Warrior Scarlet (7 page)

The shadows were lengthening though it would not be evening for a long while yet, and Wenna had finished her grinding, and gone in again, carrying the baby with her on her hip, and Drem was alone before the house-place door, when at last Talore came home, driving a small, dispirited brown heifer calf on the end of a rope.

Drem scrambled up and went to meet him as he came up between the store shed and the woodstack, with the calf lurching from side to side on the end of the rope, and the three hounds loping at his heels.

‘Well?’ Talore said questioningly when he saw him, leaning back to check a sudden rush by the calf.

‘I have come for the cub,’ Drem said. ‘I can pay the price.’

Talore’s dark brows went up. ‘Where is it then? In the pot already?’

‘I could not bring it with me. It is too big.’

‘Have you killed a wild ox with your throw-spear?’ Talore’s voice deepened, as it always did with laughter; and the dog teeth showed at the corners of his mouth. ‘It was a bird I said, remember.’

‘It is a swan!’ Drem’s pride came rushing up into his throat. ‘A cob swan—big, big as a cloud!’

‘So? That is a kill indeed!’

They were all heading for the byre by now, and the calf had set up a dismal bawling. Drem nodded urgently. ‘Down in the Marsh, it is. I could not carry it, so I hid it and came back. I thought maybe—we could go for it—now.’ His voice trailed away a little, as it dawned on him that perhaps that was rather a lot to ask at the day’s end.

Talore glanced down at him, at the same time putting out a leg to fend the calf from a determined sideways rush in the wrong direction. He was tired, and wanted nothing but to sit down and stretch out his legs and polish his spears while he
waited for Wenna to make ready the evening meal. But looking at Drem’s proudly eager face with the doubt already beginning to shadow it, he said, ‘Let you help me to stall the calf, and then we will go down together and fetch this kill.’

They stalled the calf in the warm-shadowed byre, and left it to Wenna’s tending; and, in a little, were heading down again toward the Marsh, Talore loping ahead with the long, light stride of the hunter, the hounds and Drem close at his heels.

The blue summer dusk had deepened into the dark, and the white owl who lived in the shed of the Chieftain’s great herd bull was hawking to and fro like a silver shadow across the corn land, when they came up again towards the huddle of the village under the Hill of Gathering. Talore walked ahead as before, and Drem and the hounds padded at his heels; but now the hunter carried Drem’s swan on his shoulder, the great wings drooping wide behind him—pale, paler than the soft wings of the hunting owl in the darkness, or the white, wilting stars of the garlic spread on the hut roofs to dry.

The skin apron over the house-place doorway was drawn back, and a stain of light came to meet them, thick and golden like honey trickling from a tipped jar. Inside, the sons had returned from their hunting and were gathered about the hearth where the fire sank low, for the evening meal was long past, burnishing their weapons, while Wenna stitched at a piece of yellow cloth by the light of a mutton-fat lamp hanging from the roof tree.

There was another man sitting by the fire, his back to the doorway, a big, broad-shouldered man who turned as they crossed the threshold, revealing the heavy, reddish face of Morvidd, the Chieftain’s brother. And behind him in the shadows squatted a boy of about Drem’s age, nursing his father’s spear—a boy with a quarrelsome and unhappy face; but Drem, who had run with him in the same pack all his life, did not of course see that. He only knew that Luga the son of Morvidd was apt to be at the root of any trouble that broke out among their own kind.

‘So. You are here at last,’ the man said, rather loudly, while the two boys cocked their heads at each other.

Talore checked just within the doorway and returned the greeting more courteously. ‘And you, Morvidd the Chieftain’s brother, you also are here, and welcome. I had not thought you would be back from your trading until the moon was on the wane.’

‘I am but this evening returned to my house-place; and one told me that Fand has whelped and the whelps are ready to leave their dam. Therefore I am come to make my choice of one of them.’

Talore stood smiling a little, the great swan on his shoulder, its wings falling wide behind him. ‘Others have made their choice already. There is none of the cubs left without a master.’

Æsk, the eldest son, looked up from the spear he was burnishing, and said swiftly, ‘I told him that, my father, but he would wait for you none the less.’

Morvidd’s face had turned a deeper red as it always did when he was crossed, so that his eyes looked like little bright splinters of glass in the redness of it; and he began to bluster. ‘Did I not say to you, last Fall-of-the-leaf, that I would give you a fine copper cooking pot that had never known the fire, for the best cub in Fand’s next litter?’

It seemed to Drem that everything stopped, between breath and breath, and there was a sudden cold emptiness inside him. He saw the grin of triumph on the face of the boy Luga. Then Talore said, ‘Did I not say to you last Fall-of-the-leaf that I do not promise unborn cubs to any man?’ And everything went on again, and the grin faded on Luga’s face.

Morvidd forced a laugh, and an air of joviality; clearly he wanted one of the cubs very badly. ‘Nay then, we will leave that part of it. I come now, and there are three cubs yet in the litter. I’ve a mind to the one with the white blaze on its breast—the best cub of the three, without doubt; and I’ll give you the cook pot for him—a good big cook pot—and a length
of fine bleached linen cloth thrown in. What do you say to that?’

‘I say that above all the litter, that one is already sold,’ Talore said.

‘Who to, then? Who to?’

‘To the boy here.’

Morvidd stared for a moment, then flung up his head with a roar of laughter. ‘And since when does Talore sell his hound cubs to children for a handful of wild raspberries? Ah, but of course if that is the way of the thing it is easily undone. I see the thing is more than half a jest!’

Talore slipped the swan from his shoulder and flung it down beside the hearth. ‘Nay, it is not a jest, the bargain was fairly made and the boy has paid the price—the agreed price—and the thing is finished.’

The great swan lay there, spread-winged in the firelight and the lamplight; one of the hounds sniffed at it and was cuffed aside by the second son. Morvidd finished his laugh rather abruptly, and stared down at the swan and then at Drem and then back at Talore, angry again, and the more angry because he was puzzled. ‘This—
this
?’ He reached out a foot and prodded the great bird contemptuously in a way that made the rage rise in Drem’s throat—his swan, his beautiful kill, the price of the hound of his heart, to be treated so! ‘Surely it is not a hand but a head that you lack, Talore! What sort of price, beside a fine copper cook pot, is a dead swan for a hound puppy? Tell me that!’

Drem clenched his sound hand into a fist; and then above him, Talore said with that leaping gentleness of his, ‘
This
swan is a better price than if it were as many copper cook pots as there are fingers on my one hand.’

The two men stood facing each other beside the fire, the one big and red-gold and blustering, swaying a little on his heels, the other slight and dark, and still as a forest pool; while the rest of the big firelit hut looked on, the boy Luga watching his father out of the shadows, expectantly.

Then Morvidd said, ‘And that is your last word as to the thing?’

‘That is my last word.’

‘Then you’re mad!’ Morvidd let out a kind of baffled roar. ‘You’re a fool, Talore One-hand! To shake your head at a fine copper—’

Talore cut across his blustering, with the same gentleness. ‘That you have said before. Nay then, Morvidd the Chieftain’s brother, there is a thing that you forget, in all this. It is I who choose what master Fand’s cubs shall go to, and what master Fand’s cubs shall not go to; I, and no other. And I choose only masters who to my mind are worthy of them.’

For a moment Drem thought that Morvidd was going to burst like an old skin bottle filled too full, then he seemed to collapse as though the bottle had been partly emptied. He blinked, and swallowed loudly, then gathered himself together and strode to the doorway. On the threshold he turned, some of his bluster coming back to him, and shouted: ‘Then here is
my
last word. There are better cubs easily come by for a smaller price; and do not you be trying to sell a cub to
me
when Fand litters again and maybe no man needs another hound!’

‘I will not, assuredly, I will not,’ Talore said, looking after the big angry man as he flung away into the night; and the familiar note of laughter was deepening in his voice.

The boy Luga made after his father, turning also on the threshold with a long, lowering look that took in everybody in the house-place but rested longest upon Drem, before he too was gone.

‘He was very angry,’ Drem said, when the sound of footsteps had died away.

‘He will forget,’ Talore said. ‘He blusters—like a west wind he blusters; but a west wind blows itself out in a while.’

But Drem had a feeling that however quickly Morvidd’s fury blustered itself out, it would be a long time before Luga forgave having seen his father worsted and made to seem foolish.

Ah, but what did that matter? The thing was over; and Drem drew a long breath, and turned his gaze again to the swan lying spread-winged in the firelight. They were all looking at the swan now, while Wenna set aside her stitching, and rose to set out the deer meat which she had been keeping hot for the lord of the house in a pot among the embers. ‘Gwythno was here at noon, and Belu from the ford a while before. I gave
them the puppies as you bade me . . . I would have liked a copper cook pot, but I suppose we can do without.’

‘Nay then,’ said Talore, laughing. ‘We are none so poor that we must trade a puppy for a cook pot. If your heart is set on such a thing, then go and speak with Kian the Smith, and tell him he shall have two dressed wolfskins from me, for making it.’

Talore’s sons were all round Drem now, laughing. ‘That was a great hunting,’ they said. ‘Little brother, that was a fine kill—see, it is all but as big as himself!’ And the eldest son caught him a friendly buffet between the shoulders that landed like the blow of a bear’s paw and all but sent him sprawling into the fire.

Triumph rushed up into Drem’s throat, all the fiercer and more sweet for what had gone before. Just for one dreadful moment following on Morvidd’s words, he had seen his swan, his beautiful kill, as so small a price for the cub that it was not really a price at all. Just a big dead bird, beginning to be tattered and unlovely. But then Talore had said that it was worth as many copper cooking pots as there were fingers on his one hand, and the white rumpled feathers on which the bright blood had turned brown were shining with pride and beauty again.

‘It is a fair price,’ said Talore, seeing where he looked. ‘Let you take the cub now.’

Drem nodded, for the moment beyond speech, and crossed to the hurdled-off place where Fand stood with her muzzle down and her tail slowly swinging, among the yippings and whimperings that came from the piled fern.

His heart was beating right up in his throat with the joy of the moment as he pulled the low hurdle aside and reached down among the small, sleepy forms in the bracken, and grasped the one with the silver blaze by the scruff of the neck and lifted him out from between his brothers. Fand made no protest, and indeed seemed scarcely interested. He held the puppy up, swinging a little from its loose scruff; he laughed as it tried from
arm’s length away to lick his nose, and knew that the perfect moment, the best moment of all, had come.

‘I have bought my hound!’ he said to the world at large. ‘I have paid the price for him, and he is mine! I shall call him Whitethroat!’

‘So, that is a good name,’ Talore said. ‘And now it is time to be going home.’

Drem looked up from the puppy. ‘I shall need to leave my spear here until tomorrow,’ he said, ‘so that I can carry the cub.’

‘Assuredly,’ Talore nodded. ‘His legs are but two moons old, and the way will be over long for them; yet first make him follow you a little. It is so that he will understand that he is your hound to follow at your heel.’

Drem looked at the hunter doubtfully a moment, then squatted down and set the puppy on its legs. ‘Will he come, do you think?’

‘Call him, and see.’

Drem got up and took a step backward. ‘Hi! Whitethroat, come!’ The puppy continued to sit on its haunches. It was too small as yet to prick its ears, but it fluttered them, gazing up at Drem with the air of one trying to understand what he would have it do. Drem drew another step towards the doorway. ‘Come! We go home now, brother.’ The puppy whimpered and made a small thrusting motion towards him. Aware that everyone in the house-place was watching them, Drem took yet another backward step. He was almost at the threshold now. ‘Whitethroat—here!’ His throat ached with urgency, and the words came hoarse. He whistled a two-note call that he had never thought of before, but that seemed to come to him now as the proper call between him and Whitethroat. The small, brindled, half-wolf cub got up, sneezed, shook itself and waddled towards him, its stomach brushing the ferny ground. Once it hesitated, and looked back at Fand its mother with an air of uncertainty, and then padded forward again. And Drem knew that he had been wrong in thinking that the moment
when he picked it out from the litter was the best moment of all.

He was across the threshold now, looking back over his shoulder as he went; and the cub gave a bounce and quickened to a rolling trot. They went down between the out-sheds together, the hunter leading, the hound at his heels, as it should be; as it would be in all their lives together. But at the edge of Talore’s steading, Drem stopped in answer to a protesting whimper, and scooped up the puppy and settled it against his shoulder, in the crook of his sound arm.

So Drem walked home up the sweeping flanks of the Chalk, through the still summer darkness, with his hunting dog asleep, warm and live and unexpectedly heavy, in the crook of his arm; and a kind of chant of triumph singing itself over and over again within him. ‘I have bought my hound! I bought him with a great white swan—a swan like a sun-burst, that I slew with my throw-spear! I have bought my hound, and he is mine! He was sired by a wolf, out where the wolves pass at the Spring Running; and he will be the swiftest and the bravest hound that ever ran with the Clan, and he is mine! Mine is the cub to me because I paid the price for him—I, Drem the Hunter; I bought him with my kill!’