Warrior Scarlet (24 page)

Drem stared at the puckered, hairless line on the pelt, and his hand on the soft deerskin coverings clenched into a fist. ‘I did not so much as scratch the hide of my wolf.’

‘Na,’ Vortrix said, ‘but I did. A brindled dog wolf, and I wounded it here, high on the shoulder; here where I found the scar when I came to flay this one, nine days since!’

They looked at each other with the great wolfskin lying half across Drem’s body between them. And Drem’s hand crept
down to rest on the harsh hairiness of it. ‘It was between him and me in the first place. My heart is glad that I have slain my wolf, even though—it is too late.’

Vortrix said, ‘It is not too late. Do you not see that there is scarlet on the loom for you already?’

Drem stared at him, his breath caught in his throat. Vortrix could not really have said that; it must be that he was still dreaming . . . But Vortrix was saying it again, bending close over him, suddenly ablaze with his own eagerness. ‘I thought they would have told you! Wake up, Drem, you have slain your wolf, and your place waits for you among the New Spears!’

Drem shook his head, denying it because he did not dare to believe it. ‘Many times the Half People kill their wolves as I killed that one. There can be but one Wolf Slaying, and—I failed in mine.’ His voice dried up into a cracked whisper. ‘It is not true; it could not be true.’

Neither of them was aware that Blai had left her grinding and stolen out like a grey shadow, leaving them alone. They had not noticed that she was there. And the only sound in the world was the drip of the thaw under the eaves.

‘I am your blood brother, not your sorest enemy,’ Vortrix said at last. ‘Why should I tell you this thing if it were not true? Listen, Drem. Three days since, it was spoken of round the Council Fire. It is true, I swear to you by—my own spear hand that it is true.’

And Drem knew that it was so. He reached out and caught the other’s wrist, straining up from the piled fern, heedless of the pain that clawed at his breast and shoulder. ‘How then—? I—I do not understand. Tell me what passed at the Council Fire—all that passed—’

Vortrix pressed him back again. ‘Let you lie still; if you burst the wounds, I shall be blamed . . . See then; when I had flayed the wolf and found the scar on it, then I went to Dumnorix my father, and showed him the scar as I have showed it to you.’ Vortrix grinned. ‘It is useful, now and then, to be the Chieftain’s son. And my father laughed that great laugh in his
chest, and said, “Sa. The cub was always a fighter, from his first day in the Boys’ House, as I remember; and the Men’s side may have need of its fighting men one day.” And so when the Spring Council gathered three nights since, he took and showed the pelt to the Men’s side of the Clan, beside the Council Fire, and said, “See, the Shining One has sent to Drem One-arm his Wolf Slaying again, and this time he has not failed!” Then there was much talk, and some among the elders said—even as you—that there can be but one Wolf Slaying. And at last the thing went to Midir where he sat gone-away-inside-himself beside the fire. So Midir came back and looked out of his eyes again, and said, “I have seen the wounds in the boy’s shoulder; they cover the scar of that first Wolf Slaying, so that the scar of that first Wolf Slaying is no more. The thing was not finished, and now it is finished; therefore let one among you be found to stand for the boy, beside Cathlan his Grandfather, on the Day of the New Spears, for the Sun Lord and the Lords of the Tribe and the Hunting Trail have shown that they would have it so.” And truly I think that there would have been more than one come forward to stand with Cathlan; but before any other man could move, Talore sprang up—you know how swift he is, like a wild cat when it springs—and stood there before the Clan, smiling so that his lip curled up over those great strong dog-teeth; and he cried out: “Seven summers ago, I found the boy curled under the roots of an oak tree, like a wolf cub himself, far into the Wild, where he had run from his own kind, fearing to fail in this very thing; a small, hairless cub and very much afraid, but fierce even then, and bit my finger to the bone before I had him out of his lair. Because he was small and valiant, and one-handed even as I am myself, my heart turned to him; and I promised him that night that when he had slain his wolf and the time came for him to stand before the Clan on the Day of New Spears, I would stand for him beside Cathlan his Grandfather. Therefore the thing was settled seven summers ago.” (You never told me that, Drem.) And then all the elders—all the Men’s side looked at each other and
nodded their heads, and said, “Aiee! It is well!” And Maelgan and I and the rest of us drummed our spears on our shields and made a great noise—and so the thing was done.’

Drem lay with his eyes fixed on the other’s face, trying to lay hold of what had happened and draw it in and make it part of himself. He began to laugh at Vortrix’s attempt to mimic Talore’s swift dark vehemence; and then, because he was to be let in to his own world after all, returned to the company of his own kind after all, and because he was very weak, found the laughter breaking in his throat, and hid his face in his sound arm and cried.

The days went by, and Drem grew steadily stronger. Every third day Midir came and pointed the Fingers of Power at the wounds in his breast and arm and shoulder, driving new life into them; and his mother and Blai dressed them with salves made of yarrow and comfrey and the little pink centaury that grew on the High Chalk, reciting the proper charms over them as they did so, so that they healed cleanly, leaving only the puckered, thunder-purple scars behind. There was a third woman in the house-place, these days, for Drustic had brought home the plump, pink Cordaella to be his wife; but she took no part in tending Drem. It was not that she was unwilling, but the only time she tried to bring him his food bowl, Blai took it from her, showing her teeth like a young vixen; so that Drem, watching in bewilderment, thought that he had been wrong in hoping that Cordaella would be kind to Blai, he should rather have hoped that Blai would be kind to Cordaella.

As soon as he was strong enough, he crawled out to sit in the sunshine before the house-place doorway, and work at his wolfskin pegged out on the ground there, curing it with herbs crushed in salt, and working in grey-goose grease until it was as supple as the finest deerskin. He wanted to be quiet, in those spring days, while suddenly there were washed-faced primroses in the hollow banks of the driftway, and the alders by the brook were dropping their little dark catkins into the water; he wanted a kind of threshold time between one thing and the next.

There was something else, besides his wolfskin, that he must have ready before the time came for him to stand with the New Spears before the Clan. And one evening when the supper stew was finished, he took down from its place among the smoky rafters, the heavy bronze and bull’s-hide shield that had been the Grandfather’s and would be his after all when the Feast of Beltane was over; and squatting beside the low fire with the rest, fell to fixing the shoulder harness of pony-hide straps, such as he had carried his buckler on in the Boys’ House.

The Grandfather, looking up for a while from his bygone battles in the fire, eyed him as he worked, with a grudging interest that increased until he was leaning far forward to see more clearly how the straps went. ‘Sa, this is a cunning thing,’ he said at last. ‘I see—ah, I see. Not even Talore carries his shield that way.’

‘No need,’ Drem said round the strap he held in his teeth. ‘Talore has his shield arm almost to the wrist.’

The old man glanced up at him under the shaggy, grey-gold just of brow. ‘Why did you never tell me of that promise between Talore and you, seven summers ago?’

Drem did not answer at once. There were hard and hurting things that he could have said to the Grandfather about that. Once he would have said them, but not now. He spat out the strap and turned the buckler round to come at it from the other side. ‘It is good to have a secret, when one is small. With a secret in one’s chest, one feels larger.’

Drustic, mending a piece of plough harness, looked up with his slow grin. ‘There was never anything needed to make you feel large, little brother.’

‘Surely the cub who comes behind so fine a brother as mine—with so long a whip—has need of
anything
that makes him feel larger,’ Drem said with an answering grin. ‘Let you throw me over that piece of thong.’

And then it was the day before Beltane. Time for Drem to go down to the Boys’ House. He did not eat when the rest of
the household ate that morning; for a New Spear must go fasting to his initiation. He washed all over in the brook, a ritual washing, and came up naked and shining and scarred, to stand beside the hearth stone, while his mother and Blai belted on his new kilt of scarlet cloth—Warrior Scarlet; he felt it lapping about him like a flame—and settled the finely dressed wolfskin over his shoulder, belting that also about his narrow waist with a strap of leather dyed violet blue and bright with studs of bronze, and combed his hair and bound it back with thongs; so that when all was done he stood up like a warrior for battle, but with no war paint on his face, and no weapon in his hand. He looked up and saw the Grandfather’s shield hanging in its usual place. Tonight they would take it down and lay it beside the hearth with his new war spear that he had not yet seen; tonight when he was—where? No one who had been that way before him, not Drustic, not even Vortrix, could tell him. They were bound by the oath of silence, as tomorrow, he also would be bound.

Blai was doing something to the fold of his wolfskin; he looked down at her, but saw only the top of her bent head, before she turned away without looking up. She never looked at him now. She had stopped looking at him when he began to get better. She did anything he wanted, willingly, but she didn’t look at him any more, and he felt vaguely hurt.

But now it was time for him to go. He knelt and set his hand on the Grandfather’s thigh as custom demanded; and as custom demanded, the old man put his huge, blue-veined one over it and said: ‘Go forth a boy and come home a warrior.’ Then his mother kissed him on the forehead with the same words, and took him to the threshold and sent him out with a light blow between the shoulders. Whitethroat followed him as usual; and at the foot of the driftway he parted from the great hound as he had done so many times before, and went on to the Boys’ House alone.

There was a little wind running through the grass, and the hawthorn bushes of the lower slopes were in flower, the scent of
them coming and going like breath, and a small brown bird flashed through the alder brake ahead of him. It seemed to Drem suddenly that the world was very kind. He had known its beauty often; a fierce and shining beauty like that of his great white swan, but he had not had time for the kindness. After this, maybe he would not have time for it again, but he thought that he would not quite forget . . .

He had been wondering what it would be like in the Boys’ House, with the New Spears who were not of his year at all, but the year behind him. But he found that his name had become great in the Boys’ House, greater even than after he fought Bragon’s Hound at the King-making; and his companions were more interested in the purple scars on his shoulder than in the fact that he belonged to last year. But they had none of them much time or thought to spend on anything save what lay before them.

There were long rituals of strengthening and purification to be gone through under the eye of old Kylan; and Kylan himself painted the white clay patterns of initiation on their foreheads. And when all was done and made ready, they sat in silence about the low fire in the Boys’ House, from which the younger boys had been sent away, listening to the sounds of life going on in the village around them; and even Vran, the stupidest of them, was afraid.

At last the sounds of life began to fall away, and in the quiet a distant voice or the barking of a dog sounded unnaturally loud. They heard feet and then more feet going down towards the centre of the village. And then Kylan rose and ranged them before him and looked them over with those wolf-yellow eyes of his, and said: ‘So, it is time. Remember the things that I have taught you, children.’ And to Drem he said: ‘You also, who have already had a year to forget them.’

And they ducked out through the low doorway, and stood blinking in the sudden blast of sunlight after the gloom of the Boys’ House.

The familiar ritual that came then seemed not quite real to
Drem, like an echo of something real that had come before. He saw the faces of the Clan as the line of New Spears went winding down towards the space beside the Council Fire. He saw the Chieftain’s face and the Priest’s face with the sun behind its eyes; he heard the ritual questions and the ritual answers.

‘Who is this that ye bring before me?’

‘It is a boy that he may die in his boyhood and return a Warrior to his Tribe . . .’

But he had lived through it all so vividly, a year ago, that now it seemed to have little meaning, less reality than the pressure of his own spear shaft against his forehead as he crouched in the alder brake . . .

And now, one behind another, looking neither to right nor left, they were following Midir out from the village and away up the long slope into the eye of the setting sun, while behind them the women raised the death chant, ‘Ochone! Ochone!’

The fires of the sunset still flamed behind the Chalk as they came up over the broad shoulder of the Hill of Gathering, passing close by the grave mound of the champion who slept on its crest, and dipped down again on the far side towards the hollow place among the hills where the warriors of the Tribe were made. And the hollow was brimming with shadows, so that as they looked down the ancient turf circle with its nine thorn trees seemed drowned in them as though it lay under water. They dropped down out of the sunset into the shadows that rose about them and closed over their heads.

The place seemed empty of all life; lost in its own solitude. But as they drew near a horn brayed somewhere ahead of them from within the thorn trees, and out of the shadows there sprang up smoky golden light; and out of the brightness figures came filing to meet them. Naked and golden in the light of the torches, hooded with the heads of animals; the animals that the Tribesmen hunted—the wolf, the wild, black boar, the red fox and the brindled badger. They closed round the boys in
silence, and turned back with them towards the half moon of piled brushwood that had been set up screening the entrance to the sacred circle.