he accepted the man’s story, that he had wandered up from Danner and was quite lost and was seeking nothing but a cottage where he might spend the night and some work if he could find it. The cold misty rain of December was coming over the hills, and the man had no proper coat, only a scanty jacket and a scarf that amounted to nothing.
Canoc led him to the farmhouse where the old woman and her son looked after the Silver Cow, and said if he liked he could come on up to the Stone House next day, where there might be a bit of work for him to do.
I have not told of the Silver Cow before. She was the single heifer who was left there when Drum’s thieves took the other two. She had grown into the most beautiful cow in the Uplands. Alloc and my father brought her up to Roddmant to be bred to Ternoc’s great white bull, and people all along the way admired her. In her first breeding, she dropped twin calves, a bull and a heifer, and in her second, twin heifers. The old woman and her son, mindful of their carelessness with her sisters, looked after her as if she were a princess, kept her close in, guarded her with their lives, curried her cream-white coat, fed her the best they had, and sang her praises to all who passed by. She had come to be called the Silver Cow, and the herd Canoc had dreamed of was well started, thanks to her and her sisters’ calves. She thrived there where she was, and he took her back there; but as soon as her calves were weaned, he took them up to the high pastures, keeping the herd far from his dangerous borders.
The next day but one, the wanderer from the Lowlands arrived at our Stone House. Hearing Canoc greet him civilly, the people of the house took him in without question, fed him, found him an old cloak to keep warm in, and listened to him talk. Everybody was glad to have somebody new to listen to in winter.
“He talks like our dear Melle,” Rab whispered, going teary. I didn’t go teary, but I did like to hear his voice.
There was really no work at that time of year that needed an extra hand to do, but it was the tradition of the Uplands to take in the needy stranger and save his pride with at least the semblance of work—so long as he hadn’t given any sign of belonging to a domain you were feuding with, in which case he’d probably be lying dead somewhere out on your borders. It was plain that Emmon knew absolutely nothing about horses, or sheep, or cattle, or farm work of any kind; but anybody can clean harness. He was set to cleaning harness, and he did so, now and then. Saving his pride was not a great problem.
Mostly he sat with me, or with me and Gry, in the corner of the great hearth, while the women spinning over on the other side droned their long, soft songs. I have told how we talked, and what pleasure he brought to us, merely by being from a world where what troubled us so made no sense at all, and none of our grim questions need even be asked.
When we came to the matter of my blindfold, and I told him that my father had sealed my eyes, he was too cautious to ask any further. He knew a bog when he felt it quake, as they say in the Uplands. But he talked to the people of the household, and they told him how Young Orrec’s eyes had been sealed because he had the wild gift that might destroy anything and anyone that came before him whether he willed it or not; and they went on and told him, I’m sure, about Blind Caddard, and how Canoc had raided Dunet, and maybe how my mother had died. All that must have tried his disbelief; and yet I can understand how it still could have seemed to him the superstition of ignorant country folk caught in their own fears, scaring themselves with talk of witchery.
Emmon was fond of Gry and me; he was sorry for us and knew how much we valued him for his company; I think he imagined that he could do us good— enlighten us. When he realised that although I’d said my father had sealed my eyes, it was I who kept them blindfolded, he was really shocked. “You do that to yourself?” he said. “But you’re mad, Orrec. There’s no harm in you. You wouldn’t hurt a fly if you stared at it all day!”
He was a man and I a boy, he was a thief and I was honest, he had seen the world and I had not, but I knew evil better than he did. “There’s harm in me,” I said.
“Well, there’s a little harm in the best of us, so best to let it out, admit it, not nurse it and keep it festering in the dark, eh?”
His advice was well meant, but it was both offensive and painful to me. Not wanting to give a harsh answer, I got up, spoke to Coaly, and went outdoors. As I left I heard Emmon say to Gry, “Ah, he could be his father just now!” What she said to him I don’t know, but he never tried to advise me about my blindfold again.
Our safest and most fruitful subjects were horse-breaking and storytelling. Emmon didn’t know much about horses, but had seen fine ones in the cities of the Lowlands, and he said he’d never seen any trained as ours were, even old Roanie and Greylag, let alone Star. When the weather wasn’t too bad we went out, and Gry could show off all the tricks and paces she and Star had worked out together, which I knew only from her descriptions. I heard Emmons shouts of praise and admiration, and tried to imagine Gry and the filly—but I had never seen the filly. I had never seen Gry as she was now.
Sometimes there was a tone in Emmon’s voice as he spoke to Gry that caught my ear; a little added softness, propitiating, almost wheedling. Mostly he spoke to her as a man does to a girl, but sometimes he sounded like a man speaking to a woman.
It didn’t get him far. She answered him as a girl, gruff and plain. She liked Emmon but she didn’t think much of him.
When it rained and blew or the snow flurries swept over our hills, we stayed in the chimney corner. Running short of other matters to talk about, since Emmon was such a poor hand at telling us about life in the Lowlands, one day Gry asked me for a story. She liked the hero tales of the
The language lifted up my heart whenever I read it, and as I spoke it, it possessed me, it sang through me. When I ended, I heard for the first time in my life that silence which is the performer’s sweetest reward.
“By all the names,” Emmon said in an awed voice.
There was a nice little murmur of admiration from the spinning women.
“How do you know that tale, that song?— Ah, of course, through your mother— But she told you all that? And you remember it?”
“She wrote it down for me,” I said, without thinking.
“Wrote it? You can read?— But not with a blindfold on!”
“I can read, but not with a blindfold on.”
“What a memory you must have!”
“Memory is a blind man’s eyes,” I said, with a certain malice, feeling that I was fencing and had best be on the offensive, having nearly dropped my guard.
“And she taught you to read?”
“Gry and me.”
“But what have you got to read, up here? I’ve never seen a book about.”
“She wrote out some for us.”
“By all the names. Listen, I have a book. It was… given me, down in the city. I hauled it about in my pack all this way, thinking there might be some value to it. Not up here, eh? But to you, maybe. Here, let me get the thing.” He soon returned, and put into my hands a small box, no deeper than a finger joint is long. The lid lifted easily. Under it, instead of a hollow space, I felt a surface like silk cloth. Under it were many more cloths, leaves, held at one edge, as in the book my mother had made, fine and thin yet delicately stiff, so that they turned easily My fingers marveled to touch them. And my eyes yearned to see them, but I handed the book back to Emmon. “Read a little,” I said.
“Here, Gry, you read,” Emmon said promptly.
I heard Gry turning the leaves. She spelled out a few words, and gave up. “It looks so different from what Melle wrote,” she said. “It’s small, and black, and more straight up and down, and all the letters look alike.”
“It’s printed,” Emmon said knowledgeably, but when I wanted to know what that meant, he couldn’t tell me much. “The priests do it,” he said vaguely. “They have these wheels, like a wine press, you know…”
Gry described the book for me: the outside of it was leather, she said, probably calfskin, with a hard shiny finish, stamped round the edges with a scroll design in gold leaf, and on the back, where the leaves joined, was more gold leaf and a word stamped in red, and the edges of the leaves were gilt. “It’s very, very beautiful,” she said. “It must be a precious thing.”
