‘I am—lonely without my brother.’
‘One was telling me that there is a girl—the daughter of Gwythno of the Singing Spear. One was telling me that she grows very fair.’
The silence fell between them again. Only a short silence this time, and then Vortrix said, ‘If there were a girl under your cloak, though her hair were as bright as the sun and her arms as white as mare’s milk, would she fill my place?’
There was no more to be said; and in a little they went out from the lambing pen, drawing the gate hurdle to again behind them, and turned towards the watch fire, round which several of the Tribesmen stood or squatted, leaning on their spears. Vortrix’s spear picked up the firelight in a slim leaf of flame against the bluish darkness of the snow and the stars; but Drem saw only the dark side of the blade, a leaf of darkness against the firelight, for he had dropped behind a little, walking not as brother with brother, but as one of the Half People behind one of the lordly Golden Ones.
XIII
The Grey Leader
THE WINTER HAD been late in starting, but before it ended, it was one of those winters which men speak of years afterwards, round the fire when the earth is frost-bound and snow comes drifting down the wind. And when the first signs of spring should have been waking in the forest and the curlews coming up from the seaward marshes, the earth was still deep in snow and held by frost as keen and deadly as the blade of the strange grey dagger that the King wore now in his girdle. On fine days the snow melted a very little in the sunshine; in the shade where it was blue as the hyacinths in the woods at Beltane (but surely that was in another world) it froze without ceasing, day after day; and it seemed that as the days grew longer the cold increased. The sheep had to be kept folded all day as well as at night, and with no grazing the fodder ran short. Drem and his fellows cut branches all along the woodshore and stripped the lower-slope birch trees of their bark, pressing farther and farther afield as time went by. But there was little good in such fodder, and the sheep grew thinner and thinner, the weaker of them scarcely able to stand on their legs, and many of the late lambs were born dead. They killed the more weakly sheep and lambs, so that the strong ones might have their share of the poor fodder; and there was so little flesh on the poor, starved carcasses that even when they could get them down to the village they added nothing to the meat supply for Clan or Half People.
The wolves, driven by famine beyond their normal fear of the guard fires, were growing ever more bold, howling closer and closer in the darkness about the folds. Farther along the run of the Chalk, the sheep folds themselves were attacked; and everywhere a sheep that strayed was a sheep lost, and no man cared to step beyond the firelight and the sound of his brother’s voice after dark.
On a day about the end of the lambing, Drem came up from the woods, carrying on his shoulder a bundle of hardly-gathered fodder branches; and flinging it down beside the gate-gap of the fold, looked about him hastily as he always did, for Doli. The old man, spent with over-much labour and hardship that was sharper even than the shepherd kind were used to, had been ill on his feet for days, after becoming chilled to the bone over a lambing ewe, and Drem had been constantly anxious about him; but to all suggestions that he should go down to the village, or even remain beside the fire in the shepherds’ bothie, he had only replied impatiently, ‘Na na, there is too much that I have to do.’ And now, not seeing him, Drem’s anxiety flared up. ‘Where is Doli?’ he demanded of Hunno, who was spreading fodder.
‘One of the ewes has broken out.’ Hunno jerked his head towards the High Chalk that closed the head of the valley. ‘A strong one such as we can ill afford to lose, and she near her time with the lamb. Doli is gone after her up towards the summer folds. He said it was in his mind that she was gone that way.’
Drem hitched his sheepskin higher on his shoulder, frowning. ‘Is Flann with him, or Erp?’
Hunno shook his ragged head. ‘Na. As for Flann, his woman has come to her time also, and all men know the fool that he is about her. One brought him word to come, and he went. Therefore, with Drem away down the woods, and the Golden Folk not yet come up for tonight’s Wolf Guard, there were but the three of us here when we found the ewe gone.’
‘And of the three of you, it must be Doli that went after her? Why not you or Erp? You are younger than he is, also he is sick.’ He swung round on Erp who had come ducking out from the bothie. ‘Why did you let him go alone?’
Behind him Hunno growled something only half spoken about an old man being of less worth to the village than a young one, and Erp gave him a swift upward look under his dark brows. ‘Not to us the blame. Doli said to us that being old and wise he knew more of the ways of the sheep kind than we could do. Therefore he bade us to stay and guard the fold, and left us Asal and took Cu with him and went. There will be no harm come to him; not to Doli in his own sheep runs . . . There is lamb stew in the hut if you are hungry.’
If he was hungry. As if any of them were ever not hungry these days. Drem hesitated, looking about him. It was drawing towards dusk already; low sky and snow-covered hills alike yellowish grey in the fading light. In the fold, the ewes and lambs—such as were left of them—huddled close, standing or lying in the puddled snow and the litter that was frozen hard where they had wetted it. Icicles hung from the long wool under their bellies, that rang together when they moved so that the fold was full of a faint chiming as well as the pitiful bleating of the ewes as the weight of ice tore at their skins. A bitter wind was gusting over the shoulder of the downs from the north-east, making jagged, bluish partings in the wool of the sheep and the rough hair of the herd dogs; and Drem, sniffing at it, could catch the faint but unmistakable smell of more snow on the way. He shrugged, and turned into the shepherds’ bothie, where the dung smoke stung his eyes, and the warmth of the fire seemed to mix with the icy eddies of wind as oil and water mix together but without ever mingling. One of the Little Dark Women was within, huddling over the rough hearth. She looked up as he ducked through the door hole with Hunno behind him, and pointed to the pot that she had just taken off the fire. And Drem took himself a bannock from the basket in the corner, and settled down to stay his chilled and empty belly with the lamb stew.
He began hungrily enough; one mouthful, two mouthfuls, scooping up the lumps of meat with bits broken from his bannock. He ate the third mouthful, more slowly; the fourth he swallowed at a gulp, and drawing his legs under him as he did so, got up, pushing the remains of his bannock into the breast of his rough woollen kirtle, and reached for one of the spears that lay against the turf wall.
Hunno looked up, his mouth full of lamb stew. ‘Where away?’
‘Up towards the summer folds.’
‘There is more snow coming.’
Drem was already half turned to the door. He checked, looking down at the little surly man beside the fire. ‘I too can smell other things than garlic with my nose. There is more snow coming, and that is the more reason why I should go after Doli.’
‘It is in my mind that you are a fool if you do,’ Hunno said simply. And as though to give point to the words, at that moment there came to the ears of both of them, far off and faintly down the wind, the long-drawn and infinitely mournful cry of a wolf. They were silent, looking at each other, while the cry was taken up by another wolf, and then, still farther off, by a third. ‘They are early on the trail tonight,’ Hunno said.
Drem’s grip tightened on his spear shaft. ‘The men from the village will be here soon. Meanwhile keep a good fire up by the fold,’ and heedless of Hunno’s growling retort that he had been keeping the Wolf Guard when he, Drem, was not yet thought of, he turned again to the door hole, whistling Whitethroat to heel with lips so chapped by the cold that he could scarcely form the sound, and plunged out into the bitter dusk, past the guard fire where the boy Erp stood leaning on his spear, with the herd dogs beside him, and away into the great, white loneliness.
All around the fold the snow was cut up, trampled to a frozen
brown mud by the feet of men and dogs and sheep, but within a spear throw the tracks thinned out, and in a little there was only Doli’s track and the strayed ewe’s, and that of the dog Cu, faintly visible in the whiteness, reeling out before him into the gathering of the winter dusk.
Drem huddled his sheepskin mantle more closely about him, and trudged on, head into the wind that came swooping down the combe. Something like a tiny frozen feather eddied past his face to alight on the thick fold of sheepskin in which his chin was sunk, and clung there. Another settled with an icy touch on his right eyebrow; another on his lip, and suddenly there was snow flurrying all about him.
It was snowing hard when he came up out of the combe-head on to the open Chalk, and already Doli’s track was becoming blurred by the fresh fall. There was still some light left to see by, for there was a moon behind the cloud roof, and the snow threw a faint upward light of its own. But the wind was rising steadily, blowing up from the dark immensity of the Wild far below, with the sea-surge roaring of wind through bare branches and the desolate, long-drawn hushing of wind across open snow. And the snow was worsening with every bow-shot that he pressed on. It was whirling down the gusts now in a fine, choking powder to mingle with the dry snow already fallen that the wind drove sideways across the ridges in a mealy spray. It was growing hard to find the trail, harder all the while. Growing harder, too, to know exactly where he was, in the whirling icy cloud that blotted out the familiar shapes and smells and underfoot feel of the downs.
Drem, already weary from a hard day’s work, pressed on in a desperate attempt at speed, stumbling in the deep snow, crouching double at times to search out the faint hollows in the smooth whiteness that were all that was left now of old Doli’s track, then struggling on again. Whitethroat, long since trained not to spoil a trail by running on it, floundered at his heel, belly deep in the snow. On the north side of the slope, Drem lost the track in the drifting of the new fall. He struggled down to the bottom of the little dip, casting desperately to and fro, houndwise, and on the farther side, where the snow lay thinner, picked up the faint trace again, and with a gasp of relief, pressed forward once more. But on the farther crest, where the whole flank of the hill turned over into a long, level slope towards the north, the tracks faded out into the drifts, and for all his searching, and the great hound’s sniffing to and fro, he could not find any trace of it again.
As he stood at fault, rather desperately, it seemed to him that the snow was passing. A faint cobwebby gleam of moonlight slid through the clouds; but only to show him the whiteness ahead as pure and unmarked as though no living thing had passed that way since the first man was a thought in the darkness of the Earth Mother. Then the gleam was gone again, as swiftly as it had come, and the snow came whirling back as though in triumph. With very little hope of any answer, Drem propped his spear in the crook of his arm, and cupping his frozen hand about his mouth, shouted at full pitch of his lungs. ‘Coo-oo! Coo-aoh-ee-yah!’ The seeking cry of the hunters and herdsmen of the High Chalk wailed out into the storm. Boy and dog listened, head up into the wind, but there was nothing to hear save the desolate hushing of the wind and the whisper of the snow. They pushed on a short way farther, as nearly as Drem could judge it in the direction of the summer folds, but his sense of direction was confused by the whirling whiteness, and he had no clear idea of his own whereabouts, let alone that of the folds.
In a while he halted, and called again, ‘Coo-oo! Coo-aoh-ee-yah!’ And this time, to their straining ears, there came a reply—a long-drawn howl from far ahead of them, at sound of which Drem’s mouth dried and his hand tightened on the ashen shaft of his spear. But the howl ended in a burst of barking. ‘That’s Cu!’ Drem said aloud, his numbed lips scarcely moving; and his heart leapt between relief and an added fear. He called again, and tried to run, stumbling, floundering in the deep snow. Ahead of him he heard the dog howling, and he called again, gasping, ‘I come! Doli, I come!’ and plunged on.
A few moments later a wolf-like shadow seemed to scramble from the whirling paleness almost at his feet, and old Cu was weaving round his legs, panting and whining. And Drem realized that he had all but gone straight over the edge of the old open flint quarry in the steep hillside. A torn-away place at the edge told its own story, and below him as he peered down, the chalk dropped away so sharply as to be clear of snow save where the whiteness clung about the roots of the bushes that grew here and there on the sheer surface of the drop. The darkness of more bushes gathered thick at the foot; and among them, something moved and bleated; and he thought that there was something else down there, darker than the bushes, that lay unmoving.
The old dog had launched himself from the crest again, and gone slithering and scrambling down at a rush, to the dark thing that did not move. Drem never paused to remember that there was a perfectly easy way down the hillside and into the old working at its lower end. He took the steep chalk slope much as Cu had done, in a landslide of snow and falling chalk and grass tufts. Whitethroat went past him as a rushing shadow, and somehow, with most of the breath driven from his body, he was at the bottom. The sheep was on her legs, so she was not likely to have come to much harm, although she bleated distressfully at his coming, and made no attempt to move. Drem was kneeling over the still figure of old Doli, lying face downwards with the snow already building up against his weather side. In frantic haste he turned the little shepherd over with hand and knee, and felt for his heart. His own was drubbing so that for a moment he could not be sure; then he felt the faint beat of life under his fingers, and a sob of relief burst from him. ‘Doli! Doli!’ But Doli never moved. His exploring fingers found a hard lump on the old man’s temple and the stickiness of blood among his hair. The ewe must have scrambled and slithered down much as he and the dogs had done, but Doli, following on her track before it was swallowed up, ill and blind weary, and away north of where he thought he was, even as Drem had been, and maybe giddy with the whirling snow, must have pitched clean over as from a cliff, striking his head somewhere on the way down.
Drem thought desperately, crouching over the old shepherd. What was the thing to do now? At fifteen he had not yet come near to his full strength, and he knew that, one-armed as he was, he could not get Doli across his shoulders and carry him back unaided. Even if he had had the strength of an ox, to carry Doli he would have had to leave his spear behind, and that would most likely mean death for both of them, with the wolf-kind abroad and the smell of Doli’s blood to draw them. Here at the foot of the old flint quarry the bushes gave some shelter from the wind and snow, and in case the wolf kind came he would at least have his spear-arm free and the solid chalk behind him. He was fumbling with the bronze pin of his sheepskin cloak even as he thought. He tore it off and spread it over Doli, feeling the wind strike like a knife through his own body without it. Then he turned to Whitethroat and pointed. ‘Back—go back, brother. Fetch the others.’
Whitethroat looked along the line of his pointing finger and then up into his face, whimpering. Drem got up and caught his collar, and urged him out to the open mouth of the quarry, where the chalk cliff sank into the hillside; then pointed again. ‘Back! Go back to the fold! Fetch Hunno!’ He had no means of sending any message, but there was no need: anyone seeing Whitethroat apart from his master would know that it meant trouble—bad trouble, and there would be plenty of men at the fold, for the men of the village would have come up long since to keep the Wolf Guard. Maybe even Vortrix; Vortrix had come up more than once in the past moon. He held the hound’s big rough head for a moment with his hand under the raised muzzle. ‘Go back, brother. Bring Hunno!’ Then he pointed again, and gave the hound a light, open-palmed blow on the rump.
Whitethroat looked up into his face again, whimpered, and, turning, ploughed away into the darkness and the flurrying snow.
Drem waited until he was lost to sight, then turned and went back to Doli. Cu, crouching over his master, greeted him with an agonized whine, and he spoke gently to the ol
d hound, and began to drag the shepherd farther back against the chalk cliff, where there was more shelter. It was not easy, with only one hand for the task, but he managed it little by little. When he got Doli where he wanted him, in a little bay of the chalk where a dense clump of spindle bushes broke the wind, he spread his cloak again over the old man, and saw with relief how Cu crawled close and lay down almost on top of his master. That should give him a little warmth.
He turned to the ewe, running his hand over her as best he could in the dark. Her lamb was on the way, but it would not come just yet. Like enough the wolves would be here first, he thought grimly. Her also he urged in close against the foot of the chalk, into the same sheltered spot where he had dragged Doli. Then he found Doli’s spear and laid it beside his own, where it was easily come by; and fell to collecting loose turfs and lumps of chalk and frozen snow—anything to throw when the time came. And when that was done, there was nothing more that he could do. If only he could have made a fire! That would have helped to keep away the wolf kind, at any rate for a while. He had his fire stones, but there was nothing in the frozen bushes that would make a blaze, nothing at all. All that he could do now was to wait.
How far would Whitethroat have got on his way back to the fold by now? He had no idea, no means of knowing how time was going by, as he crouched, spear ready to hand, over the old shepherd, trying to add the shelter of his own body to that of the spindle bushes. Maybe Whitethroat would never get back to the fold at all; maybe he would meet the wolves, his father’s kind, instead. Peering out through the bushes, with every strained sense on the alert for danger, it seemed to him once again that the snow was slackening. A little later he was sure of it. That was one thing to the good. It was scarcely snowing at all now; there might be something left of their track for the others to follow—if Whitethroat ever got through. It was growing lighter, too, the low sky breaking up into hurrying masses through which every now and then a greasy blur of tarnished silver showed where the moon rode high. Behind him the ewe was becoming restless. The lamb would be here soon.
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