The Mark of the Horse Lord (16 page)

‘It is always amusing to see what can be done in that way,’ Conory said, catching his breath a little at Phaedrus’s probing fingers on the wound, and glancing up at the striped cat who had remained at the top of the bank and was now crouching there with her face a little above his. She was staring into some inner distance of her own, but when he put up his hand, she rubbed her broad furry head into his palm. ‘They will tell you it is not possible to tame a wildcat, and most times it will be true, but not – quite always. I found Shân as a kit, before her eyes were well open. Her mother had been killed by an eagle,
aiee!
a great fight that must have been – and the rest of the litter were dead for lack of her. But there was still a spark of life in this one and so I took her. She bit my thumb to the bone in the hour that she first had teeth enough to bite with, but now – you see?’ He smiled reflectively, and Phaedrus knew that he was taking refuge from the thought of Midir alive and blind, until he had had time to get used to it. ‘Only the first time I put a leash on her and brought her into the Fire Hall on my shoulder, every fool in Dun Monaidh thought that Conory was starting a new fashion . . .The Healer Priests were busy cleansing bites and clawings for the best part of a moon before the thing wore itself out.’

‘You had best take
this
to the Healer Priest, when we get back,’ Phaedrus said, ‘but it will do for now . . .Well, she proved her ancestry when you flung her in Logiore’s face. Did you think to see her again with the life in her striped hide?’

Conory gave a small, one-shouldered shrug. ‘It was a risk we all took. She is a fighting animal, as we all are. But it was good to hear that wicked triumph-song of hers, afterwards.’

He returned to the thing they had been speaking of before Shân came into it. ‘Only small mistakes. But I would not be needing any mistake at all. Way back in the Cave of the Hunter – what name did you answer to, before you answered to Midir?’

‘In the arena, they called me Red Phaedrus.’ He was tearing a strip from the end of his cloak. It would make a better bandage than that foul rag, anyway.

‘Then, Red Phaedrus, tell me – in the circus, were you wont to draw your weapons from some common store, or did you each have your own?’

‘You do not have anything of your own, in the Gladiators’ School, save the clothes you stand up in, and the gewgaws that your patrons and admirers give you; but as far as maybe, you stick always to the same sword.’

‘
Sa
. Then you will know how it is with weapons; to the eye they may be as like as one grain of sand is like another, but each comes from the armourer a little different in balance, with some nature of its own that no other weapon has, and your hand grows to know it, so that if you take up another in its stead, though there is no difference to the eye, your hand knows.’

Phaedrus nodded.

‘Midir and I were two halves of the same nut when we were boys. I was not sure at first, that night in the Cave of the Hunter, but when we put our arms round each other and made a show for all those onlookers,
then
I was sure. The balance of the blade was not right.’

‘Why did you not speak out, then?’

‘It was in my mind to see what would happen – to learn what you were, since you were not Midir. Also it was
not
in my mind to wreck the uprising we had waited and planned for so long, and perhaps be the death of many friends.’

Phaedrus was binding up the wound, and his eyes and Conory’s were very close together. ‘And now? If you denounce me now, you will split the People of the Horse from top to bottom, and Liadhan will walk back unchecked into the red ruins of her queendom.’

‘If we needed the Prince Midir in throwing off the She-Wolf’s yoke – we will be needing the Prince Midir still.’

Phaedrus tied off the knot. ‘You will stand with me, then?’

‘When a man binds up a gash in my hide for me, I must be counting him as a friend. And most times I stand with my friends. Is it so with you?’

‘Ach, don’t you be putting overmuch trust in my friendship – we learn to take such trifles easily, in the arena,’ Phaedrus said, lightly and harshly. ‘The only man I ever counted for a friend, I killed in winning my wooden foil.’

They looked at each other an instant, and then Conory said, ‘It’s a chance I’ll take.’

They went back towards the camp, with their arms lightly across each other’s shoulders. And this time it was not altogether for show. The striped cat stalked ahead, tail uplifted like a banner.

Gault and his band had just ridden in to the forgathering as they got back to the camp. Well on into the night, Cuirithir and a knot of horsemen came in with word that Dergdian would be in next day. None of them had had any success with their hunting. And later still, when the meagre food had been eaten in dulled silence, and the weary men were already huddling into their cloaks and the heather wind-brakes close about the fires, Gault gathered the leaders about him, and kept them waiting until he was ready to speak, then looked up from drawing in the ash with a bit of stick and said abruptly, ‘We have two moons – three if the spring comes later, but assuredly no more, to have our swords whetted before the Caledones take the war-trail. It is time enough, but no more than time enough. Therefore, the sooner we bring the King to the Crowning Stone, the better, for when that is done—’ The wolf-yellow gaze whipped round, singling Phaedrus from the rest, so that for the first time Gault’s words were directly for him: ‘The sooner that is done, and he has taken the Princess Murna for his woman, the sooner we shall be free for the whetting of our swords.’

Phaedrus had sprung up before the last words were spoken. ‘The Princess Murna?’

The wolf-stare never wavered. ‘Who else?’

‘It was not in the bargain!’

‘What bargain?’ Gault’s voice had the ring of iron. ‘If Liadhan had not escaped to her left-hand kin, the thing might not have been so direly needful, at least not so urgent. As it is, you must take the Royal Daughter for your woman, even as your great grandsire took the Royal Woman of the Epidii, that the two people might become one, and you must take her as soon as you are crowned King. The little Dark People, the Women’s Side, all those who make their foremost prayers to Earth Mother, will accept you the more readily if you hold by the ancient right, as well as by the right of the Sun People, and you must make your claim strong, before any rise to question it.’

Phaedrus was seeing inside the darkness of his head, the white mask-like face under the silver moon head-dress, with the look in the eyes that he could not read. The face of Liadhan’s daughter. ‘How if I refuse?’ he demanded, his voice thick in his throat.

The dark brows lifted a little. ‘You will not refuse. You are the King.’

Phaedrus made one desperate effort to beat down the tawny wolf’s gaze that would not leave his face, but he was trapped, and he knew it, and knew also, raging inwardly, that he was ham-strung in this battle of wills by the fact that he had been a slave too long, trained to obey as a thing that had no right to any will of its own, and the training had left scars and weak places in him like an old wound that lets you down when you least expect it.

He turned the thing into an ugly jest. ‘So, I will take Liadhan’s daughter for my woman. But “like mother like daughter”, they say. Will you promise not to let her eat me and choose another king, seven Midwinter Fires from now?’

He dared not meet Conory’s eyes, lest he should see scorn in them, or worse still, the look of a man making allowance for a friend.

PHAEDRUS OPENED HIS eyes into complete darkness, and lay for a while trying to remember where he was, trying to pierce back through the black sleep that had come down like a curtain between him and some strange, shadowy half-world on the other side of it. Three days, they had said – someone had said – three days and three nights for the Horse Lord before he came back to life. But surely it had been longer than that, whole years longer than that. Or had there perhaps never been a beginning to it, and would there never be an end?

He made a sudden panic movement, and the pain and stiffness of his body seemed to tear apart the feeling of nightmare that had begun to rise in his throat, so that he remembered where he was and what was happening to him. He turned his head cautiously, and saw a little way off, the few red gleeds of a dying fire. There had been many fires in this place where the little Dark People had laid their dead Chiefs away, when they were the lords of the land; he had seen the dark scars of them on floor and roof, at the beginning, when there were torches to see by. The Place of Life, they called it, this place where now the boys came at their initiation mysteries, and the Horse Lord must lie for his three days and nights among the dead.

He had not been alone in the tomb-chamber. Vaguely he could remember now the Sun Priests coming and going about him; silent figures in horse-hide cloaks and aprons, their heads shaved save for the broad centre crest. The strange-smelling herbs that they had burned in the fire, the ritual patterns of sound and movement that they had woven round him. Dreams there had been, too, that seemed to come from the smoke of the fire, dreams of having four legs and a heart like flame, and running with a four-legged herd of kindred, in a thunder of hooves and a sky-wide flying of manes and tails. Strange wild dreams of freedom such as no mortal man had ever known.

He moved again, carefully, testing out his body, and the stiffened smart of the new tattoo marks on breast and shoulders brought him fully back to himself with a rush, and to wondering why, in the name of all the Gods that ever man had prayed to, he had got into that fight at the wine-booth. Why hadn’t he simply hitched up his bundle and turned south, the moment the gates of the Gladiators’ School closed behind him? He might have been in Londinium, a free trainer in some other school, perhaps, by now; his own master among his own kind. Even when Gault came, why hadn’t he pretended to agree, and waited his chance and run as though all the fiends of Tartarus were after him? He supposed he had grown so used to thinking no more than one day ahead that when Gault and Sinnoch had put the scheme to him, and when he was with Midir, it had only seemed like a wild adventure to set out on, and he had not realized that it was for all the rest of his life.

To the end of his life, he was Midir the Horse Lord, and when he came to the end he would be laid in much such a place as this, with a sword to his hand and a pot of heather-beer to cheer him on the dark journey, and be remembered by a name that was not his, by a people who were not his, either.

Meanwhile, wasn’t it time that somebody came? How much longer? Soon the last gleeds of the fire would dim and go out . . . Suddenly the darkness was bearing down on him with all the weight of piled stone and turf between him and the world of living men, suffocating and engulfing him, crushing him out of existence. There was a drumming sound all about him, quicker and quicker, and a strange, animal panting that seemed to echo back from the unseen walls, and he did not realize that he was hearing his own heartbeats and his own hurrying breaths. He thrust back the soft, skin rug in which he was wrapped, and struggled to an elbow, then into a sitting position, groaning as every stiffened fibre of his body twinged in protest.

There was a stir and a flicker of torchlight far off at the entrance to the tomb-chamber, as though someone on watch there had only been waiting for some sound of movement to tell them he was awake, and figures came ducking in along the low tunnel. After so long in the dark, the sudden light of the torches they carried jabbed at Phaedrus’s eyes, half blinding him, so that it was a few moments before he could see that the foremost of the torch-bearers was Conory, for once without his cat, and with two more of the Companions at his back.

‘It was a good sleep?’ Conory asked the ritual question.

And Phaedrus gathered his wits to make the ritual answer: ‘A good sleep. And a good waking.’

The Companions were setting their torches into the makeshift stands of crossed spears that stood ready for them against the walls, and the light, flaring upward, splashed the great in-curving stones with honey colour, till they ran in to meet at the great fire-blackened lintelstone high overhead. It was like a giant beehive, Phaedrus thought suddenly. It was easy to imagine the wild bees nesting up there, filling the chamber with their deep song – would the rib-cage of a dead Chieftain make a good framework for a honeycomb?. . .

‘It is time to be making ready,’ said Conory’s voice in his ear. And he pulled himself together and straightened his mind from its wandering with an effort. There were so many things he wanted to ask. So much could have happened during these three days and nights that he had been shut away from the world of living men. He wanted to know if there had been any word of Liadhan and what had happened to her priests – those that had not died in the fighting – how many of the tribe had died on either side, how the rising had fared in the farther parts of Earra-Ghyl. But all that must wait. He had been well drilled by Gault in how he must behave during this time of being made ready. So he drank the dark, bitter-tasting brew in the bronze cup that Conory gave him, and got stiffly and awkwardly to his feet, the floor dipping and side swimming under him, until whatever was in the drink took effect, and the world steadied somewhat; and stood to be decked out for his King-Making, like a sacrificial bull for the slaughter, he thought, and had a moment’s insane desire to laugh.

In silence, Conory and the Companions combed his hair and bound it back with thongs as though for battle, and dressed him in breeks and tunic that they had brought with them. They hung round his neck an ancient clashing necklace of river-gold, amber, and cornelian, and a broad collar of heron-hackles; sheathed a leaf-shaped dagger with a gold pommel-mount at his side and sprang on to each arm a pair of coiled bronze arm-rings that he seemed to have seen before. It was a few moments before he remembered when, and where, and that it was not the arm-rings alone; and then, looking down, he saw the dark clotted patch where Logiore’s blood had sunk into the heron-hackles.