Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [19]
But because he had come from the open tundra, it was above all on the bleak, silent high ground that Hwll liked to wander. In summer on a cloudless day, it often felt as though he could reach out and touch the sky; and when winter came and a biting east wind whipped the snow from the tops of the trees, the place reminded him still more of the vast, implacable emptiness of the tundra he had once loved.
It was, however, the midsummer of the year after their arrival that he discovered one of the greatest beauties of the area. He and Akun had wandered alone on to the high ground one sunny afternoon, and some miles north, they had come across a huge clearing. It had been made on a gently sloping hillside some thirty years before by a band of hunters who had camped there for several years and cut down all the surrounding trees. Cowslips grew there, and the delicate horseshoe vetch; but what puzzled Hwll was that the ground seemed to have a strange, blue colour, unlike anything he had ever seen before. What could it be? It was Akun who solved the problem. Laughing, she ran forward into the clearing, clapping her hands. As she did so, the blue field dissolved before his eyes, and upwards of a hundred thousand blue butterflies, startled, rose into the air and almost blinded him with their crazy flutterings of wings. These were the adonis blues and the chalkhill blues that made any empty spaces on the plain their special home. As he watched Akun in this cloud of blue wings, Hwll felt his heart once again leap for joy. Rushing to her, he pulled her to the ground and they made passionate love in the field.
For three years the families lived together in peace, and Hwll’s broad, craggy face creased into ever deeper lines of contentment as he watched his family grow. The boy, Otter, grew into a strong, stocky little fellow, bright and capable; he and Tep’s children took to hunting along the valleys in a pack and soon Otter had proved himself as adept as any of them in trapping the small animals they hunted. As for Vata, the little girl, she had Akun’s magnificent hazel eyes from birth and by the time she was eight she was so strikingly like her mother that it sometimes made Hwll burst out laughing; he delighted in her company and he was only sorry that he had promised her to Tep’s boy, who showed every sign of being as hard and untrustworthy as his father. But the promise had been made and it seemed he could do nothing about it. Despite this one regret, his joy seemed almost complete when, early in the second year of their new life he saw that Akun was going to have another child: and that summer she gave birth to a second fine son. It seemed then to the hunter that the goddess of the moon, to whom he sacrificed an animal every year, had blessed him and his family indeed.
As for Tep, he was glad no longer to be an outcast. He and Hwll often hunted together, and sometimes he would disappear down river in his dugout and return a few days later with pelican meat or some other delicacy from the lake, or with the bright plumage of one of the lake birds that Ulla, smiling for once, would weave into one of her baskets. Ulla’s own life changed little. Sometimes she would appear with a black eye or some other mark of the beatings Tep gave her from time to time; but she rarely complained about the life of drudgery she led.
It was not until the fourth year of the new settlement, in the summer, that an event took place which nearly destroyed both families.
The preceding winter had been exceptionally long and hard and in the middle of it, Ulla had fallen sick. Though she was still only twenty, the intense cold and her hard life