Читать книгу The Golden Strangers - Henry Treece - Страница 8
4: Craig Dun
ОглавлениеThe great chalk hill stood above the village. At the Spring festival, with the grey-fleeced sheep grazing on its slopes, it seemed kind and smiling. But when the dark time came, after the burning of the straw to keep away the snow, the hill seemed to glower down, asking for sacrifice. Then it was not kind. It was a hunched monster that held the frightened village in its hand. Then the folk of Craig Dun cowered over the hearth-place, shivering in the smoke, speaking the charms against evil that they had learned from their fathers and their fathers before them, hoping to drive away the horrors of the hill.
There were forty houses under the hill. Their walls of stout flint, brought up from the flint-shaft in the hill’s bowels; their roofs of ashwood and thatch. Go down the three sacred steps of flint into the circular room and you were safe from cold. Pull down the staghide door curtain on to its pegs and you were safe from the wolves. At least, almost safe—for once when the snow had lain on the hill for three moons they had braved the skin doors and the axes behind them and had brought death into the village before the ancient Hunters had come from their caves in the wood and driven them away. In Craig Dun no man said ‘Wolf’ now. That was the law.
The forty houses clustered about the great steading of Marrag. He was the Old Man of the folk and made their laws. His palace housed twelve people and three cows, whose milk fed the children. When the ewes dropped their lambs in the village, they were brought into Marrag’s steading too. Then, the air that was already thick with the smoke of peat and heather, vibrated to the sound of calves calling out for food, lambs bleating with their new voices, men and women arguing or singing, and children shouting. For Marrag’s son, Garroch had three wives, Gwraig, Mona and Garreg-wen, though he loved none of them. There seemed to be children everywhere. The women cuffed them away incessantly, for there were many tasks to perform—food to prepare, flax to spin and weave, hides to scrape, fuel to gather. Some of these tasks went to Brach, Garroch’s eldest daughter. She was eight yet could already clean an oxhide with her little flint scraper so evenly that it fell in perfect folds to make a cloak for her grandfather, Marrag, or her fine young father, Garroch.
Brach’s mother was proud of her little daughter, with her great doe’s eyes and her long black hair that must never be cut. But the other women were cruel to her when Garroch was away and the Old Man was asleep, as he often was now, because he was so old.
His last remaining wife, the Old Woman of the folk, Wraich, was dead. She had died two winters before when food had been so hard to get as it was this year.
‘Do not put me on the hill,’ she had said in her thin voice. ‘I do not want the hairy folk to break my bones and tear my liver out while I am watching them. I want to be with you all, to hear you talking. Then I shall feel comfortable in my own home.’
So they had dug her a place under the floor of the hut and had put her there, with a comfortable scooped stone to sit on. They put her clothes down there with her, the best fur cape and the flax skirt that she had always liked, dyed blue and yellow with the herb-juices. They gave her a flint knife and a clay beaker, though they could spare little food to go into the jar.
Then they laid many boughs and beams across the hole and placed the clay over them, stamping it flat. On that they built their fire, hoping that the warmth would go down to her and comfort her. She heard them walking above her for three days and sometimes heard the sounds of children’s voices, the high-pitched ones. Then she went to sleep. The wolves would have hurt much more.
Now the hut was a sacred one. She watched over it. Sometimes when the villagers were in difficulties, they came to Marrag’s house and asked permission to speak to the Old Woman. They shouted their questions into the fire hole and then put their ear to the floor and waited. Old Marrag would smile and tell them what she said. They would go away believing. Brach, who had sharp eyes despite their softness, sometimes noticed that there was a still smile about the old man’s thin dark face when he interpreted the message of his dead wife, Wraich. But she said nothing, for she loved her grandfather almost as much as she loved her father, Garroch, who had gone to get food from the Fisherfolk.
One day they would take the Old Woman’s bones out from under the floor and paint them and place them in the Long House of Sleep, at the other side of the hill, among the bones of all the great ones who had ever died in that village. Then she would rest without murmuring in the quiet summer nights when it was too hot for anyone to sleep in the stuffy hut. But it took time for a body to become bones, and so they waited impatiently; the wolves did it all more quickly, up there on the hill.
This winter had truly been a long one. Many of the ewes had died in the snow and even the cows had been eaten. The Hunters, the ancient ones, who lived in the caves of Coidun, down in the oak forest by the river, and were clever enough to hit a hawk at fifty paces with their little leaf-shaped arrows, had almost starved too. They were hardy men, into the bargain, with great jaws and red hair, the few that were left of them. They did not know how to weave or to grow the beautiful little barley shoots that made the hearts of the villagers rejoice as they pushed up their pretty heads in the fields outside Craig Dun. The Hunters boasted that they were the first folk; that they had always been there with the reindeer and the buffalo, and had not come in boats like the villagers. They were friendly, up to a point unless they were hungry, but they did not like being teased because of their fur jackets and their difficulty in speaking the language of the dark barley-growers.
But this year, even the Hunters had found that it was a hard one. Many of them had starved in their caves, unable any longer to draw those pictures on the walls in red and black and deep yellow that would bring the deer into their nets or the wild pigs within range of their flint arrows.
In the village there was sadness too. Garroch, the son of the Old Man, was away, trying to buy food from the Fishers on the seashore, five days off. Marrag was alone in the hut, with the wives and their children. He slept long now, with age and hunger. When he didn’t sleep, he muttered to himself or drew signs on the clay floor of the hut and brooded over them. His long hair was almost white. He no longer bothered to coil it about his head, in the proper manner, and keep it in position with the bone pins which were his by right of rank. He would not have bothered even if someone cut his hair off in the night as he slept. Often he did not know where his flint knife and axe were. When a man has come to that state, his power must be doubted, even by his family.
As the Old Man dozed in the one ray of wintry sunlight that filtered down the steps on to the hard-trodden clay floor, he saw the pictures of his life. He saw himself as a young one again, taking over the task of ruling the folk of Craig Dun from his own father after the Harvest Feast. He recalled how his father had placed the black bearskin on him, its pelt covering his shoulders and back, its grinning mask falling over his own black head. Then the women placed the necklace of bear-claws round his throat and the amber bracelets round his wrists. He remembered how heavy his father’s great axe and oxhide shield had seemed before, and how light they suddenly became when the bearskin fell into position on his shoulders.
‘Old Man, Old Man!’ the people had shouted, though he was younger then than many of them. He smiled at them and made the high prancing dance that the Old Man must do. They beat their hands and shouted out again, ‘Old Man! Old Man!’
Then with the blood still bouncing in his head, he noticed his old father, who seemed so small now and afraid. The bearskin and the axe and the shield became heavy again, burdens not pleasures. His father was waiting for something, something that he did not want to happen yet knew to be inevitable. Marrag went to the man and whispered, ‘Do not fear, father, I shall not put you out on the hill. The hairy grey ones shall not mock at your bones while I am strong.’
His father came closer to him then and tried to smile like a little child again. Marrag placed his arm over the old man’s shoulders and led him back to the Chief’s house. The folk of Craig Dun followed at a distance muttering and discontented, for this was to break the old law and disaster would surely come. Some of the youngest ones even waved their axes and flint knives about wildly and whispered hoarsely that they should take the deposed Chief, whether or not, and put him on the chalk hill with the stones tied to his hands and feet so that he could not run away from the grey folk.
But at the door of the house, when his father had gone down into safety, Marrag had turned on them and made his swarthy face look as grim as the bear’s above it. He had waved his own long-bladed axe viciously in their faces. ‘Who dares question the Old Man now?’ he asked. And the younger ones had looked on the ground, their hands by their sides, afraid that he would choose one of them for a sacrifice if the barley did not push through the thin soil next year.
In the dimness of the hut, with only the little clay lamp flickering, his father had said, ‘I have brought suffering on the people, my son. I should have gone to the hill as they wished. It always has been so. Now the crops will fail and the ewes bear no lambs.’
But Marrag had put off the bearskin and laid down the axe and shield. Now for a moment he was the son again and not the Old Man. He put his flint-scarred hand on his father’s thin thigh.
‘If sorrow comes to the people,’ he said, ‘it will be my bargain to settle, not yours. I must deal with Earth Mother now, not you. A year ago, when I went south to trade with the Fisherfolk, I broke Earth Mother’s law for the first time. On a hill such as ours, set above a village such as ours, I came on an Old Man such as you, the great flints at his wrists and feet, the crows already settling about him. He looked at me with such sad eyes that I did not pass him by as the law says I must do. Instead, I took out my bear knife and went towards him. His eyes told me that he welcomed my knife but it was not my place to do what he wished. I only cut the thongs that held him.’
Marrag’s father had sucked in his breath sharply at these words. ‘Aiee! Aiee!’ he said. ‘To let loose a man on the hill! Yes, you have broken the law twice indeed, Marrag. What did the Old Man do then?’
Marrag had said smiling bitterly, ‘He followed me begging me to tie the thongs again for it was the law. But I walked faster and faster so that I could not hear his words. When I looked back he was standing on the hill slope, crying and calling to the villagers to come out again and set him where the old law demanded.’
So the Old Man of Craig Dun remembered the past, the faults of his life, the strange echoing in the vaults of the House of Sleep when the new guests were laid there upon each other after a famine or a battle against the Hunters. Leaning against the clay wall of the hut these things came back to him again and again as they do in a sickly dream. Then it seemed to him that he stood before the sacred stone that leaned over the village, at the place where the woods ended and the fields began. It had been roughly carved beyond man’s memory so that a gravid belly and two swelling breasts emerged from the stone. This was ‘The Old Woman’. Marrag in the hut dreamed he was standing in the sunlight before ‘The Old Woman’, when a voice came from her, a frightening voice like the shrill barking of the vixen on the frosty hill at night-time. ‘The Old Woman’ said, ‘Your time has come at last, Marrag. You have at least two debts to pay. Go up on to the hill and make ready for the House of Sleep. Your place is waiting for you. Hasten, hasten, Marrag!’
Then Marrag woke out of his dream with a start. He was relieved at first to find that he was still in the house, leaning against the cold clay wall. But when he looked towards the smoking fire in the centre of the floor he was afraid again. Garroch’s three women crouched there hungry, their eyes red with smoke, their fingers pointing. They did not smile at him as once they used. As Marrag’s mind came out of the caverns of sleep, he heard Gwraig say, ‘There is hardly enough for the little ones. He has eaten his belly full for years now. It is time for him to make way for the children.’
Then Garreg-wen, Garroch’s youngest woman had said, ‘Gwraig speaks true words, the Old Man eats as much as any of us. Yet if we put him on the hill before Garroch returns from the Fishers, he will be angry with us, for he loves Marrag.’
Marrag was astounded that they were speaking words which he could understand, and not in the Woman’s Tongue, which was kept a deadly secret from the menfolk.
Gwraig spat into the glowing embers and said, ‘That should trouble no one. Once this old man is on the hill, I shall be the Old Woman here, being Garroch’s eldest wife. My word will be as true as his, my anger as great, my power with Earth Mother as strong. She will listen to me before Garroch even. She loves women, not men, if the truth be told.’
The other women bowed to her and then the three rose to go. As they reached the steps, Gwraig said again, ‘If Garroch does not return before night, we will get the men of the village to put the stones on his wrists and ankles. Then it will be done, whatever Garroch says!’
They laughed and went up into the light. Marrag shook his head, thinking how right they were, and then he went to sleep again. This time he dreamed about the cave where Kaa Fox, the Chief of the Hunters, lived. On the walls were great bulls and stags, their colouring glorious with red and yellow ochre, their outlines swift and clear with lamp-black, making the bulls seem to bellow again, the stags to leap out of the past. In his dream Marrag longed to make such pictures though he knew that his people, the small dark ones, were not meant by Earth Mother to do such things. Only the first folk, the ugly red ones who lived by killing beasts and not by tilling the fields, had ever been able to draw and paint like that.
Marrag wept in his sleep with longing to draw beautiful bulls and stags and men shooting their flint arrows deep into the savage flanks. Then he woke again. Now the shaft of sunlight had ceased to come through the doorway and the fire had burned down, leaving white ashes within the circular hearth-stones. Someone was shaking him by the thin shoulder. It was a little hand. Marrag looked up into the great dark eyes of the little girl, Brach. She was not afraid of him like the others of the village because he was the Old Man. She had always spoken to him as though he was eight, too.
‘Quick! Quick!’ she whispered. ‘The men are waiting for Earth Mother to put on her cloak of darkness then they will come to tie the stones on you and carry you on to the hill. Quick! Come with me.’
Marrag began to draw on the clay floor with his long finger nail. He made a circle then placed four straight lines across it like the spokes of a wheel. He seemed very interested in what he was doing. Brach became impatient. She shook him again, and even slapped him lightly on the back of the hand to make him see reason.
‘Silly, old grandad,’ she said, ‘I am telling you what we must do. You don’t want to go out on the hill and have the grey folk hurting you, do you? Do you, then?’
Marrag shuddered but made himself smile. Her face was so serious, her voice so urgent and commanding, for a little child. He patted her cheek and said, ‘What can we do? If they have decided I am no longer the Old Man then I must go on the hill. That is the law.’
The little girl thumped him quite hard on the shoulder. Now she was angry. ‘Silly, silly man,’ she said. ‘If you come with me they will not find you and then they can’t put you on the hill. When Garroch returns with the fish they will forget about putting you on the hill and you can be the Old Man again.’
Marrag smiled and stroked her long black hair that must never be cut. It was so shiny and beautiful. He wished he had a ring of blue stones to put round her forehead, to show that she was a princess. She was so beautiful. He said, ‘There, there, Brach, I am still the Old Man and I know magic. Look, my drawing is not silly. It makes me safe, this circle. While it is here they will not touch me. They dare not for I have often told them it is a magic thing.’
Brach listened then turned to him with a little smile of sadness, ‘I can hear them coming,’ she said. ‘They are saying things which tell me that they will not be afraid of the circle now. Come with me, quickly, Old Man.’
Marrag tried to stand in the hut. He too heard the excited voices and their tones sent a strange shivering through his body. He knew, only too well from the sacrifice stone, how men sounded when blood was in their nostrils. He remembered the proud Stranger who once came, and even poor silly Two-fingers. The girl dragged him towards the door. Then she stopped and said, ‘I am the daughter of Garroch, who is the son of Marrag. I have magic in me too, grandad. Look, I will show you a stronger magic than your circle, perhaps, if it will work for me.’
Quickly she ran to the beds of straw in the shadows of the hut and taking up a great bundle twisted it and set it against the clay wall where the old man had been sitting. Then she flung a sheepskin over it and bending until her forehead touched the floor she said, ‘Earth Mother, make me a straw man to be like Marrag! One, two, three! A bracelet for you, Earth Mother! Make me a man like Marrag.’
Marrag looked back through the gloom of the hut and seemed to see himself sitting there, asleep in the dusk, a tired old man.
Brach tugged at his arm and said, ‘They will wait until the straw man wakes, and that will give us time.’
Marrag gazed at her in astonishment and said nothing. He had never seen anything like it and he had been the Old Man for many years.
But even as they turned to go from the steading, there came a sudden savage pattering of feet towards the door, and then, as they looked up in fear, they saw the shaggy black hair, the wild eyes that gazed down on them. The killers had come to take the Old Man to the hill. One of them carried the binding-thongs; others, the sacred stones that must be lashed to his neck and limbs. Their leader, a man who had always hated Marrag since that sacrifice when his first-born child had gone into the flames with the animals of the village, stood before them all, holding his long-bladed axe out and saying, ‘If you do not wish to go on the hill, Old Man, all you have to do is to run up the steps and try to escape us. I will put a quick end to your waiting then.’
Then the others laughed, even the wives of Garroch, who stood at the back of the crowd, anxious for it to end as soon as it could before Garroch could return.
Brach looked at her grandfather. He stood like a man in a trance, his thin arms hanging low down by his sides, his back bent and his head thrust forward. He was nodding to the man and saying, ‘Yes, yes, I know it is my time at last. I shall come with you to the hill, do not fear. The Old Woman has been calling to me from under the floor telling me of this. I am ready.’
He began to walk forward. The man was secretly disappointed that Marrag had not tried to push past him up the narrow steps. The antler shaft of his axe itched in his hand.
Then Brach cried out, ‘No, no, Old Man! You must not go. Garroch my father will be angry if they put you on the hill and he is not here.’
She scampered before the old man and stood in his path so that he should not go up to them. Marrag smiled at her in his silly tired way now, and tried gently to push her aside. But she stood firm and would not move, her eyes full of tears and her long hair hanging half over her face with the effort she was making.
Then the man with the axe gave an exclamation of impatience and grasped her by the shoulder, meaning to fling her aside. She turned on him suddenly and taking his wrist in both of her hard hands, bit deeply into his forearm. He howled with the pain and dropping his axe tried to shake her away, but Brach bit and bit and would not let go. The others now tried to drag her off in the narrow doorway, but could not get at her properly.
The Old Man stood back, staring at this sudden struggle with eyes that hardly understood its significance.
And then, beyond the stockade, Garroch’s bull-horns began to moan.
Brach heard them and let go the man’s arm. He fell back, rubbing it, the tears heavy in his eyes.
‘My father!’ she said. ‘Now you will know what it is to lay your swine’s hands on me and to threaten the Old One.’
The man fell before her, begging for his life, but she kicked him in the mouth as she ran forward to greet Garroch.
Inside the gate, Garroch stood proudly, letting the folk crowd round the wicker fish-baskets, praising him for his skill in bargaining. Brach ran full tilt into him and clasped her arms about his middle, her heart beating wildly and the tears running down her soiled cheeks.
Garroch stroked her thick black hair and tangled it with his tired fingers. He loved her more dearly than any other women he knew. His other children were younger than Brach, and came from his other wives. They were a sullen lot who always seemed afraid of him and would not speak to him or dare to play with him like Brach.
‘What is it, my Queen?’ he asked at last.
The little girl pointed back at the terrified group about Marrag’s steading.
‘They were going to put the Old One out on the hill for Hair,’ she said, gulping. ‘Kill them, Garroch! Knock out their teeth and let them wander on the hill and see how they fare.’
Garroch passed his thin dark hand across his brow in exhaustion, for they had walked five days back from the coast, eating only a little of the shellfish on the way and drinking from the sour salt water of the marshland.
‘Later, Queen,’ he said. ‘We will find a time later. Let me take this fish to Marrag for he is the Old Man who must share it out in the village.’
Brach stood back from him, disappointed that her warrior father had not gone straightway and chopped the man who had bruised her shoulder. She had pictured him doing it, and the man’s head falling sideways with that funny look they always had in their eyes, as though they were very surprised and offended.
Then looking up, she saw that someone else stood behind Garroch, a woman she had never seen before. Rua, thin and dispirited by the cruel treatment she had had on the journey from the shores, pulled her tattered robes round her body and tried to outstare this hostile little girl.
‘Who is that cow?’ asked Brach, drawing back her lips and pointing at Rua with her tongue.
Garroch did not answer, but strode forward between the people to where Marrag now stood in the doorway of his house, his hand pressed against his thin breast, breathing hard with the effort of climbing the three steep steps.
‘One of you, who is that bitch?’ asked Brach again of the warriors who carried the fish-baskets.
Rua still stood as proudly as her weary body would let her.
One of the warriors pushed past Brach with his load, saying, ‘That is Rua, who killed her father in the mud. She is a stinking fish. Anyone could tell that by her smell.’
The folk of Craig Dun clustering round her laughed at this and decided that this should be her name, Stinking Fish, from then on.
But though her eyes were suddenly flooded with bitter water, Rua still tried to look noble as befitted the daughter of a chief. And though there was a great pain in her breast now, she vowed to avenge herself on these folk, and especially this savage little girl, one day, before long perhaps.