Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

the bright rain, and looked about them. After the sharp spring wind and the changing light out of doors, the air in the great round hut was still and heavy, and the light was dim and brown, thickened by the inevitable bloom of wood smoke over the shadows. There were sleeping stalls round the walls, spread with sheepskin over the piled fern, but they would be for the great ones, the lordly ones who had reached their second and even their third year; the likes of Drem would sleep like hounds around the central hearth. There was a half-made hunting bow before one of the stalls, and a cloak with a green patch at the shoulder in another; a clutter of cook pots beside the hearth and weapons stacked against the roof tree; and several pelts in various stages of curing hung from the rafters.
    The twelve-year-olds felt their own boldness in their chests. Here they were, for the moment, in possession of the Boys’ House, and they grinned at each other, strutting a little. The fire on the hearth had sunk low, to a red glow and a few charred logs in the midst of the white ash. ‘They have let the fire sink,’ Drem said. ‘They should be grateful to us for coming in and mending it for them before it goes out!’ And greatlydaring, he kicked the logs into a blaze, and threw on a couple of birch logs with the bark still on them from the pile beside the hearth. Vortrix had led them in here; he, Drem, would be the one to wake the fire. The logs were dry and the bark like tinder; a little tongue of saffron flame licked up, and the silver bark blackened and curled back, edged with red jewels. There was a sudden flare, a flickering amber light that warmed the shadows; and they looked at each other with kindling excitement born of their own boldness and the likelihood that the older boys would make them pay for it later.
    The sudden flare of the flame-light caught the bronze face of a great war shield that lay tilted against the roof tree as though some champion had just cast it down there, and woke sparks of shifting fire among the raised bosses with which it was covered. It caught at their attention, and they gathered round, looking down at it. Each of them knew a shield, maybe more than one, in their own homes; nevertheless, this one caught and held their interest. They squatted about it and heaved it up to examine it in the firelight. Truly it was a mighty shield, a hero’s shield, formed of layer upon layer of bull’s-hide, the whole face sheathed in shining bronze, and the bronze worked in circle within circle of raised bosses, the outermost circle lying just within the hammered strength of the shield rim, the innermost close against the thrusting swell of the central boss. And looking at it as the firelight played and ran on every curve, Drem thought it was like the spreading ripples made by a leaping fish, or when you dropped a pebble—or a brooch—into the water.
    ‘It is a fine shield,’ Maelgan said.
    ‘Ugh! It is heavy!’
    Urian thrust his arm through the straps, and staggered upright, panting a little under the weight, his fierce brown face flashing into laughter. He pulled a spear from among those against the roof tree, and stood straddling his legs and thrusting out his chest though the weight of the great shield dragged his shoulder down. ‘See! I am a man! I am a warrior already!Why should I spend three years running with little boys like you?’
    They pushed him over—it was quite easy, for he was off balance already with the weight of the great shield—and rubbed his nose in the fern; and Vortrix heaved the shield on to his own shoulder, and stood proud and bright-eyed in the firelight, braced under its weight. ‘I am a warrior too! I am the Chieftain, the lord of all your spears!’
    ‘Stop crowing, and let me try it,’ Luga said.
    One after another they all tried their strength with the great shield. Maelgan, who was the biggest of them all, with the slow strength of an ox, even managed to walk a few steps