lay before my face or feet. Never was the temptation stronger to lift my blindfold, and yet never had I feared so much to do so, for I was in a continuous, terrified rage—helpless, resentful, humiliated. I dreaded and could not escape Brantor Ogge’s shouting, harrying voice. Sometimes he pretended to believe I was truly blind and pitied me loudly, but mostly he teased and dared me, never quite openly, to lift my blindfold and display my destroying power. He feared me, and resented his fear, and wanted to make me suffer for it; and he was curious, because my power was unknown. He never overstepped certain lines with Canoc, for he understood clearly what Canoc could do. But what could I do? Might my blindfold be a trick, a bluff? Ogge was like a child teasing a chained dog to see if it really would bite. I was in his chains and at his mercy. I hated him so much that I felt that if I saw him, nothing could stop me, I would, I must destroy him, like the rat, like the adder, like the hound….
Parn Barre called a herd of wild swine down out of the foothills of Mount Airn, and called the boar away from the sows. When the dogs and hunters had the beast encircled, she left the hunt and came back to the camp, where I had been left along with the packhorses and the servants.
It had been a shameful moment for me when they all set off. “You’re bringing the boy along, aren’t you, Caspro?” Brantor Ogge said, and my father replied as pleasantly as ever that neither I nor old Roanie were coming, for fear of holding others back. “So then you’ll be staying safe with him too?” came the big braying voice, and Canoc’s soft one: “No, I thought I’d come to the kill.”
He touched my shoulder before he mounted—he had brought Greylag, not the colt—and whispered, “Hold fast, my son.” So I held fast, sitting alone among Drum’s serfs and servants, who kept clear of me and soon forgot I was there, talking and joking loudly with one another. I had no idea of what was around me except the roll of bedding I had slept in the night before, which lay near my left hand. The rest of the universe was unknown, a blank gulf in which I would be lost the instant I stood up and took a step or two. I found some little stones in the dirt under my hand and played with them, handling them, counting them, trying to pile them or put them in lines, to pass the dreary time. We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can’t choose where to listen. I wanted to hear the birds singing, for the forest was full of their spring music, but mostly I heard only the men yelling and guffawing, and could only think what a noisy race we humans are.
I heard a single horse coming into camp, and the men’s voices became less boisterous. Presently someone spoke near me: “Orrec, I’m Parn,” she said. I felt her kindness in saying who she was, though I knew her voice, which was much like Gry’s. “I’ve got a bit of fruit here. Open your hand.” And she put two or three dried plums in my hand. I thanked her and chewed away on them. She had sat down near me and I could hear her chewing too.
“Well,” she said, “by now the boar’s killed a dog or two, and one or two men, maybe, but probably not, and they’ve killed him. And they’re gutting him and cutting poles to carry him, and the dogs are after the guts, and the horses want to get away from it all but they can’t.” She spat. Maybe a plum pit.
“Do you never stay for the kill?” I asked timidly. Though I had known her all my life, Parn always daunted me.
“Not with boar and bear. They’d want me to interfere, hold the beast so they could kill it. Give them an unfair advantage.”
“But with deer, or hares—?”
“They’re prey. A quick kill’s best. Boar and bear aren’t prey. They deserve their fair fight.”
It was a clear position, with its own justice; I accepted it.
“Gry’s got a dog for you,” Parn said.
“I was going to ask her…”
“As soon as she heard about your eyes being sealed, she said you’d want a guide dog. She’s been working with one of our shepherd Kinny’s pups. They’re good dogs. Come by Roddmant on your way home. Gry might have her ready for you.”
That was a good moment, the only good moment of those endless, wretched days.
The hunters came back late to camp, straggling in. I was anxious about my father, of course, but dared not ask and only listened for what other men said, and for his voice. He came at last, leading Greylag, who had hurt his leg a little in some kind of collision or melee. He greeted me gently, but I could tell he was exasperated almost beyond endurance. The hunt had been mismanaged, Ogge and his elder son quarreling about tactics and confusing everyone, so that the boar, though brought to bay, had killed two dogs and escaped, a horse had broken its leg in the chase, then as the boar had got into thickets, the hunt had to dismount and go in afoot, and another dog had been disemboweled, and finally, as Canoc put it, very low-voiced, to me and Parn, “they all stuck and stabbed at the poor brute but none of them dared get close to it. It took half an hour to kill it.”
We sat in silence, hearing Ogge and his son shouting at each other. The hunt servants finally brought the boar into camp; I smelled the rank wild stench of it and the metallic smell of blood. The liver was ceremonially divided up to be toasted over the fire by those who had been in at the kill. Canoc did not go to get his share. He went to look after our horses. I heard Ogge’s son Harba shouting at him to come get his killfeast, but I did not hear Ogge call to him, nor did Ogge come to harass me as his custom was. That night, and all the time it took us to return to the Stone House of Drummant, Ogge did not say a word to Canoc or to me. It was a relief to be spared his jovial bullying, but it worried me too. I asked my father, when we camped the last night, if the brantor was angry with him.
“He says I refused to save his dogs,” Canoc said. We lay by the warm ashes of a fire, head to head, whispering. I knew it was dark, and could pretend that it was because it was dark that I couldn’t see.
“What happened?”
“The boar was slashing the dogs open. He yelled to me, ‘Use your eye, Caspro!’ As if I’d use my gift on a hunt! I went at the boar with my spear, along with Harba and a couple of others. Ogge didn’t come in with us. The boar broke then, and ran right past Ogge, and got away. Ach, it was a botch, a butchery. And he lays it on me.”
“Do we have to stay, when we get back there?”
“A night or so, yes.”
“He hates us,” I said.
“Not your mother.”
“Her most,” I said.
Canoc did not understand me, or did not believe me. But I knew it was true. Ogge could bully me all he liked, he could prove his superiority to Canoc in wealth and strength and so on, but Melle Aulitta was out of his reach. I had seen how he looked at her when he came to our house. I knew he looked at her here with that same amazement and hate and greed. I knew how he pressed close to her; I had heard his impotent attempts to impress her, boasting and patronising, and her mild, smiling replies, to which he had no reply. Nothing he had, or did, or was, could touch her. She did not even really fear him.
¦ 11 ¦
When we got back from the days and nights in the wilderness, and I could rejoin my mother, and bathe, and put on a clean shirt, even the unfriendly rooms of Drummant, which I had never seen, seemed familiar.
We went down to dinner in the great hall, and there I heard Brantor Ogge speak to my father for the first time in two days. “Where’s your wife, Caspro?” he was saying. “Where’s the pretty calluc? And your blind boy? Here’s my granddaughter come to meet him, come across the whole domain, clear from Rimmant. Here, boy, come meet Vardan, let’s see what you make of each other!” There was a brassy, crowing laughter in his voice.
I heard Daredan Caspro, the girl’s mother, murmur to her to come forward. My mother, her hand on my arm, said, “We’re happy to meet you, Vardan. This is my son Orrec.”
I did not hear the girl say anything, but I heard a kind of sniggering or whimpering noise, so that I wondered if she was carrying a puppy that was making that sound.
“How do you do,” I said, with a bob of the head.
“Do you do you do you,” someone said in front of me, a thick, weak voice, where the girl must be.
“Say how do you do, Vardan.” That was Daredan’s tremulous whisper.
