Gifts

♦ 7 ♦

I set off, like any man, full of cares and self-importance. The colt Branty had lovely, springy gaits. On the open slopes of Long Meadows, his canter was a dipping flow like a bird’s flight. He ignored the staring cattle; he behaved perfectly, as if he too respected my new authority. I was pleased with both of us as we came, still at a canter, to the Stone House of Roddmant. A girl ran in to tell Gry I had come, while I walked Branty slowly round the courtyard to cool him off. He was such a tall, grand-looking horse, he made the person with him feel grand and admirable too. I strutted like a peacock as Gry came running across the yard to greet us with delight. The colt of course responded to her gift: he looked at her with great interest, ears forward, took a step towards her, bowed his head a little, and pushed his big forehead up against hers. She received the salutation gravely, rubbed his topknot, blew gently into his nostrils, and talked to him with the soft noises she called creature talk. To me she said nothing, but her smile was bright.

“When he’s cooled off, let’s go to the waterfall,” I said, and so when Branty had been established in a stall in the stable with a bit of hay and a handful of oats, Gry and I set off up the glen. A mile or so up the mill creek the two feeders came together in a dark, narrow cleft, and leapt down from boulder to boulder to a deep pool. Cool, ceaseless wind from the falling water kept the wild azalea and black willow bushes nodding. Among them a little bird that sang a three-note song was always hidden, and an ouzel nested by the lower pool. As soon as we got there we went wading, and then ducked under the falls, and climbed the rocks, and swam and scrambled and shouted, and finally clambered up to a high, broad ledge that jutted into the sunlight. There we stretched out to get dry. It was a day of early spring, not very warm, and the water had been icy, but we were like otters, never really feeling the cold.

We had no name for that ledge, but it had been our talking place for years now.

For a while we lay and panted and soaked up the sunlight. But I was full of what I had to say, and soon enough began to say it. “Brantor Ogge Drum called on us yesterday,” I informed Gry.

“I saw him once,” she said. “When Mother took me on a hunt there. He looks like he’d swallowed a barrel.”

“He’s a powerful man,” I said stuffily. I wanted her to recognise Ogge’s grandeur, so that she would give me due credit for sacrificing my chance to become his son-in-law. But after all, I hadn’t yet told her about that. Now that it was time to tell her, I found it difficult.

We lay on our bellies on the warm, smooth rock, like two skinny lizards. Our heads were close together so that we could speak quietly, as Gry liked to do. She was not secretive, and could yell like a wildcat, but she liked talk to be soft.

“He invited us to Drummant in May.”

No response.

“He said he wanted me to meet his granddaughter. She’s a Caspro through her mother.” I heard the echo of my father’s voice in mine.

Gry made an indistinct sound and said nothing for a long time. Her eyes were shut. Her damp hair was tangled over the side of her face that I could see; the other side was pillowed on the rock. I thought she was going to sleep.

“Are you going to?” she murmured.

“Meet his granddaughter? Of course.”

“Be betrothed” she said, still with her eyes shut.

“No!” I said, indignant but uncertain.

“Are you sure?”

After a pause I said, “Yes,” with less indignation, but no more certainty

“Mother wants to betroth me,” Gry said. She turned her head so that she was looking straight before her, with her chin resting on the stone.

“To Annren Barre of Cordemant,” I said, pleased with myself for knowing this. It did not please Gry. She hated to know that anyone talked about her. She wanted to live invisibly, like the bird in the black willows. She said nothing at all, and I felt foolish. I said by way of apology, “My father and your father have talked about it.” Still she said nothing. She had asked me, why shouldn’t I ask her? But it was hard to. Finally I forced myself. “Are you going to?”

“I don’t know,” she muttered through closed teeth, her chin on the stone, her gaze straight ahead.

A fine reward, I thought, for my saying no so staunchly to her question. I was ready to give up Drum’s granddaughter for Gry, but Gry wasn’t willing to give up this Annren Barre for me? That hurt me sorely. I broke out, “I always thought—” Then I stopped.

“So did I,” Gry murmured. And after a while, so softly her words were almost lost in the noise of the falls, “I told Mother I wouldn’t be betrothed till I was fifteen. To anybody. Father agreed. She’s angry.”

She suddenly turned over onto her back and lay gazing up into the sky. I did the same. Our hands were close, lying on the rock, but did not touch.

“When you’re fifteen,” I said.

“When we’re fifteen,” she said.

That was all we said for a long time.

I lay in the sun and felt happiness like the sunlight shining through me, like the strength of the rock under me.

“Call the bird,” I murmured.

She whistled three notes, and from the nodding thickets below us came the sweet, prompt reply. After a minute the bird called again, but Gry did not answer.

She could have called the bird to her hand, to perch on her finger, but she did not. When she began to come into her full power, last year, we used to play all kinds of games with her gift. She would have me wait in a clearing in the woods, not knowing what I was to see, watching with the hunter’s strained alertness, till all at once, always startling me, a doe and her fawns would be standing at the edge of the clearing. Or I’d smell fox and look all about till I saw the fox sitting in the grass not six feet from me, demure as a house cat, his tail curled elegantly round his paws. Once I smelled some rank odor that made the hair stand up on my head and arms, and saw a brown bear come across the clearing, heavy-footed, soft-footed, without a glance at me, and vanish into the forest. Gry would slip into the clearing presently, smiling shyly— “Did you like that?” In the case of the bear, I admitted that I thought one was enough. She said only, “He lives on the west spur of Mount Airn. He followed the Spate down here, fishing.”

She could call a hawk down off the wind, or bring the trout of the waterfall pool up to leap in air. She could guide a swarm of bees wherever the beekeeper wanted them. Once, in a mischievous mood, she kept a cloud of gnats pursuing a shepherd all across the bog-lands below Red Cairn. Hidden up in the cairn, watching the poor fellow’s swats and starts and windmilling arms and mad rushes to escape, we snorted and wept with heartless laughter.

But we had been children then.

Now, as we lay side by side gazing up at the bright sky and the sprays of restless leaves that nodded across it, the warm rock under us and the warm sun on us, through my peaceful happiness crept the thought that I had come with more than one thing to tell Gry. We had spoken of betrothals. But neither I nor she had said anything about my coming into my power.

That was more than half a month ago now. I had not seen Gry in all that time, first because I had been going out with my father and Alloc to mend the sheep fences, and then because we had had to wait at home for Ogge’s visit. If Ogge had heard about the adder, surely Gry had. Yet she had said nothing. And I had said nothing.

She was waiting for me to speak, I thought. And then I thought maybe she was waiting for me to show my power. To display it, as she had done so simply and easily, whistling to the bird. But I can’t, I thought, all the warmth draining out of me, my peacefulness lost. I can’t do it. At once I got angry, demanding, Why do I have to do it? Why do I have to kill something, ruin it, destroy it? Why is that my gift? I won’t, I won’t do it!— But all you have to do is untie a knot, a colder voice said in me. Have Gry tie a hard knot in a bit of ribbon, and then undo it with a glance. Anyone with the gift can do that. Alloc can do that— And the angry voice repeated, I won’t, I don’t want to, I won’t!

I sat up and put my head in my hands.

Gry sat up beside me. She scratched at a nearly healed scab on her thin brown leg, and spread out her thin brown toes fanwise for a minute. I was deep in my own sudden fear and anger, yet was aware that she wanted to say something, that she was bringing herself to speak.

“I went with Mother to Cordemant last time,” she said.

“You saw him then.”

“Who?”

“That Annren.”

“Oh, I’ve seen him before,” she said, utterly dismissing that subject. “It was for a big hunt. Elk. They wanted us to bring the herd that comes down the Renny from Airnside. They had six crossbowmen. Mother wanted me to come. She wanted me to call the elk. I didn’t want to. But she said I had to. She said people wouldn’t believe I had the gift if I didn’t use it. I said I’d rather train horses. She said anybody can train horses, but they need us to call the elk. She said, ‘You can’t withhold the gift from need.’ So I went with the hunt. And I called the elk.” She seemed to be watching the elk come pacing to her through the air, on our high perch. She gave a deep sigh. “They came…The bowmen shot five of them. Three young bulls and an old bull and a cow. Before we left they gave us a lot of meat, and presents—a cask of mead, and yarn, and woven goods. They gave me a beautiful shawl. I’ll show it to you. Mother was really happy about the hunt. They gave us a knife, too. It’s a beauty. It has an elkhorn handle mounted in silver. Father says it’s an old war dagger. They sent it for him, as a kind of joke. Hanno Corde said, ‘You give to our need, we give to your not-need!’ But Father likes it,” Hugging her knees, she sighed again, not unhappily, yet as if something oppressed her.

I didn’t know why she had told me the story. Not that she needed a particular reason; we told each other everything that happened to us, everything we thought. She was not boasting; she never boasted. I did not know what the elk hunt had meant to her, if she was happy about it or proud of it or not. Maybe she didn’t know herself, and told the story to find out. Maybe by telling it she was asking for my story, my triumph. But I could not tell it.

“When you call,” I said, and stopped.

She waited.

“What does it feel like?”

“I don’t know.” She didn’t understand my question; I hardly did myself.

“The first time your gift worked,” I said, trying another tack, “did you know it was working? Was it sort of different from, from the times it didn’t work?”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes.” But nothing more.

I waited.

“It just works,” she said. She frowned, and wriggled her toes, and thought, and finally said, “It’s different from your gift, Orrec. You have to use the eye, and…”

She hesitated and I filled in, “Eye, hand, word, will.”

“Yes. But with calling, you just have to find where the creature is, and think about it, and of course it’s different with each one, but it’s just sort of like reaching out, or like calling aloud, only you don’t use your hand, or your voice, mostly.”

“But you know when it’s working.”

“Yes. Because they’re there. You know where they are. You feel it. And they answer. Or they come… It’s like a line between you and them. A cord, a string, from here,” and she touched her breastbone, “between you and them. Stretched. Like a string on a fiddle—you know? If you just touch it, it calls out?” I must have looked blank. She shook her head. “It’s hard to talk about!”

“But you know you’re doing it, when you do it.”

“Oh yes. Even before I could call, sometimes I could feel the string.

Only it wasn’t stretched enough. It wasn’t tuned.”

I sat hunched up, despairing. I tried to say something about the adder. No words would come.

Gry said, “What was it like when you killed the adder?”

So simply, she gave me my release from silence.

I could not accept it. I started to speak, and broke into tears. Only for a moment. The tears made me angry, shamed me. “It wasn’t like anything,” I said. “It was just—just nothing. Easy. Everybody makes this fuss about it. It’s stupid!”

I stood up and walked right to the end of the ledge of rock, put my hands on my knees and stooped far over to look down to the pool below the falls. I wanted to do something daring, courageous, foolhardy. “Come on!” I said, turning. “Race you to the pool!” Gry was up and off the rock quick as a squirrel. I won the race, but skinned both knees doing it.

I RODE BRANTY HOME over the sunlit hills, and walked him to cool him down, toweled him and brushed him, watered him and fed him, left him whuffling at Roanie in his stall, and came in conscious of having fulfilled my responsibilities, as a man should do.

My father said nothing, and that too was as it should be: he took it for granted that I had done what should be done. After supper Mother told us a story from the Chamhan, the saga of the Bendraman people, which she knew pretty well from beginning to end. She told of the hero Hamneda’s raid on the demon city, his defeat by the demon king, his flight into the wasteland. My father listened as intently as I did. I remember that evening as the last—the last of the good days? the last of my childhood? I don’t know what came to an end there, but I woke next morning into a different world.

“Come out with me, Orrec,” my father said late in the morning, and I thought he meant we would ride together, but he only walked with me some way towards the ash grove, till we were out of sight of the house, in the lonely, grassy swale of the Ashbrook. He said nothing as we walked. He stopped on the hillside above the brook. “Show me your gift, Orrec,” he said.

I’ve said that obedience to my father had always been a pleasure to me, though often not an easy pleasure. And it was a very deep habit, a lifelong, unbroken custom. I had simply never thought of disobeying him, never wanted to. What he asked of me, even if difficult, was always possible, and even if incomprehensible, always turned out to be reasonable, to be right. I understood what he was asking of me now, and why he asked it. But I would not do it.

A flint stone and a steel blade may lie side by side for years, quiet as can be, but strike them together and the spark leaps. Rebellion is an instant thing, immediate, a spark, a fire.

I stood facing him, the way I always stood when he spoke my name that way, and said nothing.

He gestured to a ragged clump of grasses and bindweed near us. “Unmake that,” he said, his tone not commanding but encouraging.

I stood still. After one glance at the clump of weeds, I did not look back at it.

He waited some while. He drew breath, and there was some slight change in his stance, an increase of tension, though he still said nothing.

“Will you do it?” he said at last, very softly.

“No,” I said.

Silence between us again. I heard the faint music of the brook and a bird singing away over in the ash grove and a cow lowing down in the home pasture.

“Can you do it?”

“I won’t.”

Silence again, and then he said, “There’s nothing to fear, Orrec.” His voice was gentle. I bit my lip and clenched my hands.

“I’m not afraid,” I said.

“To control your gift you must use it,” Canoc said, still with that gentleness that weakened my resolve.

“I won’t use it.”

“Then it may use you.”

That was unexpected. What had Gry told me about using her gift and being used by it? I could not remember now. I was confused, but I would not admit it.

I shook my head.

Then at last he frowned. His head went back as if he faced an opponent. When he spoke, the tenderness had gone out of his voice.

“You must show your gift, Orrec,” he said. “If not to me, to others. It’s not your choice to make. To have the power is to serve the power. You’ll be Brantor of Caspromant. The people here will depend on you as they do on me now. You must show them they can rely on you. And learn how to use your gift by using it.”

I shook my head.

After another unbearable silence, he said, almost in a whisper, “Is it the killing?”

I didn’t know whether it was that, the idea that my gift was to kill, to destroy, that I rebelled against. I had thought that, but not very clearly, though I had often thought with sick horror of the rat, the adder…. All I knew by now was that I refused to be tested, refused to try out this terrible power, refused to let it be what I was. But Canoc had given me an out, and I took it. I nodded.

At that he gave a deep sigh, his only sign of disappointment or impatience, and turned away. Then he fished in his coat pocket and brought out a bit of lacing. He always carried ends of cord for all the thousand uses of a farmstead. He knotted it and tossed it onto the ground between us. He said nothing, but looked at it and at me.

“I’m not a dog, to do tricks for you!” I burst out in a shrill, loud voice. It left an awful, ringing silence between us.

“Listen, Orrec,” he said. “At Drummant, that’s what you’ll be, if you choose to see it that way. If you don’t show your gift there, what will Ogge think, and say? If you refuse to learn the use of your power, our people will have no one to turn to.” He took a deep breath, and for a moment his voice shook with anger. “Do you think I like killing rats? Am I a terrier?” He stopped, and looked aside, and finally said, “Think of your duty. Of our duty. Think of it, and when you’ve understood it, come to me.”

He stooped and picked up the length of cord, unknotted it with his fingers, put it back in his pocket, and strode away, uphill, towards the ash grove.

When I remember that now, I think of how he saved that bit of lacing, because cord was hard to come by and must not be wasted, and I could cry again; but not with the tears of shame and fury that I wept as I went down the stream valley from that place, that day.