Read Online Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff - Free Book Online

fire, his back to the doorway, a big, broad-shouldered man who turned as they crossed the threshold, revealing the heavy, reddish face of Morvidd, the Chieftain’s brother. And behind him in the shadows squatted a boy of about Drem’s age, nursing his father’s spear—a boy with a quarrelsome and unhappy face; but Drem, who had run with him in the same pack all his life, did not of course see that. He only knew that Luga the son of Morvidd was apt to be at the root of any trouble that broke out among their own kind.
    ‘So. You are here at last,’ the man said, rather loudly, while the two boys cocked their heads at each other.
    Talore checked just within the doorway and returned the greeting more courteously. ‘And you, Morvidd the Chieftain’s brother, you also are here, and welcome. I had not thought you would be back from your trading until the moon was on the wane.’
    ‘I am but this evening returned to my house-place; and one told me that Fand has whelped and the whelps are ready to leave their dam. Therefore I am come to make my choice of one of them.’
    Talore stood smiling a little, the great swan on his shoulder, its wings falling wide behind him. ‘Others have made their choice already. There is none of the cubs left without a master.’
    Æsk, the eldest son, looked up from the spear he was burnishing, and said swiftly, ‘I told him that, my father, but he would wait for you none the less.’
    Morvidd’s face had turned a deeper red as it always did when he was crossed, so that his eyes looked like little bright splinters of glass in the redness of it; and he began to bluster. ‘Did I not say to you, last Fall-of-the-leaf, that I would give you a fine copper cooking pot that had never known the fire, for the best cub in Fand’s next litter?’
    It seemed to Drem that everything stopped, between breath and breath, and there was a sudden cold emptiness inside him. He saw the grin of triumph on the face of the boy Luga. Then Talore said, ‘Did I not say to you last Fall-of-the-leaf that I do not promise unborn cubs to any man?’ And everything went on again, and the grin faded on Luga’s face.
    Morvidd forced a laugh, and an air of joviality; clearly he wanted one of the cubs very badly. ‘Nay then, we will leave that part of it. I come now, and there are three cubs yet in the litter. I’ve a mind to the one with the white blaze on its breast—the best cub of the three, without doubt; and I’ll give you the cook pot for him—a good big cook pot—and a lengthof fine bleached linen cloth thrown in. What do you say to that?’
    ‘I say that above all the litter, that one is already sold,’ Talore said.
    ‘Who to, then? Who to?’
    ‘To the boy here.’
    Morvidd stared for a moment, then flung up his head with a roar of laughter. ‘And since when does Talore sell his hound cubs to children for a handful of wild raspberries? Ah, but of course if that is the way of the thing it is easily undone. I see the thing is more than half a jest!’
    Talore slipped the swan from his shoulder and flung it down beside the hearth. ‘Nay, it is not a jest, the bargain was fairly made and the boy has paid the price—the agreed price—and the thing is finished.’
    The great swan lay there, spread-winged in the firelight and the lamplight; one of the hounds sniffed at it and was cuffed aside by the second son. Morvidd finished his laugh rather abruptly, and stared down at the swan and then at Drem and then back at Talore, angry again, and the more angry because he was puzzled. ‘This—
this
?’ He reached out a foot and prodded the great bird contemptuously in a way that made the rage rise in Drem’s throat—his swan, his beautiful kill, the price of the hound of his heart, to be treated so! ‘Surely it is not a hand but a head that you lack, Talore! What sort of price, beside a fine copper cook pot, is a dead swan for a hound puppy? Tell me that!’
    Drem clenched his sound hand into a fist; and then