The Mark of the Horse Lord (25 page)

Still he could not stop. ‘That I believe; but Murna, you were knowing, when you would have knifed me on the night I pulled the bride-mask from your face.’

‘What does a hunted wild-thing do when the hounds bring it to bay? It turns and uses whatever weapons it has of teeth or claws or antlers.’

‘As simple as that,’ Phaedrus said, after a surprised pause.

‘As simple as that. You hunted me and I was – very much afraid.’ Suddenly and surprisingly, she laughed, but it was laughter with a little catch in it. ‘No, you still do not understand, there is so much that you do not understand, Midir. Listen – my mother loved my father, and she loved Logiore, until she had sucked out all that there was in them to love. And – she loved me.’

Phaedrus, a chill shiver between his shoulders, reached out in the half dark and caught her hand without speaking, and she turned it over inside his until they came palm to palm and fitted.

‘I can scarcely remember a time when I did not know that I must keep her out, and – I do not know how to be explaining this – I learned to go away small inside myself, where she could not reach me. I made walls to keep her out, and all these years that I have done and said and maybe even sometimes thought as she bade me, I have been safe from her behind my walls. Only, to be strong enough to keep her out – they had to keep me in . . . If I had passed, that would have broken them down, you see.’

Phaedrus’s hand tightened on her. ‘I am trying to see. Go on, Murna.’

‘And then you came back and turned the world to red fire, and when you stood leaning on your sword and looked at me, after the fighting was over, I knew that presently you would come breaking through my walls and find me, however small I had gone away behind them.’

‘And was that such a bad thing?’

‘It is frightening, to come to life. I do not think I should be so afraid to die, as I was when I knew that I must come to life.’

‘Does it seem so bad now, Murna?’

‘No, not now. I think maybe I should have been a little less afraid if I had known – how much you have changed.’

There it was again, this talk of the change in him. Phaedrus was brought up with a jolt, and found himself on the edge of dangerous ground. But he had to know. ‘Murna, you said before that I had changed, you said that I did not care what I broke and did not remember afterwards. Murna, I don’t remember; let you tell me what I did.’

There was a little pause, and then Murna said, ‘In the early times, I had one chink in my wall. Just one. It was a tame otter. I found him abandoned when he was a cub – maybe his mother had been killed – and I reared him in secret, lest my mother should know. You found him and set your dogs on him one morning when you had nothing better to do. He didn’t know about being hunted, so he was very easy to kill. Too easy, you said; there was no sport in it.’

Phaedrus felt sick. ‘I couldn’t have known! I must have thought it was a wild one,’ he said after a moment. ‘Murna, I couldn’t have known he was yours!’

‘Oh yes, you knew; I was there. But I was not ten, then, a girl-child of no account, and you hated and feared my mother. Maybe you did it because I was the nearest thing to her that you could hurt. But my otter was the only thing I had to love, and after, I closed up the chink, and never dared to love so much as a mouse again, for fear of what might happen to it.’

So Midir had done that, and not even remembered afterwards, or he would have told him during those lessons in the cock-loft at Onnum on the Wall. But though the story sickened Phaedrus, it did not hit him with any feeling of discovery about Midir, nor make him feel the bond between them any less close. Instead, he felt a sudden rush of pity for the boy who had been so much afraid, and he’d had good cause to be. And fully and freely he took the weight of that long-ago piece of wicked cruelty on to his own shoulders, not only because he had to, but because in some odd way it seemed as though by doing so, he could lift it from Midir’s. ‘Oh, Murna, I’m so sorry – so sorry! It is in my heart that I deserved the dirk!’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I know that, now. It was because you – because that boy was so afraid. We were both so afraid.’

‘You’re not afraid any more?’

‘No.’

‘But you’re shivering – I can feel you.’

‘Only because I am tired.’ Murna made a little sound that was almost like a whisper. ‘I am so tired.’

Phaedrus flung back the folds of his cloak with his free hand. ‘Then come and lie down, there’s room for us both.’ And when she was lying in the piled bracken, he pulled his cloak over both of them, and sleep gathered him in like a tired hound after a hard day.

The wound-salves of the Healer Priest did their work, and before many days were passed Phaedrus was out with the war bands again, as sound as ever, save for the great half-healed scar that dragged the left side of his face askew. He had most assuredly ‘left his beauty behind him up the Glen of the Black Goddess’; and he knew it and did not like it, for he had been good to look at – the arena had taught him that; a gladiator’s good looks, if he had any, were part of his stock-in-trade – and now he was only good to look at if he stood with the left side of his face turned away. He caught himself actually doing that one day, and for the rest of the day the Companions wondered why he was in such a vile temper. Only Conory, whom he had been speaking to at the time, knew the answer. He never did it again.

But, indeed, he had other things than his lost beauty to think of in the months that followed.

All summer, though there were no more full battles, the fighting went on, now dying down like a fitful wind into the long grass, now flaring up in some new place, or in many places at once, as the People of the Cailleach drove in thrust after thrust, now down the Druim Alban glens, now across the fords and narrows of the Firth of War-Boats. But gradually, as summer wore on, the scattered fighting began to draw in to one point, narrowing into the country round Glen Croe that ran up north-westward from the Firth. It started with a skirmish there, no greater as it seemed, than a score of others that had gone before, but where the Caledonian war bands had been driven off, others, many others, came spilling back. Quite suddenly it seemed that the country for half a day’s trail up and down the Firth shore was swarming with them. And always there was enough going on elsewhere to make sure that Phaedrus could not concentrate his whole War Host to the one task of driving them out. The dwindling war bands of the Dalriads swept down on them again and again, but even when for the moment they were driven back, almost before the defenders of Earra-Ghyl could draw breath, they were flooding in again, more and always more, until it seemed to Phaedrus and Conory and grim, bow-legged Gault, struggling to hold the whole coastline of the Firth against them, and close the narrow lands between the Firth-head and the loch of Baal’s Beacon, that they were springing out of the ground like the War Hosts magicked from puff-balls and thistlestalks of which the ancient legends told.

The whole glen was theirs now, and the heights on either side, and they held the old forsaken strong-point of Dun Dara on the high shoulder of Beinn Na Locharn that commanded the pass through the mountains to Royal Water. Soon, when they were just a little stronger, they would come pouring over that pass, and now that they held the coast all about Glen Croe mouth, there was little to stop them bringing over every warrior they had.

The leaders looked at each other with one question in their eyes. How much more strength had the enemy still in reserve? It was as the Envoy had said: the Caledones were a great people and the Dalriads a small one; the Caledones had other tribes to call on, while the men of the Western coasts and islands had only themselves, and had come to the end of their reserves, even the boys and women. Yet surely even the Caledones must come to the end of their strength one day . . .

But for Phaedrus, that wild and bitter summer had a kind of broken-winged happiness of its own. All through the long night rides and the swift bloody fighting, while the rowan-trees blossomed and the blossom fell into the hill burns running low with drought, Murna rode with him and Conory among the Companions, proving herself as hardy and as skilled with the throw-spear as any of the young warriors. And at night among the steep glens and wooded hollows of the moors, or in some hill dun long since cleared of cattle and all else that could be driven or carried away, when the warriors slept with their spears beside them and their shields for pillows, she spread her own cloak on the ground between the wheels of the chariot for Phaedrus to lie on, and lay down beside him with his cloak to cover them both. And there were times when they would laugh together at some foolish jest; and once when there was a night attack on the chariot ring, they fought together behind one shield.

But as summer drew on towards its end, and the heat-parched heather began to fade, Murna had a look about the eyes that Phaedrus did not understand – and he knew the looks of her well enough by then. He wondered if the sword-cut she had taken across the ribs a few weeks back were troubling her. But when he asked, she laughed and showed him the place, and he could see that it was cleanly healed.

He told himself that he was imagining things, and turned his whole mind towards gathering the remains of the War Host for what all men knew must be the last battle.

Through those last crackling, drought-baked days of summer, they gathered in from the scattered ends of Earra-Ghyl; war bands brought up to strength with men who were too old for fighting and boys who were too young, hastily mended chariots drawn by unmatched horses, each the survivor of some other team. They gathered in the steep glens northward of Dun Dara, and in the midst of them the Horse Lord and the men of Dun Monaidh made their great chariot-ring on the grassland slopes of Green Head.

And then one morning, with the last battle as it were already brewing, Murna disappeared when the scouting chariots were being harnessed. And Phaedrus, going in search of her, found her crouched beside the low-running, hazel-fringed burn, being very sick. He squatted down and held her head for her, just as he would have done for Conory or young Brys, and waited until the spasm was over and she was gathering up palmfuls of the cold peat-brown water and bathing her face. Then he demanded urgently, ‘What is it? Are you ill?’

She turned to look at him, with the colour creeping back into her face, smiling at him a little behind her eyes. ‘No, I am not ill. But it seems that I must turn to women’s work after all. I am carrying a child for you, Midir.’

It was a time of lull, one of those uneasy lulls that come on the edge of fighting, or he would have sent her away at once. As it was, there were a few hours more, and the scouts reporting no signs of movement from around Glen Croe, Phaedrus was even able to leave the War Host for a little while, to set her on her way.

And so at about the same time next day they stood together on a ridge of the high moors a mile or so westward of the main Host, to take their leave of each other, while the small escort of Companions who were to take her back to Monaidh waited at a little distance. Early as it was, the sky arched, cloudless and already heat-pearled, over hills that were shadowed with fading heather or tawny as a hound’s coat; a warm, dry wind went blustering across the moors, making a sea-sound in the dark glen woods below, and Phaedrus remembered afterwards that there was a scattering of late harebells among the furze.

Murna said almost accusingly, ‘Why did you come seeking me yesterday? If you had not come then, you need not have been knowing. Not yet, not for a few days more. It was only a few days more I hoped for.’

And the warm wind through the furze and the impatient harness-jingle of one of the horses were the only sounds again.

A few days more . . . in two or three days now, the thing would be settled, one way or the other, and she knew it as surely as any of them, and had tried to keep her secret long enough to share the last battle with him; and part of him wished sore that she had been able to keep it; she had been a good fighting-mate.

‘Let me stay, then,’ she said, as though she knew what he had been thinking. ‘Just three more days.’

‘They might be three days too many.’ He looked her very straight in the eyes. ‘Murna, this one time,
you will obey me
!’

‘
Sa
; this time I will obey you.’ There was a small wry attempt at a smile on her mouth. ‘I am not wanting to – but the babe is stronger than I am. And he wants to be born and live.’

‘He? You are sure, then, that it will be a man-child?’

‘Of course. A son to lead the Horse People after you.’ She flung up her head and laughed, a laughter that seemed to ache in her throat. ‘How could he be anything else? He was begun among the spears!’

Ever since he had first known about the babe Phaedrus had been taking care not to think too closely about the fact that Murna believed it was Midir’s, but now, at her words, suddenly everything in him was crying out to tell her the truth. She had the right to know, and for himself, he felt that something at his heart’s core would tear out by the roots if he had to part from her with the thing untold, raising a barrier between them. But he never must tell her; never in all his life or hers, no matter how long or how short that might be.

He put his arms round her, loosely, and carefully at first – strange that he was holding two people in the circle of his arms – then fiercely close. ‘Listen now: whatever happens, whether I come back to Dun Monaidh to make the victory dance, and we grow old together and watch this son who was begun among the spears become a man, or whether we are not together any more this side of the sunset – whatever comes, whatever you hear of me, remember I love you, my Murna.’

She put up her hands and took his scarred face between them, and kissed him, and stood for a few moments straining up to rest her forehead against his. ‘I love you, my gladiator, that shall be helping me to remember.’

Phaedrus held her tight against him for a heartbeat longer, then he almost pushed her away. ‘Go now, go quickly.’