Fire Bringer (15 page)

At Bhreac’s suggestion two of the hinds scouted ahead, returning regularly to report what they had seen. It was a strange feeling for the hinds to be acting like Outriders. The calves travelled in a group, flanked by their mothers, except for Quaich who always kept to Morar’s side. It was close to Larn and the deer were nearing the end of the valley when Bhreac pulled them up. Fern and Shira, who had been sent up ahead, were racing towards them. The fawns immediately saw the fear in their eyes.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ asked Bhreac.

Shira was the first to speak, fighting back the breaths that came to her harsh and shallow.

‘Up ahead. Fern smelt them first and then I saw one. There are men up there.’

The news drew the deer together. Fern was all for turning round but Bhreac was afraid that the Draila might have found a way round the ravine. One thing was for sure, they couldn’t stay where they were for very long. Bhreac’s plan was to wait until dark and then to try and skirt around the humans. So, when night had wrapped them in secrecy, the deer turned east, climbing out of the shallow valley, going slowly and listening all the time.

Bhreac had miscalculated though, for although Shira had indeed seen a human at the end of the gully – not a man as it happens but a young boy throwing stones at a cairn – their dwellings were eastwards too, where the hills opened out around a shallow loch. The deer didn’t scent them until it was too late, for the wind was from the west, carrying the smell of their fires and their lives away from the hinds’ sensitive nostrils. Alyth was the first to stop and start fearfully, as she tipped the brow of the gentle hill they had been travelling across. The deer came up behind her and they all froze as they looked down.

They blinked nervously as they took in the scene below. What they saw was a number of huts, not more than fifteen, spread out sparsely near the water. A track ran off down the valley, vaguely connecting the dwellings, and thin plumes of smoke rose from their peat-covered roofs as the strange glow of orange firelight shone out from their windows into the darkness. The brightest glow came from a hut near the water where a fire had been built outside. A group of humans were laughing and joking as they gathered round it. The deer did not have names for what they were seeing and they stirred fearfully as the strange sounds and smells drifted up towards them.

They did not know it, but the deer had come on a community of crofters that had worked and lived and died in this spot for over four hundred years with little change coming to affect their ways. It had been they who had built the bridge over the ravine but they had never found any real use for it and had let it fade again out of memory. They were simple people who had little knowledge themselves of the great encampments that people were beginning to build in Edwinburgh to the east or Inverness to the north.

For this was a time long before the days when man’s success took him to every corner of the wild and drove the wolf from its home. He still had no knowledge of the machines that would lay everything open and drive out the spirit of Herne. It was two hundred years after the four tribes of Caledonia – the Scots, the Picts, the Britons and the Angles – came together to form the kingdom of Scotia and over a thousand years after the Roman emperor Hadrian had built his great wall. It was two generations before the civil wars that led the English King Edward, the Longshanks, to invade the northern lands, and before the rising of Wallace that raised the heart of a people and inspired the Bruce to free his countrymen at the battle of the Bannockburn. It was, for men who believed in such things, a golden age which had begun with William the Lion and now saw peace in the Great Land under the rule of the third Alexander, free from the rivalries that inflamed the clans and brought misery both to man and to Lera.

Free that is except in the north-west, for the Norsemen still reigned in the islands of the Shetlands and the Hebrides – the Western Isles – and from time to time one of these crofters, gripped with the urge to travel and fight, might venture forth and perhaps return to tell tales of the terrible Vikings to warm a winter evening, happy now to grow old and die where he had been born. But tonight they had no thought of such things, for two among them were to be married and now they were feasting by the fire, full of ale and whisky. Happily for the deer, they were drunk and quite oblivious to the animals that were watching them.

Besides, they had already hunted that day. Rannoch saw it first and asked Bracken what it was. There, over the fire, the boy whom Fern had spotted earlier was standing turning a spit. Pinned on its wooden shaft, crackling merrily in the sparking glow, was the whole carcass of a young fallow deer.

‘Nothing, Rannoch.’ Bracken shuddered but the smell of the meat came to the deer’s noses and so sickened and frightened them that Bhreac hurried them away across the snow. As they went the spit boy looked up and nudged his father, but the old man was already asleep.

‘Try to get some sleep, Rannoch,’ said Bracken softly in the night. The deer had settled at the bottom of a meadow, well away from the crofters.

‘Mamma,’ whispered Rannoch as he nestled by her side, ‘what is man?’

Bracken looked into her calf’s eyes.

‘Man? Man is something you must always fear.’

‘But why must I fear him?’ asked Rannoch.

‘Because, my little one,’ she said, remembering the Lore taught to her when she was a young fawn, ‘man is cruel and cold. He eats up everything he touches. He enslaves Lera and breaks the laws of the forest. Because, Rannoch, he is the only creature that hunts without need.’

‘Why?’

‘That, my dear, I don’t know. Perhaps because he can.’

‘Well, I don’t like his smells,’ said Rannoch.

‘No, my dear. Nor do I,’ whispered Bracken, shivering as she remembered the fire. ‘Now get some sleep. You’ll need all your strength for tomorrow.’

Bracken thought that the fawn was drifting towards dreams when he stirred again and opened his eyes.

‘Mamma?’ he whispered again.

‘What is it, Rannoch?’

‘Why are the Herla so full of fear?’

Bracken looked down sadly and licked Rannoch on the forehead, but she said nothing.

The next day brought more bad weather. A blistering wind swept across the hills and though it wasn’t actually snowing it might as well have been for the gusts tore across the ground and swept up the surface snow, scurrying around the deer’s faces as they tried to make headway. Canisp was beginning to limp and Quaich was sickening. Indeed all the calves were hungry and miserable and, though she kept it to herself, soon Bhreac began to worry about food.

Rannoch, Bankfoot, Tain, Thistle and the twins travelled together and Tain kept them all amused for a time and made them forget some of their woes with a story that he had made up about Rannoch. The fawn was embarrassed, especially in front of Willow, and he kept telling Tain to be quiet.

By late afternoon the fawns were thinking of summer pastures and rich grasses; anything they could to take their minds off the cold and wet. All around them was nothing but high, flat hills which kept rising all the time, treeless and windswept. There was no cloud cover at all and as evening approached the temperature began to drop still further, so that the hinds became really fearful.

‘We must find some shelter,’ Bhreac whispered to Bracken as the deer began to climb a hill that was steeper than the downs they had already crossed, ‘or we’ll all be dead by morning. Look at Quaich; he can hardly walk.’

‘I know,’ said Bracken. ‘There may be some trees beyond this hill. It’s our best hope’.

But when the deer reached the top their hearts sank, for ahead the landscape was the same as before with more treeless hills, blanketed in white. They were more exposed than ever. The calves huddled together for warmth and the wind howled and screeched off the hilltop.

‘Quaich can’t go on,’ said Morar desperately. ‘I must find him somewhere to sleep.’

‘Yes, Morar,’ answered Bhreac kindly, looking back to the fawn who was standing by Peppa and Willow. His little legs were shaking uncontrollably.

‘We’ll go back down and shelter in the lee of the hill.’ The path they had taken up the hill had not provided the deer with any cover, so Bhreac decided to lead them on a little, along the escarpment they now found themselves on, in the hope of dropping down into some more sheltered spot. But as they walked in the biting wind Tain suddenly came on something hard under his hoofs and called to his mother. It was a flat, stone rectangle, badly weathered and half covered in snow, but too regular to be natural.

‘Man?’ asked Bracken nervously. Bhreac nodded.

Ahead, Tain found another stone and another and then he shouted as he saw a whole pile of stones. The deer came over and there, cut into the hill, was a wide rectangular pit, walled with heavy rocks. The hinds began to back away nervously.

‘We must get out of here,’ said Bhreac.

‘Wait,’ said Bracken. ‘Can you smell it?’

‘What?’ asked Bhreac, sniffing the air.

‘That’s exactly it. Nothing. There’s no scent. None at all.’ The hinds began to smell the stones and they soon realized that Bracken was right. If man had made this, he had not been here in years. Bracken looked at Bhreac who had had the same idea.

‘Shelter,’ she whispered.

The hinds and their fawns crept off the stone paving they had stumbled on, down into the wide recess. The place offered perfect shelter from the bitter wind which whistled over their heads now, and though there was snow on the ground, for the roof was open, the deer soon felt much warmer. They lay down, side by side, and listened to the storm outside, taking comfort in the stones and earth and the strange setting. The wind died and the place became perfectly silent; chill and eerie under a huge black sky spattered with stars that made the fawns dizzy as they gazed up into the vastness.

‘Mamma,’ whispered Peppa, her breath turning to ice, ‘where do stars come from?’

‘The stars, my little one?’ said Fern, lifting her sleek muzzle to the heavens. ‘The stars are the souls of Herla. For when deer die Herne takes them and with his antlers he tosses them into the night and there they stay, shining on the lives of all Lera.’

‘And is Starbuck up there?’ said Tain, stirring from

Canisp’s side.

‘Oh yes, Tain,’ said Fern. ‘You see that great band across the sky where the stars are like a thicket?’

The fawns were all looking up intently now and they nodded, all except Quaich who was sleeping against Morar’s flank.

‘Well, that is Starbuck’s herd,’ said Fern. ‘And if you look over there, where those great stars are grouped together, you can make out the body and antlers of the mighty stag who guards them.’

Fern was staring up at the constellation that men call Sagittarius and as the fawns followed her gaze towards the twinkling canopy they could indeed see the outline of a giant deer.

Fern nodded. ‘Yes, that is Starbuck. He runs across the heavens for ever, unafraid.’

Bhreac looked at Bracken and smiled knowingly, but the fawns were lost in wonder as they peered out into the inky night. They felt warmed and comforted, as though a great father were looking down to protect them.

‘Bhreac?’ whispered Bracken as the hinds and their fawns began to slumber. ‘Why do you think there is no scent of man here?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered the old deer, roused from her thoughts. ‘For man surely made this place. But I can scent nothing. Nothing at all. It’s as though he was never here. But it’s a piece of luck for us, for I think if we hadn’t stumbled on it when we did it would have been disastrous. Especially for Quaich,’ she whispered. ‘Look at the poor little thing.’

Quaich’s thin flank was rising up and down rapidly as he shook with cold.

‘Well then, I suppose we have man to thank,’ sighed

Bracken as she closed her eyes, ‘wherever he went.’

The hinds too fell asleep in the stony hollow which had been built and abandoned over a thousand years before. For the deer had come upon the remains of an old Roman hill fort. It was the furthest northern outpost of the legions sent to civilize Britain by the Emperor Hadrian and was nearly one hundred miles north of the great wall that closes the mouth of Scotia from Tynemouth to the Solway Firth. But this place had never found its way into any human history, except among the stories of the young men stationed here for but two brief winters. It had been raised as a sentry point but in its time had attracted violence and death when it became a focus for the tribesmen that had lived close by.

A terrible battle had been fought on its northern slopes before the soldiers had gratefully received the order to abandon it. But for a time there had been peace on the hilltop too and the young men far from home had gazed up at the stars and told stories of their gods, of Mercury and Apollo, of Bacchus and Athena, and longing for the hot, warm scents of the south, for their mothers and loved ones, had cursed the wind and wondered what strange force had brought them so far from home, or if their lives would ever be free from fear.

So the soldiers had left – those that survived – and marched south again and the fort had fallen in on itself. The wind came, and the snow and the hard, grey drizzle that hangs like a fog over Scotia. The sun had burned down too and with the passing of time the stones had been bleached and washed clean of the scent of man. The fort, or the hollow as it now was, had passed back into the hands of the earth. So it seemed to Lera and the deer that were now protected by its walls that man had never been here at all.

Rannoch stirred restlessly in the darkness and tried to turn over. He opened his eyes and blinked up at the sparkling canvas of stars. He felt cold suddenly and, though he was at Bracken’s side, terribly alone, for he had just had a strange dream. A man, or what he thought was a man, had been standing above him just on the edge of the hollow. Draped around his shoulders he was wearing the skin of a red deer and on his head was a pair of antlers. The man’s arms were cut and bleeding, but as he stood there he smiled and held up a handful of leaves and began to rub them into his wounds.