Warrior Scarlet (12 page)

‘What is it, then?’ Drem said. ‘Is there a raid?’

Two or three voices answered him, taking up from one another. ‘The King is gone beyond the Sunset!’

Drem whistled. ‘How do you know?’

‘The runners were here when I got back,’ Vortrix said, intent on his hare.

‘What killed him, then? He was not old?’

Urian tested the blade of his dagger. ‘They say it was a boar. He went hunting yesterday—but it was the boar who killed, and not the King.’

Excitement shivered through the little group. There was no sorrow in them; they had never seen the King in his high Dun, they knew from their fathers that he was a hard man and a shining warrior, and that was all. And now he was dead, gone back beyond the Sunset because of a long-tusked, red-eyed boar, turning at bay.

‘Now there will be a great Death Feast, and a King-Making for a new King to lead the Tribe,’ said Tuan.

‘A three day feast, with wrestling and foot races, and all the Men’s side gathered in the Royal Dun—’

‘My father says that when the last King was made,’ Maelgan put in, blinking pale eyelashes in the firelight, ‘there was so much cattle roasted that the smell of roasting fat reached from the Wild to the Great Water.’

There was a shout of laughter. ‘That is the thing that you would care about, Fat One! . . . When Maelgan was small, they drove him down with the swine in the autumn to fatten on acorns!—Let you be careful, Maelgan, that they do not mistake you for one of the fattened porkers for the cooking pits!’

Drem’s eye ran over the preparations that were going on,
while Maelgan, who was used to being a butt, grinned peaceably. The swift excitement that was rising in the others took hold of him. ‘Is it that we also go to this feast?’

‘Surely.’ Old Kylan grunted, speaking for the first time. ‘Are ye not of the Chieftain’s household, hounds of the Chieftain’s pack? Let you stop asking questions now and get to making ready for the morning. It grows late, and you are away behind the others, and I’ll not have it said that any of Dumnorix’s hounds looked like a mangy flint-knapper’s cur when he followed his lord to the Death Feast and the King-Making!’

Luga, who was burnishing a bronze bridle bit, looked up with a sneer. ‘You forget, Old Father, that Drem has always to take that most precious hound of his home, before he can come back to us in the Boys’ House. Sometimes it is in my mind, Drem One-arm, that I wonder you can bear to come back at all, leaving him behind you.’

‘Is it?’ Drem said, stacking his spear in the rack beside the hearth. ‘Maybe if you had more thought for your own hound, Luga, he would answer to you better on the hunting trail.’

It was queer how long Luga could carry a grudge and still find pleasure in it, he thought, as he clattered up the ladder to the loft in the crown of the roof, and began to delve among the gear of the rest of the Boys’ House for the things that were his own. But there were other things to think about than Luga and his dark, rankling humours. He got out his brown cloak with the kingfisher stripe, which was now as much too short for him as it had been too long when his mother cut it from the loom, and his good saffron kirtle, and his belt with the bronze studs, and brought them down again. And when the evening meal was over he sat with the rest, round the fire, burnishing his dagger and the bronze belt studs, and combing and combing his hair to make it shine, as the Men’s side combed their hair. For they were almost men now, he and Vortrix and the rest. The twelve-year-olds, thrust away from the fire to shiver in the door draughts, watched them enviously.
They
had no need to comb their hair, they would not be going to the Death Feast
and the King-Making. That was for the third year of the Chieftain’s hounds, who sat lordlywise around the fire, and talked as men, with their spear beside them.

Next morning at first light, when the village was already seething like a pan of warming yeast with last-moment preparations, the men from the outlying steadings of the Clan began to arrive, riding their small, shaggy ponies whose harness was rich with bronze and narwhal ivory, and leading others to serve as pack beasts. Cattle were being driven in from the grazing grounds, for the Royal Dun could not feed the whole Tribe, and so every Clan would drive its own meat with it, on the hoof. Supplies were being brought out and laid before the riders, or bound on to the backs of the pack animals: barley loaves and white cakes of ewes’-milk and mares’-milk curds, and meal in sewn skins. And everywhere children and dogs were under foot; children squealing, dogs barking, ponies trampling.

Drem had bitted and bridled his own mount—the Boys’ House did not have ponies of their own, but rode the fiery little brutes out of the Chieftain’s stable—and was standing with Vortrix near the Chieftain’s door, when a cold muzzle was thrust into his hand, and he looked down to see Whitethroat beside him with waving tail. ‘Greetings, brother!’ he said, pulling the great hound’s ears. Then to Vortrix, ‘It must be that Drustic is here.’ And at that moment Drustic rode into the crowded open space below the Chieftain’s steading, his own hounds loping among the ponies’ hooves; and a little behind him, leaving him to force their way through the throng, rode the Grandfather!

Drem had known of course that Drustic would come, but he had not thought of the Grandfather coming with him. He let out a soundless whistle. ‘
And
the Old One! It must be years since he had his legs astride a pony, and he’s too old by far and far for such a journey!’

Vortrix laughed. ‘He looks very well pleased with himself, the old Golden Eagle!’

‘Always he is pleased with himself,’ Drem said. ‘It is the rest of the world that he is not pleased with!’ and leading his own mount with him, he plunged into the throng, weaving his way through to join his kinsmen.

Drustic grinned at his young brother as he came up, but he had a somewhat harassed look; and the Grandfather, seated on his bearskin that had been flung over the pony’s back for a riding rug, splendid in his beaver-skin cloak with the scarlet lining, with his best bronze bracelets on his arms and his heron-tufted war-spear in his hand, was alight with triumph. Clearly, Drem thought, there had been a battle.

The Grandfather, it seemed, was still in something of a fighting mood, for he ignored Drem’s salutation, and said in his deep crackling voice, ‘So! You also think I am too old!’

‘Did I say so, my Grandfather?’ Drem said.

‘It looks at me out of your eyes. It looks at me out of everyone’s eyes. Aiee! I grow old indeed, and
because
I grow old, it is bad for me not to do as I wish! Now, I wish to see once more the full gathering of the Tribe. I wish to wear my bronze bracelets and talk with the men who stood up with me in arms when the world was young—with such as are left of them. Is it so great a thing to ask?’

‘It is in my mind that you are not one for asking, my Grandfather,’ Drem said, grinning, and put up his hand to caress his pony which was growing restive in the crowd. ‘And surely you are wearing your bronze bracelets, and surely you are going to the gathering to talk with whoever you wish to talk with.’

‘You—you were always an impudent whelp!’ the Grandfather began, shooting out his lips and his ragged brows; and then unwillingly he chuckled. ‘But it is true as you say. It is Sabra your mother’s fault: I have argued so long with that woman that now I cannot stop. Also with so much arguing, my throat is dry. Go you and bring me some barley beer instead of standing there grinning like a frog on a hot stone!’

By the time Drem had found some barley beer and brought a cup of it to the old man, and reclaimed his own mount which
he had left for the moment in charge of one of the second year boys, Dumnorix the Chieftain had come out from his house-place, burning on the grey autumn morning in his scarlet cloak and the gold-work on his arms and about his bull neck, and mounted the raven black stallion that Vortrix was holding for him before the door. The elders and the great ones of the Clan were all assembled by now; and most of them already mounted. Drem saw Talore sitting a young red mare close behind the Chieftain; Talore seeming as always very slight and dark among the tawny warriors of his kind. He saw Morvidd with a necklace of blue beads showing under his wolfskin cloak, as small and hard and bright as his hot-tempered blue eyes, and old Kylan from the Boys’ House, and the rest. Now suddenly Midir was in their midst, all men urging their ponies back from him lest any should step in his shadow; Midir with the amber Sun Cross on his breast and his grey hair straggling out from under the folded eagle wings of his head-dress. The holy man settled himself on a litter of skins slung from birch poles, and was lifted on the shoulders of six runners. The great bull’s horns brayed and bellowed to the mist-pearled morning sky, and the foremost riders following the Chieftain kicked their ponies from a stand into a canter. One after another they swung in a jostling stream, away between the crowding huts of the village, then up towards the Ridgeway that followed the crest of the Chalk from Sunrise to Sunset. And behind them rode Drem and the other boys, with their dogs running among them, driving the lowing, wild-eyed cattle.

All that day they followed the ancient green ridgeway along the High Chalk, with their faces towards Sunset, the Wild falling away below them on the Sword side; and on the Shield side, wherever the long upland ridges fell back, the far off shining line of the Great Water—only for Drem it was the other way round, because he used sword and spear left handed, and carried his shield, when he must carry one for appearance, on a harness over his right shoulder; and so when anyone said ‘Shield side’ or ‘Sword side’ he had to turn the things round in his mind.

Other ways branched from the way that they were following; some grassy, some white, making a spider-web of communication along the tawny ridges of the high downs. They passed grazing sheep, who ran into startled huddles as they went by, stamping and staring at the scarlet and the bronze and the dull thunder of hooves and the streaming ponies’ manes; so that the little dark shepherds sent their curses after the Golden People, who crashed by, lordlywise, startling the sheep. They passed the round grave mounds of the forgotten heroes that were strung out along the ridges, helping to mark the way. That night they camped beside one of the ancient, fortified dew-ponds; and about noon of the next day they came in sight of the Royal Dun, high on its vast wave-lift of the Chalk.

By that time they had become one of several such bands, following their Chiefs and great men, all drawing in by the white trails of the Chalk towards the huge fortress of turf banks that lay like a girdle, like a triple crown, like a coiled snake, about the highest crest of the downs.

The autumn day was a gleaming one, the hawthorn bushes glowing copper red with berries in the sunlight, against the staring white of the chalk-cut ramparts, and the turf below the Dun fiercely green where the autumn rain had brought it up from the tawny dryness of late summer: a day of sharp edges and colours clear and hard as the enamels on a shield boss. But away towards the Great Water, a long low bank of cloud was creeping inland, and already the distant Marshes were growing blurred as though a grey finger had been smudged across their blue and green and violet.

‘Mist,’ Drem said to Vortrix, riding at his shoulder. ‘We shall have cheerless camping tonight, up on these high downs,’ and then, as the Dun drew nearer, forgot about it in the noise and excitement of their arrival.

Up the white chalk of the ancient track and over the turf on either side, the riders let their ponies out, and they leapt forward with tossing manes, shaking their heads and spilling foam on their breasts; and Midir’s litter bearers, changed many times
since the journey started, quickened from their long, swift lope into a run that must have all but shaken the holy man’s head from his shoulders. So they swept forward towards the massive triple gateway, where the silent warriors of the Royal Clan lined the chalk-cut ramparts, their bucklers darkly glinting against the dappled autumn sky. Now they were threading the zigzag causeway that spanned the outer ditch; now the timber facings of the gateway towered on either hand; and the riders poured through. Last of all, Drem and his fellows dug their heels into their ponies’ flanks and swept yelling after them, driving the wild-eyed, sickle-horned bullocks through the narrow-necked entrance.

Within the Royal Dun was an open space where the whole Tribe could gather in time of trouble, with the cattle driven into the berms between the vast concentric rings of defensive banks; and in the highest part of the stronghold the round turf roofs of the Royal Village clustered about the high hall of the King. But Drem, casting eager glances about him as he dropped from the back of his shaggy little mount, saw that from all the huddled roofs no smoke rose into the air. No hearth fires burned in the Royal Dun, nor would any, until the new King was made. And from the King’s high hall he heard the keening of the women: ‘Ochone! Ochone!’

When the cattle had been handed over to the men who waited to pen them, he made his way with Maelgan and the rest, down through the swarming encampment where already the horsehide tents were being set up, to picket the ponies in the inner berm. There were many ponies there already, and they were restless, stamping and fretting, made uneasy by the strangers all around them, or by the feeling that lay like a shadow, like the thick heaviness and sense of waiting before thunder, over the Royal Dun. They had almost finished picketing and feeding the ponies, when Vortrix, who had been kept back to attend on his father, came down to join them, leading the Chieftain’s black stallion. They gathered round him as he set about the task that they had just finished, and looked on.
But it seemed that the general uneasiness was in Vortrix’s usually easy temper, for he turned on the perfectly unoffending Maelgan, saying, ‘Must you stand there looking like a pig? Give me the other picket rope.’

Maelgan took up the coiled hide rope and tossed it to him. ‘I do not know about a pig,’ he said peaceably. ‘I wish I was a pony. Nobody expects the ponies to fast until the new King is made!’