratched his tousled head. He smiled incredulously at Ynen. “She’s a sharp one, your sister. She is your sister, isn’t she? Lucky I never mind what people say.” He moved Hobin’s gun round on his knee until it pointed to Mitt. “You. Find some tackle and catch us a fish for lunch.”

“If you don’t mind what people say—no,” said Mitt.

Al snapped back the trigger so that Hobin’s gun was ready to fire. “You can say what you like as long as you do it,” he said, and the look he gave Mitt made it quite clear he intended to shoot him.

“There may be some tackle in one of those lockers,” Ynen told Mitt, in the slow, serious way people only use when they are truly frightened.

16

For the rest of the day Mitt sat fishing. Not venison, oyster, or pheasant tempted any fish to bite. Mitt sullenly watched the line trailing a little pucker in the sea and hated Al more every hour. It was no comfort to see Ynen and Hildy hated him, too, for Al had divided them from Mitt in every possible way.

Al liked talking. He lounged on the cabin roof, between Mitt and the well where Ynen and Hildy were, laying down the law about this, telling them the truth about that, and always treating Hildy and Ynen with great deference and Mitt with none at all. He told them the North was nothing like as free as it was cracked up to be, that a diet of pies would give them scurvy, and that Waywold was a better place to live than Holand. Then he came round to Poor Old Ammet and Libby Beer.

“Funny superstition, having a couple of dummies in your boat,” he said, waving from the straw figure to the wax one. “It’s not as if you Holanders believed in them. When I was in Waywold, they had a saying there that Holanders kept gods they didn’t own to. And that’s true. I bet you didn’t know they were gods one time.”

“They’re all right now,” Mitt said.

“And we know they’re something special,” said Ynen.

“Surely you do, guvnor. No offense. But I’ve been in the Holy Islands all this year past, and I know a bit more than you do. They call those two things gods there. That’s how the islands got their name, see. But—this is a funny thing—they don’t call them anything there. You ask what are the names of these two dummies, and people just look at you. Oh, they’re funny people—half crazed with god fearing, if you ask me—and all the gods are is two dummies.”

“I think you might let Mitt stop fishing now,” said Hildy.

“Little lady,” said Al, “you’ve a kind heart, and he can stop when he’s caught a fish. You hear that?” he said to Mitt. “She’s a nice girl— considerate. All her kind are like that. They can afford to be nice, and frank, open, and generous, too. They’ve got the means behind them, see, where your kind and mine can’t afford it. It’s a high-priced luxury, being nice is.”

Mitt humped his shoulders bitterly. He was sure Al was right. Al could not have chosen any better way of describing the way Ynen and Hildy had treated him all along. It hit the nail on the head.

Ynen said to Hildy as Al talked on, “Who is he? I’ve seen him before somewhere.”

Hildy knew Ynen had a far better memory for faces than she had. “I don’t care who he is,” she said. “I’m going to push him in the sea.” She meant it.

But Al was too old a hand to let any of them have a chance to harm him. Having divided them from one another, he talked until he had bored them into numbness. Then he demanded food. Then he talked until nightfall, and still no land was in sight. By now they all thought of land as the thing which would rescue them from Al.

“Well,” said Al, as soon as supper was over, “I think I’ll be turning in.”

They made an effort to suggest he took a watch during the night.

“Who, me?” said Al. “I don’t know the first thing about this game. I’m a landsman.”

“You had a sail up in that boat,” Ynen said. “And you’re a Holander. I’ve seen you. Holanders aren’t landsmen.”

“I never denied it, guvnor. But that was all years back, before your time. Good night, then.” And, since none of them could stop him, Al went into the cabin and fell asleep with the gun hidden under his body where nobody could get it.

While Mitt was dourly stowing the fishing tackle back in the locker, Hildy looked vengefully into the cabin. “He’s just like the cousins, Ynen, only I hate him more.”

“I hate him harder every time he calls me guvnor,” said Ynen.

“He’s bound to,” Mitt said, kicking the locker to vent some of his feelings. “He’s respectful of you.” It was on the tip of his tongue to ask them if he had been as bad as Al, but he had not the heart to. He knew he had been. Instead he found himself arranging the night’s watches, in a constrained and businesslike way, and taking the dawn watch himself again. Mitt felt in his bones it would be dawn when they sighted land.

In fact, the numb hatred they all felt for Al was very different from the way Ynen and Hildy had felt about Mitt. Ynen pondered about this while he steered Wind’s Road into darkness. Mitt had scared them horribly at first. But Ynen had never felt unequal to him, the way he felt with Al. As soon as Mitt had started to argue, Ynen had stopped being scared. There were things they had in common with Mitt, but with Al there was nothing. You could not trust him or argue with him. Ynen hoped the wind would be fresh tomorrow, because if it was and if Al stayed on the cabin roof, he was fairly sure he could bring himself to give the tiller a quick shove and sweep Al off the roof with Wind’s Road’s boom.

Hildy spent her watch thinking wretchedly of Uncle Harl. Ye gods! It was as if she, or Ynen, had paid Al to shoot Navis. Hildy felt so sickened that she was truly thankful Mitt had forced them to sail North, out of that horrible situation. Only now they had Al on board. Hildy knew they were going to need all their cunning, and Mitt’s, too, to escape from Al once they did reach land. And she had quarreled with Mitt. Of all the stupid things to lose her temper over! After what Al had said, Mitt was not going to believe in anything friendly Hildy said. Hildy hated Al for the way he had treated Mitt. It was like Uncle Harchad and the Earl of Hannart’s son, except that Al had used words instead of kicks.

She tried to show Mitt she was friendly by being very pleasant when she woke him up for his watch. Mitt hardly spoke to her. He pretended to be very sleepy and stumbled past her into the well, mumbling. When he took the tiller and set Wind’s Road heeling away into the faintly silvering sea, he was too perplexed and miserable to notice what he was doing. The awful similarity between himself and Al was all he could think of. “He did it for money, and I did it for a cause—that’s all the difference I can see,” he said to himself. “But what cause?”

He felt a sharp nudge on his back. He looked up to find Wind’s Road yawing about in a white sea, against a white sky. The wind had dropped and changed. It was quite a bit colder. Mitt set Wind’s Road to rights, buttoned his coat, and turned to have a good look at Libby Beer. She was a tiny, dark figure, too far away to have nudged him. Yet she had.

“See here, lady,” Mitt said to her, in his misery, “can I talk to you? Will you answer?” The little dark knobby shape did not move or make any sign. “What I want to know,” said Mitt, “is: Am I going to end up worse than Al if I started so young?” Libby Beer gave no sign of having heard. “All right,” said Mitt. “I promise to leave murdering alone in future. Will you help me now?” There was silence, except for the fitful rilling of water. “I can’t seem to think things in my head without talking them,” Mitt explained. “I went through life thinking I was on the right side—one of the good ones, you know—and now I can see I’m as bad as Al. So I got it all to think about again. I want to know what I thought I was doing there in Holand.” There was still no sign from Libby Beer. She sat at the end of the tiller among her twine lashing, and the faded colors began to come back to her because the sun was rising. Mitt did not dare talk anymore, in case some one in the cabin heard him. He stared round the welling yellow waves. There was still no land in sight.

No land came in sight all that day. The wind sank to a light, fitful breeze, in which they all buttoned their coats and shivered. It was so much colder that they were sure they must be in Northern waters. That was their one comfort. The pies were smelling strange, the water was low, and got lower still when Al refused to shave in seawater—and there was Al.

Al announced he was bored. “You must have brought a pack of cards or some dice with you,” he told Mitt, evidently thinking he was the most likely one.

Since Libby Beer had nudged him in the dawn, Mitt felt just a little more equal to Al. “Me?” he said. “People in my station can’t afford games.”

Al roamed about grumbling for a while. Then he suddenly went below and came up with the bottle of arris. “This’ll have to do then,” he said. “Should just be enough. Mind you, little lady, I’m not grumbling, but you should be sure your bottles are full before you sail.”

He settled himself on the cabin roof and got drunk. They could all see Hobin’s gun stuck in his belt, but Al’s hand was never far off it, and he patted it lovingly from time to time. Al sang a little. Ynen looked yearningly at the sail. But the wind was so light that he knew the boom would only give Al a gentle bump if he did swing it over. He sighed and handed the tiller over to Hildy, hoping she would have better luck.

When Al had drunk half the arris, he began to talk again. They all closed their ears. It was easy to do. They were all half asleep after their night watches. For an hour not one of them heard a word Al said. Then he began to laugh uproariously and shout at them.

“I tell you, I’ve been around all right! And my advice to you is two games at once! Rich against rich—they pay better—but rich against poor, if you can’t have that. I’ll tell you—I’ll tell you—Come here and look, the lot of you!”

Hildy was steering, but Ynen and Mitt did not dare disobey. Reluctantly they went toward the cabin roof, where Al was fumbling and pawing at his jacket and staring at them with angry, unfocused eyes. As they reached him, he managed to turn the top of his jacket inside out, to show the drab strip of tape in the lining. Fixed to the tape was a tiny round piece of gold with a wheatsheaf crest on it.

“There. Know what that is?”

“Yes,” said Ynen. “You’re one of Harchad’s spies.”

Al slapped himself with triumph. “Right!” he said. “Right, right, right! Been Harchad’s man for seven years now. So you see what I done?” he asked shrewdly, and became earnest and confiding before either of them could answer. “Rich against rich is the best way. Harl pays me to shoot old Haddock. Harchad gives me a bounty to shoot old Haddock. Offers of safety from both. Al’s all right whatever happens, see.”

“Just what we’d have expected of you, Al,” said Mitt.

Ynen was quite unable to stay near Al any longer. He backed away beside Hildy and was glad when she took a chilly hand off the tiller and squeezed his arm so hard that it hurt.

Al seemed quite content to concentrate on Mitt. He laughed and waved one finger under Mitt’s nose. “You take my advice and go in for the double game. Do what I done. You can’t beat the earls, so you join them. Find freedom fighters, join them with the Earl’s blessing. Then bust them up. I done that all over South Dalemark. Harchad pays—wants information. Earls pay. Lovely life.”

Mitt felt his face being pulled elderly as he listened. There seemed no end to the similarities between Al and himself. He turned away from Al’s wagging finger and saw that Hildy and Ynen were as hard hit as he was. Their heads were hanging at wretched doll-like angles, and their faces were blurry. Mitt would have liked to say something— something rude to Al, at least—to cheer them up. But he was in such a blazing misery himself that he thought: Being nice is a high-price luxury. Why should I bother? He jumped up onto the decking and scrambled toward Wind’s Road’s bows.

“Hardest bunch of freedom fighters are in Waywold,” said Al. “Where are you going?”

“To talk to Poor Old Ammet,” said Mitt. “He’s better listening. He keeps quiet.”

“But the cushiest job,” said Al, as if Mitt had not spoken, “was in the Holy Islands. They don’t know the meaning of freedom fighting there— only I’m not telling Harchad that. I’m on to a real good thing there.” He laughed. “They think the world of me. And all because of my name. Did you know my name was Alhammitt? But I’m not telling that in Holand. I’d have half Holand coming and trying to set themselves up in style there.”

“Oh shut up!” Hildy whispered.

But Al talked on, until there was very little arris left in the bottle. Then he sang the “Ballad of Fili Ray.” It was about a man who was hanged.

“At least he knows what he deserves!” Ynen said. “Hildy, I know where I saw him before. He was in the Palace last week. The first time I saw him, he was with Uncle Harchad. The other time was out at the back, where Father was having those new houses built. Al came out and talked to Father there, I’m afraid.”

Hildy knew, by the dead, sick feeling inside her, that she had feared this all along. “You—you think Father paid him to shoot Grandfather, too?” If Navis had been expecting someone to shoot Hadd, it would explain his unusual presence of mind.

“I don’t know,” Ynen whispered wretchedly. “He kicked Mitt’s bomb away.”

“But that could have been because it wasn’t part of the plan,” said Hildy, and they both looked over to Mitt’s hunched shape beyond the mast. They were both quite sure Mitt would want nothing more to do with them now.

The song stopped. Al drank the last of the arris. Then he stood up and staggered toward the well. Hildy and Ynen, both thoroughly frightened, pressed back against the stern and stared up at his swaying, grinning face. There was simply no knowing what Al would choose to do next.

“Funny thing, guvnor and little lady,” Al said slurrily. “You look as though you seen a ghost. Another funny thing—I don’t feel quite myself. Think I’ll go and lie down.” He came off the edge of the roof and collapsed on his knees in the well. Neither Hildy nor Ynen could bear to touch him. They turned their feet sideways out of his way, as he floundered round and crawled into the cabin. After two attempts he got onto a bunk and was shortly snoring.

“The gun’s underneath him again,” Hildy said hopelessly.

They waited for Mitt to come back to the well. It seemed the most important thing in the world that Mitt should come and be friendly with them. It had nothing to do with the fact that they were both sure Mitt was the only one who might get the better of Al. It was that if Mitt disowned them, then they were disowned indeed. But Al snored for two hours before Mitt moved. Old Ammet was as little help to Mitt’s misery as Libby Beer had been, although Mitt reached out several times and pleadingly touched the stiff, salty straw of him. Mitt knew he would have to talk to someone. The only way he could think was aloud.

Wind’s Road’s movement altered. The dip and swing of her became shorter and stronger, though the wind was still the merest chilly breeze. Mitt knew they must be in coastal waters again. He jumped up, but there was still no sign of land. He hurried across the cabin roof to tell Hildy and Ynen what he thought, but when he looked at them, below him in the well, he wondered if he was going to be able to speak to them at all. Their searching expressions, and their very faces, put him off. Ynen’s nose had blistered in the weather, but it was still Hadd’s nose. Hildy’s two pigtails were loose and puffy, and wisps of black hair blew across her narrow cheeks, but the sharp, tanned face was like Harchad’s even so.

Hildy made an effort to talk about Navis. “I know what you’re thinking—” she said to Mitt.

“I’m no good at thinking,” Mitt said sadly. “Not like you.” It sounded much nastier than he intended. Hildy took it for a snub and did not go on.

After that none of them tried to talk about any thing important, much as they all wanted to. The things Al had said were like a sore place none of them wanted to touch. This had a very odd effect. They found themselves chattering, and even laughing, about things that were not important, so that someone who did not know might have thought they were three great friends. They got the pies out again and picked out the parts that were still good. The rest—more than half—they had to throw in the sea.

They had just finished eating when Hildy exclaimed, “Seagulls!” White birds were bobbing on the water behind, riding high and light like Wind’s Road herself. Others wheeled above the well on big bent wings, each with a bead of an eye watching for more pie. Ynen looked at Mitt.

“Land,” said Mitt. “Can’t be too far off.”

They exchanged excited looks. Not only was the long voyage nearly over, but if they could reach land while Al was still asleep, they had a real chance of getting away from him. Ynen tiptoed into the cabin and rustled all the charts there were off the rack above Al’s bunk. Al did not move. He tiptoed back to the well with them. Most of the charts, naturally enough, were detailed maps of the water round Holand, but there was one which showed the whole curved coastline from Aberath in the far North to the sands round Termath in the South. Just above the middle of the curve, there was the large diamond-shaped block of Tulfa Island, about thirty miles out from Kinghaven. Below Kinghaven was the wicked spike of the Point of Hark, dividing North from South Dalemark waters. Below that again, much closer inshore, was a scatter of small and large blobs that were the Holy Islands.

“We should recognize that,” Ynen whispered, pointing to Tulfa Island, “and I think we’d know the Point of Hark, too. It looks like sheer cliff. I wish we knew how far North we’d come.”

“There’ll be light on Tulfa, if—” Mitt began.

Al surged out of the cabin like a bloodshot bear. “What’s all this whisper, whisper, guvnor? Can’t a man sleep?”

The three of them exchanged baffled looks. “Seagulls wake you?” asked Mitt.

“You don’t get charts out for seagulls,” said Al. He gave the horizon the benefit of his bloodshot look, and seemed as annoyed as they were at finding no land there. “Fuss about nothing. Where’s the food?”

They took pleasure in assuring him that all the pies were gone. There was, in fact, a hunk of cheesecake left, but none of them saw any reason to waste it on Al. Al annoyed them by taking the news philosophically. He said his stomach was not too good, anyway, and turned to go back to his bunk.

It occurred to Ynen that if Al was this alert, the thing to do was to make use of him. “How well do you know the coast?” he asked him.

“Like the back of my hand,” Al said over his shoulder. “Told you I’d been around, guvnor.”

“Then could you stay on deck?” said Ynen.

Al said nothing. He simply went into the cabin and back to sleep again.

But as things turned out, they had no need of Al, nor of the charts, that day. The wind continued light. No land appeared. It was clear that they were in for another night of standing watches.

“We’d best turn due North,” Mitt said. “We could run aground in the night on this course.” And again he settled to take the dawn watch.

Ynen called Mitt earlier than usual. The sky was hardly beginning to pale. But Ynen was horribly sleepy. He kept nodding off and kept feeling that gentle nudge in his back from Libby Beer. The last nudge was not quite so gentle. Ynen jumped awake, into air that was chilly and muggy at once, and knew something was different. Wind’s Road was riding in a high, jerky way. Ynen had not felt the like since the day they picked up Poor Old Ammet, and, for a moment, he was as terrified as he had been that first night, when there was space all round him and Mitt crying out in the cabin. He put his hand on Libby Beer to steady himself and realized that the only thing to do was to wake Mitt.

“I think we must be in coastal waters,” he said to Mitt as he fell onto the warm bunk Mitt had just left.

Mitt knew they had been in coastal waters since yesterday. He got to the tiller before he was really awake. While he was furiously jerking the rope from the mainsail, which Ynen had tied in a manner Siriol would have given him the rope’s end for, Mitt could tell Wind’s Road was in alarmingly shallow water. He searched that paler side of the sky, but there was only misty darkness. Yet while he searched, he could hear the roar and rumble of waves breaking.

“Flaming Ammet! That’s a reef somewhere,” Mitt said. He wiped a sudden sweat out of his eyes and stared forward into the paling dark. He thought his eyes were going to burst out of his head with the strain. He could hear the waves clearly, but he could not see a thing.

The figure with flying light hair, half hidden by the foresail, was pointing right and slightly forward. Yes, but which? Rocks there, or go there? Mitt wondered frantically. The tiller swung firmly left under his hand. Wind’s Road leaned right, in the crisp wash and guggle of a current. Waves crashed over to Mitt’s left, and he saw the dim white lather above the rocks she had only just missed.

“Phew!” said Mitt. “Thanks, Old Ammet. Thanks, Libby. Though I don’t know what call you have to keep on helping, with me and Al on board. I suppose you got Ynen and Hildy to consider. Thanks all the same.”

He heard the waves round more rocks ahead as he said it. This time he did not hesitate to turn Wind’s Road as soon as he saw the light-haired figure pointing. He was pointing the other way almost at once. Waves crashed on both sides of Wind’s Road, and the white spray showed whitish yellow in the growing light. Mitt found he was following Old Ammet’s pointing arm through a maze of rocks it made him sweat just to think about. Once or twice, in spite of Old Ammet’s care, Winds Road’s deep keel grated, and she was snatched sideways in an undertow. Then Mitt would feel Libby Beer’s strength on the tiller, pulling them to rights. Frightened as he was, Mitt smiled. The light was growing all the time. If this kept on, he was going to see them as they really were. Old Ammet looked more of a man every second. If Mitt pushed his eyes sideways, he had glimpses of a long white hand behind his on the tiller. It was worth the danger.

The last reef he saw clearly for himself. It was a welling and a milling of yellow water. It was nearly light. Then it was full day. The sun was up, making the sea look as if it was scattered with broken glass. The mainsail was cloth of gold; the island ahead was half golden, and the birds circling it were stabs of dazzling white; and the mist over to the right was a molten bank. The only sign of Old Ammet was a tuft of sunlit straw beyond the mast. Libby Beer was back to a colored knobby thing, tied with string. And Mitt was so disappointed that he could think of nothing else.

Then he came to his senses. He bent down and whispered into the cabin, “Island ahead! Come and look!”