Warrior Scarlet (16 page)

Then one evening the wind died, and the sun set wetly yellow over behind the Hill of Gathering, and the rain drifted away, leaving the world sodden and gale-weary. ‘Give it two
days,’ old Kylan said. ‘Two days, and the game trails will be alive and fit for following again.’

Drem looked up from beside the fire, where he sat burnishing his wolf spear. ‘Give it two days, and the storms may return on their track. Already there are too few days left of Wolf Slaying. Give the word, old Lord of the Boys’ House, and I go tomorrow.’

Kylan considered, his eyes that were yellow like a wolf’s frowning into the eyes of the boy before him; and at last nodded his ragged head. ‘So be it then; it is your trail, your wolf trail. Let you follow it.’ And he gave the black pebble into Drem’s hand.

And so in the dark before the next day’s dawn, the hunting band rose and began to make ready. Standing naked by the fire, with the others about him, and the whole of the Boys’ House awake and eager in the shadows as always when there was a Wolf Slaying in the wind, Drem tied back his hair with a thong, that it might not get in his way; and stood for Vortrix to bind the supple, sweat-darkened straps of pony hide about his belly and between his legs and round his left forearm, just as he had done beside the Royal Fire when the King called for a hound fight.

‘Too tight?’ Vortrix asked.

Drem twisted and crouched. ‘Na, not too tight—tight enough, though.’ And their eyes met in the light of the roof-tree torch, one pair very blue, the other suddenly golden, remembering that other time. The others stood looking on; one less of them than there should have been, and Drem, glancing round at them, saw in his own mind the missing one among them; a smallish ghost in the firelight with a mouth like a frog, and felt the skin prickle a little at the back of his neck. Beside Gault’s death fire he had felt that quiver for the first time. Each of the New Spears were well aware, when they went out to the Wolf Slaying, that they might not come back, but he had realized then, as he had not quite realized before, that for him, because of his arm, the chances of not coming back
were greater than for the others. Maybe tomorrow they would build the death-fire for him . . . But he would not think of that. He would think of coming back to the village at Sunset with the blood of his wolf on his breast and forehead, and the newly flayed skin on his shoulder.

He reached out and took his broad wolf spear from the rack beside the roof tree, and turned to the door, while behind him the others caught up the spears and the light wicker hunting shields that they carried for self defence, and Vortrix took down the flaring torch from its sconce. Kylan was waiting for him in the doorway, old fierce Kylan with his bull’s-hide whip laid aside, oddly gentle as he always was at this moment, and set his hand on Drem’s shoulder, saying, ‘Show the wolf kind that I have taught you well. Good hunting, my son.’

The sky had begun to lighten, a luminous water-green above the dark peaks of the turf roofs, as Drem with his hunting band behind him crossed the steading garth towards the doorway of the Chieftain’s house-place; and his own shadow ran dark and spider-tall before him, in the light of the torch that Vortrix carried. Midir came to meet them on the threshold, with the golden eagle cap upon his head, and the amber Sun Cross on his breast catching the warmth of the torchlight.

‘Who do you bring here to the sacred threshold of the Chieftain’s house?’ said Midir as they halted before him; and to the ritual question, Vortrix, the torch bearer, gave the ritual answer. ‘A New Spear to be marked for his Wolf Slaying, Holy One.’

‘Let him kneel down,’ said Midir.

And while Drem knelt before him on sacred ground—every threshold was sacred, the Chieftain’s above all others—the old priest made the three slim lines of the Wolf Pattern with charcoal and red ochre on his forehead. Lastly, with a hand so thin, despite its strength, that the torchlight seemed to shine through it, he took the amber Sun Cross on its thong, and touched Drem with it on the forehead above the Wolf marks, and again on the breast.

‘Go forth and slay the wolf that waits your coming, my son. The Light of the Sun be with you through this day.’

And Drem rose, marked for his Wolf Slaying, set apart from the world of other men, and turned away to his hunting.

‘What is the plan?’ Vortrix asked softly, when they had left the still sleeping village behind.

‘It is in my mind that the Under-Hill track is a good place to pick up a trail,’ Drem said, moving a little ahead of the rest; and as they went down through the village barley plots he lifted his head and sniffed the morning, his nose almost as sensitive as a hound’s, so that for him, running water and bare chalk and the north side of trees all had their clear, distinctive smells. The morning smelled chill and fresh, the wind still blowing in long, soft gusts that died away into stillness between; but his questing nose could discover no scent of wolf in it as yet. He felt the Wolf mark on his forehead as though the charcoal and red clay pressed against his skin. The light was broadening in the sky when they came down to the track under the steep northern scarp of the Chalk. The ancient trackway was sticky and slippery after so much rain, set with great pools that reflected back the pale shining colours of the sunrise beyond the interlacing hazel and sallow twigs. And for the trained eyes of the boys who came down to it spear in hand through the scrub, it bore a complete record of all the coming and going that there had been on it since the rain stopped yesterday evening.

Drem, his eyes moving unhurriedly here and there, as he checked beside the way and then began to follow it, was reading the signs with the ease of long use. Here a hedgehog had crossed the track from left to right, there a herd of deer had followed it for a little way, then turned off into the scrub towards the river: four head of deer, with three yearling fawns among them. A little farther on, a fox had crossed the track, going down to drink at sunset, and his spoor was crossed by that of a hunter coming that way a little after, carrying his kill on his left shoulder. Drem saw where he had halted to change it to the
other shoulder, and left the tale in a single blood spot on the sodden ground, and in the changed balance of his footprints when he went on again. And then, just beyond that place, clear in a patch of fine gravel, were three padmarks that might have been the prints of a huge dog.

Vortrix saw them in the same instant as Drem, and said softly, ‘Here’s your wolf, brother.’

Drem nodded, slipping to one knee and bending low over the prints for a closer view, for the light was still poor, though growing stronger every moment. The tracks were new; the wolf could not have passed much before first light, and the depth and spacing of the pad marks showed that he was travelling easily, almost lazily. Probably he had killed somewhere up on the hill, and was now on his way back to his lair.

The others were standing round him, careful of their feet and where their shadows fell, in the way of the trained hunter. ‘Well, do you take it?’ Luga asked impatiently. ‘Or is it that you need that dog of yours to tell you what to do?’

‘I take it,’ Drem said quietly, ‘when I am ready.’ And he went on studying the tracks, learning all that he could about his wolf. It was a big dog wolf, and from the angle at which the prints crossed the open ground, he judged that it was heading for the shallows of the stream below, as though to cross over into the dense forest that choked up the valleys on the farther side. He rose from his knee at last, his hand tightening on the white ash shaft of his spear, his heart giving the little lurch of excitement with which he always began a hunting; and with his hunting band at his back, melted into the budding hazel scrub beside the way, leaving the wet track empty in the day-spring until a magpie flew down on to it to drink at one of the puddles.

They forded the stream, picking up the pad marks again in the soft earth on the far side, and pressed on. All that morning while the sun rose high into a sky of drifting cloud and storm-washed blue, and the broken tumble of light and shadow sailed lazily across the High Chalk, Drem and his companions followed the trail of the big dog wolf through the deep mazes of
the forest; very occasionally by a pad mark, more often by a single brindled hair on a low-hanging thorn branch, by a few side-brushed blades of grass, by the distant alarm call of a jay; by all the thousand and one signs, not there for any save the trained hunter, that told of a wolf passing that way. The hazel scrub and wild fruit trees and the red, sap-bloomed alders of the forest fringe had given way by little and little to the small, dense damp-oaks of the Wild, and as they pushed farther and farther into the dark heart of the forest, dense tangles of yew and holly crowded ever more thickly about them. It was not a tall forest, but a dark one; grey-misted, brown-shadowed, green-gloomed, and the hunting band, moving with the light swiftness of questing hounds, moved in a twilit world, where the sunlight, splashing in through the tangle of bursting oak twigs overhead or between the black rook-wing branches where a yew had fallen, seemed to burn with a brilliance that was sharp-edged as a sword cut and gave off none of its light into the misty glooms of the surrounding forest. When summer came and the trees were in full leaf there would be no sunlight at all, even to stripe and dapple the darkness. A cold and heavy smell hung between the trees, and there were few birds here. Only suddenly, not far off, a jay screamed its warning.

Drem checked an instant, the little cold thrill closing round his heart; then he began to run, circling wide so as to come upwind on the place where the jay had sounded its alarm call. And the rest of the band were hard behind him; a swift and silent running of shadows among the trees.

Stronger light glimmered through the twisted and crowding trunks ahead, and somewhere to the right the jay called again; and slipping low under the drooping branches of a great forest yew, he found himself crouching on the edge of a clearing. In the midst of the open space, a dense mass of thorn and elder and wayfaring trees thrusting up into the light and air, almost hid from sight a kind of low, overhanging cliff of earth and rock, caused maybe by some landslide in the rains of a long past winter, that closed the far side of the clearing. But Drem knew
as surely as though he could see the cave mouth with his own eyes, that somewhere in there, under the dark overhang and the crowding bushes, was the lair of the wolf that they had trailed so far.

He made a small, swift sign to the others behind him; and knew, though no breath of movement told him so, that they had slipped away, right and left, to draw their ring about the place. Drem crouched motionless in the brown gloom under the yew branches, his hand clenched on the spear shaft until the knuckles shone white. His nostrils windened, and little tremors ran through his body, houndwise, as the smell of wolf came to him down the wind.

The faintest movement, the swaying of a branch in one place, the stirring of a tall bramble spray in another, signalled to him that the others were in place all round the clearing. This was the moment, then! He stood up. The others were up almost in the same movement; he could see them all round the circle, closing in towards where, somewhere in the dense scrub before them, the wolf must be aware of their coming and watching them come. The time for silence was past now, and they began to shout, their voices chiming together and rising into the tree tops. ‘Ty-yi-
yah
-eee!’ And with the rising voices, Drem’s heart seemed to rise too, beating upwards with a wild exultancy: ‘Ty-yi-ee! Yah-ee-ty-yi-yi!’ as they came closing in through the long grass and the brambles.

And then suddenly the wolf was there. With a crashing of twigs and small branches it sprang into the open, then, seeing the hunters all about it, checked almost in mid spring, swinging its head from side to side, with laid-back ears and wrinkled muzzle: a great, brindled dog wolf, menace in every raised hackle. Then, as though it knew with which of the hunters it had to deal, as though it expected him, it looked full at Drem. For a long moment it stood there, tensed to spring, savage amber eyes on his as though it knew and greeted him. The rest of the band had checked at a small distance, spears ready; but Drem was no longer aware of them; only of the wolf, his wolf.
The thing was between him and his wolf, life for life, and the Warrior Scarlet.

It seemed to him that the open jaws with their lolling tongue were grinning at him as he leapt forward and ran in low, his spear drawn back to strike. And at the same instant the wolf sprang.

Quite what happened he never knew; it was all so quick, so hideously quick. His foot came down on something agonizingly sharp that stabbed through the soft raw-hide of his shoe and deep into his flesh—a torn furze root perhaps—throwing him for one instant off his balance. It was only for the merest splinter of time, but twisting to regain his balance, somehow he missed his thrust; and the wolf was on him. He had one piercing flash of realization; a vision of a snarling head that seemed to fill his world—yellow fangs and a wet black throat;
and then sky and bushes spun over each other. He was half under the brute, he felt a searing, tearing pain in his right shoulder, he smelled death. The wolf’s hot breath was on his face as he struggled wildly to shorten his spear for a dagger-stab, his chin jammed down in a despairing attempt to guard his throat; while at the same moment something in him—another Drem who was standing apart from all this—was knowing with a quiet and perfect clearness like a sky at summer evening: ‘This is the end, then. It is Gault’s fire for me . . .’

He heard shouting, and at the edge of his awareness caught the downward strike of another spear blade. There seemed to be another struggle rolling over him, and confusedly he knew that the wolf had turned from his throat. He heard its snarl rise to a sudden yelping howl; he was aware of a great weight gone from him, a crashing away through the bushes, a burst of more distant shouting; a moment of oddly terrible quiet. And in the quiet, scarcely knowing what he did, he dragged himself to his knees, shuddering and gasping for breath, his spear still in his hand. And Vortrix’s arm came down to him, helping him to his feet.