The Mark of the Horse Lord (8 page)

‘It isn’t heath fire,’ Sinnoch said. ‘That is the smoke of the Northern Wall cooking its supper.’

It was late into August by now, and the dust-cloud rose from the track under the ponies’ hooves, and settled slowly again after their passing; a grey bloom of dust that powdered beasts and men from head to foot, parched the throat and stung the eyes, and seemed to fur over even the sound of the bell that the train leader wore about his neck to warn off the evil eye. And Phaedrus, constantly on the move to and fro along the plodding line, enviedVron, who had been Sinnoch’s fore-rider for a score of years, ambling ahead on his small, ragged pony, his feet almost brushing the ground on either side, his old sheepskin hat hanging loose and easy on the back of his head.

It was a very small pack-train, only four burdenbeasts and the three riding ponies; for Sinnoch was a horse-trader before all else. Once a year he made the trip south with a score or more rough-broken three-year-olds, herded by drovers on little shaggy ponies much as sheep-dogs herd their flock. He would give the lads a few days to make Corstopitum a still wilder place than it was the rest of the year, and then send them north again, and himself follow later with no one but Old Vron and maybe one other, his ponies’ yellow balecloths laden with a few luxuries chosen with care and long experience of knowing his market: a few fine bronze weapons, ornaments of amber and jet, a cup of violet-coloured glass, a length of emerald silk, a couple of jars of Etruscan wine slung one on either side of a pack-saddle.

Phaedrus had asked him one day why he did not keep the drove-boys with him to act as guard for his small, rich cargo, and Sinnoch had said, ‘Ah now, that would be to cry aloud to the very hills that the goods in my bales were worth taking; and what could a handful of drove-lads do against a rieving party?
Na
,
na
, it is better not to be putting ideas into honest folks’ heads.’

A short while later they had crested the ridge, and were looking down at the Cluta marshes again, where the river flung one of its great loops northwards. A broad tongue of low, sodden land reaching far back into the hills, flaming with gorse along its backward fringes, blurred with saltings and mouse-pale dunes towards the coast. And away across the flatness of it, where the land began to rise again, was the square-set mass of a big turf and timber fort with the usual huddle of native bothies in the stockaded cantonment; and on either side, the turf banks and ditches of the Wall itself. The Wall that ended, westward, in some kind of blockhouse or signal-station far out on the marshes, and eastward, climbed away and away on to higher ground, strung with other forts – Phaedrus could make out two, from the low ridge where they had checked to breathe the ponies – until it lost itself in distance and heat-haze and the great, dust-dark Caledonian Forest that lay like a thundercloud over all the inland country. And beyond the Wall, range behind range, trembling and transparent on the sultry air, the mountains of the North, seeming less substantial than the smoke of the cooking-fires that hung above the fort . . .

Eight years ago, the smoke hanging above the forts of the Northern Wall had been war-smoke, the dark smitch of burning timbers, rolling over dead men in the ditch. That was the last time that Dalriads and Caledones had joined spears; the second time that the Wall of Lollius Urbicus had gone up in flames. But each time it had been patched up and garrisoned again, and now the smoke was the quiet evening smoke of cooking-fires and the place looked secure and set in its ways between the marshes and the wooded hills.

‘A pleasant change, to see smoke rising from a hearth again,’ Phaedrus said, his mind going back over the cold hearths, the remains of deserted villages, the steadings and cattle-folds whose stones were laced together with brambles and bindweed about their doorways, that they had passed more than once on their way north. Oh, there had been living settlements, too, but even they had had a chill about them: too many old women with hollow faces, too few men, and too few children.

‘
Aiee!
Lollius Urbicus made a fine clean sweep of Valentia while he was about it,’ Sinnoch said. He spoke the General’s name as though it smelled: a tone which Phaedrus had heard before among the men of the North. ‘More than forty summers ago, but the scars still show.
And
still ache when the wind is in the east, as old scars have a way of doing.’

Phaedrus glanced round, with quickly raised brows. ‘Meaning another rising, one day?’

But the merchant, sitting loosely on the saddle rug, the great ox-hide whip resting across his pony’s withers, had nothing in his eyes but distance and heat-haze. ‘Maybe one day when and if the lowland tribes grow strong enough. That won’t be in your time or mine; Lollius Urbicus knew what he was doing when he made his demands on the province – draughts for the Auxiliaries has a fine respectable sound to it – and marched all the young men away to serve the Eagles at the other end of the Empire.’

‘One might be calling that a kind of murder,’ Phaedrus said thoughtfully, ‘only the murder of a whole people instead of one man.’

Sinnoch’s voice was dryly and bitterly amused. ‘Ah,
na
, it is just the Red Crests making the
Pax Romana
.’ He whistled to the pack team, cracking the long whip above their backs to set them moving again.

‘And then he built his fine new Wall,’ Phaedrus pondered, as they plodded on and the choking dust-cloud rose again, ‘to say to all men: “The
Pax Romana
runs to
here
. This far the sun shines, and beyond it is the dark, that had best keep out.”’

‘Not quite. There were forts along that line a hundred years ago, so I’ve heard, and there are still outpost forts and the old warship base at Are-Cluta, a full day’s trail beyond it. And as for keeping anything in or out . . .’

‘What purpose does it serve, then?’

Sinnoch shrugged. ‘It serves as a check-line, by which the Red Crests can keep track – after a fashion – of who comes and who goes, and how many, and how often.’

‘After a fashion?’

‘There are ways through without troubling the Red Crests. There are the coastwise marshes at either end, if one knows the tides and troubles to learn the habits of the patrols. But the game’s not worth the lamp-oil unless there is something of especial value to be smuggled through.’

‘Such as?’

‘Arab mares, for instance. The Romans will wink quite happily at the odd stallion, fairly bought in the horse-market, going through to improve the stock – the more so that they buy our three-year-olds for Cavalry re-mounts. But mares are another matter.’

Phaedrus nodded. A stallion could sire many foals in a year, but a mare bears only one. That was why no War Host ever put its mares in the fighting-line unless it was desperate for horses, why no province would allow good mares out over its borders if they could possibly be stopped. ‘Then if it is only to improve the stock, why not leave the mares alone and bring north only the stallions that the Red Crests wink at?’

Sinnoch looked round at him. ‘A charioteer, you have been, among other things, but it is in my mind that you know little of horse-breeding. Have you never heard that a horse gets his strength from his sire, but his courage from his dam? And valiant though our little hill-run mares may be, there’s nothing like an Arab mare for setting fire in her foals. Besides, it would be a poor cold world in which a man was only doing what the Red Crests allowed.’

Phaedrus said softly, ‘Have you taken mares through, yourself?’

‘I may have done, from time to time, when I was young and rash. If it served no other purpose, it taught me the hidden ways of my own hills as few save the little Dark People know them. But
this
trip we are not looking for trouble; also I’ve a mind to visit an old friend who keeps the wine-shop in the Cantonment yonder. So tonight we shall sleep safe and respectable under the fortress walls, and pass through with Rome’s blessing in the morning.’

And so late that evening, having unloaded the pack bales and left Sinnoch in the back room of the wine-shop, exchanging the news of the Frontier with his old friend, who proved to be an immensely fat old woman in a dirty pink tunic, Phaedrus and Vron took the ponies down to water them at the stream below the fort, that, born somewhere among the furze and birch scrub inland, came down in a chain of looped shallows and widening pools on its way to join the Cluta.

A patrol of the Frontier Scouts had just come in and were watering their mounts, and Phaedrus, well aware of the cast-difference between pack-pony and cavalry mount – though, indeed, these particular cavalry mounts were just as rough-coated as his own charges and not much larger – followed Vron down to the pool below that at which the troop ponies were drinking. It was cool under the alders that trailed their branches towards the water, though the midges still danced in the sunlight, and a breath of air stole up from the marshes, salt-laden after the heat of the day. You could see the long, soft breath of it coming, silvering the marsh grasses all one way. Phaedrus and the old fore-rider dismounted, knotted up the halters, and let the ponies make their own way down the bank, and the cold peat-brown water rippled round the seven eager muzzles as the weary little beasts dropped their heads to drink.

Vron squatted on to his heels, his back against an alder trunk, tipped his sheepskin hat over his eyes and became instantly and peacefully one with the landscape. But Phaedrus, making sure that the halters were secure so that the ponies could roll without danger of getting entangled, before going back to the corral, kept one eye on the men upstream.

He had seen bands of the Frontier Scouts once or twice since coming north of Hadrian’s great wall, but they were a strange breed to him, not like the Legionaries, or the Auxiliaries of the Wall garrisons who came down to Corstopitum on leave. Of course he had heard stories . . . They were lean, rangy men who he knew could cover the hills on foot almost as quickly as on horseback if need be; many of them British born. A wild lot, the stories said, but said it in a tone of unwilling respect, and watching them as they stood by, relaxed but watchful while the ponies drank, one leaning against a hazel trunk and whistling through his teeth, one frowning over some adjustment to his bow – a light horn bow such as the Cretan Auxiliaries used, good for work on horseback; two more arguing softly and fiercely, an argument that looked as though it had gone on all day and might well go on all night, but each with an eye on his mount to make sure that he drank what he needed and no more, Phaedrus could believe something of their reputation and understand something of the respect. No Legion would have been seen dead in their company, breeched like barbarians, wolfskin cloaked, some with the wolf’s head drawn forward over their own in place of cap or helmet. Something about them seemed familiar, waking an odd pang of longing in Phaedrus that surprised and puzzled him, until he realized that it was the oneness of the pack, the strong bond that he had known in the Gladiators’ School.

But the little, red-roan pack-mare was water-greedy, and in seeing that she did not guzzle half the pond and give herself colic, he lost track of the Frontier Scouts until a twig cracked, and he looked round to see that the Captain of the band had come strolling down the stream side with an eye cocked on the ponies.

He nodded towards the mare. ‘She looks as though she had a bit of breeding to her.’

‘She’s not—’ Phaedrus began, instantly on the defensive.

And the other laughed. He was a thin, very dark man, maybe in his late twenties, with a hooked nose too big for his narrow face, and a pleasant pair of eyes set deep and level on either side of it. ‘Ah no, I’m not accusing her of Arab blood! I was thinking merely that she seemed a bit too good for pack duty. She might make a hunting-pony. I wonder if Sinnoch would sell her.’

Phaedrus, beginning to coax the mare back from the water (‘Enough, greedy one! Back, now! Back, I say!’), looked round at the soldier. ‘You know my master?’

‘I have been in these parts three years now – seen him through three times into Valentia with his re-mounts, and three times back into the hills again with his wine and amber. Everyone on this sector of the Wall knows Sinnoch, and relies on him for news of the outer world. But as to the mare—’

‘You had better ask him.’

‘Maybe I will.’ The man had put up a hand that was thin and dark like himself, and began fondling the mare’s wet muzzle as she turned unwillingly from the water, coaxing her to him. ‘There’s my girl. See, we are friends already, you and I.’ But his gaze was still on Phaedrus’s face, considering; and suddenly he said, ‘You’re a new man of Sinnoch’s, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And like the mare, you have not the look of the pack-train.’

‘I have been other things – more than one – in my time.’

‘Among them, perhaps, a gladiator?’

Phaedrus’s head jerked up. ‘I gained my wooden foil something over two months ago.’

‘So-o. This seems an unlikely way of life for a gladiator to turn to.’

‘It’s meat and drink. My kind still needs to eat, even when the arena gates are closed to us. Is it written all over me, then?’

‘It is my business to know the looks of fightingmen. You are a fighting-man, but you have the look that does not come from Legionary training.’

Phaedrus grinned. ‘Is it only the training then, that makes the war hound or the arena wolf?’

‘Generally something more, I grant you. Assuredly the gladiator, once trained to the sand, makes a very bad soldier.’

‘I was right then. I did think to go up to the Fort – that was at Corstopitum; but I reckoned it would be a waste of time.’

The other nodded, his hand still on the little mare’s neck, while she nuzzled with delicately working lips against his breast. Then he added abruptly, ‘The Frontier Wolves, of course, might be another matter. We also make very bad soldiers by Legionary standards.’

Phaedrus was silent a moment in blank surprise. ‘You would not be offering me a Scout’s dirk for my wooden foil?’ he said at last.