Warrior Scarlet

  Drem lay with his eyes fixed on the other’s face, trying to lay hold of what had happened and draw it in and make it part of himself. He began to laugh at Vortrix’s attempt to mimic Talore’s swift dark vehemence; and then, because he was to be let in to his own world after all, returned to the company of his own kind after all, and because he was very weak, found the laughter breaking in his throat, and hid his face in his sound arm and cried.

  The days went by, and Drem grew steadily stronger. Every third day Midir came and pointed the Fingers of Power at the wounds in his breast and arm and shoulder, driving new life into them; and his mother and Blai dressed them with salves made of yarrow and comfrey and the little pink centaury that grew on the High Chalk, reciting the proper charms over them as they did so, so that they healed cleanly, leaving only the puckered, thunder-purple scars behind. There was a third woman in the house-place, these days, for Drustic had brought home the plump, pink Cordaella to be his wife; but she took no part in tending Drem. It was not that she was unwilling, but the only time she tried to bring him his food bowl, Blai took it from her, showing her teeth like a young vixen; so that Drem, watching in bewilderment, thought that he had been wrong in hoping that Cordaella would be kind to Blai, he should rather have hoped that Blai would be kind to Cordaella.

  As soon as he was strong enough, he crawled out to sit in the sunshine before the house-place doorway, and work at his wolfskin pegged out on the ground there, curing it with herbs crushed in salt, and working in grey-goose grease until it was as supple as the finest deerskin. He wanted to be quiet, in those spring days, while suddenly there were washed-faced primroses in the hollow banks of the driftway, and the alders by the brook were dropping their little dark catkins into the water; he wanted a kind of threshold time between one thing and the next.

  There was something else, besides his wolfskin, that he must have ready before the time came for him to stand with the New Spears before the Clan. And one evening when the supper stew was finished, he took down from its place among the smoky rafters, the heavy bronze and bull’s-hide shield that had been the Grandfather’s and would be his after all when the Feast of Beltane was over; and squatting beside the low fire with the rest, fell to fixing the shoulder harness of pony-hide straps, such as he had carried his buckler on in the Boys’ House.

  The Grandfather, looking up for a while from his bygone battles in the fire, eyed him as he worked, with a grudging interest that increased until he was leaning far forward to see more clearly how the straps went. ‘Sa, this is a cunning thing,’ he said at last. ‘I see—ah, I see. Not even Talore carries his shield that way.’

  ‘No need,’ Drem said round the strap he held in his teeth. ‘Talore has his shield arm almost to the wrist.’

  The old man glanced up at him under the shaggy, grey-gold just of brow. ‘Why did you never tell me of that promise between Talore and you, seven summers ago?’

  Drem did not answer at once. There were hard and hurting things that he could have said to the Grandfather about that. Once he would have said them, but not now. He spat out the strap and turned the buckler round to come at it from the other side. ‘It is good to have a secret, when one is small. With a secret in one’s chest, one feels larger.’

  Drustic, mending a piece of plough harness, looked up with his slow grin. ‘There was never anything needed to make you feel large, little brother.’

  ‘Surely the cub who comes behind so fine a brother as mine—with so long a whip—has need of anything that makes him feel larger,’ Drem said with an answering grin. ‘Let you throw me over that piece of thong.’

  And then it was the day before Beltane. Time for Drem to go down to the Boys’ House. He did not eat when the rest of the household ate that morning; for a New Spear must go fasting to his initiation. He washed all over in the brook, a ritual washing, and came up naked and shining and scarred, to stand beside the hearth stone, while his mother and Blai belted on his new kilt of scarlet cloth—Warrior Scarlet; he felt it lapping about him like a flame—and settled the finely dressed wolfskin over his shoulder, belting that also about his narrow waist with a strap of leather dyed violet blue and bright with studs of bronze, and combed his hair and bound it back with thongs; so that when all was done he stood up like a warrior for battle, but with no war paint on his face, and no weapon in his hand. He looked up and saw the Grandfather’s shield hanging in its usual place. Tonight they would take it down and lay it beside the hearth with his new war spear that he had not yet seen; tonight when he was—where? No one who had been that way before him, not Drustic, not even Vortrix, could tell him. They were bound by the oath of silence, as tomorrow, he also would be bound.

  Blai was doing something to the fold of his wolfskin; he looked down at her, but saw only the top of her bent head, before she turned away without looking up. She never looked at him now. She had stopped looking at him when he began to get better. She did anything he wanted, willingly, but she didn’t look at him any more, and he felt vaguely hurt.

  But now it was time for him to go. He knelt and set his hand on the Grandfather’s thigh as custom demanded; and as custom demanded, the old man put his huge, blue-veined one over it and said: ‘Go forth a boy and come home a warrior.’ Then his mother kissed him on the forehead with the same words, and took him to the threshold and sent him out with a light blow between the shoulders. Whitethroat followed him as usual; and at the foot of the driftway he parted from the great hound as he had done so many times before, and went on to the Boys’ House alone.

  There was a little wind running through the grass, and the hawthorn bushes of the lower slopes were in flower, the scent of them coming and going like breath, and a small brown bird flashed through the alder brake ahead of him. It seemed to Drem suddenly that the world was very kind. He had known its beauty often; a fierce and shining beauty like that of his great white swan, but he had not had time for the kindness. After this, maybe he would not have time for it again, but he thought that he would not quite forget . . .

  He had been wondering what it would be like in the Boys’ House, with the New Spears who were not of his year at all, but the year behind him. But he found that his name had become great in the Boys’ House, greater even than after he fought Bragon’s Hound at the King-making; and his companions were more interested in the purple scars on his shoulder than in the fact that he belonged to last year. But they had none of them much time or thought to spend on anything save what lay before them.

  There were long rituals of strengthening and purification to be gone through under the eye of old Kylan; and Kylan himself painted the white clay patterns of initiation on their foreheads. And when all was done and made ready, they sat in silence about the low fire in the Boys’ House, from which the younger boys had been sent away, listening to the sounds of life going on in the village around them; and even Vran, the stupidest of them, was afraid.

  At last the sounds of life began to fall away, and in the quiet a distant voice or the barking of a dog sounded unnaturally loud. They heard feet and then more feet going down towards the centre of the village. And then Kylan rose and ranged them before him and looked them over with those wolf-yellow eyes of his, and said: ‘So, it is time. Remember the things that I have taught you, children.’ And to Drem he said: ‘You also, who have already had a year to forget them.’

  And they ducked out through the low doorway, and stood blinking in the sudden blast of sunlight after the gloom of the Boys’ House.

  The familiar ritual that came then seemed not quite real to Drem, like an echo of something real that had come before. He saw the faces of the Clan as the line of New Spears went winding down towards the space beside the Council Fire. He saw the Chieftain’s face and the Priest’s face with the sun behind its eyes; he heard the ritual questions and the ritual answers.

  ‘Who is this that ye bring before me?’

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

&n
bsp; But he had lived through it all so vividly, a year ago, that now it seemed to have little meaning, less reality than the pressure of his own spear shaft against his forehead as he crouched in the alder brake . . .

  And now, one behind another, looking neither to right nor left, they were following Midir out from the village and away up the long slope into the eye of the setting sun, while behind them the women raised the death chant, ‘Ochone! Ochone!’

  The fires of the sunset still flamed behind the Chalk as they came up over the broad shoulder of the Hill of Gathering, passing close by the grave mound of the champion who slept on its crest, and dipped down again on the far side towards the hollow place among the hills where the warriors of the Tribe were made. And the hollow was brimming with shadows, so that as they looked down the ancient turf circle with its nine thorn trees seemed drowned in them as though it lay under water. They dropped down out of the sunset into the shadows that rose about them and closed over their heads.

  The place seemed empty of all life; lost in its own solitude. But as they drew near a horn brayed somewhere ahead of them from within the thorn trees, and out of the shadows there sprang up smoky golden light; and out of the brightness figures came filing to meet them. Naked and golden in the light of the torches, hooded with the heads of animals; the animals that the Tribesmen hunted—the wolf, the wild, black boar, the red fox and the brindled badger. They closed round the boys in silence, and turned back with them towards the half moon of piled brushwood that had been set up screening the entrance to the sacred circle.

  Here there was a kind of low bier of turfs spread with a huge red oxhide, and still without a word, they took the youngest of the New Spears and laid him upon it as for sacrifice. One with the head of a badger took up something that lay beside the bier, and for an instant Drem’s breath caught in his throat. Then he saw that it was only a wooden haft set with slim bright pins of bronze, and realized that this must be the time and place to receive the warrior tattooing of the Men’s side.

  It was a long time before it came, last of all, to Drem’s turn; and when he flung back the wolfskin from his shoulder and gave himself proudly into the hands of the tattooers, it had grown quite dark, and looking up past the tawny flare of the torches and the snarling masks of those who bent over him, he saw the stars very far off and uncaring, and already, behind the Hill of Gathering, the silvery snail-shine spreading before the rising moon. The man with the badger’s mask took up his tools for the seventh time, and began to paint the zigzag and flowing lines on the skin of his breast and shoulders with a wisp of sheep’s wool dipped in his woad pot, and then to prick along them with the sharp bronze pins, grinding in more woad as he went. It felt like being stung by a crawling trail of insects, and where the lines crossed the newly healed scars the insects became hornets, and it was all he could do, lying there with shut teeth, not to flinch under the small, merciless, stinging points. And all the while he was knowing that this was the easy part; that the real thing, the dark and terrible and shining thing was yet to come.

  Save for that first blaring of a war horn as they drew near the Holy Place, complete silence had held the scene; not even a night bird’s call or the whisper of a little wind over the turf to break the stillness; but now Drem became aware of a sound—no, a sensation rather than a sound, a rhythmic pulsing that might almost have been his own heart. But even as he listened, it grew and strengthened, changing—changing—from a pulse beat to a fierce, confusing rhythm that made Drem think of that harvest magic of the Dark People, beaten out with an open hand on the sheepskin drums. It never grew loud, that drumming, but moment by moment it became more intense, more potent, until it seemed to Drem to be inside himself, in his head, in his heart, so that he could no longer think clearly, like a man who was drunk with much mead.

  He was vaguely aware of getting up from the bier and standing with the other New Spears, the proud new patterns smarting like fire on his breast—on all their breasts, for while the drumming lasted they all seemed to be part of each other, so that each felt the sting of the others’ wounds and the sharp, confused fear in the others’ hearts—and then, suddenly, as though it had been cut by the swift downward flash of a sword-blade, the drumming stopped, and there was silence again; silence that was more potent, more clearly and irresistibly a call than any blare of war horns could have been.

  The New Spears looked at each other, their blood jumping oddly within them. And while the silence yet seemed to tingle, two of the beast-headed figures took the youngest of the New Spears and led him to the shielded entrance of the sacred circle, and in a while came back alone.

  Then the drumming started again.

  Again and again came the tingling silence, and each time another of the New Spears went away into the sacred circle, and none of them ever came back.

  And then the drumming ceased for the last time of all, and the call was for Drem. He stepped forward, with a sense of moving in a dream, the two beast-headed figures on either side of him, out from the shelter of the brushwood curve, and turned to the entrance of the sacred circle. There was light, a smoky dazzle of torchlight among the thorn trees; he glimpsed figures like the figures of a dream—beast-headed as the others had been, striped badger mask and upreared antlers and snarling grey wolf muzzle—and the torchlight under the thorn trees making the white blossom shine against the moony darkness, and the sparks flying upwards. But his whole awareness was caught and held by the tall figure of Midir the Priest, naked as the rest, and crested with the folded wings of the golden eagle, standing in the midst of the circle, in the very heart of the brightness. He was no longer aware of the men on either side of him, not aware of walking forward, until suddenly he was close before Midir; not aware of anything but Midir’s eyes.

  But Midir’s eyes, that were like dark sunlight, were no longer eyes at all. They had contracted to two pin points of intense yellowish light, and the light ate into his very soul . . . Yet even as he gazed and gazed, his whole spirit caught up and held powerless, they were eyes again; yet such eyes as he had never seen before. Eyes that burned with a fire beyond fire, a blasting and shrivelling glory; and he was aware of a face growing up around them, and a figure, but not Midir’s. He had forgotten Midir. This was One who leaned on a spear as vast as the shaft of light when the sun strikes through storm clouds. And the face—? Afterward Drem only remembered that looking into it was like trying to look into the sun at noonday. He was aware of a shining and unbearable glory, a power that seemed to beat about him in fiery waves; and he knew in a moment of terror and ecstasy that he was looking into the face of the Sun Lord himself, which no man might see and live. The voice of a thousand war horns rang in his ears, and he was flying forward, plunging, swooping like a hawk, like a shooting star, into the heart of the singing brightness, the heart of all things.

  XV

  The Flower of the Sun

  THE WARMTH OF the sun was on his body, and above him great grey and white clouds were drifting across a sky that had in it already a hint of evening. There was a lazy, blustering wind blowing—a south wind, it must be, for there was the salt of the sea in it: the honey of hawthorn flowers in it too, and garlic, which was odd and did not seem to fit with the rest. He felt as though he had been on a very long journey; so weary that he wanted to do nothing ever again but go on lying on his back and staring up past the lazy clouds into the blue heights of heaven. But he had a feeling that somebody had called him by name, and he stirred himself to look about him.

  He was lying at the heart of the ancient circle, and the other New Spears with him; lying with their feet to the centre and their heads towards the ring of thorn trees, like the rays of a seven pointed star. And instantly he remembered the splendour and the terror that had been. The warrior patterns on his breast and shoulders were sore and stiff, and as he moved, a knot of dried garlic flowers fell from his breast, where they must have been set to keep his body safe while he was away from it.

  The others were stirring n
ow, sitting up one by one and looking about them. Nothing remained of last night’s mystery; no beast- and bird-headed figures among the thorn trees; no smoky blaze of torches; nothing left of the supremely beautiful and terrible moment when each had looked into the face of the Shining One—only Midir the Priest, sitting peacefully under one of the thorn trees and gone away small inside himself, with his bull’s-hide robe about him and his thin, grey hair wisping out in the wind from under the eagle head-dress, and the amber sun cross on his breast catching and losing the light with his old, quiet breathing, and a few fallen hawthorn petals lying in his lap, as though he had sat there unmoving all night.