Warrior Scarlet

  Ah, but it seemed that he had been right in his thinking. The wolf kind would be here first!

  From somewhere ahead of him in the grey murk, it rose; long-drawn, savage, and unutterably sad, the cry of a wolf on the hunting trail. Another cry echoed it, nearer than the first—and then there was only the wind in the silence. Drem felt as though all the blood in his body had jumped back to his heart, and an icy stillness took him. The ewe stirred behind him, snorting and stamping her foot; he prayed that she might not bleat in terror—not that it would make much difference if she did, for the wolves were down wind of them, and the gusts would carry their scent, if indeed the brutes were not running on it already. Something brushed against his knee, and Cu was crouching beside him; he could feel the tremors running through the old dog’s body: tremors of fear and fury and hate. He laid his hand for an instant on the dog’s neck, and felt the harsh hairs rising against his palm.

  Nothing more happened for so long that he felt he could not bear the waiting for a heart-beat longer; he must yell, beat his spear against the chalk, anything to break the thin-drawn agony of waiting. But still he crouched silent, his heart beating with a slow, heavy drub that seemed to wait to listen between each beat, and the old hound crouching against his knee. The ewe was snorting again, in pain and terror. She had gone off her feet, and Drem thought she needed help, but he could not help her; not now. The moon swam out suddenly, free of the scudding, curdled cloud into a lake of clear sky—and in the sliding silver light, something moved on the smooth whiteness of the snow before the quarry mouth. Something dark, and running low, like a great hound. But it was no hound; and behind it came two more.

  Now that the moment had come it was almost a relief; and as the wolves swerved in their tracks and headed in towards him, Drem began to yell; yell and throw the lumps of chalk that he had gathered. That might frighten them back for a while, but not for long. If only he had some means of making a fire—fire to singe their hides! The great grey leader flinched from the lump of chalk that caught him on the shoulder, and gave back a little. But they were famine-driven; even in that fitful light Drem could see how their bones stared through their hides; and seeing that there was none against them but one lone shepherd and a dog, they would not be long held from their attack by yelling and lumps of chalk.

  They slunk to and fro, dodging the clods he flung at them, and he saw their shining eyes in the moonlight, their lolling tongues and the thick, raised hair of their manes. There was a kind of hideous mirth about them, as though they knew that there could be but one end to the thing, and could afford to laugh.

  Already the great grey leader was slinking forward again, his belly almost on the snowy ground, his jaws widening in that obscene grin . . . Drem had no idea how long he had held them off with his lumps of chalk. He had nothing to throw now, except Doli’s spear. He caught that up and flung it; but the broad fighting spear was not meant for throwing, and in the uncertain light it did no more than graze the leader’s shoulder as it flew. He had nothing left to throw at all now; and the wolves knew it. This was the kill. Drem had caught up his own spear and half risen to his feet, crouching there, his eyes wide and fixed on the oncoming grey leader. His mouth was very dry. The old hound crouched snarling at his side, and behind him he was aware, though he did not know how, that the ewe had struggled to her feet again, bleating in wild pain and terror.

  Nearer and nearer, circling warily, came the grey leader, squirming and slinking low-bellied over the snow. In the last moment it seemed to Drem that he had known this wolf before; and the wolf had known him. The wicked grin, the welcome in the savage yellow eyes belonged to a before-time as well as to now. But then it had been the wolf who waited for the meeting. Now it was Drem.

  Then the great beast gathered himself on his haunches, and sprang. Drem leapt to meet him, while Cu flung himself with a snarl at the throat of the second wolf, the she-wolf. Even as they came together, there was a distant shout—a burst of shouting—but Drem did not hear it. In all his world there was only himself and his wolf, and old Doli; and the ewe struggling to bring her lamb to birth behind him.

  And then not even Doli and the ewe, only himself and his wolf. He had side-slipped as the wolf sprang forward, and his spear took the great brute behind the shoulder and was all but wrenched from his grasp as it turned, yowling, almost in mid leap. Fiery pain slashed at his right shoulder just as it had done before; but he scarcely felt it as he drove his shortened spear home again. He was dragged to his knees, the wolf almost on top of him, tearing at his shoulder, striving to come at his throat. He drove his chin down on to his breast, and stabbed his spear dagger-wise again and again into its body as they rolled together in the snow. The third wolf was on him now; there was a terrible stricken howling—he did not know whether it was himself or his wolf that howled—a worrying and a snarling and a yelling. There was the taste of blood in his mouth, and a darkness flaring into ragged lights before his eyes . . .

  And then the yelling was a different yelling, neither his own nor his wolf’s; and the lights were the saffron mares’-tails of torches carried by running men—and it was all over. In some unbelievable way it was all over. He was crouching with hanging head in the churned and trampled snow, staring down at the red that blotched and spattered the whiteness. Scarlet on white; Warrior Scarlet; and for a moment he thought hazily that it was the scarlet on the white breast of the swan that had been his first kill. Then his brain cleared somewhat, and he saw that it was blood on snow—hot blood on cold snow, steaming a little in the flaring light of the torches. Old Cu and the she-wolf lay sprawled together, both with their last fight fought, and at a little distance; the third, a young one, snapped and snarled in its death agony, with somebody else’s spear through it. But the torch light fell fullest and fiercest on the body of the great grey leader lying outstretched almost against Drem’s knee.

  There were men all around him; Whitethroat nuzzling into his face, trying to lick all at the same time the torn and streaming wounds in his right arm and breast and shoulder. Someone was supporting him, and he knew that it was Vortrix; and Vortrix’s voice was in his ears, lit with a ringing triumph. ‘He has killed his wolf! See, Luga, Urian, a fine Wolf Slaying there has been here! He has killed his wolf!’

  ‘And I think that his wolf has killed him,’ Urian said.

  But Drem only heard them vaguely and a long way off. ‘Look to Doli,’ he mumbled. ‘The ewe too—she—’

  ‘It is well with the ewe.’ That time it was Hunno’s voice. ‘She needs no looking to.’ And suddenly he was aware of the thin crying of a new born lamb; and a moment of swift exultancy leapt in him, not because he had slain the great grey leader, but of all unlikely reasons, because a lamb had come unscathed into the world.

  It was the last thing he knew with any clearness for a long time.

  XIV

  Warrior Scarlet

  AFTER THAT THERE was a time that Drem remembered only as a darkness and confusion, with two fires burning in it, one in his head and one in his shoulder. Sometimes the confusion thinned a little, and there were faces in it; his mother’s face, and Blai’s, and Midir the Priest’s with its eyes like dark sunlight; and sometimes the face of Vortrix. But he knew that it could not really be so, because all those faces were of the Tribe, and something had come between him and the Tribe, between him and Vortrix—a kind of black gulf. He couldn’t remember what it was, and always when he tried to, the confusion came back and all the faces were lost to him again.

  And then, like someone waking from a sleep that has been uneasy and full of crowding dreams, he opened his eyes and knew by the angle of the sword of sunlight striking through the smoke hole in the crown of the roof, that it was evening; knew also that he was lying on piled fern, under deerskin rugs in his own sleeping stall, where he had lain before he went down to the Boys’ House a whole lifetime ago—or maybe only yesterday. He felt quiet and clean, and he was sharply and shiningly aware of the delicate, fork-tongued fl
icker of the fire on the hearth, and the golden dust dancing in the beam of sunlight, and the little rhythmic sounds that meant somebody weaving—his mother, or Blai. The hairs of the dappled deer-skin were tickling his neck, and he made to thrust it down, finding to his surprise that he had barely the strength to fumble his hand clear of the folds. There was a swift movement beside him, and Blai leaned forward and did the thing for him. She bent closer a moment to look into his face, and then cried out something—he did not know what, but the sound of it was glad; and the sounds of weaving stopped and next instant his mother was kneeling at his side, feeling his forehead, looking into his face with eyes that looked as though they were aching in her head, her bright, heavy hair bursting as always out of its net. ‘Small cub! Heart-of-my-heart—’ She gave a little laugh that broke in the middle, and put down her cheek against his. ‘You have come back. Soon, quite soon, you will be well again.’

  He tried to come up towards her, and press his face in the soft hollow of her neck as he had used to do when he was small. But at the first movement, pain tore at his shoulder, where the fire had been, and he realized that shoulder and breast were tightly bound. That must be where the wolf had mauled him. There had been a wolf—or was that only another dream?

  Blai had risen, and brought a bowl from the fire, with warm, strong broth in it, and his mother fed him, calling him all the while by the small soft names that the Women’s side kept for the smallest of their children. And by and by, when he was already beginning to grow sleepy, she rose and went back to her weaving.

  Drem lay still, blinking at the disc of singing gold that was the sunset beyond the smoke hole. Then Whitethroat crawled up from where he had been lying at his feet, to thrust his muzzle under the palm of his lord’s hand. Drem fondled the great rough head, drawing the twitching ears through his fingers with a small, sharp-edged pleasure in their warm, silken texture. Odd how soft the ears of even the harshest coated dogs were. ‘Greetings, brother,’ he said. He could hear the sounds of his mother weaving, and somebody scouring the cook-pots—that must be Blai—and the buzzing, sing-song snore of the Grandfather who must have fallen asleep over the fire after his supper, as he so often used to do. There were other sounds behind these, too, little formless, green, trickling sounds; a dripping under the eaves. An indefinable sense of relief and quickening reached him even under his piled deerskins and told him that at last the thaw had come.

  The faint, familiar rattle of the loom weights teased at his ears. He wondered what his mother was weaving, and managed to turn his head to see. The big standing loom by the door had been set up afresh quite lately; there was a new piece of cloth just begun on it—scarlet cloth.

  Was it for the Grandfather? Or for Drustic? he wondered. Drustic must have had the piece that she had woven for him, Drem, a year ago. Vaguely he seemed to remember something heard in one of his dreams: the Grandfather saying with the familiar, wide-nostrilled snort, ‘Let you wait to see that the boy will live, before you set the loom up and maybe have your trouble for nothing!’ But that did not seem to fit in anywhere; and he was too tired to think it out, too tired and spent even to care that the scarlet could never be for him. He had spent so much caring over that, that his caring seemed to have grown numb.

  All that he cared for now, was to sleep.

  He slept that night, a long, dark sleep without dreams, and woke at dawn to hear the thaw still dripping under the eaves, and feel the life running back into his own torn and battered body, and with the life, old unhappiness, old complications that he did not want to look at as yet; the beginning of a half formed idea that there was something odd about his being in the home house-place at all.

  But in a little, he slept again, while the rest of the household woke around him; and when he roused the second time, they had already scattered to the work of the day, Drustic to see to the beasts, his mother to the store shed, even the Grandfather gathering his huge frame together and hobbling out to see how much snow had gone from the world since yesterday. He was alone save for Whitethroat, and for Blai grinding the day’s corn beside the doorway, until suddenly a pony whinnied in the entrance porch and somebody came ducking in over the threshold.

  Drem turned his head towards the doorway, thinking to see his mother or Drustic; and saw instead Vortrix with something that looked like a brindled wolfskin under his arm.

  He gave a little croaking cry, and fumbled his hand clear of the coverings, and next instant Vortrix had come striding across the house-place and flung down the bundle and was squatting beside him with Drem’s hand in both of his. ‘My brother—oh my brother, they told me that you were come back into your body.’

  Drem looked at him, frowning a little. ‘I thought—I dreamed—that you were here before.’

  ‘One may dream many things, with a wolf-mauled shoulder such as that,’ was all Vortrix said; but looking into his square steady face with the very blue eyes, Drem knew that it had not been a dream.

  ‘That was a great fight—a great Wolf Slaying!’ Vortrix said; and his eyes were shining. ‘I shall not forget how we came down the slope at Whitethroat’s tail—running we were, running until our hearts were like to burst—and saw you down there, with a whole pack it seemed upon you, and the snow trampled and scarlet as though two wolf-packs had fought there. Aiee! They speak your name round the fires in the village, these nights!’

  Things came rushing back to Drem as he listened; things that had been hovering on the fringe of his memory since last evening, but they brought with them no triumph in his Wolf Slaying. He was too weak for triumph. ‘Doli!’ he said. ‘What of Doli?’

  ‘Doli went to his own place, back to the Earth Mother, five days since,’ Vortrix said. ‘The little man was worn through, and there was the breathing-fever on him.’

  There was a small harsh pause; and then Vortrix laid Drem’s gaunt hand back on his breast with a kind of clumsy gentleness, and took up the brindled wolfskin. ‘See, I have brought you your wolfskin. I have scraped it and begun the curing, lest it should be beyond curing before you could come to it. But now it can wait until you are strong again to finish the task.’

  Drem looked from him to the wolfskin and back again; and his heart began to beat heavily, unevenly, though he did not as yet understand—did not dare to understand. Vortrix was brushing aside the harsh, brindled hair at the shoulder of the pelt, high up near the base of the neck, showing him a scar that there was on it, a place where the hair had not grown again over an old wound, saying something about his own wolf. ‘It is your own wolf!’ Vortrix was saying. ‘Your own wolf! Here is the mark from the first time!’

  Drem stared at the puckered, hairless line on the pelt, and his hand on the soft deerskin coverings clenched into a fist. ‘I did not so much as scratch the hide of my wolf.’

  ‘Na,’ Vortrix said, ‘but I did. A brindled dog wolf, and I wounded it here, high on the shoulder; here where I found the scar when I came to flay this one, nine days since!’

  They looked at each other with the great wolfskin lying half across Drem’s body between them. And Drem’s hand crept down to rest on the harsh hairiness of it. ‘It was between him and me in the first place. My heart is glad that I have slain my wolf, even though—it is too late.’

  Vortrix said, ‘It is not too late. Do you not see that there is scarlet on the loom for you already?’

  Drem stared at him, his breath caught in his throat. Vortrix could not really have said that; it must be that he was still dreaming . . . But Vortrix was saying it again, bending close over him, suddenly ablaze with his own eagerness. ‘I thought they would have told you! Wake up, Drem, you have slain your wolf, and your place waits for you among the New Spears!’

  Drem shook his head, denying it because he did not dare to believe it. ‘Many times the Half People kill their wolves as I killed that one. There can be but one Wolf Slaying, and—I failed in mine.’ His voice dried up into a cracked whisper. ‘It is not true; it could not be true.’

  Nei
ther of them was aware that Blai had left her grinding and stolen out like a grey shadow, leaving them alone. They had not noticed that she was there. And the only sound in the world was the drip of the thaw under the eaves.

  ‘I am your blood brother, not your sorest enemy,’ Vortrix said at last. ‘Why should I tell you this thing if it were not true? Listen, Drem. Three days since, it was spoken of round the Council Fire. It is true, I swear to you by—my own spear hand that it is true.’

  And Drem knew that it was so. He reached out and caught the other’s wrist, straining up from the piled fern, heedless of the pain that clawed at his breast and shoulder. ‘How then—? I—I do not understand. Tell me what passed at the Council Fire—all that passed—’

  Vortrix pressed him back again. ‘Let you lie still; if you burst the wounds, I shall be blamed . . . See then; when I had flayed the wolf and found the scar on it, then I went to Dumnorix my father, and showed him the scar as I have showed it to you.’ Vortrix grinned. ‘It is useful, now and then, to be the Chieftain’s son. And my father laughed that great laugh in his chest, and said, “Sa. The cub was always a fighter, from his first day in the Boys’ House, as I remember; and the Men’s side may have need of its fighting men one day.” And so when the Spring Council gathered three nights since, he took and showed the pelt to the Men’s side of the Clan, beside the Council Fire, and said, “See, the Shining One has sent to Drem One-arm his Wolf Slaying again, and this time he has not failed!” Then there was much talk, and some among the elders said—even as you—that there can be but one Wolf Slaying. And at last the thing went to Midir where he sat gone-away-inside-himself beside the fire. So Midir came back and looked out of his eyes again, and said, “I have seen the wounds in the boy’s shoulder; they cover the scar of that first Wolf Slaying, so that the scar of that first Wolf Slaying is no more. The thing was not finished, and now it is finished; therefore let one among you be found to stand for the boy, beside Cathlan his Grandfather, on the Day of the New Spears, for the Sun Lord and the Lords of the Tribe and the Hunting Trail have shown that they would have it so.” And truly I think that there would have been more than one come forward to stand with Cathlan; but before any other man could move, Talore sprang up—you know how swift he is, like a wild cat when it springs—and stood there before the Clan, smiling so that his lip curled up over those great strong dog-teeth; and he cried out: “Seven summers ago, I found the boy curled under the roots of an oak tree, like a wolf cub himself, far into the Wild, where he had run from his own kind, fearing to fail in this very thing; a small, hairless cub and very much afraid, but fierce even then, and bit my finger to the bone before I had him out of his lair. Because he was small and valiant, and one-handed even as I am myself, my heart turned to him; and I promised him that night that when he had slain his wolf and the time came for him to stand before the Clan on the Day of New Spears, I would stand for him beside Cathlan his Grandfather. Therefore the thing was settled seven summers ago.” (You never told me that, Drem.) And then all the elders—all the Men’s side looked at each other and nodded their heads, and said, “Aiee! It is well!” And Maelgan and I and the rest of us drummed our spears on our shields and made a great noise—and so the thing was done.’