Warrior Scarlet (15 page)

The crowd was falling back, clearing a space beside the fire. The King had seated himself again on his painted and skin-spread stool with his blind harper at his feet. The four hounds dragged against their collars with rencwed urgency, their snarling rising to a sing-song note of hate and menace; most of the others had been thrust out of the circle, lest they seek to join in. ‘Good hunting, my brother in blood,’ Vortrix said, and Drem heard him through the advice that the rest of his kind were showering upon him and which he did not hear at all. Then he stepped out into the clear space.

Across the crowding circle he saw the Grandfather sitting with his beaver-skin cloak huddled to his ears, gazing into the middle distance, for it was not the custom for any of the Men’s side to show a public interest in a young kinsman who had not yet slain his wolf. Drustic, close beside him, was clearly deep in trouble; poor Drustic, who took life heavily and was always troubled about something, and was now in all likelihood wondering what he was going to tell their mother afterwards. Talore was looking straight at him despite the custom; Talore, slight and darkly fierce in the firelight that glowed in the brilliant folds of his scarlet cloak and struck shifting sparks of light from the coils of the great copper snake about his maimed forearm; and between the man and the boy, across the cleared space, unseen by the rest of the Tribe, there passed the old salute.

Then he was walking forward with stiff legs, houndwise, to meet his enemy.

They came together in the midst of the circle, and checked. The mist seemed to have thickened again, a golden smoke in the firelight, dimming a little the farther shapes of the crowd. He was aware of the moment’s hush, everything save for the sing-song snarling of the hounds caught into stillness; of the eyes of the Men’s side upon him. He was not aware, for his pride did not run on that particular trail, that standing there poised in the firelight and the golden mist, on the edge of intense and deadly action, he was beautiful to see. A tall, red-haired boy, with the lean, strong grace of the King’s wolfhound; all the more beautiful, in a queer, crooked way, because he carried his right arm trailing, like a bird with a broken wing.

Then the hounds, slipped from leash, sprang snarling past him, for each other’s throats, and the frozen instant was over.

Drem and his enemy did not spring as the hounds had done; they were circling warily, crouching a little. Drem was watching the other boy’s eyes. ‘Watch his eyes.’ How often old Kylan of the Boys’ House had said that: ‘Watch his eyes, and let his dagger hand look after itself.’ Cuneda was the first to spring, but Drem had seen the flicker in his eyes in the instant before, and slipped sideways, feeling the wind of the dagger past his shoulder. Then he sprang in himself, to be met by a lightning guard-stroke. Dagger and dagger rang together, and he felt the jar of the impact all up his arm. On either side, all around him, the snarling tumult of the dog fight rose, and the voice of the crowd surged to and fro; but Drem heeded neither the one nor the other. His world had narrowed to a circle of sea-smelling, fire-gilded mist, and he was alone in it with his enemy. Once before, he had fought in deadly earnest—on that first day in the Boys’ House; but this was a very different thing, no wild, squealing hurly-burly of random blows, no warrior’s smell of blood at the back of his nose. This was something almost of ritual, a duel rather than a battle, and the more deadly for that. Yet it was linked, as the other had been, with his Warrior Scarlet.

Cuneda sprang in again, and again there was that ring of
bronze on bronze; and Drem, breaking free his dagger, leapt in under the other boy’s guard and drew blood from his upper arm before he could spring back out of range. One of the dogs had begun to howl, and there was a hideous worrying noise. For a few moments the boys circled at a distance, then sprang in again in a swift, fierce flurry of thrust and counter-thrust.

Drem felt a hot flick of pain in his side, as though old Kylan’s bull’s-hide whip had flicked him there. He laughed, and drove in for closer fighting, momentarily pressing the other back. He saw Cuneda’s face, the lips drawn back and nostrils flaring. Cuneda was losing his temper, as yesterday he had lost it with the pony mare; all the better, for with temper gone, judgement went too.

For a few moments the thing had the swiftness of a battle between wild cats rather than a dog fight, before both sprang back out of touch, and the wary circling began once more.

The end came suddenly; and by chance rather than his enemy’s skill, very nearly in disaster for Drem. He saw again the warning flicker, just in time, and again side-sprang clear of the other boy’s stroke, but even as he did so, he heard a shout behind him, and something crashed snarling into the back of his legs, and he went down sprawling over two hounds locked together, the one with jaws fast in the other’s throat.

Cuneda was on him in the same instant. He saw the flash of the descending blade, and twisted wildly, flinging up his arm. There could be no parrying the blow. He took it on his dagger arm instead of in the breast, and the keen blade, landing square, sheared through the pony-hide straps and laid his dagger arm open from wrist to elbow, and in the same instant he stabbed upward and felt the blow go home in the other boy’s shoulder.

The King, on his painted stool, bent his head to listen to something that it seemed his blind harper had to say; then nodding briefly, rose to his feet, and stood hands on hips, surveying the scene.

Drem knew nothing of that. But as Cuneda grunted and lurched sideways, and he got to his feet panting, he heard the King’s voice raised above the splurge of other voices. ‘Finish! It is enough! The fight was good and it is over!’ And just at first he did not understand. But he saw a flicker of a new kind in Cuneda’s eyes, as the other boy scrambled up, clutching his shoulder; a flicker of relief.

For a moment Drem and his enemy, no more his enemy now, stood and looked at each other, while the uproar of the Men’s side rose about them. Of the two victorious hounds, one was being dragged off by his master, and the other, bleeding from a score of wounds, stood licking his muzzle over the body of his foe. The fourth dog writhed horribly on the stained ground with his throat torn open. One of the warriors bent and put the poor brute out of its agony with a thrust of his dagger.

Drem turned and walked back to meet his own kind, stiff-legged still, swaggering his shoulders as he went. But the blood from his gashed forearm was trickling over his hand, and it was hard to hold the dagger. Whitethroat, tearing free of the hands on his collar, had come leaping to meet him, with bushy tail flying. They were all about him now; Vortrix had an arm across his shoulders. ‘My heart is glad!’ Vortrix said. ‘It was a good hunting.’ And then old hairy Kylan of the Boys’ House was there, and one of the priest kind with linen strips and evil-smelling, black salve.

Meanwhile the King stood with his Chiefs about him, swinging a little on his wide-planted heels, the golden mead cup again in his hand. ‘Nay,’ he said, in answer to the grumbling protest of an old Chieftain, that the fight should have been allowed to find its own end. ‘We have had our sport: why should the Tribe lose a warrior, maybe two?’

‘Aye, but see,’ said another Chieftain. ‘The matter of the dagger is not yet wiped clean, for look you, a dog of Bragon’s clan and a dog of Dumnorix’s have won their fight, and you called off the boys with their fighting not yet finished. Therefore the thing stands equal and unfinished still.’

‘You speak truth, Findabair,’ said the King, and there was a small and rather grim smile in the shadow of his young golden beard. ‘The matter of the dagger is not yet finished. Therefore we will make an end of it now . . . It is in my mind that surely it is not fitting that a strong magic such as this grey dagger seems to be, should lie in the hands of a Clan Chieftain—even so great a Clan Chieftain as you, Bragon my brother—while the King carries only a bronze dagger such as all men have in their belts. Therefore doubtless it has been in the mind of Bragon the Chieftain to give the grey dagger into the hands of the King.’

Bragon swallowed thickly, and turned as red as a withy when the sap rises. ‘The King—surely the King jests.’

‘Na, the King left jesting behind him on his father’s death-pyre,’ said the big golden man, smiling still, and he held out his hand.

Bragon, now almost purple, took the little grey dagger from his belt, and pressed it to his forehead, then gave it into the outstretched hand.

The King took his own dagger rich with inlaid silver and red amber from his belt, saying, ‘So. Now let you take this in exchange, that the gift of a knife may not break the friendship between the King and his Chieftain.’ And so the thing was robbed of its sting.

Dumnorix flung up his big russet head and laughed, and the laughter was caught up by the Chieftains and the warriors around him, until even the red face of Bragon cracked into an unwilling grin. The King’s dagger was a fine one, after all. And on the outskirts of the throng, Cathlan the Old gave a deep appreciative chuckle, and said to Talore who stood beside him: ‘Sa, sa, the young bull has an old head on his shoulders. Behold, he has turned aside the trouble that there might have been between the Clans; and he has the grey dagger for himself.’

Talore showed the dog teeth at the corners of his mouth, in that swift, dark smile of his. ‘Surely the young bull is a wise one—or has a wise counsellor in that blind harper of his. It is in my mind that it was wisdom to call off the fight when he did, that Bragon’s boy should not be put to shame by a one-armed fighter—a thing which also might have bred trouble between the Clans at a later time.’

The Grandfather peered up at him under his thick, grey-gold brows. ‘You think it would have ended so?’

‘After that shoulder blow, I—think that it would have ended so,’ said Talore the Hunter. ‘He is a born fighter, that hound cub of yours.’

Drem heard the laughter of the Men’s side, though he did not know what it was about. The small gash in his side had been salved, and his forearm tightly bound with linen strips to stop the bleeding and bring the edges of the wound together; and his own kind were thronging about him; and he was very thirsty. ‘I am thirsty,’ he said. And it was Luga who brought him a pot of barley beer, and held it for him to drink, because
his arm was so stiff in the tight binding that he could scarcely bend it. And looking at Luga’s dark face over the tilting rim of the pot, he thought suddenly: ‘I know you; you’re a troublemaker, always one to pick a quarrel and bear a grudge; but you’re one of the Brotherhood still, and let any threat come against the Brotherhood from the outside, and you’ll stand with the rest of us until the threat is beaten back.’ Nothing was changed between himself and Luga, they would be hackles-up with each other tomorrow as they had been yesterday. But today they grinned at each other across the beer pot as Luga set it down empty.

The firelight was in Drem’s eyes, and the taste of triumph in his mouth was hot and sweet as wild honey. He had made a good fight with his enemy, Whitethroat was safe, and he had held and strengthened his place among his spear brothers; now, surely, nothing but his Wolf Slaying was between him and his Warrior Scarlet.

And his Wolf Slaying would be before the spring came again.

DREM WALKED PROUDLY
among his fellows of the Boys’ House in the moons that followed, while the long gash on his forearm healed and faded to a pinkish line that would be silvery by and by, and autumn gave place to winter, and the mid-winter fires blazed on the crest of the Hill of Gathering. And when the year turned towards spring and the wolves left the winter pack to mate, it was time for the Wolf Slaying to begin.

For two winters, Drem had watched the boys in their third year go out to the Wolf Slaying; and now the time had come for him and Vortrix and the rest of them. The time that, he realized now, had lain like a kind of darkening gulf across his path ever since he entered the Boys’ House, making everything on the far side of it seem fiercely bright and at the same time remote. That was the same for all of them, he knew; they did not speak of it, but it was in their eyes as gaze caught gaze, every time they drew the sacred lots.

Since the choice of the Tribe’s warriors must lie with the Sun Lord, the boys drew pebbles out of a narrow-mouthed jar—one black pebble and the rest white—to determine each time who should have the next hunting. And after each Wolf Slaying, one pebble was cast away, so that there were always so many pebbles in the pot as there were boys with their Wolf Slaying yet before them; one black pebble, and the rest white.

And in the dawn after each lot drawing, the hunting would
begin. There were no hounds with the Wolf Slayers, but the whole of the little brotherhood would set out together as a hunting band; and together they would track down the beast and bring it to bay. Only the actual kill must be left to the one of them who had drawn the black pebble. For at the last, the thing must be fought out in single combat between the hunter and his wolf, matched together by the Sun Lord, so that from that time forward there was room for only one of them in the world of the living.

The time of Wolf Slaying went by slowly, and the white pebbles dwindled in the narrow-mouthed jar; and one white pebble was smeared with red ochre before it was cast away. That was for Gault who had missed his spear thrust and would never play the fool again. They made his death fire as it had been made for the old King; but this was a small fire, for a boy who had never come to the Warrior Scarlet.

Vortrix drew the black pebble and killed his wolf; Luga also, and Tuan and fat Maelgan, while still Drem drew only white pebbles, and waited for his turn to come. Spring came early that year, and the curlews were calling over the upland country and the first blackthorn foaming on the forest fringe, when Urian and he drew the last two pebbles from the jar. Once again, Drem drew the white pebble. And after Urian had slain his wolf, the weather turned wild and wet, so that for many days on end the white rain drove lashing before the spring gales across the roof of the Boys’ House, and there was little to do but crouch over the smoking fire and go out to try one’s weapons and come in half drowned and deaf with the wind, to crouch over the fire again; waiting, waiting, no hope of a wolf in this weather, while the days went by. Drem scarcely ate in those days of waiting; he grew gaunt as a famine wolf himself, and tense as an over-strung bow, so that even Vortrix scarcely dared to speak to him.