Sun Horse, Moon Horse Page 8

  Not like this had been the droving of which Sinnoch the Harper had sung, thought Lubrin Dhu; the chariots making their wheel-thunder along the High Chalk, the spreading horse herds, the ox-carts for the women and children, the goods and gear, the bellowing of driven beef on the hoof. Yet perhaps this was more valiant, this handful of warriors and women worn to the bone with captivity, setting out with nothing but a kind of threadbare hope. . . .

  The round solemn eyes of a child met his over the rim of a pony-pannier; a gaunt dog sniffed at his heels, then padded off after its master. Soon, now, they would all be gone. They looked at him standing there in the opening of the great timber gates; but there was little, almost nothing, that they could say to each other.

  At the last moment, Teleri came to him, brushing back from her forehead the fair wisps of hair that were escaping as they had always done, from her thick braids. She did not look like a girl at all. Her bones, he saw suddenly, were beautiful, and sharp, so sharp you felt you could cut your hand on them; and her eyes seemed already full of long distances, even while she looked into his face.

  ‘May you come safe to the new horse-runs,’ he said, seeing that she did not know what to say.

  She made a little movement towards him, then drew her hands back, without touching him at all. ‘We shall come to them,’ she said, with clear certainty, ‘and we shall not forget that that is your doing. Maybe one of the little ones in the war-carts has already the gift of harpsong in him; maybe the gift is waiting for one not yet born. If that is the way of it, I hope that he will be born to Dara and to me. But one way or another way, the time will come, in the horse-runs in the north, when the clan will have a harper again, and he will make a song of the northward droving, which shall be also the song of Lubrin Dhu,’

  Again she made the little movement, and again drew back, not touching him, and turned away.

  It was a long time since anyone had touched Lubrin, or eaten from the same bowl. That had begun at the same time as they had begun to avoid stepping in his shadow and the great loneliness had come.

  And soon, so soon now, they would all be gone.

  And then, on the very edge of their going, Dara, who had been making a great thing of seeing to all the last-minute arrangements, so that Lubrin thought he would go without any leave-taking at all – well, he would like enough have done the same thing if they two had stood in each other’s places – Dara flung down the bundle of rugs that he had been loading on to one of the ponies, and came back into the gateway and put his arms round Lubrin’s shoulders, daring whatever taboo he might be breaking with a courage made reckless by grief.

  For a breath of time, Lubrin stood rigid as the new timber of the gate pillar. Then he flung his arms round Dara, who had been heart-friend and more than brother to him since they were five years old. For one long moment they strained close, each driving his face down into the hard hollow of the other’s neck.

  ‘Heart-brother,’ Dara said, ‘wait for me in the Land of Apple Trees. Whether it be tomorrow, or when I am lord of many spears in the north, and too old to sit a horse or lift a sword, wait for me until I come. And do not be forgetting me, for I will not forget you.’

  ‘I will not be forgetting.’ Lubrin said.

  And they parted touch, and Dara turned away to the herd pony which one of the other men was holding for him nearby. He mounted, and flung up his hand in the signal to be off. Horses pricked forward under the slap of their drivers, and the wheels of the two old wagons began to turn; men and women hitched up bundles; the herd-riders set the herd on the move. Somewhere among them a child began to cry, thinly, like a newborn lamb.

  Lubrin turned and went up to the northern rampart to watch them away.

  He saw the ragged skein of men and women, the two old war-wagons that looked as though they would not hold together beyond the first day; the meagre horse-herd and its drovers out to one side; seen and lost and seen again, as the track looped sinuous as a whiplash, among the steeply falling combes and headlands of the Downs, until they gained the valley floor, and crossed the ancient Road of the Horse People and headed out along the northward track. Somewhere, he knew, they would look back, and see the great white mare on the hillside; and then they would not look back again, but keep their faces to the north, following the dream of the distant grazing lands between the mountains and the sea.

  There were so few of them, less than two hundred to the youngest child. He wondered how many more would be born on the way, how many would die. How long it would take them to get to the place where they were going. A year? Two years? Half a lifetime? He wondered if they would ever get there at all.

  The white dust was rising behind them, and the track ran into the trees.

  He watched until he could not see even the dustcloud any more.

  13

  Sun Horse, Moon Horse

  Before noon the people were gathering, the new lords of the High Chalk streaming out from the dun to freckle the hillside more and more thickly with their blue and brown and saffron and poppy-red. Even at midday, on the steep northward-facing slope, the shadows of man and bush and hummock and hollow spilled out long and thin like the shadows of evening. But after the long hot summer the turf was bleached pale and tawny, and the smell of sun-warm grass and small aromatic downland flowers that beat up from it was unmistakably the scent of high noon. Lubrin smelled it above the thicker, musky smell of the crowd, as he stepped out into the clear space around his great chalk-cut mare. A little wind carried with it the cool shadow-scent of trees up from the valley woods over the bare shoulders of the Chalk, and he smelled that, too, and heard the sharp cry of a kestrel hanging high overhead. The crowd was very quiet, so quiet that there was nothing to blur the bright harsh splinter of sound. A faint blue heat-haze lay over the low country. He had known it all before, as long as he had known life; but he had never been so sharply and achingly aware of it. It was as though there was one skin less between himself and the wind and the sun-warm turf and the kestrel crying.

  He was naked, his body painted with red and yellow ochre, in patterns that were not the patterns of his own people; and the priests had set lines of dark berry juice on his forehead and about his eyes. Two of the priest-kind were on either side of him as he walked; and on the turf between the mare’s forelegs, two men waited for him. One was Cradoc, clad in his ceremonial mantle of blood-red wool fringed with martens’ tails. The other was the High Priest, swaddled in cloth that was bleached white as only the priests might wear it, crowned with oak and yew; fat like an acorn-fed hog, in the way of the priests of the Attribates, who lived too richly on the offerings to the gods; and holding a knife of some darkly polished blue-green stone.

  Lubrin saw the knife; and it seemed as much a part of him as the wind and the warm turf and the sound of the kestrel crying. But he did not wish to take his death from the hands of this stranger-priest. That had not been in the bargain.

  He looked at Cradoc. ‘This is a thing between you and me.’

  ‘Assuredly, this is a thing between you and me,’ Cradoc returned. ‘Among my people there can be no god-ceremony if the priest-kind do not give it their presence. But this is a thing for the chief-kind, my brother.’

  And he held out his hands to the High Priest beside him, and the man laid the strange dark knife across his palms.

  Side by side, Lubrin and Cradoc stepped on to the bare white chalk of the mare’s breast. A low rhythmic murmur rose from the gathered priests, and was taken up by the crowd, rising louder and louder, becoming prayer and triumph-song in one. The mare’s arched neck was like a royal road, and Lubrin walked up it like a king going to his king-making. He came to the strange half-falcon head, and it seemed to him that the proudly-open eye stared back at the sun and moon and circling stars and the winds of all the world. ‘It is only a round patch of turf, after all,’ said something within him, laughing gently at his own foolishness. But something else, deeper within him, knew that it was strong magic, the touch-spot where
earth and sky came together; and something else said, ‘There is a harebell growing on it. That is the most wonderful thing of all.’

  Then he lay down.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Cradoc said, kneeling beside him.

  Lubrin smiled up into the narrowed blue eyes in the wind-burned face. ‘I am ready.’

  He knew the high wind-stippled sky above him, and the warm steadfastness of the ground beneath. He knew the harebell growing in the tawny grass, tossing on its thread-slender stem as the wind came by. From somewhere far away in time and place, he knew the weary joy of his people’s homecoming to their herding runs between northern mountains and the sea.

  ‘Brother, go free,’ said Cradoc.

  He saw the sun-flash on the descending blade.

  Author’s Note

  Most of the White Horses still to be seen cut on English hillsides have only been there since the eighteenth or even the nineteenth centuries; but the White Horse of Uffington, high on the Berkshire Downs, belongs to a much older world; nobody knows for sure how long ago it was made, but probably about a hundred years before the birth of Christ. And whereas the other horses stand stiff and still on their hillsides, elegant, sometimes, but without any spark of life, the Uffington White Horse is magical; full of movement and power and beauty.

  I have always felt that anything so magical must have a story behind it. A long-forgotten story, which I should love to tell. And then one day, reading T. C. Lethbridge’s book Witches, I came upon his theory that the Iceni, the great Early Iron Age tribe who inhabited East Anglia, were also in the Chilterns and the Down Country north of the Upper Thames Valley, until they were forced out by invaders from the south. And I began to get an idea of what the story might be.

  Sun Horse, Moon Horse is the result.

  Mr Lethbridge believes that the Iceni who were forced out became the Epidi of Argyll and Kintyre – Epidi and Iceni both mean ‘Horse People’ – and if that is true, then it must mean that Lubrin’s people got through safely to their new horse-runs in the north, and in a way my story has a happy ending.

  If any of you who read it have already followed the adventures of Marcus and Esca in The Eagle of the Ninth, and think that Lubrin’s people are not very like the Epidi who they found when they went north to rescue the eagle of the lost legion, I can only say that when I wrote that story, I had not read Witches. And if I had, I would have made them a slightly different people. Though, of course, they might have changed quite a lot in more than two hundred years.

  About the Author

  Rosemary Sutcliff was born in 1920 in West Clanden, Surrey.

  With over 40 books to her credit, Rosemary Sutcliff is now universally considered one of the finest writers of historical novels for children. Her first novel, The Queen Elizabeth Story was published in 1950. In 1972 her book Tristan and Iseult was runner-up for the Carnegie Medal. In 1974 she was highly commended for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and in 1978 her book, Song for a Dark Queen was commended for the Other Award.

  Rosemary lived for a long time in Arundel, Sussex with her dogs and in 1975, she was awarded the OBE for services to Children’s Literature. Unfortunately Rosemary passed away in July 1992 and will be much missed by her many fans.

  Also by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Beowulf: Dragon Slayer

  The Hound of Ulster

  The High Deeds of Finn Mac Cool

  Tristan and Iseult

  The Witch’s Brat

  The Shining Company

  Knight’s Fee

  The Capricorn Bracelet

  SUN HORSE, MOON HORSE

  AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 17422 5

  Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK

  A Random House Group Company

  This ebook edition published 2013

  Copyright © Rosemary Sutcliff, 1977

  First Published in Great Britain

  Red Fox 9780099795605 1977

  The right of Rosemary Sutcliff to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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