The Mark of the Horse Lord (9 page)

‘Hardly. But if you were to go to the Commandant at Credigone, I
think
you might not find it a waste of time.’

They stood confronting each other while the slow heartbeats passed; the silence full of the soft stamping and sucking of the horses, and the woodwind call of an oyster-catcher from the marshes. Phaedrus thought, with detachment, what it would be like to break away from the wild venture he was bound on, and ride behind this man or another of his kind, one of a closeknit company again. It was a thought to play with for an instant, like a little sharp dagger that one throws up and catches by the blade . . .

Then he shook his head. ‘Too late now; I’ve another trail to ride.’

‘No turning aside from it?’

Phaedrus had a sudden vision of the kind of thing that would happen to him if he tried to turn aside from this particular trail now; and knew in the same instant that if there had been no bargain made in the back room of the ‘Rose of Paestum’, no mark like a blue-and-crimson four-petalled flower tattooed on his forehead under the close Phrygian cap, still he would have done no more than play with the thought for an instant.

‘No turning aside. To speak plain, I’d not care to spend the next twenty years patrolling this desolation of Valentia, with a skirmish with cattle-raiders now and then by way of salt in the stirrabout. Not that I’d be lasting twenty years. I’d be cutting my throat by spring.’

‘So? Are you so much of a townsman? The hills are lonelier, north of the Wall, than the hills of Valentia.’

‘But maybe not so desolate. There are too many dead villages and cold hearths between here and the Southern Wall.’

‘That is an old story now, though it was an ugly one in its day,’ said the Roman officer. ‘Punitive work is always ugly.’

‘More than forty years old, they tell me, but the little villages are still dead and the hearths cold, as Lollius Urbicus left them.’

‘You’re British, aren’t you?’ the Captain said. ‘Well, upward of half my scouts are native to the land.’

‘They have chosen their loyalties, and I choose mine,’ Phaedrus said, and checked, trying to find words for what he meant. ‘My mother was from somewhere in these Northern parts, and knew the inside of a slave-market. My father was – of another conquered people. There are too many conquered peoples in Rome’s world.’

‘At least we have brought some kind of order, even some kind of peace, to a world that was ancient chaos before.’

‘The
Pax Romana
,’ Phaedrus said. ‘My fa— my first master had me taught to read and write, though I have lost the trick of it now. He let me read his books. There was one, a history that a man called Tacitus wrote of the General Agricola’s campaigns, a hundred years ago. He fought a great battle, this Agricola, with a war-leader called Calgacus, far to the north somewhere; and there was a fine fiery speech that Calgacus was supposed to have made to his warriors before the battle joined – no Roman could have heard a word of it and so it must have been Tacitus’s speech really – you see that? He made Calgacus say of the Romans, “They make a desolation, and call it peace.” So even Roman Tacitus could have his doubts.’ He was surprised and infuriated, even while he was speaking, to find how much of his mother’s race those dead villages had roused in him. Fool, to be crossing swords with this dark man, just when it was most needful that he should not get into trouble, or draw attention to himself in any way! But still, he did not stop until the thing was said.

Mercifully it seemed that the Roman officer was unusually slow to take offence. There was no gathering frown of affronted dignity on his face, only the look of a man arguing with another who has different beliefs from his own, and who respects those beliefs even while he will not yield to them one hair’s breadth.

‘I think you must have been almost as unlikely a gladiator as you are a pack-driver. I’m sorry I can’t persuade you; I believe you would have made a good Frontier Wolf.’

There was the jink of a hanging bridle-bit as one of the cavalry ponies tossed up his head, and from the fort, a trumpet call sounded through the evening air; and Phaedrus realized that the shadows were beginning to thicken among the alder roots. ‘Aye, well, I’ll have a word with Sinnoch about the mare,’ the Captain said, and turned on his heel to stroll back upstream to his own men.

Phaedrus stirredVron out of his sleep with a friendly foot. ‘Come on, old one, time to be getting them penned for the night.’

Late that evening, in the lamplit store-shed behind the wine-shop, when the fat woman had gone waddling off to attend to her customers and Vron had betaken himself to a cock-fight, Sinnoch said, ‘And what were you and the Captain, Titus Hilarion, talking of so earnestly, down at the horse-pool?’

‘
That
will be Vron,’ Phaedrus said. ‘I doubted he could have gone to sleep so suddenly.’

‘Vron always sleeps like a hound – one ear cocked and one eye open.’

‘
Sa
– I have noticed. Well then, he can tell you what we talked of.’

A dry smile twitched at the corner of Sinnoch’s mouth. ‘Alas, you spoke in the Latin tongue. Vron has only three words of Latin, and one of them is “drink”. . .What did the Captain want?’

‘He was interested in buying the roan mare.’

Sinnoch nodded. ‘I thought he might. He was needing a new hunting-pony when I came by on the road south, so I kept my eye open in the Corstopitum horse-markets.’

‘You thought – then why all this pretence of her being a pack-pony?’

‘Why bring her all this way like a fine lady eating her head off, when she can earn her keep on the trail? Besides, it was in my mind that he would be well pleased with himself to discover breeding under a pack-saddle, and a man pleased with himself pays the better.’

‘You wily old fox,’ Phaedrus said in admiration.

Sinnoch made a small deprecatory gesture, as of one modestly turning aside a compliment. ‘It is merely a matter of knowing one’s market. He is a bright enough lad, our Captain – good at his job. He’ll be commanding one of the outpost forts in a year or two, if he isn’t broken for going too much his own way, or dead in a bog with an arrow of the little Dark People in him; but like most of his kind, his mind works in straight lines. Maybe that is what has made Rome the ruler of the world, but there’s no denying that when it comes to buying or selling a horse, the man who can think in curves has the advantage.’ He leaned forward abruptly, his face in shadow, one heavy ear-drop of coral and silver catching the lamplight as it swung. ‘What else did he say?’

Phaedrus frowned, and was silent an instant before answering. ‘That an ex-gladiator might do well enough among the Frontier Scouts.’

‘And you are thinking it, maybe; a sad pity that you never thought of that before you went the first time to the “Rose of Paestum”, and ended in the town gaol.’

Phaedrus rubbed his knee, where the scar was pulling as it still did when he was tired. ‘We have a saying in the circus, that life’s too short to waste it in saving for the future or regretting the past. I told the Captain Hilarion I’d be cutting my throat by spring, if I took service in this desolation.’

‘You may not last so long in Earra-Ghyl.’

NEXT DAY WHEN the bargaining for the red mare was over and she had changed owners, they pushed on north-westward into the tribal lands beyond the shadow of Rome. Gault met them two nights later, a picked handful of warriors with him. And after that there were days and nights – so many that Phaedrus lost count of them – among the coastal marshes and steep woodland glens and great inland-running arms of the sea, with always the huge mountain mass that Sinnoch said was Cruachan the Shield-boss of the World, towering higher and higher into the northern sky. A constant shifting from place to place, strange faces seen in the fire-light and gone again next morning; word spoken softly and passed on, in herdsman’s bothy or at river ford. Little bands of men with spears who appeared as it were from nowhere in the half-light of dusk or dawn, and were given their orders and merged into nowhere again.

They came at last to three great cliff caves that must once have had their feet in the western waters, though now there was a strip of rocky shore between them, and made their fire in the heart of the largest of them; and after that for a while there was no more changing camp.

It was well into autumn by now; the great gales came booming in from the sunset, leaping the back of Inshore Island that crouched as though to give what shelter it could to the rocky coast behind it, and the seals had left their basking rocks for deep water. And a certain autumn night came, a soft dark night between storms, bringing with it a moment that seemed to Phaedrus very like the moment before the first trumpets sounded and one heard the clashing open of the arena gates.

The branching gallery in which he stood was no more than a fault in the living rock, so narrow that a man’s shoulders might brush against either side, but running up to unknown heights overhead. The rocks were slippery underfoot and somewhere in the depth of them was the sound of running water; and the heavy cold air was full of hollow sighings of the sea. There was a faint blur of light at the far end where the lamp still burned in the small inner cave, and close at hand a fiercer gash of torchlight shining through a chink in the heavy sealskin curtain that covered the mouth of the gallery.

Low voices sounded beyond the curtain, as the three of them checked an instant in the all-enveloping dark between the two gleams, and they, too, had a hollow sound, and set strange whispering echoes running. Then Gault – he knew that it was Gault by the kind of leashed ferocity of the movement – reached out and dragged the heavy skins aside; and torch- and fire-light flooded in to meet them.

Phaedrus, caught full in the smoky light, with all the darkness of the gallery behind him, checked an instant on the lip of the rock-tumble that led down into the huge main cavern. Trained as he was to make an entrance and an impression, he was vividly aware of himself, aware that gladiator and pack-rider had both gone, and that in their place stood a prince of the Dalriads, in breeks of chequered stuff and tunic of fine saffron wool, raw hide brogues on his feet, a bronze-sheathed dagger at his belt, and everywhere about him, on arms and neck and in the fillet of twisted wires that bound back his hair, the glint of yellow river-gold.

The voices in the cave had suddenly stopped. Faces were turned and eyes fixed hungrily upon him. He sprang down over the loose stones into the cave, Gault and Sinnoch following more soberly in his wake.

As always in the first instant of coming into the great cavern, he cast one swift glance towards the innermost wall, where the masses of volcanic rock which elsewhere upheaved themselves in gigantic zigzag layers, rose in sheer slabs as flat and level as though cut by hand, and on the smooth surfaces still showed the dim and fragmentary traces of animals and birds drawn in red and ochre and black: wild ox and bear, boar and wolf, and what looked like a wild duck rising, and in the midst of them, towering into the upper gloom, gaunt and grotesque but magnificent, the figure of a man with the head of a twelve-point stag. No one knew how long he had stood there, only that he was very, very old. And Sinnoch, who knew many things beside how to sell horses, had said once that he was the Lord of Herds and the Hunting Trail, and something strange about his dying for the people whenever the Sacrifice was needed.

It was only a flung glance as his feet touched the cave floor, then he turned to the five men who sat or stood beside the driftwood fire on the raised central hearth.

‘Well?’ Gault said, beside him, and then, ‘Look him over, my brothers; will he serve?’

It seemed to Phaedrus that there were nothing but eyes in all that great sea-echoing cavern, and behind the eyes, the judgement of five men, focused on him. He felt them burning him up, as he stood confronting them, head raised and mouth curving into a smile that he did not know was faintly insolent.

A big, freckled man with the blurred outlines of an athlete run to flesh was the first to speak. ‘It is hard to tell, with a boy of fourteen summers, what like the man will be; but the King his father’ – he checked an instant and corrected himself – ‘this man is much such a one to look at as the King, Midir’s father, was at his age.’

Another nodded in agreement, and the third said, ‘It takes more than the shape of a nose to be making one man able to pass for another, but so far as outward seeming goes, aye, he will serve.’

But the fourth member of the group, an oldish man with hot, clever eyes and a sour mouth with no teeth in it, said fretfully, ‘I wonder, Gault the Strong, that you are troubling yourself to bring him to the Council fire at all, since it seems that you have decided the thing to suit yourself already. Or do I dream in my old age, and only
think
to see the Mark of the Horse Lord on his forehead?’

‘
Na
, you do not dream, Andragius my Chieftain,’ Gault said. ‘The Mark is there. But maybe your memory plays you tricks, and you forget that because
you among the rest of the Council
chose me, I am the leader in this matter as I have been from the first. There was no time to call a Council; indeed, if Sinnoch had not had calm weather for the boat crossing and found me in my own Dun of the Red Bull, but had come on north to Dun Monaidh seeking me, it is in my mind that there might have been no time to carry the thing through at all. The Mark had to be made at the first possible moment, that there might be time for the look of fresh tattooing to wear off from it, and in such a case it must be for the leader to decide what shall and what shall not be done! Will any of you say that I have gone beyond the powers you gave me?’

There was a moment’s silence, broken only by the sea-echoes and the crackle of the driftwood spitting on the fire. Then Andragius shrugged and said unpleasantly, ‘If my brothers are satisfied, then I suppose I have little choice but to be satisfied, too.’

Gault dropped the subject as though it was a dead mouse and turned to the fifth member of the Council. ‘You have not spoken yet, Tuathal the Wise, Cup-bearer of the Sun: you who should speak first among us.’