Warrior Scarlet (10 page)

NEXT DAY DREM
heard that the bronze-smith had moved on, taking with him the strange grey dagger with the fire at its heart, despite all the Chieftain’s efforts to make him part with it; and Dumnorix the lord of three hundred spears had gone to look for a bear to kill, to ease his temper.

Blai never spoke of what had happened, and when the other children taunted her with it she cried out on them as though amazed that they could be so foolish. ‘That was not my father! Something happened to
my
father so that he could not come back!’ Nothing would shake her in that. It was almost as though she believed it herself. Drem’s mother was gentler to her than usual in those days, but being gentle with Blai, it seemed, was no good; she merely shrank away, like a wild thing backing from a kind hand, looking sideways and showing its teeth.

So that winter came and wore away, and the year came up again out of the dark. The whitethorn of the steading hedge was curdled with blossom, and there were young calves to bring in and stall in the hurdled-off part of the house-place; that year’s new warriors were made, in the night and the day before Beltane, and the Beltane fires blazed on the Hill of Gathering, before the grave mound of the forgotten champion who slept there; and it was time for Drem to go to the Boys’ House.

The Boys’ House stood in the garth of the Chieftain’s steading, among the other turf-thatched bothies that made up the Hall of Dumnorix. From their twelfth spring until the spring that they were fifteen years old, the boys of the Clan were brought up there, as it were at the Chieftain’s hearth. They learned the use of broad spear and throw-spear, sword and buckler and the long war-bow of the tribes. They learned to handle hound and pony; they hunted with the young hunters of the Clan, learning to follow a three-day-old spoor as though it were a blazed trail. They fought and wrestled together and grew strong; and together they learned to go cold and hungry, and to bear pain without flinching. And so, under the eyes of the Chieftain and of old Kylan who ruled the Boys’ House with his oxhide whip, the warriors of the Clan were made.

When the morning came for Drem to be setting out, Drustic gave him much useful advice, remembered from his own years in the Boys’ House, and a particularly well-balanced throw-spear of his own, which Drem thought a great deal more of than he did of the advice. And his mother gave him a cloak of thick brown wool with a stripe of kingfisher blue along the edge, a fine cloak, though it was too long for him, as yet. When he had eaten his morning barley cake and mare’s milk curds—always it must be mare’s milk curds flavoured with wild garlic, on the day one went to the Boys’ House—he went and knelt before Cathlan the Old as he sat on his folded bearskin beside the fire, and set his hand on the old man’s thigh in leave-taking.

‘I go now, my Grandfather.’

‘Sa, you go now, son of my youngest son, little red fighting cock,’ Cathlan said, leaning forward to peer down at him with those fierce, gold-irised eyes, ‘and truly I think that you will be a seasoned fighter before you come again with your Wolf Slaying behind you—if ever you do—Aiee, if ever you do. But I will tell you this: it is good, for you, that your years in the Boys’ House will be the years of Vortrix the Chieftain’s son, also. For ever after, the men who trained together as boys, and slew their wolves and passed into the Men’s side together are a
brotherhood; and the Chieftain does not forget the men who did these things with him. I know, ah, I know, I who slew my wolf in the same year with Belutugradus, the great grandsire of this one.’

Drem bent his forehead on to his hand as it rested on the old man’s thigh; then rose and took leave of his mother, driving his head for a moment into the hollow between her neck and shoulder that was warm and white and soft even though her voice was often harsh with scolding. Then he caught up his new spear and flung his cloak across his shoulder, and went out into the morning, whistling Whitethroat to heel. He forgot to take his leave of Blai at all.

The parting from his family sat lightly on him, for he was used to being away from home, and had come and gone as the mood took him, since the days when he had gone up to Doli and the shepherds on the High Chalk. But at the foot of the driftway, between the waking green of the young barley, and the sleeping fallow, he halted, knowing that the time had come for a harder leave-taking. He had known that it would be no good tying Whitethroat up to keep him from following, when he went down to the Boys’ House, and so for a long time past he had been training the great hound to go home alone when he bade him. And now it was the time for putting the training to the test.

Suddenly the three years that had seemed a proud thing earlier that morning, looked very long and grey; and there was an ache in his throat as he dropped his spear and called Whitethroat from snuffing among the coarse grass and the pimpernels and yellow vetch at the side of the rough chalk, and squatted down to talk to him, holding his muzzle and rubbing behind his ears in the warm hollows where he loved to be rubbed. ‘I must go down to the Boys’ House, brother, and I cannot take you with me. Soon I will come again, soon and often, and we will hunt together. But now you must run with Drustic’s hounds, and do as Drustic bids you.’

And Whitethroat talked back in the singing growl he always
made when Drem rubbed behind his ears, holding his head low and flattened, and turning it for Drem to come at yet more delicious places.

Drem stopped rubbing at last, and pressed his face down for a moment on to the top of the dog’s rough head; then he sprang up. ‘Go home! It is time to be going home, brother!’

Whitethroat pressed his head against Drem’s knee, his tail swinging.

‘Go home! Home now!’ Drem ordered, pointing. And the great hound looked from his face to the pointing finger and back again, whimpering; understanding what Drem wanted of him, understanding also that this time was not like the other times that he had been ordered home.

Drem caught him by the studded collar and dragged him round to face up the driftway. ‘Home! Off now! Go home, can’t you!’ His voice was rough and angry with the unshed tears in his throat; and he thumped Whitethroat hard on the rump with his clenched fist.

Whitethroat went then, with a piteous puppy-whimpering, his head down and his proud bushy tail that came from his wolf father tucked between his legs. And Drem caught up his throw-spear and ran, with his shoulders hunched and the ball of tears swelling in his throat.

When he reached the garth of the Chieftain’s steading, he found a little knot of boys already gathered before the empty doorway of the Boys’ House. Vortrix the Chieftain’s son, and a boy with a round head and a mouth like a frog whose name was Gault, and Luga kicking moodily at tussocks of coarse grass that grew against the wall. Otherwise there was no sign of life in the steading, save for the old hound sleeping on the dung heap as he had been on the day last autumn when the bronze-smith came, and a half tame mallard drake with his dun wives behind him, waddling about the brushwood pile. Drem walked across to the three boys. They opened their ranks for him, and the four of them stood and looked at each other and
away again, half grinning, but somehow a little uneasy. None of them spoke.

Drem leaned against the wall of the Boys’ House. The flints in the wall were tawny and white and grey-blue. He had never really noticed flints before. One of them was striped grey and white and looked like a badger’s mask peering out of the wall. He watched the mallard drake, seeing the glint of metallic green on his wings as he turned in a gleam of sunlight. It was a pale, dry, windy day, with a constant changing of light as cloud and clear chased across the sky; and little whirls of chalky dust hurried about the steading garth, that stung when they got in one’s eyes. He wished someone would come. Old Kylan or some of the older boys—because until they did he was stuck and could not go forward into the start of the three years’ training time that must be got through before he was a warrior and could be with Whitethroat again. They must all be away to the hunting or the weapon practice; and he could hear the emptiness of the Boys’ House behind him.

In a while, Urian the son of Cuthlyn came stalking across the steading garth with his thumbs in his belt, and brought their numbers up to five; and then fat Maelgan appeared, with little black-eyed Tuan in his shadow; and the gathering of that year’s New Spears was complete.

There before the door of the Boys’ House they stood and looked at each other, still in silence. Drem saw them all with a new clearness, an awareness of them as though he had never seen them before; and it was the same with all of them. They had run and tumbled and fought together all their lives, like puppies of the same pack; but now, suddenly, they were aware of each other, and a little shy of each other, caught up in a relationship that was new to them.

A sudden spatter of rain came down the wind, freckling the ground with dark, and streaking the flints of the Boys’ House wall; and a woman slave passed across the garth from the byre, carrying a high-shouldered milk pail, and turned to stare at them before she disappeared. They ignored her with an
elaborate air of unconcern, trying to look as though they were not at all at a loss and were standing round the Boys’ House door because they chose to.

But when she was gone, Vortrix hunched his shoulders and said, ‘It grows wet, here in the garth. Let us go inside.’

‘Will they not be angry?’ Tuan said doubtfully. Tuan was always inclined to be cautious.

‘I don’t see why. No one seems to be coming to tell us what we are to do.’

Luga stopped kicking at the tussocks of grass. ‘So long as you remember if Kylan comes with his whip, that it was your idea!’

It seemed a bold thing to do, to go in without leave; into the Boys’ House where none of them had ever been before; and their breaths caught a little at their own hardihood, as, one after another, following Vortrix, they ducked under the door curtain and prowled in out of the wind and the bright rain, and looked about them. After the sharp spring wind and the changing light out of doors, the air in the great round hut was still and heavy, and the light was dim and brown, thickened by the inevitable bloom of wood smoke over the shadows. There were sleeping stalls round the walls, spread with sheepskin over the piled fern, but they would be for the great ones, the lordly ones who had reached their second and even their third year; the likes of Drem would sleep like hounds around the central hearth. There was a half-made hunting bow before one of the stalls, and a cloak with a green patch at the shoulder in another; a clutter of cook pots beside the hearth and weapons stacked against the roof tree; and several pelts in various stages of curing hung from the rafters.

The twelve-year-olds felt their own boldness in their chests. Here they were, for the moment, in possession of the Boys’ House, and they grinned at each other, strutting a little. The fire on the hearth had sunk low, to a red glow and a few charred logs in the midst of the white ash. ‘They have let the fire sink,’ Drem said. ‘They should be grateful to us for coming in and mending it for them before it goes out!’ And greatly
daring, he kicked the logs into a blaze, and threw on a couple of birch logs with the bark still on them from the pile beside the hearth. Vortrix had led them in here; he, Drem, would be the one to wake the fire. The logs were dry and the bark like tinder; a little tongue of saffron flame licked up, and the silver bark blackened and curled back, edged with red jewels. There was a sudden flare, a flickering amber light that warmed the shadows; and they looked at each other with kindling excitement born of their own boldness and the likelihood that the older boys would make them pay for it later.

The sudden flare of the flame-light caught the bronze face of a great war shield that lay tilted against the roof tree as though some champion had just cast it down there, and woke sparks of shifting fire among the raised bosses with which it was covered. It caught at their attention, and they gathered round, looking down at it. Each of them knew a shield, maybe more than one, in their own homes; nevertheless, this one caught and held their interest. They squatted about it and heaved it up to examine it in the firelight. Truly it was a mighty shield, a hero’s shield, formed of layer upon layer of bull’s-hide, the whole face sheathed in shining bronze, and the bronze worked in circle within circle of raised bosses, the outermost circle lying just within the hammered strength of the shield rim, the innermost close against the thrusting swell of the central boss. And looking at it as the firelight played and ran on every curve, Drem thought it was like the spreading ripples made by a leaping fish, or when you dropped a pebble—or a brooch—into the water.

‘It is a fine shield,’ Maelgan said.

‘Ugh! It is heavy!’

Urian thrust his arm through the straps, and staggered upright, panting a little under the weight, his fierce brown face flashing into laughter. He pulled a spear from among those against the roof tree, and stood straddling his legs and thrusting out his chest though the weight of the great shield dragged his shoulder down. ‘See! I am a man! I am a warrior already!
Why should I spend three years running with little boys like you?’

They pushed him over—it was quite easy, for he was off balance already with the weight of the great shield—and rubbed his nose in the fern; and Vortrix heaved the shield on to his own shoulder, and stood proud and bright-eyed in the firelight, braced under its weight. ‘I am a warrior too! I am the Chieftain, the lord of all your spears!’

‘Stop crowing, and let me try it,’ Luga said.

One after another they all tried their strength with the great shield. Maelgan, who was the biggest of them all, with the slow strength of an ox, even managed to walk a few steps carrying it. Tuan, who was the smallest, only just managed to lift it clear of the ground. One after another, breathless and intent, until there was only Drem left to try.

‘Drem! Hai! Drem, wake up!’

Drem woke up. He had hung back to the last, which was not his way; and suddenly his heart was pounding as he stepped to the great war shield. He thrust his sound arm through the straps, and setting his teeth, lurched up again. The weight bore down on his shoulder, as he stood to face the others. The war spear that each of them had taken in turn lay in the brown bracken at his foot; he felt it there. And it had already dawned on him that he could not take it up.