Warrior Scarlet (8 page)

It had been a long day and a hard one, and it had given him his hound and his first big kill, and the proof of his own skill with a throw-spear that brought him just so much nearer to his Warrior Scarlet. It had been a good day.

But he had been right in thinking that it would be a long time—a very long time—before Luga the son of Morvidd forgave, or forgot.

AT MOST PLACES
the brook ran deep, sunk between steep alder-fringed banks; but at the loop just below the ancient trackway, the current had formed a low spit, which was a favourite bathing place with the boys of the Clan. It was a good place, in the blue and green noon-tides of summer when the high sun splashed through the alder leaves and fell in freckles of gold on the dark water, and the shadows might be lit at any moment by the iridescent flash of a dragon fly. Summer was over now, and the water turning cold, so that you splashed in and out again, shouting, and tumbled over each other in sham fight on the bank to get warm, while you dried off and got your kirtle on again; but it was still a good place, on a fine autumn evening, with the westering sunlight slanting in spears of tawny brightness through the alders and the nut leaves, and the shadows blue as woodsmoke.

There were some boys down there now; Luga the son of Morvidd, and fat, good-natured Maelgan, and little dark Erp of the Half People, who could swim like an otter under water, and two or three more, with the usual pack of dogs. Drem sat a little farther up the bank than the rest, re-tying the ankle thongs of his rawhide shoes, a thing which always took him rather longer than it took the others, because of having to do it one handed. And beside him, nose on paws, and superb bush-tail curving away into the tangle of the past summer’s willow-herb, lay the great, brindled, black and amber hound whom
more than a year ago he had picked, small and woolly and half asleep, from among his litter brothers in Talore’s house-place, and whistled to follow him.

Drem made the thong fast, and half drew his legs under him, beginning to think about going home to supper. He wondered what there would be; stew of some sort, he hoped, for as usual he was hungry. And if Blai, who had gone down the brookside with a withy basket, came back in time, maybe his mother would have made some of the sweet, dark, pippy mess that she brewed with blackberries and honey to spread on barley cakes; but more likely that would be tomorrow.

For the moment they had fallen quiet, and in the quiet, a flash of living blue lit across Drem’s eyes, as a kingfisher swooped down to a low-hanging branch of the great willow, upstream.

Luga picked up a flint from the grass beside him—there were always a few along the spit, rolled down from the made-place where the cattle came to drink—and flung it. It missed its mark and skittered over the top of the branch into the water beyond with a sound like a fish leaping, and the kingfisher darted off with a guttural anger-call.

Drem hooted derisively, and Luga scowled. ‘I was not trying to hit it.’

‘Yes you were,’ Drem said.

‘I was not, then.’

‘You can never see anything alive and—and
liking
being alive without wanting to throw something at it and make it be dead,’ Drem said, and added, more for the sake of arguing than anything else, ‘Talore says that killing for the sake of killing, in the way of the fox and the weasel, makes the Forest Gods angry.’

‘Talore! Talore!’ said Luga, skimmering another flint into the water, and trying to mimic Drem’s way of speaking. ‘Of course we all know you are Talore’s pet. Didn’t he give you Whitethroat just for a dead swan that you like enough found dead of old age on the Marshes and stole from the magpies,
when
my
father would have given him a fine copper cooking pot?’

Drem rose in his place and was just about to fall on him and avenge the insult to himself and his swan alike, when Whitethroat sprang to his feet and stood alert, his head up to reveal the silver blaze that had given him his name, his amber eyes wary, muzzle testing the wind; and almost in the same instant, Erp, who had been lying on his stomach investigating a water rat’s hole under the bank, rolled over and sat up, cocking his narrow, dark head towards the track: the ancient green track along which, as often as along the Ridgeway, the world went by; bands of skin-clad hunters from distant hunting runs; herdsmen in the droving season; warriors with stripes of woad and ochre on their foreheads, following their princes to war; traders from across the Great Water with salt and scented yellow amber and fine bronze in their ponies’ bales.

Somewhere, a long way off as yet, someone or something was coming along the track between the hazels and the whitethorn trees, and instantly the quarrel was forgotten, and boys and hounds in a knot went scrambling up the bank to where they could get a view of the track through the scrub.

‘Maybe it is a war-band!’ said Luga, hopefully. It was exciting when a war-band came by; and there was no need to be afraid, for if their business was with the village under the Hill of Gathering, as it had been in the time when Talore lost his hand and Drem’s father went beyond the sunset, then they would not be on the track at all.

‘More likely it is a hunting party, now in the Fall-of-the-Leaf,’ Maelgan said.

Little Erp lay with his ear pressed against the ground. ‘Ponies,’ he said, ‘The earth speaks of ponies—I think two ponies—and one man. No more.’

‘Then it must be a trader of some kind.’

They waited, peering between the hazel branches, and listening. They could all hear it now, very faintly, the light beat of hooves on the summer-hard ground, and then the pad
of human feet; nearer, and nearer. There was a flicker of saffron yellow through the alder leaves; and a few moments later a man came into view: a tall, dark man in a tattered cloak whose greens and purples had dimmed with weather and mud to the colour of storm clouds, leading two dejected ponies one behind the other, the foremost bowlegged under the weight of two great bales wrapped in yellow cloth, the hindmost loaded with the tools of a bronze-smith’s trade.

A trader or travelling craftsman was always of interest, for his stories of the outside world as well as for the wonders that might be hidden in his bales. And as this one drew level, walking with the long, slow stride of a man who walks from the sky’s edge to the sky’s edge and knows that there is no hurry, the knot of boys swarmed from cover with the hounds at their heels, and flung themselves upon him, demanding, ‘Where are you from?—Where are you away to?—Do you sleep in our village tonight?—What have you in those bales?’

The tall man looked down at them, laughing, as they padded alongside him. ‘Sa hah! Here is a fine welcome, then! I am from the last village behind me, and it may be that I spend the night in your Chieftain’s steading, or it may be that I shall sleep as sound under a hawthorn bush with a fire to keep the Wild away. I am for the West towards the Sunset; and as to what there is in my bales, let you see when I open them before the Chieftain’s door.’

And they went on together, only Erp was not with them, for he was of the Little Dark People whose instinct was to run and hide instead of coming out to ask questions; but the others knew that he was watching them from under the whitethorn bushes.

Maelgan ran ahead to give warning of the bronze-smith’s coming, and when they reached the outskirts of the village, one
of the Men’s side came down to meet them, with reversed spear for a sign of peace, saying, ‘Greeting, stranger. We have our bronze-smith already among the huts of the Half People; but Dumnorix the Chieftain sends you greeting, and bids you come and open your bales before his threshold, according to the custom.’

‘Sa, I will come as the Chieftain bids me, and open my bales before his door according to the custom,’ the stranger said. ‘It is in my mind that the Chieftain will not regret it. All the world knows that the finest bronze-smiths are from the Green Isle in the West; and in all the Green Island there is no smith with cunning to match mine whether in the forging of weapons for a hero, or the working of ornaments for a queen’s white neck.’

When they reached the clear space before the Chieftain’s house-place, the only things alive in it were an old hound sleeping outstretched on the dung heap, and Midir the Priest sitting in the last echo of the sunset, against the wind-break beside the house-place doorway, with his soft bull’s-hide robe huddled about his shoulders against the chill of the autumn evening, and his chin sunk on his breast as though he also slept. But it was commonly believed that Midir never slept, only went away small inside himself and talked with the Gods in the silence he found there. He did not look up or make any sign as they drew near. But almost in the moment of checking the ponies, two older boys—next year’s warriors—came across from the Boys’ House to take charge of the poor tired beasts as they were unloaded; and several of the Men’s side who were home early began to trickle up, gathering for a sight of the things in the yellow bales, so that the small boys who were only there on sufferance anyway, were thrust farther on to the fringe of things.

Then the dyed deer skins over the house-place doorway were flung back and Dumnorix, the lord of three hundred spears, came out; a big man with a mane of red-gold hair tumbling about his bull neck and on to his shoulder, and the bright hairs of his beard spreading over his breast almost to the bronze
buckle of his belt. He was followed by his hounds and a square-built a few months older than Drem, with bandy legs and a pair of round, very blue eyes; his son Vortrix, who had not been one of the bathing band, because he had trodden in Midir’s shadow that morning, and so had been taboo until sunset.

‘Greeting and welcome to you, stranger Bronze-smith,’ said Dumnorix, ‘for your own sake, and for what is in your bales. It will be a while before the evening stew comes from the fire; therefore if you are not over-weary, let you open your bales now, for I am eager to see if you have fine weapons to trade.’

The stranger touched palm to forehead, then stood up straight before the Chieftain with a pride to match his own, like a prince on a journey, rather than a wandering bronze-smith in a tattered cloak. ‘Greeting, Lord of three hundred spears. Did ever a bronze-smith come out of the Green Isle yet, that had not fine weapons to show? And am I not the most skilled in the craft that ever the Green Isle bred? I am on my way home towards the Sunset, and much that I had is sold, yet there are still a few treasures worth the seeing in these bales of mine.’ His long, strong fingers were busy on the bale-cords even as he spoke. ‘And what better way to pass the time while we wait for the food bowls to be filled?’

The Chieftain had seated himself on his stool of carved and painted wood before his door, and the others of the Men’s side were squatting on to their heels, huddling their cloaks about them. Drem, squirming his way through from the outcast fringe to get a better view, came up under the arm of Talore the Hunter, and Talore made room for him, so that in the end he had as good a view as Vortrix the Chieftain’s son himself.

And so, while the flame of the sunset blazed and sank behind the Hill of Gathering, as though the sacred fires burned there as they did at Beltane, and the faint smell of frost and dead leaves stole up from the forest to mingle with the sharp, blue reek of wood smoke and horse droppings, the bronze-smith brought forth his treasures, laying them first before the Chieftain, then passing them among the eager knot of tribesmen:
beautifully shaped axe-heads, spear blades all of bronze, neck rings and arm rings of shining bronze and silver and copper, ornaments for a pony’s harness, and a sword with studs of red coral in the unguarded hilt. There was little bargaining as yet; men looked at the things they wanted, making no comment; and in a little they would go home and think about it, and see what they had to give in exchange, and come back in the morning maybe with a length of cloth or a couple of fine beaver skins or a lathe-turned beechen bowl.

All the while Midir the Priest sat hunched in his bull’s-hide robe, seemingly oblivious of all that went on around him. When you saw him so, Drem thought, it was hard to believe that he was that Other One, the One red with bull’s blood at the sacred slaying when the Need Fires burned on the Hill of Gathering; whose voice was like a storm wind when he spoke from the Sun Lord to the people on Midsummer mornings. He was just a tired old man making little breath-puffings in his beard, Drem thought, and then hurriedly made the sign to avert evil, because it was dangerous to think such things.

‘And is this, then, the last of the things that you have to show?’ Dumnorix asked at last, handing back a pony’s breast ornament that had the curve of a breaking wave.

There was a little silence, and then the smith said, ‘Na, there is one thing more, though not of my forging—and maybe a strange thing for a bronze-smith to be carrying in his bales.’

He took up something wrapped by itself in a piece of woollen cloth, and unwrapped it and set it in the Chieftain’s broad hands.

Dumnorix the Chieftain looked up swiftly. ‘The light fades, and I must see this thing. Bring a torch.’

Vortrix slid from his place at his father’s feet, and disappeared into the house-place, returning in a few moments with a smoking torch that he must have taken down from its sconce against the roof tree, for there was a faint sound of protest from within, as of a woman left to weave by firelight. With the coming of the torch, the misty twilight seemed to deepen behind the shoulders
of the tribesmen, though it had still been almost daylight the moment before. As the whole circle gathered closer, Drem saw that there was something strange, something very strange indeed, about the dagger in the Chieftain’s hands. It was the wrong colour: not the familiar sun-colour of bronze, but a kind of dim moon-colour, fish-scale colour, as the Chieftain tipped it towards the torch, and the light ran like water along the blade.

‘Sa, what is this thing—this grey metal?’ said Dumnorix, testing the blade gingerly with a finger.

‘It is called iron,’ said the stranger.