The Mark of the Horse Lord (20 page)

‘I would speak with you because it has been told me that you are a Chieftain among your own people, and because the war horns are sounding across Druim Alban. When the spring comes, the hosts of King Bruide will take the war-trail, and at such a time it is surely good that the Horse Lord should know something of all those within his hunting-runs, not of his own tribe alone.’

The little man gestured to Phaedrus to sit himself on the flat stone, and then squatted down at his feet. ‘You have more than one of our people among the slaves in your Dun. Why not ask
them
what you would know of the Dark People?’

‘Because a slave answers as a slave, and it is the answer of a free man that I am wanting.’

The other nodded. ‘Ask, then.’

Phaedrus knew that it would be no good trying to come at the thing slantwise, not with this little man who would understand slantwise methods all too well, so he made his question as direct as a dagger thrust. ‘When the fighting comes, this fighting that will not be only for cattle or boundaries, but for deciding whether the Dalriads shall be a free people any more, and what kings shall rule us, and what Gods we shall follow – have we to fear your little blue-flint daggers in our back while our shields are turned to the Caledones?’

‘If you had, should I tell you?’

‘No,’ said Phaedrus frankly, ‘but I have fought for my life to amuse a Roman crowd too often not to be able to judge men’s faces. I had hoped that your face might tell me before you were aware of it.’

‘And it does not? See now, I will be telling you myself, and I will be telling you the truth. We count for nothing, we, the people of the dark-blue flint, since the Horse People took our hunting-runs; we count for nothing, and we know it. But the tribes come and go like wind-waves through the heather, and we bide in our hills and let them pass. It is no concern of ours when they fight each other. We shall always be here as long as there are wolves on the hill. Kill and be killed as you choose, it is nothing to us.’

‘Yet you helped Liadhan to escape into Caledonia.’

‘Surely. She was the Mother, the Lady of the Forests. She was ours to us, and we were hers. Yet because she fled from it when her own Call came –
aiee
, though we helped her in her fleeing – I do not think that many of us will stir from our own fireside for her sake again.’

‘When her own Call came?’ The phrase caught at Phaedrus’s attention, and he was puzzled by it.

The other’s dark gaze was on his face, and the burn sounded very loud in the silence. High, high overhead, Phaedrus heard the thin, sharp yelp of the golden eagle. Then the little Dark Man said softly, ‘The Horse Lord, of all men, should be knowing what that Call means . . .’ And then as though changing the subject, he reached out and took up one of the barley-cakes, and broke a long piece of crust from one side. ‘Lord, do you see what I am holding?’

‘Surely,’ Phaedrus said, surprised.

‘What is it, then?’

‘A crust of barley-cake.’

‘Are you sure?’

From being surprised, Phaedrus was puzzled, and somewhere deep within him was a flicker of warning that he did not understand. ‘I am quite sure. It is a crust from one of the barley-cakes I brought you.’

‘Look at it well,’ the man said.

And Phaedrus found himself obeying, his head bent over the crust as though it were something strange and wonderful that he had never seen before.

‘Are you still sure?’ said the soft, insistent voice.

And suddenly he was not so sure. Not sure at all. The thing in the narrow dark hand was growing blurred, losing its outline, changing into something else. Something – something—

‘What is it, then?’ said the voice.

‘It is – it is
like
a feather.’

He could see it taking shape, the strong slender line of it, as it were, filled in with mist. But the mist was thickening, taking on substance and colour. He could see the almost blackness of the strong pinion barred with gold – in another moment – but something in him had begun to resist.

‘What kind of feather would it be?’

‘A golden plover—’ he began, and checked. ‘No feather at all!’ He forced the words out, his eyes fighting for the lost outline of the barley crust. He could see it now very faintly like a shadow – showing through the feather that was growing misty again. For what seemed an eternity of time the two images hung equally balanced, so that he could see them both, one showing through the other. ‘It is only a barley crust –
a barley crust!
’

The feather was no more substantial than a wisp of wood-smoke and with a supreme effort of will, he snuffed it out, the dark slender shape and the golden shadow-bars, and there was nothing in the other man’s hand but the strip of crust with the grains of parched barley scattered on top.

He looked up with a gasping breath, and drew the back of one hand across his forehead. Despite the little chill wind, it was wet. ‘Why did you do that?’

There was sweat on the little Dark Man’s forehead too, as he set the barley crust back beside the cake that it had come from. ‘That? It was no more than a small piece of Earth Magic, such as may be made between the eyes of one man and the eyes of another. I made it – for the answering of a question that was in my mind.’ He looked up from fitting the crust back into place with a craftsman’s care, and his eyes rested consideringly on Phaedrus’s face. ‘It is strange; I could have sworn that there was not one among the Sun People that I could not have made to see that golden plover’s feather and forget altogether the barley crust, until I bade them remember it again.’

There was a little pause, and then Phaedrus said, ‘I have spent seven years in the Romans’ world, which is a different world from ours; maybe that is why you could not work your magic on me perfectly.’

‘Maybe,’ the other said, but his eyes still brooded on Phaedrus’s face.

And meeting the question in them, Phaedrus conjured up the old swaggering arena smile that he had learned as he learned his sword strokes. ‘
Na
, now, do you think that I am not Midir of the Dalriads, not the Horse Lord after all, but another wearing his forehead mark?’

‘I do not know,’ the man said slowly. ‘But when you see that golden plover’s feather again, you will be the Horse Lord; and the forehead mark your own.’

‘Rede me the riddle, Old Man.’

‘Time will do that. But this I will tell you, that you may be knowing I speak true: within three days one of the Old People will reach out to touch your life again, but it is in my heart that he will be already dead.’

So – Phaedrus had his answer; it was only the horses and the beef cattle that need be reckoned, after all. The People of the Hills were part of a different world, and no more to be counted as strength or weakness than the glen woods or the snows of Cruachan . . .

Next day he rode back with the Companions to Dun Monaidh, and after that there was little time for remembering the scrap of Earth Magic that was already fading in his mind like a dream, or for thinking of the things that Old Man had foretold. Little time for anything save the matter in hand. And the matter in hand was war! War, when the wild geese flew north in the spring.

In Dun Monaidh, as in every other dun and rath and steading of Earra-Ghyl, the smiths and armourers, the horse-breakers and chariot-builders were at work. All day long from the huddle of blackened bothies in the outer court came the red lick of flame and the roar of the sheepskin bellows, and the ding of hammer on anvil, as here the fresh iron felloes were fitted to chariot wheels, and there the dints were beaten out of the rim of a dappled ox-hide shield; and every warrior sharpened and resharpened his weapons on the great Pillar Stone.

And then on the second day after his return, Phaedrus came out of the long chariot shed with a couple of the Companions behind him, and heard somewhere over towards the northern rampart, a sudden worry of sounds that were all human, and yet made him think of the moment at the end of a hunt, when the hounds close in and make their kill.

The small tumult died out almost as he began to run, the other two at his heels, and when he came out between two store-sheds into the clear space just within the dry-stone curve of the rampart, the little group of warriors he found there were quite silent, their dirks still in their hands, looking down at a body that lay crumpled on the ground among them. One of them was turning it over with his foot as Phaedrus arrived, much as a man might turn over a dead rat, and as it fell all asprawl, he saw that it was the body of one of the Dark People, stabbed in four or five places about the breast and belly.

‘What has happened here?’ he demanded.

And the man who had turned the body over answered him, ‘A rat-hunt, Midir.’

‘It seems that you have made your kill. What was he doing in the Royal Dun?’

Another man shrugged. ‘Spying. We found him hiding in the wood-store yonder. He must have come over the rampart in the night.’

‘Or up by the way that the She-Wolf went.’

A small crowd had begun to gather; someone came cleaving his way through them like a strong swimmer in a rough sea, and Gault stood there, arms folded on barrel chest, looking down with hard, wolf-tawny eyes at the slight dark body in its blood-soaked deerskin. ‘A spy, most assuredly.’ He bent forward abruptly for a closer look. ‘Aye, he’s out of the Caledonian hunting-runs, by the patterns on his hide. Doubtless, if you had not found him he would have been out over the rampart again tonight, and away back to King Bruide with word of how many chariots Dun Monaidh can muster.’ He straightened and half turned away, as though, for him, the thing was finished. ‘Make a fire on the eastern slopes beyond the outerbank – good and high, for the blaze to show far across country – and burn me this rat.’

There was a sharp, half-surprised silence, and then little Baruch said, ‘Why do more than tip him into the bog – or throw him out for the wolf-kind?’

‘Fire is the fitting end for rats.’

Phaedrus, his eyes narrowing under the red brows, suddenly took command. ‘Why are you so firm set on this burning, Gault the Strong?’

‘His litter-brothers will come to know of it. It will maybe serve for a useful warning.’

‘They will come to know that he is killed. Will that not serve for warning enough?’

‘I am doubting it,’ Gault said harshly. ‘The Old Ones are so close to Earth Mother, that death is to them no more than a short journey.’

And so, the fire . . . Phaedrus had been long enough out of the four-square Roman world to have some idea of what all this was really about. To the Sun People it made little real difference whether earth or fire took their bodies when they were done with them; but with the children of Earth Mother, it was very different. Grain thrown into the fire would never quicken, and for them, burning took not only the body but the life that had belonged with it. Gault, in fact, was proposing to destroy whatever this little dark creature had of a soul, for a warning to his kind. Phaedrus had never cared overmuch for the laws of men, but this was another thing, and the laws of men had nothing to do with it. Until now, feeling his way in a new and unfamiliar world, he had left the real leadership to Gault and the inner Council. But now he knew, suddenly and with absolute certainty, that he had come to the end of that . . .

‘But to my mind, the killing is enough,’ he said, ‘and Gault, it is I that am the King! Whatever he was doing, his death settles the score.
There will be no burning!
’

Gault’s wolf-gaze whipped round to meet his, and Phaedrus read in the other’s frown that he, too, knew the time had come for a trial of strength between them. ‘You are the King, but it seems that you have forgotten much of your own world in the arena. And until you remember, best be leaving such matters as this to those of us who will better understand what we do.’

‘I have forgotten much,’ Phaedrus agreed, ‘but I learned some things, too. Even in the arena, we count the fighting ended with the kill, and do not seek to carry it beyond the death-stroke.’

The knot of onlooking warriors was growing moment by moment, but no one attempted to take any hand in this odd quiet battle of wills. It was a thing between Gault and the Lord Midir, with the body of the little dark hunter lying between them.

‘You speak like a gladiator – a mere bought butcher,’ Gault said at last.

‘There might be worse things to be than a gladiator.’

‘Such, for instance, as Lord of the Dalriads?’ It was easy enough to read the meaning behind that: ‘I made you and I can break you. No need to be Lord of the Dalriads another hour, if it displeases you.’

Phaedrus’s mouth lifted at the corners in the faint, insolent smile that his fellow sword-fighters had come to know. ‘Surely it is a fine thing to be Lord of the Dalriads; and Lugh Shining Spear himself forbid I should forget it was you who took me from Corstopitum city gaol and set my foot on the Coronation Stone.’ He let Gault see the meaning behind that, too: ‘You made me and you can break me, but you will be broken with me, if you do.’

There was a feeling of battle in him, under the quiet surface. He had again the old sense of life narrowing and sharpening its focus until there was nothing in it but himself and Gault, and both of them knowing that the thing they fought for was the leadership of the tribe.

So they confronted each other, eye looking into eye, neither speaking again nor moving, until the silence between them drew out thin and taut, so that Phaedrus felt he could have plucked sparks from it like notes off a harp-string; and he heard his own voice break it, saying very clearly, each word separated from the next, ‘There will – be – no – burning.’

Something flickered far back in Gault’s eyes, and he shrugged his bull shoulders. The fight was over, and the victory to Phaedrus. ‘You are the King, the thing must be as you choose. But the Gods help you and all of us, if you choose a’wrong.’ But there was no enmity in his tone; indeed, his dark frowning gaze held a new respect.

On the surface, it had been such a small battle; it had not even concerned a warrior of the tribe, only one of the little Dark People, who, in the eyes of the Dalriads, were half animal and half uncanny. Yet it was now, and not in the moment of his King-Making, that Red Phaedrus felt the Lordship of the Dalriads come into his hand.