Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
1 The White Mare of a Dream
2 Fight in Hall
3 Merchants’ Tales
4 The Choosing Feast
5 Menace from the South
6 The Conquerors and the Conquered
7 Captive Winter
8 The Bargain
9 Of Hawks and Gods and Men on the Ground
10 Chief’s Right
11 The Great Loneliness
12 Song of the Northward Droving
13 Sun Horse, Moon Horse
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Rosemary Sutcliff
Copyright
About the Book
In this book, set in the Iron Age, Rosemary Sutcliff has created a haunting and powerful story based on the White Horse of Uffington in the Berkshire Downs.
This book is for Anthony Kamm
1
The White Mare of a Dream
The dun, the Strong Place, crouched on the highest wave-lift of the Downs. Three encircling banks, one within the other, turf-built and timber-faced, and the broad chalk-cut ditch outside all. And where the gateways made weak places in the defences, the ends of the inner and outer banks were joined together, so that the heavy timber gates were set at the end of a kind of passage-way, and an attacking war-host could only reach them through a crossfire of spears and slingstones from the defenders on either side.
Five times the life of a man, the Strong Place had crouched there, ever since the young men of the tribe, following a queen’s youngest son, had come thrusting along the Downs from the vast flat grasslands far to the north-east, to find new lands for themselves in the way of young men all the world over. They had brought their women and their children and their horse herds with them. They were of the Iceni, the Horse People, breeders and breakers of horses, counting their wealth not in gold, but in stallions and rough-coated two-year-olds and foaling mares, and trained chariot teams.
They had found their new horse-runs, here along the High Chalk, and driven out the Dark People, the Old People who had been there before them, and built their Strong Place; and in the early years, the whole clan had lived within the shelter of its ramparts. But now the Old People had settled into a life of their own in the shadow of the men who had once been their conquerors, and the times had become less fierce. In time of danger, under a raiding moon, the whole clan and the flower of the horse herds, sometimes even some of the Old People, too, could still refuge there, while the herdsmen drove the cattle and the rest of the horses off into the hidden places in the woods below. But in time of peace, most people lived in settlements along the lower and more sheltered slopes, or in clearings of the valley woods. And the smaller strongposts were used now as corrals for the autumn round-up of the mares at foaling time.
Only Tigernann the Chieftain still had his great timber hall up there on the windy roof of the world, with its byres and barns and stables gathered about it, and the lodgings of his household warriors, and his harper and his champion and his priests, and the craftsmen who made such things as a chieftain and his warriors and his horses need.
Tigernann the Chieftain had three sons born to Saba his wife in the women’s place behind the great hall, Brach and Corfil who were litter-brothers born at one birth, and Lubrin, the younger by two years. Lubrin Dhu, the little dark one, who came into the world with black down on his head, and eyes that seemed too old for his face from the moment he first opened them.
It happened so from time to time among the clan, for there was never a conquering people yet who did not mingle their blood a little with the people who were before them. And Lubrin’s mother wept when he was born, for it was through her that the darkness came, though herself she was creamy-skinned and copper-haired as any other woman of the Horse People, and she knew something of the joys and the sorrows and the dreams that would be part of him, and that the rest of his kind would never be troubled with nor understand.
But Lubrin Dhu was happy enough as the first years of his life went by, tumbling with the hound pups and the other children of the dun about the threshold of his father’s hall.
One hot summer day when he was five years old, he was playing with a hound puppy in the stable court. After a while, the puppy grew tired of the game and wandered off about its own affairs. Lubrin remained where he was, sitting on his heels. In the quietness after the puppy’s going, he had become aware of the swallows who had their nests under the eaves of the stable sheds.
They were darting low after the dancing midge cloud, sweeping and skimming, weaving their pattern of flight against the sky. It seemed to Lubrin that he could see the pattern. But it changed so quickly. Something in him longed to capture it before it was lost. He began to draw with his fingers in the dust, trying to catch the dark sickle-flash of wings, almost as one might try to catch a living thing in one’s hands. But they were too fast, too fast, and escaped him every time.
At the upper end of the court, Urien his father’s charioteer had pulled down one of the light hunting chariots from where they stood tipped up against the chariot shed wall, and was backing the red pair under the yoke. They fidgeted and side-stepped, tossing their heads in the air and swishing their tails. Urien said, ‘Easy! Easy now, my brothers! Have you never smelled thunder in the air before?’
In the usual way of things, Lubrin would have been with them, watching – as close as he dared, for Urien did not care for children underfoot when he was dealing with a nervous team – for he loved his father’s chariot ponies, the red team best of all. But he was still too caught up in the darting and swooping and swerving of the swallows overhead, and his own efforts to catch the pattern they made before it was lost in the blue air. He did not even notice when Tigernann his father came into the stable court, and sprang up into the chariot, taking the reins from his waiting charioteer, and turned the red team towards the gateway. Lubrin Dhu had had an idea.
Somebody, bringing up branches for bedding from the woods below, had dropped a slender spray of birch. It lay in the white dust close beside him, three of the leaves on it already touched with gold. If he singled out just one of the darting swallows and ran after it very fast, following every twist and turn, and dragging the birch spray behind him in the dust, and then did it again with another bird, and another – and another . . .
He caught up the birch spray and stood ready, staring upward. A swallow darted out from the eaves directly overhead, and he was off after it, darting and swerving, his face turned skyward, the birch spray bobbing behind him, but already the swallow, his swallow, was gone, lost among a cloud of crescent wings.
And in its place there were ponies’ upflung heads; open mouths and snorting nostrils, a tossing tangle of fiery manes. Hooves seemed crashing all around and over him. There was a moment of trampling chaos as the team were wrenched to one side and reined back on their haunches; and he was looking up over the wicker side of the chariot into his father’s angry face.
‘What in the name of Epona do you think that you are doing?’ demanded Tigernann, quietening his startled beasts.
Lubrin stood his ground and looked back into the gathering storm between the Chieftain’s brows. Something within him knew that it was going to be too complicated to explain that he had been trying to catch the pattern of the swallows’ flight. ‘I was being a swallow,’ he said.
‘It is in my mind that you came near to being a dead swallow. Also you have startled my horses.’
The charioteer had come running to scoop Lubrin out of the way, but Tigernann gestured him back.
Lubrin said nothing. There did not seem anything to
say. He and his father went on looking at each other.
Until now, Lubrin Dhu had not been much aware of his father, save as something large and strong and splendid and terrifying, a sort of combined sunburst and thundercloud, on the edge of his world. Now, meeting the angry blue gaze, he discovered for the first time that Tigernann the Chieftain was indeed his father, and a man like other men. It was a discovery that felt good in the making. And at the same time, Tigernann was making much the same kind of discovery. It was the first time since he was born that the Chieftain had really looked with a seeing eye at his third son; the little black runt of a golden litter. But he was seeing him now, and suddenly his heart warmed to what he saw. He liked this creature, who had not made any outcry when he found himself almost under the ponies’ hooves, this creature who stood scarcely higher than the rim of his chariot wheel, and was not afraid of him but gave him back look for look.
‘Come,’ he said, on an impulse, ‘we are not Bird People, we are Horse People, you and I. Come with me and see the mares in the High Run.’
And before Lubrin knew what was happening, his father had stooped and caught him up into the chariot beside him, and the team sprang forward from a flick of the reins.
They clattered out through the eastward gate of the dun, and swung aside on to the track that crested the long ridge of the Chalk. And Tigernann let out his whip lash, flickering and cracking above the backs of the red team, as they sprang forward into full gallop.
To their right, as they left the great up-rearing of the Fortress Hill behind them, the land fell away gently, past the barley strips of the lower slopes already whitening towards harvest, to the dim far-off blueness of lowland forest. To their left, the northern side, it swooped and plunged in whirlpools of headlong turf to the nearer woods. And between the two, high up with the sun and the clouds and the larks for company, they followed the crest of the Chalk.
They were out now, from the thickets of bramble and wayfaring trees and the quiet grave mounds that marked the track, on to the open ground south of it. The red team were going full stretch; the turf, thin and tawny with late summer, streaked backwards beneath them, and the world was full of the thunder of hooves and iron-shod wheels. Lubrin felt the woven leather straps of the chariot floor vibrating under him. The chariot leapt and rocked, and he gave up trying to steady himself by the side, and clung instead to one of his father’s wide-planted legs, because that seemed the surest thing to cling to. His brothers Brach and Corfil would have lifted up their voices, singing and shouting to the wind of their going; but Lubrin was silent; and his father looked down, half scornfully, to see if he was frightened, and saw that he was not, but that the shouting and singing were all within him.
That day, for the first time, Lubrin saw the herdsmen working the great horse herds, shifting them from one pasture to another for the late summer grazing. And he had never been so far from home before; and he had discovered that his father was real. And any of those things would have been enough to remember one day by. But he remembered it all his life as the day on which he saw the white mare.
There had been thunder muttering in the distance all day; one of those late summer days of quickly changing lights. And the smell of thunder was in the little puffs of warm wind that stirred the grass and the low-growing thorn scrub. And what he saw at first was a knot of mares heading at an easy canter along the ridge, the sky behind them massed with storm clouds that had the colour and bloom of ripe sloes, while the nearer slopes of turf were still in acid sunlight.
Then out from the rest, one took the lead, mane streaming, tail streaming, white against the gathering storm, whiter than the secret chalk below the grass, whiter than thorn blossom. For a few heartbeats of time she was his to see, with the skein of darker mares following after. And then, from out of the heart of the piled clouds, came a licking tongue of lightning. For an instant the mare seemed made of white fire, and the fire of her burned into the inmost self of the Chieftain’s youngest son as a brand burns into the hide of a yearling colt, leaving a mark which is never quite lost.
Then she flung round, snorting with fear, and was gone over the lip of the Downs, the rest after her. And in the same instant, there was a crack of thunder like a whiplash, that turned into the roar of the skies falling, and boomed and echoed away among the combes and hollows of the Chalk. And Lubrin’s father flung a dark wing of his cloak over him as the rain came hissing towards them along the dry ground.
Later, the sun came out again and everything was shining. But that was not what Lubrin remembered. He remembered the white mare, the dream.
2
Fight in Hall
On the edge of autumn, Lubrin’s sister was born. The priest-kind sounded the Moon Call on the sacred oxhorns that sent the news booming all along the run of the Downs. And that night there was a great feast in the Chieftain’s hall.
It was a fine thing to have sons, but among Lubrin’s people, kingship and chieftainship did not pass down from father to son, but were carried down by the daughters to the men they married. Tigernann was Chieftain because he was married to the old Chief’s daughter, the Woman of the Clan. Now he had a daughter of his own, and so his line would carry on the chieftainship after him; and the clan feasted accordingly.
On any other night Lubrin would have been curled up in his sleeping rug of dappled faun skins in the women’s quarters before the eating and drinking started. But this was not like other nights, and the women were busy about other things; and he and most of the children of the dun were with the hunting-dogs under the tables. When the warriors threw down bones and scraps of meat to the hounds, the children got their share; and Lubrin was more blissfully full of pig-meat and honey-baked badger than ever he had been before.
There had been much noisy drinking to the new daughter, and to the unknown warrior who would one day be her lord. ‘May he be such a one as led the clan from the eastern horse-runs!’ the household warriors had shouted, gulping down the dark Greek wine that was too costly to be drunk except in time of high festival. But they had fallen quiet now, and Sinnoch the Chieftain’s harper, sitting on his stool at the head of the long hearth, but begun to tune his little black bog-oak harp, gentling it into wakefulness as a man makes ready his hawk to fly. Then he tilted back his head and began to sing. He sang the old song of the droving, about the young men of the tribe who had followed a queen’s youngest son out of the eastern grasslands to find new horse-runs in the morning time of the world.
‘Now,’ said the Youngest Son, ‘let us take the horse herds, high crested and of fiery heart,
And let us set our faces toward the West,
Toward the land of the trees of silver apples. Come!’
And the hills trembled beneath the thunder of their hooves,
And the dust-cloud of their chariot wheels rose to the sun.
Lubrin Dhu, under the high table, saw the firelight leaping on the plucked harpstrings; but he was watching the pattern that the words and music had begun to weave inside his head; deep strong flowing patterns that had in them the beat of hooves and the streaming of manes, and above and around the horse patterns, the grace-notes rising like spun clouds, like flocks of little birds wheeling and skimming above the herd. And as he watched, the longing that he had had to capture the swallows’ flight came back on him again.
Scarcely knowing that he did so, he edged forward, out from under the table, over the bracken-strewn floor towards the bare flagstones that edged the hearth. A piece of charred stick had fallen from the fire; and he picked it up and began to draw on the stone the thing that he was seeing inside his head. He was so taken up with trying to catch the shapes as they changed and flew that, just as he had done in the stable court, he lost all awareness of what was around him. The long timber hall, the warriors at the tables and the women moving among them with the slender-necked bronze wine jars; the firelight springing up all the height of the roof trees, to where the skulls of ancient enemies, smoke-blackened and daubed with r
ed and yellow ochre, were ranged along the tie-beams overhead, all faded as into the dust-cloud of the droving. And along with all else, he forgot about the other children under the high table.
The pattern was coming. Anyone else might have seen on the flagstone only a tangle of wavy lines and random spots and dashes, but to Lubrin, coming closer to the secret of the thing this time than he had done with the swallows, it meant what he wanted it to mean, and it was beautiful; also, in a strange sort of way, it was part of himself.
And then suddenly Brach and Corfil, who had been tustling over a honeycake nearby, saw that he was doing something with a bit of charred stick on the hearthstone, and craned over to look. Corfil laughed. He had a wide scornful laugh that let you see right past where some of his cub teeth were missing, and down his pink throat. Then he got up, and deliberately walked across Lubrin’s drawings, scuffing his feet as he went, so that the middle of it was all blurred and spoiled.
Brach, who always did what his twin did, would have followed him; but on the instant a red flower of rage seemed to burst open in Lubrin Dhu, and with a cry of fury he flung himself on Corfil, taking him by surprise so that he went over backwards, his mouth still open, but the laughter changed to blank astonishment. Brach dived in to his twin’s aid. They had Lubrin between them, and pulled him down and hurled themselves upon him, pummelling and kicking. They were two to one, and Lubrin was two years younger, and small at that; but he fought like a wild thing cornered. Corfil yelped, and backed off for an instant with a bitten thumb, then came boring in again in a flailing mass of arms and legs.
But almost in the same instant a fourth-comer hurled himself into the fight, Dara, whose father Drochmail was chief among the household warriors, butting head down into Brach’s belly.
Sinnoch had let his harp fall silent almost between note and note, and sat looking down with interest at the furious tangle that was rolling to and fro at his feet, almost in the ashes of the fire. Then two of the armour-bearers went in to break it up, as men go in half-laughing and dealing out cuffs right and left, to break up a fight among hound puppies.