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 every body 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 recognise 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 water-front. 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 any body 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.
8
The fat woman was very grateful to Mitt. She clung to him, and he had to help her to the street beyond the house. “You’re a sweet boy,” she kept saying. “Come on up to the stalls, and I’ll buy you something.”
Mitt refused. He had to be where the soldiers were. It was the only thing left for him to do. Half his life’s work had fallen to someone else’s bullet. Hands to the North, curse them! he thought. He knew he would never get a chance to be revenged on Hadd now. But the other half remained. He had to get caught and get questioned and, with the utmost reluctance, let out that it was Siriol, Ham, and Dideo who set him on to plant the bomb. So, as soon as he had shaken off the fat woman, he went back to the waterfront.