Diana Wynne Jones - Dalemark 02 - Drowned Ammet

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Drowned Ammet
Diana Wynne Jones
The Dalemark Quartet Book Two
A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0
click for scan notes and proofing history
Contents
•PART ONE Free Hollanders
|1|2|3|4|5|
•PART TWO The Sea Festival
|6|7|8|9|10|
•PART THREE Wind’s Road
|11|12|13|14|15|16|
•PART FOUR The Holy Islands
|17|18|19|20|
A Greenwillow Book HarperTrophy
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
For centuries, Dalemark has been a land divided by
the warring earldoms of the North and South. Now, with
the help of the Undying, the mysterious gods of
Dalemark, four extraordinary young people— from the
past, present, and future—must join forces to reunify
their beloved land.
To avenge his father, Mitt joins in a plot to assassinate
the tyrannical Earl Hadd, but when the plot goes wildly
awry, he finds himself fleeing on a storm-tossed sea,
alone among his enemies—except for the figure of
Drowned Ammet…
Don’t miss the other books in The Dalemark Quartet
Book l: Cart and Cwidder
Book 2: Drowned Ammet
Book 3: The Spellcoats
Book 4: The Crown of Dalemark
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 anymore,” 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.
Harper Trophy® is a registered trademark of
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Drowned Ammet
Copyright © 1977 by Diana Wynne Jones
First published in Great Britain in 1977 by MacMillan
London Ltd.
Published in 1993 by Mandarin, an imprint of Reed
Consumer Books Ltd.
First published in the United States in 1978 by
Atheneum.
Published in 1995 by Greenwillow Books.
Map by David Cuzic
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Printed in the United States of America. For
information address
HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of
HarperCollins Publishers,
1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Diana Wynne.
Drowned Ammet / by Diana Wynne Jones.
p. cm. (The Dalemark Quartet; bk. no. 2)
Summary: When his protest against the tyrannical government
fails, a young boy escapes, with two other children, to the
mysterious Holy Islands where they learn the identity and the
power of two folk figures celebrated by their countrymen.
“Greenwillow Books.”
ISBN 04)6-029872-3 — ISBN 04)6-447314-7 (pbk. )
[I Fantasy. ] I. Tide. II. Series: Jones, Diana Wynne. Dalemark
Quartet; bk. 2.
PZ7J684Dr 1995 94-1513
(Fic)-dc20 CIP
AC
Typography by Larissa Lawrynenko
First Harper Trophy edition, 2001
Visit us on the World Wide Web!
www.harperchildrens.com
For my mother
Also by Diana Wynne Jones
Archer’s Goon
Aunt Maria
Believing Is Seeing: Seven Stories
Castle in the Air
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Dogsbody
Eight Days of Luke
Fire and Hemlock
Hexwood
Hidden Turnings: A Collection of Stories Through Time and
Space
The Homeward Bounders
Howl’s Moving Castle
The Ogre Downstairs
Power of Three
Stopping for a Spell
A Tale of Time City
The Time of the Ghost
Warlock at the Wheel and Other Stories
Year of the Griffin
The Worlds of Chrestomanci
Book 1: Charmed Life
Book 2: The Lives of Christopher Chant
Book 3: The Magicians of Caprona
Book 4: Witch Week
Mixed Magics (Stories)
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume I
(Contains books 1 and 2)
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume II
(Contains books 3 and 4)
DROWNED AMMET
Part One
Free Holanders
1
^ »
PEOPLE MAY WONDER how Mitt came to join in the Holand Sea
Festival, carrying a bomb, and what he thought he was doing. Mitt
wondered himself by the end.
Mitt was born the day of the Holand Sea Festival, and he was
called Alhammitt after his father. Perhaps the first sound Mitt
heard as he burst bawling into the world was his parents laughing
about both these things.
“Well, he took his time,” said Mitt’s father, “and chose his day all
right. What does this make him? A man of straw, born to be
drowned?”
Milda, Mitt’s mother, laughed heartily at this, because the Sea
Festival was something of a joke. On that day, every autumn,
Hadd, the Earl of Holand, was required by tradition to dress up in
outlandish clothes and walk in a procession down to the harbor
carrying a life-size dummy made of plaited wheat. The dummy was
known as Poor Old Ammet. One of Hadd’s sons walked after him
carrying Poor Old Ammet’s wife, who was made entirely of fruit,
and her name was Libby Beer. The procession that went with them
was both noisy and peculiar. When they reached the harbor, they
said traditional words and then threw both dummies into the sea.
Nobody knew why this was done. To most people in Holand the
ceremony was just an excuse to have a holiday, eat sweets, and get
drunk. On the other hand, everyone would have thought it horribly
unlucky not to have held the Sea Festival.
So Milda, even though she was laughing until her dimple was
creased out of existence, bent over the new baby and said, “Well, I
think it’s a lucky birthday to have had. He’ll grow up a real free
soul, just like you—you wait! That’s why I’m calling him after you.”
“Then he’ll be common as dirt,” said Mitt’s father. “Just like me.
You go into town and shout ‘Alhammitt’ in the street, and half
Holand will come to you.” And they both laughed at the thought of
the common name they were giving their baby.
Mitt’s early memories were full of his parents’ laughter. They
were very happy. They had the good luck to rent a smallholding on
the Earl’s land in what was known as the New Flate, only ten miles
from the port of Holand. It had been reclaimed from sea marsh by
Earl Hadd’s grandfather and grew lush emerald grass, big
vegetables, and corn in narrow yellow stripes between the dikes.
Dike End holding was so fertile and the market of Holand so near
that Mitt’s parents had plenty to live on.
Though Earl Hadd was said to be the hardest man in Dalemark,
and other farmers in the Flate were always being turned out of
doors for not paying their rent, Mitt’s parents always had just
enough money to go round. They laughed. Mitt grew up running
carelessly along the paths between the crops and the dikes. It never
occurred to anyone that he could drown. When he was two, he
taught himself to swim by falling into a dike when his parents were
busy. Since no one was there to help him, he had to help himself.
He struggled to the bank and got out, and his clothes dried in the
stiff breeze as he ran on.
The sound of that breeze was as much part of his early memories
as his parents’ laughter. Apart from the hill where Holand stood,
the Flate was flat as a floor. The wind blew straight across from the
sea. Sometimes it came storming in, laying the grass over, chopping
the sky reflected in the dikes into gray Vs, and hurling the trees
sideways so that their leaves showed white. But most days it simply
blew, steadily and constantly, so that the dikes never stopped
rippling and the leaves of the poplars and alders went rattle-rattle
up and down the banks. If the wheat was ripe, it rustled in the
wind, stiffly, like straw in a mattress. The constant wind sighed in
the grass and hummed in the chimney, and kept the sails of the big
windmills always turning, creak-thump, creak-thump, to pump the
water to the dikes or grind the flour. Mitt used to laugh at those
windmills. It was the way their arms pawed the air.
Then one day, shortly after Mitt had taught himself how to swim,
the wind suddenly dropped. It did that sometimes in early summer,
but it was the first time in Mitt’s life that he had known the Flate
without wind. The sails of the windmills creaked and stood. The
trees stopped moving. There was blue sky in the dikes, and trees
upside down. Everything went quiet and unexpectedly warm. Above
all, there was suddenly an extraordinary smell. Mitt could not think
what was happening. He stood on the bank of the dike nearest the
house with his ears tipped to the silence and his nose lifted to the
smell. The smell was cow dung and peat and trampled grass, mixed
with smoke from the chimney. But that was only in the foreground.
Beyond that was the smell of fresh things growing—cow parsley,
buttercups, a hint of may, and strongest of all, the heavenlike scent
of willows budding. While, at the back of it, there and not there, so
that Mitt almost missed it, was the faint boisterous bite of the
distant sea.
Mitt was too young to think of it as smells, or to realise that the
wind had simply stopped. He thought it was a place. It seemed to
him that he had got an inkling of somewhere unspeakably
beautiful, warm, and peaceful, and he wanted to go there. Yes, it
was a land. It was not far off, just beyond somewhere, and it was
Mitt’s very own. He set off at once to find it while he still
remembered the way.
He trotted to the end of the dike, crossed the footbridge, and
continued trotting, northward and inland. He passed all the places
he knew, impatiently—they were obviously not his land—and
trotted on until his legs ached. Even then he was still in the New
Flate, lush and green, with its dikes, poplars, and windmills. Mitt
knew his land was different from the Flate, so he was forced to toil
on. And after a mile or so, he came out into the Old Flate. Here it
was different, all right. The ground was wide and treeless and
covered with pinkish marsh plants. In some places, long lines of
rushes and green scum showed where there had once been dikes
and farms, but now it was all flat and blank. Nothing seemed to be
alive there but mosquitoes and plaintive marsh birds. In the wide
distance, it was true, there were one or two islands of higher
ground with trees and houses on them. The roads to them crossed
the pink waste on causeways, raised up like the veins on an old
man’s hand. Otherwise there was nothing until, away on the edge
of the distance, there was what Mitt took for a line of clouds but
was in fact the beginning of the land above sea level, where Holand
joined Waywold.
Mitt was a trifle daunted. This was not the kind of land he had in
mind. His vision of his perfect place faded a little, and he was no
longer sure this was quite the way to it. Nevertheless, he set
forward bravely into the dismal landscape. He felt he had come too
far to turn back now. After a while he thought he saw something
moving, out in the marsh. He set his eyes on the movement and
waded toward it. It was extremely dangerous. There were snakes in
the Old Flate. And if Mitt had walked into one of the scummy pools,
he could have been sucked down into it and drowned. Fortunately
he had no idea. And even more fortunately the moving things he
could see were a troop of the Earl’s soldiers combing the Flate for a
run-away revolutionary.
Mitt could see they were soldiers before long. He stood on a
clump of rubbery plants, with the marsh sucking and gobbling
around him, and wondered whether he ought to go near them.
When people in the New Flate talked about soldiers, they talked as
if soldiers were something to be afraid of. There was a causeway
quite near Mitt. He wondered if he ought to climb up on it, out of
the soldiers’ way. While he was wondering, a muddy horse heaved
itself onto the causeway from the marsh behind it. The young
officer on its back reined in and stared at the sight of such a very
small boy standing all alone in the middle of the Flate.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” he called to Mitt.
Mitt was rather pleased to have company. “I’m looking for my
home,” he told the officer chattily. “I come a long way, too.”
“I can see you have,” said the officer. “Where is your home?”
“There.” Mitt pointed vaguely northward. He was busy
examining his new acquaintance. The gold on the officer’s coat took
his fancy. So did the officer’s face, which was very smooth and pale
and narrow, with a nose that went out much more sharply than
any noses Mitt had known before and a mouth which Mitt somehow
thought of as clean. Altogether Mitt felt he was a person worthy of
knowing about the perfect place. “It’s all quiet, with water,” he
explained, “and it’s my place where I’m going to, but I can’t find it
yet.”
The officer frowned. His own small daughter had been found
marching out into the Flate only yesterday, saying she had a house
on a hill that was hers and she had to find it. He thought he knew
the signs. “Yes, but where do you live?” he said.
“Dike End,” Mitt said impatiently. It was unworthy of the officer
to ask such things. “Of course. That’s where I come from, and I’m
going to my home.”
“I see,” said the officer. He waved at the distant soldiers. “Come
here, one of you!”
The several troopers who came running at his shout were
somewhat astonished to find not a full-grown revolutionary but an
extremely small boy. “He shrunk with the wet,” one suggested.
“He says he lives in Dike End,” said the officer. “One of you take
him home and tell his parents to take more care of him in future.”
“Dike End’s not my home. It’s where I live!” Mitt protested.
Nevertheless, he was taken back to the New Flate almost
dangling from the hand of a huge trooper in the Earl’s green
uniform. Mitt was sullen at first, disappointed and vaguely
humiliated. And he was deeply disillusioned about the officer. Mitt
had told him a valuable secret, and the officer had barely even
listened. But the trooper was a cheerful man. He had children of his
own, and it had been hot, wet work, hunting the revolutionary in
the windless Flate. The trooper was pleased to have a rest. He was
very jolly to Mitt, and before long Mitt cheered up and chatted
happily about how far he had walked and how he thought he would
like to be a soldier, too, when he grew up, and a sea captain as well
and sail the Earl’s ships for him.
When they came to the New Flate, people came to doors and
gates to stare at Mitt trotting along with his hand stretched above
his head in order to reach the great warm hand of the trooper. The
stares were unloving. Earl Hadd was a hard man and a vindictive
one. The soldiers were the ones who carried out the Earl’s harsh
orders. And lately the Earl’s second son, Harchad, had taken
command of the soldiers, and he was even harder than his father,
and a good deal more cruel. But since, all over Dalemark, an earl in
his earldom had more power than a king, in the times when there
were kings, Harchad and his soldiers did exactly as they pleased.
Therefore, soldiers were hated heartily.
Mitt understood none of this, but he saw the looks. “Don’t you
look like that!” he kept crying out. “This is my friend, this is!”
The trooper became steadily more uncomfortable. “Take it easy,
sonny,” he said every time Mitt cried out. And after a while he
seemed to feel the need to justify himself. “A man’s got to live,” he
told Mitt. “It’s not work I enjoy, but what can a poor boy off the
harbor edge do? When I get my bounty, I aim to take up farming,
like your dad does.”
“Did you fall in the harbor?” Mitt asked, fixing on the only part of
this he understood.
They came to Dike End. Mitt’s parents had missed Mitt about
half an hour before, and they were by then in a panic. Mitt’s father
received him with a great thump, and his mother hugged him
frantically. Mitt did not understand the reason for either. The
vision of his perfect land had faded by then. He was not sure what
he had gone away to do.
The trooper stood by, very stiff and correct. “Boy was found out
in the Old Flate,” he said. “Said he was looking for his home, or
some such story.”
“Oh, Mitt!” Milda cried joyously. “What a free soul you are!” And
she hugged him again.
摘要：

DrownedAmmetDianaWynneJonesTheDalemarkQuartetBookTwoA3Sdigitalback-upedition1.0clickforscannotesandproofinghistoryContents·PARTONEFreeHollanders|1|2|3|4|5|·PARTTWOTheSeaFestival|6|7|8|9|10|·PARTTHREEWind’sRoad|11|12|13|14|15|16|·PARTFOURTheHolyIslands|17|18|19|20|AGreenwillowBookHarperTrophyAnImprin...

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