If Tula could have been in the damp dungeon, he would have seen that Garroch was already on his knees, with exhaustion and hunger, which left him little opportunity of showing any pride he might still have.
Of his followers, only two had survived the beating after their attempted escape, and now the three seldom spoke to each other, so weak and downhearted were they. Yet each morning the two tribesmen slithered across the floor from their sleeping place and touched their Chief’s hand, to show that they were still his men.
But Garroch hardly looked at them as they did this. He kneeled, or sat cross-legged, all day, his head bowed, his tangled hair filthy and lice-ridden now, the bones of his shoulders sticking up, pointed, as he folded his arms to relieve himself of their weight.
Now even his dreams had deserted him. He did not see the blue sky over the hill any more, or walk with his father and daughter and Mai Mai the dog. Earth Mother withheld such pleasant pictures from his mind, almost as though she too was punishing him.
He tried to think why this misfortune should have happened to him, and the answers were many—he had sheltered a woman who had killed her own father, he had shown weakness in the Corn Dance on the hill, he had deceived Earth Mother by taking Marrag’s place in the Long House, he had robbed the other flint-folk of their barley and their cattle so that his own folk might prosper. All these things might have offended the Gods.
He went over this every day, again and again, but now it did not seem useful any longer to pray to Earth Mother. She seemed to have made up her mind that he must die forgotten. Besides, he had nothing to offer, no sacrifice—unless it was part of himself. But even as he thought of this, his body shuddered with fear. It had suffered too much in the last weeks. It could no longer bear pain. Garroch lay down and turned his face to the wall, hoping that he might die in his sleep.
Yet he did wake again, to hear the big stone being rolled away from the door, and then in a sudden burst of sunlight to see Asa Wolf standing on the steps, his arms held out to embrace his blood-brother. And behind Asa there was the great sound of many cattle stamping the earth and lowing, so loudly that it sounded to Garroch like the beating of surf on the seashore.
For a while they looked at each other silently. Then Asa’s face lost its smile and he knelt before Garroch, weeping at his sad condition.
Garroch spoke first. He said. ‘Are you a ghost, my brother?’
Asa shook his head and said, ‘I am not ghost, Old Man. Though I was nearly a ghost before I crawled back to Craig Dun with the arrows in me. Yet I have survived.’
Garroch had to wait long before his thudding heart would let him speak again. Then he whispered, ‘Why are you here, my brother?’
And Asa said, ‘I come to take you back to your people. I come to pay your ransom to this Chief, so that he will set you free.’
Garroch said, ‘I hear the sound of many cattle. Is that my ransom?’
Asa answered, ‘Aye, that is your ransom—all the cattle we have, each bull, each cow, each calf.’
Garroch said, ‘That is a big price to pay for one so weak as I am. My people must love me to offer so much, to offer all their profit in our raids, for me.’
Asa lowered his eyes and said with a wicked smile, ‘My brother, Kaa Fox, and I told them that if they did not bring you back, we would leave them to their fate. They have relied on my brother’s warriors for some time now, for your own are scarcely ready to fight for their village. We told them that they must pay the ransom or we would take the cattle, for ourselves, so that they must lose it in any case.’
Garroch shook his head in sorrow. Then he clasped Asa’s hand and said, ‘I have two good brothers, I see.’
Then he gestured towards the wretches who sat with him in the dungeon, sharing his misfortunes. They smiled back, bright eyed at the prospect of freedom.
‘Will these friends come with us away from here?’ he asked. But Asa shook his head. ‘The Chief is a hard man,’ he answered. ‘He will set you free, Garroch, but he says that these must stay and take your place in whatever is to come.’
Garroch turned towards them and held out his hands. ‘There, you see, my brothers,’ he said, ‘our friend Asa has done what he could. What will you have me do now? Shall I stay with you so that we die together, as we expected; or shall I go back with Asa?’
They touched their foreheads on the back of his hand. ‘Go back, Old Man,’ they said. ‘We are but dogs. We are worth nothing. Go back and leave us.’
Garroch beat his head on the floor and wept. Then he said, not looking at them this time, ‘My brothers, I will come again for you, to fetch you from this place of death. Be alive when I come, for if you are not, I shall have yet another load to carry on my shoulders through my dreams.’
He got up then and went out with Asa. The two bowed down before him as he passed and did not raise their heads again until the stone had been rolled back across the doorway, shutting out the sunlight. Then they sat in silence, as they always did now, staring at each other.
Garroch stumbled forward, leaning heavily on the broad shoulder of his blood-brother. As he appeared from the depths of the prison-house, a gasp went up from the folk in the compound, for their enemy who was to be ransomed seemed so changed a man. His haggard face and dark-ringed eyes were those of an old man, they thought, remembering the hawklike glory of his body when they first took him.
In the centre of the compound, sitting amongst his wives and many children, was the Chief of the Village Under the Rocks. He had put on all his ceremonial splendour, the green-dyed lynx skin that acted as a hood, its foreclaws dangling down on either side of his face, his cloak of white bullhide, rubbed so thin and so shiny that it had the appearance of the finest cloth, his triple necklace of wolf-teeth, his great bone rings, his loin-cloth of blue linen, trimmed with the fur of the pine marten. His fleshy face was streaked with the juice of the woad plant and his beard and eyebrows had been redyed a deeper shade of black, which contrasted strangely with the long grizzled hair that hung down on to his bent shoulders.
As Garroch approached, he wrinkled up his eyes and began to chew more strongly on the barley grain with which he had filled his mouth while waiting for his prisoner to appear. He stroked his black beard, wondering whether he had done the wise thing in letting this man go for the ransom he had agreed on, or whether he might not have screwed more out of the folk at Craig Dun if he had waited. He wondered whether to send Garroch back into the prison and tell Asa Wolf that he needed even more cattle, and also many bags of barley, before the man could go home.
One of his wives, a woman many years older than he, sensed what was in his mind. She had that talent, which was why he feared her and kept her on as his wife—she always knew what he was thinking. She leaned towards him and said, ‘If you send him back he will die before his friend can fetch the new ransom. I see it in his eyes. He would not stand imprisonment any longer after being promised freedom.’
The Chief spat at her feet, meaning that she should hold her tongue on such an important occasion.
‘I shall do as I think best,’ he said, not knowing what he would do.
The woman inclined her head, as was befitting for a wife before a husband; but there was nothing slavish in the tone of her voice as she whispered, ‘I promise you, if you break your word now, that man who is with him, whom they call Asa Wolf, will leap on you and tear out your throat with his teeth. It is written in the pebbles at your feet.’
The Chief gave a start. Then, hurriedly, he reached forward with his right foot and scattered the little flints so that they lost the pattern they had had.
‘What now, O Knower of All Things?’ he said with a smile.
The woman sniffed with an endless cold in the head. Then she shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘The pebbles now say that if you send him back into the death-house, a stone will form inside your belly and swell there until it bursts you open, one night, when no one is with you to put stitches into the hole and save your blood from leaving you.’
The Chief said, ‘Have no fear, woman, I shall let him go.’
When Garroch stood before him, swaying, he said, ‘Hail, great Chief! Your folk have sent your cattle-price. You may go from us freely, and may Earth Mother be good to her son.’
But Garroch only stared into his eyes, unwaveringly, his hands clenched by his sides, his white lips twisted with hatred.
The Chief said hurriedly, ‘What has been done to you, was done to the body, not to the Chief in you. The spirit of the Chief in you has not been touched, you know that. We love and respect that spirit, my brother. It is only the wicked body that we punished for what it did to our old folk and children about the peaceful fires.’
For a while, Asa Wolf was afraid that Garroch would use his last strength to drag the fat Chief from his chair and gouge out his eyes, for Garroch’s fingers now began to twitch uncontrolledly. The Chief saw this too, and tried to back away as far as he could from the wild beast who stood before him. But then a shudder passed through Garroch’s body and his hands were still. The mood of killing had left him.
‘I understand,’ said Garroch. ‘What of my friends still in your prison house? Can they not come with me?’
The Chieftain shook his head sadly. ‘It is too late, my dear brother,’ he said. ‘For I gave orders that when you were taken from them, they were to be sent on the last journey, so that they should not suffer the loneliness of being without their Chief. They are already dead.’
Garroch muttered, ‘That is another load I must carry then.’
He turned away from the Chief, without a word or a sign of respect and began to stumble towards the hillside that would lead him out of this place of pain. Asa turned and followed him closely, lest he should fall down.
The Chief and his people watched the two go without a word. When they stood at last on the top of the basin, the old wife of the Chief said, ‘Those two are great ones, husband. You would have done well to grant Garroch’s request. Because you kill his friends, he will come back one day and put an axe-head into your neck.’
In fury the Chief turned and knocked the woman away from him, so that she fell on the ground. Losing all control, he shouted now to the group of warriors who stood nearest the prison house, ‘Roll back the stone! Go in and kill those dogs! I will not be brow-beaten by this woman any longer. She is no longer my woman. She is a witch and must die at the next burnings.’
But the woman did not seem to mind his words. She lay where he had knocked her, smiling up at him strangely and spreading a little group of pebbles with her hand.
At last she whispered to him as he watched her, wide-eyed, ‘So it has come to this at last! Very well, my husband, you shall see that you cannot escape the death. These pebbles bring something worse than Garroch’s axe to you!’
Suddenly he gave a choked cry and shambled at her. No man dared step forward to drag him from her. But at last he stood up, his broad-bladed hunting knife red, his flushed face moving in a silly smile.
The old woman coughed again and again, but still smiled in her mocking way.
‘You will never enjoy Garroch’s cattle,’ she said. ‘What a shame! Oh, what a shame!’
Then she began to laugh aloud, but in the middle of her laughter, she sank back and did not move again.
The folk lowered their eyes and went back into their huts. The Chief was left alone in the middle of the compound, weeping over the body of the only woman who had ever been of use to him.
That night his oldest son, the child of the woman he had killed, pushed a bone bird-arrow into the Chief’s ear, deep, with a savage thrust that broke the thing inside his head. There was no one else in the hut to help the Chief, though all in the village heard his high screaming, but were afraid to go to his aid for fear that someone else might be with him in the darkness, someone they all feared by day and by night.
They tried to make out what their Chief was yelling, but his hoarse words were not for men to understand.
As for Garroch and Asa, they passed away from that village in the daylight, pausing many times because Garroch was so weak. Once they sat on a little hillock and saw below them the vast herd of cattle, that had been Garroch’s ransom, being walked by many herdsmen and dogs towards a high hill corral. The lowing and the shouts and barking came clearly to Garroch’s ears, like taunting words.
‘My brother,’ he said, ‘this poor body is not worth a half of those.’ He pointed towards the great moving stream.
Asa Wolf took his hand and stroked it gently. ‘You are worth many hundreds of such herds, my brother,’ he said. ‘Yes, worth all the cattle that the hills have ever bred.’
Garroch looked at him strangely and said, ‘I would die, my brother, rather than let you speak a lie like that. Help me to be that man you boast of, Asa Wolf. Help me, I beg you, brother.’
And Asa Wolf put his arm about the Chieftain’s thin shoulders. ‘I shall help you, Garroch,’ he said, ‘or may this hand rot from my body, and the worm come inside my mouth.’
They slept in a little hollow and when the dawn came, they began their march once more towards Craig Dun. The buzzards hovered over them, but Asa Wolf only smiled, baring his teeth up at them.
‘Fly another way, little brothers,’ he called, ‘for down here you cannot hope to feed. Down here there are two who would pluck you from the air and crunch you up, wings and claws and all, if you came too close! Fly, fly, little brothers.’
The birds wheeled and flew away, far towards the east.
Asa Wolf shook his fist at them and smiled.
‘Coward hawks,’ he called. ‘If you but knew, there are two here who haven’t the strength to eat a dish of barley porridge!’
He smiled towards Garroch, who smiled back, happy now.
But it was not Asa’s threat that had called the birds away. The message had just reached them that a great army had landed at the place of the Fisherfolk, strange men in dug-out boats, with many dead cows and horses laden on their rafts. Better it was to fly far to such a feast than follow two men-things over the dry hills, waiting for one of them to fall. The pickings would be greater, if less sweet.