The Mark of the Horse Lord (14 page)

Conory flung off his own cloak, and under it, he also was stripped for battle. He drew his own dagger without haste, and took the one long pace forward that brought him to the Queen’s side and face to face with his adversary. The drums had begun to throb again, the smell of the strange smoke drifting from the fires seemed at once to heighten and confuse the senses. And still the striped cat clung to its lord’s shoulder, its eyes enormous and fur fluffed up along its arched back until it seemed to bloat to twice its normal size. In the last few moments, Conory had been murmuring to it, its furry cheek against his, but now – surely he must have forgotten it was there. Others thought so, too. One of the Companions spoke to him, pointing to the creature, holding out his hand to take the leash.

Conory answered with a sound in his throat that was for the cat alone, and the small fiend laid back its tufted ears and with a splitting screech of fury, the unsheathed claws ploughing red furrows in Conory’s bare shoulder as it launched itself, sprang straight for Logiore’s face.

In the same instant, so that both movements were one, Conory flashed round with his dagger upon Liadhan the Queen.

But in the same instant also, there happened one of those small unforeseeable mischances that can tear an empire down. It was no more than a hound, tied up in the stable court, that had chewed through its leash and come to find its master. Nobody, certainly not Phaedrus who had his back to it, saw the wolf-shadow in the mist, poised on the crest of the broad dry-stone wall and searching the crowd with anxious tawny eyes. But in the barest splinter of time before the cat leaped screeching at Logiore’s face, the hound gave a joyful bark of recognition and sprang out and down. He had leaped for a gap in the crowd, but something – maybe the grotesque figure with the boar’s head – made him swerve in mid-air. He was no mere herd-dog but one of the great wolf-hounds of Erin, feather-heeled, and for size and weight almost the equal of a yearling pony colt. His swerve brought him crashing full into Phaedrus, and flung him headlong, full into the light of the nearest torches. The hound landed on top of him, driving most of the wind from his body, and went bounding on across the circle to join its master on the farther side. Best part winded as he was, Phaedrus was up again with a speed learned in the arena, but the hood of his cloak had fallen back, and there on his forehead, plain for all to see, was the Royal Pattern of the Dalriads, the Mark of the Horse Lord.

Time seemed to go slow, so that there was space for many things to happen between one leap and another of the great hound. Liadhan, perhaps already half alerted by something that had been in the air all evening, had whipped round to face the sudden small tumult, and the lightning stroke of Conory’s dagger that should have ended in her heart, gashed her side instead. With a furious cry, he struck again, but the girl Murna had flung herself between them, dashing the dark folds of her cloak across his face, muffling and blinding him as she did so. The Queen herself had sprung clear, and as the whole scene dissolved in howling chaos, Phaedrus saw, in the very act of regaining his feet, her terrible eyes fixed on the mark on his forehead. Then she screamed, and in screaming, raised the agreed war-cry: ‘
Midir!
’

The women, their knives out, were swirling in upon Conory; and Logiore, his face now a streaming mask of blood, the wildcat still clinging to him, came crashing in with the shrill fury of an angry stallion.

Phaedrus, plunging forward with no thought save to reach Conory before it was too late, heard Gault beside him take up the war-cry, raising the terrible bull-bellow that was the signal for those waiting in the outer darkness: ‘Midir!
Midir!
’

The perfect timing on which so much might depend, had been lost to them, but there was no help for that now. All around the Pillar Stone and among the seven fires, the warriors were reeling to and fro, as the men of the braided forelocks ripped out their dirks and hurled themselves upon the Queen’s followers. But for the moment all that was lost on Phaedrus; in the heart of that hideous struggle before the High Place, he was fighting back to back with Conory. Fighting for his life and something more than his life, for no man likes the idea of being torn to pieces, against a screaming throng of women, whose weapons, beside their knives, were the wild beast’s weapons of teeth and claws. He did not know what had happened to Liadhan or the girl Murna, nor even what had happened to Logiore; there was nothing in this world but the screaming furies about him, and the feel of Conory’s back braced against his. A knife gashed his shoulder, claws were at his throat; if no help came, it could not be long before he or Conory went down, and once that happened . . .

Suddenly the press was slackening, breaking up, the blood-screams of the women changing to howls of baffled fury, as a solid wedge of the Companions, heads down behind cloak-wrapped forearms, came charging through to their support.

The fighting had spread through into other courts by the sound of it. Someone shouted, ‘They’re fighting for the armoury!’ And from somewhere in the heart of the Dun, a tongue of flame leaped up, blurred and wavering in the mist. Men were pouring through the great gate that had been opened to them, swarming in over the ramparts, men who carried each a spare weapon with him. Phaedrus with one such sword in his hand, Conory racing beside him with his own again, was storming forward at the head of a swelling band against the main mass of the Queen’s Party, who, after the first moments of random fighting, were gathering in closed ranks before the gateway to the stable court. They, too, had weapons now; seemingly some of the Queen’s people had reached the armoury first. Away to his right he heard Gault’s bull-roar, and yelled the war-cry in answer: ‘Midir!
Midir!
’

Another band of men and women, headed by the wild figure of Logiore with his horse-mane flying, came charging in across their path. They also were fully armed, for by now weapons were springing into every hand; and in the light of scattered fires and guttering torches, Phaedrus thought he glimpsed in the midst of the battle-throng around the gateway, the moon-silver gleam of the Queen’s diadem. Others had seen it too, for a new shout went up: a baying of hounds that sight the kill. Gault bellowed, ‘There she is! The Hag! The She-Wolf!’ as they crashed together with Logiore’s band, hell-bent to come at the gleam of that distant diadem. The patterns of the fighting were changing and reforming so quickly that everything was shapeless as a dream; and now Logiore’s band had been flung back, and they were at reeling grips with the warriors about the gate, locked knee against knee, blade against blade, snarling faces and flying hair.

And now the Queen’s Party were falling back. Slowly, stubbornly, battling for every inch of the way. Somehow, the outer court was cleared, and then the Horse Court, and they were falling back on the gate-gap of the King’s Court, the Citadel itself. There were men on the crest of the rock outcrop that formed part of the King’s Court wall, and stones and spears came whistling among the attackers. And still, somewhere ahead in the swirling press, like a flicker of moonlight between racing storm-clouds, the gleam of a silver head-dress came and went.

They were back to the gate again now and every foot of the outcrop wall had become a reeling battleline. The mist was red about them, for somebody had fired the heather thatch; and in the fiery murk, Phaedrus had come together with Logiore the Old King.

And then a strange thing happened, for the rest of the fight surging all about them seemed to fall away a little on every side, and in the space so cleared, they fought, as Old King and Young King were fated to fight according to the ancient custom; Phaedrus still in the rough dress of a charioteer, his red, mist-wet hair flying about his head, and the man in the trappings of the Horse Lord, with the terrible burning eyes in the terrible painted and blood-streaked face. Even Conory held aloof from that fight, and found plenty of work for his sword elsewhere; and in this isolation they crouched and thrust and parried, with the sparks from the burning Hall falling about them. Logiore was a fine swordsman; Phaedrus the Gladiator, used to the quick judging of an opponent, knew that, but knew also that thanks to Automedon’s training, he was a better.

The struggle for the Citadel did not last long, for the Queen’s Party were by now heavily outnumbered, and though the numbers were equal enough in the actual gateway, they were too few to hold the inner wall against those who swarmed over. They made their last desperate stand, while before the flame-lit gateway, Old King and Young fought the ancient ritual fight that was ritual no longer. Both were bleeding from gashes on breast and arms and shoulders; no space to manoeuvre, no springing back out of touch; they fought where they stood, close-locked as battling stags. Phaedrus could see the mist drops on the horse head-dress, and the sparks of the burning thatch that died among them, the otherworld glare in his enemy’s eyes. He saw the eyes change, as he had once seen Vortimax’s do, and parried the deadly lunge, turning the other’s blade at the last instant, and lunged in his turn, in past the open guard. He felt his own blade bite deep, and saw those eyes widen and had time to wonder at the triumph in them, before the Old King staggered back and went down.

Everywhere the line of the defence was going, and the followers of the Horse Lord were crashing in through the gate and over the broad low walls. Hounds were baying and the screams of terrified and angry horses tore the air. But in the Citadel itself there seemed for the moment to be a strange silence. Logiore, with his head-dress torn off and most of the death-paint washed from his face by blood, lay like any other dead man – and there were plenty – crumpled against the righthand gate-stone where he had been trampled and kicked aside in the breakthrough. But the look of triumph was still in his eyes.

And Phaedrus knew the reason for it now, as he stood leaning on his crimsoned sword, drawing his breath in great whistling gasps; and looked at Murna the Royal Daughter, standing between two of the Companions, on the threshold of the burning Hall. Murna with blood on her ripped and tattered tunic, and a little smile that echoed Logiore’s triumph lifting the corners of her lips. And on her head the tall, silver moon head-dress of the Queen.

GAULT SAID IN a rasping voice, ‘Where is Liadhan?’

‘The Queen, my mother, is in a place where you will not find her – Gault the Traitor!’

Gault shrugged his bull shoulders. ‘I have other things to do than be playing hurly with evil names for a ball.’ Then to the two Companions, ‘Take her away and lodge her safely – remembering that she is the Royal Daughter, and not to be mishandled.’

‘
Sa, sa
, I have to thank you,’ the girl said. ‘Would you have given my mother the same cause to thank you, if you had taken
her
?’

‘
When
we take her, you will have the answer to that question.’ Gault jerked his chin at the Companions, to take her away. She half turned in obedience to their hold on her arms, then checked, and looked back full at Phaedrus for the first time. A long, strange look, completely unreadable, and meeting it, Phaedrus wondered if she knew how her mother had in truth disposed of the real Horse Lord. If she did, she must know, even as Liadhan must have known it when the first shock was over, that whoever else he might be, he was not Midir. And like Liadhan, there would be nothing that she could do about it. He returned the long, cool stare, and in a few moments she turned away between her guards.

The fiery fog seemed to get into Phaedrus’s head after that, and everything became like a dream in which there was no ordered sequence of events. He heard Gault shouting orders, and was aware of men tearing off the burning heather thatch and beating out the flames that had spread to the timbers, aware of fighting still going on in odd corners of the Dun, with now and then a cry to tell how some fight had ended. There was a search going on, swift and desperate and very thorough, among the mist-shrouded buildings and the huddled dead. He was bleeding from a score of gashes, none of them serious, and beside him, Conory was cursing softly as he tried to staunch a deeper wound in his upper arm with a strip torn from a dead man’s kilt; and somewhere a cat was raising its wild squalling cry. Stupidly he looked about for it, and saw in the dying flame-light, a striped shape with eyes like green moons and blood dripping from a gashed flank, clinging to the edge of the foreporch roof and singing a triumph-song that might have been made by all the fiends in Ahriman’s deepest pits of torment. Conory left off cursing long enough to call, ‘Shân,’ and the thing leaped to his shoulders, trailing the remains of its leash behind it, and settled across his neck, singing still.

A man was panting out some message to Gault, and then there was a time of running, in the midst of which Phaedrus stumbled on the body of an almost naked man with an otter’s mask for a face. And then he was in the outer court again, over in the far angle away from the gate, staring at the place where the overflow from the spring that formed the Dun’s water supply disappeared into a narrow gully and dived under a rough-cut lintel stone through the rampart wall. Three men with braided forelocks lay dead there, each tangled as though from a distance, in the thongs of a hunting bolas, and stabbed where they lay. Someone was holding a torch low to the dark mouth of the tunnel, and the light showed a glint of silver apples under the water.

Someone fished out the silver branch.

‘So that’s the way she went,’ Gault said, chewing at a lower lip that was chapped and red-raw.

‘She will be heading for Caledonia, and her own kin,’ Conory said. He had knotted the rag round his wounded arm, and save for the blood on him he looked as unruffled as the striped cat who had dropped from his shoulder and was now sitting a little way off, unconcernedly licking its flank wound. ‘Can we stop up the runs before she gets clear away?’

Gault shook his head. ‘I doubt it. The People of the Hills will stand her friends, and no one save the red deer know all
their
runs. None the less, we must try it, for she carries maybe the life or death of the tribe in her keeping.’ He swung round on the young warrior with the torch. ‘Brys, find me your Lord Gallgoid, with Dergdian if the life is still in him – and that horse-smuggler Sinnoch; there are few men know the border hills as he does.’