Warrior Scarlet

  There was a little silence, filled by the delicate riffling of the wind through the short grass, and the stirring of the sheep in the fold behind them. A curlew cried from the head of the combe, and one of the herd dogs, still lying obediently at Doli’s side, gave a warning growl as Whitethroat’s exploring muzzle came too near. Then Drem said, ‘I have had too much fighting of late, to care much for the gentle things. But I have lost my fight. I have failed in my Wolf Slaying.’

  Doli showed neither surprise nor sorrow—but then Doli very seldom showed anything. ‘Sa, that is a bad thing,’ he said. ‘And so now you come to me and the sheep.’

  ‘So now I come to you and the sheep,’ Drem said dully.

  ‘Then let you come in to the fire, and I will salve that shoulder,’ Doli said. No surprise, no questions asked. And deep in his raw and angry heart, so deep that he did not realize it, Drem was grateful, as he ducked under the low lintel and followed Doli into the shepherd’s bothie. Someone sat beside the fire, a dark boy of his own age, and he saw that it was Erp who had run with the rest of them in the days before the Boys’ House. their eyes met, black eyes and golden, and then both looked away again.

  Doli brought rank-smelling yellow ointment in a pot, and smeared Drem’s shoulder as though he had been a wolf-bitten ewe, saying, ‘This is good against a wolf gash, whether in man or sheep.’

  Drem bore with the salving, then sat down with Whitethroat against his knee, beside the fire, not avoiding Erp’s dark, curious gaze any more, not seeking it out, too tired to care either way. He felt oddly adrift, like something with its roots hacked from under it, spent and empty. Even his rage had gone from him, and there seemed nothing to take its place, nothing; just emptiness where yesterday his life had been: and he was so tired.

  By and by he lay down beside the fire, with his head on Whitethroat’s flank, and fell asleep like a tired child, the traces of the Wolf Pattern still on his forehead. So deeply asleep that he did not wake even when Flann and his brother came back from the village.

  It was the eleventh morning after that, and his shoulder, thanks to Doli’s salve, was three parts healed, when he looked up from helping the old shepherd to spread the same stinking yellow stuff on a ewe’s back where she had been pecked by ravens—and saw Vortrix standing by the opening of the fold.

  He was not surprised, he had known that Vortrix would come, before his initiation cut them off from each other for all time. And this was the last day of all.

  No word passed between them, only one long look, and when the ewe had been released, bleating after her lamb, he said to old Doli, ‘I will come back in a while,’ and whistling Whitethroat to heel, walked out of the fold to where Vortrix waited for him.

  Still without a word, they turned together, and walked up the combe, with their hounds loping behind them.

  ‘Why did you not come before?’ Drem asked at last, staring straight before him as they walked. He had not meant to ask it; but he asked, none the less.

  ‘I have been nine days and nine nights enclosed. Taboo in my father’s house,’ Vortrix said. ‘Midir sealed the door with clay, and sealed it again every time he came—he and the warriors with him—and I might not break the seal.’

  Drem had not thought of that; that Vortrix had broken custom by coming between him and his wolf, and would have to pay for it in ritual purification. ‘Was it bad?’ he said.

  ‘It was—not good,’ Vortrix said, quite quietly, but it sounded as though he had spoken through shut teeth. Drem looked at him sideways. Vortrix’s square, cleft jaw was set, and there were great stains like bruises under his eyes. What had they done to him, those nine days and nights, in the hut with the clay seal on the door? Drem realized that he would never know; that he must not even ask.

  All that day they hunted together as of old. They killed at last among the wooded combes of the High Chalk, and evening found them making their way home with the carcass of a young roe hind slung from Vortrix’s spear between them. The hounds padded at their heels; the shadows of boys and hounds and kill long-drawn on the downland turf. All as usual, everything as usual, save that it was for the last time.

  They came over a last lift of the Chalk, and on the edge of a little solitary wood of wind-stunted oak and thorn trees that crested the ridge, halted to rest. But they had carried home heavier kills before now, and never thought of resting. And there among the budding oak trees, with the body of the hind at their feet, they turned to look at each other. All day they had contrived somehow to hide from themselves the fact that this was their last hunting together, but now they could not hide it any longer. It was in the sea-song of the wind in the budding oak branches, and the distant crying of the gulls, in the cool scent of the moss that grew thick under the trees, and in the bleak and hopeless desolation of their own hearts.

  ‘We have had good hunting,’ Vortrix said.

  Drem nodded. They had had good hunting; not only today, but all the days of their hunting together. He would hunt again, and so would Vortrix, but never again together. That was over. The fore-shadow of tomorrow’s parting hung over them; a parting as sure and more final than it would have been if one of them was to die in the morning, and one to go on living. It was not that they would not see each other again, but that they would see each other only across the gulf that divided the Men’s side, the free Tribesmen of the warrior cast, from the Half People without the Tribe. There was nothing they could do. They were in the grip of the custom of the Tribe; and the custom was stronger than they were, stronger than all the men of the Tribe together.

  Drem stared down at the roe hind at his feet. There was a scarlet stain on the white of her belly, like the scarlet stain on the white breast feathers of the swan. Warrior Scarlet . . .

  He cried out hoarsely, as though under sudden sharp pain. ‘Why did you come between my wolf and me?’

  ‘I had no time to think—even now I cannot think. I—it is none so easy a thing to stand leaning on one’s spear to see a brother die.’

  ‘And so tomorrow I must stand to see you and all our company go away from me—and turn back alone, after you are gone.’

  ‘My brother—oh, my brother—we have hunted the same trails and eaten from the same bowl and slept in the same bed when the hunting was over. How shall I go on or you turn back alone?’

  ‘I do not know,’ Drem said. ‘It must be—it must be; but how, I do not know.’

  They reached out their hands to each other, Vortrix’s two hands, Drem’s one, gropingly as though both of them were blind. Their arms were round each other in a close, hard embrace. They had always been equally matched, a team that had neither leader nor follower; but now in their parting it was Drem who was the stronger of the two, and Vortrix who cried like a woman, with his head bent into the hollow of Drem’s shoulder, while beyond the wind-stirred branches of oak and thorn the low sun set fire to the clouds, and the west was suddenly kindled to furnace gold.

  Higher and higher burned the fires of the sunset, deepening from gold to copper, to fierce and glowing red. The branches of the oak trees were black against it, and the wings of the gulls were black as they swept by; and the crimson light splashing far in through the little wood flushed the vivid moss under the trees, and stained the breast of the roe hind so that it was as though the blood spread until the whole of the white fur was stained pink.

  When the fires began to fade, dying out into pale rose-flecks overhead, so that all the sky was freckled like the skin of a trout, and the shadows thickened among trees, they stooped again to their kill. The village, though out of sight below them, was not far off, and, ‘I will come no farther with you,’ Drem said. ‘It is in my mind that you can carry her alone from here.’

  ‘Aye, I can carry her. I will take your half of the kill to your mother.’

  He helped Vortrix to get the carcass of the deer across his shoulders, fore feet in one hand and hind feet in the other, and to settle his spear. Then without another word between them, he turned and w
ent blundering down through the little wood. He could not bear any more. He did not even remember to whistle Whitethroat after him, did not remember the great hound at all, until a brindled black and amber shadow brushed past his knee and circled before him with bushy tail flying. He had forgotten Whitethroat; he would not be quite alone.

  It was dusk when he got back to Doli and the shepherd kind; and he settled down to his evening stew keeping well away from the fire, that the light of the flames might not show them his face.

  Drem tried to keep away from the village the next day, but nevertheless, when sunset drew near and it was time for the start of the ceremonies, he came up the stream, through the alder brake, and stood among the alder trees in their haze of young leaf, looking across the irregular barley plots to the familiar huddle of turf roofs. He heard the soft, formless murmuration of the gathering crowd that rose to a long-drawn cry as the boys appeared from the Boys’ House doorway; and he bent his head on to his fist on the spear shaft, seeing against the darkness of his closed eyes the scene that he had watched so often before. He saw them coming down through the now silent crowd, walking one behind another, very proud and erect, and looking straight before them. Another cry—almost a wail—told him that the first boy had stepped out into the open space about the Council Fire where Dumnorix stood with the greatest of his warriors about him. That would be Tuan, the youngest of them; always it was the youngest first, the eldest last—the eldest who this year would be Vortrix. Against the darkness he saw two warriors step out from the Men’s side, to either side of him. But it was no longer Tuan between them, and the warriors that he saw in his mind were not Tuan’s father and his friend but a huge and stooping old grey-gold man with a beak like an eagle’s, and a slight, dark one with a great copper snake twisted about a left forearm that lacked a hand. They were bringing him to Midir beside the Council Fire; Midir bending a little to receive them, his thin hair straggling from beneath the golden eagle cap of the priest kind. He seemed to hear the ritual questions and answers. ‘Who is this that you bring before me?’

  ‘It is a boy, that he may die in his boyhood and return a warrior to his Tribe.’

  ‘And who speaks for the boy?’

  ‘I, Cathlan the Old, Cathlan the Mighty, I his Grandfather, speak for the boy—’

  Drem, leaning on his spear among the alder bushes, drew a hoarse breath that was like a sob. Why had he come? But he knew that his coming had made no difference; if he had stayed with Doli and the sheep as he had tried to do, the thing that was happening beside the Council Fire would have reached him just as surely.

  Across the little barley plots and the young flax, he heard the women taking up one from another the death chant for the sons who were going out to their ritual dying, and knew that it was over; it never took long, that first ceremony. Now they would be coming down after Midir, through the crowd that swayed back to let them through, the boys who had been his companions of the Boys’ House, who would have been his fellows of the Spear-ring—Vortrix . . . He raised his head, and saw them, no longer against the darkness of his inner eyes, a slim line of young proud figures, with the winged figure of Midir at their head, and the fires of a stormy sunset that he had not seen come, blazing behind them; and as they walked, their shadows reached out towards him across the springing barley as though in farewell. Now, for a night and a day, until the fires of tomorrow’s sunset flared beyond the Hill of Gathering, they would be as dead to the Tribe; and then they would come back, as warriors from victory, with the tattooed patterns of their new manhood raw on their breasts, and there would be a great rejoicing, a triumphal blowing of war horns before presently the Beltane fires were lit.

  But Drem knew that he would not see that triumphal homecoming. He had come because he must, to see his brothers of the Boys’ House away; the return of the young warriors was no more to do with him.

  They had turned right hand, now, and were walking straight up the slopes of the Hill of Gathering, while behind them the women lamented still. ‘Ochone! Ochone!’ And the death chant fell heavy on Drem’s ears and on his heart. The boys dwindled smaller and smaller on his straining sight, winding up the long slope towards the sleeping-place of the unknown champion on the crest, and as they dipped over the skyline towards the Place of New Spears beyond, it seemed as though they walked straight into the blazing brightness of the sunset. And the brightness opened for them, and they were gone.

  Drem turned away alone, blind with more than the sun in his eyes, and plunged back through the alder scrub. And still behind him rose the wailing of the Women’s side. ‘Ochone! Ochone!’

  XI

  The News-Bringers

  THE NEXT NIGHT Drem stood alone by the empty lambing pens, when the flocks and herds had all been driven down to the village, and watched the Beltane fires blazing red on the crest of the Hill of Gathering; and knew that the young warriors had returned out of the sunset. Behind him in the shepherd’s bothie the hearth was black and cold, just as his own heart felt black and cold within him, and with the same empty desolation. But the hearth only waited, like every hearth throughout the Clan and the Half People, to spring to life again at the touch of the sacred fire . . .

  Then far down the combe a red bud of flame pricked out in the darkness, and Erp came running with a torch, as all up and down the Clan territory the youngest man of every household would be running. And the black hearth in the shepherd’s bothie woke and kindled and uncurled petals of living flame. But the coldness and darkness within Drem was as cold and as dark as ever.

  Next day, when the Beltane fires were burned out, the sheep were taken up to the high summer pastures, and Drem, whose life was now the life of the shepherd kind, went with them. And little by little, as the days went by, the slow, solitary rhythm of the new life closed round him. Every night at twilight they folded the sheep in the great, turf-banked enclosures. (Even in summer the sheep only had to be left unfolded for a few nights for the wolves to come up from the forest and hunt the grazing lands. They were no fools, the wolf kind.) Every morning, when the light returned to the world, they were let loose again. And morning and evening they must be taken to the dew-pond a bow shot from the enclosures, to drink. All day long as they grazed, they must be watched and guarded, moved from place to place so that there was always fresh grass, kept from the parts of the Chalk where harmful herbs grew, and from danger spots such as the old flint quarries; rounded up when they became too scattered; tended when they were sick or hurt. At night when the sheep were safely folded, there was the low turf bothie by the dew-pond, and stew—mutton stew for the most part, from the carcass that hung in the hearth smoke out of reach of the dogs—cooked by one of the Little Dark Women who came and went and seldom seemed to belong to any of the shepherds in particular. There were sheep salves to be mixed and shepherd’s gear to be mended; while sometimes old Doli would blossom into a story, and sometimes young Erp would play a little wandering, tuneless air on the elder pipe that by day he played to his sheep. But for the most part they sat in silence. They were a silent people, the shepherd kind.

  When Drem had been more than a moon with Doli and his people, it was time for sheep shearing.

  Three times a year the Tribe and the Half People without the Tribe came together at a common need. One was at the great cattle round-up at the Fall-of-the-Leaf; one was at lambing time, when every able-bodied man, Dark or Golden, must take his turn in the Wolf Guard; and one was at sheep shearing. But it was chiefly the women of the Tribe who came to mingle with the Half People at the sheep shearing.

  It was early summer as yet, but already the rolling chalk hills quivered in the heat. Swifts darted high in the blue air, or skimmed low above their own shadows along the flanks of the turf, and the whole wide sky shimmered with lark song. Drem, bringing down a small flock from the high Chalk to the shearing pens above the village, heard the larks and smelled the dry thyme bruised under his feet and the little sharp hooves of the sheep, and felt the sun hot between his shou
lders. But the old fierce joy that he had once taken in such things was lost to him. He kept his ears on the bleating of the ewes and their half grown lambs, his eyes on their bobbing rumps, and on the grey herd dog circling on the flanks of the flock. Cu, the older of Doli’s two dogs, who had been the young one, six summers ago, would not work with anyone but his master, but Asal, the young one now, would work with Drem well enough, and there was no trouble between him and Whitethroat so long as Drem remembered never to fondle Asal when the great hound was by. Whitethroat padded at his lord’s heels now, with a long fluted strap of pink tongue dripping from his mouth. He would never make a herd dog, he had been a hunting dog too long, but he understood that the sheep were not for hunting but for protecting, and already he had proved that he could earn his keep as a guardian of the flock.

  It was the first time that Drem had been within sight of the village since the day when he had watched the opening ceremonies of the New Spears from afar; and as he dropped lower, and the distant blueness of the Wild was lost to sight behind the rolling bluffs of the Chalk, he looked for the familiar roof-huddle under the Hill of Gathering, and the full and noisy scene on the level turf above the corn plots, where the shearing pens had been set up and the shearers were already at work; half longing for the sight of familiar things, familiar faces, half flinching from it.

  Drem could not work among the shearers. There were few things that he could not do one-handed, but to deal with a struggling and indignant sheep and work the heavy bronze shears, one must have two hands. So through the rest of that crowded and sweating day, when the droving was over, he worked at the pens, and ran the sheep down, bleating and protesting, to the shearers, from whose hands they were turned loose at last, pale and shorn, to trot quietly off in search of their bleating lambs. It was hot work. His hair stuck to his forehead and his kilt to his thighs, and his hand was greasy with the yolk of the fleeces that seemed to have got inside his nostrils so that he could not smell anything else.