The woman smiled. It reminded Mitt of the way Milda smiled, when the crease went out of her face and the dimple took its place. “Thank you. I can manage him,” she said.
As Mitt set off up the steep path, he saw the woman go toward the bull with her hand held out. The bull stretched its massive neck to nuzzle her fingers. Well, rather her than me! Mitt thought.
The path went backward and forward across the hill, diving between twisted trees and making hairpin bends over rocks. Mitt climbed with the rich smell of the earth and the sharp smell of turf in his nose. In his ears the plangent plash and roll of the waves became larger, but more distant. Mitt wondered where he was going and what good it would do when he got there. Then the path went round a rock with a tree growing out of it and entered a very small hanging dell, open one side to the sea, and greener than any of the islands. Mitt stood there to get his breath. There was a great view over the islands in the golden light, islands on one side floating green-gold in blue-gray sea, and islands on the other side blue-black against the sun, floating in silver-gold, like clouds in the sunset.
Mitt, hot and breathless and miserable as he was, felt very bitter at the sight. Times out of mind, as a small boy, he had dreamed of such a place. Now he had found it, and what good had it done?
He turned away and went on into the dell. It was moist and cool. To Mitt’s pleasure, there was a trickle of water running down a rock. The sack had made him very thirsty. He put his hands and then his face into it and came out dripping. He noticed that beside him there was one of those stone pillars he had seen on the Isle of Gard. It was about as tall as a sundial, but wider. On it were two small figures, one made of green grapes and rowan berries, and the other of plaited stalks of wheat.
“Hey!” said Mitt. “Here’s Libby Beer and Old Ammet!”
He was stretching out a hand to give Old Ammet a touch of greeting when he felt the dell tremble under the feet of a heavy creature. He whirled round, expecting to see the bull again.
A gray-white horse had stopped further down the dell and a tall man with flying light hair was dismounting from it. Mitt hastily brushed his wet face with his arm and backed against the short stone pillar. The man was Old Ammet. He came toward Mitt, smiling a little, with his long light hair blowing and swirling about his head and shoulders as if the wind were blowing half a gale in the dell. But there was no wind at all. He had a straight, grave way of looking, which reminded Mitt a little of Hobin, though his face was nothing like Hobin’s. It was like no face Mitt had ever seen. One moment Mitt thought Old Ammet was a grand old man, and the next he seemed a handsome young one. And as Mitt saw these strange changes in Old Ammet, he was more frightened than he had ever been of any nightmare. With every step Old Ammet advanced, Mitt felt another wave of fear, until he was as terrified as he had been that time in Holand when he pretended to play marbles—right up to the moment when Old Ammet spoke to him. Then it all seemed perfectly natural.
“I was needing to speak with you, Alhammitt,” Old Ammet said. His voice reminded Mitt of Siriol’s, though it was also quite, quite different. “I have to ask you a question.”
“You could have talked to me anytime,” Mitt said, feeling a little resentful. “Why does it have to be now, when I’m all to pieces?”
Old Ammet’s young face laughed, and his old face answered. “Because there was no doubt till now what you would do.”
“What I want to do is get out of this place and go North,” Mitt said. “What’s so doubtful about that?”
“Nothing,” agreed Old Ammet, out of his grave old face. “The men of the Islands will help you go North.” Then his face blazed young and glad and eager, a
nd he said, “It is also quite certain that you will come back.”
“How did you know that?” Mitt asked. He knew it was true. He would have to come back to the Holy Islands. “When do I come?”
“That is for you to say,” said Old Ammet, young and old at once. “And when you do, it is laid down that we shall deliver these Islands into your keeping. My question to you is: Will you take them as a friend or as an enemy?”
“As an enemy to you, you mean?” Mitt asked, highly perplexed by this question.
Again Old Ammet’s young face laughed. “We are not the stuff of enemies or friends, Alhammitt. Shall I ask this way: Will you come as a conqueror or in peace?”
“How should I know?” Mitt said. “What do you mean coming and asking me questions like that? What do you mean coming and pushing me around? It’s my belief you’ve been pushing me around all the time, you and Libby Beer, and I don’t like people pushing me around!”
“Nobody has pushed you around,” said Old Ammet. He looked as old as the Islands. “You chose your own course, and we helped you, as we were bound to do. We shall help you again. All I needed to know was what manner of help we must give you in times to come.” And as if Mitt had already told him the answer to that, Old Ammet turned away and went to his horse. The corn color of his clothes and hair caught the sun and seemed to melt into it.
“Hey, wait!” said Mitt. He felt very resentful and very disappointed in Old Ammet. He had expected more from him somehow. “Well, what am I supposed to say? You might give me a bit of help over that, at least!” he said, hurrying after the melting, hazy figure. Old Ammet turned round, melting back to a young man, and Mitt found he had to stop. “Can’t you give the Holy Islands to someone else? I don’t deserve to get them,” he said.
Old Ammet shook his blowing hair and smiled regretfully. “I’m not anyone’s judge.”
“But you could be,” said Mitt.
“What good would that do?” said Old Ammet. “What is your answer?”
Mitt was glad to find that he had not, after all, yet answered Old Ammet’s question. He thought about it. The first thing he wanted to do was to ask Old Ammet to come back in an hour or so, to give him time to think. But Old Ammet stood there, old and patient beside the tall gray horse, and the horse cropped the cool green turf with drops of bright water falling gently from its mane, as if, for both of them, there was all the time in the world.
“I’m bad at thinking without talking,” said Mitt. “I’m like Al that way. We both love to talk.”
“Then why not talk?” suggested Old Ammet.
But Mitt did not talk because it suddenly came to him that he had it in him to be far worse than Al. Mitt, if he wanted, really could become the person out of his recent daydream and go round the country putting people like Navis to death. Al did what he did for himself alone. Mitt would be doing it against people. Mitt looked up at Old Ammet and caught his face as it changed to young. He looked as splendid as Mitt’s daydream. Yet beyond Old Ammet was the opening of the dell, and there lay the Holy Islands spread out between the evening sea and the sky. And Mitt knew he did not want to come back to them hunting people from island to island and putting them to death. It just did not fit. But if he came back as an enemy, he would. He had Old Ammet’s word for it that he would come back. And it would be like destroying his own early daydreams.
He looked up at Old Ammet’s face and caught it between young and old. “It’ll have to be friends,” he said.
Old Ammet, turned to old now, simply nodded gravely. It was no more than Mitt expected, but he was disappointed all the same. He had hoped Old Ammet would praise him, or at least reward him, for his decision. He was a very puzzling being, and, Mitt suspected, a very powerful one, too.