He was so twanging taut that when, without an instant’s warning, a mallard drake beat up from the rushes not three spears’ lengths away to his right, he was thrown completely off his balance. Next instant he had recovered himself, and sent the light throw-spear, thrumming as it flew, after the quarry. It missed so narrowly that it carried away the tip of a wing feather, and for one instant he thought he had made his hit, before the spear plunged back into the rushes and the mallard darted off, raising its wild alarm call to the morning skies. And suddenly with a great bursting upward, the Marsh was alive with startled and indignant wings.
In a while, the morning fell quiet again, and he could hear teal and widgeon, curlew and sandpiper crying and calling in the distance; but all around him the Marsh was silent; empty under a shining and empty sky.
Drem hit the stem of the nearest sallow with a passionate fist; but that only hurt his knuckles and did nothing to mend what had happened. He was almost crying with fury as he slid out of his cover and searched among the reeds for his throw-spear. It took him a few moments to find it, because he was blind with rage and disappointment; but he found it at last, and settled again to wait. But the wild fowl did not return though he heard them calling in the distance; and at last, with the sun well up and the level light streaming across the Marshes, he knew that it would be no use waiting any longer.
He left his hiding place, slipping along in the lea of the sallow bushes. Maybe he would be able to flush something and knock it down before it got out of range. But though he hunted far and wide as the shadows shortened, he never got within spear-throw of a bird; and something was growing in him that was frightened and a little desperate. There would be other days; Talore would not sell the cub away from him at once, because he failed on the first day of all. But last night he had said, ‘I will pay the price tomorrow.’ And somehow for him there was only this one day; that was the bargain. Somehow, in his mind, the thing was mixed up with his Warrior Scarlet; he must earn the price of the cub today, he must keep his bargain perfectly and completely, and give proof of his skill with a throw-spear today, if his mother was ever to weave scarlet on the loom for him.
It must have been noon or later, when, as he came crouching down the fringe of a long straggle of alder trees, he heard the rhythmical creaking sound, half eery, half musical, of a swan in flight, and turning, saw the great bird flying low towards him across the level of jewel-green turf between two spreading sheets of water. The sun was on its feathers, and its shadow flew beneath it like a dark echo along the ground; a bird of snow and a bird of shadow . . . Drem saw the proud spread of shining wings, beating with slow, almost lazy power and beauty, as it flew with outstretched neck; he heard louder and louder the half musical throb of the wing beats; and the great swan swole on his sight. It seemed rushing towards him, blotting out the world with the white spread of its wings. He was caught up in a piercing vision of white, fierce beauty that was like thunder and lightning and an east wind, like a sun-burst. He was scarcely aware of rising to his feet as the great bird swept towards him, climbing into the sunlight, scarcely aware of his spear-arm swinging up and back in its own perfect curve of movement . . .
The spear went thrumming on its way. It took the swan in the breast, and the great bird pitched in the air, half turning over its own length, and dropped.
Drem started from cover of the alder trees and ran towards it. The swan was still alive, and threshing where it had fallen, with a dreadful, broken struggling. Drem ran in among the flailing wings that could have broken his leg even now, if a blow had landed square, and finished the work with the knife from his belt. The struggling ceased with a last quiver.
The swan—a big cob—lay dead, its neck outstretched as in flight; and Drem pulled out the spear which was still embedded in it. There was blood on the white feathers. Blood on snow, Drem thought, standing over it; blood on his own hand, too; and the living, flashing beauty was gone. Desolation as piercing as the moment of vision had been stabbed through him. How could a little spear that he had thrown almost without knowing it, blot out in an instant all the power and the swiftness and the shining?
But the desolation passed as the vision had done, and he was left with the fierce hot pride of his first real kill. He stabbed his knife into the turf to clean it, and thrust it back into his belt; then stood to think what he must do next.
IV
The Price of Whitethroat
THE FIRST THING he realized was that he could not possibly get his kill back to Talore alone. He had seen himself proudly walking into the steading with a teal or a widgeon hanging from his hand; how much more proudly with a swan on his shoulder, the huge white wings drooping all about him! But those wings must be as far from tip to tip as the height of a man. And when he tried, he found that he could not even get the swan on to his shoulder without help, let alone carry it all the way back. The only thing to do was to hide it, and go and tell Talore.
He got hold of the bird, and began to drag it back towards the alder trees. It took him some time to do, because instinctively he was trying not to spoil it. It was his kill, and still beautiful, though with a moveless beauty now; and he wanted it to keep the beauty until Talore saw it. Little by little, the great wings fanned out on the grass, he got it back: in at last among the tangle of alders and the thick-growing rushes and wild iris. Dragging it deep into the tangle, he folded the great wings close so that it might take up as little space as possible, and dragged up handfuls of brown, flowering rushes and cool, sword-shaped iris leaves and spread them over it in a thick layer until there was no gleam of white to betray it to the magpies and the ravens. Then he got up, picked up his spear and cleaned it as he had cleaned his dagger, by stabbing it into the turf, and taking a last careful look round him to be sure of knowing the place again, set off for the village and the steading of Talore the Hunter.
He had wandered long distances to and fro in search of his kill, but turned back often on his trail, so that he was not so far out into the Marsh as he had expected. But even so, the way up through the midge-infested hazel woods and along the flank of the Chalk was a long, hard one, and his bare, briar-scratched legs were beginning to be very weary when he came within sight—and smell—of the village.
It was the time of the wild garlic harvest, when the women and girls went down the stream sides and through the cool, dark places of the forest fringe, searching for the rank-smelling star-white flowers, and gathering the plants into big rush baskets; and for days the village and every outlying steading reeked of the white flowers spread out on the south sides of the low turf roofs to dry. Yesterday it had been no good trying to dry the flowers, but today the sun shone hot, and the swallows were flying high for fine weather, darting and swerving against the blue of the sky, and every roof had its patch of wilting white stars; the pungent waft of them came to meet Drem as he climbed up between the village corn plots towards the steading of Talore the Hunter.
Talore was not there, nor any of his sons. Only fat, good-natured Wenna sat on her heels in the house-place doorway, grinding corn for the next day in the big stone quern; and she cried out at sight of him, ‘Now what thing have you been doing? Tch tch, you’re hurt—there is blood on your forehead—’
Drem had not known that; it must have come off his hand when he pushed back his hair. ‘Na, I am not hurt,’ he said. ‘I have been hunting, and I have killed. Now I would speak with Talore.’
‘He is away down the valley about a heifer calf,’ said Talore’s son’s wife, smiling at him across the quern, now that she knew he was not hurt. ‘Do you want to go in and look at the cubs? Gwythno came for his today, and Belu also, but there are still three cubs left.’
Drem shook his head. That was a thing that he was saving.
‘Are you hungry, then?’ Wenna asked.
Drem thought about this a little. In the intensity of his thinking about other things, he had forgotten about being hungry, but now he realized that having eaten nothing but Blai’s bannoc
k all day, he was as empty as a last year’s snail shell. ‘I am hungry,’ he agreed.
‘Bide you—’ Wenna rose, and disappeared into the house-place, leaving him alone with the girl-child, who lay in a soft deerskin, sucking the bead of red coral that hung round her neck, and gazed at him out of solemn, sloe-black eyes. Drem stared back at the girl-child, then poked it gingerly in the middle with one toe, to see what would happen, prepared to retreat and swear he hadn’t been near it if it screamed. But it kicked inside the deerskin, and made pleased noises. So he poked it once more, then abandoned it rather hurriedly as Wenna came back.
‘Here—take this, then,’ she said, and gave him a wheaten cake smeared with dark honey, and squatted down again to her grinding.
Drem sat down with his back against the rowan-wood doorpost in the sunshine, and ate his wheaten cake, licking the golden dribble of sweetness round the edges, and watched Wenna scoop the grain from her basket into the hole in the upper stone of the quern, and the coarse creamy meal that came out between the two stones as she rubbed, on to the spread skin under the quern. Every now and then she stopped rubbing, and scooped up the meal into a crock beside her. Drem did not offer to help; it was woman’s work, and he was of the Men’s side, a hunter, and had made his first big kill.
The shadows were lengthening though it would not be evening for a long while yet, and Wenna had finished her grinding, and gone in again, carrying the baby with her on her hip, and Drem was alone before the house-place door, when at last Talore came home, driving a small, dispirited brown heifer calf on the end of a rope.
Drem scrambled up and went to meet him as he came up between the store shed and the woodstack, with the calf lurching from side to side on the end of the rope, and the three hounds loping at his heels.
‘Well?’ Talore said questioningly when he saw him, leaning back to check a sudden rush by the calf.
‘I have come for the cub,’ Drem said. ‘I can pay the price.’
Talore’s dark brows went up. ‘Where is it then? In the pot already?’
‘I could not bring it with me. It is too big.’
‘Have you killed a wild ox with your throw-spear?’ Talore’s voice deepened, as it always did with laughter; and the dog teeth showed at the corners of his mouth. ‘It was a bird I said, remember.’
‘It is a swan!’ Drem’s pride came rushing up into his throat. ‘A cob swan—big, big as a cloud!’
‘So? That is a kill indeed!’
They were all heading for the byre by now, and the calf had set up a dismal bawling. Drem nodded urgently. ‘Down in the Marsh, it is. I could not carry it, so I hid it and came back. I thought maybe—we could go for it—now.’ His voice trailed away a little, as it dawned on him that perhaps that was rather a lot to ask at the day’s end.
Talore glanced down at him, at the same time putting out a leg to fend the calf from a determined sideways rush in the wrong direction. He was tired, and wanted nothing but to sit down and stretch out his legs and polish his spears while he waited for Wenna to make ready the evening meal. But looking at Drem’s proudly eager face with the doubt already beginning to shadow it, he said, ‘Let you help me to stall the calf, and then we will go down together and fetch this kill.’
They stalled the calf in the warm-shadowed byre, and left it to Wenna’s tending; and, in a little, were heading down again toward the Marsh, Talore loping ahead with the long, light stride of the hunter, the hounds and Drem close at his heels.
The blue summer dusk had deepened into the dark, and the white owl who lived in the shed of the Chieftain’s great herd bull was hawking to and fro like a silver shadow across the corn land, when they came up again towards the huddle of the village under the Hill of Gathering. Talore walked ahead as before, and Drem and the hounds padded at his heels; but now the hunter carried Drem’s swan on his shoulder, the great wings drooping wide behind him—pale, paler than the soft wings of the hunting owl in the darkness, or the white, wilting stars of the garlic spread on the hut roofs to dry.
The skin apron over the house-place doorway was drawn back, and a stain of light came to meet them, thick and golden like honey trickling from a tipped jar. Inside, the sons had returned from their hunting and were gathered about the hearth where the fire sank low, for the evening meal was long past, burnishing their weapons, while Wenna stitched at a piece of yellow cloth by the light of a mutton-fat lamp hanging from the roof tree.
There was another man sitting by the fire, his back to the doorway, a big, broad-shouldered man who turned as they crossed the threshold, revealing the heavy, reddish face of Morvidd, the Chieftain’s brother. And behind him in the shadows squatted a boy of about Drem’s age, nursing his father’s spear—a boy with a quarrelsome and unhappy face; but Drem, who had run with him in the same pack all his life, did not of course see that. He only knew that Luga the son of Morvidd was apt to be at the root of any trouble that broke out among their own kind.
‘So. You are here at last,’ the man said, rather loudly, while the two boys cocked their heads at each other.
Talore checked just within the doorway and returned the greeting more courteously. ‘And you, Morvidd the Chieftain’s brother, you also are here, and welcome. I had not thought you would be back from your trading until the moon was on the wane.’
‘I am but this evening returned to my house-place; and one told me that Fand has whelped and the whelps are ready to leave their dam. Therefore I am come to make my choice of one of them.’
Talore stood smiling a little, the great swan on his shoulder, its wings falling wide behind him. ‘Others have made their choice already. There is none of the cubs left without a master.’
Æsk, the eldest son, looked up from the spear he was burnishing, and said swiftly, ‘I told him that, my father, but he would wait for you none the less.’
Morvidd’s face had turned a deeper red as it always did when he was crossed, so that his eyes looked like little bright splinters of glass in the redness of it; and he began to bluster. ‘Did I not say to you, last Fall-of-the-leaf, that I would give you a fine copper cooking pot that had never known the fire, for the best cub in Fand’s next litter?’
It seemed to Drem that everything stopped, between breath and breath, and there was a sudden cold emptiness inside him. He saw the grin of triumph on the face of the boy Luga. Then Talore said, ‘Did I not say to you last Fall-of-the-leaf that I do not promise unborn cubs to any man?’ And everything went on again, and the grin faded on Luga’s face.
Morvidd forced a laugh, and an air of joviality; clearly he wanted one of the cubs very badly. ‘Nay then, we will leave that part of it. I come now, and there are three cubs yet in the litter. I’ve a mind to the one with the white blaze on its breast—the best cub of the three, without doubt; and I’ll give you the cook pot for him—a good big cook pot—and a length of fine bleached linen cloth thrown in. What do you say to that?’
‘I say that above all the litter, that one is already sold,’ Talore said.
‘Who to, then? Who to?’
‘To the boy here.’
Morvidd stared for a moment, then flung up his head with a roar of laughter. ‘And since when does Talore sell his hound cubs to children for a handful of wild raspberries? Ah, but of course if that is the way of the thing it is easily undone. I see the thing is more than half a jest!’
Talore slipped the swan from his shoulder and flung it down beside the hearth. ‘Nay, it is not a jest, the bargain was fairly made and the boy has paid the price—the agreed price—and the thing is finished.’
The great swan lay there, spread-winged in the firelight and the lamplight; one of the hounds sniffed at it and was cuffed aside by the second son. Morvidd finished his laugh rather abruptly, and stared down at the swan and then at Drem and then back at Talore, angry again, and the more angry because he was puzzled. ‘This—this?’ He reached out a foot and prodded the great bird contemptuously in a way that made the rage rise in Drem’s throat—his sw
an, his beautiful kill, the price of the hound of his heart, to be treated so! ‘Surely it is not a hand but a head that you lack, Talore! What sort of price, beside a fine copper cook pot, is a dead swan for a hound puppy? Tell me that!’
Drem clenched his sound hand into a fist; and then above him, Talore said with that leaping gentleness of his, ‘This swan is a better price than if it were as many copper cook pots as there are fingers on my one hand.’
The two men stood facing each other beside the fire, the one big and red-gold and blustering, swaying a little on his heels, the other slight and dark, and still as a forest pool; while the rest of the big firelit hut looked on, the boy Luga watching his father out of the shadows, expectantly.
Then Morvidd said, ‘And that is your last word as to the thing?’
‘That is my last word.’
‘Then you’re mad!’ Morvidd let out a kind of baffled roar. ‘You’re a fool, Talore One-hand! To shake your head at a fine copper—’
Talore cut across his blustering, with the same gentleness. ‘That you have said before. Nay then, Morvidd the Chieftain’s brother, there is a thing that you forget, in all this. It is I who choose what master Fand’s cubs shall go to, and what master Fand’s cubs shall not go to; I, and no other. And I choose only masters who to my mind are worthy of them.’