“They gave the old name to our gift,” he said now. “’The adder,’ people used to call it.” He glanced at me, just the flick of an eye, grave and hard as he had been ever since the instant on the hillside. “Their venom and our stroke act much the same way.”
She winced. After a while she said to him, “I know you’re glad the gift has run true.” It took courage for her to say it.
“I never doubted that it did,” he replied. That was said as reassurance to her and to me also, but I am not sure either of us was able to accept it.
I lay awake that night as long as a boy that age can lie awake, going over and over what had happened when I saw the adder, becoming more and more confused and troubled. I slept at last, to dream confused and troubled dreams, and woke very early. I got up and went down to the stables. For once I was there before my father; but he soon came, yawning, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “Hello, Orrec,” he said.
“Father,” I said, “I want to— About the snake.”
He cocked his head a bit.
“I know I used my hand and eye. But I don’t think I killed it. My will— It wasn’t any different. It was just like all the other times.” I began to feel an aching pressure in my throat and behind my eyes.
“You don’t think Alloc did it?” he said. “It’s not in him.”
“But you— You struck it—”
“It was unmade when I saw it,” he said as he had said the day before, but some flicker of consciousness or question or doubt passed through his voice and eyes as he spoke. He considered. The hardness had come back into his face, which had been soft with sleep when I first saw him at the stable doors.
“I struck the snake, yes,” he said. “But after you did. I am sure you struck first. And with a quick, strong hand and eye.”
“But how will I know when I use my power, if it— if it seems just the same as all the times I tried to and didn’t?”
That brought him up short. He stood there, frowning, pondering. Finally he said, almost hesitantly, “Would you try it out, the gift, Orrec, now—on a small thing— on that bit of a weed there?” He pointed to a little clump of dandelions between the stones of the courtyard near the stable door.
I stared at the dandelions. The tears swelled up in me and I could not hold them back. I put my hands over my face and wept. “I don’t want to, I don’t want to!” I cried. “I can’t, I can’t, I don’t want to!”
He came and knelt and put an arm round me. He let me cry.
“It’s all right, my dear,” he said when I grew quieter. “It’s all right. It is a heavy thing.” And he sent me in to wash my face.
We spoke no more about the gift then, or for some while.
¦ 6 ¦
We went back with Alloc for several days after that to mend and build up the fence along our southwest sheep pastures, making it clear to the shepherds on the other side that we knew every stone of those walls and would be aware if one were moved. Along on the third or fourth day of the work, a group of horsemen came towards us up the long falling pastures below the Little Sheer, land that had been the Corde domain and now was Drummant. Sheep trotted away from the riders, blatting hoarsely. The men rode straight at us, their pace increasing as the hilltop leveled. It was a low, misty day. We were sodden with the fine rain that drifted over the hills, and dirty from handling the wet and muddy stones.
“Oh, by the Stone, that’s the old adder himself,” Alloc muttered. My father shot him a glance that silenced him, and spoke out in a quiet, clear voice as the horsemen cantered right up to the wall—“A good day to you, Brantor Ogge.”
All three of us eyed their horses with admiration, for they were fine creatures. The brantor rode a beautiful honey-colored mare who looked too delicate for his bulk. Ogge Drum was a man of about sixty, barrel-girthed and bull-necked. He wore the black kilt and coat, but of fine woven wool, not felt, and his horse’s bridle was silver- mounted.
His bare calves bulged with muscle. I saw them, mostly, and little of his face, because I did not want to look up into his eyes. All my life I had heard ill of Brantor Ogge; and the way he had ridden straight at us as if in assault, reining in hard just short of the wall, was not reassuring.
“Mending your sheep fence, Caspro?” he said in a big, unexpectedly warm and jovial voice. “A good job too. I have some men good at laying drystone. I’ll send them up to help you.”
“We’re just finishing up today, but I thank you,” Canoc said.
“I’ll send them up anyhow. Fences have two sides, eh?”
“That they do,” my father said. He spoke pleasantly, though his face was as hard as the stone in his hand.
“One of these lads is yours, eh?” Ogge said, surveying Alloc and me. The insult was subtle. He certainly knew that Canoc’s son was a boy, not a man of twenty. The implication was that there was no way to tell a Caspro son from a Caspro serf, or so we three took it.
“He is,” my father said, and did not name or introduce or even look at me.
“Now that our lands border,” said Ogge, “I’ve had it in mind to come invite you and your lady to visit us at Drummant. If I rode by your house in a day or two, you’d be there?”
“I will,” Canoc said. “You are welcome to come.”
“Good, good. I’ll be by.” Ogge raised his hand in a careless, genial salute, wheeled his mare standing, and led his little troop off at a canter along the wall.
“Ah,” said Alloc with a sigh, “that’s a sweet little yellow mare.” He was as thorough a horseman as my father; the two of them longed and schemed to improve our stable. “If we could put Branty to her in a year or two, what a colt that might be!”
“And what a price it would carry,” Canoc said harshly.
He was tense and often sullen from that day on. He told my mother to make ready for Ogge’s visit, and of course she did so. Then they waited. Canoc did not go far from the Stone House, not wanting her to have to receive Ogge alone. It was half a month before he came.
He brought the same retinue with him, men of his and other lineages of his domain; no women. My father in his stiff pride took that, too, as an insult. He did not let it pass. “I am sorry your wife did not ride with you,” he said. Ogge then made apologies and excuses, saying his wife was much burdened with household cares and had been in ill health.
“But she looks forward to welcoming you to Drummant,” he said, turning to Melle. “In the old days there was far more riding about and visiting from domain to domain. We’ve let our old Upland customs of cordiality lapse. It’s a different matter down in the cities, no doubt, where you have neighbors all about you thick as crows on carrion, as they say.”
“Very different,” my mother said meekly, eclipsed by his loud voice and big looming body, which seemed always to contain a repressed threat.
“And this would be your lad I saw the other day,” he said, suddenly turning on me. “Caddard, is it?”
“Orrec,” my mother said, since I was voiceless, though I managed a duck of the head.
“Well, look up, Orrec, let me see your face,” the big voice said. “Afraid of the Drum eye, are you?” He laughed again.
My heart was beating at the top of my chest hard enough to choke me, but I made myself hold my head up and look into the big face that hung over me. Ogge’s eyes were barely visible under heavy, drooping lids. From those creases and pouches they stared out steady and empty as a snakes eyes.
“And you’ve shown your gift, I hear.” He glanced at my father.
Alloc of course had told everybody on our domain about the adder, and it is amazing how fast word travels from place to place in the Uplands, where it seems that nobody speaks to anybody but their closest kin and not often to them.
“He has,” Canoc said, looking at me not at Ogge.
