The Mark of the Horse Lord (21 page)

‘Take him away and throw him out for the wolves,’ he said to the men who had done the killing. The wolves did not matter; it was only the fire that mattered.

It was only then, watching them dragging the little body away, that he remembered the Old Man’s foretelling, of just three days ago.

That night, when the evening meal was over and the harping silent in the Fire Hall, and Phaedrus went to the King’s Place to sleep, he checked on the threshold with a caught breath of surprise. Beside the central hearth, where Brys should have been waiting for him, sat a woman. She had drawn his own stool to the fire, and sat there, with her loosened mantle dark about her. Her face was hidden from him by her hair which she had unbraided and begun to comb, as though to pass the time while she waited, but the falling curtain of it was unmistakable: the soft dove-gold, mouse-gold hair of the Royal Woman.

‘Murna! What is it that you do here?’

She flung back the mass of hair and turned her face to him. ‘May the Queen not come to the King’s quarters when she chooses?’

‘Surely. But has the Queen chosen to come so often?’ He pulled off his heavy cloak and flung it across the piled skins of the bedplace, and came to stand beside the fire, and look down at her, his shoulder propped against the roof tree.

‘I was wishing to have a word with you,’ she said, ‘and so I sent your armour-bearer out for a while.’

‘Yes?’ Phaedrus’s guard was up.

‘You gained a victory today.’

‘In the matter of the spy? So you have heard about that?’

‘There is little that the Women’s Side does not hear about,’ she said, and the cool, hazel eyes that he suddenly realized were like Conory’s, for all that they were set level, rested on him consideringly. Then, as though making up her mind to something, she added, ‘But he was not here for spying.’

‘No? For what, then?’

‘He came to get speech with me.’

‘And did he get it?’

‘Yes. He brought me word from my mother – and a gift, for you.’

Phaedrus’s red brows flashed up. ‘For me? I’d not have thought she loved me so greatly.’

‘There are gifts and gifts,’ Murna said.

‘And this one? Are you going to give it to me?’

For answer, she laid down the ivory comb she was still holding, and brought something from the breast of her gown, and held it out to him.

He took the thing and looked at it warily; a leather flask so small that it lay like a chestnut in the palm of his hand, plugged with a bone stopper carved into the likeness of a tiny snarling head – human or animal, there was no telling which. The thing had an almost palpable smell of wickedness, and he took care not to interfere with the waxed thread that kept the stopper in place.

‘What is it?’

‘Death,’ Murna said.

‘Poison?’ He had been half prepared for that, but something twisted coldly in the pit of his stomach all the same. He stood for a few moments turning it over and over, and looking at it. Odd to see one’s own death lying in the palm of one’s hand. ‘Why have you told me this – shown me this?’

She held out her hand for the thing’s return. ‘Because I do not think I will be using it, after all.’

‘After all?’ Phaedrus, surprised and amused to find what a fool he was, gave it back to her.

She sat cradling it in her hands and looking up at him between the falls of mouse-gold hair. ‘You have changed, in seven years. The Midir I knew when I was a child would have let Gault have his burning without another thought – unless it seemed to him amusing to pit his strength against Gault’s and he chanced to be in need of amusement just then.’

‘And how do you know that I did not chance to feel in need of amusement today?’

For the first time there was the shadow of a smile in her face. ‘Did you?’

‘No.’

‘And most assuredly, if it had been like that, the Midir I knew would not have troubled himself to lie to me.’

‘I was a boy, seven years ago. Boys do change, growing into men.’

‘It is more than that – another kind of change.’

‘You have said “the Midir
I
knew” twice, but in truth you were little more than ten when your mother put an end to that Midir. You were never knowing much of him, were you, Murna?’

Her face tightened, and for a moment he wondered if she was going to fly out at him for that word of her mother. But she let it pass. ‘I knew maybe better than others guessed at; more than you remember. But you were never one to care much what you broke, or even remember the breaking of it, were you, Midir?’

‘Was I not? If I was never one for remembering, what use to ask me?’ He dropped the light, hard tone. ‘Tell me – if your mother’s messenger had escaped, and so the thing between Gault and me today had not happened, would you have used the poison?’

‘In the day that I have a use for poison,’ Murna said simply, ‘I have no need that my mother should send it to me.’

She snapped the thread and pulled out the bone plug; and poured the contents of the tiny flask into the heart of the fire, then dropped the flask itself after it. The fire spat like an angry cat, and a bluish flame leaped up, wavered, and slowly died out.

As it did so, Murna picked up the ivory comb and rose, wrapping the folds of her cloak about her. ‘
Sa
, there is no more that I came to say. Brys will be within call, I do not doubt, like the good, well-trained hound he is.’

And she was gone.

Phaedrus did not at once call his armour-bearer, but stood staring after her, a frown bitten deep between his brows, trying to make sense of many things that he did not understand, his own feelings among them.

THE SNOW WAS shrinking in the lower corries of Cruachan, and the nights were alive with the green sounds of running water and the mating calls of curlew flighting in for the high moors, when the Caledonian Envoy came.

The Lord of the Dalriads received him and his escorting nobles seated on the High Place of black ramskins in the Fire Hall, with a group of the Companions about him; made them welcome, feasted them as honoured guests, and afterwards bade his harper play for them. The pretence must be kept up that the green juniper brand in the Envoy’s hand really meant that he came in peace.

But the knowledge of what was going forward, and the presence of the Caledonian nobles in their ceremonial cloaks of wildcat skins was like a thin, dry wind blowing round the Hall, and a mood was rising in the young men that needed more than harping. The Companions had begun to make another kind of music of their own, little Baruch beating out the rhythm with an open palm on one of the cooking-pots, others taking it up from him, clapping and stamping it out on the beaten floor where they had kicked the fern aside. And six or seven of the young warriors spilled out on to the paved dancing space and began to crouch and stamp in a hunting-dance, among the very fringes of the fire.

Diamid of the devil’s eyebrows was the hunted, the rest were the hunters – men or hounds, it made no difference. The quarry fled from them, and turned back to them, to dance, as it were, with his own death, and fled from them again, drawing them after him; and the hunters followed, miming the chase to that wild, throbbing rhythm of stamping feet, led by the strangely bell-like drumming of Baruch’s open palms on the cooking-pot, until the Old Magic filled the Fire Hall and Phaedrus could have sworn that the roof had become the interlaced branches of forest trees, and the shadows of the dancers, spun outward by the fire, were the shadows of a flying stag and a pack of hounds. They danced the Kill, the rhythm rising to fever pitch, closed in about the panting quarry and pulled him down, and ran in with their spears. The drumming ceased, as though cut by the spear-thrusts, and the dancers stood laughing and breathless, the mystery dropping from them like a cloak – so that they were no more than young men, who had been letting off some of the pentup strain in the air.

But now the mood was on them and soon the dancing began again, the dancers constantly changing, until the whole night seemed to dissolve into stamping and whirling figures, and even the older men were adding their bit to the heady rhythms beaten out for the dancers.

But presently, in a pause for breath, Forgall the Envoy, seated beside Phaedrus, turned to him with an air of scarcely veiled boredom and said, ‘Tell me, is it not the custom with the Dalriads, as it is with us, for the women to dance also?’

‘It is, when it pleases them,’ said Phaedrus.

‘It is in my mind that I would gladly see your women dance. It would be interesting to me to see how they compare for skill with the women of my own people. Will you send word to the women’s quarters, that maybe it will please them now?’

Phaedrus was suddenly furious at the cool demand so thinly masked as a request. The Women’s Side did indeed dance when it pleased them, but for a stranger within the gates to demand it of them was an insult, and he very much doubted if this Caledonian noble with the full mouth and insolent dark eyes was ignorant of the fact. But before he could speak, Murna, who had led the other women all evening in keeping the mead-horns filled, and now sat at his other side, erect and indrawn as usual under the moon head-dress, said in a clear, high voice, ‘It is not for my Lord the King to send such a message to the women’s quarters. But since our guest would have it so, I will send the word.’ She looked across the great, round Hall to where the few women who yet remained – old ones for the most part – had gathered in a little knot before the doorway. Grania, one of the women, came at her call, and was given some murmured instructions, and went out. And the young warriors lounged back to the places and pastimes they had left earlier: to fondle a hound’s ears or start a game of knuckle-bones with a comrade. Phaedrus sat coldly raging behind his best arena smile. That this Envoy should have dared . . .That Murna should have made it impossible for him to thrust the insult back down the man’s throat . . . But of course she would have been eager to avoid that, she was Liadhan’s daughter, part Caledonian herself; probably the man was her kin.

There was a sound of women’s voices and running feet outside and a knot of girls came in through the foreporch, flinging off hastily donned cloaks. Their skirts were already hitched knee-high and each girl carried a dirk in her left hand and another thrust into her belt or girdle. The woman who Murna had sent, had returned with them, and she also carried two dirks; but clearly she was not going to dance, for her gown still fell in straight folds to her ankles, and in her free hand she held a long elder-pipe.

Murna rose in her place, and called in a clear, hard tone to the girls by the door: ‘The guests in our Hall would have us dance for them, my sisters. So – let us dance.’

One of the girls, a dark, fierce creature, laughed, as though sharing a harsh jest that their hearers did not understand as yet. ‘We will dance for them, Murna the Queen – as we used to dance when we called ourselves the Wildcats, and went to the practice grounds together.’

As they came forward between the crowding warriors, Murna walked out, kilting her skirts through her bronze-studded belt as she went, to join them on the dancing-floor.

For a long moment the silence in the Hall was so intense that all men could plainly hear the faint chiming of the row upon row of tiny, hanging silver scales that, stitched on to the tall, leather head-dress, made up the Moon Diadem. Murna held out her hands, and the older woman came and put the two dirks into them, before she moved aside with her pipe, and settled down with her back against one of the seven great roof trees.

The dancers formed a wide-spaced ring about the fire, each girl with the blade of her left-hand dirk lying across the blade of her neighbour’s right, and as the first notes of the elder-pipe thrilled out, began to move slowly round the fire, with little short weaving steps. So far it all seemed very childish and pretty, Phaedrus thought, still coldly angry, though one might have expected the girls to be linked by a garland or a coloured ribbon rather than by crossed daggers, and he wondered why every man in the Hall caught a quick breath and sat more upright; why Conory just behind him, muttered, ‘Gods! The Wildcats indeed!’ He had not seen this particular dance before.

At first there had been no sound but the piping and the light pad of the dancers’ feet on the flagstones; then, one after another, the men began to pick up the rhythm as they had done before, and the rhythm itself was changing from white to red, growing fiercer, more urgent. The dirk-blades pointed now up, now down, began to nuzzle each other, blade licking round blade as though each had a life of its own. Faster and faster, the blades flickered and leaped, the shadows spun . . . and then the circle seemed to break off its own spinning, and instead of a ring of dancing girls, there were seven pairs of young warriors. And Phaedrus understood the sudden tensing in the Hall. He was watching a war-dance of the Women’s Side.

He was watching, too, a Murna whom he had never seen before, whom he had never known existed. Murna with her face come to life, and a tense laughter in every line of her, dancing out her mimic battle with the dark girl so close to where he sat, that he could have reached her in one stride and pulled her out of the dance. He wondered for a passing moment if she would turn those leaping daggers on him if he did, then knew that far more likely she would simply change back into the Murna he knew, the cold, unreachable Royal Woman between his hands. And another kind of anger sprang up in him, a raging helplessness that he did not understand; but then he understood scarcely anything that had to do with Murna.

All round the circle the long knives whirled and darted, flashing their deadly interlacing patterns in the flame-light; the pipes shrilled higher and higher against the throbbing rhythm that the men were stamping out from the shadows, and the ring of blade on blade. And then at last, in each pair of warriors, one girl dropped to her knees and flung herself round and backward, to lie with outspread arms, radiating like the petals of some great dagger-tipped flower from the fire that was its heart, while the other made the victory leap high across her body; and the dance was over.