“So, you too have something of the Old Wisdom, the Earth Wisdom in you, Sun Man. . . . And indeed you speak the truth.” Suddenly I felt my gaze released, as though she had seen all that she needed to see, but the touch of her hands was still on either side of my face. Then she released that hold also, and dropped them into the fine blue-stained marten skins on her lap. “She is not the first of our kind to take that way into death. . . . Men have always hated us; that is because they are fools, and always fools hate what they fear; but for the most part they have left us alone. But these men that swarm now in our hills, with them it is another thing, the Sea Wolves and the Pirates from the West and the Painted People. They think that because we are small they can crush us and so crush the fear too. They think also that there is gold in the place where we bury our dead. They burn us out as one burns out unwanted bees at the start of winter.” (I thought of Irach, who had eaten his father’s courage, and the small burned-out village above the road from Deva to Eburacum.) “They drive off our cattle and our women. This place is well hidden, and so far we have been safe from them, we small kindred. But now we too have our sorrow to avenge.”
She was silent, and I grew more aware of the thin high keening of the women, and one of the warriors drawing in his breath with a sharp hiss.
“Are you afraid of us, Sun Man?”
“A little,” I said. “But I have come in under your roof, Old Woman, when I need not have come at all, with neither a weapon nor a bunch of rowan in my hand.”
“That is true,” she agreed, “and because of that, and because you are who you are and your sword is a lightning against the Sea Wolves and their kind, it may be that if you call for the People of the Hills when you have need of their aid, the People of the Hills will come to your call. We are small and weak, and our numbers grow fewer with the years, but we are scattered very wide, wherever there are hills and high lonely places. We can send news and messages racing from one end of a land to the other between moon-rise and moonset; we can creep and hide and spy and bring back word; we are the hunters who can tell you when the game has passed, by a bent grass blade or one hair clinging to a bramble spray. We are the viper that stings in the dark —” She turned a little as she spoke, and summoned one of the young warriors with the same crooked finger with which she had summoned me. He came, and knelt beside me at her feet, not looking at her. Indeed I noticed that none of the men looked her in the eyes; she was sacred, taboo: “The Old Woman.”
“Show the Sun Lord one of your arrows.”
He reached to the quiver behind his shoulder, and drew out an arrow no larger than a birding bolt. It lay across his narrow palm, shafted with reed, flighted with widgeon’s feathers, and barbed with the most wonderfully dressed blue flint. It was a beautiful little thing, a child’s toy like the slender bow he carried; but as weapons of war, oddly pitiful.
“It is well made, is it not?” said the Old Woman. “And it flies like a bird. Be careful how you handle it, and do not touch the barb. It has only one fault, that it cannot be used for hunting — the poison remains in the kill.”
“Poison?” I had taken up the small thing to examine it more closely, but laid it back with both care and speed in its owner’s palm.
“One scratch from that barb — quite a small scratch — and you would be dead in a hundred heartbeats. Therefore it can only be used against man.”
“With such weapons to your hand, I find it wonderful that you have not yet driven the Sea Wolves from your hunting runs.”
“If we had enough of such weapons, well might you find it wonderful. But the plants that yield the poison are rare and hard to find, and there must be three to poison one arrowhead. Nonetheless, we have some store, and all that we add to it from now is in the hollow of your hand, Sun Lord. It is better and stronger when mixed with the black venom of hate; and we are good haters, we the People of the Hills.”
The owner of the arrow slid it back into his quiver as casually as though no death hung in the barb, and getting up, moved back to rejoin his brothers in the shadows; and I heard him playing with a young hound, teasing it and rolling it on its back as I had done with Cabal when he was a puppy.
“Old Woman, I will remember the promise,” I said, “for I think that I shall need good haters and skilled hunters in the time ahead.” I did not speak of the poisoned arrows.
She settled back on her stool, planting her hands on her knees, clearly finished with one thing and turning to another. “Ah, but I grow old, and dim from walking with dreams, and forget the thing that should come first of all. You must have the Dark Drink, and the herbs to burn on the little one’s grave about your nine great Sun Horses.” She looked down at the girl who crouched, not rocking or wailing like the rest, beside the fire. “Fetch them, Itha, daughter’s daughter; and fetch also the Cup, for the Sun Lord is weary, and must drink to the promise that has been made between us, before he goes again to his own people.”
A sudden finger of chill touched me between my shoulders, as the girl Itha rose to obey. How often, in my earliest years, the woman who reared me had impressed on me the warning, “If ever you should be in the Hollow Hills, which the Lord of Life forbid, never let you touch anything to eat or drink. So long as you remember that, they cannot get you in their power, but one cup of milk or a crust of barley bread and you are theirs forever, and your own soul lost to you.” It was the thing that ail mothers and nurses told to all children; it was the thing one grew up knowing.
I went on kneeling before the Old Woman, trying not to let my hands tighten on my knees, a long time, a very long time; and then the girl was back, bearing in one hand a black pottery flask and a small leather bag, and in the other a cup of age-blackened leather, bound with bronze at the rim, and brimming with drink of some kind.
She laid the flask — which had no base to stand on — together with the bag on the filthy fern-covered floor beside my knee, and held out to me the cup. “Drink, my Lord the Bear, it will shorten the long way back.”
I took the cup slowly, and sat looking down into the faintly amber depths of it, holding off the moment. . . . The Old Woman said, “Drink; there is no harm in it. Or do you fear to sleep and wake on a bare hillside and find when you return to it, the fort empty and your spear brothers dead a hundred years ago?”
And the chill that was on me seemed to deepen, with the memory of another woman who had spoken almost those same words. I had drunk then — of all that she had to give; and wakened on my cold hillside, and though I joyed in the comradeship of my men, in the warmth of the sun and the balance of a sword and the willing power of my horse under me, something of myself had been on that cold hillside ever since.
But I knew that if I did not drink, I should have lost forever the friendship of the Little Dark People, I should have failed in the thing that brought me, and maybe gained enemies as deadly as the little poison arrow sheathed so lightly. I should quite possibly have lost Britain.
I made my stiff face smile. “No man fears to drink in the house of a friend — I drink to the Dark People and the Sun People.”
I would have stood up, but under that roof I could not stand fully erect and put my head back. So I drank on my knees, draining the cup to the dregs, and gave it back into the girl’s hands. The drink was cool and without the sweetness of heather beer, a forest drink with a flame at the heart of the coolness. I have never tasted its like again.