The Mark of the Horse Lord (24 page)

A knot of enemy horsemen was bearing down on him. In the shifting patterns of battle he had long since become separated from the Companions, and Brys was nowhere to be seen; and in all the dreamlike chaos, he realized with a small, cool certainty that this was the end of his fighting, and prepared to take as many of his new assailants with him as might be when he went down.

And then with a thunder of hooves and a whirling clangour of wheels, and a yelling that might have come from the dark throats of devils, three war-cars of the Dalriads were sweeping towards him. He turned and stumbled to meet them. He saw a hand with bead bracelets on its wrist like a woman’s, and caught it – or was caught by it – as the foremost chariot swept by, and half scrambled, was half dragged aboard, the horses scarcely slackening their wild career.

The wind of their going cleared his head somewhat, and he realized for the first time that the eternity of surging to and fro over the same ground was over, and the tide of battle had set all one way; up the Glen of the Black Goddess, away from the Loch Abha levels, and back – back – towards the hills that bordered Caledonia!

The Caledones were breaking almost everywhere, falling back and streaming away, save here and there where some knot of warriors, cut off from their fellows, turned to go down fighting. There were broken chariots among the ferns and the trampled wreck of young foxgloves; dead horses, dead men, and the pursuing chariots swept over the bodies of friends and foe alike. It was Phaedrus’s first experience of driving at speed over a spent battlefield; the wheels lurched and bucketed over corpses in the bracken, and came up with the iron tyres wetly red; blood splashed up at the axle tree and even forced its way between the leather straps of the floor, and he wanted to lean over the chariot rail and be sick; but he swallowed the vomit in his throat, and got to his feet, holding to the side of the chariot. He was the King, the Horse Lord, leading the victorious pursuit that spread behind him and on either side. He shook the blood out of his eyes, and looked round at them and it seemed to him that there were fewer than he expected . . .

There was another sound in the air; the screeching, venomous war-song of a wildcat, and looking down, he saw Shân, her tufted ears laid back and tail lashing behind her, crouched along the yoke-pole, where she always rode in battle. Conory, himself, was driving, crouched low on wide-planted feet, with the reins knotted round his body, as many of the charioteers drove, so as to have a hand free for his spear.

Phaedrus demanded thickly through shut teeth, ‘Where is Brys my charioteer?’ But in his heart it was all those others he asked for, as well.

‘Somewhere behind us, with a spear hole in his thigh,’ Conory said. ‘Mine is dead. You must be making do with me for your charioteer this time.’ And he crouched lower yet over the haunches of the team, calling to them by name: ‘Come on now, Whitefoot – Wildfire! They run now; keep them running! Drive them as the wind drives the storm-clouds from Cruachan’s crest – so shall thy mares be proud to bear thee many sons!’

It became a kind of song in Phaedrus’s head, a triumph-song that rose and fell with the hideous war-song of the great cat. The fog of unreality was thickening all about him, so that he knew nothing very clearly any more, save for the smell of blood and the fiery throbbing of his wound. Certainly not how the hunt ended, or who gave the order to call the hunters off.

But suddenly there was no more tumult, no more lurching chariot floor under him; and he was sitting on the stinking yoke-pole, while the spent horses, with hanging heads and heaving flanks, were led away. Someone was bending over him, holding a cold wet cloth to his face, and a voice said, ‘He’s left his beauty behind him up the glen, I’m thinking.’ And another answered, ‘The bleeding has slacked off, anyway, and that will be the chief thing.’ And then a third voice – he thought that both it and the hand holding the wrungout cloth were Conory’s – said, ‘Gods! He’s come near to losing that eye!’

And he wondered, as though he were wondering it about someone else, what would have happened if he had. Did one eye count the same as both, where the kingship was concerned?

Someone was holding a flask of mead to his mouth. The rim jolted against his teeth, and he raised his head and tried to suck the drink between them. His face was set rigid as though with a grinding cramp, and some of the fiery stuff came out again through the great torn place in his cheek. But he managed to swallow a few mouthfuls, and the fog seemed to roll back a little.

He looked about him through the sick throbbing that seemed to pound inward from the wound and fill his whole head, and saw that it was evening, the shadows lying long across the woods and marshes; Cruachan towering sloe-dark against the sunset, with gold and purple storm-clouds flying like banners from its crest. Across the level towards Loch Abha, the shadowy scrub was alive with camp fires, and between the fires the horses were tethered to their chariot rails. But again, it seemed that there were surprisingly few of them, fewer of everything, chariots, horses, men – many fewer men . . .

Phaedrus made to struggle to his feet, but someone pushed him down again by the shoulders. ‘Bide still, the Healer Priest is coming.’

He shook his head, and put up an exploring hand to the ruins of his left cheek. ‘It is scarcely bleeding now. Let you give me that clout to take with me, and I’ll do well enough.’ The words came thick and slurred between his teeth, for his throat and even his tongue were swollen.

‘Wait for the Priest.’

‘That can come later. I’ve other things to do now – and so has he.’

But the hands were on his shoulders still, and he was too weak to rise against them. Instead, he asked after a moment, ‘What of Dergdian’s chariot bands?’

And the voice of Dergdian himself answered him. ‘Here in the camp, and wolfing stir-about – those that are left of us.’

Phaedrus heaved up his head – it was so heavy he could scarcely lift it – and saw the old warrior bending over him. ‘We – came as fast – as we could.’

‘Surely,’ the other nodded.

‘And the rest of us? There – seems so few.’

There was a small, leaden silence, and then Conory said with an odd gentleness quite different from his usual silken tone, ‘It is in my mind that the Caledones have their wounds to lick, too – more and deeper than ours.’

‘Ours are deep enough, seemingly!
Na
, I must – see for myself—’ Phaedrus gathered whatever strength was still in him, and lurched to his feet. ‘Take your hands away – I must – see—’

They let him go, and he never knew that Conory was close behind him, as he stumbled away towards the nearest fire.

Before he reached it, a voice called weakly, ‘My Lord! My Lord Midir!’ and he checked and looked round. Only a few paces away, his red horses were tethered to the rail of what remained of the Royal Chariot, a few armfuls of cut grass piled before them, and close beside them lay young Brys, straining up on to one elbow, blood still seeping through the strips of someone’s cloak that had been bound about his thigh.

Phaedrus turned unsteadily in his tracks and doddered towards him. ‘Lie still, you’ll start bleeding – like a pig again if you – writhe about like that. And – we’ve lost enough men as it is, seemingly.’

‘My Lord, I—’ The boy glanced at his bandaged thigh. ‘I got this, and – when I could get up again, I had lost you – and I wasn’t good for much more, save to get the horses out of harm’s way.’

‘You did that finely, and there was – no more you could do. Ach now, lie still, will you – I’ll be wanting my charioteer another day.’

He tried to grin, but his whole face seemed set rigid as though clay had been plastered over it, and pain clawed at the wound, almost blinding him again, and he turned away quickly, so that the boy should not see.

The sudden turn set the world spinning round him. For a moment the camp fires swam into a bright sun-wheel, and a roaring cavern seemed to open in his head. And then straight in front of him, but a long way off, he saw a face. A face that was curd-white under the coloured streaks of war-paint, with the eyes in it so dark that they seemed to cast a shadow over all. And he saw without the least surprise, that it was Murna’s.

He did wonder vaguely why she looked like that, not knowing what he looked like himself, blood-stained from head to foot and with that terrible torn face like a ragged crimson mask. Without knowing what he did, he started towards her, and the ground tipped under his feet and began to slide away. Somebody caught and steadied him – and in the same instant Murna was there, and above the roaring in his ears, he heard her say, ‘Give him to me.’ Her arms were round him, and he felt her brace herself under his weight as his knees gave under him and he slipped to the ground. She was kneeling beside him and holding him as he leaned against her with his broken and bloody face in the hollow of her shoulder.

The world steadied again, and he pulled his head up with a great effort, leaving dark stains on the shoulder of the boy’s tunic she wore. And then a thing happened that seemed surprising afterwards, but at the time did not surprise him any more than finding her there had done. She took his ruined face between her hands and kissed him. And this time she did not feel for his dagger afterwards.

He mumbled thickly, ‘Now you have blood on your face as well.’

‘It will wash off with the war-paint,’ she said.

PHAEDRUS LAY ON piled bracken in the little branch-woven bothy, covered by his cloak with the worst of the blood washed out of it, and watched Murna burnishing his weapons by the light of the fire that burned before the opening. Outside, he could hear the voices of the Companions – not Loarne’s voice or Domingart’s, or Ferdia’s – they had gone with so many others, on to yesterday’s death fires, in the Glen of the Black Goddess, and their voices would not sound among the Companions again. He could catch a glimpse of Conory leaning on his spear, and Shân beside him playing some small, selfcontained deadly game with her own leash.

He stirred uneasily, made restless by the fever in him, though the salves of the Healer Priest and the life that he had driven into the wound through his forefingers had eased some of the pain; and she checked in her burnishings and looked up, her eyes anxious and questioning. It was strange how different her face looked, now that it had come to life. The same shape as it had always been, the same colour, and yet even in the fire-light the difference was there.

He said, ‘If you burnish my weapons, who will burnish yours?’ It was still hard to talk, and the great wad of salve-soaked cloth that covered all the left side of his face did not make it easier. But there were so many things that he wanted to say to Murna, and he could not wait any longer.

‘I lost my spear in the fighting; I’ve only a dirk like the foot-fighting women.’

‘So you called out your Wildcats.’

‘When the word came to Dun Monaidh, we knew that there would be need of everyone who could hold a weapon.’

‘Even the Queen?’

‘I could not be asking the other women to make the War-Dance, and I refuging behind the queenship,’ she said, almost exactly as she had said it on the night the Caledonian Envoy came. And suddenly there was a rather piteous twist to her mouth. ‘Not even though you forbade me because I was my mother’s daughter, and not to be trusted.’

Phaedrus watched in silence as she turned his shield to come at the other half of the rim. ‘Don’t be holding that against me, Murna,’ he said at last. ‘Murna –
she is your mother!
’

‘And so? Did I give you the poison at her bidding?’

‘That is one thing, but to take the war-trail against her is another.’

‘How if I say to you that the Caledones have always hated us, because they fear that one day we shall grow strong? That when Liadhan my mother fled to her own kin among them, they saw their chance and took it, and that I take the war-trail against
them
, because I would not have them trailing their cat-skin cloaks lordlywise through Earra-Ghyl?’

‘I should say that you spoke the truth – but not all the truth.’

‘I will try again, then – I am my father’s daughter as well as my mother’s. Do you remember how big and warm and golden he was, before she drained him out until he was only the poor hollow husk of a man? Just such a husk as Logiore was at the end?’

‘Yet it was your cloak that saved her from Conory; and you stayed behind, wearing the Moon Diadem, that she might escape.’

‘She was the Goddess-on-Earth.’

‘You believe that?’

‘I did not have to believe it. She was the Goddess-on-Earth. I do not have to believe that you are the Horse Lord. I saw you crowned.’

‘Then how is it different now? If she was the Goddess then—’ He checked, not knowing quite how to go on.

Murna did not answer him for a long moment, then she said in a voice so low that he could scarcely catch the words, ‘Maybe she lost that, when she fled – when the time came for her and she – would not make her own sacrifice.’

The words made a kind of echo in Phaedrus’s mind as though, somewhere, he had heard them – something like them, spoken before. But he could not remember where, or when. ‘If so, it is small loss,’ he said. ‘She made a somewhat ungentle Goddess.’

She said, patiently, as though she was explaining something to a small child, ‘What has the Great Mother to do with gentleness or ungentleness? She does not
do
, she only
is
. She is the Lady of Life and Death. When a man and a woman come together to make a child, she is in it, and when a pole-cat finds a thrush’s nest and tears the young to shreds while the parents scream and beat about its head, she is in that, too.’

‘And when a boy is – made away with, that another may take what is his?’ Phaedrus wished that he could stop this probing, but something in himself could not stop. There were things that he must get unsnarled between himself and Murna.

She ceased her burnishing, and laid the shield aside before she answered. Then she said, ‘Let you believe me. I knew nothing of that until the night you came back. I knew only what all Earra-Ghyl had been told; that you were drowned in the river that runs by Dun Monaidh, and your body carried away.’