The Mark of the Horse Lord (15 page)

Phaedrus had not recognized the boy for his cheerful neighbour of the crowded foreporch; his face was so grey and old, with the laughter all gone from it. ‘My Lord Gallgoid is dead.’

‘Cuirithir then. Those three – quickly.’

The boy went, running. And presently Dergdian was there, with Sinnoch and Cuirithir hard on his heels, and Gault was speaking quick and harsh. ‘The She-Wolf is away – you’ll all be knowing that, and she must be heading for Caledonia by one way or another – there’s nowhere else for her, unless she takes to sea. Sinnoch, you know the border hills better than any of us, how many trails into the Cailleach’s country at this time of year?’

Sinnoch thought a moment. ‘As many as there are fingers and thumb on my right hand.’

‘One to each of us here, then.’

‘There are six of us here,’ Dergdian said, hackles up, and with a glance at Phaedrus.

There was an instant’s pause, and then Phaedrus said, ‘It is a long while since I was in the border hills. I will ride behind one of you.’

‘One to each of us here, then,’ Gault said, as though there had been no interruption. ‘Conory, take what men you can raise quickly – two-score should be enough – and follow the track up Loch Fhiona, the Royal Water, and across the mountains into the Glen of Baal’s Beacon. Not beyond; it will not profit the tribe that you run wild into the Cailleach’s hunting-runs and never come back! Dergdian, and you, Cuirithir, make for the great Gap of Loch Abha, and divide there; take one of you the Glen of the Alder Woods and the other the Glen of the Black Goddess.’

‘She will not be taking
that
way,’ Cuirithir said. ‘Ach now, it is close on twice as far, and the trail runs a full two days through the very heart of Earra-Ghyl.’

‘She will not likely be taking that way,’ snapped Gault, ‘but if the little Dark People choose to be her guide and cast their mists about her, for the very reason of its unlikeliness she might take it, and we’d be fools to leave it alone. Myself, I will be for Rudha-Nan-Coorach, and the fisherfolk shall lend me their coracles to cross Loch Fhiona. The trail down the Glen of the Horns keeps hard enough at this season, and with fisherfolk all down the far shore to see her across the Firth of War-Boats, I’m thinking that’s the trail she might choose. That is four. Where runs the fifth trail, Sinnoch?’

‘It is in my mind that I miscounted. There are two more trails – two more at the least, between the Royal Water and the Firth of War-Boats. But it is all wild country, and the Caledones hunt over it almost as often as we. It is hard to be sure in one’s head, without seeing the state of the trails; there have been heavy rains in the past moon.’

‘Go and look, then. Those trails I leave to you. Take the best hunters with you; you’ll need them.’

‘
Sa
, that means my old Bron for one. Some of the best hunters in Dun Monaidh are hammering from within on the slave-house door at this moment.’

‘Men of the little Dark People?’ Gault interrupted.

‘The little Dark People are the best hunters in the world.’ The dry smile was in Sinnoch’s voice, though his face was lost now in darkness. ‘And as for those in the slave-house, Liadhan’s slaves do not learn to love her – even for Earth Mother’s sake.’

‘So be it then, hunt your little dark hounds.’

‘Those and others – a mongrel pack, shall we say – open to any who are not too proud to hunt with it.’

‘I will hunt with your mongrel pack,’ Phaedrus said, and decided, by the moment of sudden silence about him, that that had been a mistake. But to change now would have been an even worse mistake, and beside – surely even a prince of the Dalriads need not dance always to other men’s piping. ‘Unless I am too out of skill as a hunter,’ he added, pretending to misunderstand the silence.

And Sinnoch said with that dry amusement out of the darkness, ‘You are the Prince of the Dalriads. Surely you may hunt with any pack – even the Hounds of Hell – that you will.’

For four days Phaedrus hunted with Sinnoch’s mongrel pack, on foot or on one of the small mountain ponies they had rounded up beyond the heather hills and steep forested glens between the two great sea-lochs. But if Liadhan had passed that way, she had been too swift for them, and left no trace behind her. And on the fourth evening, when they forgathered with Conory and his band, far up the Glen of Baal’s Beacon, they, too, had had bad hunting.

They were fog-wet and bone-weary and their wounds had had little chance to heal. The dried meat that the tribes carried with them on trail had begun to run short and there had been no time to hunt for themselves, and so they were hungry. They made camp dourly, on the strip of turf and heather between the river and the forest that seemed to reach its hands towards them in the gathering shadows as though it, too, were hungry; and tended and picketed the rough-coated ponies – they dared not let them graze loose with the trees so near.

And meanwhile Phaedrus and Conory had come together, and as though the thing were arranged between them, gone downriver a short way towards the head of the loch. The rest of the camp had seen them go without surprise or remark: they had always been best content with each other’s company, as boys.

They did not speak at once of the thing that both knew had brought them out from the camp. Indeed, for a while they did not speak at all, but simply stood looking across the river to where the great hills of Caledonia caught the last red of the winter sun, while the striped cat, who had stalked after them through the heather and bog myrtle, sat down for another lick at the healing wound in her flank.

‘So – the She-Wolf is safe away into her kinsman’s hunting-runs,’ Phaedrus said moodily at last.

‘Unless Gault or Dergdian have had better hunting than we.’

‘They will not.’

‘No, I am not thinking it likely.’

‘Was it my doing? Or the dog’s? Or the chance fall of the dice?’

Conory shrugged. ‘Can the dice fall chance-wise from the God’s hand?’

‘I have wondered that, before. It is the way they cast for pairs of fighters in the arena . . . What will happen now?’

‘Nothing now, in the black of winter. You know what the tracks are like, and not even Liadhan can move a War Host over these mountains and mosses when the high passes are deep in snow and there’s no grass for the chariot ponies. But when the birch buds thicken and the burns come down in spate from the melting snows, then there will be a great hosting among the Caledones.’

Phaedrus looked round quickly. ‘It will really come to war?’

‘She is the King’s kinswoman. And do you think that the Great Mother – the Lady of the Forest, they call her – will not rise up in war-paint to protect her own? Have you forgotten that the Caledones follow the Old Way, too?’ Conory turned his head slowly, and the mocking, veiled gaze was on Phaedrus’s face. ‘You have forgotten many things in these seven years.’

‘There is time to forget many things in seven years.’

For an instant gaze held gaze, carefully blank.

Conory’s cloak had fallen back from his left shoulder, and glancing down, Phaedrus saw that the rags about his upper arm were dark and juicy. ‘That wants rebinding,’ he said.

‘I’ll see to it, by and by.’

‘Better now, while there’s still enough daylight to see by. I’ll do it for you.’ Then at something he saw on the other’s face, ‘It is not the first time that you and I have bathed each other’s hurts.’

There was a small, sharp silence, empty save for the rush and suck of the water, and the sudden desolate calling of some bird among the winter-black heather. Then Conory said slowly and deliberately, ‘Is it not?’

Phaedrus’s heart gave a small, sick lurch under his breastbone, but there was no shock of surprise in him. This was the thing between them, the thing that had brought them down here away from the camp. He tried once more, prepared to fight it to a finish, all the same. He forced a laugh. ‘There is one time that sticks in my mind above all others. But you did not have the beating, so there’s less reason for you to remember helping me wash the blood off my back after Dergdian had thrashed me for half braining him with a throw-stone.’

Conory whirled round on him. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Who should tell me? It was I that had the beating, and I remember well enough without being told.’

‘Oh no, you don’t,’ Conory said, silken-soft. ‘It was Midir who had that beating, and
you are not Midir
!’

‘You are out of your wits! It must be that you have the wound fever,’ Phaedrus said.

‘Both the wound and my wits are quite cool.’

‘Very well then, tell me who I am.’

The other’s hands shot out and clenched on his shoulders with that unexpected strength that he had felt before in the Cave of the Hunter. Conory’s face was thrust into his, the odd-set eyes narrowed under the traces of paint that still clung to the lids. ‘
You
shall tell
me
that!’

Phaedrus made no attempt to break the other’s hold, though with Conory’s arm wound he could have done it without much trouble. For one thing, the cat had stopped licking its flank, and was crouching ready to spring, with laid-back ears, and mask wrinkling in a silent snarl. It made no sound, it did not move, but he knew that at the first movement of his that looked hostile, it would fly at him. The added complication of being attacked by a wildcat, he felt, was more than he could handle just then.

But another kind of recklessness took him like a high wind. He did not know whether or not this was the end of the trail, but he laughed in the other’s face. ‘
Sa, sa!
I will tell you! My father was a Greek winemerchant, and my mother was his slave who kept his house for him. I was born a slave and bred a slave – you can see now how suitable was my choice of pack to hunt with! I was bought and sold, bought and sold, until I came into the Corstopitum Circus, and was a slave still. Most gladiators are slaves, did you know?
That
is what you cried “Midir!” for, five nights ago!’

‘And so Sinnoch saw you in your circus and saw the likeness – and the opportunity. Well may men call him “Sinnoch the Fox!” What price did he pay you?’

Phaedrus asked quietly, ‘Was that meant for an insult?’

‘If it seems so to you, then yes. But chiefly, I was asking a question.’

‘One that I cannot answer. I gained my wooden foil on the day he first saw me – that means freedom with honour, for a gladiator. I was free for a whole day after they had pushed me out, until the howling boredom of it drove me into a street brawl, and my freedom ended in the town gaol. If you would know how much it cost in bribes to get me out, you must ask Sinnoch – or Gault.’

‘I am not interested in the cost of unbarring a prison door. What was
your
price? And in what kind? Did they buy you, or force you? Or did you come because anything was better than this howling boredom?’

‘Something of all three. Also they called in Midir to their aid. He – was a master of persuasion.’

The hands on his shoulders gave a little jerk, and released their hold. Conory let them drop limply to his sides and half turned away. ‘Midir . . . yes, of course. Nobody but he could have told you about washing off the blood of that beating . . . and the other things – all the other things. He was always thorough.’ Phaedrus saw him swallow. ‘Will you tell me something. If Midir still lives, why did they need another man to take his place?’

‘He is blind,’ Phaedrus said.

‘Blind!’ Conory’s voice sounded sick in his throat, and he made a strange little gesture, pressing the heels of his hands into his own eye-sockets as though for a moment he felt them empty. ‘So that was how she made sure of him . . .Where is he?’

‘He went back to the man he works for, a harness-maker in a Roman city far south of the Southern Wall.’

‘How long have Gault and Sinnoch known all this?’

‘Three years, I believe.’

‘And who else beside?’

‘Tuathal the Wise, Gallgoid – but he’s dead.’ (It was odd, that it had hardly struck home to him until he said the words.) ‘Two or three more.’

‘And never told me; even when the She-Wolf sent me her token last Beltane and the time came to begin sharpening our swords. I that was closer to him than most brothers.’

‘There was a great while still to wait. They are all grey-muzzles except – Gallgoid, and maybe they feared that you might do something hot-headed.’

‘Did they fear the same thing at summer’s end, when they told me the same tale as the rest of the tribe, concerning the Prince Midir come back from the dead?’ Conory’s voice had a bite to it.

‘It seemed to them good that you should be the test. If you did not know that I was not Midir, then nobody would know it. But you knew, and so I have failed.’

They had come a long way from the dangerous mood of so short a while before.

‘No,’ Conory said absently, ‘I’d not be saying that, for the test was not a fair one.’ He looked round at Phaedrus with his gentle, almost sleepy smile. ‘This arm of mine begins to ache. Is there light enough, do you think?’

A few moments later, they had scrambled down the bank and were kneeling among the tangled alder roots at the water’s edge, and Phaedrus had begun easing off the filthy rags that left dark juicy stains on his fingers as though he had been picking overripe blackberries. Conory squinted down to watch him. ‘Ach no, I would not be saying you had failed at all. Unless you make some glaring mistake, you will pass well enough – with everyone else.’

‘What mistake did I make with you?’ The last clotted fold came away, and Phaedrus stooped to cup the icy water in his palm and bathe the stale blood from the wound before he could see how it did.

‘More than one; small things enough. When Gault was ordering away the hunting-bands, it came to you that you did not know these hills, and there was an instant when you did not know what to do. You covered up well, though; to choose Sinnoch’s mongrel pack to hunt with was just the kind of thing Midir would have done. He was always one to take a devil’s delight in seeing how far he could go in outraging the Grey-Muzzles and the customs of the tribe.’

‘As you do in seeing how wild a fashion you can make the young braves follow for their own befoolment?’