And the thing was over. Lubrin’s red rage-flower died, and he was standing in the grip of a young warrior, panting and still half-sobbing with rage and grief. But they were dry sobs, strangled in his chest. He would not weep like a child before the warriors of the clan. Above all, he would not weep before his brothers.
‘And for what cause is all this snapping and snarling of whelps?’ demanded Tigernann the Chief.
For a long breath of time, no one spoke. Then Brach said, ‘Ask Lubrin, my father. It was he that was the starting of it.’
The Chief’s golden brows twitched upward, as he turned to his youngest son. ‘Lubrin?’
Lubrin did not answer. He had known that it would be useless to try explaining to his father, when he had been trying to capture the swallows’ flight. This would be still worse. If he said, ‘I was making a picture of Sinnoch’s harpsong, and Corfil broke it,’ who would understand? He was not even sure that he understood himself, now that the thing was over and the magic broken.
‘I am waiting, and I do not like to wait,’ said the Chieftain.
Lubrin shook his head, ‘I have forgotten,’ he said sullenly.
‘So? And for a thing so small that you have forgotten it already, you will start a dogfight in the high hall?’
‘Yes,’ said Lubrin.
They looked at each other as they had done across the chariot rim that time before. Then Tigernann leaned back in his seat with its covering of black oxhides. ‘Then we will agree that it is finished for this time. But the next time, you will go outside to finish it in the forecourt, all of you; and the places where your tails would be, if you were whelps indeed, will be fiery behind you!’
The young warrior who had Lubrin by the back of the neck gave him a little shake, friendliwise, and let him go. Sinnoch’s hand had begun to move once more on the strings of his harp, making again the shining sounds. His old faded gaze caught the small bright eyes of Gault the Bronzesmith, whose wonderful encircling patterns on a cup or a shield-boss seemed to hold the secrets of wind and stars and running water. They knew the meaning of the spoiled and half-rubbed-out lines on the hearthstone, and said to each other without words, ‘Here is another of the brotherhood.’
But Lubrin saw nothing of that. He was looking at Dara; and Dara was licking a cut lip and looking back at him with round puzzled eyes.
Dara had not understood, any more than Corfil or Brach, but he had come to Lubrin’s help without understanding. There were things happening inside both of them that they were not old enough to put into thought. They had played and fought together ever since they could crawl, along with all the young of the dun, human and hound pups alike, but it was not until that moment that they knew, far down below the need for thinking about it, that they were friends.
Lubrin grinned at Dara, and Dara grinned back, carefully, because it hurt where he had had somebody’s heel driven into his mouth. And they retired companionably under the table once more, and squatted down with one of the hound puppies between them, and began to go over it for cockle burrs tangled in its rough coat.
And over their heads, the feasting and rejoicing continued for the birth of the girl-child who would carry on the life of the clan.
3
Merchants’ Tales
The life of the clan went on; and the years turned full circle after each other. The mares dropped their foals in early summer, and in autumn the herds were rounded up for branding, and in winter the leggy two-year-olds began their breaking to rider or chariot.
And from the day of the fight at the girl-child, Teleri’s, birth feast Lubrin and Dara held together. They were an oddly matched pair, especially as they grew older; Dara big-boned and golden-freckled and rangy as a wolfhound; little dark silent Lubrin beside him like his short noonday shadow. But in truth Lubrin Dhu was nobody’s shadow.
‘They were born in the same moon. They are the two halves of a hazel-nut,’ said Sinnoch the Harper. ‘It is as simple as that.’
So they hunted and laughed and fought together, shared their food from the same bowl and slept under the same mg most nights, until they were nine years old, and it was time for them to enter the Boys’ House.
Every spring, on the day after the Beltane fires had burned out, the boys of the clan who had turned nine since last Beltane entered the Boys’ House, the long low building at the lower end of the Chieftain’s forecourt, to begin their warrior training. There were many things that they must learn and skills that they must master; skills of the war spear and the horse herd and the hunting trail. They had to learn the use of sword and spear and sling; how to kill and how to suffer pain with a shut mouth. They had to learn how to keep a whole herd on the move, and cut out a single colt for branding from among a flying cloud of yearlings. They had to learn how to build a chariot, for every one of the Men’s Side must serve as a charioteer in his early years before he became a chariot-warrior himself, and every charioteer must be able to mend or replace the worn or broken parts of the chariot he drove. They must be able to break and train a chariot team as well as drive it. They must learn from the priest, Ishtoreth of the Oak, how to read and write the word-magic cut on peeled willow rods; and from Sinnoch they must learn by heart the songs that held within them the history of their people. And all these things and many more they must master in just seven years.
‘It is hard work, this training to be a man!’ said Bryn, the biggest and strongest of them all, who liked to sleep in the sun.
Lubrin did not mind the hard work, but in the early years he minded very much the never being alone. The life of the Boys’ House was close-knit, and the boys of each year worked together and slept close-huddled in their own part of the long building, and even in their spare time they mostly ran as a pack. Dara seemed quite happy with that way of things. But then, Dara did not have this aching need to catch and set down bird flight or harpsong, wind in barley or running herds. Nobody laughed at Dara or tormented him for the making of strange patterns. They laughed at Lubrin, led by Brach and Corfil who always laughed at anything they did not understand, in case, if they did not laugh, they might be afraid of it; and what was worse, they laughed at the picture-magics he made, so that for a long time he almost gave up making them except sometimes in secret. His refuge, during those years, was a great wych-elm on the edge of one of the forest clearings. He had found it before ever he went to the Boys’ House, one day when he and Dara were hunting for a wild bees’ nest. Three great limbs sprang from its main trunk, making it easy to climb, and up near the top it was antlered like a king stag, with a spreading poll of branches. He could lie up there above the tops of the lesser forest secure from the rest of his world. Now and again when the need to work out his strange patterns was sore upon him, he took a few bits of charred stick and a piece of silvery birch bark up with him – the deeply rutted grey bark of the tree was too rough to draw on – and made his private magic up there. There was even a deep crevice between two branches where he could hide his drawings for a while, until the weather got at them and fretted them away. At other times he went simply for the refuge, working his way far out along his favourite branch until it rose and fell under him with every movement of the wind. In a high wind it was like riding some giant unbroken horse; in gentle weather he could lie out along it half asleep in the dappled sunspots through the leaves, and look out southward to the great slow lift of the Downs rising to the Fortress Hill then sinking again on their way towards the sunset.
Lying up there one day he made the interesting discovery that if he shut one eye, he could cover the whole of his father’s dun, the Boys’ House and Brach and Corfil and the steep turf slopes below the ramparts and all, with a single elm leaf held before his face. It did not seem a very important discovery, but after he had made it, it ceased to matter so much when the others jeered at him and his picture-magic. ‘I can cover all of you with an elm leaf,’ he thought. And little by little, when they found that he did not mind any more, they mostly gave up jeering, and left
him to be himself in his own way.
One day late in the third autumn that Lubrin and Dara spent in the Boys’ House, a merchant came down the track from the north, with fine dressed skins in his ponies’ packs, and ornaments of yellow Irish gold in a sealskin bag. Many merchants came and went through Tigernann’s dun, for below its turf and timber walls the high Ridgeway and the way of the Horse People that shadowed it along the lower slopes crossed an ancient trade road running north and south. They were horse traders for the most part. Once, Tigernann’s people, the Iceni, had bred their small fiery horses only for themselves, but now there were new markets for trained ponies opening in the south, and the traders came accordingly – but also dealers in skins from the north, and iron spear blades and dark salt from the rain forests far beyond the Great Water, and the bronze ingots that Gault and the smith-kind fashioned into fiercely beautiful wine-cups and war-caps and shield-bosses, and wine from the south in narrow-necked jars slung on either side of a pony’s pack saddle.
And always it was the custom that the trader, when he had eaten in the Guest Place, should show his horses in the in-paddock, if he came to sell as well as buy, or spread his other wares before the High Seat in the hall, that the Chieftain, and after him his household warriors, might have first choice. And that next day he should show his wares in the open forecourt, that all who wished might come and do their bargaining. Then people would gather from far and wide, and not only to sell or buy, for beside their merchandise, the traders were the bearers of news, all the news of the world that they picked up on their travels and carried from place to place.
The Boys’ House counted as part of the Chieftain’s household, though only the boys in their last year ate in the hall with the warriors. And so that first evening, after the merchant had fed, those of them who had nothing more interesting to do went across to the great timber hall to see what he had for sale and listen to his stories. If they were lucky, he might be one of those who are as full of travellers’ tales as an egg is full of meat, and anyway they would make a change from the stories of Sinnoch the Harper, which everyone knew by heart. It was good, sometimes, to hear a new thing.
Lubrin was scratch-drawing the head of a hind on a flat shoulderblade of the mutton they had had for supper, trying to catch her in the instant before flight, and he would have gone on drawing, leaving the merchant’s tales unheard, but Dara grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him to his feet. ‘She will wait for you, and you can go on with her later,’ Dara said, jerking his chin at the blade bone. Lubrin doubted that. He doubted if he would be able to catch the edge-of-flight moment again. But he went with Dara and the rest, up past the tall black stone in the centre of the forecourt, where the warriors sharpened their weapons, to the open doorway of the hall.
In the smoky mingling of fire and torchlight the Chieftain sat forward on his High Seat, watching as the merchant brought out this thing and that from his bale cloths and laid them on the piece of crimson cloth spread at his feet. For the most part, the man had left his furs in their bales – furs from the north found a better market farther south – but he had brought out some particularly fine marten pelts and some beautifully marked mountain cat skins. They lay on one side now, piled on the shaggy hide of a brown bear, and the warriors and their women were crowding close to look at the other things that he had brought.
The boys edged through, getting as close as they could.
They saw a gold collar, and brooches set with red enamel that glowed like hot embers in the torchlight, and great arm-rings of gilded bronze, and a dagger whose hilt was shaped like a man with his arms folded across the top of his head. But the merchant himself, a dark, thickset man with black hairs curling on the backs of his forearms, seemed more akin to the piled furs than to the glinting gold and enamel and narwhal ivory that he handled as gently as a woman.
He had just tossed out on to the crimson cloth a jingle of small golden balls, each with a tiny loop to hang it by, and was picking them up again, delicately, casting two or three of them from hand to hand.
‘And what are those?’ the Chieftain said. ‘I have not seen their like before.’
‘Apples for a woman’s hair. It is a new fashion among the fine ladies of Eriu. They plait their hair into many thin braids – ah, more than there are fingers on my two hands – and bind one of these to the end of each braid. A pretty fashion.’
‘Aye, a pretty fashion. From Eriu, you say? You are from Eriu, this time?’
‘I was in Eriu earlier this summer. Why?’
The Chieftain shrugged. It was a small matter. ‘Traders from Eriu come almost always along the track from the west.’
‘I carried my trading up to the north of Eriu, and across to the Islands and so in to Albu. It was a new trail; and a trail that other men have not followed before is often good. But—’ the merchant shook his head – ‘I would not follow it again. There are too few people between the mountains and the sea. Just sea-lakes and empty moors. For you, now, it would be a different creel of fish! An empty land, and wide grazing for the horse herds; good grazing in and out between the hazel woods and the heather . . .’
The young men looked at each other in the firelight, and memory stirred in them, of Sinnoch’s song of the Westward Droving. Lubrin could feel the stirring of it, the faint quickening in the blood, that leapt from one to another. His eyes met Dara’s brightening gaze, and he saw that it was the same with him, too. In that moment, out of the merchant’s random words and the memory of an old song, a dream was born between the two of them.
Then Tigernann turned to his wife, Lubrin’s mother, sitting on piled deerskin cushions beside him. ‘Saba, my woman, how would it please you to dress your hair so?’
Saba shook her head. Her hair was gathered into an embroidered net, as many women of the Iceni wore it. ‘I am not wishing to change my own way for the fashion of the women of Eriu. If you would make me a gift, my lord, then let it be this,’ and she picked up a polished bronze mirror with blue and green enamel on the finely-chased back, and a handle of braided silver.
‘It is your gift. It is for you to choose,’ Tigernann said; and to the merchant, ‘What will you take for the mirror?’
And while they fell to bargaining, Gault the Bronzesmith leaned forward, holding out his hand. ‘Lady, may I look?’
She gave it to him, and he sat turning it to the light, tracing with his fingers the flowing lines, the three and fourfold curves that sprang from each other and curled back into each other again. And when the bargaining was over, he said to the merchant, ‘This is a good pattern. It would make a fitting pattern for a shield-boss.’ And gave Saba back her mirror.
The trader smiled. He had passed that way before, and he and Gault were well known to each other. ‘Is there anything in the world that you look at, without wondering will it make a fitting pattern for a shield-boss? And speaking of such matters, have you anything to show me if I come – humbly – to your workshop in the morning?’
‘To show you, yes,’ Gault said. ‘Whether you would be wishing to buy, that is another thing; another thing altogether, and depends on who you would be wishing to sell to; my work does not speak to all men; and even for those it speaks to – it is not cheap.’
‘That, I know of old.’
Gault smiled and spread his hands. ‘I have no need to sell cheaply.’
‘I can offer a good price,’ said the trader. ‘For it is in my mind that I can make a good sale. The Attribates are a rich people.’
‘The Attribates? So I have heard. Rich in those new gold coins that they have brought from Gaul. But surely they have bronzesmiths and shield-wrights of their own?’
‘They are a great people, these chariot lords, and they have their bronzesmiths and their shield-wrights fitting for their greatness. But in the way of a rich people, above all a people rich in coins, which make for easy trading, they like to buy things strange to them, from outside their own workshops. Therefore they will pay.’
In t
he little following silence, men glanced at each other. Then the Chieftain said, ‘I have heard something of these people who cross the Narrow Seas, to make their homes yonder.’ He jerked his thumb towards the great lowland forests to the south. ‘It is said that they come north, rather than lie themselves down on their bellies under the marching feet of the Red Crests. Well, that is a thing that we may all understand.’
And they began to talk of the world beyond the Chalk and the forest, southward to the Great Water; and the heavy-handed people who called their war-hosts Legions, and marched in straight lines following gold and silver figures of their war gods in the shape of eagles, and wore crests of red horsehair on their helmets. The merchant had been amongst them more than once, and had wonderful stories to tell. And the others sat round listening. This was what they had really come for – the travellers’ tales.
But Lubrin Dhu heard little of all that. He was still thinking about that country in the north. Empty horse-runs waiting, between the mountains and the sea. Dreaming foolish dreams to himself of the day when he and Dara would lead a new band of the young men north to find it. He saw the mares grazing under high mountains such as he had never seen waking in the daytime; and heard the harpers beside new hearths, making a new song of a new droving . . .
Dara was shaking him by the shoulder, and it was time to go back to the Boys’ House.
That night he dreamed, as he had done time and again since he was five years old, of a white mare cantering along the ridge of the Downs, whiter than the secret chalk beneath the grass, whiter than thorn blossom, with the shadow-flow of the herd following after.
4
The Choosing Feast
The seven years of the Boys’ House passed, and together with the rest of their year Lubrin and Dara went through the dark ceremonies of the Man-Making. Together they passed the Hidden Days; the three days when the women of the clan keened for them as for the dead. And together they came back, walking proud among the spear warriors, to their place in the Men’s Side, with the newly-pricked and painted man-patterns still sore and reddened on their breast and shoulders.