Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff

on the rump with his clenched fist.
    Whitethroat went then, with a piteous puppy-whimpering, his head down and his proud bushy tail that came from his wolf father tucked between his legs. And Drem caught up his throw-spear and ran, with his shoulders hunched and the ball of tears swelling in his throat.
    When he reached the garth of the Chieftain’s steading, he found a little knot of boys already gathered before the empty doorway of the Boys’ House. Vortrix the Chieftain’s son, and a boy with a round head and a mouth like a frog whose name was Gault, and Luga kicking moodily at tussocks of coarse grass that grew against the wall. Otherwise there was no sign of life in the steading, save for the old hound sleeping on the dung heap as he had been on the day last autumn when the bronze-smith came, and a half tame mallard drake with his dun wives behind him, waddling about the brushwood pile. Drem walked across to the three boys. They opened their ranks for him, and the four of them stood and looked at each other andaway again, half grinning, but somehow a little uneasy. None of them spoke.
    Drem leaned against the wall of the Boys’ House. The flints in the wall were tawny and white and grey-blue. He had never really noticed flints before. One of them was striped grey and white and looked like a badger’s mask peering out of the wall. He watched the mallard drake, seeing the glint of metallic green on his wings as he turned in a gleam of sunlight. It was a pale, dry, windy day, with a constant changing of light as cloud and clear chased across the sky; and little whirls of chalky dust hurried about the steading garth, that stung when they got in one’s eyes. He wished someone would come. Old Kylan or some of the older boys—because until they did he was stuck and could not go forward into the start of the three years’ training time that must be got through before he was a warrior and could be with Whitethroat again. They must all be away to the hunting or the weapon practice; and he could hear the emptiness of the Boys’ House behind him.
    In a while, Urian the son of Cuthlyn came stalking across the steading garth with his thumbs in his belt, and brought their numbers up to five; and then fat Maelgan appeared, with little black-eyed Tuan in his shadow; and the gathering of that year’s New Spears was complete.
    There before the door of the Boys’ House they stood and looked at each other, still in silence. Drem saw them all with a new clearness, an awareness of them as though he had never seen them before; and it was the same with all of them. They had run and tumbled and fought together all their lives, like puppies of the same pack; but now, suddenly, they were aware of each other, and a little shy of each other, caught up in a relationship that was new to them.
    A sudden spatter of rain came down the wind, freckling the ground with dark, and streaking the flints of the Boys’ House wall; and a woman slave passed across the garth from the byre, carrying a high-shouldered milk pail, and turned to stare at them before she disappeared. They ignored her with anelaborate air of unconcern, trying to look as though they were not at all at a loss and were standing round the Boys’ House door because they chose to.
    But when she was gone, Vortrix hunched his shoulders and said, ‘It grows wet, here in the garth. Let us go inside.’
    ‘Will they not be angry?’ Tuan said doubtfully. Tuan was always inclined to be cautious.
    ‘I don’t see why. No one seems to be coming to tell us what we are to do.’
    Luga stopped kicking at the tussocks of grass. ‘So long as you remember if Kylan comes with his whip, that it was your idea!’
    It seemed a bold thing to do, to go in without leave; into the Boys’ House where none of them had ever been before; and their breaths caught a little at their own hardihood, as, one after another, following Vortrix, they ducked under the door curtain and prowled in out of the wind and