The Dream Time

by Henry Treece

  They wrapped her in a sheepskin bundle, and a woollen shawl, and then set off away from the forest, towards the open land that lay beyond the nearest ridge of hills.

  And when they had gone for a while a clan of brown wolves started up from behind a little clump of hawthorn trees and came snuffling towards them. Blackbird gave a little scream, but Twilight turned on her with such a stern face that she even smiled at him.

  He said, ‘Hold tight to Linnet and I will speak to these poor four-footed things.’

  But he did not have the chance to speak. He went forward at the clan-leader, who was already bristling to leap, and never said a word. The wolf halted suddenly and glared at him, his eyes flat and amber, his red tongue lolling out between the white fangs. But it did not leap. Instead, its hackles fell all at once and its tail dropped into the snow. It looked up at Twilight

  as though waiting for a command. But Twilight did not speak. All he did was to hum that little running-song he had made, so long ago, when he was coming back from making the two clay owls. The king wolf heard this and a strange blur came across his flat yellow eyes. It was almost as though his hair came down over his brows in a bewildered frown. Then, when Twilight still kept coming on, the wolf turned his head slowly, not to look at him, and then slunk round and went back to his folk.

  Blackbird came running up and laughing. She said, ‘See, they have drawn back into the bushes. They cannot face you, brother. What did you say to their king?’

  Twilight looked at her vacantly, the beads of sweat on his lips and chin. ‘Say to them?’ he said. ‘It would be a very small man who bothered to argue with such carrion-folk. It would be a waste of manhood if those who can make pictures should have to deal with such four-legged scum as wolves. They smelled the pictures in me and drew away from them. Perhaps they smelled the other thing I once dreamed, of forming an owl in melted copper.’

  Then Blackbird said, smiling, ‘If you talk such magic I shall draw away from you too, brother. For that is far more frightening than a spear-stick.’

  Twilight turned towards her and said, ‘I shall never carry a spear-stick any more. Spear-sticks did not save the Red Men, strong as they were. Spear-sticks will save no man. But his dream will, if he can only find the courage to hold it when the wolves glare into his eyes.’

  Blackbird said, ‘Hush! Hush! You arc getting loud and boastful. You will waken the little sleeping Linnet in her sheepskin nest with your shouting.’

  Twilight laughed and said, ‘Let her wake, if she wishes. Let her see that I do not drag my leg now, that I have learned to walk as firmly as any man should do.’

  Blackbird said, ‘But if she wakes she will not be bothered about your silly leg, Twilight. She will be more concerned with feeling hungry. She will cry out because she has had no food for so many days. That is what Linnet will do.’

  Twilight strode on for a while, then he said, ‘For once I shall not go into a dark corner and tear out my hair because a child cries and disturbs my dreams. For now the child is a part of my dreams, and my dreams are for that child. She can cry to her heart’s content, and soon she will cry no more, because there will be food and milk enough to make her smile again.’

  Blackbird was a few paces behind, carrying the sleeping bundle gently so as not to set it squealing. She said, her head down and set towards the thick snow, ‘Dreams, dreams, dreams! Men, men, men! I have heard it all before, whether they hold a charcoal stick or a spear.’

  Then Twilight said very calmly, ‘You are so locked in your own dreams of what you once saw that you do not see what lies before you, sister. Lift up your head and see something more than snow.’

  So Blackbird looked up and saw the little village before them, warm among the gentle hills, with the blue smoke rising from the huts.

  She said amazed, ‘Look, brother, there is no stockade round this place.’

  Twilight said, ‘Stockade? Stockade? Must a man have a stockade? Is he bom with a stockade about him? Is there a stockade round little Linnet now? I tell you, before 1 even see them, that the folk of this place have something better than stockades, or spear-sticks, to keep them safe. Come on, Blackbird, I can see that they are coming to meet us, laughing—as well they might, seeing our strange cavern-clothes!’

  Then he went with his hand outstretched to meet them laughing too. And behind him Blackbird was laughing. And in her sheepskin bundle, Linnet had awakened and was doing her best to laugh.

  It was a golden end to a black beginning indeed.

  Postscript by

  ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF

  Different kinds of stories need to be told in different kinds of words strung together in different ways.

  Henry Treece understood this better than almost any other writer I know. He had a very special gift for finding exactly the words and word-patterns that each of his books needed, so that instead of simply telling the story, they blend into it and become part of its texture and colour and shape and smell.

  This is a kind of magic; but it is a magic that, if it is perfectly carried out, hardly shows; so that one might read The Dream-time from beginning to end, and never notice that it was there at all, which would be a great pity.

  The Dream-time is a story of people in the very early morning of humanity, when they were not really used to being people at all, and so everything had a strangeness about it, and nothing was quite certain; not even that the spring would come again next year. They were so near the beginning that they can have had only the fewest and simplest of words with which to talk to each other and share their thoughts and feelings and ideas. And yet we know, from the things to do with their religion and way of life that they left behind them, and from Stone Age people who are alive today, such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari, that they had all kinds of complicated thoughts and fears and longings in their heads and hearts. So Henry Treece has told this story in very short and simple words, put together in such a way that they can express things which are not simple at all.

  Before you have read very far into The Dream-time, you will know what Henry Treece is saying. Indeed, he makes Crookleg, who became Twilight, think part of it for him: ‘He wished that all people, the men and women and horses and owls and dogs could agree to speak the same words. Then all things would be easy, to speak and to be understood. Perhaps no one would fight then.’

  It is a consistently shifting and changing story that holds one all the way, with its adventures and its strange peoples and places; but it is also a plea for people to get to know each other and care about each other more; for peace instead of war, making instead of breaking.

  I think that in this, the last book that Henry Treece wrote, he did not mean to make a historical novel, such as he had made before, but to do something quite different. It is more as though, in a way, he were writing down a dream; and just as, in a dream, times and places get jumbled together, he has deliberately put different periods and ‘pockets’ of very different Peoples nearer to each other than they really were. The story, of a boy who would rather make beautiful things than kill people, seems to belong to the late Stone Age, to the Little Dark People who possessed the secret of growing barley; but the Hunters, the makers of wonderful cave paintings, who were there long before the Barley People, come into it, too; and about the River folk there is a suggestion of the Age of Bronze, which came after the Little Dark Ones had had their day. I think that in all this, He was trying to show that however much people change in the outward way that they behave and even think, certain things never change. Some of these things are good, and some of them bad and sad. In all ages, even today, there are people who want to make beautiful things more than anything else in the world; and people who are willing to die for a dream, even for the kind of dream that seems crazy to everyone else. And in all ages, even today when we have had four thousand years or so in which to learn more sense, people still fight because they do not understand each other.

  One of the sad things of life, for every writer, is the knowing tha
t one day he will write his last book. And all too often, when it comes, it is just a book like others that he has written before; maybe not even as good as some of those others were. But Henry Treece was lucky; he has written a very special book indeed for his last novel of all.