The Golden Strangers

  HENRY TREECE was born in the West Midlands in December 1911. Educated at Wednesbury High School he won a scholarship to Birmingham University where he graduated in 1933. War-time service as an intelligence officer with R. A. F. Bomber Command interrupted a very fine teaching career. His literary career began as a poet; Messrs Faber published four volumes. Contact with George Orwell helped him enter the world of radio broadcasting of verse plays, short stories and schools programmes. In 1952 came Treece’s first historical novel, The Dark Island, and during the years until his death in June 1966 he wrote a succession of Celtic novels for adults, including The Great Captains, The Golden Strangers and Red Queen, White Queen, as well as the Greek novels Electra, Jason and Oedipus. The Green Man in 1966 was the last adult work. His work also included criticism and a number of co-edited anthologies War-Time Harvest, Transformation and others. Among the many historical novels for children are the Roman books Legions of the Eagle and The Eagles Have Flown; the trilogy Viking’s Dawn, The Road to Miklagard and Viking’s Sunset;Man with a Sword (Hereward the Wake); and the much praised posthumously published The Dream Time. Mary Treece, his widow, lives in Abingdon, in Oxfordshire.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Barley Dream

  PART ONE - Dark Folk 1: Strangers

  2: Hunters

  3: Fishers

  4: Craig Dun

  5: Rua Fish

  6: Little Death

  7: Hair Wolf!

  8: Hunting

  9: Barley Warning

  10: Barley Rape

  11: Barley Night

  12: Asa Wolf

  13: Long House

  14: Awakening

  15: Preparation

  16: Victory

  PART TWO - Light Folk 17: Waiting

  18: Sailing

  19: Escape

  20: Landing

  21: Farewell!

  22: Meeting

  23: Dancing

  24: Little Dog

  PART THREE - Day and Night 25: Fire

  26: Golden Moments

  27: Cradac

  28: Building

  29: Feasting

  30 : Morning

  31: Child

  32: Night

  PART FOUR - Dawn 33: Barley Dream Ends

  Notes on Perception and Vision

  Introduction

  I step from a land no eye has seen

  To a land no hand may ever hold;

  My name with the sea’s cold tears is green,

  My words are the wind’s words graved in gold.

  That first verse from the first poem in Henry Treece’s first published book of poems (Invitation and Warning, 1943) is probably as good a statement as any of Henry Treece’s outlook. A Romantic who followed a form of anarchism (he received encouragement in the thirties from Sir Herbert Read), he was a leading light in the movement which called itself the New Apocalypse and his early fame was as a poet. His earlier novels (of which this is one) show more of this spirit, in my view, than do the later ones. He was always at his best on territory he ‘felt’ and I suspect he ‘felt’ Britain more than he did the Hellenic world of his later books (Jason, Electra, Oedipus). Even his anarchism was typically British. He came from more or less the same part of the world as J. R. R. Tolkien and his romanticism has something in common with Tolkien’s, though his prose, his imagination, his eye on the world, are all far tougher than anything Tolkien or any other Bagginseer could come up with.

  Even those of us now jaded by too many stones, too many mysterious ravens, too many Old Ones, too many portents, dooms, Celtic twilights and Saxon dawns, will find a freshness in Treece’s tales of Ancient Britain: perhaps because he was the first to imagine with clarity and realism what human beings were like and what their attitude to Corn Men, Green Men and even Chalk Men was likely to be in actuality: for his characters are not the romanticised adolescents of generic Stone books. Unless they are described as adolescents, they are usually mature men and women who know the score. They do not necessarily have the information, but they certainly have the experience. They might see things in magical terms, but they are rational. They are of their own time.

  Fundamentally what we are reading in The Golden Strangers is the story of one race’s fight for survival against a more powerful race equipped with a superior technology. This is the story of the centuries and it is a story which has yet to see a conclusion. It is set in a past which was in some ways simpler; but the issues are the same. The actions of the Great Powers in the Third World are not so very different from those of the Cattle Lords in the land of the People of the Hills, except the Cattle Lords are a little less hypocritical. It is worth remembering, that Indians are still being poisoned in Brazil according to semiofficial policy, because their land is in demand. One can read Treece, if one wishes, in this light: for an insight into the issues and the methods employed when one race embarks on the conquest of another. At least the Cattle Lords had no ethic to justify their actions, no sense of the future to rationalise their genocide.

  In this book equilibrium is achieved, if only for a while. The story continues. It continues in books which chronologically follow this one — The Dark Island, Red Queen, White Queen and The Great Captains. It continues in Britain to this day.

  Michael Moorcock

  Ladbroke Grove

  May 1979

  Barley Dream

  At last the ice withdrew over the edge of the, world and now, wherever willow did not grow, the wide plains swarmed with creatures, reindeer and buffalo, so that the masked Hunters forgot the thin days when they had dug deep in the ground for frozen roots and grubs. Now they had but to cast a spear to eat meat for a week.

  Then as darkness fled and sun smiled warmly on the land, the rains began to fall. Trees planted themselves wherever they could find a footing—birch and pine, oak and elm, hazel and indomitable alder.

  So the hunting grounds became fewer, for the trees’ great army had occupied the land, and at last men looked towards the sea for food, forgetting the sweet taste of deer and giant ox.

  At length, majestic, sea roared down the tree-hung valley, and one golden morning ah island stood separate, new-born, afraid with loneliness. Those who came now must cross in boats, must dare death in the valley, among the blackened oaks.

  This was the way the dark folk came, the little ones who brought the barley seeds.

  The hungry hawk, poised high above the hills, at last looked down on a land that shaped itself into something it had not been before, an island that had made up its dark mind to live, in its fashion, to give home to men, to such men as were brave enough to help in the remaking of a world.

  And this hawk saw the roads these men trod for themselves, white snail-tracks, high above the dusky woods, running the length of the land wherever ridges were; saw the great stones pointing, stark fingers to the sky, from hill-top to hill-top, guiding the dark ones down their spider’s webs; saw the brown villages, clustered hives, grabbed in a hedge of thorn, whose fires must never be allowed to die; saw the strange barley-fields, set round with lumps of chalk.

  Kaleidoscopic eye swept over hill-top corral where the short-horned cattle lowed; swept down the slope to where a shepherd lad leaned with his back against an ancient tomb, dreaming of barley-cakes and honeyed milk, leaving his dogs to watch the thin-legged flock.

  The hawk’s keen eye followed the flax-field down, down past the clustered bracken in the wood. There by a fallen oak a blind man lay, happy in sunlight, grunting to his herd.

  The hawk’s red eye tasted the jostling swine, picked out the farrowing sow who struggled from the crowd into the sheltering patch of willow herb, swollen with time.

  “Now! Now! ” the buzzard’s cold heart urged.

  “Now! Now! ” called beak and talons back.

  The hawk’s stone eye saw feast below it laid, red meat among the fern—and stooped to strike.

  Then stone to stone, flint arrow-head struck deep, and plummet to the earth the buzzard fell, grey feathers scattered careless on the herd, among the squeaking new-born farrowlings.

  Archer, smiling in his dark-eyed way, watched tired sow take up the staring hawk, watched those gold eyes ringed round with blood’s bright hue, stare fearless down the glistening dark maw.

  So hawk was paid. He’d known the best, the worst.

  The Archer watched the sow crunch up the bird. More hawk than swine, regretting the quick loss of that dear arrowhead, he walked up to the village, wondering.

  The land was bom. Yet with its birth had come another thing that made men fear the force that gave them life.

  ‘A payment must be made,’ they said, ‘for nothing comes of nothing.’

  They said, ‘The bread we eat calls out for blood. Out of the belly of the earth it comes. Into that belly we must pour our blood if we would prosper. Nothing is given for nothing, barley asks for blood.’

  So grew the Barley Dream, out of men’s fear, and so the Earth, as though anxious to please her new children, created signs for them to follow, granting their wayward hearts permission to shed blood in the furrows every year.

  PART ONE - Dark Folk

  1: Strangers

  Two-fingers stood on the bare chalk hill-top, black as a stone against the red sun. He was quite still. Even the clay beads on the thong round his neck had stopped clinking against each other. He was listening, his thin dark face screwed up like an otter’s, his broad nostrils opening and shutting as though he might find the scent he wanted, wanted
and feared, if only he tried hard enough.

  Then it came to him like a harsh slap in the face, and he knew. ‘Hair! Hair!’ he said to himself, for in his village below the hill no man must ever name a wolf. That would be the quickest way to bring them howling round the stockade at night.

  He reached down to his cow-hide belt for the polished greenstone axe with his right hand. Then he remembered and dragged the axe out with his left. His right hand was only a finger and a thumb, barely healed yet, and they would not hold an axe. It had happened only recently, the adder-bite, when he was gathering red berries, and did not see the coiling creature till it had bitten him. He was not used to it yet, just a thumb and a finger.

  As he grasped the axe, he recalled the Old Man curing him of the bite. His arm was swollen and red in long streaks when they found him. The Old Man made them hold him down while he did what had to be done with his keen black-flint knife. Two-fingers did not remember it all. But he remembered someone screaming, and then he was home again, in his mother’s house under the stockade. The Old Man made a paste with the three fingers and tied it to his swollen arm with strips of flax cloth. Two-fingers was able to walk and talk again when three moons had come and gone. He was grateful to the Old Man. That must have been strong magic. Now he must repay the Old Man and tell him quickly about Hair.

  Below him the little sheep nibbled at the short wiry grass. They had smelled nothing. Nor had the two young dogs who lay beside them. Two-fingers was angry with the dogs for not smelling Hair. He thought of hitting them on their heads, just hard enough, with the axe, but then he remembered they were little more than puppies and did not know much as yet. The Old Man had asked for their mother, the trained bitch, at the time of fires, before snow-falling. She went into the big fire, with the other animals. There was a baby in the same fire, one from a young man’s house, too poor yet to own animals. Two-fingers thought how lucky that man was, not to lose a trained sheepdog, as he had done. Yet the fire was a success, for the snows came and went quickly, and the Old Man was right. He had guided his people through the dark-year once more and into the light.

  Two-fingers drew out a little bone whistle, carved with bulls and stags. It was very old—older than the People of the Hill. His father had found it deep in the dank moss of the oak forest that swirled below the hill, about the river. Two-fingers only used it on special occasions like this, for he was afraid to waste its magic by blowing through it too often. It was made by the early folk, he knew, and they were powerful spirits. Now he blew it gently and the two dogs sprang silently into action, as though wakened from sleep, jostling the puzzled sheep down the hill.

  Two-fingers followed, looking fearfully over his shoulder from time to time, lest Hair was behind him. He wondered whether to drive the sheep over the hill’s shoulder to the next one, where the village had its great earthwork corral, protected with rampart and ditch. But perhaps there would not be time. He hurried on, turning his head away from the Long House that suddenly loomed out of the dusk, a fearsome hunchbacked thing. This was the place of long silence, where the most important of the People of the Hill went, back into the womb of Earth Mother, to lie in their rows, painted with bright red ochre to represent the blood of birth. Its stone entrance seemed to yawn at him and he struck himself hard on the temple with the antler shaft of the axe, as a gesture to Earth Mother. She let him pass on safely down the hill, so he knew that she was not too angry with him.

  An owl started from, a gorse bush and Two-fingers was almost sick with fright. At first he thought it was the man they had put at the bottom of the mine-shaft when they sank the new cutting for flint. His bones were still there and each miner touched them when he climbed down the notched tree-trunk in the morning on his way to work. That ensured a good day in the curving, treacherous galleries where the hard keen flints were dug with the antler-picks. Two-fingers barely remembered the man being put down there to bring luck, but he was always afraid of the place.

  Then his quick steps brought him to the last slope before the stockade. In his haste he almost passed the great, leaning stone, which they called ‘The Old Woman’ because of the two lumps which stuck out from it. He shuddered to think what might happen if he ever did forget, and ran back to bruise his jaw against the hard mossy surface before passing on. That was the law; all villagers must do that by night and by morning. Only the sick did not do it and they soon died, which was a proof of its importance.

  ‘Forgive me, Mother,’ he said, and then ran after the little sheep, who were already rubbing themselves against the oaken stockade.

  He had expected everyone to be excited when he shouted ‘Hair!’ as they swung the heavy gate wide for him to enter. But they only smiled in their dark slow way, and nodded as though it happened every day. Some of the women, the younger ones, even tapped their foreheads and then shrugged their shoulders.

  Two-fingers felt hurt: One of the men he spoke to shared a field with him. They had worked together, breaking that hard land with their pointed sticks and singing the Barley Song that would bring good crops:

  ‘Spring quickly, Barley Woman,

  There is blood in the furrows to feed you!’

  But this man only shrugged his shoulders like the women and stood aside.

  Puzzled, Two-fingers almost ran towards the Old Man’s warren. It was a cluster of huts, set about a bigger central one, connected to it by dry-stone passages through which a man might crawl on all-fours. The roofs reached high about a central kingpost, roughly thatched and pointed. Two-fingers ran towards the biggest one, where light from the fat-lamps glowed.

  The chief’s proud young son Garroch, met him at the curving doorway, pushing him hard against the windbreak and sticking a sharp flint knife against his throat.

  ‘There are strangers,’ he said. ‘Old Man must have quiet.’

  But Two-fingers would not be silent.

  ‘Hair! Hair is on the hill!’ he yelled.

  The talking in the house died down, then there was a little scurry of laughter. The Old Man had three proud wives who always made fun of the tribesmen like that.

  A deep voice said, ‘Come in, Two-fingers, and tell us about Hair then.’

  The shepherd broke free and ran into the great circular room. The light from the chalkstone lamps with their rush wicks was dim and the smoke from the fat-oil sent whorls of greasy blackness into the air. But Two-fingers saw, all the same, that strangers had come. He counted seven of them, squatting on their haunches before the Old Man. He could not wait to inspect them then, but ran forward and knocked his forehead before the Old Man, who sat serenely, draped with his ceremonial robe of deer-hide and wearing his thick black hair, that must never be cut, piled upon his head with bone pins, on the slate stool that had been fetched so far from the sunset for him.

  Two-fingers pretended to ignore the women who squatted behind the chief, giggling at him and shaking their jet ear-rings and bone-bracelets as they pointed derisively, but he saw their plump pale breasts moving as they laughed.

  ‘Hair is here on the hill, Old Man!’ he began.

  The Old Man smiled and shook his head. ‘Perhaps Hair can wait, Two-fingers,’ he said, taking the man’s wrists in his strong hands so that the power flowed into him and made him silent. ‘We must show our visitors something else than Hair.’

  The Old Man called to a slave girl who stood waiting with a wicker basket full of barley-bread for the guests. She flung a barley cake on to the earthen floor beside Two-fingers. The Old Man leaned forward and swiftly drew a circle about the little loaf with the point of the black flint knife, the one Two-fingers knew so well, the magic knife.

  ‘Take up the cake, friend,’ he said to the shepherd. ‘Eat with us now.’

  Two-fingers felt proud that the Chief should invite him and tried to take the cake. But something always seemed to push against his hand, something soft and furry, forcing it away from the bread and back over the circle. Behind him he heard a faint laugh.

  ‘I cannot reach it, Old Man,’ he said at last.

  The Old Man smiled and smoothed out the circle with his foot. Two-fingers grabbed out for the cake again. The furry thing had gone. It was easy now and he sat with the cake in his mouth, looking wide-eyed at the strangers, inspecting them for the first time.