Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff Read Free Book Online Page A

master the throw-spear; he had some skill, he knew. Suddenly he grinned, flinging up his head like a pony, in a way that always showed when he was ready for battle; and the dripping of the rain under the eaves went back to its proper place. ‘I will pay the price,’ he said, ‘I will pay it tomorrow, Talore.’
    Drem did not say anything in the home house-place about what he was going to do; he could not speak of it to anyone until it was done. He slept fitfully that night, waking often, until the first faint paling of the sky where the roof turf was rolled back warned him that it was time to be on his way. Then he pushed back the deer-skin covering and got silently to his feet, feeling to make sure that his knife was safely in his belt. There were a few bad moments while he felt for his own spear among the others in the rack, and got it out, but he managed it without the blade clattering against its neighbours, and with a sigh of relief turned to the entrance. Old Kea raised her head beside the fire to watch him, but made no outcry, for the hounds were well used to night-time comings and goings; and since it was summer time there was no stirring and stamping of ponies in the fore porch to betray his passing that way.
    Yesterday’s rain had gone over, and there was a new-washed cleanness in the air, a smell of wet, refreshed earth. The curlews were already calling over the High Chalk, but at this time of year they called almost all through the short nights; and there would be plenty of time to reach his chosen hunting ground before dawn.
    He had left the last of the corn plots behind him, and wasturning down to the little brook that had its spring in a deep hollow under the grazing ground, when his ear picked up the pad of running feet behind him—very small, swift feet on the downland turf—and he had scarcely time to swing round before a flying shadow came down the slope and Blai was beside him, panting with the speed she had made.
    Drem was angry. ‘What do you come after me for?’ he demanded. ‘Go home, Blai.’
    ‘I saw you go,’ Blai said in the little clear voice that had somehow the note of a bird call in it and never seemed to belong to the same person as her narrow, shut-up face, ‘and I thought maybe—if it was a hunting, you would need food for the day.’
    Food; yes, he had not thought about food. Well, it was for the Women’s side to think of such things. ‘What have you got?’ he demanded.
    ‘Only a barley cake. That was all I could steal without waking them. But it is a big one.’
    ‘It will serve,’ said Drem handsomely, and tucking his throw-spear under his arm, took the hard, crusty bannock that she thrust into his hand. ‘Go home now, Blai, and do not you be telling anyone that I have gone hunting.’
    ‘I will not, then.’ Blai hesitated on one foot, half going, half staying. ‘Drem—let you take me too!’
    Drem said with harsh reason, ‘You! What use would you be?’
    ‘I would do anything—I would be your hound—’
    But Drem was already turning away. ‘Na, I do not need a hound today. And’—suddenly he could not hold it back—‘soon I may have a hound of my own to hunt with me!’
    Behind him as he went, he heard her cry out in a little defiant voice, ‘One day—one day my father will come back for me—’ But she was crying it out to herself, not really to Drem.
    Drem crossed the brook—it was so narrow still that it did not even need a stepping stone—and went on to his day’s hunting, leaving her standing there.
    A faint bar of amber light was broadening in the east as he came down through the oak and hazel and whitethorn scrub of the lower slopes, eating the bannock as he went so as to have it out of the way, and headed for the marshes. A great, slow, full-bodied river, winding south from the forest uplands far inland, found a pass in the hills just there, and went winding and looping out to join the Great Water. Many streams rising in the lower flanks of