Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff Read Free Book Online

among the hounds at his heels. And now, the hurdle shifted back, he was squatting on his heels in the fern, with the cubs all about him. The rain dripped from the eaves, and the flames fluttered under the pot in which Wenna was seething deer meat in milk; the wet girl-child chirrupped and bubbled to herself on a deer-skin beside the hearth, and the pupples squealed and whickered together. Fand pushed past Drem and snuffed among her cubs, thrusting them this way and that with her broad muzzle; but she no longer lay down among them, for her time for feeding them was gone, and she was tired of being nipped and crawled over.
    They were twice the size that they had been when first he saw them; they had become woolly and venturesome and had long since ceased to look like rats. He looked up at Talore, who had come across the hut to join him, after hanging up his kill. ‘Does Fand not feed them any more?’
    ‘Nay, the time for that is over; they eat meal stirabout and meat now.’
    Something seemed to twist in Drem’s stomach, and he put out his hand to the cub with the white throat, and bowled it on to its back, feeling the nip of its little sharp teeth in his thumb. ‘Ah—ee! Fierce wolf-dog! You would bite, would you?’ He rolled it from side to side while it squirmed with delight; and still playing with the puppy, so that he need not look up, he asked in a carefully levelled voice, ‘Then—their new masters will be taking them soon?’
    ‘Any day now,’ said Talore.
    Drem swallowed. ‘You will—have chosen who they go to?’
    ‘Surely. The little red one I keep myself, and the mealy grey. This one, Belu from above the ford will trade me a length of cloth for—poor Wenna cannot clothe four men with her weaving—and this one goes to Gwythno of the Singing Spear.’
    That left only the cub with the silver blaze, now muzzling into the hollow of Drem’s neck, for without quite knowing that he did so, he had caught it up and was holding it against his breast.
    ‘And that one—’ said Talore, and let the end of the sentence fall, watching the small, braced, tell-tale figure crouched among the fern, with the puppy held fiercely, protectively, against his breast.
    Drem looked up, and met Talore’s dark, narrowed gaze upon him, and waited, with a sudden intensity of waiting that hurt him somewhere beneath his breast-bone. He heard the drip of the summer rain from the eaves, and Wenna crooning to the girl-child as she turned barley cakes among the hot ash. The puppy whimpered protestingly at being held so close, its little body warmly alive against his, its breath like the breath of all puppies, smelling of garlic. Soon its warmth and liveness would be under someone else’s hand, it would learn to come to someone else’s call, and hunt with a master who was not Drem . . . And still the rain fell, drip-drip-drip from the eaves, very loud.
    ‘Do you want him so badly, then?’ Talore said.
    Drem lifted bright, grave eyes to his face and nodded. He could not speak.
    ‘Then it is in my mind that I will sell him to you,’ Talore said, ‘at a price.’
    It seemed to Drem that the rain was louder than ever. ‘
Drip-drip-drip
’ marking off the silence with little dark arrow-heads of sound. Price? What price could he give for the cub? He was not Belu to have fine cloth to trade. His eyes searched Talore’s face, looking for the meaning behind it.
    ‘What is the price?’ he asked at last, and his voice sounded husky in his own ears.
    Talore smiled. ‘I grow weary of mutton and of deer meat.The price is a bird for the pot—but it must be brought down with the throw-spear.’
    Drem frowned at him a moment in bewilderment, knowing that Talore could bring down wild fowl for himself at any time he chose, and had, besides, three sons to hunt for him. And then he understood. It was proof of his own skill with the throw-spear that was really the price of the cub.
    Well, it was a year since he had first set himself to