Warrior Scarlet (21 page)

So, carrying the lamb like a mere rag of wet wool trailing from his hand, Drem made his way across to the bothie that looked more than ever like a little knoll of the hillside, with the snow to muffle its outlines. The bothie was empty but the fire burned low and red, and a crock of ewe milk stood ready as always in the lambing season. Drem set the lamb down on the spread fern beside the hearth, and left it to be licked and nuzzled by Whitethroat, who, though no sheep dog, seemed to have the love of all small and young things that some very big dogs possess, and an instinctive feeling for what to do with a new-born lamb, while he set some of the milk to warm in a bronze pipkin, and with fingers numb with cold brought out from the dark recesses of the bothie the feeding bottle of stitched sheepskin, and a short length of elder twig with the pith scraped out. When the milk was warm, he poured it into the bottle, wrapped the elder twig in a scrap of rag so that it would be soft and the lamb might be persuaded to suck on it, and pushed it into the neck of the bottle; then, taking the lamb from Whitethroat, he settled down beside the fire, with the
little creature against his knee, to the business of getting it to suck.

Patience never came easily to Drem, but he had more patience with animals than he had with people; and besides, he was learning. He was learning many things, those days and nights. Again and again he dipped his fingers into the drops of warm milk left at the bottom of the pipkin, and painted the lamb’s mouth with them; again and again the little thing wavered its head away, or merely lay there making no response whatever. But it was stronger; he was sure that it was stronger. That was Whitethroat’s licking and the warmth of the fire. Little sprawling tremors began to run through it; and then quite suddenly the battle was won, and it began to suck. ‘Sa, that is the way of it, small one,’ Drem said, and dipped his fingers again in the warm drops and gave them once more to the little sucking mouth, and then hastily took up the feeding bottle; and the lamb butted at it as though it was its mother’s flank.

It was half standing against Drem’s knee, its tail awag behind it as it sucked, while Whitethroat looked on with prick-eared interest, when old Doli came ducking down the entrance step, with the snow thick in his sheepskin mantle. Drem looked up with a kind of wry triumph. ‘If we are no good for anything else, Whitethroat and I, at the least we do well enough in the place of a dead ewe.’

The old man crouched down beside the fire, taking in the little scene with those shrewd, weatherwise eyes of his. ‘There are worse things for a man or a hound to do well at,’ he said.

The next night it happened the other way round; a lamb dropped in the snow that no skill even of old Doli could stir to life, and a ewe was left bleating pitifully without understanding. Drem went across to the shepherd’s bothie with the dead lamb hanging from his hand as yesterday the living one had done. And there, leaning against the squat roof tree, with a barley bannock in one hand, the firelight flickering upwards warmly
saffron over his square, bandy-legged figure and steady face, was Vortrix.

Drem checked an instant, crouching in the low doorway, and as he did so, Vortrix’s head went up; and for a long moment their eyes met through the drifting, firelit smoke, while Erp and Hunno looked on.

It seemed to Drem that there was a pain, a physical, dragging pain, under his breast bone. Then, deliberately, as Vortrix made the beginning of a movement towards him, he turned away, as he had done from the others of his kind. Only this was not just another of his kind, this was Vortrix, with warrior patterns blue upon his breast; and the sudden wild weeping rose against the base of his throat as he bent to the next thing he had to do.

Laying the dead lamb down beside the fire, and thrusting away Whitethroat’s exploring nose with a, ‘Na na, brother, not this time,’ he drew the knife from his belt.

‘The ewe?’ Hunno grunted.

‘It is well enough with the ewe,’ Drem said, and his voice sounded hoarse and heavy in his own ears, as he set about the task of skinning the dead lamb.

‘You will give her the other one in its place, then?’ Hunno jerked his head towards where last night’s motherless lamb slept curled into a little grey hummock against the wall.

Drem nodded and went on with his task. Hunter though he was, he had never found an easy way to skin an animal one handed. It would have been much simpler to pass the task over, lordlywise, to Erp. The other boy would have done it for him, he knew, though he was in the middle of his evening bannock. But if he did that, he would have no excuse to keep his head bent over his hand; he would have to look up. He did look up once, and saw Vortrix watching him, the bannock still untouched in his hand. Then he bent his head again over his flaying-knife.

When the skin was off he did turn to Erp. ‘Bring the small one and help me get him into it.’

So Erp brought the live lamb, bleating in scared protest, and between them they worked his back legs into the pelt of the dead one; then his forelegs, finally drawing up the head over his own like a little hood. Hunno laughed, and little dark Erp laughed; there was always something funny in the sight of a lamb wearing another lamb’s skin over its own; and the little creature’s shrill, indignant clamour made them laugh the more. Only Drem, tying the skin lightly at neck and belly to keep it in place, did not laugh; nor did Vortrix, looking down on them from his stance against the roof tree.

When the thing was done, Hunno tossed a bannock towards him, saying, ‘Best eat before you take it out.’

Drem shook his head, and left the bannock. ‘Later, maybe.’ He got up without looking again at Vortrix, and carrying the living lamb in the pelt of the dead one, shouldered out blindly into the grey, snow-lit darkness.

He went down, Whitethroat as always at his heels, through the big lambing enclosures, parting the ewes and turning them aside with his knee where they were most densely packed, until he found the ewe he sought. The ewe was restless, calling for her lamb. He set his small burden down beside her, and stood to see that all was well. The little creature staggered to its feet, bleating, and made instinctively for the warm woolly flank that meant milk. The ewe swung her head and sniffed at it, suspiciously; but the smell was the smell of her own lamb; all was well. Seemingly quite satisfied, she stood, passive and peaceful, while the fosterling, accepted as her own, butted at her flank to make the warm milk flow faster. Both of them were perfectly content.

If only there was as simple a cure for all ills, Drem thought dully, and turned away, holding himself bent a little as though to ease the ache of a physical wound.

Another figure, short and bandy-legged and dearly familiar even in the darkness, had come down towards him through the sheep, and Vortrix’s voice said, ‘They are happy now.’

‘They are happy now,’ Drem echoed. He drew a quick breath. ‘Why have you come down after me?’

‘You left your bannock lying,’ Vortrix said. ‘Therefore I have brought it down to you. Why did you turn from me as from a stranger, up yonder in the bothie?’

‘Maybe because I was a fool,’ said Drem wearily. ‘I am tired of things that hurt in my belly.’ And he took the bannock that the other held out to him in the darkness, and began to eat; but the bannock seemed to be made of dust instead of barley meal, and his stomach revolted at it though he was wolf hungry.

‘I also. I am tired of things that hurt in my belly,’ Vortrix said.

Wading through the grey, huddled shapes of the flock, they had come out to the opening of the great fold, and stood together, looking away down the curve of the snowbound valley. It was a very still night, still with the brittle, waiting stillness of hard frost. The seven stars of the Great Hunter seemed to hang out of the sky, pulsing with cold fires; the Great Hunter, swaggering as he always swaggered, above the pale shoulder of the snow-covered downs. Far off in the distance a wolf howled, and the sheep stirred uneasily, and were quiet again, their breath and the warmth of their bodies making a faint smoke in the starlight. With their backs to the fire beside the fold opening, Drem and Vortrix might have been the only living men in a frozen and forgotten world.

They were standing very close, and Vortrix brought up his
arm and laid it across his blood brother’s shoulders. Drem felt the warm weight of it through the thick rough sheepskin of his mantle, and let it lie there. But the gulf was between them, nevertheless, and neither of them could cross it to the other’s side.

‘How is it with you, my brother?’ Vortrix asked, very quietly, in a while.

‘It is well enough with me,’ Drem said. ‘I have let go my own kind, and I hunt with the Dark People in all things now.’

‘Is it truly so?—in all things?’

There was a long silence, and again, far off among the woods that lay dark and soft like furs flung across the whitened hills, the wolf cried, and again the sheep stirred in the fold, snorting and stamping. Then Drem said, ‘Na, we cannot think with one mind, the Dark People and I. We speak the same words but they do not mean the same things. We laugh together, but I do not know the things that stir behind their eyes. Maybe one day I shall learn . . .’ He turned to Vortrix. ‘And with you? How is it with you?’

‘I am—lonely without my brother.’

‘One was telling me that there is a girl—the daughter of Gwythno of the Singing Spear. One was telling me that she grows very fair.’

The silence fell between them again. Only a short silence this time, and then Vortrix said, ‘If there were a girl under your cloak, though her hair were as bright as the sun and her arms as white as mare’s milk, would she fill my place?’

There was no more to be said; and in a little they went out from the lambing pen, drawing the gate hurdle to again behind them, and turned towards the watch fire, round which several of the Tribesmen stood or squatted, leaning on their spears. Vortrix’s spear picked up the firelight in a slim leaf of flame against the bluish darkness of the snow and the stars; but Drem saw only the dark side of the blade, a leaf of darkness against the firelight, for he had dropped behind a little, walking not as brother with brother, but as one of the Half People behind one of the lordly Golden Ones.

THE WINTER HAD
been late in starting, but before it ended, it was one of those winters which men speak of years afterwards, round the fire when the earth is frost-bound and snow comes drifting down the wind. And when the first signs of spring should have been waking in the forest and the curlews coming up from the seaward marshes, the earth was still deep in snow and held by frost as keen and deadly as the blade of the strange grey dagger that the King wore now in his girdle. On fine days the snow melted a very little in the sunshine; in the shade where it was blue as the hyacinths in the woods at Beltane (but surely that was in another world) it froze without ceasing, day after day; and it seemed that as the days grew longer the cold increased. The sheep had to be kept folded all day as well as at night, and with no grazing the fodder ran short. Drem and his fellows cut branches all along the woodshore and stripped the lower-slope birch trees of their bark, pressing farther and farther afield as time went by. But there was little good in such fodder, and the sheep grew thinner and thinner, the weaker of them scarcely able to stand on their legs, and many of the late lambs were born dead. They killed the more weakly sheep and lambs, so that the strong ones might have their share of the poor fodder; and there was so little flesh on the poor, starved carcasses that even when they could get them down to the village they added nothing to the meat supply for Clan or Half People.

The wolves, driven by famine beyond their normal fear of the guard fires, were growing ever more bold, howling closer and closer in the darkness about the folds. Farther along the run of the Chalk, the sheep folds themselves were attacked; and everywhere a sheep that strayed was a sheep lost, and no man cared to step beyond the firelight and the sound of his brother’s voice after dark.

On a day about the end of the lambing, Drem came up from the woods, carrying on his shoulder a bundle of hardly-gathered fodder branches; and flinging it down beside the gate-gap of the fold, looked about him hastily as he always did, for Doli. The old man, spent with over-much labour and hardship that was sharper even than the shepherd kind were used to, had been ill on his feet for days, after becoming chilled to the bone over a lambing ewe, and Drem had been constantly anxious about him; but to all suggestions that he should go down to the village, or even remain beside the fire in the shepherds’ bothie, he had only replied impatiently, ‘Na na, there is too much that I have to do.’ And now, not seeing him, Drem’s anxiety flared up. ‘Where is Doli?’ he demanded of Hunno, who was spreading fodder.

‘One of the ewes has broken out.’ Hunno jerked his head towards the High Chalk that closed the head of the valley. ‘A strong one such as we can ill afford to lose, and she near her time with the lamb. Doli is gone after her up towards the summer folds. He said it was in his mind that she was gone that way.’

Drem hitched his sheepskin higher on his shoulder, frowning. ‘Is Flann with him, or Erp?’

Hunno shook his ragged head. ‘Na. As for Flann, his woman has come to her time also, and all men know the fool that he is about her. One brought him word to come, and he went. Therefore, with Drem away down the woods, and the Golden Folk not yet come up for tonight’s Wolf Guard, there were but the three of us here when we found the ewe gone.’

‘And of the three of you, it must be Doli that went after her?
Why not you or Erp? You are younger than he is, also he is sick.’ He swung round on Erp who had come ducking out from the bothie. ‘Why did you let him go alone?’

Behind him Hunno growled something only half spoken about an old man being of less worth to the village than a young one, and Erp gave him a swift upward look under his dark brows. ‘Not to us the blame. Doli said to us that being old and wise he knew more of the ways of the sheep kind than we could do. Therefore he bade us to stay and guard the fold, and left us Asal and took Cu with him and went. There will be no harm come to him; not to Doli in his own sheep runs . . . There is lamb stew in the hut if you are hungry.’