He was aware of two winds blowing at the same time through the tattered remains of the clan before him. One was a kind of breath of relief. At least, that must mean there was to be no killing off of prisoners such as often followed such a victory. To die in battle was one thing, and not a great one, to a warrior people; to die as a sacrifice to the conqueror’s gods was quite another. The other wind was a little cold one, and he did not in those first moments understand its meaning.
Teleri got up and faced him. There was blood all down the front of her tunic. ‘Why you?’ she said.
Now that she had moved, the torchlight fell where her shadow had lain; and he saw that the man she had been kneeling over was Dara. Dara lying with eyes half open and half closed, a sodden mass of rags still oozing darkly between his neck and shoulder. He went closer, and stood looking down. ‘Will he live?’
‘I do not know,’ Teleri said, and again asked her question, ‘Why you?’
‘Because I am the Chieftain’s son.’
‘Dara is the Chieftain.’
And Lubrin, his head still too confused for clear thought, knew in the dark inmost places of himself that that was a truth better kept away from Dara, and from their captors, at least for the present time; better kept very far away indeed.
Mindful of the guards, he kept his voice down. ‘I am thinking that he will not make much showing as Chieftain, for a while and a while.’
And Teleri answered as quietly, ‘I am thinking that he would not make much showing ever, as the ears and mouth between us and our conquerors!’
And Lubrin knew the meaning of the little cold wind.
The weight of the chieftainship was like to be greater even than he had thought.
The world had begun to swim round him again. By a great effort of will he kept himself upright on his feet, and walked away from her, away from Dara, into the darkest and farthest corner of the corral; and crumpled to his knees and began retching until it seemed that he must throw up the very heart out of his body.
7
Captive Winter
‘What will they be keeping us for?’ someone asked.
And ‘They will be having a use for us,’ someone answered. ‘We shall know it soon enough.’
It was true that the conquerors had a use for them; and soon enough they knew what it was. Now that they had captured the dun, it seemed to the Attribates not large or strong enough for the frontier fortress of a great tribe. The turf and timber walls must be thrust out on the southern side, the remaining ramparts repaired and strengthened, the ditches dug wider and deeper. It was not for the Attribates, the Spear Lords, to do such work. It was work for the Old People, the Dark People. But the Old People had simply melted into the woods when the fighting began. One day, they would drift back, but not yet. That was always the way of the Old People, who saw the conquerors come and go or become Old People in their turn. So there was work and to spare, that autumn and winter, for Lubrin and the tattered remains of his clan.
At first, they were wild to rise against their conquerors and fight their way out.
Lubrin flung his whole weight against that. ‘It would be a fine red way to die, nothing more. Death for all that is left of the clan, even for the cubs. Have you forgotten the cubs? This way – ’
‘This way, we may live – with the Attribates’ heels on our necks.’ Kuno, who had been with him in the Boys’ House, looked him straight and bitter in the eye. ‘Easy it is to see that you have the Dark blood in you; easy it is to hear it speaking in your words.’
And a jagged mutter of agreement rose around him.
A little drum began to beat deep down at the base of Lubrin’s throat. He forced it into stillness. If they began to quarrel among themselves it would be the end indeed.
‘He is of one blood with the Woman of the Clan!’ That was Dara’s voice, still not much more than a breathless croak, and looking round, Lubrin saw him straining up on to his elbow from the old cowskin rug on which he lay in the shelter of the bank. His face looked as though it had been cut from the white inner layer of birch bark, his hair was still dark with sweat from the wound-fever that had scarcely left him. But his eyes, set back in bony hollows, were wide and challenging, and every hair seemed standing on end like angry hackles. ‘And if any man speaks such words again, let him wait until I can stand upright, and I will thrust them back down his throat until he chokes on them!’
In that moment, Lubrin was sure for the first time that Dara was going to live. And there came to him the same rush of warmth and strength that he had felt beside the Chieftain’s hearth on the night that Teleri was born. The warm sense of increase that comes in battle from the awareness of a friend’s shoulder against one’s own.
He turned again to face the rest of the clan. ‘In this way—’ He took the thing up where he had left it, and found that now, angry and unwilling though they were, they were listening to him, and in silence. ‘If we hold together, and wait, as seed-time waits for harvest, one day our chance may come to be a free people once again.’
‘How?’ someone demanded.
‘I do not know,’ Lubrin heard his own voice speaking words that did not seem to be altogether his own. ‘I am not Ishtoreth of the Oak. If he were yet living, maybe he would know. It is in my mind that if we wait surely the day will come when we are once again a free people. Maybe that also is the Dark blood speaking in my words.’
The tongues of the Iceni and the Attribates were near enough kin for each to understand what the other said. But it had come to the Horse People almost from the first day of their captivity, that they could speak together, so, even in the hearing of their guards, if they did not do it too often or too obviously, by using the tongue of the Boys’ House. Every Boys’ House made up its own tongue and spoke it during the training years, and then when the manhood rites were over, never again. But now it was more important to be able to speak together, without their conquerors knowing every word they said, than it was to obey the custom of the Boys’ House. After a while, they even let in the Women’s Side, but that was not yet.
Winter passed, and spring came back to the world, and soon the swifts would be darting, sickle-winged along the flanks of the High Chalk. Of the Iceni’s wounded, Dara and a handful more had mended, and the rest had died, along with most of the old people and some of the children. Some of the women had gone too, but that was in another way, the old, old way of women going to conquerors who have killed their men. The Iceni saw them still, from a distance among the women and children of the Attribates – for the newcomers had brought up their own families with them, as Lubrin’s clan had done in their day, or sent back for them before winter closed in. The Iceni spoke the names of their dead, but they did not speak the names of those women any more.
The work on the dun was well on towards its end; the fresh-cut chalk of the ditches gleamed fiercely white, the new wood of the stockades shone golden where the weathered grey of the old timbers had been. And a day came that started off like any other day. . . .
Noon of that day came, and they laid down adzes and antler picks, pots of lime-wash and the great wicker carrying-creels, for the noon-time breathing space. And Lubrin, in the broad flat bottom of the outer ditch, saw a pointed flint lying loose beside his left foot, and picked it up for no reason except that it was there, and sat turning it in his fingers and looking at it. On one side it was dark, almost blue, and flat; on the other it was weathered grey, and curved comfortably into the hollow of his hand. It had somehow not the feel of a natural flint, but of having been chipped out and shaped and used by someone, maybe very long ago; maybe long before the dun was there at all. He wondered who it was, and how his shaped flint came to be half-buried in the chalk. And while he wondered, a knot of horses went by at the gallop, along the turf below the dun. Down there in the ditch, he could not see them, but he heard the soft ragged flurry of hoofbeats sweeping nearer, and past, and dying away, and his inner eye, the eye in the darkness behind his forehead, knew the si
ght and shape and sweep of their passing.
The whiteness of the raw chalk was beside him, and the pointed flint was in his hand; and, almost unthinking, he began to draw on the wall of the ditch. It was the first time he had made a picture-magic since before the Attribates came. He drew the leading horse, and another half a length behind and then a third. . . . He drew the speed and the power, and the blurred flow of manes and tails, and the thunder of hooves, and the restlessness of spring time in their heels.
A shadow fell across the white dazzle of the chalk, and he looked round to see Cradoc the Chieftain standing behind him. Cradoc, who had been last autumn’s war-chief, and now was lord of the dun, often came striding along the new defences to see how the work went. He was standing with his legs straddled and his thumbs in his belt, and his head tipped to one side. His narrowed gaze flicked from the scratches on the chalk to Lubrin’s face and back again.
‘What is this that you do?’
‘I make a picture of the horse herd that went by just now,’ Lubrin said. ‘Did you not hear them?’
‘I heard them.’ Cradoc looked more closely. ‘So-o. The leader I see. And this horse – and this – and then here is the last one of all. But what are these strange waving lines between?’
‘That is the main mass of the herd.’
‘But they are horses – whole horses, as the others are?’ Cradoc frowned, puzzled and enquiring.
‘Surely. But you do not see them whole horses as the others are.’ Lubrin tried seriously to explain. ‘Unless you are watching a particular beast in their midst, when did you ever see more of a horseherd at the gallop than the first two or three, and the last one – and between, just the mass of the herd, that flows and changes as it goes.
‘I have not seen this kind of picture-making before,’ Cradoc said. ‘Do others of your people make in this way?’
Lubrin shook his head. ‘For my people, as for yours, horses are like the horses on the gold trading-pieces that you count for wealth. I draw what I see; but I think that all men do not see as I do.’
8
The Bargain
For a while, that was all. And then one evening Cradoc grew bored in his hall after supper. He knew all the songs that his harper could sing, and he wanted something new. And he thought of the little dark Chief’s son who could catch the speed and power of a galloping horse herd in a few flowing lines.
He crooked a finger for his armour bearer, ‘Ferradach, go you down to the captives’ corral, and bring me up the old Chief’s son; him they call Lubrin Dhu.’
So a while later, Lubrin found himself standing in the Chieftain’s hall, where he had not stood since before the Attribates came; standing before Cradoc the Chieftain, who sprawled on the piled skins of the High Place, where his father had sat and Dara should have sat after him. He knew that if he looked up, he would see his father’s head, grinning and smoke-withered on the roof-beam above him. He knew that he should look up. But he could not force himself to look higher than Cradoc’s face.
‘Draw for me,’ Cradoc said.
Surprise made Lubrin check for a moment. Then he said, ‘Why will I draw for you?’
‘Because I am minded for something new.’
‘Bid your harper to make a new song.’
‘He only makes the old songs over again,’ Cradoc complained. ‘Therefore draw for me – here on the hearth stone.’
‘I do not draw because another man bids me,’ Lubrin said.
The silence between them held while a man might take three breaths, slowly. (‘They can kill me, but I will not make the picture-magic for them,’ Lubrin thought.)
And Cradoc answered the thought as though it had been spoken. ‘Na, na, it is not yourself that I shall kill. But let you remember that you answer to me for your people.’
The sickness rose in Lubrin’s throat; but he remembered the tattered remains of a clan, who were his people; and he asked between his teeth, ‘What would you have me draw?’
‘Draw more horses,’ said Cradoc the Chieftain.
So Lubrin took charred sticks from the fire and squatted down beside the hearth-stone, and began to draw. It was the same stone on which he had tried to draw old Sinnoch’s harpsong, so long ago.
He drew a pair of fighting stallions in a few swirling and savage lines, while the Chieftain leaned forward, arms across his knees, and the warriors and their women crowded close to look. And then he rubbed the lines away, and drew a mare giving suck to her foal. And then he drew a war-pony standing at check, head up to listen to the sound of distant warhorns, or maybe snuffling the wind for the scent of danger to the herd. But when he would have rubbed that away also, the Chieftain leaned forward quickly and caught his wrist. ‘Na! Let be!’
So Lubrin laid aside the charred stick, and sat back on his heels. And while he squatted there, waiting like a hound, he thought, for his master’s whistle, and while all about him the warriors looked on, Cradoc continued to lean forward on his crossed arms and stare down at the war-pony scratched in its few charwood lines on the hearthstone. In a while, he held out his hand for his great bronze wine-cup, and when his cup-bearer brought it to him, took it and drank deeply, then sat up and looked round at his crowding hearth companions. ‘I have been thinking.’
‘Cradoc the Chieftain has been thinking! Sound it forth on the warhorns!’ said Anbar, who was the Chief’s foster-brother, and free to jest with him as not even the rest of the hearth companions quite dared to do.
Cradoc’s teeth showed, strong and crooked in the flash of a grin, but he shook his head. ‘I have been thinking it is a sore waste of horses, this making on the hearth-stone and then brushing away almost as swiftly as though they were formed of the hearth smoke itself. I have been thinking that now we have carried our frontiers up here on to the High Chalk, and made our new rampart of the old run of the Downs, and pitched our outmost herding tents here in this dun that we have made greater as befits a great people—’
(‘That you have made greater!’ thought Lubrin, feeling the scarred hardness of his hands, and remembering old men and sick men who had died among the timber and wet chalk in the winter that was past.)
‘—and surely it would be a fine thing if, here on the outward-facing scarp, we should have such a horse as this one, but half a hillside high, cut into the chalk, to last for all time and say to all men that here stands the frontier of the Attribates.’ Cradoc brought both hands down with an open-palmed thwack on his knees. ‘To say that here stands our landmark, not to be shifted while grass grows over the Chalk and foaling time returns with the spring!’
One of his companions nodded. ‘Such a horse of power would give its strength to the frontier. Also it would please Lugh the Sun Lord, that he may send us many foals and many sons.’
‘That, too,’ said an older man, sagely. ‘Aye, surely such a great Sun Horse, which is the sign of the Attribates, his people, must find favour with the Sun Lord!’
The talk washed to and fro over Lubrin’s head; and then Cradoc was speaking to him again. ‘Have you the skill? Could you make a horse the like of that?’
A horse cut out of the downland turf, white against the green, half a hillside high. Lubrin could see it. And from somewhere a memory came to him; a very small memory, of lying out along the branch of his wych-elm and holding up a leaf and finding that he could make it cover his father’s dun and its whole hillside. Maybe one could begin the horse like that. Make a first drawing very small, and hold it up and notice where the lines came? ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘A horse that size is surely a task for giants; but there might be a way.’
‘So. The new walls are all but finished. Let you take as many of your people as you need, to help you.’
‘There are none that I shall need,’ said Lubrin, and got to his feet.
‘To clear so much turf yourself would be a task for a giant indeed. You will need other hands beside your own.’
‘You have it wrong. I shall not need my people’s help, becaus
e I will not make you your hill-high Sun Horse,’ Lubrin said flatly. ‘I think that there might be a way, but I will not seek to find it.’
Yet again there was a waiting silence, Lubrin and the Chieftain staring levelly at each other, and the warriors watching to see what would break between them.
‘It is not wise to speak such words to me,’ the Chieftain said at last. ‘You have shown me already that you do not fear what I can do to you. But I have told you already to remember your people, who lie in the hollow of my hand.’ And as he spoke, he slowly clenched his hand into a fist, tighter and tighter until the knuckles shone yellow-white and it seemed as though blood might come oozing out, dark as crushed bramble juice, between the fingers. It was a gesture that said more than words could do.
And the silence settled again, thick as a swarm of flies.
Then, looking his conqueror eye into eye, Lubrin said, ‘Such a thing as this horse you speak of cannot be made unwillingly. If you force me, by threats of what you will do to my people, I can try to make the thing for you. But the gods will not breathe life into it at another man’s commanding; and what I make will be without power or meaning as an unlit lamp. You may have your horse, but it will not be worth having.’
And even while he spoke, he was aware of the silence continuing inside himself; and in the heart of the silence, something telling him what he had to do. He was aware of other things too, at the same time; the saddest and most surprising of them, that there could so easily have been friendship between him and the fair-haired man in the High Seat, who he was fighting for the life of the clan. And again, he was aware of the blackened and withered head on the roof-beam. He wrenched up his own head as though to meet its dead gaze, and cried out to it in his heart, ‘Tigernann my father, you said it might be a harder thing than to lead a chariot charge. I do what I may to save the clan; that is more important than all else. It is the only thing that matters now.’