Drowned Ammet (15 page)

“What does that mean?
Can't
you cancel it?” Hildy demanded.

“I doubt it,” said her father.

“Don't you
care
?” said Hildy.

“I fancy I do,” Navis admitted. “But with things in this state of upheaval—”

Hildy lost her grip on her temper. “Ye gods! Nobody cares in this place! You're the worst of the lot! You just sit there, after all that happens, and you don't even care that nobody even knows if there's going to be a feast or not!”

“Don't they?” Navis asked, rather surprised. “Really, Hildy, there
is
nothing to do at the moment but sit. I'm very sorry—”

“You're
not
sorry!” raved Hildy. “But I'll make you sorry! You just wait!” She turned to storm out of the rooms.

Navis called after her. “Hildy!” She turned round to find him looking oddly anxious. “Hildy, will you make sure you and Ynen stay where I can find you?”

“Why?” Hildy said haughtily.

“I may need you in a hurry.”

This was such an unlikely thing that Hildy simply made a scornful noise and crashed out of her father's rooms, slamming each door behind her as hard as she could. She was so angry, and so determined to make Navis sorry, that she reached the gallery outside her uncle Harl's rooms on a surge of blind fury and had almost no idea how she got there. She was fetched back to her senses by running into her cousins Harilla and Irana. They were hurrying the other way. Harilla's face was still streaked with red from her recent hysterics. Irana's was red all over.

“It's no good,” Irana said. “If you're going where I think you're going. They're both pigs.”

Harilla gasped, “I wish I was dead!” and burst into tears. Irana led her away.

Hildy wondered what was the matter with them this time. When she saw that there were guards outside her uncle's rooms, she supposed that meant Harl had refused to see them. She marched up to the guards, prepared for battle. But they stood aside, most respectfully, and one opened the door for her. Hildy marched on into the antechamber, rather puzzled. The servants there bowed. She heard her uncle Harl's voice from the room beyond.

“I tell you I owe the fellow a favor! He killed old Haddock, didn't he? Let him get away.”

“Don't be an ass, Harl!” snapped Uncle Harchad's voice.

“With my blessing,” added Harl.

“Look, Harl, if we don't catch him—” Harchad broke off irritably as Hildy came in.

Harl looked at her and let out a great guffaw. He was sitting in great comfort, with his shoes off and his feet on a chair. A table under his beefy elbow was crowded with wine bottles. He seemed very happy. He was grinning and sweating with happiness all over his big, bluff face. Harchad, on the other hand, was sitting tensely on the edge of his chair, nervily twiddling a full glass of wine. His face was paler than usual.

“Ha! Ha!” bellowed Harl. “Now it's Hildrida. That makes the full set of them. We haven't any more, have we, Harchad? Daughters and nieces and things?”

“No,” said Harchad. He did not seem to find it funny. “If you please, Hildrida. We are trying to talk business. Say what you have to say quickly, and then go.”

Hildy stared at them. She had never paid much attention to her uncle Harl before. He had always been a lazy, sober, silent man—and so ordinary. Nothing he said or did was ever remarkable. But now Uncle Harl was drunk, drunker even than the soldiers got on their nights off. And he was not drowning his sorrow either. He was celebrating. And Uncle Harchad was no more sorry about Grandfather than Harl was. But he was frightened: scared stiff in case he got shot next.

Harl pointed a drunken finger at Hildy. “Don't say it. We know. All the rest said it.” He put on a high, squeaky voice. “‘Please, Uncle, will you break off my betrothal, please?' Who's she betrothed to?” he asked Harchad.

“Lithar,” said Harchad. “Holy Islands. And the answer's no, Hildrida. We need all the allies we can get.”

“So it's no good asking,” said Harl. He wriggled his stockinged toes at Hildy and produced strange cracking sounds.

At this Hildy's anger blazed up again. “You're quite wrong,” she said haughtily. “I wasn't going to ask. I was going to tell you. I am
not
marrying Lithar or anyone else you try to choose for me. I'm quite determined about it, and you can't make me.”

Her two uncles looked at one another. “She's quite determined, and we can't make her,” said Harl. “This one had to be different. Her father's Navis.”

“I'm afraid you'll find you're mistaken, Hildrida,” said Harchad. “We
can
make you. And we will.”

“I shall refuse,” said Hildy. “Utterly. There's nothing you can do.”

“She'll refuse utterly,” said Harl.

“She will not,” said Harchad.

“She can if she wants,” said Harl. “She'll be married by proxy, anyway. Can't expect Lithar to come all this way. You refuse, my dear girl,” he said to Hildy. “Refuse all you want if it makes you happy. It won't bother us.” He wriggled his toes at Hildy again, and once more they cracked. Harl was impressed. “Hear that, Harchad? That noise was my toes. Wonder why they do that.”

Hildy clenched her teeth in order not to scream at him. “Lithar might bother if I refuse.”

Harl bawled with laughter. A small smile flitted on Harchad's face. “Well, it'll be you he takes it out on, won't it?” said Harl. “That doesn't worry me!” He lay back in his chair and grinned at the idea.

“All right,” said Hildy. “Don't say I didn't warn you.” She swung round and swept out, with her back very straight and her chin up, willing herself not to let the tears in her eyes fall until she was past the attendants, and then the soldiers. Then she ran. She ran to find Ynen. He was the only person in the Palace who was kind.

She could not find him. She dried her tears on her sleeve and searched grimly, high and low, right down to the kitchens. The cooks there were cursing. Hildy discovered that Navis had bestirred himself sufficiently to cancel the feast. She was angrier than ever. To think that out of what she had said to him, this was the one thing he had attended to! She wanted to bite something and tear things up. She stormed to her own room, wondering if a sheet or a curtain would be best to tear.

Ynen was there, still curled up on her window seat. By this time he was feeling very doleful. Hildy was a little ashamed to think she had clean forgotten telling him to wait.

“Hildy,” he said plaintively before he noticed her state of mind. “Why is it all so miserable?”

“Can't you
think
why?” Hildy snapped. She seized the coverlet on her bed, a good handful in each hand, and wrenched. It gave way with the most satisfactory ripping noise.

Ynen's eyes widened. He wished he had not spoken. Now he knew he would have to say something else, or Hildy would turn on him for sitting there like a dumb idiot. “Yes,” he said. “It's because nobody's even pretending to be sorry Grandfather's dead.”

“How right you are!” Hildy snarled. Carefully, almost with enjoyment, she tore a long strip off the coverlet.

Ynen watched her anxiously and kept talking. “People are more sorry about the Festival being messed up. They go on about bad luck. And the awful thing,” he said hurriedly as Hildy began on another strip, “is that I don't care about Grandfather either. I just feel sort of shocked. It makes me think I'm wicked.”

Hildy finished the second strip. Then, fists up and elbows out, she began on a third. “Wicked! What a stupid way to talk! Grandfather was a horrible old man, and you
know
he was! If people didn't do exactly what he wanted, he had them killed, or tried them for treason if they were lords.” She dragged the third strip down to the selvage and wrenched to tear that. She began on a fourth. “The only people who dared argue with him were other earls, and he quarreled with them all the time. Why should you be sorry? Even so,” she said, rending the fourth strip loose, “I felt sick when I heard Uncle Harl calling him old Haddock.”

Ynen judged that Hildy's temper was cooling. He risked laughing. “Everyone called him that!”

“I wish I'd known,” said Hildy. “I'd have said it, too.”

This encouraged Ynen to believe she was almost calm again. “Hildy,” he said, “that was rather a good coverlet.”

It had been a good one. It was blue and gold, and worked in a pattern of roses. The sewing women down in Holand had taken a good month to embroider it. Hildy's four furious strips had left it a square of ragged, puckered cloth about four feet long. “I don't care,” said Hildy. Her rage flared up again. She seized the puckered square and tore it and tore it. “I hate good things!” she raged. “They give us good coverlets, and golden clocks, and beautiful boats, and they don't do it because they like us or care about us. All they think of is whether we'll come in useful for their plans!”

“Nobody thinks I'm useful at all,” Ynen said. That was the reason for his misery, but he had been ashamed to say it before.

Hildy glared round at him, and he shrank. “I could murder them for thinking that!” she raved. “Why do you
have
to be useful? You're nice. You're the only nice person in this whole horrible Palace!” Ynen went pink. He was very flattered, but he would like to have been told he was useful, too. And he wished Hildy would realize that she was quite as alarming raging
for
him as she was raging
at
him. “I intend to teach them a lesson,” Hildy proclaimed.

“They probably won't notice,” Ynen said. “I wish we could go and live somewhere else. Somebody told me Father preferred living in the country. Do you think if I asked him—?”

Hildy interrupted him with a squawk of angry laughter. “Go and ask one of the statues in the throne room! They'll pay more attention.”

Ynen knew she was right. But now he had talked about going away from the Palace, he knew it was the one thing he really wanted to do. “Hildy, couldn't we go out for the rest of the day? I hate the Palace like this. Couldn't we go sailing—oh, I forgot. You're not allowed to anymore, are you?”

“Don't be a fool! The place is full of revolutionaries. They won't let us go out,” said Hildy. But she could see from the window behind Ynen that it was perfect weather for sailing. “Won't all the sailors have a holiday today?”

Ynen sighed. “Yes. I wouldn't have a crew.” Still, it had been a good idea. “Suppose we rode out to High Mill then?”

But Hildy stood looking from the window to the ruins of her coverlet. There was going to be trouble about that. It was a silly thing to get into trouble about on its own. She ought to do something worse. She was aching to do something really terrible and show everybody. She remembered Navis had asked them to stay where he could find them. That decided her. “Let's go sailing, Ynen,” she said. “And let's give them a fright. Let's knot the coverlet and hang it out of the window, and make them think we've run away.” Ynen looked at her dubiously. “I can crew,” said Hildy. “You can be captain because it's your boat.”

“You don't mind getting into awful trouble?” said Ynen.

“I do not,” said Hildy.

Ynen jumped up, so full of pleasure and mischief that he looked like a different boy. “Come on then! We'll need warm clothes, and we'd better pinch some food, too. We'll have to sneak out past the kitchens, anyway.”

Hildy laughed at the change in him as she snatched up two strips of coverlet and knotted them together. She pulled the knot tight. There was an ominous ripping noise. “It wouldn't bear a sparrow, this stuff,” she said.

“It's only got to look used,” Ynen pointed out. “Pull it as tight as you can without tearing it.” He helped her make the knots and then to tie the fraying strip to the window frame and let it down outside. It did not reach very far. “It'll do,” Ynen said hopefully. “We could have jumped down onto the library roof.”

Hildy leaned out beside him. Their rope dangled a pitiful sixteen feet. The library dome was twenty feet or more below that. “They'll wonder how we didn't break our necks,” she said. “Go and get warm clothes. I'll come to your room when I've changed.”

Ynen raced off, hardly the same boy who had sat miserably on Hildy's window seat half the afternoon. Hildy, as she changed into a short woolen dress, sea boots, socks, and a pea jacket, told herself she was doing right. Ynen was so happy. She still felt wonderfully rebellious, but she was also just a little scared. There were people in Holand with bombs and guns. She had seen them.

“They won't know who we are,” she told her reflection in the mirror. “And I'm sick of being important.” She took her hair down and did it in pigtails, to look as ordinary as possible, and collected dust from all the corners where she could find it and rubbed it on her face. Then she threw her good clothes to the back of a closet and set off for Ynen's room.

Her cousins Harilla and Irana were coming along the passage. Hildy dodged behind a grand china vase. She heard them go into her room. Harilla was saying: “Well, Hildy, did they let you break off your betrothal? You needn't think—Oh!”