Warrior Scarlet (3 page)

But Drustic hated anyone else to meddle in a thing that he was making. He looked up slowly—all his movements were slow and deliberate—and said quite kindly, ‘Na, I can manage well enough. Let you learn to shaft a spear; that is the thing for you to do.’

Drem snatched his hand back as though it had been stung. You needed two hands for a bow, but you could learn to use a spear with one. That was another thing that he had not really thought about.

And at the same moment, his mother called to him. ‘See, there is some stew left. Let you come round here and take your bowl. You are not a man already, that you should eat on the Men’s side of the hearth.’

Drem came at her call, and took the black pottery bowl of stewed mutton that she held out to him, and squatted down in the fern. As he did so, he caught sight of Blai squatting far back in the shadows, picking the furze prickles and bits of dirt from a lapful of raw wool, and watching him as she worked. And he realized that Blai also had heard what the Grandfather had said. So he turned his shoulder on her, hunching it in a way that was meant to show her that she mattered so little that he had not noticed that she was there at all.

And somehow in doing that—he overset the bowl.

It was such a small thing, a thing that might have happened to anyone. But to Drem, coming so close on the heels of what had gone before, it was overwhelming. The words that the Grandfather had said, Drustic’s refusal to let him help with the bow—they were things that came from outside; and a thing that came from outside could be in some sort shut out; it could be defied and snarled against. But this was different; this came from inside himself; there was no defence against it, and it let in all the rest.

Dismay and something that was almost terror swept over him as the warm stew splashed across his knee and into the fern. The Grandfather grunted; a grunt that said as plainly as words could do, ‘See now, did I not say so?’ And his mother caught up the bowl, crying in exasperation and something under the exasperation that was as though he had hurt her, ‘Oh, you clumsy one! You grow more clumsy every day! Can you never look what you are about?’

Black misery rushed up into Drem’s breast, so that it was as though his heart were bursting because there was more misery in it than it could hold. He raised a white, desperate face to his mother’s, and shook his head. Then he scrambled to his feet and bolted for the doorway.

‘Where are you going?—Come back, cub!’ his mother called after him; and he called back mumbling that he was not hungry, that he would come again in a while, and stumbled out through the fore porch into the summer night.

The gateway of the steading was closed, as always after dark, by an uprooted thorn bush, and he went out through the weak place that had let him in earlier that evening before the blow fell that changed the world, and making his way round the steading hedge, started down the chalk-cut driftway between the lower corn-plots and the half-wild fruit trees that were his mother’s care.

He had no clear idea what he was doing or where he was going, or why. Blindly, instinctively, he turned to the wilderness, like any small desperately hurt animal seeking solitude from its own kind and the dark and a hole to crawl into.

LOWER DOWN, THE
combe ran out into a broadening valley that swung northward, opening into a vast half moon of rolling chalk hills above the forest and the marshlands far below. Drem followed the valley down, because down was easier than up, but he did not think of which way he was going; he simply went. Down and down, by swirling slopes and plunging headlands of turf, by bare chalk and tangled furze and through the whitethorn bushes of the lower slopes, until at last the great trees of the Wild came climbing up to meet him.

The Great Wild, mist haunted, spirit haunted, rolling away into the unknown; the wilderness of forest and marsh that was the place of wolf and bear and wild pig, the place of the Fear that walked among the trees, so men said, after dark; where only the hunters went at night, taking their lives in their spear hands and trusting their souls to the charms and talismans of amber and bear’s teeth and dried garlic flowers that they wore about them.

At first it was quite easy travelling, for anyone used, as Drem was, to wandering about in the dark. The hazel and elder and wayfaring trees of the forest verge grew well apart, and there was little undergrowth; but as time went by, the trees crowded closer and closer; oak and ash, alder in the damper places, holly everywhere, great thickets of it, mingled with black masses of yew, matted together with a dense undergrowth of thorn and
brambles. And wherever the trees fell back a little, the bracken grew head high to the small boy who thrust his way on, deeper and deeper into the fastness, driven by the misery and the furious bewilderment within him like a small wild thing driven by the hounds.

Utterly lost in his own desolation, Drem never noticed how the forest darkened and crowded in on him, until suddenly a piece of rotten tree-trunk gave under his foot, and he all but went through into an ants’ nest; and that woke him up, so that as he gathered himself together again, he was suddenly aware of his surroundings. He had never been into the forest at night before; never so far as this, even in day-time, and he did not know where he was. And, swift-footed fear overcoming his longing for refuge, he had enough sense left to tell him that it was not good to be so far into the forest alone at night, and that he must get back to the woodshore. He knew the direction to take without even having to think; the north side of any tree, especially any oak tree, smelled quite different from the south, and he had only to head south to strike the Chalk again at last.

So he turned his face southward, and set off. But he was desperately tired, and he dreaded going home, because going home would mean facing the thing that he had run away from; and his dread somehow made it harder to find the way.

The trees that should have begun to thin out crowded thicker and thicker about him as he went, and there was no way through the tangled thickets of bramble and holly, so that he must cast about for the narrow game-tracks worn by the feet of the deer, that never led in the right direction. It seemed that he would never win free of the choking tangle, and he was too tired, too wretched to care very much. Only—only it seemed that a change was coming over the forest.

Or maybe it was that he was awake and aware of the forest now as he had not been before; awake to the darkness and the crowding trees that were suddenly—not quite what trees should be, not quite what they were in the day-time; to the furry hush that was full of voices, the whispering, rustling, stealthy voices
of the forest, that were not the voices of the day-time, either. There were little nameless rustlings through the undergrowth, the soft swish of wings through the branches overhead; in the distance a small animal screamed, and Drem knew that somewhere a fox had made its kill. Surely the whole forest was disturbed tonight. But those were not the sounds that raised the hair on the back of his neck. Once he thought he heard the breathing of a big animal close at hand, and as he checked, his own breath caught in his throat; something brushed through the undergrowth towards him, and there was a sudden silver pattering like rain among the leaves—but it was not raining. He pushed on again, more quickly now, carelessly, stumbling often among the underbrush; and when he stopped once more, to listen and make sure of his direction, suddenly the breathing was there again; a faint, slow panting, just behind him. He whirled about, his hand on the knife in his belt, but there was nothing there. Nothing but the furry darkness. And far off through the trees, he thought that something laughed. His
heart was racing now, sickeningly, right up in his throat; he struggled on again, blindly. Mustn’t stop any more; it was when you stopped that you heard things. But even as he blundered on, above the brushing and crackling that he made, above the drubbing of his heart, he heard that soft, stealthy panting, as though the Thing prowled at his heels. But it was not only at his heels now, it was all around him, in front as well as behind, and the forest itself, the whole forest was like some great hunting cat crouched to spring. ‘Don’t run!’ said the hunter that was born and bred in him and that knew the ways of the wild through a hundred generations. ‘
Don’t run!
’ But terror had him in its power, and he was running, with no more sense of direction than a mouse with a stoat behind it.

Brambles tore his skin, fallen branches tripped him, low-hanging boughs slashed across his face as he crashed through the undergrowth that seemed to lay hold of him with wicked, clawing hands. This was what the hunters spoke of under their breaths around the fire. This was the Fear that walked the forest, the Terror of the Soul. He had never felt it before, but the hunter within him knew it; the Fear that prowled soft-footed beyond the cave mouth and the firelight.

Panting, sweating, sobbing, he crashed through a screen of alder scrub on the edge of a little clearing, and next instant had pitched forward and was rolling over down a slope rustling with last year’s leaves. He reached the bottom with what breath he had had left all knocked out of him, and found himself almost under a great hollow bole of roots and uptorn earth where a huge oak tree had come down in some past winter gale. It seemed to offer shelter, the shelter that even a very small cave gives from the Fear that prowls outside; and with a shuddering gasp, Drem crawled in as far as he could over the deep, rustling softness of drifted oak leaves, and crouched down, pressed against the roughness of the torn roots.

For a long while he crouched there with drubbing heart, still shivering and sweating, while the Fear snuffled about the
opening of his refuge. But little by little the Fear faded and went farther away. Strength and steadfastness seemed to come out to him from the torn roots of the great tree that had been a forest king in its day; his heart quietened and his breath came slower. And gradually his terror and his misery alike grew dim. He did not know that he was falling asleep like a small, exhausted animal . . .

He woke with a crash, and the taste of terror in his throat. There was hot breath panting in his face, and something was snuffing at his shoulder.

For a moment he lay quite still, everything in him seeming to curl in on itself and turn to ice, knowing that the thing could only be a wolf, and that if he made the slightest movement it would be at his throat before ever he could whip the knife from his belt. Then a voice said softly, ‘Sa, what have we here, then? Off, Swift-foot! Back now, Fand!’ And his eyes flew open to see a man—or something in the shape of a man—bending over him, head and shoulders blotted dark against the white light of moon-rise; and the thing that had been snuffing at his shoulder drew back with a whine.

There was a swift exclamation, and a hand flashed down on him as he flattened back against the earthy root-tangle behind him; and like a wild thing cornered, with nothing in him but a blind instinct to fight for life, he snapped at it, his teeth meeting in a finger. He was shaken off, and in the same instant, as it seemed, the hand was on his shoulder, and he was jerked bodily out from under the tree roots and set on his feet, still kicking and struggling and trying to bite, in the full moonlight. The hand held him at arm’s length in a grip that he could not break though he twisted and squirmed like an otter cub; but the man’s voice when he spoke again was not harsh, despite his bitten finger. There was even something of laughter in it.

‘Softly, softly now! There is no need for such a snarling and snapping!’ Then, as Drem, reassured by something in the voice, ceased his struggling: ‘Why, it is old Cathlan’s grandson!’

Drem stood quite still now, and looked at the man, while
three great hounds sat down around them with lolling tongues and eyes shining in the moonlight. The man was slight and dark—dark for one of the Golden People—and had faintly the smell of fox about him; and even in his stillness, as he stood holding Drem at arm’s length, was the swift, leashed power of a wild thing. He was naked save for a fox’s pelt twisted about his loins; and the moon caught the blade of the long hunting-knife thrust into his girdle, and the coils of a great snake of beaten copper that coiled again and again about his left forearm, the head lying level with his elbow, the tail curled downward into a hook that served him instead of a left hand.

‘So it is you who walks the forest tonight, making all the Wild uneasy,’ said Talore the Hunter.

Drem nodded.

‘A small cub, surely a very small cub, to be sleeping out in the forest.’

Drem said fiercely, ‘I have seen nine summers, and I sleep in the forest because I choose.’

‘Surely that is as good a reason as any other,’ said the man, with the laughter deepening in his tone. ‘But now, I think, the time comes to be going home.’

There was a silence among the crowding trees. Then Drem said, ‘Let me be. I will go back in a while and a while.’

‘Na, not in a while and a while,’ Talore said, and he looked down at Drem in the moonlight, with eyes that missed nothing of the small, desperate figure before him. ‘This part of the forest is no place for small cubs, alone. Therefore we go together, you and I; and we go now.’

He released Drem’s shoulder, and stooping with the lithe and lazy swiftness that was in all his movements, caught up from among the brown leaves and white-flowering dead-nettle at his feet his hunting-spear, and a newly flayed badger pelt, which he flung across his shoulder. ‘Come,’ he said, and with an almost soundless whistle to his hounds, turned to the steep slope behind him.

And rebellious and resentful, bewildered by the swiftness
with which the unknown terror whose hand he bit had become Talore the Hunter, and by the man’s mastery over him, which was different from anything he had experienced before, Drem came. The Fear was gone from the forest, and the chill freshness of the dawn was in his face as, with the three hounds, he followed at the shadow-silent heels of the hunter, threading the mazy deer-paths that seemed to have turned themselves about to lead in the right direction after all. He felt spent and empty as though he had cried until he had no more tears to cry with; and nothing of last night seemed quite real; it was all dark and confused and had the sick taste of nightmare that remains in the back of one’s mind after one wakes. He wished he could talk about it to Talore. Talore with his copper snake would understand as no one else in Drem’s world could. It would be good to tell Talore. But he knew that if the hunter was to stop in his tracks, and turn, and say, ‘Cub, what Thing was it that you ran from, into the forest?’ the words would never come. So there was no good thinking about it.