Then he lowered his eyes to meet the narrow blue gaze of the living man. ‘Cradoc, Chieftain of our conquerors, I will try to make you your hill-high Sun Horse. I will make it willingly – for a price.’
Cradoc raised his brows. ‘Lubrin, Chieftain’s son of our conquered, what price is that?’
‘If I succeed, you shall let those who are left of my people go free. You shall let them have enough stallions and brood mares out of the herd to raise a new herd in another place.’ (‘Good grazing, in and out between the hazel woods and the heather,’ said the merchant’s voice in his mind, across the years between.) ‘And you shall let them go.’
‘It is a high price that you ask,’ said Cradoc.
‘But you only pay it if the Sun Horse seems to you good.’
‘There is truth in that,’ said the Chieftain, staring into the heart of his wine-cup. Abruptly, he looked up. ‘So, then, that shall be the way of it. The new ramparts, I have said it before, are all but finished; and already the Old People are beginning to creep back after the way of their kind. If the Sun Horse seems to me good, it shall be for your people’s freedom. That is the bargain between you and me. . . . I have had enough of horse pictures for one night.’
And so Lubrin Dhu left the Chieftain’s hall.
And all the while, he knew that there was something more; something that had not been spoken between them, not even thought between them; but still there, in the dark heart of things; waiting.
Later that might, in the corral between the inner and outer banks of the dun, Lubrin Dhu gathered the rags of the clan about him, to tell them what had passed beside the Chieftain’s hearth. But looking round from one to another of the faces turned towards him in the mingled light of the cooking-fire and the rising moon, he found it hard to begin; harder even than he had expected, and he had not expected it to be easy.
Kuno asked, ‘Well then, Ears-and-Mouth of the Chief, what thing did he want with you?’
‘He wanted me to draw horses for him on the hearth-stone, to amuse him because he grew weary of his harper’s song. And when I had drawn him as many horses as he wanted, he bade me say could I make him a Sun Horse, cut into the turf of the northern scarp. A horse half a hillside high, to be a frontier mark for the Attribates.’
‘And you said?’
‘I said that I did not know. I said it was in my mind there might be a way – for one that was willing to find it.’
‘And you were willing?’ someone said.
Kuno leaned forward into the firelight, ‘Are you telling us that he asked this of you, and you refused, and yet come back to us with your bowels still in your belly and your head on your shoulders? That is a story hard to swallow.’
‘Na,’ Lubrin said, slowly. ‘I did not refuse, I said that I would try – at a price.’
Teleri his sister cut him short, her face a hard white mask in the growing moonlight. ‘You should find the task easy enough, for you will be able to copy the horse from one of the gold coins they use. I am thinking it will be in gold coins that they pay you?’ Her voice matched her face, hard and coldly accusing. And the silence of the rest seemed to accuse him also.
‘The tails of those horses are wrong.’ Lubrin heard himself saying, as though it mattered. ‘Our horses have their tails set on in a different way.’
‘But it will be their horse that you are making.’
‘It will be their horse, the Sun Horse of the Attribates, yes. But it will be the Moon Horse also, the horse of our people, so that so long as the Downs rise above the forest, and men make their prayer to Epona the Mother of Foals, they will know that the Iceni were here.’
Below in the woods, an owl cried mockingly in the silence; and the silence was cold as the moonlight. Lubrin felt the chill of it, and knew that they thought, all of them, like Teleri, that he had broken faith with them. And for a moment anger and grief rose in him so that he could not find words to set the thing straight.
It was Dara who broke the silence and the chill. ‘This price that you speak of – I think that it is not in gold horse-pieces. Let you tell us what it is, Lubrin, my brother.’
‘Aye,’ a score of voices took up the demand. ‘Let you tell us what it is!’
‘I said to the Chieftain that I would try to make him his Sun Horse half a hillside high; and that if I brought it to finish, and it seemed to him good, then what was left of us, of the clan, should go free, taking enough stallions and brood mares from the herd to raise up a new horse herd in other runs than these.’
A low murmur rose from the listeners. And Dara said, ‘So-o! That is a price indeed!’
And someone else spoke up from the dark behind him. ‘But will he keep his share of the bargain? It would be easy to say, when the horse is finished, that it does not seem good to him.’
‘Cradoc will keep his share of the bargain,’ Lubrin said. ‘And I shall keep mine.’ His gaze found and held Dara’s. And between them again, unspoken, was the old shared dream of the northward droving. Once, he and Dara had thought to share that leadership together; and then, when Dara had been named at the Choosing Feast, to marry with Teleri and be the next Chieftain of the clan, Lubrin had known that if ever the dream were to become more than a dream, it would be for him to take the leadership alone. And now the thing was the other way. Now it would be for Dara to lead the people north, while he. . . .
For an instant, the thing that he had been aware of in the Chieftain’s hall, the thing that had been left unsaid, unthought, began to stir. He thrust it back into the dark, not looking at it. The time for looking at it was not yet. ‘I shall need help,’ he said, ‘hands to cut turf and carry chalk.’
‘You shall have them.’ Dara held out his own in a gesture offering, as he said it.
And Kuno added, ‘We’ve had practice enough, by now.’
And Teleri came forward from among the women, and reached out with a quick shy gesture that did not quite touch his wrist. ‘I will carry chalk for you. Let you forgive me, I did not understand.’
But the loneliness, that had begun for Lubrin on the first night of their captivity, had deepened, and did not go away.
9
Of Hawks and Gods and Men on the Ground
Next day Lubrin went down from the dun past the nine sacred apple trees that were swelling into bud, and away through the valley woods to the wych-elm on the edge of its clearing. He was alone. He had been surprised at first that Cradoc had not ordered at least a couple of men with spears to go with him; but then he had understood. Cradoc knew as well as he did that there was no need; he could not run, while his people were still captive in the dun.
The great tree was smoky with tiny purplish flower-tufts, and the scent of it, and the boom of bees were all about him as he climbed. And all about him too, as though it had been waiting for him, the old sense of shelter and home-coming. He climbed up by the familiar road, swinging his way from branch to branch until he was clear of the tops of the lesser woodshore trees; up and up until he was lying out along his special branch, with all the broad lowland stretch and the distant wave-lift of the Downs rising to his father’s dun clear before him.
It was all as familiar as part of himself, but now he was looking at it as he had never quite looked at it before; seeing the long slow masses of the hills that seemed to rise with the sunrise, and travel westward to set far, far off with the setting sun. Even the sudden lift where the land reared up above plunging combes and hollows, carrying the dun on its highest crest, did not break the line. It was as though the High Chalk arched its neck as it passed on westward, no more.
‘Now,’ said the Youngest Son, ‘let us take the horse herds, high crested and of fiery heart,
And let us set our faces toward the West, Toward the land of the trees of silver apples. Come.’
The words and the beat of Sinnoch’s harpsong feathered across the back of his mind. He pulled round the deerskin bag he carried behind his shoulder, and took out the pieces of silvery birch bark and the
charred sticks wrapped in a bit of old cloth. His eyes were full of the long-familiar rise and fall of the skyline, the changing play of light over the lifts and hollows. Below the dun and a little to the left, a small flat-topped hill rose from the lower slopes of the Downs – there was an old tale of a dragon that slept, coiled up within it, guarding a magic spear – and behind it, already taking on the clear green of springtime, the north scarp of the Chalk swooped upward to the skyline. Somewhere below the skyline, he thought, would be the right place for his horse.
He began to draw on his bits of birch bark. He drew again the horse that he had drawn on the Chieftain’s hearth-stone, standing tensed and alert, head up to snuff the wind; a war-pony hearing the sound of distant warhorns, a stallion on guard over his herd. That was the right kind of horse for a frontier mark.
All day he lay out along his branch, making his drawings and gazing at the hillside, until hillside and horse came together in his mind’s eye, and he knew just where the lines must run, from that thorn-tree to the lip of that hollow; and down in a flat curve towards the loop of the old droveway. He made it all into a kind of pattern on his last piece of birch bark; and then, with the shadows lying long in the evening light, he dropped out of his tree and made his way back to the dun.
And when the dusk had deepened into the dark, and the evening meal had been eaten in the Chieftain’s hall and corral where his captives were penned, Lubrin Dhu stood again before Cradoc the Chieftain in his High Place. ‘I have been all the day seeing how the lines must run, and now I know, and I am ready to begin the horse. Therefore give me leave to fell birch saplings in the valley woods tomorrow, and lime that is left over from whitening the rampart timbers, and ten oxhides. And let me take who I will from among my own people, to help me, and in two days I will set out the first lines on the slope above the Dragon Hill.’
‘And by means of a few oxhides and saplings and some lime daub, you will take these lines from inside your own head and make them again on the hillside?’ The Chieftain frowned, interested and perplexed. ‘How shall such a thing be done?’
Lubrin shook his head. ‘Let that lie for a while. I have not done this thing before; nor do I know of any man who has done it. Therefore I must learn the secret as I go along; and until I have learned it – I cannot tell.’
‘So, that is fair,’ said the Chieftain. ‘Not tomorrow but in maybe three days’ time, when the defences of the new gates are finished, you shall have your oxhides and your lime, and leave to fell your birch saplings, and any that you choose from among your own people to work for you.’
So three days later, Lubrin and Dara, and the other men who had come forward to join them, went down to the valley woods to cut the birch saplings, and toiled back with them up the snaking track, their spear-guards following watchful on either side. It seemed that with almost the whole Men’s Side out, Cradoc was less sure of them than he was of Lubrin alone. It took them the best part of two days to cut and carry all that they needed, and get it stacked up just below the Ridgeway, as near as the hill slopes allowed to Lubrin’s chosen place. After that was done, they trimmed the oxhides and daubed them with lime so that they would show up from a distance, white on the young green of the turf. And then Lubrin was ready to begin.
It was a blustery day when they started setting out the oxhides to serve as markers, brow and muzzle, neck, flanks, breast and tail, and the four firm-set feet; and the wind, gusting up from the west through the spring grass and the white-fleeced thorn trees, scattered the larksong all about the sky and drove clouds of lime-dust from the flapping oxhides into their faces, so that their eyes smarted and grew red-rimmed. Lubrin shouted his orders to Dara and the rest. ‘Over that way towards the second thorn tree. Let you try forty paces – na, na, you are working too far uphill. Kuno, hold it there, while I go to the left – Dara, help me get this one pegged down . . .’
Otherwise they did not speak. There seemed nothing to say.
Lubrin felt strange and un-belonging on the familiar hillside, and he could catch none of the feeling of magic that was a part of his picture-making. There was no more life or magic in what he was doing now than there had been in digging out the new ditches for the dun. Instead, there was an oddly dead feeling. Maybe it was because the work was so big that he could not see what he was doing. He had never drawn anything before, without being able to see in the same heart-beat as he set them down, whether or not the lines were what he wanted them to be.
When he could get away far enough to see what he had made on the hillside, it would be all right, and the life and the magic would come.
But by the time they had all the hides in place, and pegged down or weighted with lumps of chalk to keep them from flapping out of true, the wind was blowing up a fine mizzle rain that smudged away the lowland woods behind drifting swathes of wetness. So it was not until next morning, when the rain had cleared and the larks were singing over the High Chalk, that Lubrin dropped down from the dun and headed across the valley for his usual vantage point. And all the way, he was careful not to look back; not until he came to the right place.
He had been anxious lest the wet night should have washed away too much of the lime-daub, and the oxhides not show up well enough from the distance. But when at last, far out on his branch, he parted the twig-tangle and looked, there they were, easy enough to trace in the clear light of early morning after rain.
He lay for a long while studying marker after marker, thinking out the white lines of the bared chalk that should join one to another, linking muzzle to ears, forming the single sweep of neck and back and tail, running from the forelegs up the arch of the neck to the head once more. It would be a good horse. Some of the markers, he thought, were not quite in the right place; one needed to be moved nearly twice its length to the right, another should go about the same distance farther up the hill. He thought so; but it was so hard to be sure, with the slope of the hillside running away from him. High over the vale, a buzzard was swinging in sky-wide circles, the tips of its broad flight pinions tilted by the lift of the upper air. Its faint mewing cry came down to him, and watching it, he thought that if only he could see as the great bird could see, circling up there against the shining steeps of the sky, with the broad upward thrust of the Downs slowly circling beneath him, he might know. . . . No, there would be no help in that; the horse must be seen always by men on the ground. No man could ever see from up there; only the buzzard and his kind, and maybe the gods. It was all so confusing that it hurt his head as well as his heart. Only one thing he was sure about: those two markers needed shifting. He would do the best he could, being a man and not a god.
Wearily he dropped down out of the wych-elm, and set off yet again, back towards the dun and the conqueror, and the tattered band of fellow captives who were his people.
10
Chief’s Right
In the days that followed, they daubed the birch stems also with lime, and set about laying them from one to another of the marker points, driving in tent-pegs to hold them from rolling away down the scarp, then gathered up the hides and set them aside to serve their purpose again at the next stage. And now the outline of the horse was clear on the hillside. Not that you could tell it for a horse; not that you could tell it for anything but a maze of lime-daubed saplings lying at random on the turf, as though giants had been playing some kind of game with them.
‘This is a horse?’ Dara said doubtfully, running the back of one hand across his forehead and leaving a white smear of lime-wash.
‘If we were far enough away to see it,’ said Lubrin, and looked up at the buzzard still wheeling and mewing against the evening sky, with the late sunlight under its wings. ‘To him – I think – it will be a horse.’
‘But we have not his wings.’
‘Na. But from across the vale, too. Today, the light is too far gone; but tomorrow’s morning I shall go to my tree, and then I shall know if it is a horse.’
That night, lying huddled in an old cloak,
he watched the stars wheel overhead until the sky paled to grey, and the first faint primrose feathering of dawn grew in the east; and never slept at all, knowing that the coming day was going to be one of those that change life, or begin it, or end it, or make it grow.
Morning came, the woods below the dun ringing with birdsong; and Lubrin drank the morning buttermilk when the women brought it round, but left his piece of barley bannock untouched, and went to the thornbush gate of the corral. The others watched him go. He could feel them watching between his shoulder-blades. Dara half moved as though wanting to come with him. But he was alone as he passed out from the corral, and alone as he came to the gate of the dun, and the spear-guards passed him through.
And so, alone, he went out to his wych-elm, and climbed to his special branch, and looked across the level land and up the slopes of the Chalk, to see whether the thing that he had outlined up there in whitened birch poles held in it the beginnings of a horse, or not.
Yes, it was a horse, sure enough, legs and tail and all where they should be; the head maybe a little small, but that could be easily made bigger. You could see at once that it was a horse, not a bull or a hound. And yet it was all wrong. Standing there, legs down and head up, it made a kind of break in the lovely sunrise-to-sunset flow of the Downs, pulling the eye up short. Sudden as a sword-gash, he thought. A sword-gash – a kind of death. . . . Yes, that was it, the horse was dead, the outer shape of a horse, but empty of the life that should be in it. It was just as he had felt it, battling with the lime-daubed oxhides up there on the windy hillside.
He lay still on his branch a long time, wondering what he should do now, while the light of the spring morning changed around him, and the fine mesh of shadows from the budding elm twigs swayed and shifted, and still the buzzard swung mewing in its sky-wide circles above the vale. He thought that Cradoc and the rest of the Attribates, maybe even most of his own people, would not see as he saw. In all likelihood he could just go on, and cut his horse into the chalk, and no one would ever know that there was anything wrong with it. But he would know. He would know that he had not kept his part of the bargain in full. He would know that he had betrayed his own kind of seeing. And it would be an ill thing to know that of the last picture that he would ever make.
Sun Horse, Moon Horse Page 6
