The Mark of the Horse Lord (10 page)

The fifth man, who had been sitting on a skin-spread stool, unmoving all this while, his eyes fixed on Phaedrus’s face, got to his feet, slowly uncoiling his full magnificent height, and instantly became the core and centre of the scene. He was, maybe, not much younger than Andragius, but of a very different kind. A man with a great curved nose like the hooked beak of a bird of prey; his robe of finely dressed horse-skins, supple as cloth, fell around him in folds like a king’s mantle; his head was shaved save for a single broad strip from forehead to nape, which sprang up and arched back with the proud sweep of a silver stallion’s crest. His eyes, too, were like those of a bird of prey – a falcon, not a hawk, the dark, full, glowing eyes that, alone of all eyes of men or beasts, could outstare the sun without being blinded. He said, ‘Come here to me, you who are now called Midir.’

Phaedrus went to him, and found himself caught and held by those eyes.

‘You understand, to the full, what we demand of you? Not only the Council here, but the people who will be your people?’

‘I know and I understand the demands of the Council. Can any man not born to it understand the demands of a people, save by learning them as they come?’

‘No,’ said Tuathal the Wise. ‘No . . .Yet even that is a thing worth understanding, and the rest may come with the need . . .’ He seemed to be speaking to himself, rather than to Phaedrus, his gaze going past him to the great daubed figure on the wall behind. Then abruptly the bright, piercing gaze returned to Phaedrus’s face. ‘You have learned the part that you must play? The ways and customs – and the memories? You know your way through the five courts of Dun Monaidh? When a kinsman speaks to you, you will know what name to call him by?’

‘I was a full month with Midir, and I think I did not waste it.’

‘No?’ Tuathal waited, clearly for some proof.

Phaedrus smiled, knowing that he could give it. ‘Shall I call you by all your titles, Tuathal the Wise, High Priest of the Burning One, Mouthpiece of Lugh Shining Spear, Cup-bearer, Foal of the Sun? And – the one more, not for speaking aloud.’ He leaned closer, and murmured the fifth name, the Taboo name that could only be spoken between the Horse Lord and the Priests of the Sun.

Something flickered far back in Tuathal’s eyes, and the proud arched lids widened a little, but he gave no other sign.

Phaedrus turned to the big, fleshy man who had been the first of the five to speak. ‘Oscair Mac Maelchwn, is there still a cub of white-breasted Skolawn’s among your hearth hounds?’

Then as Oscair nodded, he turned to the third man, meeting little, bright, lively eyes like a grass-snake’s, in a big-boned, ruddy face. ‘You will be here in the Chief your father’s stead, Cuirithir? He was a sick man, growing old before his time, seven years ago, and yet you do not wear the Chief’s arm-ring.’

And then it was old Andragius’s turn, and Phaedrus longed to say to him, ‘Poor old man! Do you know that they only brought you into the Council because you are too great a Chieftain to be left outside?’ Instead he said, ‘My Lord Andragius, you were never quite believing that I did not trip your grandson on purpose in the boys’ Spear Dance, so that he went heels over head and everybody laughed. But truly, it was no more than clumsiness. I have learned to use my weapons better now.’

And last of all, to a thickset, dark man, younger than the rest, with a gay and ugly face, he said, ‘Gallgoid, are you still the Prince of Charioteers in all Earra-Ghyl? You used to take me up into your chariot, and drive like the west wind with me, and I’d not have changed places with all the Gods and heroes rolled into one!’

‘There’s none risen to supplant me yet,’ Gallgoid said, with a flash of white, crooked teeth.

‘You have put your month to good use,’ the Sun Priest said after a moment, ‘but let you tell us one thing more. Why are you doing this?’

Oscair put in gruffly, ‘He
is
doing it. Does the reason matter?’

‘It is in my mind that there are reasons and reasons – though maybe this one is not far to seek. A kingship must seem good enough reason to such men as I have heard fight to the death to amuse a Red Crest crowd, for the price of their next meal.’

‘Both Gault and Sinnoch will bear me out that at first I swore I’d not meddle with a kingship that was not mine.’

‘
Sa, sa
– what made you change your mind?’

There was a long silence, and Phaedrus heard by the changed sea-echoes in the cavern that the tide was on the turn. ‘Midir, as much as any other thing,’ he said at last. Then with a kind of defiance, ‘
Na
, it is simpler than that. Gault offered me a price – oh, not in gold; the whetted edge to life that I had missed somewhat since I gained my freedom from the Gladiators’ School. The price seemed to me a fair one, and so I am your man, in the way of any other Mercenary who strikes a fair bargain for his sword.’

‘So, you give us two reasons; and together, I find them good.’ Tuathal turned to the others beside the fire. ‘For myself, I am with Gault the Strong in this. How say you, my brothers?’

‘I also,’ Gallgoid said vehemently.

‘And I.’

‘And I.’

Only Andragius shrugged and held his hands to the fire. He would be able to say that he had warned them all along, he would even be able to claim that he had never agreed but been overruled by the rest of the Council, if trouble came later.

Presently they were all sitting about the fire, while the mead horn passed from hand to hand and Phaedrus, as the youngest man there, tended the thick hunks of pig-meat broiling on the red peat heart of the blaze.

They went over plans as they waited for the food to be ready; the plans that were to become action on the night before the Midwinter Fires. But, indeed, all things had been worked out long since (‘Already the horns are sounding in the hills, and the black goat dies,’ Gault had said, months ago in Corstopitum), and there was only some small point here and there to be altered because now, instead of a blinded prince to avenge, they had a long-lost prince to set back in his father’s place.

Even the mark that would tell friend from foe had been decided on, and every man of the Sun Party would wear the temple-locks of his hair plaited, the rest hanging loose. Conory, it seemed, was to manage that, setting the fashion and making sure that it spread naturally as a fashion does, between this and the night of the uprising.

Oscair said suddenly, ‘You are sure that Conory can handle it? He is more skilled with the sword than the ways of guile.’

‘He’ll handle it. He’s no fool, and he has only to cut the tip off his nose one day for half the young braves of the tribe to be lacking theirs the next.’

‘I still think,’ Gallgoid the Charioteer put in, ‘that we should have been telling Conory the truth of this matter.’

‘If he suspects—’

‘Why should he suspect?’ Gault demanded harshly. ‘It is seven years since he last saw Midir, and they were both fourteen. And in any case, it is a less risk than telling him would be. He’s as unpredictable as a woman and once told, it would be too late to untell the thing again.’

The Sun Priest, who had seemed to be far withdrawn into some inner distance of his own, looked up from the fire. ‘Furthermore, in Conory we have our one sure test. They were closer to each other than most brothers, those two; if Conory does not know that this is not Midir, then unless he makes some very great mistake, no one will ever know.’

Many torches burned at the upper end of the cavern, and in the unaccustomed light that leaped from his feet to the proudly antlered head high among the hearth smoke, the painted figure of the Horned God seemed to stand clear of the rock wall behind him. An apron of skins across the seaward entrance had been drawn tight over its pegs against the wild autumn night, and the storm-wind coughed and roared against it like the open palm of a giant on the stretched skin of some mighty drum. And between it and the driftwood fire on its raised hearth, the Chiefs and Captains of the tribe were gathered.

Phaedrus, standing alone at the huge rock-daubed feet of the God, saw them only as thickened shadows, lit here and there with the blink of bronze or gold, here and there with the life-spark of an eye. The shadows, that had had deep-murmuring voices before his coming, had fallen silent, even the wind had ceased for a moment its drumming on the entrance skins; only the sea pitching on the rocky foreshore still boomed and roared, flinging its echoes about the cave.

Then Gault, standing with his knot of household warriors a spear’s length to one side, cried out in a voice which leaped back from the rock walls with the rough ring of war horns, ‘Here he is, then! Here is the Prince Midir, your true Horse Lord, whom the woman Liadhan would have slain, seven winters ago!’

And among the crowding shadows below the fire there was a stirring and an indrawn breath that was almost a sob.

Then a voice shouted back, ‘What proof can you give us that this is indeed Midir, and not some other with the look of him?’

‘What is proof to do with myself or with Sinnoch the Merchant? We have found and brought to you the Prince Midir. The proof is for him to give, if it’s more than the sight of your own eyes you’re needing!’

‘Let him give it, then!’

Phaedrus put his hands to the circlet of braided gold wires that pressed low on his temples, and lifted it off and flung it down ringing on the rock floor at his feet, baring his forehead to the torches. ‘Here is your proof! Come closer and look!’

A formless smother of voices answered him, lost in the boom of the storm-wind as it swooped back, and the shadows parted and came crowding up past the fire, taking on the substance of living men as the flaring torchlight met them. An oldish man whose hair showed brindled as a badger’s pelt, thrust out from the rest; his voice, deep and glad, crashed through the bell-booming of the storm. ‘Midir! It is Midir, after all these years!’

‘Seven years,’ Phaedrus said, and reached out to him, the gold and copper arm-rings clashing on his wrists. ‘It is good that they are over and I come back again!’

But the doubt lingered in some of them. A tattoo mark could, after all, be copied, and they had learned caution under Liadhan’s rule. ‘You do not speak like us,’ someone called from the heart of the throng.

And Phaedrus dropped his hands and turned on him. ‘Set a wolf-cub among the hound-pack, and he’ll learn to bark like a dog. Great Gods, man, I have been seven years in the South!’

Then another spoke up. ‘Why did you not come back before?’

‘Why does the mare not foal before she is mated, or the bramble ripen before the flower falls? What would have happened if I had come creeping to your hunting fires one night, or worse still, burst in upon you shouting war-cries, before the time was ripe? Before you called me back? I heard no man call till now.’

‘We did not know that you yet lived.’

And somewhere out of the knot of warriors a third voice rose, with others in support: ‘How does it happen that you did not drown as we were told? Tell us what passed that night and after.’

The drumming of the wind about the cave mouth filled the expectant hush, but Phaedrus had a sense of silence. He had known that this would come, and come again and again; he had his story ready, so familiar that it seemed part of his own memory; but suddenly, every nerve on the stretch, he knew that this first time, he must not tell it; that to tell in answer to a shouted demand would not have been Midir’s way.

His head was up and his hand caressing his dagger. He laughed a little, but without mirth. ‘Ach now, did they not tell you that tale when they summoned you here? Did the messengers only whisper in your ear, “Midir is back from the slain! Come!” and you came, asking no question?’

‘We would hear it from yourself, Midir.’

‘Would you so?’ Phaedrus looked them up and down, then flashed out at them in a fine blaze of anger. ‘Now by Lugh of the Shining Spear! To hear you, a man might think the Prince Midir stood on sufferance, here among his own! Shall I come to you with my hands held out, and bend my neck and stand before you like a beggar before the master of the house, telling my story for a crust of bannock and a corner by the fire? It is not for you to wag your heads and take me in as the master of the house takes in a beggar of his charity; it is I, Midir the Horse Lord, who comes back to take the place among you that is mine; mine to me! I am the spearhead of this rising that shall drive the She-Wolf from the place that she has snatched, and free the tribe to walk in the daylight again! I am the Lord of the Horse People as my father was before me; if you do not believe me, kill me for an impostor; if you do, then take me for what I am, and be glad of my coming!’

For a moment longer the hush endured, and then the badger-haired man broke it. ‘That had the true ring of Midir about it. There was never a shred of respect he had for his elders!’

And someone laughed deep in his throat, and the hush broke into the hubbub of slackened strain.

And in the midst of it all, Phaedrus was handfast with the badger-haired one, and saw in the torchlight the line of an old scar slicing through one bushy eyebrow, and said, suddenly quiet, ‘What, Dergdian, no doubts at all?’

‘None!’ Dergdian said. ‘I knew you from the first moment. I am not like some fools who forget a face they have not seen for a week! Ah well, I set my mark on you, as I remember.’

‘And I on you! The scar still shows a little – but you made me pay for it! My back still smarts when I remember that day!’ He hitched at his shoulders. ‘I still say it was a simple mistake; you were red as a fox in those days. Not so red now, Dergdian.’

‘
Na, na!
I will not be called a fox! That is for Sinnoch. I am a hound growing grey about the muzzle.’ Laughter-lines deepened about Dergdian’s eyes. ‘But I am your hound as I was your father’s.’ And still holding Phaedrus’s hands, he got stiffly down on to one knee, and pressed his forehead against them, in the way of a tribesman swearing loyalty to his Chief.

One by one the others followed his lead, pressing about Phaedrus to take their allegiance. Their faces were alive with reborn hope. And suddenly Phaedrus wanted to fling the next man off and shout at them: ‘Don’t! In Typhon’s name don’t. I’m not Midir – if you want him go and look for a blind leather-worker in Eburacum!’