Warrior Scarlet (11 page)

It dawned on the others at the same moment. They were all round him, watching him with sudden speculation. Then Luga pointed down at the spear and his face was alight with malice. ‘Aren’t you going to take up your spear? A warrior must needs carry a spear as well as a shield; do you forget that?’

Drem faced him, faced them all. ‘Na,’ he said. ‘I do not forget that. But it is in my mind that a warrior might do well enough carrying only his spear and not a shield at all! I took up the shield to try its weight as you have all done. No more.’

‘Ya-ee! Hark to Drem One-arm!’ Luga cried. ‘Drem One-arm cannot carry his spear and his shield together; he would
make only half a warrior—and what use is half a warrior to the Men’s side?’

Drem was sharply aware of the silence all about him, and in the silence the spattering rain on the thatch and the distant scolding of a woman. He did not move, he was too proud to move before them, even though his arm and shoulder were beginning to tremble under the weight of bronze and bull’s-hide; but if he had been a hound, the hair would have risen on his neck. The others were still staring at him, not hostile as yet—though that was coming—but somehow no longer strange with each other, bonded together under Luga’s leadership; and
he
was the only stranger. He understood about Luga; Luga had never forgiven him for the matter of Whitethroat and the swan; that was simple. The rest was less simple; but something far down in Drem that had nothing to do with thinking, understood that too. All their lives they had run together in one pack; a mingled pack of children and hounds from the Clan and Half People alike; but now it was different, now Erp and his dark brothers must follow their own ways, and the Clan and the Half People were no longer one. This was the Boys’ House; this was the beginning of the Men’s side, the Spear Brotherhood, the beginning of the question whether Drem’s place was inside with the Spear Brotherhood or outside with the Half People.

‘Let you go and learn to weave with the women,’ Luga said, bright-eyed and taunting, and there was a splurge of laughter.

‘But you’d need two arms for that, too,’ Gault squealed in sudden excitement; and—he was a great one for playing the fool—he began to jig up and down, making the gestures of a woman working at an upright loom. They were crowding in on Drem, beginning to jostle him. It was more than half in jest at first, but the jest was an ugly one, and wearing thin over what lay underneath. ‘Ye-ee! Drem One-arm—Drem One-arm!’

It must be Luga or himself, Drem thought, and the only thing he could do was to fight, and if need be go down fighting.
He did not stand the faintest chance, of course, but that made no difference. He let go the great shield. It fell with a ringing clash and crash against the edge of the hearth stone, momentarily scattering the little fierce knot, and in the same instant, with the life still tingling back into his arm, he hit Luga fair between the eyes, with all the strength that was in his body behind the blow. And he cried out on a shrill note of challenge, ‘One arm is enough to hit with!’

Luga staggered backward, shaking his head, as though for the moment he was not at all sure what had hit him. Then he recovered himself and came in again with flailing fists.

Drem hit him again in the instant before the other boy’s fist crashed into his own cheekbone, filling one eye with a red burst of stars. Having only one serviceable arm, he could do nothing to guard against the blows that came pounding in on him. He tucked his head down to save his face as much as possible, and somehow got his back against the great roof tree. The whole lot of them were on him at once, giving tongue like hound puppies at the kill. He saw their faces pressing in on him, their open mouths and bright eyes; and their shrill clamour rose and rose in his ears. He knew that he was fighting for his place in
the Clan, fighting for his whole life—all that made life worth having; and he hit out wildly, desperately, yelling his defiance. He never knew what it was he yelled, only that it was defiance. He kicked somebody’s legs from under them so that they came down across the great shield with a hollow clangour; but while the thrumming of it still hung upon the air, a buffet landed on the side of his head that sent him staggering sideways, and instantly they were on him, dragging him down though he struggled and tore and bit like a cornered wild cat.

And then, when he was all but done, somebody dived low through the flailing mass of arms and legs, and whirled about at his side, flinging Maelgan off him with one shoulder, and driving his fist into Urian’s howling face. And as Drem grasped the moment’s respite to drag himself free and stagger upright again, shaking his head to clear it, he realized vaguely that he was no longer alone.

‘Sa sa sa! Come on then! Come on all of you and see what you’ll get!’ he heard his new comrade yelling. He had his back against the roof tree again now, and the other boy’s shoulder was against his, guarding where he could not guard for himself, and a sudden warm sense of increase was in
him. The smell of blood came into the back of his nose, far up between his eyes; the Warrior Smell. And suddenly, from feeling like a cornered animal, the joy of battle leapt in him like a flame.

He cared nothing now for the blows he got, only for the blows he gave. It was a great fight, though a short one; a stand against hopeless odds such as no warrior of the Tribe need have been ashamed of. But it was a last stand, and the odds were hopeless; five against two, and Drem had only one arm to fight with.

In their shrill and bloodthirsty absorption in the matter in hand, none of them saw the sudden dark swoop of figures into the doorway as several of the older boys came ducking in; nor the squat, hairy figure of Kylan of the Boys’ House straddling there with his whip in his hand, looking on. They were not aware of anything but themselves and their own affairs; until someone behind Kylan spoke a deep-voiced word, and suddenly Kylan was among them, wading into their midst with his lash busy in his hand, as a man wades into a fight among his own hound puppies. ‘Break off! Back, I say! Back—get back!’ And the long supple lash of oxhide curled and cracked again and again as he laid about him. Drem felt it sear like a hornet sting across his neck and shoulders. The shrill yammer died down, and slowly, sullenly, the fight fell apart and the fighters stood rather sheepishly looking at each other, and at Kylan, and at the Chieftain himself, standing in the doorway with his great golden head bent under the lintel and the last of the shower shining behind him.

Dumnorix the Chieftain looked them over with interest, his frowning grey eyes moving from one to another in little darts and flickers that missed nothing. His gaze rested a long moment on Drem and the boy beside him; and he said to Kylan, with the merest flicker of a smile under his long moustaches, ‘You spoke too soon when you swore but now that the bad days were here, and there were no more champions coming up to take their stand in the Spear Brotherhood.’

‘So it seems,’ Kylan said, breathing loudly through his
hairy nostrils as he stood now drawing the supple lash again and again through his broad hairy hands. ‘If the snapping and snarling of puppies gives any proof in the matter.’

Drem, his breast still heaving, the blood trickling from a cut under one eye, stared rather muzzily at Luga’s face. Luga was working at a loose tooth, and his nose was bleeding and seemed to have spread over his face like a bannock. Yes, he’d set his mark on Luga. He’d set his mark on a good many of his own kind—he and the other at his shoulder. For the first time it occurred to him to wonder who it was; and he turned his head carefully, as though it were loose on his neck, to see.

He saw that it was Vortrix, the Chieftain’s son. Vortrix turned his head at the same moment, licking a cut lip; and they looked at each other gravely, almost warily, and then, as though making up their minds, broke into slow and rather wavering grins.

The voice of Dumnorix the Chieftain called them back to the matter in hand. ‘And what thing brought it about, this mighty battle?’

No one answered; they looked straight before them and scuffled among the strewed fern, while the older boys looked on as the lords of the world look on at the antics of a litter of puppies. ‘Well?’ said Dumnorix. ‘Are you all dumb? You yelped loud enough but now!’ and the frown gathered on his face like the shadow of thunder clouds gathering on the face of the High Chalk. Dumnorix the Chieftain was not a good man to defy.

For one agonized moment more, the silence held, not even Vortrix found his voice; and then Drem cocked up his head and grinned into the Chieftain’s frowning face. ‘We were practising to be warriors. O Dumnorix, Lord of three hundred spears, is it not for that, that we live three years as the Chieftain’s hounds, at the Chieftain’s hearth?’

For a moment after he had said it, he was so frightened that his mouth dried up and he could not have spoken again if he had wanted to. And then the storm broke—into a gale of laughter, as Dumnorix the Chieftain
flung up his head among the rafters, and roared. His great laughter filled the Boys’ House, so that a log fell on the hearth, and the sparks whirled upward, and even Kylan chuckled grumblingly in his deep chest, and the older boys nudged one another, grinning. But to the twelve-year-olds it was no laughing matter.

‘Sa sa sa! We have champions indeed!’ Dumnorix said, still laughing. ‘The good days are not gone yet, Kylan old wolf; and we shall not be without cunning champions in the Men’s side, when our time comes to sit by the fire and dream of old battles!’ And then, already turning to the low doorway, he added to the knot of silent twelve-year-olds, ‘It is in my mind that there has been enough
practice
for one day. Maybe now the time comes to be washing off the blood.’

When he was gone, they looked at each other uncertainly, while the older boys turned away to their own affairs as though they no longer existed. They wondered a little, now that it was over, what it had all been about. Only Luga, still working at the loose tooth, looked as though he remembered. Then Maelgan grinned suddenly, blinking pale eyelashes, and began the drift towards the doorway and the spring below the village.

Drem and Vortrix were the last to go, and as the drift became a scramble, Vortrix flung an arm of friendliness round Drem’s neck. He had cut his knuckles on Urian’s front teeth and a crimson trickle from the cut under Drem’s eye splashed on to his hand where it was still bleeding. They both saw it, and looked at each other. Vortrix laughed, and then grew sober, for it was no laughing matter after all. ‘See, we have mingled our blood. Now we are brothers, you and I.’

ON AN EVENING
well into the Fall-of-the-Leaf, Drem came down the long flank of the Chalk towards the village. His hunting spear was over his shoulder, and he had just left Whitethroat at the foot of the home driftway. Two and a half years had gone by since the first time that he had left his hound there, to go down to the Boys’ House—two and a half years in which Drem had become the finest spearman among his fellows and a rider who could control his little fiery mount with the grip of his knees alone when he needed a hand free for his weapons—and by now it was a thing that they were both used to. It had become a definite pattern. Always, when Drem was free to hunt with him, Whitethroat would seem to know, and would refuse to go with Drustic about the farm or on the hunting trail, though at other times he went willingly enough; and when Drem and Vortrix came up through the alder brake beside the stream, he would be waiting at the foot of the driftway, smelling the wind for their coming, quivering with hope. Then he would leap up, baying, and come with great leaps and bounds down over the springy turf to fling himself upon his lord, and they would roll over together, laughing—the hound as well as the boy—Drem with his arm round Whitethroat’s neck, and Whitethroat growling and roaring in mock ferocity while all the while his bushy tail lashed to and fro behind. And then they would go off, the boys with their spears on their shoulders, the hounds—Vortrix also had his hound—padding
at their heels. And when the hunting was over, Drem would bring Whitethroat up the combe again to the foot of the driftway, or sometimes even to the gateway of the steading where he might speak with his mother or Blai, though he might not cross the threshold while he was of the Boys’ House. But if he went up to the steading, Whitethroat always came down again to the foot of the driftway with him. There, by the lowest of the little ragged corn plots, was their place for parting.

Drem and Vortrix had hunted together since that first day in the Boys’ House, the day that they had become blood brothers whether they would or no; but Vortrix was never present at these partings. Drem was one to keep his loves in separate stalls; and Vortrix, though not in general over-quick to sense such things, was wise in the ways of his blood brother, and always went back to the Boys’ House alone, while Drem ran his great, white-breasted hound back to the foot of the driftway.

The autumn dusk was coming up blue as wood smoke across the rolling dimness of the Wild, quenching the russet flame of the forest far below, as Drem came down through the higher field plots of the village. There was a black and white flicker of plovers’ wings over the fallow, and the starlings swept homeward overhead; and already firelight was beginning to strengthen in house-place doorways. It all looked very quiet, a faint mist stealing among the huts, made up of wood smoke and the first promise of frost and the warm breath of the cattle byres. But as he drew nearer, as he came in among the crowding bothies, Drem found that it was not so quiet as it had seemed. There was a strange activity in the village that evening; a coming and going of figures dim-seen in the dusk, a fitful murmur of voices, a general air of making ready for something. And in the Boys’ House, too, when he reached it, was the same air of preparation. Vortrix, who had arrived some while before him, was squatting by the fire on which the evening stew bubbled in its great, slung cauldron, his light hunting bow lay beside him; and he was skinning the hare that he had shot that day, with an air of one attending to first things first. But the
other boys of his year and Drem’s, sprawling or standing around him, were talking eagerly as they burnished cloak pin and dagger blade, and furbished their trailing pony harness as though for battle, while Kylan sat on his skin-spread stool with his spear across his knees and watched them with a bright and vigilant eye.