The Mark of the Horse Lord (23 page)

He had been in the south with the main War Host, turning a thrust of the Caledones who had seized on the few hours’ darkness at the black of the moon to swim their horses across the narrows of the Warship Firth and coracle-float the light chariots over, when the word had come. Word brought by a wounded man on a foundering horse, that a vast chariot horde were swarming through the Druim Alban passes, heading for the glens of the Alder Woods and the Black Goddess, and the ways down to Loch Abha. The light chariot bands led by old Dergdian who were on guard there would hold them – ah yes, to the last man – but it could not be long, if help did not reach them, before that last man went down. Aye, the man said, another rider had set off at the same time as himself for Dun Monaidh; they would have the word before this, for the old chariot road made swifter travelling than these accursed hills . . .

Then he died.

Chariots. That would mean the Glen of the Black Goddess, steep as it was; there would be no way for chariots through the crowding alder woods. The Leaders had taken hurried Council almost while the teams were being harnessed, and Gault had remained with a strong force, including all the foot fighters, to finish with the southern thrust, and Phaedrus and Conory had taken the flower of the horsemen and chariotry and flung them northward like flighting geese, spare chariot horses harnessed as wheelers for extra speed and to fill the places of any yoke horses that foundered on the way.

The distance was less than it would be from Dun Monaidh, but as the messenger had said, the old chariot road made swifter travelling than these accursed hills. And the storm, bursting on them last night, maddening the horses and bringing down all the hill burns in sudden spate, had held them up still further. Three days they had been on that desperate ride, and at least seven horses they had killed with the merciless speed of it. But when they had come down through the pale, stormspent dawn into the low, wet country of the Loch Abha Gap, the scouts sent on ahead had found the light chariots still holding, with the reserves that had reached them yesterday; still holding but cut to pieces, and the fight already joining again after the few hours’ darkness.

No time to rest the men and horses, as he had hoped to do; no time for any counsel. Phaedrus remembered looking over at Conory, the question and the agreement passing between them unspoken, and then giving the needful orders. He remembered the sharp trampling of hooves as the scout wheeled his pony and was off again with word to old Dergdian and the hard-pressed and dwindling chariots far up the Glen of the Black Goddess. ‘I send horsemen to cover your flanks; be ready to fall back when they come. We stand ready to catch you.’

And almost on the heels of the messenger, the weary horse-band had been away, riding into the early mists, each man eating his morning barley-bannock from the bag tied to his horse’s pectoral strap, as he rode.

Now, with their own morning bannocks eaten and the horses tended as best they could be, there was nothing to do but wait, here in the glen mouth, with the wide woods and marshes running to Loch Abha behind, the river guarding their left flank, and ahead of them the bare rocks and plunging bracken slopes of the Glen of the Black Goddess, shimmering in the heat.

Phaedrus had no experience, before this past few weeks, of leading a War Host, but his gladiator’s training and a natural trick of leadership had stood him in good stead; and now he glanced along the chariot line, taking in the placing of the rough-riding cavalry, with the eye of one who had at least a fair idea of how to place his men to the best advantage. The gaps left in the chariot ranks were there to let the hard-pressed squadron through; the little companies in the rear standing ready to swing forward and close them before the enemy could follow. Phaedrus, used to the disciplines of Rome and the ordered sham fights of the arena, had given the order for that battle-move but the tribesmen had never heard of such a way of fighting and now he knew that in trying to carry it out with an undisciplined horde of chariots, he was running the most hideous risk. What would happen if the gaps did not close in time was a prospect that sickened him to think of, but unless they were going to leave valiant old Dergdian and his squadrons to their fate, it was a risk that had to be taken.

A gad-fly stung his wrist, and he swore and cracked his hand down on the place, brushing the small, crushed body away. And went on waiting. There should be some sign of them by now. He was straining his whole attention out ahead of him up the rocky sweep of the glen, for any sign of movement – any sound . . .

With the air full of the soft, wet rush of the river, it was hard to be sure when the first rumours of sound came at last. Suddenly, far off from the slopes of Beinn Na Stroine, a curlew rose, crying its alarm note, thin and small with distance. And away down the chariot line a pony flung up his head, and another pawed the ground, snuffing the eddy of cool air that came down the glen from the high hills of Druim Alban. A faint, formless murmuration that seemed to drift on the little stir of wind, died with it into the fern, and then came again. Then clear on the heat-bloomed air, broke the sound of a hunting-horn. Someone still in command up there was calling back the survivors of that first heroes’ stand, as a huntsman calls off his hounds.

Something – a kind of boiling and thickening of the heat-haze – was gathering far up the glen; and out of it came a blink of light, and then another, sunlight on weapon or wheel-hub or glittering horse-pectoral. Darkness was growing under the dust-cloud, and a sound muttered out of it like thunder among the hills. It grew to the rumble and drum of wheels and hooves, the clash of war-gear and the shouting of men; all the ragged turmoil of a running fight. Phaedrus, on his feet now like all the rest, could see their own chariots falling back – back. The war-horn of the Dalriads boomed hollowly from the skirts of Beinn Na Stroine; and suddenly the bracken slopes below it were alive with running figures with long spears in their hands, while the cavalry came sweeping down to join their fellows covering the flanks of the hard-pressed chariot band.

They were so near now that Phaedrus could see through the dust-cloud how in every chariot that still carried two men, the warrior rode faced about to the pursuing enemy, spear still in hand, and shield up to guard both himself and his driver’s back. They were pouring in through the gaps, like the squadrons of some terrible ghost army, tattered and bloody; chariots with only one man in them, chariots with driver and warrior slumped against the wicker side, or dragged askew by one wild-eyed and wounded horse with the harness dangling where a dead team-mate had been cut free. The wild cavalry were swinging right and left towards either flank of the War Host. The weary horses in the chariot line, roused by their comrades and the tumult and the smell of blood, had forgotten their weariness and were fighting for their heads. Conory, next in line, was looking to him, but Phaedrus, sweating with more than the heat now, set his teeth and held the whole War Host in leash that one moment longer, until the very last of the retreating chariots were safely through; while the enemy behind them, maybe in fear of a trap, reined their horses in and swerved aside for a few moments from their charge, and the waiting bands in the rear were swinging forward to close the gaps; waited one racing heartbeat of time longer, and then with the Caledones on the very lip of spilling forward again, raised the bronze ox-horn to his lips, and winded one sharp blast that flung to and fro among the hills until the high corries of Cruachan caught and flung it back, startling every shore bird in Earra-Ghyl.

But long before that last echo had died into the wild crying of curlew and sandpiper, the chariot line of the Dalriads was away at full flying gallop to meet the onrushing hosts of the Cailleach. Phaedrus heard himself raise the war-cry: ‘Cruachan! Cruachan!’, heard it taken up and hurled back by the long-drawn battle yell of the enemy. He flung his first spear as they came into javelin range, and one of the leading charioteers went down, his plunging team bringing confusion on those behind him, and almost in the same instant the two chariot hordes rolled full tilt together, with a great shouting of men and a screaming chaos of horses; a ringing crash that seemed as though it must shake the very roots of the mountains.

How long they struggled there in the mouth of the glen, the whole battle mass swaying now this way and now that, Phaedrus never knew. Time was not time any more, it passed with the speed of a lightning flash, and yet it seemed to him that they had been fighting here all their lives, to hold the Caledones back from Loch Abha levels, and the way into the heart of Earra-Ghyl.

The battle had long since lost all pattern and broken up into a swirl of scattered fighting. The whole glen was full of dust now, like a vast threshing floor; the chariots careered and circled, wheel locked in wheel, while the horsemen hung on the fringes of the battle, driving in a thrust of their own wherever the chances opened, and everywhere the foot-fighters swarmed with daggers reddened to the hilt. It seemed to Phaedrus that many of these on foot were women, but he had no time to think of that just then.

Ahead of him in the smother of flying dust and flung weapons, he saw a chariot covered with black ox-hide, whose team of bright duns flashed back fire from their gilded pectorals in the dusty sunlight, and whose half-naked warrior daubed with the woad and red ochre of the Caledones’ war-paint, wore about his neck the broad golden torque of a Chieftain.

His throw-spears long since spent, the broad infighting spear in his hand, he shouted to Brys. The boy laughed and crouched lower, and the red team sprang forward from the goad, scattering blood-stained foam from their muzzles. The splendid chariot rushed nearer on Phaedrus’s sight, almost broadside on. He nerved himself for the shock, caught one searing sight of the horses’ upreared heads and flying manes, and the blueeyed, snarling face of the Caledonian Chieftain, as the darting spear just missed his shoulder; and then in the instant before the crash, the enemy team plunged away left-hand wise and Brys wrenched the reds aside, and as one chariot hurtled across the hind-flank of the other, with no more than a thumb’s breadth between wheel-hub and wheel-rim, for one splinter of time the enemy driver’s back was exposed as he fought to get his plunging team under control. And Phaedrus drove home his spear, and dragged it out again with a satisfied grunt, and was past before he could see the man crumple forward on to the haunches of his team.
That
was a battle-move that the tribes knew well enough. He had hated the killing in the back, the first time, but he was used to it now.

A shout from Brys brought him round to see a second chariot charging down upon them. But the boy was a better driver, or maybe more fortunate, than the other had been. Almost at the last moment, he dragged the reds back on their haunches and brought them plunging round towards the onrushing team. The chariot leaped and twisted like a live thing in pain, and from somewhere under the floor came an ominous crack. They were scraping the side of the enemy war-car, and it seemed that in the next instant the wheels must lock; and then somehow, they were clear, while the other swept by and turned to charge again.

It was the driverless dun team, whose warrior, like many of his kind, had sprung down to fight on foot, that cut across and fouled the on-sweeping enemy, bringing all into confusion; and in the instant before the sweating charioteer could get clear, the warrior, with a yell of rage, drew back his spear-arm and flung the great, broad-headed war-spear as lightly as though it were no more than a javelin. Arching high, it took Phaedrus on the temple as he flung up his shield, and sliced downward, laying his left cheek open, and tore its way out through the young red beard along his jaw-bone.

For one terrible moment, as half his sight went out in red darkness, brought to his knees and clinging to the chariot rail, he thought his left eye had gone. Then as he freed one hand and flung it up to his face, he realized that he was only blinded by blood.

He heard Brys shouting something, and he spat blood and shouted back above the tumult, ‘
Na
– I am well enough.’ But from the feel of it, the chariot was far from well enough; some vital lashing had given under that terrific strain, and it was little fit for more fighting that day. Phaedrus had got himself to his feet again, wiping the blood out of his eyes with the back of one hand as strength came back to him. ‘Only a gash. Much mess but little matter. Try to keep near me, but above all, hold the horses out of trouble.’ And drawing his sword, he sprang down to meet the Chieftain in the gold torque, who came roaring in on him again.

The battle had swept them closer to the river than he had realized, and on the bank above the yeasty water they met and locked in combat, while the battle swung to and fro about them. They fought close, each with his back to his own hunting-runs. The Chieftain attacked with the courage of a wild boar, but against his tremendous strength and two good eyes, Phaedrus could set those four years of the Gladiators’ School. The two things cancelled each other out and made the fight an equal one. And the fierce joy rose in him, and with it a kind of fever-haze, so that he was scarcely aware of making his kill at last, only of a different enemy before him, a younger and lighter man who sprang in and out like a dancer as he fought, making the Horse Lord suddenly aware that his own feet were growing slow and his sword-arm heavy. He knew that deadly creeping weakness from an earlier time, and the shouting and hoof thunder and the clangour of the war-cars all about him blurred for an instant into the roar of the circus crowd. He shook his head to clear it, and saw the steep fall of the river bank almost beneath his feet; and the dark flash of his enemy’s blade coming at him like death made visible – and dived in under the man’s guard, driving his point up under the buckler rim.

The Caledonian’s eyes widened suddenly, with a puzzled look in them, his guard flew wide, and with a choking cry he crashed backward down the bank, almost dragging Phaedrus with him by the sword still in his body. Phaedrus flung himself back on his heels, and the blade came clear with a grating of metal on bone and a gush of blood, and as the man disappeared with a splash, he stumbled round, his sword reeking to the hilt, to face whatever came next.