Drowned Ammet

MITT ALWAYS HATED to remember that first winter in Holand. His father was living in one room in a big tenement block down by the harbour. Mitt and Milda joined him there. The tenement had perhaps once been the house of a wealthy man. Outside, on its greenish, peeling walls, there were the remains of pictures – once fine paintings of garlands of flowers and people out of stories, sheaves of wheat and bunches of fruit. But they were so old that Mitt could not quite tell what they were, and anyway, the inside of the building was what he saw most. The large rooms had been chopped into as many small ones as possible, so the house was crowded as full as it would hold of people. It was filthy. The buckets on the dark stairs stank. Bedbugs lived in all the walls. They came out at night and bit, viciously. What with that, and the strangeness, and the noise of all the people, Mitt could not sleep very well. He lay awake and listened to his parents quarrelling as they had never quarrelled before.

Mitt could not understand what the quarrels were about. It seemed as if his father was not pleased to have them with him in Holand. “Hanging round my neck!” he put it. He wanted them to go back to Dyke End. When Milda shrieked at him that there was no rent, he cursed her for laziness.

“Why should I work my fingers to the bone to keep you in idleness?” Milda screamed at him. But after a week of quarrelling, she found a job in a workroom which made fine embroidered hangings, and she was there, sewing, from early morning until light failed in the evening.

After this the quarrels Mitt’s parents had became even harder for Mitt to understand. His mother kept saying to his father, “You and your Free Holanders! Free Holanders! There’s no such thing as freedom in this place!” Mitt had no idea what that meant.

Mitt was shocked and shattered by the town of Holand itself. He hated the dirt and the noise and all the people. His job for the day was to carry their bucket to the waterfront and tip it in the harbour. As Milda said, the one advantage of living in that tenement was that you did not have to go far to get rid of your rubbish. Mitt hated the smell on the greasy waterfront, where fish scales glimmered on the flagstones like sequins on a dirty dress. The crowded harbour appalled him. There were tall ships with many masts and pennants flying, merchant ships, ships of the Earl’s fleet, loading and unloading going on most of the time. In between were small boats, packed and bustling, rowing boats, cutters, jollyboats and a good hundred fishing boats. Mitt was always glad when the fishing fleet sailed out, because the crowded water seemed a little emptier then.

After Mitt had brought the bucket back to the door of their room, he was all on his own once Milda had found work. He had nothing to do but keep out of the way of the other children. He hated them most of all. They were town children, shrewd, nimble and knowing. They made rings round Mitt. They jeered at him for not understanding town ways. They made him look a fool, then ran away laughing.

Mitt hid from them, usually, in the dark holes and corners of the house or the waterfront. But one day he felt he had had enough of that and ran away instead, up the hill from the harbour, into the better part of the town. Here, to his surprise, the streets were cleaner, and became wider and cleaner still as he went upwards. The air smelt almost fresh. There was a tang in it of the sea, and an autumn smell from the Flate. Better still, most of the houses were painted, and unlike the tenement, the paint was fresh and bright, and Mitt could see what the pictures were about. He walked slowly, looking at trees and fruit, red swirls and blue flowers, until he came to a particularly fine tall house, where the painting was in gold as well as other colours. On one gable, a stiff sort of lady in a green dress held out a very purple bunch of grapes to a stiff man on the other gable, whose hair seemed to be solid gold. Mitt much admired them. They reminded him a little of the figureheads on the fronts of the big ships. And perhaps because of the fresh air smell, they made him think of his perfect land.

He was standing lost in admiration and daydream when a servant of the merchant who owned the house came out with a stick and told him to be off. He called Mitt a guttersnipe and said he had no business to be there. Mitt ran away, terrified. As he went, he looked back and upwards. And there, on the very top of the hill, was the Earl’s palace, larger, whiter, brighter, and with more gold paint than any other house in Holand. Mitt felt it was squashing him. He felt like a pip in a cider press.

That was the last time for many years that Mitt remembered his perfect land. Holand quashed it out of his mind entirely and left him simply bewildered.

When Mitt’s birthday came, a few days later, and with it the Sea Festival, that was bewildering too. Everyone had a holiday, so there were more people about than ever. Mitt watched the Festival procession, hoisted on to the shoulders of a kindly man called Canden, who seemed to be a friend of his father’s. Down the street came a boiling and a bubbling of brightly clothed people. There was terrific shouting and yelling, and ribbons, fruit and flowers on everyone. Some had silly hats. Images went by on sticks – heads of cows and horses, with hats and ribbons on too. Big boys went tearing in and out of the procession, shouting and swirling wooden rattles. It was noise, noise, noise. Every so often came a group of people playing the traditional tune on traditional instruments. There were pipes called scarnels, which sounded just like their name, and triangular stringed things you played with a horsehair bow. They were cruddles, and they sounded just like their name too. And the groups of musicians were so far apart from one another that it was only by accident that they played the same part of the tune as the rest. Then, drub, drub, drub, came people banging at horsehair drums and drowning out even the scarnels. In the midst of it, Mitt glimpsed a straw dummy, fantastically looped with cherry-coloured ribbons, riding along in somebody’s arms.

“Look,” said the kindly Canden. “There’s Poor Old Ammet. That’s Earl Hadd carrying him.”

“What’s he going to do with him?” Mitt asked anxiously. He had never heard of Earl Hadd doing anything good with anything.

“Throw him in the harbour, of course. For luck,” explained Canden.

Mitt was horrified. Earl Hadd must be quite heartless. He thought of Poor Old Ammet being tipped into the harbour just like the bucket of muck Mitt tipped in daily, and Poor Old Ammet sinking, soaking, drowning, his ribbons getting spoilt. “Doesn’t he float?” he asked tensely.

“Not too often,” Canden said, quite unaware of Mitt’s state of mind. “Mostly he falls to pieces and sinks in the harbour or just outside it.”

“He doesn’t!” Mitt said frantically.

There was another friend of Mitt’s father’s standing beside Canden. He was called Dideo, and his face was a mass of tiny lines. Mitt thought Dideo’s eyes looked like two shiny fish caught in the net of his skin. Dideo said, “He doesn’t always fall to bits – Old Ammet. If the tide’s right, he goes out on the tide in one piece. Or they say he does. Floats for miles. And those in a boat that can find him and pick him out have a lucky boat ever after, they say.”

If anything, Mitt found it even more distressing to think of Poor Old Ammet floating, floating, all on his own out to sea. He tried to change the subject. “Who are those boys with rattles?”

Canden glanced at the procession, where boys in red and yellow trousers were having great fun whirling their rattles under the noses of cruddle players. “Boys from the Palace. All them in the procession come from the Palace,” he told Mitt, and turned to Dideo again. “I’ve never seen Old Ammet float. He goes down almost as quick as Libby Beer.”

“Would they let me run about with a rattle?” Mitt interrupted desperately.

“No. You’re born a nobody,” said Dideo. “He does float,” he said to Canden. “You’ve not been in Holand long enough to know, but he was picked up once, a good ten miles out, by the old Sevenfold, and I heard every man on that ship made a fortune afterwards. That was the only time I ever knew it happen, though,” he added regretfully. “I was about Mitt’s age at the time.” Here he looked up at Mitt and, finding him inexplicably white and tearful, nudged Canden.

Canden took Mitt down and peered at his face. “What’s the matter? Would you like an Ammet of your own?”

“No!” said Mitt.

Nevertheless, he arrived in front of a stall where dozens of tiny straw Ammets were for sale. With them came another friend of Mitt’s father’s, a man with a dour, blank face, called Siriol, who stood by without saying anything while Canden and Dideo bent over Mitt, doing their best to please him. Would Mitt have this Ammet here? Or how about this one with blue ribbons? And when Mitt firmly refused to have anything to do with Poor Old Ammet in any colour ribbons, Canden and Dideo tried to buy him a wax model of Libby Beer instead. But real and enticing though the wax fruit looked, Mitt did not want Libby either. She was thrown into the sea just like Poor Old Ammet. He burst into tears and pushed her away.

“But they’re lucky!” Canden said, quite mystified.

Dour-faced Siriol picked up one of the toffee apples from the other end of the stall and stuffed it into Mitt’s damp fist. “There,” he said. “That’ll please you best, you see.” He was quite right. Mitt forgot his distress, somewhat, in the difficulty of getting his teeth through the toffee into the apple underneath.

There was some mystery about these friends of Mitt’s father’s. Mitt knew his mother did not care for them. He heard her objecting to them every night when his parents quarrelled. Her objections seemed to mount steadily through that winter, until around the new year, when Mitt heard her say, “Oh, I give in! Only don’t blame me when the soldiers come for you!”

It must have been about a week after Milda said this, in the very heart of winter, when Mitt woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. A red light was flickering on the ceiling. He could hear crackling and distant shouting, and smell smoke. One of the big warehouses on the waterfront was clearly on fire. Mitt could see it, when he raised himself on one elbow, blazing into the sky and down into the dark water of the harbour. But what had woken Mitt was not that. It was the slow shuffling outside the door of the room. The sound made Mitt’s back prickle. He could hear Milda trying to light the lamp, whimpering with haste and annoyance because she could not get the wick to burn. Then the light came at last, and Mitt saw his father was not in the room. Milda ran through the room with the lamp, making lurching shadows as she ran, and tore open the door.

Canden was on the other side of it. He was clinging to the doorframe to hold himself up. Mitt could not see him well because Milda was holding the lamp all wrong, but he knew that Canden was either hurt or very ill, or both. He could see it in Canden’s face. He had a feeling that the part of Canden which was behind Milda and the doorpost was the wrong shape. It did not surprise him that Milda gave a dreadful strangled scream.

“Eeech! What—? I knew it would go wrong!”

“Harchad’s men,” said Canden. He sounded disgusted. “They were there waiting for us. Informers – that’s what they were. Dideo, Siriol and Ham. They informed on us.”

After that Canden gave a quiver of indignation and slid down the doorpost to the floor. Milda knelt down to him, hugging the lamp and whimpering. “O ye gods! What do I do? What can I do? Why doesn’t somebody help?”

After that doors began cautiously opening and shutting up and down the stairway. Ladies came in nightgowns and old coats, with more lamps or candles. There were troubled whispers and soothing words, while Milda rocked about on her knees, moaning. Mitt was too appalled to move. He did not want to look at Canden or his mother, so he lay and looked at the ceiling instead. The bustling ladies thought he was asleep, and after a while he must really have gone to sleep. Canden was not there in the morning. But he had been there. He had left a stain on the floor. And Mitt’s father was still not there either.

Mitt knew both of them were dead. Nobody told him, but he knew. What he did not know and wanted to be told was what had happened. He wanted to know why ladies in the tenement came and told Milda, “I should lie low, if I was you. You don’t want to get yourself arrested too.” Milda stayed away from work for a while, sitting very still by the window. Her face was so drawn in by worry that the seam where her dimple used to be looked more like a puckered scar than a line. Mitt hated her face like that. He crouched beside her feet and asked to be told what had caused it.

“You’re too young to understand,” said Milda.

“But I want to know,” said Mitt. “What’s happened to Dad?” He asked at least forty times before he got an answer.

“Dead,” said Milda. “At least, I hope that’s what he is, because they all say it’s better to be dead than have Harchad after you. And I shall never forgive them that did it to him – never, never, never!”

“What did Siriol and Dideo and Ham do?” Mitt prompted her.

“Leave me be, if you know so much!” Milda said irritably. But Mitt went on asking, and in the end Milda told him as much as she knew.

It seemed that when Mitt’s father had found it so hard to get work in Holand, he had felt so bitter against the Earl that he had joined a secret revolutionary society. There were a lot of them in Holand. The Earl’s son Harchad had spies and soldiers hunting out these societies night and day, at all times. But when he found one and marched the members off to be hanged, there was always another to take its place.

The one Mitt’s father joined was called the Free Holanders. It was composed mostly of fishermen who felt there should be more justice and better living for the ordinary people of Holand. Their ambition was to have the whole city rise against the Earl, and, as far as Milda knew, they had never done much except talk about it. But when Milda and Mitt had been turned out of Dyke End, Mitt’s father was so angry that he had tried to stir the Free Holanders to action of some kind. Why not set fire to one of the Earl’s warehouses, he said, to show the Earl they meant business?

Canden and the other younger Free Holanders were delighted by the idea. It would hit Hadd where it hurt, they said – right in the moneybags. But the older members, particularly Siriol, Dideo and Ham, were clean against it. If they fired a warehouse, they said, the Free Holanders would be hunted down by Harchad’s men, and how would that help the city to rise and overthrow the Earl? The society split in half over it. The younger members went with Mitt’s father to fire the warehouse. The older members stayed at home. And when the younger ones reached the warehouse, Harchad’s men were waiting for them. All that Milda knew beyond that was that someone had managed to start a fire even so and that no one had come back from it except Canden to say that Siriol, Dideo and Ham had informed on them. And Canden was dead too.

Mitt considered all this. “Why did Siriol and them inform, though?”

The crease of worry down Milda’s face drew into a tighter seam. “Because they were frightened, Mitt, like I am now.”

“Frightened what of?” Mitt asked.

“Harchad’s soldiers,” Milda said, shivering. “They might come banging at this door any moment now.”

Mitt considered what he knew of soldiers. They were not so frightening. They brought you home when you were found wandering in the Flate. “How many soldiers are there? More than everyone else in Holand?”

In spite of her misery, Milda smiled. To Mitt’s relief, the crease on her face turned into a dimple again for a moment. “Oh no. The Earl couldn’t afford that number. And I don’t suppose he’d bother to send more than six or so to come and take us away.”

“Then,” said Mitt, “if all the people in this house, or all the people in Holand, all got together, they ought to be able to stop the soldiers, oughtn’t they?”

Milda was forced to laugh. It was quite beyond her to explain why everyone in Holand lived in dread of soldiers, and even greater dread of Harchad’s spies, so she said, “Oh, Mitt, you’re a real free soul, you are! You don’t know what fear means. It seems such a waste when Hadd and the Free Holanders have done for us between them, it does really!”

Mitt realised that by talking in this sturdy way, he had managed to comfort his mother. He had sent the hateful crease of worry out of her face twice. Better still, he had made Milda comfort him by calling him a free soul. Mitt was not sure he knew what a free soul was – it never occurred to him that his mother had no idea either – but he thought it was a splendid thing to be. By way of earning it, he said stoutly, “Well, you’re not to worry any more. I’ll make it all right for you.”

Milda laughed and hugged him. “There’s my Mitt!”

MIRACULOUSLY, NO SOLDIERS came for Milda and Mitt. It seemed as if Dideo, Siriol and Ham had contented themselves with getting rid of the younger half of the Free Holanders and had not bothered to include wives and families. All the same, Milda and Mitt had a hard time of it for a while. When, after a week or so, Milda dared to go back to work, she found her place had been taken. Mitt was furious.

“It’s the way things are in this town,” Milda explained. “There’s hundreds of poor women willing to work their fingers into blisters. And the rich people have to have their curtains ready on time.”

“Why?” said Mitt. “Can’t the poor people get together and tell the rich ones where they get off?”

That was the kind of question which made Milda call him a free soul. Mitt knew it was, so he made a point of asking such things. It was a great comfort to know he was a free soul who did not know what fear was, while Milda was out trudging from workshop to workshop. Mitt himself, hungry and miserable, spent the days hanging round the back doors of counting houses, or on the edges of boatbuilders’ yards, hoping to be sent on an errand. Few errands came Mitt’s way. He was too small, and there was always the crowd of bigger, quick-spoken city boys to jostle Mitt aside and run the errand instead. And of course they jeered at Mitt too. But Mitt would tell himself that he was a free soul, he was, and wait patiently on. It helped him greatly.

At night Mitt had horrible dreams. He dreamt repeatedly that Canden was coming shuffling to the door again. Then the door would open, and there would be Canden, hanging on to the doorpost and slowly falling to pieces like Poor Old Ammet in the harbour. “All dead,” Canden would say, as pieces dropped off him, and Mitt would wake up trying to scream. Then Mitt would lie and tell himself sternly that he did not know what fear was. In the middle of the night that was not always so easy to believe. But sometimes Milda woke up when Mitt yelled. She would tell Mitt stories she had learnt as a girl until he went back to sleep again.

Milda’s stories made good listening. There was magic and adventure and fighting in them, and they all seemed to happen in North Dalemark in the time when there were kings – though there were earls in the stories too, and ordinary people. Mitt puzzled about the stories. He knew Holand was in South Dalemark, but this North Milda talked about seemed so different that he wondered for a while if it was real.

“Do they have kings still in the North?” he asked, to see what Milda would say.

But Milda knew disappointingly little about the North. “No, there’s no kings any more,” she said. “I’ve heard they have earls in the North just like we do, only the earls there are all freedom fighters like your dad was.”

Mitt could not understand how an earl could be anything of the sort. Nor could Milda explain.

“All I can say is I wish there were kings again,” she told Mitt. “Earls are no good. Look at Hadd – us poor people are just rent on two legs to him, and if we do anything he doesn’t care for, he claps us in prison, or worse.”

“But he can’t put everyone in prison,” Mitt objected. “There wouldn’t be anyone to catch his fish for him or sew his clothes.”

“Oh, you are a free soul, Mitt!” Milda exclaimed.

Mitt was not sure when or how it happened, but in the course of these talks he had with Milda in the night, it began to be understood between them that Mitt was one day going to avenge his father and put right all the wrongs in Holand. It was an accepted thing, even before Milda found work. She found work fairly soon, in another sewing house, because the one thing she could really do well was fine embroidery. They managed to pay the rent on their room in time to prevent the landlord turning them out. But they were still short of food. Milda spent the rest of her week’s earnings on a new pair of shoes.

“To celebrate,” she said. “I just happened to see them. Aren’t they pretty?”

Mitt would have been very hungry indeed had not Siriol, the dour-faced informer, sent round his daughter, Lydda, with a basket of sea fry. Lydda was a fat, meek girl of twelve. She showed Milda how to cook the fry, and she much admired Milda’s pretty new shoes. Perhaps she described them to her father. At any rate, Mitt and Milda had a square meal, and there were still enough fish for breakfast. Milda put them out on the windowsill of their room to keep fresh. The ants came out of the wall in the night and ate them up. When Mitt opened the window to fetch in breakfast, all he found was some tiny scraps of bone. He was looking miserably at them when Siriol came clumping up the dark stairs in his clogs and came into the room without being invited.

“Lost your breakfast, I see,” he said. “You’d better come round to mine and have some. And best thing I can see, Milda, is for him to sail with me in future. I was thinking of taking an apprentice.”

“Well—” said Milda.

“Free Holanders look after their own,” said Siriol.

Knowing what he knew about Siriol, Mitt was speechless. He had to stand there and let Milda do the refusing for him. But to his astonishment, Milda smiled gratefully at Siriol, thanked him over and over again, and agreed that Mitt should sail with Siriol.

“I don’t need breakfast,” was all Mitt could think of saying.

“Be round at my place in half an hour,” Siriol said, and clumped away again.

Mitt rounded on Milda. “But he informed!” he said passionately. “What did you want to go and agree for?”

Milda shrugged, with the crease in her face very deep and bitter. “I know. But we have to live. And maybe you’ll see your way to getting even with him if you keep close to him.”

Mitt was mollified by that. And it made a great deal of difference that he had a job too. Siriol was very scrupulous. Mitt had an apprentice’s share of the takings, so that when the catch was good, he earned nearly as much as Milda. That almost made up to him for the kind of job it was. He did not like fishing. He did not like Siriol. He hardly knew which he disliked most.

Fishing was a mixture of boredom, hardship and frantic bursts of work. Siriol was sour and surly and insisted that everything should be done exactly right. Mitt very soon learnt that he was not allowed to make a mistake. The first day he forgot to coil a rope as Ham had shown him. Siriol picked up the end of the offending rope – which had a knot in it – and hit Mitt across the back with it. Mitt glared at him.

“Do it,” said Siriol. “Do it right. Or else. You’ll be glad to know how one of these days.”

Small as Mitt was, he shared watches with big, slow Ham, who was Siriol’s partner. He learnt to patch the much-patched sail, to mend nets and to gut fish. Siriol and Ham taught him to steer, at first by day, which was simple, then to find his way by night, by the stars, or in pitch dark, by the feel of the wind and the water, and the pull of the sails. They taught him to smell bad weather before it was near enough to hurt. Mitt also learnt what chilblains were and how it felt to be too wet and too cold for too long. And he learnt all these things, loathing them, until they were second nature, and learnt them so young that they were with him all his life.