Fire Bringer (20 page)

‘Come on,’ she said at last. ‘Lets go back to the loch and find Peppa.’

‘No. I want to be on my own.’

‘You don’t want me to be with you?’ said Willow.

‘No. Yes. Oh, I don’t know,’ cried Rannoch suddenly, setting off at a run. Willow hung back and watched him and then ran after him towards the top of the hill.

‘I’m sorry, Willow,’ said Rannoch as she caught up with him. ‘It’s just that I don’t understand.’

Rannoch turned and looked at her, then said in a whisper,

‘Tell me, Willow, do you think I’m different?’

Willow’s large, bright eyes looked back at him calmly. She looked at his fine young face with its high forehead and the strange fawn mark in the middle of his temple.

‘Of course I think you’re different,’ she said and touched his nose with hers.

‘No, not like that,’ said Rannoch.’I mean, do you think I’m strange?’

‘No, I don’t,’ answered Willow. ‘I think you’re. . .’

‘But this mark,’ said Rannoch, ‘and the forest and the raven and my dreams and I feel strange sometimes.’

‘Its only because you’re sensitive and intelligent,’ said

Willow kindly.

‘But I see some of the others watching me and I know they’re frightened of me. Perhaps I should go away,’ Rannoch added, dropping his head.

‘Don’t talk like that. You have lots of good friends and besides, if you went away I would have to come with you and I don’t think I want to go out there again, not just yet.’ The fawns had stopped at the top of the valley and were looking north across the hills. In the distance they could see the tips of great white mountains that rose much higher than the surrounding peaks. The tree line hardly rose to their foothills and their tops were furled in huge swirls of cloud.

‘Willow,’ said Rannoch almost to himself, ‘do you think

Tain’s right?’

‘About the Prophecy?’

‘No. He says the Great Mountain is over there, where Starbuck first met Herne, and that beyond is the High Land where Starbuck still lives. I don’t believe it, but it’s a good story, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Willow, gazing out at the high peaks that looked so distant and forbidding.

‘You know,’ said Rannoch, ‘I think that I would like to climb the Great Mountain one day.’

‘Well, I shouldn’t,’ said Willow. ‘I think it’s probably cold and dangerous and I much prefer it here.’

The two calves were walking along the ridge now, where the hill sloped away into downs covered in lush young bracken. This was further than they had ever strayed but as they looked they saw a stag party feeding nearby and, reassured, they wandered on. They started to graze in the warm sunlight and talked as they did so, but moving all the time, so after a while they found that they were quite a long way from home. Willow eventually suggested they turn back but as she did so she saw that Rannoch was standing stock-still, his ears pricked forward.

‘What is it?’ she said.

‘Can’t you feel it?’ whispered Rannoch.

‘It’s you who has those feelings,’ said Willow half teasingly, but as she said it she felt it too, a kind of shaking in her legs. Willow began to tremble.

‘Listen,’ said Rannoch.

The stags nearby had raised their antlers and their heads were cocked. Then, on the breeze, they caught it; a sound that sent fear flowing through them. In the distance came a low, hollow barking that made the air shake.

‘Wolves?’ whispered Willow.

‘No,’ said Rannoch, ‘look.’

The fawns saw something they barely understood. In the distance, along the valley ridge, a group of men were racing towards them. It seemed at first as though they were floating on air, but as they rose up the hill the fawns saw that they were carried along on great antlerless stags. Although the others knew instantly what they were, the fawns had never seen horses before and the pounding of their hoofs filled them with terror. All they had seen of man on their journey had made them fear and mistrust that creature, but as they watched these animals, so like themselves, tamed to man’s will and carrying the humans towards them, a new horror awoke in their young minds.

Worse even than this though were the creatures that ran before them, snapping and barking as they went. The pack of deer hounds had found their scent and were baying for blood. Suddenly, the air was rent with a deafening noise that spoke neither of man nor beast. A high, lingering note that changed again to a hollow call. It was the sound of a hunting horn.

‘Run. Run for your lives,’ cried a stag nearby and in a sudden, darting movement the whole stag party swung round on their haunches and bolted like a flock of birds. Rannoch and Willow went with them, hurtling blindly east along the ridge. The stags moved like lightning, for a frightened deer is one of the fastest creatures in the wild. But the fawns somehow managed to keep up with them, for a time anyway, until the deer swung into a small gully at the very end of the valley’s escarpment where the hills reared up again. Now the stags began to pull away. The barking and baying and pounding and the strange wail of the hunting horn came nearer and nearer. The fawns ran on blindly but suddenly, out of sheer instinct, Rannoch dived to the right into a stretch of ground where the bracken was thickest.

‘Quick. Follow me,’ he cried and Willow went with him. They vanished into the undergrowth just in time, for the hounds were on them. The dogs swept past like a wind, straight up the gully, and the horses followed, churning up the ground with their hoofs.

‘Are you all right?’ whispered Rannoch when the thunder had passed.

‘Yes,’ gasped Willow, ‘I think so.’

‘Look,’ said Rannoch, raising his head above the bracken. Willow lifted her head too. In front of them the stags had reached the end of the gully and were trying to climb up its closed face. But the slope was steep and the hounds were already on them, snapping and biting at their haunches. Five of the dogs had cornered the stag who had cried out first and now he had swung round and was scything right and left with his antlers. One of the dogs yelped bitterly as a tine caught its side but it looked as if the stag would be pulled down, when suddenly the air was rent with a final blast of the strange horn.

The dogs looked back fearfully to where the men, who had climbed down from their horses, were advancing towards them and shouting angrily. The dogs became confused and some of them began to whimper as the humans waded in and pulled them off, kicking and hitting them. The stags’ hopes lifted for an instant. But then one of the men raised something that looked like a branch to his eyes and pointed it at a single deer climbing the verge to the right. There was a swishing noise and Rannoch and Willow watched amazed as the stag simply crashed to his knees and rolled down the slope. From his side, where a thin wooden shaft had entered his flesh, the stag’s hot blood was already staining the grass. To the left another deer fell and then another, until the only stags left standing were those at the bottom of the gully with their backs against the hill.

Then the men, who had formed up in a line, began to shout and whistle. One by one they lifted their hands to their backs and pulled out the strange objects that had been slung across their shoulders and which now glinted and flashed in the sunlight. Some of these objects were long and thin, with sharp pointed ends. Others branched at the bottom like the antlers of the fallow deer. The fawns had no notion of what a sword was for, but they soon understood as the humans began to swing them in front of them, advancing on foot towards the waiting deer. Rannoch and Willow blinked in horror at that slaughter. But when it was over every stag that had entered that gully, fifteen in all, lay dead on the earth. The fresh young grass had turned from a spring green to a deep, bruised crimson. Then one of the men bent down. He was tall, with hair the colour of a red deer and a long, thick beard. When he raised himself up again and turned to the others with a great shout, he was holding aloft a single five-pointed antler.

‘Come away,’ Rannoch whispered in horror, backing off through the bracken. ‘Willow?’

Willow shook herself from her trance and turned to follow Rannoch. But suddenly there was a howl from in front of them. One of the hounds that had been pulled off the stags had made its way back to where the fawns had hidden in the bracken. It had spotted them.

‘Run, Willow, run,’ shouted Rannoch desperately, as the hound leapt forward, its teeth and snarling gums keen to avenge themselves for the kill that had just been denied them. Willow didn’t need to be told twice. She sprang forward, lifted on a wave of terror. Rannoch followed and the fawns dashed for their lives. But the dog was hungry and was soon gaining on them. The hound was almost at their heels when Rannoch suddenly veered away to the left to try and draw it off Willow.

The hound swung after him, barking and snapping at his legs. Rannoch could almost feel its hot breath on his haunches as he ran, the tears blinding his eyes. It was hopeless, the dog was on him.

The ground dipped suddenly and as the dog’s teeth closed Rannoch threw himself forwards and kicked as he did so. A deer can jump much further than a dog and as the fawn took off, the dog’s teeth snapped shut on empty air. It pulled up for an instant at the ditch, startled by Rannoch’s leap and looking around stupidly as Rannoch found himself on level ground again and hurtled on. With a howl, the hound took up the chase once more. On Rannoch sped, with the dog following him. It began to close again and suddenly Rannoch broke clear of the bracken and looked ahead in terror. He had been running back up the gully and now, in front of him, he saw a forest of horses and men and his nostrils were swamped by their scent.

Rannoch swung away to the right. But the other hounds had seen him and the air behind was shattered with their cries as they too took up the chase. Rannoch felt as if his heart would burst. His head was pounding with the noise of the dogs and as he looked ahead he felt his spirits fail. To the right of where the stags had fled, the gully had opened out a little but now Rannoch was nearing its end and its sides were steeper than the fawn could manage. He was lost.

‘So this is where it ends,’ he said to himself bitterly as he ran, ‘fleeing from the herd to be torn to shreds.’

With that the fawn’s senses began to swim and Rannoch felt as though he were falling. He touched ferns and smelt dry earth.

‘They’re on me,’ he cried as a terrible pain gripped his back leg and everything went black.

Part Two -
8 Sgorr

‘Cruel he looks, but calm and strong, Like one who does, not suffers wrong.’ Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Prometheus Unbound’

A hind was grazing on the hill in the weak spring sunshine. She had a smooth red coat and her huge eyes looked proud and defiant. But there was a sadness in them too as she gazed out across the valley. She was still fairly young, seven years old, but in the lines around her scent glands there was the sign of some tragedy that had aged her more than her natural span. A stag, old and limping, wandered past the Home Oak towards her and called softly, but the hind took no notice and it was only when he had nearly reached her and he called again that she turned her head.

‘Blindweed,’ said Eloin, surprised to see the storyteller so close to the Home Oak. ’Blindweed, I’m sorry, I must have been daydreaming.’

‘That’s all right,’ said the storyteller, coming up to her slowly. ‘It’s all I’m good for myself nowadays. But what were you thinking of so sadly?’

The hind smiled at her friend. Blindweed looked very old. His antlers were deeply rutted, like the arms of a weathered oak.

‘I was wondering about Rannoch.’

‘He’s all right, Eloin. I’m sure of it.’

‘But they haven’t given up searching.’

‘No. But they’ve found nothing either.’

‘He’ll be nearly two by now,’ said Eloin wistfully, gazing out across the grazing herd. ‘I wonder if he is growing up to look like Brechin.’

‘A fine little Outrider.’

‘I miss them, Blindweed, but at least I can believe that Rannoch is still alive. Brechin will never come back. Never.’ Eloin lowered her head.

‘Brechin’s with Starbuck,’ whispered Blindweed kindly, ‘and Herne.’

‘I suppose so, but I still miss him, Blindweed.’

‘And I miss Bhreac,’ said Blindweed, shaking his head, ‘but we must be strong. I am glad at least that she is with your fawn. I know she will do everything she can to protect him.’

‘You’re right, I mustn’t be gloomy. It’s just that some days it’s so hard. I remember when the Outriders crowned the hills and roamed free. Now the Draila have destroyed everything and the Drailing are so powerful that the hinds even fear to bear fawns.’

‘I know.’ Blindweed nodded gravely. ‘But perhaps. . .’ The old storyteller paused.

‘Perhaps?’

‘The Prophecy.’

‘Do you really believe it, Blindweed?’ said Eloin, looking hard at her old friend. ‘Can Rannoch really be the one?’

‘It’s the only thing that has kept my heart from breaking these past years.’

The two friends were silent now as the thin sun shone down on them. It gave them little warmth.

‘But have you ever thought what it says, Blindweed?’ said Eloin suddenly, looking deeply into her old friend’s eyes. ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Sacrifice shall be his meaning. That’s what it says. Sacrifice, Blindweed. What did I give birth to him for?’

‘That none of us may know,’ said Blindweed gravely, ‘until the Prophecy is fulfilled. And if it is to be fulfilled Drail and Sgorr must never find out that he is a changeling. Or they will not stop hunting him until they have uprooted the Great Land.’

As the old friends were talking, three stags were walking through the spring grass on the western hill above the home herd. The youngest had a fine head of antlers while the oldest, who was leading, walked with a limp and his antlers had already gone back. The stag next to them, who was talking to them now, kept dipping his head to the leader and, though the herd had not yet shed, he had no antlers at all.

‘Did the inspection please you, Lord?’ said Sgorr sycophantically, blinking with his single eye.