The Dream Time

by Henry Treece

  This made Crookleg very angry and he forgot to be afraid of the axe and went back again, looking for a stone he could throw at the man. The only stone he found was so deeply embedded in the sandy shore that he could not pull it out. So he grabbed up a handful of sand and white seashells and did his best to walk firmly forwards.

  Blackbird called out to him, ‘Go away. Go away. This man will hurt you, boy.’

  While she was saying this she was also kicking at the man as hard as she could, but her bare feet did not hurt him. He screwed his hand round more deeply into her hair and shook her all the more.

  Then Crookleg shouted, ‘Stop that!’

  The man did stop, and gazed at him. His pale blue eyes were hard to look at. Crookleg felt his own eyes going crossed as he stared at the man, because there seemed nothing to look at; it was as though there was no understanding behind the pale blue eyes, only a sort of emptiness.

  Then the man said, ‘I am Shark. No one tells me to stop anything I care to do. I am the Old Man here, and when I whistle all the fish come close to the shore so that we can eat them. I shall whistle to you now, and you will come close to me, and then I shall hit you with my whalebone axe. Is it agreed?’

  Crookleg did not answer. He did his best to be very brave and to think of what he could do to hurt this Fish man. He flung the sand and shells at him, but the wind caught them and they flew away. Most of them came back over Crookleg’s own arm and half-blinded him. And while he was spluttering, he heard the man whistling, and sure enough he felt his legs being drawn towards that red-haired brutish man.

  And when he was within three paces of the man, the whistling stopped, and Shark said grimly, ‘Now stand still, little one, and I will gaff you like a fish.’

  Blackbird cried out, ‘Run away, Crookleg. Run away. You are too weak to help me. What can you do against this chieftain?’ Crookleg said, ‘See if you can hold his arms and I will try to take his axe away.’

  Shark laughed and swung Blackbird about as though she were just a dead fish herself. But at last she grasped his right arm and then Crookleg hobbled in and took hold of the axe shaft.

  He had never held on to anything so fierce in his life. He saw Blackbird go flying away into the sand, and roll over and over. Then he felt himself being lifted and swung round, and in the end he had to loose the axe and go flying himself. He fell with his face in a shallow sea-pool with little shellfish in it. The water was very thick and strong and salty.

  He drew his lips away from it and as he did this, the whalebone axe thudded into the little pool, just where his head had been. So he rolled over, and the axe just missed him again.

  As he took his breath, to roll sideways once more, he heard the thudding of Blackbird’s feet on the hard sand, and glanced up to see her fling handfuls of sand into Shark’s face.

  The man staggered back, rubbing at his eyes, his axe forgotten for the moment.

  ‘Run, Crookleg,’ Blackbird shouted. ‘Get away from the shore while I keep him here. I will follow you. I will follow you. Run!’

  So Crookleg got up and ran as well as he could, away from that dreadful place. But when he got up to the dunes where the coarse brown grasses were, he saw that Shark had caught Blackbird again and was carrying her off towards the caves in the cliffside.

  He did not know what to do then. He felt more useless than ever before. He wished that he could use an axe and make folk like Shark afraid of him. He wept and hit his right hand against a rock, and wished he could not make pictures, and that he could fight instead.

  Then at last the night came down and he made his way inland and slept on top of a pinnacle of rock where nothing could reach him in the darkness.

  6.

  the next morning he woke thinking of Blackbird, but he did not dare go back to the shore and see where she was. He had dreamt all night about Shark’s red hair and pale eyes and, his terrible axe. Now he felt sick even to think of him again.

  So Crookleg climbed down from the rock pinnacle and went with the sun at his back so that he would get a warning of any shadow that came up behind him. He found a damp stone where there were snails crawling and ate some of them. The shells were very gritty in his mouth, but now he was getting too hungry to bother about that.

  He chewed the leaves of a tree, but only to get the moisture from them. He did not swallow the pulp that was left in his mouth when the juice had gone.

  He began to wonder if he dared go back to his own village, and tried to think which way he should go to get there. In the far distance, on a long chalk ridge, he could see three stones standing upright to mark the way somewhere—but he felt sure that this was not his country. He did not want to meet the folk of any tribe he did not know now. And even if he could find the way back to the Dog village, Holly and Ash and Bone the Rainmaker would be there, waiting to ask him where he had been, and why he had not reported back after the fight with the Fox Folk. Fang would be the war-chief there now, and Fang did not like him very much. He would ask for his finger again, and Crookleg could not bear to think of that.

  He was so miserable, he began to weep and the tears ran down his cheeks as he ran onwards inland. A brown wolf with grizzled sides was standing under some overhanging oak boughs watching him with yellow eyes. But Crookleg didn’t care at all. He ran quite close to the wolf, crying, and the wolf just stood and watched him without rushing out at him and pouncing. The wolf had never heard men making these sounds before and he thought that there must be some trick in it, to catch him. So he let the boy go on.

  And by sunset Crookleg stumbled to a place where there was a curling blue river, and men sitting on it in skin-boats, fishing with lines. Smoke came up from the clustered huts among the reeds, and he could smell porridge being cooked. He was so hungry that he ran down into the village.

  Close by the river there was a long shed without walls, its thatched roof supported on tree trunks with the bark still on them. Men and women and children were sitting under this shelter, and a young woman in a red linen cloak was ladling out meal-gruel into their bowls.

  She looked up when Crookleg came round the side of the shelter and said, ‘Who are you, then? If you want to cat with us you should have a porridge-bowl. We do not eat out of our hands like some savage folk inland. We are decent folk here.’

  She went on with her work then and seemed to forget him. Some of the other folk looked back at him, not angrily but as though they had not seen anything like him before. A little girl came to him and put a wooden bowl into his hands and then went back to her mother.

  So Crookleg took the bowl to the woman in the red cloak and she filled it without saying a word.

  An old man with white hair touched him on the leg and showed him where to sit on the ground, and after a while, when his bowl was empty, Crookleg rose and gave it back to the little girl. He said to her, ‘I am of the Dog Folk and they call me Crookleg.’ But the little girl’s mother said, ‘I did not hear anyone ask where you came from or who you were. In this place we look after our own tasks and do not meddle with other folk. If you have something to tell, then go to the Head-woman who has fed you and tell her. That is the custom here.’

  So Crookleg hobbled over to where the woman in the red cloak sat on her high chair and kneeling before her said, ‘I am Crookleg from the Dog Folk. Thank you for the porridge, I was very hungry.’

  The headwoman gazed at him then laughed and shook her corn-coloured hair. ‘You are lucky to be alive,’ she said. ‘There are no Dog Folk now. They burned up the Fox Folk and now the Badger Folk have burned them up, too. One of our folk sat in a tall tree yesterday and watched it happen. You have no house to go back to. You can stay here if you wish.’

  Crookleg said, ‘Who are you? If I stay with you, what will you make me do? What do you call the god here?’

  All the folk in the long shelter were listening to him and whispering, then sometimes laughing at the strange way he said his words. The woman in the red cloak smiled down on him very kindly and he
ld up her hand for all the folk to be quiet a while.

  She said, ‘We are River Folk—not sea-folk or forest-folk or hill-folk. We do not care where the river comes from, or where it goes to. It keeps passing by our village, and that is all we care about. And our lives are ruled by our river, who is the god that we pray to and dream of. If you wish to stay with us, you must learn to let all things pass by as the river passes. So, no more words from you. We will call you Twilight—because you have the hair of night time.’

  She looked at him a while, then put out her hand and felt his hair with her long, white fingers. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘this is inland hair, twilight hair. So you know your name now. I am the lady here and no one questions my law. Do you question my law?’

  Twilight said, ‘I question nothing, lady. I am glad to have a roof over my head and a fire to sit by. I am not a war-man.’

  She said softly, ‘War-man? War-man? We set little store by war-men here. We live quietly beside the stream. It is only the inland folk who hurt one another. If you talk of hurting folk here, my people will send you away, or the fish-stick will go in you.’

  He went with her then, down by the shallow stream, and saw the sheds where the women teased the wool, then put it on spindles and wove it into cloth. He saw the wooden vats where they dyed it in all the colours of the seasons—green for spring, yellow for summer, red for autumn and white for winter.

  She said, ‘Come now, Twilight, and we will see what the men do.’

  He said, ‘Lady, I am not a proper man. I am crippled in one leg—and I am not very brave either.’

  She looked at him a long time, smiling out of her yellow-fringed eyes, then said, ‘I can see that you have hurt one leg, slightly, and that you are gentle in your speech. But that is not how you describe yourself. No, Twilight, if you are fit to walk at all, you should walk with me.’

  so he went with her to the men’s place and saw the hides being stretched and limed to make them soft, and the fresh fish being gutted and prepared for the hearth fire.

  And in one place Twilight watched men over the great oak buckets sniffing at the barley beer as it fermented.

  He said to the lady, ‘There are many things happening in the world these days, lady. One would not think that so much could go on at the same time.’

  She laughed and said, ‘I am hardly older than you are, but I know that life does not stay still.’

  She walked about the hall for a while, then she said, ‘Some of my men have found a strange stone in their digging for flint. It is like no other stone. It bends and shapes to the hammer.’

  She went to her coffer and came back with a piece of this strange stone. Twilight scratched it with his thumb-nail and found the marks shining brightly where his nail had been.

  He said, ‘I could scratch a wolf or an owl on this. I know their shapes by heart.’

  She said, ‘Better an owl than a wolf. I do not take well to those beasts. But do as you please. I shall like to see what you can make. Perhaps you could be useful in this village.’

  for many days Twilight worked at the red metal. At first he thought only of owls, or of men with three arrows in them, or of women howling when they knew that Bud would not come to leaf.

  Then at last he saw sense, saw that a beast with four feet, or with antlers, made a more pleasing shape to the eyes and to the fingers. And so he chiselled out a shape. A shape that could be looked at, or worn round the neck on a thong. Or, if it was big enough, even made into a shield for a war-man.

  When Twilight had finished the copper brooch he gave it to the woman. She said, ‘This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Now I shall hide it away or news of it will get round and the Fish Folk might come to take it from me.’

  Twilight said, ‘I did not make it to be hidden away. It is to be worn round the neck on a thong for all men to sec. What joy is there in making if no one sees the leaping beast?’

  The woman smiled at him and said, ‘Very well, I will wear it. But I shall always know that men are looking at it and wondering how they can get it for their own women.’

  Twilight said, ‘I have never wanted to fight before, but I would fight to protect that brooch. When a man makes a thing from nothing, with his hands, he loves it in a strange way, even though he gives it to someone. He always remembers it and keeps it warm in his heart. What is your name? I have not dared ask you before. I only dare ask you now because you like the brooch I have made for you.’

  The woman with the golden hair said, ‘My name is Wander. I shall always walk with three men at my back from now on. This brooch must be guarded. And since you have made it for me I shall let you walk with me, by my side, before the warriors. If you wish, I will tell the folk that you are my chosen one. Would you like to be a chieftain among my folk?’

  Twilight shook his head. ‘No, Wander,’ he said. ‘I am only a lame boy who likes making the shapes of beasts. If you made me a chieftain the folk would want

  me to do other things. I am not very brave. I cannot use a spear very well. I do not know how to give advice to the war-men, or how to sow the grain at the right time.’

  Wander laughed. ‘Everyone has to learn, Twilight,’ she said. ‘Besides, the folk would be happy to have one among them who can make such brooches. They would not expect the other things from you. Turn it over in your head while you are working, and later I will ask you again.’

  7.

  twilight stayed with them for many months. The folk brought pieces of soft stone and copper to him and asked him to make brooches out of them. They gave him a hut to work in, down by the blue river and left offerings of food and drink and deer hides in return for the things he made.

  His head was full of shapes and his hands were hardly ever still. With his knives and chisels of bone and flint, he made the shapes of stags running, eagles flying, fish swimming and men prancing into battle with their spears in their hands and their wicker shields held before them. The warriors would come and lean at his doorpost every day, watching his swift hands at their work. One of them called Adder said, ‘If I could do that I would be the happiest of men. Better to make such things than to stand alone against bears and wolves. If I had a son I would hope that he could do what you do. Could you show another man how to make such things?’

  Twilight shook his head. ‘I do not know myself how they will turn out,’ he said, ‘until I have made them. It is in my head and my eyes and my hands. It is not a thing that can be told to others.’

  The warriors nodded and one of them said, ‘It is as I thought, it is your own magic, only for you. If you passed it on to someone else, you would lose part of it and then your things would not be so good to look at.’

  For the warriors Twilight carved knife handles and made the shapes of twining snakes round their spear shafts. For Wander he made another brooch, of a black stone that a boy found by the river. It was in the shape of a man’s hand holding a wheat ear. When he gave it to her she said, ‘Now you can never leave us, Twilight. Now I know what you are. You are a man who can fetch the corn out of the earth so that the reapers can hold it in their hands and cut it with their sickles. It is all clear to me now that if you left us our crops would stop growing and then we should starve. I ask you once more, will you be our chief and rule the folk, sitting beside me in the council hut?’

  So Twilight gave in and did as she asked. The River Folk sang and danced at this, and all in the village went about laughing at the thought that now they would never have a bad harvest again.

  That year the barley came up out of the earth so thickly that a man could not put a finger between the shoots. It was the best crop the folk had ever known.

  When Twilight passed along the path between the thatched houses, women came out and kneeled on the ground. Some of them asked him to touch their children when they had coughs or had broken a bone. They said that Twilight could make them well again. He did as they asked, but always told the women that his only magic was in his carving and drawing. They
did not believe him, and thought that he was joking with them.

  Then, when all was going well, one bright morning the boy who watched on the hill above the river came running into the village shouting that the Fish Folk were coming in their skin boats. Wander took Twilight on to the hill and pointed. ‘He is right,’ she said. ‘I have never seen so many of them. There are two hands of them and three men in each boat. It is a war band and the chief in the first boat is called Shark. He has red hair and blue eyes and carries an axe of whalebone. He is the fiercest of men. It will not be easy for our war-men to drive them away. What shall we do, Twilight?’

  He bit at his knuckles thinking. Then he said, ‘Who am I to tell war-men what to do, I cannot fight?’

  But just then Adder came running up to them and kneeled before Twilight. ‘What shall we do, master?’ he said. ‘There are two of them to one of us. What shall we do? You must tell us.’

  Twilight said, ‘If you fight they will kill us all and take the women and children away with them. If we run away they will take the village and the River Folk will never have a place to be in again. If I had to decide, I would say that we should talk to them and ask them to go back to their own place and leave us alone.’

  Adder laughed behind his hand at this, but Wander nodded and said, ‘If you say this, then we will do this. But they will not listen to us.’

  In the village the River Folk were gathered, the women and children surrounded by a ring of war-men who were waiting with their spears stuck out.

  Then the round hide-covered boats of the Fish Folk pulled in among the reeds and their war-men leaped out with their bone axes and came running. Shark led them, with white clay over his face and his hair greased and bound up on top of his head to make him look taller.

  When Twilight saw him, he was very frightened. But he stood beside Wander and tried not to shiver. His face and hands were very wet as Shark came striding towards them, grinning like a sea monster, his blue eyes as sightless as flints.