Warrior Scarlet

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  When a girl, passing with a tall jar full of buttermilk for the shearers on her hip, paused beside him, he turned to her eagerly—and it was Blai.

  For almost the first time in his life he was glad to see her. She would be able to tell him of his house, of the old life that he had left behind him. For the moment, in his swift surge of longing, he forgot even his thirst and the buttermilk, and letting go the sheep he had just taken from the pen, stretched out his yolky hand and caught her wrist as though he was afraid she might be away before he could get out the things he wanted to say, the questions he wanted to ask. ‘Blai! Blai!’ He was almost stammering. ‘It is good to see you!’

  She looked up quickly, and for a brief moment it was as though a light sprang up in her face. ‘Is it, Drem?’

  ‘Of course.’ He was impatient at her stupidity. ‘You can tell me how it is with my kin at home! How is it with my mother, Blai?’

  The light died again, and Blai said after a moment, ‘Yes—I can tell you of your home. It is well with your mother, Drem.’

  ‘She is—not here?’

  ‘Na. She is not here.’

  They looked at each other a moment, then Blai raised the wide-necked jar, holding it for him because he had not the two hands to take it. ‘Now drink. You must be thirsty.’

  Drem drank. The buttermilk was cool and thin and smooth, and he drank his fill. When he had done so, he stood back, wiping his hand across his mouth; and then wished that he had not because of the yolk on it.

  In swift little scattered sentences, Blai was telling him the news of his home; of the Grandfather’s cough and Drustic’s hunting, of the birth of hound puppies, of how the half wild fruit trees did, of his mother, and the red mare who was ready for breaking.

  When it was all told, she was silent a short while, staring down into the jar. Then she said a little breathlessly, ‘I could come and bring you news of your home again—sometimes—if you would like.’

  ‘I shall be up on the High Chalk again tomorrow. That’s a long way,’ Drem said quickly; and then, without meaning to say it, heard his own voice adding, ‘It is lonely, up on the High Chalk, Blai.’

  Blai was still staring into the jar. ‘I could come—sometimes,’ she said. ‘I would not mind the long way, and—then maybe it would be—less lonely.’

  Drem looked at her with a little frown between his eyes. He was puzzled. ‘Why would you do that—come all that way, for me, Blai?’

  Blai raised her head, and a slow painful wave of colour flowed up over her narrow face. ‘You came after me once—years ago—when that man came, and all the other children laughed. You came after me because I was of your hearth, you said; and so now—surely if I am of your hearth, then you must be of mine.’

  There was a little silence—silence to Drem and Blai, though filled with all the crowding sounds of sheep shearing going on around them. Drem was still puzzled, not so much by Blai now, as by something in himself that was strange to him. Just for a moment he seemed to be looking at Blai for the first time, and for the first time really seeing that she was there. He saw that there was a knot of white elder flowers caught into the dark coils of her hair. The other girls often wore a flower caught in the neck pin of a kirtle or braided into their hair, but he had never seen Blai, who was not like the other girls, with a flower about her, before. Or maybe it was that he had never noticed before. Somewhere deep inside him, a small faint fellowship curled open, delicately like a bud curling back its petals. And yet with the fellowship, with his sudden awareness of her, he was shy of her for the first time in his life.

  ‘Blai—’ he began uncertainly. ‘Blai—’

  A triumphant bleat awoke him to the fact that the ewe he had been taking down to the shearers had of course wandered off. Fool that he had been to forget about the ewe! It was at a little distance by now, already mingling with the shorn sheep that had been turned loose. One of the Half People shouted to him, pointing. As though he could not see! He began to run, and the ewe, seeing him coming, broke away and began to run too, bleating as though he were the butcher, her matted fleece flouncing up and down above her thin legs. He caught her in a few moments, but before he could get a firm grip on her fleece she whirled about, bawling, and dived between his legs, tripping him up. Somebody at the pens laughed, and as he picked himself up and went after her again, he felt that he was a fool—one armed, humiliated. He shut his teeth, and getting her again, twisted his hand in the fleece at her neck, and swung her round with a savage thrust of his knee in her flank, all but bringing her down. She cried out in earnest that time, in pain and terror; and in the same moment Erp passed him, carrying the pot of wood ash that was for dabbing on any cut made by the shearers. ‘It is a poor shepherd that loses his temper with the sheep,’ Erp said, not quite looking at him, as usual. ‘Also it is foolishness, for she will remember and be the more trouble another time.’

  From one of the older men, Drem might have taken it, but from Erp, who was no older than himself, who was not even shearing, but only ash-boy to the shearers . . . ‘Maybe I should find it easier if I were like you, you little black bush-creeper, born for nothing better than to tend the sheep!’ he began furiously; and then he caught sight of old Doli, standing leaning on his spear beside the opening of the lower pen; and what he saw in the old man’s weather-wrinkled face made him swallow the rest. With shut teeth, and the blood burning up to his forehead, he ran the ewe down to the shearers, and then returned for the next. Doli was still leaning on his spear beside the lower pen. ‘You should not lose your temper with Erp, either, as though he were another sheep that would not go your way,’ Doli said. ‘That also is foolishness.’

  Drem stood before him, his breast heaving a little. ‘I forgot that the Little Dark People are my equals now. It is a thing still strange to me. Maybe I shall learn in time!’ he said. It was the most insulting thing that he could think of to say.

  But Doli, it seemed, was not insulted. That was one of the maddening things about the Dark People; they were often in some way beyond the reach of an insult. ‘Nay, there is no question of equals,’ Doli said. ‘Since you have come to us, by our standard you must be judged. Hunno and Flann and I are older than you, and wiser; and even Erp knows more about the sheep. Therefore you are the least among us . . . Go now, and bring down another sheep lest there be a shearer waiting.’

  Drem brought down the sheep, and another, and another. He worked on, furious and heart sick; and when, a little later, he straightened to wipe the sweat out of his eyes and thrust back the heavy red hair that was stuck to his forehead, and found Blai with her jar beside him again, he turned on her so roughly that she shrank back as though he had struck her. ‘No need that you follow me about with the buttermilk, for I am not thirsty. No need that you follow me up to the summer pasture. I shall do well enough—better maybe—without news of my home, for I have no home now. I am no more of your hearth!’

  Blai was white enough now, a grey, thin white like the buttermilk in her jar; she stood looking at him for a moment, in the way that he had seen her stand looking at someone once before, but he didn’t remember who it had been, or when, and he didn’t care. He noticed with a kind of savage satisfaction that the elder flowers in her hair were limp and tarnished already.

  He turned away with hunched shoulders, and went after another sheep, leaving her standing there.

  Summer wore on. Below, along the skirts of the downs, the wild garlic flowers were gathered and spread to dry on the roofs of the village, and the flax harvest was got in, and the barley stood tall and golden, rustling when the wind blew over, in the village corn lands and the little lost plots among the downland folds that belonged to Tah-nu’s children who had known the secret of the barley before ever the Golden People came. But up on the High Chalk there was little sign of how the seasons passed. The turf grew dry and tawny, and the noontide shadows of shepherd and flock grew shorter, and then began to lengthen again, and that was all, save that the elder trees that grew in t
he corners of the sheep enclosures for a medicine, shed their creamy blossom and began to darken with blue-black berries that the birds loved.

  Drem was no happier than he had been, but he began to grow used to what had happened, as one may grow used to the ache of an old wound until it is possible almost to forget about it and to think of other things, though the ache is still there, just the same, and the weariness of the ache.

  Harvest came, and among the clustered turf hummocks in the high combe that was the nearest thing Tah-Nu’s children had to a village, the Little Dark People made strong magic of their own that had nothing to do with the harvest of the Golden People on the lower slopes. Magic that was made with the open palm on stretched sheep-skin drums, while one of the young men danced the dance of the Corn King until he fell twitching to the ground. ‘Once we killed the Corn King every year, that the next year’s harvest might be good, but now there are not enough young men among the Dark People, and we kill him only once in every seven harvests,’ old Doli said to Drem, when the ceremony was over. ‘And the harvests are not what they used to be. Na na.’

  On an evening a little after harvest, Drem took part of the flock to the dew-pond, to drink before they were folded; a task that sometimes fell to him and the young dog Asal, now that they had begun to learn the ways of the sheep and how to handle them. He had half the flock with him; if you took the whole flock together half of them would never get near the water. Whitethroat was loping at his heels as usual, Asal circling on the flanks of the sheep. As they came over the last rise, and saw the water before them, they surged forward in a bobbing flood, suddenly purposeful. He heard the quick putter of their little sharp hooves on the turf. The pond had sunk very low in the long, hot summer, a shining round boss of water in a great shallow buckler of puddled clay that was almost white at its upper edge, deepening to the pinkish brown under a mushroom as it neared the water. Sometimes it was blue and staring, that water, sometimes changeable with cloud shadows, or sullen grey when the mist came up. Now it lay pearl and palely golden, quiet in the sunset, and a magpie rose from the water’s edge, chattering, as the flock swept down towards it. There were always birds at the dew-pond; they dropped feathers round the margin of the water, wagtail and hawk and magpie; warm, russet curlew feather curved like a flower petal, speckled starling feather; once, far out on the water, the white pinion feather of a swan.

  The sheep were spreading out all round the margin of the pool, working down over the hard clay to the water. Drem stood leaning on his spear and watching them, the two dogs at his side. The dogs were thirsty, panting and with dripping tongues, but they knew—even Whitethroat knew by now—that they must wait their turn until the sheep had drunk. The sheep drank thirstily, the water riffling round their muzzles, every ripple with a flake of the sunset caught in its spreading curve. It was a very peaceful thing to watch.

  In a while the sheep had drunk their fill, and began to lose interest in the water and turn away. Asal and Whitethroat were looking up into Drem’s face, their tongues hanging from their jaws, their tails giving little beseeching flicks and flutters. ‘Go then,’ he said, and they bounded away into the longed-for water, crouching belly deep in the coolness as they lapped.

  He had just whistled the dogs out, shaking the shining drops from their rough coats in showers, and set Asal to rounding up the flock—not that much rounding up was needful now, for the sheep, their thirst gone, were beginning to drift of their own accord in the direction of the night enclosures—when little dark Erp came over the brow of the Chalk carrying a meal-skin on his shoulder, and headed down for the bothie beside the pond.

  Drem lingered a little behind his sheep, half waiting for the other boy to draw near. Erp had been down to the village that day, for fresh barley meal; and it was seldom that he came up from the abodes of men without news of some kind; he was all eyes and ears, was little dark Erp. And so now Drem, sick for the news of his own kind that he was too proud to ask for, lingered behind his flock, making belief to do something to the belt that held his sheepskin close about his narrow waist, while the other boy flung down the meal sack before the bothie door.

  ‘Surely you have been a long time down in the village,’ he said, his eye half on the flock, as Erp came up to him a little sideways as a dog comes.

  ‘The meal sack was heavy,’ Erp said, and wriggled his shoulder. ‘And it is a long way from the village, and the meal sack grew heavier all the way.’

  There was a little silence. Drem longed to say, ‘Well, then, and how was it with the village? How is it with my house? What word runs through the Clan?’ But pride stuck in his throat; and Erp glanced sideways into his face, torn as he always was between his wish to please the boy who seemed to him so tall and golden and splendidly heedless of where his feet fell, and his wish to be revenged on him for being what he was. At last he said, ‘There is a new man-child in the house of Talore.’

  ‘So?’ Drem said.

  ‘And a new red bull calf in the Chieftain’s byres, and Urian has slain a bear, but they do say that it was little more than a cub. And Caradig and Morvidd have returned to their quarrel—the old quarrel about the line where their corn plots come together.’ He looked at Drem again, sideways under his brows, bright-eyed and curious. ‘And Drustic the brother of Drem has asked Belu from above the ford for the third daughter at his hearth.’

  Drem looked round quickly. He remembered that third daughter: Cordaella he thought her name was. A plump, pink girl who smelt like new bread. So she would be coming to spin beside the fire in his old home. Suddenly, and rather oddly, since he had never troubled about it himself, he hoped that she would be kind to Blai.

  ‘And Drustic is not the only one,’ Erp said. ‘They do say that Vortrix also has a girl under his cloak.’

  Drem did not answer for a short space. Then he said: ‘What girl is that?’

  ‘Rhun, the daughter of Gwythno of the Singing Spear. I have seen her myself, grinding corn before her father’s door, and she grows very fair.’ Erp grinned. ‘See now, do I not bring you back news—much news, from the Golden People?’

  ‘Much news,’ Drem said. ‘Much news, little Eyes-and-Ears. But now it is time that I go after my sheep, lest they begin to scatter.’

  It seemed to him that the sunset was fading very quickly tonight. The gold of it was quite gone, as he turned from the dew-pond; and there was a new and sharper ache in the old wound. He had a harsh desire to make the sheep suffer for it, to set Asal snapping at their heels, and hustle them along, and see their silly fleeces flouncing above their thin legs as they ran; but he had learned that lesson—among other lessons that summer on the High Chalk. He walked slowly, using his spear as a staff, the dogs on either side of him, the flock drifting ahead, a grey cloud of sheep along the tawny downland turf. One of the ewes swung out sideways from the rest, and he whistled to Asal, pointing with his spear, and the dog streaked off to gather her in. ‘Easy!’ Drem called after him; Asal, being young and over-eager, was sometimes inclined to chevy his charges exactly as he, Drem, was longing to see them chevied. Despite the warning, he was doing that now, snapping over close at the heels of the straying ewe. Drem whistled again, shrill and compelling, and the dog checked and looked back. ‘Softly,’ Drem called. ‘Softly, brother.’ And the dog returned to his task more gently, heading the ewe in again to the main flock.

  ‘Sa, that was well done,’ said Doli’s voice, and he found the old man beside him, leaning on his spear, and looking, as always, as much part of the downs as did the elder trees in the corner of the sheepfold; as though he had not moved in a hundred years.

  ‘I begin to learn,’ Drem said. ‘It is well that I begin to learn.’ There was a hard and heavy note in his voice, and the old shepherd gave him a swift, searching look under his grey brows.

  ‘Erp is a great one for hearing news.’

  They were walking together now, behind the flock; and Drem looked quickly at the old man, realizing that he must have met with Erp as the
dark boy came up with the meal sack, and also heard the news of the Golden People. ‘Little Eyes-and-Ears could always hear the thoughts of a man’s heart a day’s trail away, by putting his ear to the ground.’

  They were drawing near to the entrance of the great turf-walled fold, where Flann and his brother waited with their notched tally sticks to count in the sheep as they did every night; and Drem fell back a little, for Doli to take over the task of getting the flock through the narrow opening; but Doli shook his head. ‘Na na, if the old dog does all the work, how shall the puppy ever learn? Let you take them through.’

  So Drem went on; he and Whitethroat and the young dog Asal, while old shepherd and old dog watched behind them. He was lost in a great loneliness; he thought he had not really known what loneliness was, until now. He tried to be glad about Vortrix—glad that now Vortrix would be comforted and would forget his blood brother. But it was lonely—so lonely, for the one forgotten; and the downs looked very wide and dark and desolate in the fading light. And surely the wind had grown cold.

  But he got the sheep safely through the gap between Flann and his brother with their tally sticks; and later that evening, when they were safely folded, and Drem and the old man were alone for a moment in the bothie, Doli said, seemingly to the red heart of the fire: ‘It is a good shepherd that can think of his sheep when his heart is full of other things. It is in my mind that maybe Drem will make none so ill a shepherd, after all.’

  XII

  The Wolf Guard

  AUTUMN CAME, AND the rams were turned loose to run with the ewes, while far below in the rolling distance of the Wild, the weary green of late summer caught fire and flamed tawny and amber, bronze and gold, the wild apple trees of the woodshore were bowed with little russet crabs, and the brambles dark with fruit among their gold and crimson leaves, and the village swine were driven down into the valleys to fatten on acorns. And then it was Samhain, and with the last leaves falling in the forest, they brought the sheep down to the winter pastures, where there would be more hope for them in snow or hard frost. There was all the tumult of the great cattle round-up and the winter slaughtering. And when the slaughtering was over, only the best and strongest of the rams and the ewes were left, for there would not be enough food for the hoggets or the weaker ones through the winter.