The last picture.
In the splinter of time while the knowledge was only a half-knowledge within him, the buzzard sighted its prey and came plummeting out of the sky and, away over towards the foot of the Downs, something died. Too far for Lubrin to hear any cry, if there was one, but he was sharply aware of the small death as though it had happened in his cupped hands.
In that split moment of time, the unspoken, unthought thing between him and Cradoc came out of the dark, and he looked it in the face, and found that he had always known it. It was the last sealing of the bargain between them. It was his own death. His blood, his life to quicken the god-horse of his making; just as the Old People shed the life of a man into the furrows every seven years to quicken the seed-corn to harvest.
He found that his hands were clenched and shaking, and his heart racing as though he had been running hard on the hunting trail, and there was a churning sickness in his belly. Carefully he unclenched his hands and watched them grow steady as though he was watching somebody else’s. The sickness passed and little by little his heart quietened. Lying out there along the branch, he accepted that he was going to die for the rags of his clan. There was nothing strange in that, after all. It was the king’s right, the Chief’s right, to stand between the people and the gods; to die for the people when the need came. That had always been the way of it. He was all that was left of the Chief’s sons, and the horse was of his making. But he needed a little while to grow used to his accepting, before he went back and looked again into the faces of other men. He needed the strength and the quietness of the great tree. And slowly, the quiet came to him; such quietness that after a while he even slept a little, having lain wakeful all the night before.
And the old dream of the white mare that he had not dreamed for a long time, came back to him. His sleep was so light that it was almost a waking dream, and there was a moment when he roused from it, when dream and waking overlapped, and he saw the white mare and the distant hillside with the same eyes. Then the dream faded, and left him to the waking world. But he had seen the two together, he had seen the horse, the mare, that he must make up there on the high scarp of the Chalk. He knew how she must move, flowing with the flow of the Downs on their way from sunrise to sunset. It was as though Epona herself had touched him in his sleep, saying, ‘See – this is the way that it must go.’
The shadows were growing long as he dropped from his tree, and yet again started on the way back. This time he did not make straight for the dun, but swung away eastward, climbing uphill by the dizzying slope behind the Dragon Hill, out on to the high emptiness of turf where the dead patterns of birch saplings waited for him. He did not know quite why he went there. There was nothing more that he could do that evening; but the place called him, and he answered the call. And then, as he stood there thinking of the new lines that he would begin to set out tomorrow, he heard horses’ hooves behind him on the turf, and turned, half expecting a mare as white as thorn blossom. But it was Cradoc, riding his favourite red stallion, with a couple of hunting dogs loping along behind.
The horse had been one of Tigernann’s, and was surefooted as a goat on the plunging slope. Cradoc reined him in, and sat looking down at Lubrin, and from him to the birch saplings, the wind plucking at his saffron cloak.
‘Strange,’ he said, ‘up here it means nothing at all, but from across the vale it begins to be a horse indeed. The work goes well.’
And looking up into the bright, harshly blue eyes of the man above him, Lubrin knew that he had been right. He could finish this horse, if he wanted to, and nobody but he would ever know that he had not kept his bargain to the full. Nobody but he would ever know that he had betrayed the dream, the vision that comes to all the makers of the world, before they make a new thing, whether it be a song, or a sword, or a chalk-cut horse, half a hillside high.
He shook his head. ‘It does not go well. There is no life in it, and it is the wrong horse. But I know now how to make the right one, and tomorrow I will start again.’
‘And if I say that this horse pleases me well enough?’
‘It must also please me,’ Lubrin said. Suddenly he smiled. ‘So. We struck a bargain, that I should make the horse, and if it seemed to you good, my people should go free. But if this is the last picture-magic that ever I shall make, let me make it to the best that is in me.’
There was a small sharp silence. The red stallion flung up his head and side-stepped on the steep turf as though his rider had jerked the rein.
‘Or is it that you think I only seek to gain time?’ Lubrin said. ‘A little more time to go on living? That would be a sad way to die.’
And the thing was out in the open between them.
Cradoc shook his head; and something in his face told Lubrin that for him, too, the thing had been left lying in the dark, until the moment came for looking at it.
‘When the horse is finished, and seems good to both of us, I shall be ready,’ Lubrin said.
High over the Chalk, the larks were singing, the shimmer of their song tossed to and fro on the evening wind. Cradoc said. ‘The priests have not demanded it.’
‘The priests have no need.’ Lubrin put up a hand to thrust back the dark hair that was blowing in his eyes. ‘They know that the thing is for the chief-kind. They know that it is in the pattern between you and me; and between the people and the gods.’
11
The Great Loneliness
When Lubrin went back to the corral the dusk was deepening and the light of the cooking-fires beginning to bite. Faces turned questioningly towards him, and Dara looked up from the strap that he was mending, and asked, ‘Is it well with the White Horse?’
‘Na,’ Lubrin said, ‘it is not well, though Cradoc sees nothing amiss.’
‘Surely that is all that matters,’ said Teleri, from the Women’s Side.
‘Na,’ Lubrin said again. ‘It is not all that matters.’ He looked round at the faces in the firelight; the faces of his people; seeing them very clearly and very completely, now that he knew he was going to die for them.
‘What more?’ demanded Teleri, fiercely, as though suddenly she was trying to deny something.
‘It matters that it should be worthy of Epona, the Mother of Foals,’ said Lubrin Dhu. ‘And since my life will be shed to quicken it when the making is finished, it matters that it should be worth dying for.’
A rustle of sound not much louder than a caught breath rose from the small tattered crowd, a stirring of little movements quickly stilled. But there was nothing startled in their stirring. They too, knew the pattern.
Only, out of the quiet that followed, Dara looked up from the strap that he was working on, and said, ‘I am the new Chief. It should be for me to die for the life of the clan.’
‘Na,’ Lubrin said, ‘it is for you, who are the new Chief, for you and for Teleri to lead the clan north to the new herding runs. I am the old Chief’s son, I am the maker of the horse. Epona herself has shown me the way that it must be done. The dying is for me.’
It was quite simple now, as complete and inevitable and rounded in on itself as the way a white convolvulus flower opens in the morning and when the single day of its life is over, folds back at evening into the shape of the bud.
He sat down beside Dara. ‘Tomorrow we will start the work again.’
So they began the work again, laying the lime-daubed hides and then the saplings. And Lubrin went to and fro between the hill scarp and his look-out tree. But now it seemed that Epona had indeed touched him, and he could not put a line wrong. Now, it was not the outer seeming of a horse that he was tracing up there on the steep hillside, but something far closer to those picture-magics in which he had tried to catch the pattern of a swallow’s flight or the struck notes of a harp.
One long, lovely, unbroken line swept the whole length of arched neck and back and streaming tail, more than a hundred and twenty strides from pricked ears to tail-tip; yet at its broadest place, the light belly was lit
tle more than four strides across. The head had something of a falcon’s look about it; the two farthest legs did not join the body at all. None of that mattered. He was not making the outward seeming, up there among the drifting cloud-shadows and the lark song. He was making the power and the beauty and the potency of a horse, of Epona herself, though his conquerors would never know it.
Dara and the rest said nothing as to the strangeness of what they did. But they were too close to see more than the scatter of markers on the grass, and maybe they did not know it, and would not know it until the day they set out on the northward drove, and looked back from across the valley. They did what Lubrin told them to do, as they would have carried out the bidding of the priest-kind, as the oxhides were replaced once again by the lime-daubed saplings, and the rough outline of the saplings was followed out more finely with long strips of pegged hide – even one oxhide cut round and round can make a good broad strip more than a spear-throw long. And all the while, they took care, even Teleri, even Dara, never to step in his shadow. His sun shadow or his moon shadow, or even his shadow cast by the cooking-fires in the corral at dusk. And he began to feel very much alone; even more alone than he had done before, and in a different way.
On the evening that the pegged outline was complete, Lubrin Dhu walked the whole length of it, starting from the muzzle and returning to the muzzle again. No use now to go out to the wych-elm, the slender lines of the rawhide strips would not carry so far on the sight. But the feel of the turf beneath his feet as he went told him that all was well.
‘Tomorrow we will start cutting the turf,’ he said to Dara, who had walked with him at a little distance.
‘So much hurry?’ said Dara, with a rawness sounding at the back of his throat.
Lubrin was looking into the west, where a long flight of feathery cloud was touched to flame by the setting sun. ‘It is not only the turf we shall have to cut away, but all the top chalk until we come to the clean white underneath. It will take a long time, and it may be that things will happen to hold us back. The weather may break. And all must be finished by harvest, or it will be too late to start north this year. We must make good time while we can.’
So the next morning they began to cut and lift the turf. Lubrin himself made the outside cuts with a bronze axehead, while Dara and the other men stripped away the green hide of downland turf with its starring of small bright flowers, clover and thyme and eyebright, to be carried away by the women in their great creels and tipped into the deep, brushgrown hollow far below.
Days went by, and days went by, and the men with their mattocks and broad deer-horn picks were digging down into the chalk itself; cutting away the dull earth-stained top layers for the women to carry away and stack in spoil-heaps; then into the clean white chalk thigh-deep beneath the grass. And that, too, was stacked nearby, ready to go back on top when all the duller surface chalk had been shovelled in again.
And all that summer, as the huge strange figure took shape on the hillside, and men a day’s journey away saw it on their southern skyline, and wondered what magic the men of the High Chalk were making, all that summer, the weather was gentle, so that the barley grew tall-stemmed and heavy in the ear, in the corn plots along the flanks of the Downs, with no high winds or thunder rain to beat it down. And the brood mares dropped strong foals; so that men knew the magic was good, and in after years spoke of that time to their great grandsons as the Summer of the White Horse.
The work drew on towards its end, and the corn ripened to harvest; and on the day that the last swathe was cut, Lubrin Dhu smoothed the last layer of white chalk on the strange bird-horse head, and knew that his work was done.
Next morning, while his own clan and those of the Old People who had returned, were gathering in the sheaves, he went out to his looking-tree. The branches of the great wych-elm that had been purple-flushed with early spring-time when he began the work, were deep-layered now with the broad dark leaves of summer’s end. And he had to pull aside two branches to make an opening, before he could look across the vale and see the thing that he had made.
There she was, the white mare of his dream, moving at an easy canter, as though she knew that she had far to go; her arched neck and the long streaming line of her tail echoing the sweep of the Downs, as though they had been part of each other since the morning-time of the world, and would be part of each other while time lasted. He saw how strange she was, with that almost falcon head, her two furthest legs that did not even join her body. But he saw that it was her strangeness that gave her her lovely lightness of movement, that made her a creature of fire and moonlight and power and beauty. And looking out to her through his gap in the branches, Lubrin knew that he had come as near to catching the wholeness of the dream, as near to making a perfect thing as it is given to mortal man to do, even when the finger of his god is upon him.
Now there was only the one thing more that he had to do.
He laid his hand against the rough bark of the wych-elm, as though touching a friend in farewell, knowing that he would never feel the liveness of the great branch under him again. Then he dropped to the ground, and for the last time of all, headed back towards the wave-lift of the downs, and the dun that had been the strong-place of his clan, to tell Cradoc of the Attribates that he was ready.
He found the Chieftain in the stable court, looking at a new chariot, the swallows twittering under the eaves and darting low among the midge cloud overhead.
‘Cradoc the Chieftain, I have made you your White Horse, your frontier-mark. Will you go now, and look.’
Cradoc looked up from examining the rawhide lashings of the yoke-pole, and shook his head. ‘I have watched it in the making, as I came and went all summer long; that you know well. There is no need that I go now and look.’
‘Then let you say – does it seem to you good?’
‘The first horse would have seemed as good,’ Cradoc said. ‘But we are both of a Horse People, you and I.’ (Memory tugged at Lubrin: his father in that same court saying much the same words. The swallows had been darting low that time, too.) ‘We know a fine mare when we see one. She will bring many foals to the horse herd, and fine sons to the Women’s Side. Yes, she seems to me good.’
‘Then I will go and bid my people to make ready for the drove,’ Lubrin said.
‘In four days, it will be the feast of Lammas. When the Lammas fires are cold, the horses shall be ready, and the gates stand open for your people to go free,’ said Cradoc the Chieftain.
12
Song of the Northward Droving
The horses were brought up, trampling through a cloud of white summer dust, and corralled close to the dun. A small mixed herd, not the flower of the horse-runs, Lubrin saw, looking them over, not the dregs either; Cradoc was playing fair. Two stallions penned by themselves, one dark brown, one fox-red, a score or more of mares, several of them showing signs of being in foal; a scatter of rough-coated two-year-olds, who would likely give trouble on the journey, five herd ponies. . . .
On Lammas Eve the twin fires flared on the high ridge of the Chalk eastward of the dun, and the pick of the cattle and horse herds were driven between them, that they might be fruitful in the coming year. They came up out of the dark, with a soft thunder of hooves, the herdsmen shouting behind them. And Lubrin standing among his own people – for they too, were gathered to the Lammas fires – saw it all, as he had seen it so many times before; the wild-eyed high-crested stallions, the frightened mares with their foals at heel, bursting out of the dark into the red glare of the fires, then gone again into the dark, over the crest of the ridge. Once he glimpsed among the torrent of upflung heads and streaming manes and tails the gleam of firelight on a milky flank, as a white mare went by, out of the dark and into the dark again like a dissolving dream. Like the white dream-mare who had been a part of him all his life, and now waited for him, cut into the chalk only a spear’s throw below the crest where the Lammas fires streamed out on the light wind.
Last of all the horses, the fox-red stallion and the three best of his mares went through between the fires, that they too, should have the year’s fruitfulness to carry north with them. And when the cattle had followed, and the fires were sinking, some of the young warriors began to catch their women by the hand and run with them through the last dying flames, so that they might have fine sons. Dara stepped forward from the gaunt and ragged Men’s Side of the Iceni and caught Teleri by the hand, and ran with her, their feet scattering the glowing embers, and she skirling like a springtime curlew in the sudden sharp gladness of coming freedom. Others of the Iceni followed. They would need bairns, as well as foals in the new herding runs.
Lubrin watched them.
Now that the flames had sunk little and low, no more than curled petals of fire here and there among the ash, the night sky that had been blotted out by the red flare of them had come back, and with it the stars; the stars of wayfaring and the hunting trail and the herding runs. Lubrin was glad that it was a night of stars.
Morning came, with the green plover calling, and a faint mist that lay low across the forest until it grew ragged and wisped away before the sun. And the white mare on the hillside gazed back open-eyed into the morning sky. And the great gates of the dun stood open for the people of the Iceni to pass through. Three of the men who were to ride herd had already mounted; and the little band of horses had been brought from the corral. Goods and small children were being loaded on to a couple of ancient war-carts or into panniers across the backs of small sturdy ponies; men and women carrying creels and bundles, one leading an elderly goat. Some of the men were carrying spears for the first time in many moons; the women had their tattered and weather-stained gowns hitched high through their belts for wayfaring. There were no old people. The year of captivity had taken a heavy toll of the old, because they were without hope; some had even drunk sleeping-juice as the time drew near, knowing that they must be left behind or become a burden to the rest of the clan.