And from all round the fire the answer came back as the Chiefs and Warriors raised their cups and horns in reply. ‘The Sun and the Moon be on the King’s path also.’
Dumnorix drank with the rest, and turned, laughing his deep, slow laughter, to drink again with the man whom the general shifting had brought to sit beside him; a fat man whose paunch bulged over his gold studded belt, and whose eyes bulged also, on either side of a mottled nose. Drem rose swiftly, taking up one of the tall mead jars that stood ready, and stepped forward to pour again for his Chieftain; and it was so that he saw the thing . . . As the fat man flung up his arm and leaned back to drain the horn he held, his fine plaid cloak fell back, and Drem and his Chieftain saw, both in the same instant, the dagger that he wore thrust into his belt; a little grey dagger that caught the firelight fish-scale colour instead of golden.
Dumnorix stopped laughing and set down his mead cup, and leaned forward. ‘Brother Bragon, show me the dagger that you wear in your belt.’
Bragon hiccupped, clearly gratified, pulled the dagger from his belt and held it out. ‘Sa. I show it to you. It is in my mind that you will not have seen a dagger the like of that before? There are few such daggers, and they are strong magic. Have a care, therefore, how you handle it.’
Dumnorix’s hand tightened on the haft. ‘I have seen the like of this dagger before; aye, more than that, for I have seen and handled this very dagger before. But the bronze-smith in whose pack it was would not sell it, not for the price of three bronze daggers nor yet for a fair woman slave. How then comes it about that you wear the thing in your belt, Brother Bragon?’
‘Did you think, then, that yours was the only fire at which a bronze-smith might open his bales?’ said Bragon, with blurred triumph, holding up his mead horn to be filled by one of his New Spears.
‘Said I not that he would not sell the thing?’ Dumnorix leaned closer still, his frowning gaze fixed on the mottled face of the other Chieftain. ‘I asked you how it came to be in your belt; now let you answer me my question!’
‘Sa. I will answer you your question. It comes to be in my belt because maybe I have sharper wits than you, my brother Dumnorix!’ Bragon laughed jibingly, showing wolf-yellow teeth. ‘What a man will not sell, he may be got to throw the knuckle bones for, if he be first made drunk enough. They are great gamblers, the men of the Green Isle; and I—I have a way with the knuckle bones. If my brother Dumnorix also wished for the little grey dagger, my brother Dumnorix should have shown more wit in the matter!’
So the bronze-smith had lost his grey dagger with the fire at its heart, Drem thought. He would tell Blai that, when he got home. He would say, ‘That bronze-smith who came once—you know—has been cheated of his grey dagger with the fire at its heart.’ And Blai would be glad; it was pleasant to make Blai glad, now and then when it wasn’t any trouble.
The frown had deepened between Dumnorix’s eyes until the thick golden brows met in a single bar, and he drew his legs under him and rose as though to find another place to sit, where the air was fresher. ‘It may be that I lack the wit of my brother Bragon—Bragon the Fox! But I do not make drunk the stranger at my hearth, to cheat him of what he will not sell!’
Bragon leapt up after him, with unlikely swiftness in so fat a man, thrusting his face into that of his fellow Chieftain. ‘When any man crows to me in righteousness of what he does or does not do, that is the time that I look to my goods and gear!’ he shouted, his voice thick with passion and much mead. ‘Give me back now my grey dagger, lest maybe you confuse it with your own!’
There was a moment’s deadly silence. Then Dumnorix, whitening to the lips, cast the dagger down at the other’s feet. ‘Take it, then. Mine is no more than bronze, but it will serve its purpose well enough!’ And as he spoke, deliberately, he drew his own dagger from his belt.
It had all flared up as swiftly as the sudden spurt of flame when a log falls on the hearth. A few moments ago they had been laughing together, and now . . .
One of Bragon’s New Spears slipped in low, and caught up the grey dagger and gave it to his lord almost before it had ceased to quiver. A kind of rustling and murmuring hush had fallen on the circle of watchers, and in the silence, there was an ominous forward thrust of men out of the farther dusk, as Clansmen from the lower fires, drawn by the raised voices of their Chieftains, came up to their support. Daggers were out in a score of places, and any moment now there was going to be trouble; bad and tragic trouble.
Then the young King flung aside his half empty drinking cup, spattering those nearest to him with the sticky golden mead, and crashed up from his painted stool. ‘Na na, my brothers!’ He stood over the scene, dominating it, young as he was. ‘Will you fight like dogs at my father’s Death Feast and my own King-Making? Here is no time nor place for such brawling; put up your daggers—put them up, I say!’
The two Chieftains never turned their gaze from each other’s faces. ‘He has put an insult on me,’ Dumnorix said, ‘and I demand fighting to wipe it out.’
‘If ye must have fighting, then let it be the fighting of dogs indeed,’ the King said, and glanced about him, laughing, at the many hounds among their masters’ legs. ‘Surely there are dogs enough about my Dun tonight. Let you take each a dog—nay, three dogs will make a better showing. Bragon, let you take three hounds from among your own pack, and Dumnorix, let you take three hounds also, and let them fight to the death, here in the circle beside the fire. So, we may have good sport with our mead, and the insult will be wiped clean.’
There was a little silence after he had spoken. Then Bragon slid the grey dagger back into his belt. ‘It is as the King says.’
‘It is as the King says,’ Dumnorix growled, echoing the action.
All around them there was a sheathing of daggers, a sudden slackening of the tension that had sprung up so swiftly; and the danger was past. A splurge of voices rose, eager, fiercely laughing. ‘So, it is good—a dog fight. Come, Cerdic, there is going to be a dog fight.’
Bragon called to one of his warriors. ‘Ho, Llew! That dog of yours is a fighter; bring him here.’ And a man came shouldering through the throng, holding by the collar a big, heavily built dog whose ragged ears and scarred muzzle told their own tale.
For answer, Dumnorix whistled, ‘Whee-ee!’ and a young prancing hound of his own sprang up at his side. Again Bragon called out a hound; and Dumnorix glanced over his shoulder. ‘Fynn, have you the red devil with you?’
‘He is here,’ said an old warrior, and thrust forward into the open space a reddish hound whose ears and muzzle were scarred like those of the first.
The King looked them over. ‘Sa, two pairs we have, and I the King, will make choice for the third.’ Under the twisted golden circlet, his gaze went carelessly to and fro among the nearest of the hounds, and singled out from among those of Bragon’s Clan a huge brindled brute with a mane on him like a full bred wolf. ‘That one I choose. And for the other—’
At that unlucky moment, Whitethroat, standing beside Drem, flung up his head to nuzzle the boy’s arm, in one of the sudden little bursts of affection that he was given to; and the firelight caught the silver blaze that had given him his name. ‘Sa! That one!’ the King said, pointing. ‘That one with the white throat.’
For one shocked instant of time, Drem did not believe it. It couldn’t be Whitethroat he meant—not Whitethroat. But there was no mistaking the direction of the King’s gaze and his pointing finger. Drem looked down at the great hound standing against his knee. Whitethroat’s tail was swinging, and he gazed up at Drem trustingly, with amber eyes a little puzzled as though he caught the smell of something around him that he did not understand.
Drem looked at the other dog, the cunning, scarred veteran of many fights, his head lowered, the hackles already rising on his neck as though he understood perfectly what was expected of him; and in his eyes the red glint, the unmistakable red glint of the killer. Whitethroat could fight when need arose, though he was no fighter by
nature, but Drem knew with a sickening certainty that if they were matched together, Whitethroat would be killed because he himself was not a killer.
They were looking to him to thrust the dog forward. The pause could only have lasted a couple of heart beats, but it seemed to Drem to have dragged on for a hundred. And then, setting down the mead jar that he still carried, he walked forward, with White throat as usual pacing beside him, and turned, head thrown up, to face the King, to face Dumnorix his Chieftain and the big-bellied Bragon. He heard his own voice, level and challenging, though his heart had lurched into the base of his throat. ‘We also, the New Spears, are called the Hounds of Dumnorix, and should we then have no part in this setting-on of hounds? Let one come out to me from among the New Spears who are the Hounds of Bragon, that we may fight it out here, beside the fire, for the third pair!’
There was a startled grunting, a startled rustle of voices round the fire. It was an unheard of thing that a boy who had not yet come to his Wolf Slaying should raise his voice in challenge before the Great Ones of the Tribe, before the King himself. But his challenge suited the wild humour of the assembled Tribesmen none the less; and the King smote his knees with an open hand, laughing. ‘Well spoken, Hound of Dumnorix! And what say the Hounds of Bragon to that?’
Bragon stuck his thumbs in his belt under his broad paunch, and whistled. And one by one his New Spears slipped through the throng of Chieftains, and came to him. Eight of them, Drem saw: and one was the boy Cuneda, of yesterday’s scene in the pony lines.
‘Well,’ said Bragon. ‘Which of you takes up the challenge?’
There was a long pause, a harsh, dragging pause. And Drem, looking bright-eyed and defiant from one to another of the eight faces that looked back at him without any sign, understood it all too well. Understood that none of Bragon’s Hounds was eager to face the possible shame of being defeated by a one-armed champion, nor yet of defeating him, for that, in its way, could carry almost as little honour. His mouth was dry, and he ran the tip of his tongue over his lips, smiling at them, a smile that was as much an insult as he could make it. If they refused him fight . . .
He was aware of the Grandfather, of Talore, of Drustic who had come thrusting up with the Clansmen from the lower fires; the whole Tribe, it seemed, looking on. Dumnorix had not whistled up his Hounds; but suddenly they were there, all the same, slipping through the crowds as Bragon’s had done; and Drem felt their coming as they gathered in a knot behind him, Vortrix’s shoulder against his; the bond of the Boys’ House, the Brotherhood, close drawn between them. Save perhaps for Luga, he thought, they would stand by him whatever happened. If Bragon’s Hounds refused him fight, they would stand by him still, in the face of the world, and make a mock of Bragon’s Hounds who feared to fight a one-armed champion; but when they were by themselves they would look at his right arm again, as they had looked at it on their first day in the Boys’ House, and he would have lost the strong place that he had won for himself among them. Drem knew his world; and it was a harsh one in which the pack turned on the weakest hound, in which little mercy was asked or given.
Bragon straddled his legs and wagged his thumbs under his belt, grinning. ‘A pity it is that none of my young Hounds runs on three paws. It is in my mind that after all—’
The sickness rose in the pit of Drem’s stomach. And then close beside him, Luga turned his head a little, and looked the boy Cuneda up and down with a faint sneer. ‘And yet even a hound on three paws has his uses,’ he said, and then, as though on quite a different subject, ‘Is it that you need anybody to help you hold a pony?’
Drem flashed a startled look at him. He had thought—if he had given a thought to the thing at all—that Luga might be glad to see him humiliated before the Tribe; glad even, to see Whitethroat killed. Was it that he would be even more glad to see Drem killed? Even as the thought came to him, he knew that it was not that; but there was no time to seek the answer now.
To the Chieftains and elders about the fire, the taunt had no meaning, but Bragon’s Hounds knew what it meant, and so did the Hounds of Dumnorix, and each knew that the other knew. There could be no escaping it. The boy Cuneda shrugged with an attempt at carelessness, though the angry colour flushed up to his forehead as it had done yesterday; and caught the dagger from his belt. ‘I’ll take you, then, with an arm bound behind my back if need be.’
‘Na,’ Drem said, smiling, though he felt the sweat prickle on his upper lip. ‘That would be to tip the chances all one way. I have learned to fight one-handed.’
Men were crowding in on them more and more thickly from the other fires; the hounds, scenting what was in the wind, were straining at their broad studded collars, snarling and with raised hair. The King stood looking down his great beak of a nose, fondling the pricked ears of his wolfhound. ‘So, it will be a dog fight indeed . . . Wait though, should the third of our pairs go up against each other as it were naked, while the rest have their wolf collars to their throats? No shields, I think, in this dog fight—no, no shields. Irdun, bring out the hunting straps.’
And so the strips of thick yet supple pony-hide that men wore on the wolf or boar trail were brought out from the King’s Hall; and Drem pulled off his saffron kirtle, and stood as though in a dream while Vortrix, thrusting the others aside, bound the straps about his belly and loins and left forearm; Vortrix, very bright and truculent of eye, and with an odd grimness about his mouth. And all the while, Whitethroat thrust and fawned against him, whining.
‘Here, let you give me your dagger, and take mine,’ Vortrix said when he had finished. ‘It is better than yours.’
It was not, it was almost identical; but Drem knew that if this had been Vortrix’s fight, he would have done the same thing because to lend Vortrix his own dagger would have been the only thing he could do for him in help and friendship. ‘So, I take your dagger,’ he said. ‘Hold Whitethroat for me.’
The crowd was falling back, clearing a space beside the fire. The King had seated himself again on his painted and skin-spread stool with his blind harper at his feet. The four hounds dragged against their collars with rencwed urgency, their snarling rising to a sing-song note of hate and menace; most of the others had been thrust out of the circle, lest they seek to join in. ‘Good hunting, my brother in blood,’ Vortrix said, and Drem heard him through the advice that the rest of his kind were showering upon him and which he did not hear at all. Then he stepped out into the clear space.
Across the crowding circle he saw the Grandfather sitting with his beaver-skin cloak huddled to his ears, gazing into the middle distance, for it was not the custom for any of the Men’s side to show a public interest in a young kinsman who had not yet slain his wolf. Drustic, close beside him, was clearly deep in trouble; poor Drustic, who took life heavily and was always troubled about something, and was now in all likelihood wondering what he was going to tell their mother afterwards. Talore was looking straight at him despite the custom; Talore, slight and darkly fierce in the firelight that glowed in the brilliant folds of his scarlet cloak and struck shifting sparks of light from the coils of the great copper snake about his maimed forearm; and between the man and the boy, across the cleared space, unseen by the rest of the Tribe, there passed the old salute.
Then he was walking forward with stiff legs, houndwise, to meet his enemy.
They came together in the midst of the circle, and checked. The mist seemed to have thickened again, a golden smoke in the firelight, dimming a little the farther shapes of the crowd. He was aware of the moment’s hush, everything save for the sing-song snarling of the hounds caught into stillness; of the eyes of the Men’s side upon him. He was not aware, for his pride did not run on that particular trail, that standing there poised in the firelight and the golden mist, on the edge of intense and deadly action, he was beautiful to see. A tall, red-haired boy, with the lean, strong grace of the King’s wolfhound; all the more beautiful, in a queer, crooked way, because he carried his right arm trailing, like a
bird with a broken wing.
Then the hounds, slipped from leash, sprang snarling past him, for each other’s throats, and the frozen instant was over.
Drem and his enemy did not spring as the hounds had done; they were circling warily, crouching a little. Drem was watching the other boy’s eyes. ‘Watch his eyes.’ How often old Kylan of the Boys’ House had said that: ‘Watch his eyes, and let his dagger hand look after itself.’ Cuneda was the first to spring, but Drem had seen the flicker in his eyes in the instant before, and slipped sideways, feeling the wind of the dagger past his shoulder. Then he sprang in himself, to be met by a lightning guard-stroke. Dagger and dagger rang together, and he felt the jar of the impact all up his arm. On either side, all around him, the snarling tumult of the dog fight rose, and the voice of the crowd surged to and fro; but Drem heeded neither the one nor the other. His world had narrowed to a circle of sea-smelling, fire-gilded mist, and he was alone in it with his enemy. Once before, he had fought in deadly earnest—on that first day in the Boys’ House; but this was a very different thing, no wild, squealing hurly-burly of random blows, no warrior’s smell of blood at the back of his nose. This was something almost of ritual, a duel rather than a battle, and the more deadly for that. Yet it was linked, as the other had been, with his Warrior Scarlet.
Cuneda sprang in again, and again there was that ring of bronze on bronze; and Drem, breaking free his dagger, leapt in under the other boy’s guard and drew blood from his upper arm before he could spring back out of range. One of the dogs had begun to howl, and there was a hideous worrying noise. For a few moments the boys circled at a distance, then sprang in again in a swift, fierce flurry of thrust and counter-thrust.
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