Warrior Scarlet

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Historical Note

  I: Scarlet on the Loom

  II: Talore the Hunter

  III: First Kill

  IV: The Price of Whitethroat

  V: The Dagger and the Fire

  VI: The Boys’ House

  VII: The King-Making

  VIII: The Hound Fight

  IX: The Black Pebble

  X: ‘Brother, My Brother!’

  XI: The News-Bringers

  XII: The Wolf Guard

  XIII: The Grey Leader

  XIV: Warrior Scarlet

  XV: The Flower of the Sun

  About the Author

  Also by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Copyright

  About the Book

  If he is to prove his right to wear the warrior’s scarlet and be accepted as a man in his tribe. Drem must kill a wolf single handed. But how can he do this with his spear arm withered and useless?

  Historical Note

  ‘The Bronze Age.’ The words have the ring of strong magic about them, conjuring up harp music and the clash of weapons, the thunder of ponies’ hooves and chariot wheels along the green ridgeways of the Downs, the rattle of the loom-weights where the women are weaving by the house-place door, the wind-torn, smoky flames of a chieftain’s funeral pyre. It is a description that could stand, without much alteration, for Homeric Greece; and that, I think, is the secret of the magic. The time of which Homer sang was the Heroic Age of Greece, and the Bronze Age is ours. Far rougher and more primitive than the Greek, of course, but a Heroic Age, all the same, though the heroes are forgotten.

  But this story is not about Kings or heroes or battles (not even a Heroic Age could be all heroes and fighting) and there are no chariots in it, because when I came to write it down, I found that although the Golden People had ponies, it was the next wave of invaders who brought chariot warfare into Britain. It is the story of a boy called Drem, who lived with his Tribe on what is now the South Downs, nine hundred years before the birth of Christ. His land and his people were not cut off from the rest of the world; the Baltic amber and blue Egyptian beads that the archaeologists find today in Bronze Age grave mounds show that clearly enough. But probably he never heard much of what went on in the world beyond his own hunting runs; a world in which Troy had fallen three hundred years ago, and Egypt was already past its greatest days, and a hollow among the hills by the ford of a rather muddy river had still more than a hundred years to wait before wild Latin herdsmen pitched their tents there and founded Rome.

  I

  Scarlet on the Loom

  THE OLD SHEPHERD sitting with his face turned seaward and his broad-bladed spear across his knees, seemed as much a part of the downs as did the wind-stunted whitethorn trees along the bank behind him: a little man, dark and knotted and tough as a furze root, with fine wrinkles round his eyes, under their jut of badger-grey brows, that told of a life-time of looking into the distance in sun and wind and rain. He was naked save for a sheepskin belted around his waist, and on the bare brown skin of his sides and shoulders showed the puckered silvery lines of more than one wolf-scar. Two great herd dogs lay beside him; one old and wise and grey-muzzled like himself, one young and gangling; and a boy of about nine summers old squatted at his feet, playing with the ears of the young one.

  The boy also was half naked, but his kilt was of rough woollen stuff dyed with the red-brown crotal dye, and in all other ways he was as different from the old man as though they came from different worlds; the skin of his broad, hot-tempered face—of his whole body—freckle-dusted and fair, his hair the colour of polished copper, and his eyes grey with golden flecks in them; eyes that would seem when he was excited or angry to be all gold.

  The boy stopped playing with the dog’s ears, and laid his arm across his updrawn knees and his chin on his arm, gazing southward where the chalk fell in long, slow turf slopes and ridges, between willow and hazel choked combes, into the forest and the Marsh Country far below, and the Marshes spread away and away to the shining bar of the Great Water on the edge of the world. Below him the turf of the steep combe-side was laced with criss-cross sheep-tracks, and the faint formless cropping sounds of the flock at the bottom came up to him along the ground. Far off and lower down on the other side of the combe, he could see the tiny figures of Flann and his dogs, on watch also over the sheep. Flann whistled to one of the dogs, and the sound came clear across the combe, a tiny, shining arrow-point of sound in the great quietness. A little warm wind came up from the south, trailing the cloud shadows after it across the Marshes and up the slow-gathering slopes of the Chalk, thyme-scented and sea-scented and swaying the heads of the blue scabious flowers all one way. The shadow of a hawk swept across the turf below him, and the sun was hot on his head: the day was good.

  Drem—the boy’s name was Drem—heaved a small sigh of contentment. He liked it up here on the High Chalk with Doli and the others of the shepherd kind. Several times this summer and last, since his legs grew long enough for the journey, he had come up, and spent a night, or two nights, with the sheep. It was good. This time, he had been with Doli two nights already, sleeping in the shepherd’s bothie by the dew-pond, and now he supposed it was time to be going home, because he had never been more than two nights away from home before; his mother was one to worry, and when she worried, her hand was hard.

  ‘It is good, up here,’ he said by and by.

  ‘Aye, it is good up here—when the sun shines and the wind blows soft without snow in it, and a man need not be away after a straying ewe, knee-deep in snow, and the wolves crying,’ Doli said.

  Drem screwed his head over his shoulder to grin at the old man. ‘You need some of your own sheep medicine. Tell me more about the wolves. Tell me how you came by that long scar on your ribs.’

  The old man shook his head, his gaze on the flock in the combe bottom. ‘I have told you that story, aye, and more than once.’

  ‘Tell it again.’

  ‘Nay, it is hot, and I am in no mood to tell over again stories that I have told before.’ Doli brought his gaze up out of the combe, and let it rest on the boy’s face. Nothing else about him moved. He never moved without need. ‘I have told you all that there is to tell about wolves and fights with wolves, and it is not good to talk of such things even in the summer. I have told you all the stories and the dreams that are of my people, save for those which may not be told. I have told you about Corn King, and Earth Mother; and I have told you how Tah-Nu, the Father of my people, in a land where the sun casts no shadows, dreamed a dream of the north, and how he hollowed out the trunk of a great tree and put into it his woman and his child and his hunting dog and a basket of barley seed, and paddled after the dream across the Great Water, and how he came to this land after many days, and sprang ashore and found that he had grown a shadow. Surely I am a great teller of stories, but even I must have rest. Maybe when you come again I shall have found in my head another story.’

  Drem wriggled round, sticking a leg out sideways on the slope, to come face to face with the old man. He said, partly in the tone of a question, partly as one repeating a thing said before, ‘And there was no one in the land before Tah-Nu, and no one after him except his children and his children’s children, and his children’s children’s children, until we came?’

  ‘Nay. Tah-Nu was the first, but there were others after him, before you came,’ Doli said. ‘There came giants as red-gold as you are, with great spears of bronze against which our flint spears were but brown-tufted rushes. So they set us to tend their herds, and sometimes they took our women to tend their fires and bear their sons; and in a while and a while and a while we became, in some s
ort, one people. Then you came, as it might be yesterday, and treated the children of the giants as they had treated us. Now we are all the Half People, Tah-Nu’s children and the children of the giants alike, and we come at your call. But we who have yet the old blood strong in us, we the Little Dark People, we have the long memories, and we remember while we tend your sheep that once, when the long grave-mounds yonder against the sky were new, Tah-Nu’s children were the lords of the land.’

  Drem nodded. ‘Does it ache in your belly, when you remember that?’ If you asked a thing like that of most of Doli’s kind, they would only look at you sideways beneath their brows, and make you an answer that slid out from under your question like an eel from under a stone. But Doli was different.

  The old shepherd shrugged, his gaze level enough on Drem’s face; yet his answer slid a little, all the same. ‘The wind from the east is a cold wind, and blood runs from a spear-thrust, and if a man be too long without food he will die. And all these things are bad; yet he would be a fool who spent his life grieving for such things.’

  Drem waited, looking into Doli’s face; but nothing more came, and the old man’s face was shut as he gazed out over his sheep once more. It seemed that the time had come to be on his way again.

  He gave a parting pull to the young dog’s ears, drew his legs under him, and stood up. ‘Now I go, if you will tell me no more stories.’

  Doli looked up at him, mocking a little under his brows. ‘It is a long trail back to the village, and a sad thing it would be if the evening stew was all of it eaten before you came.’

  ‘As to that, my mother will keep something for me in the pot,’ Drem said, with the assurance of the Lordly Ones of the world, for whom something is always kept in the pot. ‘Nevertheless, I go now. Maybe I will come again before barley harvest. But if I do not, then surely I will come up and help with the droving when the time comes to bring the flock down at Samhain.’

  ‘Come when you will. You have a way with the sheep; and it is in my heart that you would make none so ill a shepherd.’

  Drem cocked up his head and laughed, rocking on his heels. ‘Nay, I leave that to Tah-Nu’s children. I shall be a warrior, after the way of my kind. Yet when I am a man I shall come up with my kind also, when the time comes to keep the Wolf Guard in the winter nights.’

  ‘I will tell it to the Wolf-people, that they may grow afraid,’ Doli said.

  Drem flushed, still laughing. ‘You laugh at me, and that is not good! But I will come back before barley harvest.’

  He swung on a hard brown heel, and set off at a trot, following the curved bank of the great enclosure where the sheep were driven for shelter at night; and a short way beyond, on the crest of the hill, passed the turf-built bothie by the dew-pond, where Hunno, the brother of Flann, was swabbing a raw place on a sheep’s back with elder-water to keep off the flies. He did not stop to talk to Hunno, who was a surly little man with small round eyes like jet beads, but went on at a steady wolf-trot, heading for home.

  Presently he struck the green Ridgeway that ran from the world’s edge to the world’s edge along the High Chalk, and followed it for a while, until another track came up from the seaward Marshes and crossed it; and then he turned inland. The sun was westering as he came dipping down into the steep combe that sheltered the home steading; and all the great, rounded, whale-backed masses of the downs were pooled and feathered with coolness, the shadows of a stunted whitethorn tree reaching across half a hillside, every rise and hollow of the land that did not show at all when the sun was high casting its own long, liquid shadow across the gold. The family cattle-ground in the head of the combe was already in shade, but farther down, where the combe broadened, the turf roofs of the steading—drying up now in the summer heat—glowed tawny as a hound’s coat in the sunlight, and the smoke from the house-place fire was blue as the fluttering haze of flower-heads in the flax plot as he trotted by.

  He entered the steading garth by way of a weak place he knew of in the thorn hedge, instead of going round to the gateway that faced towards the corn-land down the combe, and made his way between the byre and the shelter where the two-ox plough was kept. Drustic must be out hunting, since there was no sign of him about the farm-land, and would scarcely be home by dusk; but his mother and the Grandfather would be there, and Blai. As he reached the back wall of the house-place and saw the familiar strip of warm darkness where the roof turf had been rolled back to let in more air and light, the idea suddenly woke in him that it would be fun to get in that way and drop on them like an earwig out of the thatch when they did not know that he was anywhere near.

  The roof of the house-place came down to within elbow height of the ground all round, and the pitch was not very steep, but the sun-dried turf was slippery, and so it was not as easy to climb up as it looked. He managed it, however, working his way up with infinite care until he could reach the edge of the opening, and after that it was easy. He drew himself up a little farther, then shifted his grip and slipped through between the rafters that showed in the gap, found a one-hand hold inside, and next instant, all without a sound—for few people could move more silently than Drem when he chose—was lying full length along the edge of the loft floor.

  The half-loft in the crown of the roof was full of warm, crowding shadows through which the bar of fading sunlight from the gap in the roof fell like a golden sword. There was a warm smell of must and dust, and the sharper, aromatic tang of the dried herbs hanging in bundles from the rafters, and the animal smell of the skin rugs laid aside there until the winter. Spare farm tools were stacked deep under the eaves, and the raw, grey-brown bundles of wool from the last clip, and the wicker kists in which the household kept their clothes and gear. Harness hung among the herbs, and a smoked bear ham; and there, too, were the two-handled crocks full of honey that kept the household in sweetness from one bee harvest to the next.

  At the open side, almost in the smoke of the hearth fire that wreathed past on its way to the smoke hole, hung two shields: Drustic’s shield that had been their father’s, and the great bulls-hide buckler with the bronze bosses that was the Grandfather’s and would be Drem’s one day.

  But at the moment Drem had no interest to spare for the loft. Lying flat on his stomach and shielded from sight by the great roof-tree and the Grandfather’s buckler, he was peering down over the edge into the main body of the house-place below. It was fun to see without being seen. Out of the fireglow and the fading sword of dusty gold, the great living-hut ran away on every side into brown shadows with a bloom of wood smoke on them, but where the light fell strongest near the doorway, hismother was working at her loom; a big upright loom, the warp threads held taut by a row of triangular clay weights at the bottom. He could hear the small rhythmical sounds as she passed the weaving-rod to and fro and combed up the woof between each row.

  The warm, fatty smell of the evening stew came up to him from the bronze pot over the fire, and brought the warm water to his mouth, for he had not eaten since the morning bowl of stirabout with the shepherd kind. The Grandfather was sitting beside the fire as usual, on the folded skin of the bear that he had killed when the world was young; a man like a huge old brooding grey eagle that had once been golden.

  On the other side of the hearth, the Women’s side, Blai squatted on her heels, turning barely cakes with small, flinching hands in the hot ash. She was exactly beneath Drem, so that he thought how easy it would be to spit on her, like spitting on the back of a hare as it sunned itself on a far-down ledge of the old flint quarry north of the summer sheep-run. Blai was not his sister; her coming belonged to the time that he could only just remember, when a bronze-smith had come by from the Isles of the West, and his woman with him—a wild, dark creature with hair and eyes like the night. She had been sick already, and in the night she had died and left a new babe bleating in the fern against the wall. The bronze-smith had not seemed much interested, and two days later he had gone off along the track that led inland, leaving the babe
behind him. ‘What should I want with the creature?’ he had said. ‘Maybe I will come back one day.’ But he never had come back. And now Blai was rising seven years old, black as her mother had been, in a house where everyone else was red-gold like flame, and somehow never quite belonging to them. Blai believed that one day the bronze-smith would come back: ‘One day, one day my father will come for me!’ seemed to be her talisman against all ills, the faith that she clung to as something of her own. But of course he never would come back; everybody knew that except Blai. Blai was stupid.

  Drem decided not to spit on her after all, because that would betray his presence in the loft, and turned his attention back to his mother. The cloth on the loom had grown a little since he saw it last, though not much, because there was so much else to do; a piece of fine chequered wool, blue and violet and flaming red. There was red wool on his mother’s weaving-rod now, the true burning Warrior Scarlet that was the very colour of courage itself. No woman might wear that colour, nor might the Half People who came and went at the Tribe’s call. It was for the Men’s side. One day, when he had passed through the Boys’ House, and slain his wolf single-handed, and become a man and a warrior of the Tribe, with his Grandfather’s shield to carry, his mother would weave scarlet on the loom for him.

  The Grandfather raised his great grey-gold head from watching bygone battles in the fire, and turned his gaze on the woman at the loom. ‘It grows slowly, that piece of cloth,’ he said, in a voice that came mumbling and rattling up from the depth of his great frame. ‘When it is finished, let you use it to re-line my good beaver-skin cloak. The old lining is worn to shreds.’

  Drem’s mother looked over her shoulder, showing a tired face in which the beautiful bones stood out so sharply that it looked as though you could cut your hand on it. ‘I had thought to use this piece for Drustic; he also needs a new cloak, for his old one does not keep out the wind and the rain.’