Sun Horse, Moon Horse Read online

  Now Lubrin wore the slim bronze collar that marked him, like Brach and Corfil, for a chief’s son. But he and Dara were still, as old Sinnoch had said, ‘the two halves of a hazel-nut’; and still, though it had scarcely ever been spoken between them, they shared the dream of the horse-runs in the north.

  Twice in every year, at the time of the Beltane fires, and again at Samhein for the autumn branding and the cattle slaughter, the herds were rounded up. And at about the start of the round-up the traders would begin to gather; and for a while the downland slopes around Tigernann’s stronghold became a horse-fair. Both round-ups were a time for feasting after the day’s work was over, and for the high ceremonies that helped the year to turn and the com to ripen, the mares to drop many foals and the women to bear fine sons. But over the first Samhein gathering of Lubrin’s manhood, there hung a dark shadow, for in the women’s place behind the hall, Saba his mother, the Woman of the Clan, lay dying, wasted to a dry husk of herself, with some sickness deep within her that not all the healing skill of the priest-kind could set right.

  The shadow lay cold between Lubrin and the sky. But the work of rounding up and branding must go on, and the Chieftain’s sons must play their part in it. The cattle, like the sheep and the corn, were work for the Old People, but the horses were for the clansmen, and at Samhein and Beltane there was work for all from the poorest warrior owning nothing but his spear to the Chief himself. Lubrin had been helping to herd a bunch of two-year-olds into the corral; and turning from heaving the gate-hurdle back into place, saw one of the strangers from the horse-fair leaning against the old turf wall and watching. A young man, short but strongly built; with a mane of straight fair hair, his eyes, as he studied the colts, making blue slits in his wind-burned face.

  ‘These are a good batch,’ he said, looking round as though he felt Lubrin’s gaze upon him.

  Lubrin summed him up, taking in without quite knowing that he was doing so, something about the man’s hands and the way he stood balanced on the balls of his feet. ‘I would be thinking the matched chariot teams had been more of interest to you.’

  The stranger smiled, showing strong crooked teeth. ‘The two-year-olds of this autumn are the matched chariot teams of two autumns’ time. I like to see the raw material.’

  “Now I know you’re a charioteer,’ Lubrin said. ‘As for the raw material, there’s plenty more of that in the western run.’ He hesitated. ‘I am heading that way now, to bring in another batch. Will you ride with me?’

  ‘I will so, and gladly,’ the other said, ‘if you can find me a horse. My own is back in the trade camp.’

  His hand already on the bridle of his own little dark mare, Lubrin called to a man passing by, and he brought up a sorrel with a striped riding blanket ready flung over its back; and a short while later the two of them were heading at a canter along the Downs south-westward. Ahead of them and to their left as they rode, the whole lie of the country dropped away gently to the wide wooded emptiness of the river lands. In clear weather you could see the far hills beyond, deep into Attribates territory. But today a faint autumn haze, blue as woodsmoke, hung over the lowlands, and all the country southward might have been the country of a dream; and out of the dream, the cloud shadows came drifting up over the bare, hound-tawny turf. Like great armies, Lubrin thought suddenly, like vast slow charges of shadow-chariots.

  ‘You will have been among the Attribates?’ he said, not quite knowing why.

  ‘And in Gaul before that. Anywhere where there are horses to be bought and sold.’

  ‘They say that one day we shall have fighting.’

  ‘Fighting?’ The stranger looked round at him quickly.

  ‘That the Attribates will push forward again, to make a new frontier for their hunting runs.’ Lubrin was ashamed, even as he said it, of the chill that touched him at his own words. He was a warrior; he should be eager to blood his spear. ‘It’s what they say,’ he added lamely.

  ‘Who say?’

  ‘The old men. As long as I can remember.’

  ‘The old men always say that, in all times, in all tribes. If they say it long enough, it comes to be true in the end.

  ‘Maybe.’ Lubrin heeled his mare into a gallop and swung away down into the long combe where the herdsmen were at their work, and the hill shoulder dappled with hawthorn scrub cut off the long view from the south, and the drifting cloud shadows.

  When he rode back through the gates of the dun that evening, he heard the women keening, and knew that his mother was dead. And he thought no more of the stranger he had ridden with that day.

  Lubrin’s mother was laid in her sleeping place, with her best blue glass necklace round her neck, and the bronze mirror with the silver handle beside her. And Lubrin cried for her going, all through one long rainy autumn night, as, almost seventeen years before, she had cried for him.

  And life went on.

  Now they must hold the Choosing Feast. Teleri was only just twelve, and in the usual way of things they would have waited until her fourteenth year, and held Choosing Feast and Marriage Feast within a few days of each other. But now that Saba her mother was dead, she was the Woman of the Clan, and no time must be lost in finding who among the young warriors was to be her lord, and lead the clan after Tigernann’s time was done.

  So the Feast was held, and the priest Ishtoreth of the Oak drank the Cup of Seeing, the bee beer in which certain herbs had been steeped to open the eyes of the spirit. Then he went down to the sheltered hollow in the Chalk where the nine sacred apple trees grew within their low turf walls, and lay down under the oldest apple tree and slept, that Epona, the Lady of the Foals, the Great Mother, might tell him in his sleep the name of the chosen warrior.

  All that night, while Ishtoreth slept in the sacred place, muffled in his horse-skin robe against the thin scurrying rain, the feasting went on in the Chieftain’s hall and forecourt. But with the first grey light of dawn, the feasting fell away, and men began to turn toward the west gate that had stood open all night long – and a great quietness of waiting spread over all the dun.

  It was so quiet that when at last they heard slow footsteps coming up the track, and the rattle of a scuffed pebble, the sounds seemed to fill the whole morning. And then Ishtoreth was standing on the broad threshold stone, with the ritual patterns on his skin blurred by the rain and black hollows around his eyes, and the look on him of a man who has not slept at all, but is just returned from a long, long journey.

  Utter silence still held the waiting dun. Lubrin, standing beside Dara among the young warriors, heard the whisper of the autumn rain and the thin wind soughing over the hilltop, and a horse stamping in the stable court.

  Ishtoreth came slowly across the forecourt, through the open space that the crowd had fallen back to make for him, past the tall black weapon-stone, to where Tigernann waited for him on the threshold of the hall.

  Tigernann spoke the ritual words. ‘Have you been? Have you seen? Have you asked the question? Do you bring the answer?’

  Ishtoreth answered, scarcely louder than the faint wet soughing of the wind. ‘I have been. I have seen. I have asked the question and I bring the answer.’

  ‘Speak, then, for we have waited long.’

  Ishtoreth turned about beside the Chieftain, to face the crowded forecourt. Suddenly he raised his arms, and this time his voice sent the silence flying like a trumpet blast. ‘Hear and listen, oh, People of the Horse. For I, Ishtoreth have slept the Choosing Sleep, and spoken with Epona, the Lady of the Foals, mother of all things that be. And from her I bring the name of the warrior who shall be lord of the Woman of the Clan, and lord of all your spears when the strength fails from the spear arm of Tigernann!’

  And again there was the waiting silence, and the little wind, and the horse stamping in the stable court.

  Then the people cried out, ‘Speak the name, Ishtoreth Oak Priest!’

  And yet again the silence, and again Ishtoreth sent it flying. ‘This name speaks the
Mother, sitting beneath her apple trees with her mares grazing about her, and foals nuzzling apples from her lap. It is the name of Dara, son of Drochmail! He shall be lord to the Woman of the Clan, and lord of the clan when the time comes upon him.’

  And the Men’s Side took up the shout, ‘Dara, son of Drochmail! Dara, son of Drochmail!’

  Tigernann stepped forward. And Lubrin, with a small cold sense of unbelieving shock in his belly, felt Dara beside him check for an instant like a startled animal. Then the place beside him was empty, as his more-than-brother walked out to meet the Chieftain in the midst of the open space.

  Dara took the Chietain’s hands between his own, and raised them to his forehead, while all the Men’s Side shouted and beat the butts of their spears upon the ground until the Chalk seemed to give back a kind of throbbing underfoot, like the beat of a great sleeping heart deep down and far off.

  That was when Lubrin slipped away by himself, out from the dun and down the broad dyke between the lower horse-runs, that served as a drove road at gathering times, to the valley woods. His feet took him without much help from his head, back to the great wych-elm on the edge of its clearing, that had so often been his refuge when the life of the Boys’ House became too much for him. He climbed almost without thought, knowing the branch-way as a man knows the track to his own threshold; and soon he was lying out along his favourite branch. The leaves were almost all gone now, though below him the birch and hazel and oak shrub were still russet and gold with the shabby fires of autumn, the grey of the deeply crannied bark deepened almost to black by the rain. But the refuge was still there, just as it always had been. He did not look out, today, towards the dun crouching on its high lift of the Downs, his father’s dun that he could cover with an elm leaf. He lay with his face pressed down on his forearm, staring into his own blackness. He didn’t even think very much.

  Oddly, he did think a little of Teleri, wondering how it would be with her when the word was brought to her in the women’s quarters. He knew so little of her. She had been only four when he went to the Boys’ House; a plump soft little creature, who cried when she did not get what she wanted from life. He wondered if she was crying now. Maybe she was glad. . . . He stopped thinking; just lay there for a long time, aware of the familiar living strength of the tree-branch under him, and staring into the dark.

  A long while later he heard a faint brushing through the undergrowth below him, something, someone, coming along the edge of the clearing. He opened his eyes and looked down through the red-brown twig-tangle and saw that it was Dara.

  He slipped off the branch, and hung, feeling with his toes for the branch below him; got another handhold and dropped again, swinging down from branch to branch, to make his final landing just as Dara reached the foot of the tree. It was better to come out of refuge to meet the Thing than to wait while the Thing came into refuge after you.

  They stood and looked at each other, the hot blue eyes and the cool dark. And while they looked, a chill breath of edge-of-winter wind came siffling along the woodshore, scattering the wet from the grey thistleheads and dead spires of last summer’s foxgloves, and died away.

  ‘I came to find you,’ Dara said at last. ‘It is time for more feasting.’

  And Lubrin realized that the light was beginning to fade.

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not so long since the Boys’ House.’

  But his tree was the one thing he had never shared even with Dara.

  Dara saw the look on his face, and answered it as though the words had been spoken. ‘There was the time you tore your new saffron kilt and left shreds of it hanging among the lower branches. A good thing it was I that saw them and not any of the others.’

  ‘Na, it would have been small matter who found them. I can outclimb any of you.’

  ‘Only because you are no bigger than a squirrel.’

  They laughed, trying, with easy insults, to catch back the old easy brotherhood; and the laughter died in their aching throats. Nothing could ever be quite the same again. They looked at each other, not speaking; and the dream died between them, the dream of the shared northward droving. If ever that happened, it must be for Lubrin alone to lead the young men to the new horse-runs. Dara could never leave the dun on the High Chalk, now.

  They put their arms round each other for a moment, as though in farewell. And then Lubrin said, ‘Come then, we must go back to the feasting.’

  5

  Menace from the South

  Almost two years must pass before the binding together of Dara and Teleri could be made complete, for no woman of the clan could go to a husband’s hearth until she was turned fourteen. So for almost two years Teleri lived still as a daughter in the women’s quarters, and Dara spread his sleeping-rug with the rest of the young warriors in the hall. And on the surface, all was as it had been before Ishtoreth slept the Choosing Sleep among the sacred apple trees.

  Twice more, snow lay over the Downs, and the men of the clan turned out night after night, along with the Old People, to keep the Wolf Guard. Twice more, the turf grew dry and slippery in the summer heat, and the south wind was full of the scent of thyme and clover and the blue swaying scabious flowers. And the sheep lambed and the mares dropped their foals; and Lubrin’s wych-elm budded into a smoke of tiny purplish flowers in the earliest spring.

  And now it was not only the old men who spoke of war with the Attribates. Every merchant from the south brought tales of men furbishing their weapons; of new chariots being built and new teams trained; so that Tigernann gave orders for a constant watch to be kept along the southern runs of the Iceni. And they blocked up the eastern gate of the dun, and broke down the causeway on that side, so that if the attack came – when the attack came – there would be only one gateway to defend.

  But the year turned again to harvest time, for all that, the barley white for the sickle along the slopes of the Downs. And with the first new moon after the harvest, the women already busy on the threshing floors levelled out of the chalk, it was time for the Marriage Feast to be made for Dara and Teleri.

  At first light on the day of the new moon, the clan began to gather; and all day the crowd grew thicker, as the people of the Iceni came flocking in from steadings and settlements among the lowland forest and across the High Chalk. Warriors in their finest cloaks riding their most fiery horses, and their women with the sacred vervain braided in their hair. Soon the dun was as thronged as a Beltane horse-fair, alive with voices and laughter, harpsong and the whinnying and stamping of horses; with the saffron and blue and crimson of fine clothes and the bronze glint of brooch and dagger, and the baking smell of whole carcases of deer and bullock and sheep from the cooking-pits.

  But as the shadows lengthened towards evening, and the sky turned to the colour of a fading harebell, and the fire of seven different kinds of wood was kindled between the weapon-stone and the Chieftain’s threshold, a quietness came over the waiting crowd and men and women began to look towards the west, searching the fringes of the sunset for the first pale feather of the new moon.

  Lubrin, searching with the rest, saw it at last, not even a feather as yet, but the white ghost of a feather, and knew that the time was come. All round him a faint murmur was spreading through the crowd. And in the same instant, from the women’s court behind the hall there rose a white shrilling of reed pipes, and below it the softer, darker crooning of women’s voices making the Bride Song. And then all other sounds were engulfed in the booming of the sacred oxhorns that spoke with the voice of the gods.

  And as the echoes died, there on the threshold of the hall stood Tigernann the Chief, with his priest-kind around him, Tigernann not in his man-self but in his god-self, his face covered by the god-mask with its towering crest of horsehair, on his wrists the sacred arm-rings that no mortal man might wear. Always at the greatest ceremonies it was so, the Chieftain ceasing to be a man to become something more, priest-chief, god-priest, god-chieftai
n, standing between his people and the Lords of Life and Death; and always at such times, awe and otherness came over the world and pressed upon the hearts of the people.

  Again the oxhorns boomed, and with all the women of the dun behind her, Teleri came pacing from the women’s court. She walked straight and still and tall – taller, it seemed to Lubrin, than she had been yesterday – under the high moon head-dress with its swinging plates of silver that seemed too big and heavy for her slender neck. Perhaps it was the head-dress that made her look so tall. Perhaps it was the moon-marks chalk-painted on her forehead that made her look like a stranger . . .

  Now Dara had stepped out from the Men’s Side, and the two of them were standing before the masked figure on the threshold of the hall.

  And the Chieftain’s voice, hollow-sounding behind the god-mask, was asking the ritual questions.

  ‘What things do you bring to the maiden, in place of those things which the maiden loses for you?’

  And Dara made answer in the old, old words which came from the days when the tribe had been wandering hunters: ‘My hearth for her warmth, my kill for her food, my shield for her shelter, my spear for the harm that threatens her. These are the things that I bring to the maiden.’

  ‘They are enough,’ said the hollow voice behind the mask.

  And Ishtoreth of the Oak came forward, carrying a great bronze wine-cup, with a dagger laid across the mouth of it. And Tigernann took the knife and made a small swift cut, first on the inside of Dara’s wrist, and then on Teleri’s, and let a few drops of blood from each fall into the wine – apple wine it would be, from the nine half-wild apple trees below the dun. It was always apple wine for a man-and-woman joining.