Warrior Scarlet (20 page)

‘So?’ Drem said.

‘And a new red bull calf in the Chieftain’s byres, and Urian has slain a bear, but they do say that it was little more than a cub. And Caradig and Morvidd have returned to their quarrel—the old quarrel about the line where their corn plots come together.’ He looked at Drem again, sideways under his brows, bright-eyed and curious. ‘And Drustic the brother of Drem has asked Belu from above the ford for the third daughter at his hearth.’

Drem looked round quickly. He remembered that third daughter: Cordaella he thought her name was. A plump, pink girl who smelt like new bread. So she would be coming to spin beside the fire in his old home. Suddenly, and rather oddly, since he had never troubled about it himself, he hoped that she would be kind to Blai.

‘And Drustic is not the only one,’ Erp said. ‘They do say that Vortrix also has a girl under his cloak.’

Drem did not answer for a short space. Then he said: ‘What girl is that?’

‘Rhun, the daughter of Gwythno of the Singing Spear. I have seen her myself, grinding corn before her father’s door, and she grows very fair.’ Erp grinned. ‘See now, do I not bring you back news—much news, from the Golden People?’

‘Much news,’ Drem said. ‘Much news, little Eyes-and-Ears. But now it is time that I go after my sheep, lest they begin to scatter.’

It seemed to him that the sunset was fading very quickly tonight. The gold of it was quite gone, as he turned from the dew-pond; and there was a new and sharper ache in the old wound. He had a harsh desire to make the sheep suffer for it, to set Asal snapping at their heels, and hustle them along, and see their silly fleeces flouncing above their thin legs as they ran; but he had learned that lesson—among other lessons that summer on the High Chalk. He walked slowly, using his spear as a staff, the dogs on either side of him, the flock drifting ahead, a grey cloud of sheep along the tawny downland turf. One of the ewes swung out sideways from the rest, and he whistled to Asal, pointing with his spear, and the dog streaked off to gather her in. ‘Easy!’ Drem called after him; Asal, being young and over-eager, was sometimes inclined to chevy his charges exactly as he, Drem, was longing to see them chevied. Despite the warning, he was doing that now, snapping over close at the heels of the straying ewe. Drem whistled again, shrill and compelling, and the dog checked and looked back. ‘Softly,’ Drem called. ‘Softly, brother.’ And the dog returned to his task more gently, heading the ewe in again to the main flock.

‘Sa, that was well done,’ said Doli’s voice, and he found the old man beside him, leaning on his spear, and looking, as always, as much part of the downs as did the elder trees in the corner of the sheepfold; as though he had not moved in a hundred years.

‘I begin to learn,’ Drem said. ‘It is well that I begin to learn.’ There was a hard and heavy note in his voice, and the old shepherd gave him a swift, searching look under his grey brows.

‘Erp is a great one for hearing news.’

They were walking together now, behind the flock; and Drem looked quickly at the old man, realizing that he must have met with Erp as the dark boy came up with the meal sack, and also heard the news of the Golden People. ‘Little Eyes-and-Ears could always hear the thoughts of a man’s heart a day’s trail away, by putting his ear to the ground.’

They were drawing near to the entrance of the great turf-walled fold, where Flann and his brother waited with their notched tally sticks to count in the sheep as they did every night; and Drem fell back a little, for Doli to take over the task of getting the flock through the narrow opening; but Doli shook his head. ‘Na na, if the old dog does all the work, how shall the puppy ever learn? Let you take them through.’

So Drem went on; he and Whitethroat and the young dog Asal, while old shepherd and old dog watched behind them. He was lost in a great loneliness; he thought he had not really known what loneliness was, until now. He tried to be glad about Vortrix—glad that now Vortrix would be comforted and would forget his blood brother. But it was lonely—so lonely, for the one forgotten; and the downs looked very wide and dark and desolate in the fading light. And surely the wind had grown cold.

But he got the sheep safely through the gap between Flann and his brother with their tally sticks; and later that evening, when they were safely folded, and Drem and the old man were alone for a moment in the bothie, Doli said, seemingly to the red heart of the fire: ‘It is a good shepherd that can think of his sheep when his heart is full of other things. It is in my mind that maybe Drem will make none so ill a shepherd, after all.’

AUTUMN CAME, AND
the rams were turned loose to run with the ewes, while far below in the rolling distance of the Wild, the weary green of late summer caught fire and flamed tawny and amber, bronze and gold, the wild apple trees of the woodshore were bowed with little russet crabs, and the brambles dark with fruit among their gold and crimson leaves, and the village swine were driven down into the valleys to fatten on acorns. And then it was Samhain, and with the last leaves falling in the forest, they brought the sheep down to the winter pastures, where there would be more hope for them in snow or hard frost. There was all the tumult of the great cattle round-up and the winter slaughtering. And when the slaughtering was over, only the best and strongest of the rams and the ewes were left, for there would not be enough food for the hoggets or the weaker ones through the winter.

So winter came, and in the long dark nights the shepherds huddled close about the fire in the turf bothie, with their sheepskin or wolfskin cloaks drawn close about them, listening, as somehow one never seemed to listen in the summer, to the great loneliness of the Chalk beyond the firelight. It was an open winter at first, a winter of gales and rain, but not cold, and there was little danger to the folded sheep from their ancient enemy; and the midwinter fires of the Golden People had burned out, and it was within a moon of the start of lambing time when the first hard frosts came.

A few nights later, they were huddled round the fire in the smoke-filled bothie, over the evening meal of barley stirabout and broiled deer meat—Drem and Whitethroat had been hunting. They were all there save Flann, who had a woman among the little green hovels of the Half People, and so was often missing when winter brought flocks and shepherds alike down to the lower pastures. Drem, who had finished eating, was polishing a new spear shaft with a piece of sandstone. The white ashen shaft came up silvery pale and smooth in the firelight; the rubbing stone, crumbling a little under his fingers, shed an occasional trickle of yellow sand, like pollen, like dust of gold, into the lap of his sheepskin mantle. From time to time he glanced across through the smoke at Erp and the girl who had cooked the evening meal. More than once, that particular girl had come up, in the past moon, and Erp had bought her a necklace of jet and blue glass beads, paying an otter skin for it to the trader. She showed her teeth like a young vixen when he sat too near her; but she was wearing the necklace. Drem could see it in the opening of her sheepskin. Pretty it was, with little blue sparks where the firelight caught the glass beads.

Drem shifted his hold on the spear shaft under his arm to come at another length of it; and drew closer to the fire, though his shins were scorching under the cross-bound deerskin leggings. That was always the way in frost or wind, one’s front scorched and one’s shoulders froze. He hunched deeper into his cloak, and said, because he was tired of the silence: ‘See, the fire burns red all through. There is a frost tonight.’

Hunno looked up from the piece of rib that he was chewing. ‘I should know that without a fire to tell me,’ he growled, ‘by the gash that I carry here in my shin where the she-wolf caught me seven winters ago. Always it aches in a frost.’

And in that moment, as though the mention of wolf had been a spell, first one and then another of the dogs pricked its ears and growled softly. Old Doli raised his head to listen. ‘So. It comes,’ he said. ‘Always it comes; later in some winters than others, but always it comes.’

Drem listened, aware of Whitethroat suddenly tense and quivering beside him. They all listened, dogs and men alike, hearing afar off in the starry darkness the long-drawn, desolate, cry of the wolves on the hunting trail.

‘So, the time comes to be keeping the Wolf Guard,’ Hunno said.

It was the thing that Drem had been dreading; knowing that it must come, yet unable to bring himself to face it. The Wolf Guard would bring his brother Drustic, and the young warriors who had been boys with him in the Boys’ House—and Vortrix. At shearing time he had not had to face that fear, for the Men’s side did not concern themselves greatly with the sheep shearing, considering it work only for the women and the Half People; but the Wolf Guard was another matter, that was man’s work, and all must take their turn when the wolves hunted among the sheep runs and the lambing time drew near.

The rubbing stone slipped in Drem’s fingers, a jagged angle of it making a long score in the silvery smoothness of his new spear shaft, and he cursed with the small, bitter, adder’s-tongue curses of the Dark People.

So the men of the Tribe stood the Wolf Guard with the men of the Half People, through the long bitter nights that followed. Men who had been great warriors and hunters before Drem was born, men who had been boys with him only a year ago.

He did not mind the older men so bitterly—even Talore, who never tried to speak with him, but set a hand on his shoulder once in passing, as he bent over a sick ewe. But his own fellows he minded with a minding that cringed in his belly. They talked easily enough with Doli and the Half People, squatting round the fire that had been built at the mouth of each fold, easily and with no sense of barriers between; there had been no barrier between Drem and the Half People before the Grandfather raised it, six summers ago. But they did not know how to speak to Drem, nor he to them; their eyes slid away from meeting; and in the end they pretended, both he and they, not
to see each other. Even when Drustic came, they pretended not to see each other. It was better that way.

As yet, Vortrix had not come at all.

At least, when lambing began, Drem had plenty of work to fill in days and nights, and that helped. Never a night went by for the next two moons or more, that several lambs were not born in it; and all the while the ewes must be watched and tended, the lambing pens constantly crossed and re-crossed to keep a look-out for trouble. When there was a moon it was easier, with the silver light to see by; in the darkness there was only the ewe’s bleating, and your own hands—hand—to tell you when she was in trouble; and then she must be got down to the fire, where there was light to work by, for you could not carry a torch among them without frightening the whole flock. And trouble came more and more often as the time went by, and the winter shortage began to tell on the ewes. There were foolish ones too, who would drop their lambs in the trampled fern and wander away; that also was a thing that must be watched for, for a lamb left long to lie on the frozen ground was a lamb dead. Then there were lambs who lived though the ewe died, and must be reared beside the bothie fire, cared for as a woman cares for a babe, until maybe they could be given to a ewe who had lost her lamb. Yes, there was work enough for Drem as for all the shepherd kind, now that the lambing time was here.

On a night midway through the lambing season, Drem squatted with Hunno beside the fold fire, working over a straining ewe, while the men of the Wolf Guard leaned on their spears and looked on. It was a bitter night, with a shrill north-east wind blowing, and snow whirling down the gusts; snow that became visible like a cloud of eddying and swirling feathers as it entered the firelight. They had got the ewe close in against the turf wall for whatever shelter there was, but even there the snow reached her, pale-freckling her fleece that the wind parted in zigzag lines. But Drem doubted whether she felt it. He doubted whether she felt anything clearly, any more. She
was beautiful, too. Sheep had ceased to be just sheep to Drem by that time, and he had begun to see them as the shepherd kind saw them, as he saw men and women; this one beautiful and that one sour-faced, this one cross grained and that one placid. Beautiful and proud she was, but old Doli had said for some time that it would go hard with her when the lamb came.

And now the lamb was here; a fine little black-faced ram lamb limp and sprawling on the handful of brown bracken fronds that they had hastily spread to keep it from lying on the snow; and they left it to itself for the moment while they turned themselves to do what they could for the ewe. Small, surely Hunno rose and turned to the fire for the barley gruel that was warming beside it. But the ewe was already stretching herself out.

Drem leaned over her. ‘Quickly, Hunno!’

And then Hunno was kneeling beside him again, with the bowl in his hands, and the growling gentleness in his voice that was only there when he spoke to a sick sheep, and never for his own kind. ‘So now, the work is over. Now gruel, my girl.’

The ewe seemed to know that they were trying to help her, and raised her head a little. But a shudder ran through her under Drem’s hand, and her head fell back on to the snow. And they were left, Drem and Hunno, as they had been left before, with a lamb flickering into life, and a dead ewe between them.

It had happened before, and each time Drem had hated it, but tonight, perhaps because he had actually felt the shudder that was the life going out of her under his hand, perhaps because she had been proud and beautiful like the great swan that had been his first kill, he hated it more than ever; and the old wailing bewilderment rose in him, crying out to know where the life had gone to . . . but it was no time to be asking such questions, with the movements of the lamb already growing fainter.

‘Sa, the thing is over,’ Hunno said, setting down the gruel with a slow, expressive shrug. ‘Let you take the lamb down to
the bothie before it goes the same way. I must see how it is with the speckled one with the torn ear.’