Drowned Ammet (12 page)

Siriol passed Mitt a rattle and banged his other shoulder. “Off you go. Good luck.”

Mitt slipped in among the crowd, and they parted to let him through. He was on, after years of waiting, and he could hardly believe it. He came to the soldiers, who stood in a line in front of the crowd. They ought to stop him.

A soldier glanced down and saw the red and yellow suit. “Sorry, sonny,” he said, and moved to let Mitt by.

Mitt was in the roaring, skirling, streaming procession. For just one second, he was small and sort of blunt and did not believe he was really there. But he was. And there was Hadd. Mitt had not seen Hadd close to before, but he knew him by Old Ammet in his arms. The bad-tempered old face was exactly what he expected. That face, Mitt told himself, is asking to have a rattle under its nose before it gets blown up. And he was off to do it, whirling from one side of the procession to the other, rattle spinning, crested cap flopping, and keeping a wary eye on the puffing bundle under his arm as he went.

He caught up with Hadd just on the edge of the cleared space. Hildy saw him clearly, from where she sat at the window jammed in among her five cousins. They had soldiers in the room with them, soldiers downstairs, and soldiers lining the new open space by the harbor. They were safe. Nevertheless, the cousins were very nervous and disposed to scream at things. They screamed when the first musicians came between the soldiers and straggled across the open. They screamed at the bull's head.

“Oh, look!” screamed Irana, as Mitt ran in front of Hadd, whirling his rattle neatly under Hadd's irascible nose as he went.

Mitt checked after he had done that. Holand looked so strange with no waterfront buildings and all the shipping cleared to one side of the harbor, that he had another moment when he could hardly believe it was real. But the bundle under his arm fizzed. Sparks puffed out with the smoke. Mitt knew the time had come to get rid of it. He turned and plumped it down at Hadd's scarlet feet. Then he did not know quite what to do next.

Hadd's legs stopped walking. His bad-tempered look did not alter. He simply stopped and stood like a statue, with Old Ammet beneath his chin. Both of them stared at Mitt, and Mitt stared back. And the cousins round Hildy screamed in earnest at the sight of the smoking bundle on the ground. Behind Navis, everyone in the procession began to run into the backs of the people in front, and still Hadd stood, and so did Mitt. Hildy could not think what the boy thought he was doing. It seemed stupid behavior, even for a revolutionary. Old Ammet seemed to be staring at him, unblinking as a cow over a gate, from under raised wheat-ear eyebrows, as if he shared Hildy's wonder.

Sparks poured out of the bundle. Navis saw that nobody else was going to do anything. He hoisted Libby Beer to his shoulder and dashed forward. This was more what Mitt had expected. He got ready to pretend to run. But to his astonishment, Navis took no notice of Mitt. Instead he aimed a great kick at the fizzing bundle. Mitt saw the ribboned leg go out, the buckled boot connect, and the bundle, in an arch of smoke, sail away behind into the open space.

And the fellow hasn't a hair out of place! Mitt thought, rather astonished. He wanted to shout to Navis, “Hey! I dedicated a lifetime to this lot! And you just wasted it!”

By this time the merchant with ears on his hat had pulled himself together, too. He made a rather dubious grab for Mitt. Mitt dodged him easily.

This made Mitt think: Might as well give them a run for their money.

He turned to run. As he did so, the explosion came and sent him reeling. The force of it rattled all the windows and sent a gust into Hildy's face. The cousins screamed again. The rest of the procession came jostling out from behind Navis, some of them demanding to know what had happened, some of them after Mitt. Hadd turned and made a sign to one of the captains that Mitt should be taken alive. Since Hildy now knew that this was the worst way to be taken, she shivered a little as she watched the boy running. He ran like a deer, ribbons fluttering, dropping his rattle as he ran, straight toward the soldiers coming out from the edge of the crowd to meet him. Hildy thought that if it had been her, she would have run to the edge of the harbor and jumped in.

So would Mitt have done if he had meant to escape. But he was supposed to be caught. His ears hurt from the explosion. They seemed to be plugged with wool. He saw the soldiers mouthing as they came but could not hear a word. Mitt dodged and swerved as only someone brought up in the poorer parts of Holand could. Looks more natural, he thought. A huge hand snatched at his face. Mitt ducked under it and twisted sideways. A blurry face mouthed curses. A bevy of big boots clodhoppered at him from all directions. This way and that went Mitt, that way and this. He leaped a boot, dodged another, missed an enormous stretching arm, and tripped over another great boot. A jerk and a sudden coldness on his back told him—where his furred-up ears could not—that his jacket had been grabbed and torn. He was flat on his face and up again in one moment. But he was still not caught. He felt his jacket leave him, jerk, jerk, and he was still sprinting forward. Too good to last, Mitt thought, and he dived, pushing and shoving, among the big bodies of the ordinary people crowded behind the soldiers.

Come on, some of you! Stop me! he thought. But no one succeeded, though Mitt thought some of them tried. Just barely, he could hear their voices now: “Stop him! Don't let him get away!”

Ah. Ears come to their senses again, Mitt thought. Good. Couldn't see myself lip-reading all the questions I'm going to be asked.

He pushed on, very glad he was not deaf. And shortly, the voices round him were saying, quite loudly, “What's happened then?” and, “Who are you shoving?”

Mitt, to his extreme astonishment, plunged out from the back of the crowd into a narrow street. Hey! he thought. This won't do. He stopped. He turned round and saw the backs of the people filling the street heaving and bumping about as the soldiers tried to force their way through after him. He cast a longing look up the narrow street. He could really almost get away. They would not run fast in those boots.

Better make it easier for them, Mitt thought, sighing. And he went back into the crowd.

Out in the open space, the procession had re-formed and was straggling toward the water's edge. Hadd behaved as if nothing had happened at all. As soon as Mitt vanished among the soldiers, he went on walking as if the whole thing were not worth thinking about. Hildy could not help admiring him. That was how an earl should behave! Hadd's behavior was so dominating that Hildy and everybody else were soon watching the procession going up and down the quays, drumming and droning and skirling, as if Mitt had never existed.

Mitt was in the crowd just beneath Hildy's window. He found he was still wearing one red and one yellow sleeve. They were a nuisance, so he took them off and threw them on the ground. He seemed to have lost his cap. He stood there in his threadbare undershirt, hoping the soldiers would recognize him by his two-colored breeches. But he was surrounded by tall citizens and nobody saw him. Above the noise of the procession he could hear the boots of the soldiers hammering away up the narrow street.

Right fools, some people are! Mitt thought. Better make myself obvious.

He squirmed his way along the painted wall of the house until he came to its front door. It had six steps up to it, for fear of flooding, as did most houses in Holand. People were crowded on the steps, staring out toward the harbor. Mitt climbed up and squeezed in among them. He was easy enough to see, had anybody been looking his way. But everyone was watching the Festival.

The procession had formed into a line along the jetty, with Hadd and Navis in the center. The heads on poles were lowered. Garlands were taken off. Everyone waved these downward, pretending to beat the water. In fact, the water was too far below to reach, but the Festival went back to the days when Holand harbor was just a low ring of rocks and none of it had been altered since. The same old words were said:

This was repeated three times by everyone in the procession. It was a growling, ragged chorus. Yet, by the third repetition, Hildy's arms were up in goose pimples from sheer awe—she did not know why. Mitt's eyes pricked, as they always did, and he was annoyed at himself for being so impressed by a load of out-of-date nonsense. Then the musicians gave vent to a long groaning chord. Hadd raised Poor Old Ammet above his head, ready to throw him in the harbor.

A little star sparkle of flame blossomed for a second on one of the ships tied up at the side of the harbor. Hadd jerked, half turned, and slid quietly to the ground. It looked at first as if he had suddenly decided to lay Poor Old Ammet carefully at Navis's feet. Then came a tiny, distant
crack
.

Nobody understood for a moment. One of Hildy's cousins laughed.

After that there was a long, groaning uproar. Mitt's voice was in it. “Flaming Ammet! I been
diddled
!” The fat woman beside him was saying, over and over again, “Oh, what bad luck! What terrible bad luck!” Mitt had no idea whether she meant bad luck to Hadd or to Holand. The ladylike girls overhead somewhere were screaming. Mitt leaned his head against their painted front door and cursed. All he could think of was that the unknown marksman had cheated him. “Half my life, and now it's wasted!” he said. “Wasted. Gone!”

Overhead the cousins hung on to Hildy and to one another, whimpering and crying. Hildy found herself saying, “Ye gods, ye gods, ye gods!”

A soldier in the room behind shouted, “He's in that boat—
Proud Ammet!
Run, you, and we'll get him!”

“They mustn't leave! We're not safe!” screamed Harilla.

They had already left. The door behind Mitt burst open, and soldiers pelted out of it. Mitt leaped clear. But he had no chance to make himself obvious. Everyone on the steps was pushed off and toppled in all directions. The fat woman landed almost on top of Mitt and knocked him sprawling. By the time he had picked himself up, and then her, the soldiers had pelted off.

“Shut
up
!” Hildy snapped at Harilla. She was trying to see what was happening on the waterfront. Navis was bending over Hadd, and the rest of the procession was crowding round. Soldiers were running. People from the crowd were surging forward to see. Uncle Harchad, keeping prudently among a crowd, was running, too. Hildy saw her father stand up and point to the boat where the shot had been fired, wave to the soldiers, and wave the crowd back. Then he stooped again, and stood up holding Poor Old Ammet. He turned this way and that with him, showing people what he was doing, and then threw him into the harbor with the traditional shout. Then he picked up Libby Beer and slung her after.

Hildy felt a mixture of pride and horrible embarrassment. She could see her father was trying to assure the citizens of Holand that this did not mean unmitigated bad luck. But it was doubtful if anybody noticed. People were surging about. Numbers were leaving. Soldiers were running out to
Proud Ammet
along the curving harbor wall. There were screams and shouts which drowned Navis's voice. Nevertheless, the rest of the procession followed his lead. In a ragged, unconvinced way, garlands began to loop out from the quay and fall on the water. By this time Uncle Harchad had reached the waterfront. Hildy watched him and Navis kneel down beside her grandfather, with red and yellow garlands sailing around them, until the harbor seemed full of bobbing fruit and wet flowers, and wondered what they were feeling. She could see Hadd was dead, but she seemed to have no feelings about that at all.

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