Fire Bringer (26 page)

‘Tell me, Father,’ said Liam.

‘Well, Liam, the deer’s a Christian image for a start. Many saints wear symbols of them. Saint Aidan and Saint Godric, for example. Saint Kentigern, who some call Mungo, harnessed a stag to a plough and so was able to till the land and feed the people. The deer is even a symbol for Christ, because deer sometimes kill and eat the snake, the child of the serpent that tempted Adam in the garden. Then they have to go down to wash away the poison in a stream, in case they die. So the deer reminds us of the baptism of Christ, when all sins are washed clean. Hubert, the patron saint of hunting, was turned from licentiousness back to the Lord God when he saw a stag in the forest with a golden cross in its antlers.’

Rannoch winced with pain. As the noise hummed around him he could feel a hand on his leg and something being rubbed into the fur. It stung at first, but then Rannoch felt his leg begin to tingle with a deepening warmth that eased the pain.

‘But I prefer the old legends,’ the boy’s father went on, ‘about Herne.’

‘Herne,’ said Liam excitedly.

‘Yes. In the north some say Herne talks through the deer and even takes on the deer’s shape. When he does not come in the shape of a man.’

‘Do you believe in Herne, Father?’ asked Liam.

‘Herne the Hunter?’ said his father gravely.’Nay, Liam, not really. But I believe he’s a way of talking about man and about animals. Like all good stories.’

‘Well I believe in Herne,’ said Liam, ‘and I shall call my calf Herne.’

‘If he lives,’ said the boy’s mother quietly.

‘Well, Herne needs rest – all the rest he can get,’ said her husband. ‘But now I must be gone. There’s to be a parley.’

‘A parley?’ said the boy excitedly.

‘Aye, there’s news from King Alexander. The Norsemen have been raiding again from the Western Isles. Haakon is all over the north.’

‘Will you have to fight them, Father?’ asked Liam, suddenly more interested in this talk of fighting than in the deer.

‘One day, perhaps,’ answered his father, ‘if the Great Land is ever to be united or free. Haakon’s rule in the Isles must be brought to an end. We must raise the west. There will be war and much bloodshed before the land is healed.’

Rannoch opened his eyes. The voices had drifted away and the little deer found himself alone again. He stirred uncomfortably, but the fire warmed him and his leg felt a little better. Most of all, the weight of fear he had felt when the humans were near him had lifted, though the strange smells in the room still made him sick at heart. He closed his eyes once more.

In the coming weeks, Rannoch felt as though he was drifting through a land of dreams. He was always by the orange light and his head buzzed with the sound of human voices that haunted both his waking hours and his sleep. He couldn’t understand anything of their meaning and whenever they were near he felt afraid and he hated the unnatural scent that they carried.

But they brought him milk to drink and berries and grass to eat and with time he grew less afraid of the boy, who would come to him and stroke his head and rub a strange green leaf onto his leg. The boy would sit and watch him intently, which always made Rannoch uncomfortable, for he found that he could never hold his gaze for more than a few moments.

Both awake and asleep, Rannoch struggled to remember what had happened. With time, some of the pictures of his journey began to come back to him. He remembered things fitfully, or all jumbled together like leaves swirling in a storm. He remembered being on a hill with other deer whose names he didn’t know but who he felt were friends. He remembered the chase above the loch and hiding in the bracken with a little fawn who he felt especially close to. He remembered a park, and a fawn being carried off by a vixen.

But with these images were mixed others that seemed not to belong to him at all. Images of a deer called Starbuck and a pair of magic antlers. Of talking to a wolf and of feeling a terrible pain in his head. And the one memory that came most clearly to Rannoch was that for some reason he had always been running.

Rannoch had little idea of the length of time he had been with the humans, when one day the boy came to him and lifted him up and carried him outside. The day was bright and a breeze was blowing and Rannoch scented the air delightedly, feeling a sudden strength flowing back into his limbs.

The boy carried the deer over the grass and, as Rannoch looked back, he saw the place where he guessed he must have been kept while the humans fed and tended to him. The walls were made of rough stone, and piled on the top was earth and grass. Smoke was rising from the roof and twisting up into the blue sky.

The boy stopped and Rannoch found himself being lowered to the ground. Rannoch watched him as he walked over to a long wooden fence and, lifting a piece of cord, pulled at it. A part swung away and then the boy began to beckon to the deer. Rannoch eyed him nervously. Then he slowly began to understand that the boy was asking something of him. He was asking him to get up.

Rannoch began to struggle and as he did so he realized that the pain in his leg was now only a dull ache. Suddenly he was on his feet. He tottered and then stepped forward. Rannoch could stand. He ran forward into the field. In the distance he could see a great expanse of hills and sweeping trees and, at that moment, his heart began to soar.

It was several months since Rannoch had been rescued from the pit and the little pedicles on his head had grown. The deer could now clearly remember much of what had happened to him, though not his own name and nothing of the Prophecy. He had spent his time in the fenced field, eating and regaining his strength as his leg healed fully. Every day the boy would come down to see him and Rannoch had grown used to his call and would run up to him and even, at times, let him stroke his muzzle or touch the bumps on his head. He felt grateful to the boy and, though he could not understand his words, when they were together the deer sometimes imagined he could tell what the boy was thinking.

There was something else that drew him strangely to the human fawn, for he would often see Liam riding back to his dwelling on a horse, like the creatures he had seen in the gully. The horse never showed any interest in the deer, but where before it had only struck horror in him, as Rannoch got used to the sight, it filled him with wonder that an animal like himself should, so calmly, allow the boy to mount its back and come when he called. Rannoch began to think that the humans must have a very strange power indeed.

But now something happened that caused a deep stirring in Rannoch. He felt it first as an itching in his head. Then, one morning, two antler spikes broke through his pedicles. As the suns passed, they rose straight up above his head; twin tines, furred in velvet. They grew at extraordinary speed and soon Rannoch had his first head. But somehow this made him more and more restless. His frustration at not being able to remember who he was brought the anguish of longing to his heart too. He would run around the field, tossing his head to and fro and stamping the earth. Liam was fascinated by this and every day he came down to watch the deer. In turn, this began to irritate Rannoch and the boy’s interest would send him running angrily to the far side of the field. More suns and moons passed and, as summer ripened, Rannoch began to rub his antlers against the fence, pulling off the soft fur that covered them as he did so, so that the tines stood out like birch branches.

‘Why can’t I remember who I am?’ Rannoch would say desperately to himself as he scraped and buffeted with his antlers. There was some memory he was reaching for in particular, that he knew was close at hand, but which frightened him terribly.

Rannoch stayed in the field near the humans’ dwelling, wrestling with his thoughts and his troubled memories as summer turned to autumn and the leaves began to fall. Autumn grew and Rannoch felt another unfamiliar sensation overwhelm him. He became more and more restive and he kept thinking of the Herla out there in the wild. Strangely, he could hardly stand to be with the boy now and whenever Liam came down to give him extra feed, Rannoch would ignore his calls.

Rannoch suddenly felt angry at the boy and desperately confused in himself. A deep longing was growing inside him. The deer would stand in the field and bellow and bark and the shaking anger that welled up inside him made him want to hit out. Sometimes, Liam would come and stand watching this for ages on end, and when Rannoch looked into his eyes he recognized something in them; a strange kind of violence that made him even more nervous. Rannoch would run away again but now he thought he must be sick, for he did not understand that the spirit of Anlach was burning in his blood.

Anlach passed and with it Rannoch’s restlessness. Winter settled round him; the snows fell thick and fast, and in the neighbouring hills the Lera sought desperately for food and shelter. But in the field the boy brought Rannoch dry straw, bark that tasted of wood smoke, and delicious ferns and conkers that he had gathered from the forest. In the bitter cold, Rannoch took this gratefully and after a while the scent that came with it no longer made him sick.

So at last spring came again and then something else happened that made Rannoch question. It was a rainy spring day and Rannoch had been buffeting at the fence with his head when his right antler suddenly snapped off. Though Rannoch knew that this must be natural, he looked down with surprise at the antler lying there in the grass. Liam was even more startled when he saw it there that evening. The boy bent down and picked it up and his young eyes opened in wonder as he began to examine the strange object. He turned it in his hands, and ran his fingers across the roughish, wood-like surface.

‘It’s like a branch, Herne,’ whispered Liam wonderingly. Rannoch watched him from a distance and though he didn’t understand Liam’s words, he noticed that the sound of the boy’s voice was changing, the water becoming deeper.

His second antler fell on its own and Rannoch walked bareheaded once more, as he had done as a fawn. As the hot sun came, Rannoch’s antlers began to grow again and this time, as well as the spikes, two brow tines sprouted forwards. Although Rannoch couldn’t see them and there was no feeling in the antlers except at the base, he sensed that they were growing stronger, and when he scraped the velvet across the fence he found that by twisting his head he could score a line in the wood. It gave him great pleasure to catch the beam of the fence between the tines of his antlers, push against the wood and feel it bend under his weight.

Then one day in high summer, when the sun was blazing down and Rannoch had shed his velvet and was standing at the far end of the fenced field looking out thoughtfully towards the hills, the deer suddenly heard a strange sound. It was just below him. As he looked down Rannoch was amazed to see the grass move, then the earth seemed to swell and bubble up and a head popped up through the ground.

Rannoch eyed the mole coolly. He hadn’t forgotten how the creature had deserted him.

‘At last. At last I’ve found you,’ cried the mole breathlessly.

‘What do you want?’ said Rannoch coldly.

‘I wanted to see if you were all right,’ answered the mole, pulling his whole body through the ground and shaking off the earth.

Rannoch looked down with little interest.

‘You know I’ve felt terrible ever since I left you,’ said the mole. ‘But really, there was nothing I could do. Then I heard from the moles around here that there was a deer living near the humans and I wondered if it was you. When they told me you had a white mark on your forehead, I knew.’

‘White mark?’ said Rannoch suddenly.

‘Yes,’ said the mole, ‘that looks like a leaf.’ Rannoch felt a violent jolt to his stomach.

‘Say that again,’ he whispered.

‘What?’

‘About the mark.’

‘You’ve got a birthmark that looks like a leaf.’

Rannoch suddenly turned and, to the mole’s amazement, he ran straight towards the edge of the field. He stopped at the fence and stood pawing the ground and staring out at the hills.

‘On his brow a leaf of oaken,’ whispered Rannoch fearfully.

In his mind Rannoch was grasping towards something and it was as though a voice had begun in his head. A voice from the past that was telling him things from his dreams. A part of Rannoch didn’t want to listen, while a part of him yearned to know everything.

Over the next three suns Rannoch’s memories grew in strength. First he remembered the flight from the herd, then why he had had to flee. Next came the journey and Bhreac’s death. The Prophecy came back slowest of all, for the deer’s subconscious had suppressed what he most feared. But it was linked with those deer he had seen in his dreams, who he knew were close to him and who he longed to recall. As their names came back to him – Willow and Bankfoot, Thistle and Tain, Peppa, and his own mother, Bracken – all the associated memories returned too. Rannoch shuddered as those other names returned to haunt him: Blindweed, Drail and Sgorr.

When Rannoch met the mole again, at the far side of the field, he looked very grave.

‘I remember now,’ said Rannoch, ‘what my name is.’

‘Well?’ said the mole.

‘My name is Rannoch.’

‘Rannoch.’ The mole nodded.

‘Yes, and it was because of this mark that we had to flee the home herd.’

‘The home herd?’

‘That’s right. From Drail and Sgorr. It’s all because of the Prophecy.’

‘Prophecy!’ said the astounded mole.

‘Yes. There’s a prophecy about Herne and the deer.’

The poor mole was so confused by this that he just shook his little head. Rannoch lay down and began to chew the cud thoughtfully. The mole shuffled closer.

‘Tell me,’ he said quietly, looking up at his twin pointed antlers.

‘Tain taught it to me before I left the loch.’

‘Go on,’ said the mole.

Rannoch looked warily at the mole. But then he began to recite the verses that old Blindweed had recited to the young fawns on the hill.

‘When the Lore is bruised and broken,
Shattered like a blasted tree,
Then shall Herne be justly woken,
Born to set the Herla free.
On his brow a leaf of oaken,
Changeling child shall be his fate.
Understanding words strange spoken,
Chased by anger, fear and hate.
He shall flee o’er hill and heather,
And shall go where no deer can,
Knowing secrets dark to Lera,
Till his need shall summon man.
Air and water, earth and fire,
All shall ease his bitter pain,
Till the elements conspire
To restore the Island Chain.
First the High Land grass shall flower,
As he quests through wind and snow,
Then he breaks an ancient power,
And returns to face his woe.
Whenthe lord of lies upbraids him,
Then his wrath shall cloak the sun,
Andthe Herla’s foe shall aid him
To confront the evil one.
Sacrifice shall be his meaning,
He the darkest secret learn,
Truths of beast and man revealing,
Touching on the heart of Herne.
Fawn of moonlight ever after,
So shall all the Herla sing.
For his days shall herald laughter,
Born a healer and a king.’