that was fighting each against the other. What Ursala said was too terrible to be true, yet it made some other things, that was vexing me already, in some ways better. I had failed the test, but suppose it wasn’t me that failed but the test that was wrong and bad its own self? Then I had got a right to be tested again, didn’t I? I had got a right to be tested on an equal foot with them that passed.
With Haijon.
Whatever I did (and I was already thinking what I might do) I had to start with him. If what Ursala said was true, then I couldn’t be friends with him no more. We had got to be enemies. I didn’t want that, yet a part of me was inclined to welcome it.
If Haijon had lied, then I would shout out the lie to everyone in the village, and Spinner would shun him. Everyone would shun him. Vennastins would be shamed too, since the lie would belong in equal parts to all of them. Ramparts would fall.
And what then, Koli? I asked myself. What happens to Mythen Rood if the Ramparts fall? I was checked somewhat in my recklessness by that question, but other reckless thoughts come in its wake. It was like Ursala dropped a big stone into my heart, and what was in there had got to come slopping out one way or another.
I lay waking all night, and worked all the next day. Jemiu was watching me close the whole time. It was not just to make sure I kept at it. I thought that at first, but there was a look on her face said it was something else besides. I think it was the state I was in the night before when I come home. It was still in her mind, and it had lit a suspicion there. She was keeping me home to keep me from something worse, though she had no real idea what that thing might be.
That was the day Ursala left the village. She had told me she would, and though I was sorry I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to her, yet I felt in another way like we had said all that had got to be said. I had asked her for answers and she give me more answers than I could rightly cope with. Now her road lay to the south, down the valley, to Ludden and then on to Sowby or Burnt Lea, places that was only names to me.
I throwed myself into the steeping and the cutting with a will, hoping some of the things I was feeling would come out of me along with the sweat. I never leaned on the long-soled plane harder than I leaned on it that day, or the next day. Jemiu left me alone at last, satisfied that I was deep into what I was doing.
Nor I never meant to deceive her, think what you might. It was myself I was striving with all that time, and I had no thought for any other. Excepting Haijon. Him I thought on a great deal.
On the third day, I picked up the water buckets and shrugged the yoke on across my shoulders. “I’ll do that,” Athen says to me. “You’re better with the plane than I am.”
“If I plane another plank, I’ll be crying splinters,” I said. “I want a change from it, Athen, and this is as good as any.”
I seen the doubt in her face. She read me almost as well as my mother did. “Did someone hurt you, Koli?” she asked. “If I didn’t know you was as gentle a one as ever walked, I’d say there was blood in your eye.”
“There’s sawdust in my eye, is all,” I said. “And I’ll walk it out and sweat it out, and be back betimes.”
She give it up, and kissed me on my cheek. “Go the right way then,” she said. Which was a peculiar thing to say when I was only going to the well. But I believe she seen deeper into me, like I said.
I left the buckets and the yoke by the well and went on to the gather-ground. That was the most likely place for Haijon to be, and there I found him, practising with the cutter while his cousin Mardew watched him with a shrewd, mistrustful eye as if he meant to steal it. I sit down to watch, some ways off,