Warrior Scarlet

  ‘Drustic is young, and the wind blows less cold for him. He can wait. Let you set up the loom for him next time.’

  ‘Next time and next time and next time,’ Drem’s mother said quietly. ‘Sometimes I wish that I had been born to the Men’s side; sometimes I grow weary of the spinning and the weaving and the grinding corn.’

  The Grandfather spat into the fire. ‘By right there should be three sons’ wives to weave and grind for me!’

  ‘Then there should be three sons for them to weave for also,’ Drem’s mother said with a spurt of tired and angry laughter, thrusting back a bright wisp of hair that had strayed as her hair was always straying from the blue linen net in which it was gathered, and looked round again. ‘Or would you have them all widows?’

  Drem knew his mother in this mood; it came when she was very tired; and he began to feel that it would not be a good idea to play his earwig-out-of-the-thatch trick, after all.

  The Grandfather drew his brows together, and glared. ‘Aiee! A hard thing it is that I grow old, and of all my three sons there is not one left, and that the wife of my youngest son should taunt me with it! A hard thing it is that I should have but one grandson to carry my spear after me; I who have been among the greatest warriors of the Tribe.’

  (‘The Old One grows forgetful,’ Drem thought. ‘He has lived so long with old battles that his mind grows dim; and he has forgotten Drustic.’)

  His mother turned again from her weaving, with a fierceness that struck him even at that moment as odd. ‘Two grandsons there are at the hearth fire! Have you forgotten?’

  It was then that the Grandfather said the thing that altered the whole world for Drem, so that it could never return to being quite the same as before.

  ‘Nay then, I have not forgotten. I grow old but I can still count the tally of my ten fingers. Two grandsons there are at the hearth fire; but a grandson at the hearth fire is not a grandson among the spear-warriors of the Tribe. Is it likely, think you, that the young one will ever win his way into the Men’s side, with a spear-arm that he cannot use?’

  There was a sudden silence. Drem’s mother had turned back to her loom, but she was not weaving. The Grandfather sat and glowered. And in the warm shadows of the loft above them, the small boy lay on his stomach, staring down at them with dilated eyes, and feeling all at once cold and sick. Only Blai went on turning barley cakes among the hot ashes, her small wan face telling as little as usual of what she thought or felt.

  Then Drem’s mother said, ‘Talore the Hunter is one of the great ones of the Men’s side to this day.’

  ‘Talore the Hunter was a man and a warrior before ever he lost a hand to the cattle raiders,’ the Grandfather said, deep and grumbling, and he eyed her with a kind of disgusted triumph. ‘Na na, it is in my mind that the boy must go to the Half People when the time comes. He is often enough away with Doli and the sheep as it is; maybe he will make a shepherd.’ He spat again. ‘Lord of the Sun! That I should have a grandson herding sheep! I, who have been such a warrior as men speak of round the fire for a hundred winters!’

  ‘If the child fails, then he must go to the Half People,’ Drem’s mother said, and her voice sounded tight in her throat. ‘But it may be that he will not fail. He is your own grandson, and not lightly turned from the things he sets his mind to.’

  ‘So. But it is not his mind alone that must be set.’ The Grandfather flared his nostrils in a derisive snort. ‘Say then that he comes through his years in the Boys’ House and slays his wolf at the end of them, and the time comes for him to receive his weapons; there must be two warriors, let you remember, and one of them not kin to him, to bring each New Spear before the Clan. And who shall I find, think you—or Drustic if I have gone beyond the Sunset—to stand for a one-armed champion?’

  ‘It is six summers before that question need be answered—and must I then answer it this evening?’ Drem’s mother cried. ‘If he fails, then let him go to the Half People as I say, and let you be thankful that there is Drustic to carry your spear after you!’ She gave a swift exclamation and turned from the loom towards the open pottery lamp that hung from the roof-tree just below Drem’s hiding-place. ‘The light fades, and if I am to finish this stripe before Drustic is home to be fed, I must have the lamp.’

  Quick as a lizard, Drem darted back into the shadows.

  ‘Surely there is a rat in the roof. I heard it scamper.’ He heard her voice, dry and hard, behind him as he slid out through the opening in the roof. He dropped silently to the ground, driven by an odd panic fear of anyone knowing that he had overheard what passed in the house-place, because somehow—he could not have said why—that would make it quite unbearable.

  The little stilt-legged hut where the seed corn was stored seemed to offer refuge and he dived under it and crouched there, breathing hard as though he had been running.

  The sun was gone, but a golden after-glow was spread behind the Chalk, and there was still light to see by. And crouching there among the timbers that upheld the floor, he looked at his right arm, as though he had never seen it before: his spear arm that he could not use, the Grandfather had said. It was thinner than his left, and somehow brittle looking, as though it might snap like a dry stick. He felt it exploringly with his left hand. It was queer, like something that did not quite belong to him. He had always known, of course—when he thought about it at all—that he could not use that arm, but it hadn’t seemed important. He held things in his teeth and he held things between his knees, and he managed well enough without it. Certainly he had never for a moment thought of it coming between him and his Warrior Scarlet.

  But he thought now, crouching under the floor of the corn store and staring straight before him with eyes that did not see the golden after-glow fading behind the Chalk. Never to take his proud place among the Men’s side with the others of his kind; to lose the world he knew, and go out into the world of the Half People, the Dark People, the Flint People, whose homes, half underground, were the little green hummocks in the hidden combes of the Chalk; who came and went at the Tribesmen’s call, though they never owned the Tribesmen as their masters; to be cut off, all his life, from his own kind . . . He was only nine years old, he could not yet understand all that it would mean; but he understood enough—more than enough. He crouched there for a long time, whispering over and over to himself, ‘I will be a warrior of the Tribe. Let you say what you like, Old Man! I will show you—I will show you’—lashing up anger within himself, for a shield against fear.

  When he went back to the house-place it was almost dark. Drustic had returned from the hunting trail, and the newly paunched carcass of a roe hind was hanging from the birch tree beside the door, out of reach of the dogs who were fighting over the offal, the white of her under-belly faintly luminous in the dusk, where the blood had not fouled it. He went in through the fore porch, where the ponies were stabled in winter. The apron of skins over the inner doorway was drawn back, and the tawny glow of the lamp and the low fire came to meet him on the threshold as he checked, blinking. The evening meal was over, and the Grandfather, it seemed, had returned to his watching of old battles in the fire. Drustic, with a half-made bow-stave across his knee and a glue-pot beside him, was busy on the great hunting bow that he was building for himself, while on the Women’s side of the hearth their mother sat spinning. She looked up as Drem appeared. ‘Cubbling! Here is a time to be coming home! When it drew to sunset I said, “He will not come now until tomorrow.”’

  ‘I would have been home by sunset, but—I stopped on the way. There were things to look at and I stopped on the way,’ Drem said. But he could not meet his mother’s eyes. Keeping his head down, he went to squat beside Drustic, holding out his hand. ‘I will hold it steady while you put on the binding.’

  But Drustic hated anyone else to meddle in a thing that he was making. He looked up slowly—all his movements were slow and deliberate—and said quite kindly, ‘Na, I can manage well enough. Let you learn to shaft a spear;
that is the thing for you to do.’

  Drem snatched his hand back as though it had been stung. You needed two hands for a bow, but you could learn to use a spear with one. That was another thing that he had not really thought about.

  And at the same moment, his mother called to him. ‘See, there is some stew left. Let you come round here and take your bowl. You are not a man already, that you should eat on the Men’s side of the hearth.’

  Drem came at her call, and took the black pottery bowl of stewed mutton that she held out to him, and squatted down in the fern. As he did so, he caught sight of Blai squatting far back in the shadows, picking the furze prickles and bits of dirt from a lapful of raw wool, and watching him as she worked. And he realized that Blai also had heard what the Grandfather had said. So he turned his shoulder on her, hunching it in a way that was meant to show her that she mattered so little that he had not noticed that she was there at all.

  And somehow in doing that—he overset the bowl.

  It was such a small thing, a thing that might have happened to anyone. But to Drem, coming so close on the heels of what had gone before, it was overwhelming. The words that the Grandfather had said, Drustic’s refusal to let him help with the bow—they were things that came from outside; and a thing that came from outside could be in some sort shut out; it could be defied and snarled against. But this was different; this came from inside himself; there was no defence against it, and it let in all the rest.

  Dismay and something that was almost terror swept over him as the warm stew splashed across his knee and into the fern. The Grandfather grunted; a grunt that said as plainly as words could do, ‘See now, did I not say so?’ And his mother caught up the bowl, crying in exasperation and something under the exasperation that was as though he had hurt her, ‘Oh, you clumsy one! You grow more clumsy every day! Can you never look what you are about?’

  Black misery rushed up into Drem’s breast, so that it was as though his heart were bursting because there was more misery in it than it could hold. He raised a white, desperate face to his mother’s, and shook his head. Then he scrambled to his feet and bolted for the doorway.

  ‘Where are you going?—Come back, cub!’ his mother called after him; and he called back mumbling that he was not hungry, that he would come again in a while, and stumbled out through the fore porch into the summer night.

  The gateway of the steading was closed, as always after dark, by an uprooted thorn bush, and he went out through the weak place that had let him in earlier that evening before the blow fell that changed the world, and making his way round the steading hedge, started down the chalk-cut driftway between the lower corn-plots and the half-wild fruit trees that were his mother’s care.

  He had no clear idea what he was doing or where he was going, or why. Blindly, instinctively, he turned to the wilderness, like any small desperately hurt animal seeking solitude from its own kind and the dark and a hole to crawl into.

  II

  Talore the Hunter

  LOWER DOWN, THE combe ran out into a broadening valley that swung northward, opening into a vast half moon of rolling chalk hills above the forest and the marshlands far below. Drem followed the valley down, because down was easier than up, but he did not think of which way he was going; he simply went. Down and down, by swirling slopes and plunging headlands of turf, by bare chalk and tangled furze and through the whitethorn bushes of the lower slopes, until at last the great trees of the Wild came climbing up to meet him.

  The Great Wild, mist haunted, spirit haunted, rolling away into the unknown; the wilderness of forest and marsh that was the place of wolf and bear and wild pig, the place of the Fear that walked among the trees, so men said, after dark; where only the hunters went at night, taking their lives in their spear hands and trusting their souls to the charms and talismans of amber and bear’s teeth and dried garlic flowers that they wore about them.

  At first it was quite easy travelling, for anyone used, as Drem was, to wandering about in the dark. The hazel and elder and wayfaring trees of the forest verge grew well apart, and there was little undergrowth; but as time went by, the trees crowded closer and closer; oak and ash, alder in the damper places, holly everywhere, great thickets of it, mingled with black masses of yew, matted together with a dense undergrowth of thorn and brambles. And wherever the trees fell back a little, the bracken grew head high to the small boy who thrust his way on, deeper and deeper into the fastness, driven by the misery and the furious bewilderment within him like a small wild thing driven by the hounds.

  Utterly lost in his own desolation, Drem never noticed how the forest darkened and crowded in on him, until suddenly a piece of rotten tree-trunk gave under his foot, and he all but went through into an ants’ nest; and that woke him up, so that as he gathered himself together again, he was suddenly aware of his surroundings. He had never been into the forest at night before; never so far as this, even in day-time, and he did not know where he was. And, swift-footed fear overcoming his longing for refuge, he had enough sense left to tell him that it was not good to be so far into the forest alone at night, and that he must get back to the woodshore. He knew the direction to take without even having to think; the north side of any tree, especially any oak tree, smelled quite different from the south, and he had only to head south to strike the Chalk again at last.

  So he turned his face southward, and set off. But he was desperately tired, and he dreaded going home, because going home would mean facing the thing that he had run away from; and his dread somehow made it harder to find the way.

  The trees that should have begun to thin out crowded thicker and thicker about him as he went, and there was no way through the tangled thickets of bramble and holly, so that he must cast about for the narrow game-tracks worn by the feet of the deer, that never led in the right direction. It seemed that he would never win free of the choking tangle, and he was too tired, too wretched to care very much. Only—only it seemed that a change was coming over the forest.

  Or maybe it was that he was awake and aware of the forest now as he had not been before; awake to the darkness and the crowding trees that were suddenly—not quite what trees should be, not quite what they were in the day-time; to the furry hush that was full of voices, the whispering, rustling, stealthy voices of the forest, that were not the voices of the day-time, either. There were little nameless rustlings through the undergrowth, the soft swish of wings through the branches overhead; in the distance a small animal screamed, and Drem knew that somewhere a fox had made its kill. Surely the whole forest was disturbed tonight. But those were not the sounds that raised the hair on the back of his neck. Once he thought he heard the breathing of a big animal close at hand, and as he checked, his own breath caught in his throat; something brushed through the undergrowth towards him, and there was a sudden silver pattering like rain among the leaves—but it was not raining. He pushed on again, more quickly now, carelessly, stumbling often among the underbrush; and when he stopped once more, to listen and make sure of his direction, suddenly the breathing was there again; a faint, slow panting, just behind him. He whirled about, his hand on the knife in his belt, but there was nothing there. Nothing but the furry darkness. And far off through the trees, he thought that something laughed. His heart was racing now, sickeningly, right up in his throat; he struggled on again, blindly. Mustn’t stop any more; it was when you stopped that you heard things. But even as he blundered on, above the brushing and crackling that he made, above the drubbing of his heart, he heard that soft, stealthy panting, as though the Thing prowled at his heels. But it was not only at his heels now, it was all around him, in front as well as behind, and the forest itself, the whole forest was like some great hunting cat crouched to spring. ‘Don’t run!’ said the hunter that was born and bred in him and that knew the ways of the wild through a hundred generations. ‘Don’t run!’ But terror had him in its power, and he was running, with no more sense of direction than a mouse with a stoat behind it.

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nbsp; Brambles tore his skin, fallen branches tripped him, low-hanging boughs slashed across his face as he crashed through the undergrowth that seemed to lay hold of him with wicked, clawing hands. This was what the hunters spoke of under their breaths around the fire. This was the Fear that walked the forest, the Terror of the Soul. He had never felt it before, but the hunter within him knew it; the Fear that prowled soft-footed beyond the cave mouth and the firelight.

  Panting, sweating, sobbing, he crashed through a screen of alder scrub on the edge of a little clearing, and next instant had pitched forward and was rolling over down a slope rustling with last year’s leaves. He reached the bottom with what breath he had had left all knocked out of him, and found himself almost under a great hollow bole of roots and uptorn earth where a huge oak tree had come down in some past winter gale. It seemed to offer shelter, the shelter that even a very small cave gives from the Fear that prowls outside; and with a shuddering gasp, Drem crawled in as far as he could over the deep, rustling softness of drifted oak leaves, and crouched down, pressed against the roughness of the torn roots.

  For a long while he crouched there with drubbing heart, still shivering and sweating, while the Fear snuffled about the opening of his refuge. But little by little the Fear faded and went farther away. Strength and steadfastness seemed to come out to him from the torn roots of the great tree that had been a forest king in its day; his heart quietened and his breath came slower. And gradually his terror and his misery alike grew dim. He did not know that he was falling asleep like a small, exhausted animal . . .

  He woke with a crash, and the taste of terror in his throat. There was hot breath panting in his face, and something was snuffing at his shoulder.

  For a moment he lay quite still, everything in him seeming to curl in on itself and turn to ice, knowing that the thing could only be a wolf, and that if he made the slightest movement it would be at his throat before ever he could whip the knife from his belt. Then a voice said softly, ‘Sa, what have we here, then? Off, Swift-foot! Back now, Fand!’ And his eyes flew open to see a man—or something in the shape of a man—bending over him, head and shoulders blotted dark against the white light of moon-rise; and the thing that had been snuffing at his shoulder drew back with a whine.