Ynen’s face was pink in the yellow light. “They aren’t roses. They’re poppies,” he said.
“Roses,” said Mitt. “And with a golden rim, too. Amazing the way your kind has to have things pretty!” He went into the cabin.
Ynen shouted after him, “Your kind built this boat!” Then, as soon as Mitt was at the end of the cabin, he whispered to Hildy, “What are we going to do?”
Now that Mitt had laughed at Hildy for being betrothed, she was determined to get the better of him. “I’ve got an idea,” she whispered, “to make him go to sleep.”
“Then we’ll turn round,” Ynen agreed. “What idea?”
“What are you whispering about?” Mitt yelled.
They dared not whisper anymore. Ynen looked at the long splintered groove in Wind’s Road’s planking and shivered. It was getting hard to see now. The sun had swum down below the horizon, leaving a yellow sky spread with straight black clouds. The sea was a melting, lighter yellow, as if the light had soaked into it. Hildy’s face was dark. “We’re saying we ought to have a light at the mast-head,” he called. “It’s the law.”
“Haven’t you noticed?” Mitt bawled. “I got nothing to do with the law.”
“Unlike you, we were brought up to be lawful,” Hildy called. “Can I light the lamp in the cabin at least?”
Mitt came out of the cupboard and fumbled his way through the cabin. It was certainly getting dark. He felt sour and grim, and he ached all over. The red and yellow breeches would not do up properly after his great meal. He came out of the cabin and flopped down on the lockers. “Please yourself,” he said. He was horribly weary.
Hildy smiled slightly and went into the cabin, where she was some time fiddling about before the lamp came on, as yellow as the sky outside. Then she moved on to the fat little water barrel, which was clamped to a special shelf above the stove. She undid the clamps and shook it. The barrel was completely full, so full that it did not even slosh. It took all Hildy’s strength to shake it convincingly, but she had been prepared for that, because it was always kept full. No one dared let Hadd’s family go thirsty.
“Oh dear!” Hildy said. She was surprised how convincing she sounded. “There’s no water in this at all! I’m horribly thirsty, too.” This was true, but she thought she could bear it in a good cause.
As soon as she said this, Mitt realized that one of the many things wrong with him was an appalling thirst. It was all those highly spiced pies he had eaten. The thought of going without water for all the time it took to get North nearly made him burst into tears. Ynen was almost equally dismayed. His mouth suddenly seemed quite dry, and he had a moment when he would have liked to report those negligent sailors to Uncle Harchad. He licked his sandpapery lips and said, “They sometimes keep wine in the lockers over the starboard bunk. Have a look, Hildy, for Old Ammet’s sake!”
Hildy turned round to hide a triumphant smile and fetched the two bottles she had already found there. One was a half-full bottle of wine. The other was a square bottle of arris. It had been full before Hildy had poured a generous dollop of it into the wine. One way or another, she thought she had done for this wretched boy.
“Which will you have?” she said, showing Mitt the bottles in the twilight.
Mitt knew the rough, foul drink was arris. But he hated it too much. “I’ll have the wine,” he said, and he snatched the bottle from Hildy, feeling he could make up on roughness and foulness that way, and took a long, guggling swig from it before Hildy could get him a cup from the cabin. He intended to drink the lot. But it tasted rather unpleasant. He passed Hildy back the bottle, a good deal less than a quarter full.
Hildy distastefully wiped the neck of the bottle and shared the rest into two cups for herself and Ynen. They sipped it and settled down to wait, while twilight grew into night.
Shortly, Ynen began to feel cheerful and Hildy slightly dizzy As for Mitt, the wine, on top of his weariness, on top of his huge meal, had the inevitable effect. The low black humps of land kept spreading under his eyes like inkblots. The stars came out and looked fuzzy. His head kept dropping forward. At length he stood up unsteadily.
“Going to have a liedown,” he said. “No stunny fuff, now. Got ears in the back of my head.” He staggered off into the cabin, while Hildy and Ynen each stuffed a fist into their mouths in order not to scream with laughter, and flopped heavily down on the port bunk.
Hildy nudged Ynen meaningly and sat down with her back against the lockers, where she could see into the cabin. They waited for Mitt to fall asleep. But, with the best will in the world to do so, Mitt could not go to sleep. The movements of Wind’s Road and the movements the wine had set up in his head seemed to be in direct conflict.
Sometimes he was convinced the boat had got into a whirlpool. Sometimes he was sure his legs were high above his head. He sat up several times to see what was going on. And each time the elegant gilded cabin was exactly as it should be, gently rising and failing, and the lamp swinging. At length he realized the queer things only happened when he had his eyes shut. So he kept them open.
The result was a set of horrible, half-waking dreams. Mitt stared at Harchad’s face in a gilded porthole, paralyzed with terror. He ran endlessly from soldiers. He struggled through innumerable dikes. Several times he was shot in the stomach. Once he threw his bomb in front of Hadd, and Poor Old Ammet bent down, put out his straw arms, and threw the bomb in Mitt’s face. “You’re in really bad trouble,” he said, and he sounded just like Hobin. Then he fell to pieces like Canden. Mitt sat up with a yell of horror. After this, when he lay down again, things got a little quieter, until it was Libby Beer’s turn. She ran at Mitt, with her fruity eyes wobbling on stalks, and kicked the bomb at him. “I brought you up to do this, Mitt,” she said reproachfully. Then the bomb exploded, and Mitt started up with a scream.
Hildy and Ynen wished he would stop yelling and go to sleep. They wanted to turn round and sail home. The yells perturbed them. The boy must be disgustingly sinful. And the sounds made them think of the things they had heard about Uncle Harchad, and that terrible day the Northmen had been hanged. Meanwhile, true night came on, and Ynen became frankly terrified. By this time he had been at the tiller longer than he had ever been in his life. He had never sailed at night before. He was cold and cramped and tired, and scared of shoals he could not see. What he could see scared him even more. It was not dark the way it was in a closed room. The sea was there, faintly, all round, heaving and swelling limitlessly. The sky was a huge empty bowl, dark blue, covered with a littering of stars, and the land was only a feeling, far away to the right. The sail noises, and the swish and fizz of waves passing, only seemed to show how small and lonely Wind’s Road was. Ynen suddenly became aware of fathoms and fathoms of empty water underneath them, too. He was hanging all alone in the middle of nowhere. Ynen clenched his teeth and kept the Northern Cross grimly over Wind’s Road’s bowsprit, and it was all he could do not to yell out the way the boy in the cabin kept doing.
It was midnight before Hildy dared signal that Mitt was asleep. In fact, he had been asleep all along, but so restlessly that Hildy had not realized. She pulled the cabin door quietly shut and shot the elegant little bolt home.