The Mark of the Horse Lord (26 page)

And she obeyed without a backward glance.

He stood and watched her going away from him through the tawny, knee-high grass between the furze, striding like a boy in her breeks and tunic, towards where the Companions waited. He saw her fling up her hand to them, and mount into the waiting chariot . . . He went on standing on the ridge, watching until a distant fold of the moors took the chariot and its little escort from his sight.

Then he turned, cursing in his heart with the dark enduring curses of the Gael, so much more potent than any that he had learned in the Gladiators’ School at Corstopitum, and headed back towards the camp on the skirts of Green Head.

Midway, he met Conory, strolling up through the hazel scrub with Shân’s leash swinging in his hand. ‘You’ll not have seen my striped she-devil?’ he inquired. ‘She has slipped her collar.’

Phaedrus shook his head. ‘Never a tail twitch of her.’ But he had a feeling that it was not really to look for Shân, who was skilled at slipping her collar and was sometimes away on the hunting trail for whole days at a time, that the Captain of his Companions had come that way.

‘Ah well, she will come back when she has killed,’ Conory said, and turning about, fell into step beside Phaedrus.

They walked some way in silence, and then Phaedrus said, ‘Murna should be safe in Dun Monaidh within three days.’

And Conory said, ‘She will be finding it dull in the women’s quarters, after this summer, and she almost alone in there.’

‘The whole War Host will have heard by now,’ Phaedrus said savagely after a moment.

‘Most of them.’

‘It is an accursed tangle.’

‘Were you never thinking it was a thing that might happen?’

‘Ach, I suppose so.’

‘And were you never wanting it should happen?’

Phaedrus said, ‘Murna is
my
woman – mine to me, in the way that no woman ever was before, and it is warmth in my heart, to know that we have begun the making of a child between us.’

‘But.’

‘It is my child – but not Midir’s.’

‘The few who know will keep silence.’

Phaedrus made an impatient gesture. ‘That is the kind of thing Sinnoch the Merchant might say.
Sa, sa
, I know it is true. They will keep their side of the bargain as I have kept mine. Besides, they have too much to lose if they let it through their teeth.’

‘But?’ Conory said again.

‘Fiends and Furies! She thinks that I am Midir,’ he groaned, ‘and I had to let her go, still thinking it.’

Conory looked at him thoughtfully, as they walked. ‘It is in my mind to wonder – just to wonder – if she does – or if for her too, the balance of the blade was wrong, after all.’

And Phaedrus stopped dead in his tracks, remembering how she had said ‘You’ and then changed it into ‘That boy’ when she told him the cruel story of that long-ago otter-hunt. How she had said, ‘I love you, my gladiator’; not giving him Midir’s name. ‘You think – that?’ he said very slowly.

‘I don’t know. You may know one day; no one else ever will.’

‘She would never foist a child that she knew was not Midir’s on to the tribe to rule as Horse Lord after me.’

‘She is a woman, not a man; there’s a difference,’ Conory pointed out kindly. ‘Women will do strange things for a man, and never feel that they are breaking any faith so long as they do not break it with that one man.’ And after a silence, ‘There is this, also, that for the tribe your son may be better than no Royal Son at all – if it is a son. Remember it will be of the Royal Blood on its mother’s side, the same blood as Midir – or as Conory the Captain of your Guard, come to that.’

They were moving forward again, threading the steep midge-infested hazel woods that skirted the lower slopes of Green Head, and again they kept silence for a while. Then Phaedrus laughed savagely. ‘It is a jest for the Gods, isn’t it – Liadhan seized the rule and brought back the old worship and the Old Ways; and the kings killed each other and came to kingship only by marriage with the Royal Woman; and the daughters were all and the sons nothing. Then Gault and the rest of you rose against Liadhan, to bring back the ways of the Sun People, and you set me up to be Lord of the Dalriads in her place. And what have I done? I killed the Old King and married the Royal Woman, and my son will draw his right to rule after me from his mother.’

‘I am not Tuathal the Wise,’ Conory said after a moment, ‘but it is in my mind that maybe all the Gods men worship blur into each other a little at the edges. It is in my mind also that there must be Earth Lady as well as Sun Lord, before the barley springs in the furrow.’

Phaedrus nodded. He supposed that was the answer. All the answer there was, anyway. Meanwhile they were getting close to the camp, and there was something else he wanted to say to Conory, something that had been in his mind to say to him, ever since he knew about the babe. ‘Conory, if I am killed tomorrow – if I go beyond the Sunset before the boy comes to his time for taking Valour – and you live after me, let you guard him and Murna for me.’

‘You are very sure that it will be a son.’

‘Murna says that it will be a son.’

‘The women have ways of knowing – so they say. See then if the rule passes to a son, the old pattern is broken after all.’

‘And you will guard them?’

‘I will swear to it, on whatever thing you choose.’

‘A plain promise will serve.’

Conory’s sweet, mocking smile was in his voice. ‘You forget that I also am of the Royal Blood, and may have sons of my own one day. I will swear.’

‘Swear then, on the bare blade.’ They were both half laughing, both in earnest under the laughter. Phaedrus whipped out his dirk, and held it out to Conory as they walked. And Conory, his hand flat along the blade, swore the oldest and most binding oath of the Gaelic People.

‘If I break faith with you, may the green earth open and swallow me, may the grey seas roll in and engulf me, may the sky of stars fall and crush me out of life for ever.’

Something had happened in the camp of the War Host while they were away, maybe some news come in. It was in the very air as they came up towards the chariot lines, and glancing aside at his companion, Phaedrus saw that his head was up and his nostrils widened as though to catch an unfamiliar smell. A knot of charioteers parted at their approach. Phaedrus called to one of them, young Brys who had lately returned to him, and the boy came, running lame like a bird trailing a broken wing.

‘What is in the wind?’ Phaedrus asked.

‘My Lord Midir, it is all over the camp that the She-Wolf herself is yonder in Dun Dara!’

Phaedrus and Conory exchanged glance. ‘So,’ Phaedrus said softly, ‘the Goddess herself come to be in at the Kill.’

‘That or’ – Conory checked an instant, his odd eyes narrowed in thought – ‘could it be that the Caledones have brought her to put fire into the hearts of their warriors? Could it be that even
their
strength has an end, and they are throwing in their last weapon against us?’

Phaedrus said, ‘We have already thrown in ours. Ah well, one way or the other, we shall soon enough be knowing.’

WHEN THE SUN went down behind Cruach Môr two evenings later, the Dalriads were once again masters of Dun Dara; and as the great hills dimmed into the dusk the old stronghold within its turf banks, and the steep slopes that dropped away from it on three sides, were red-flowered with the watch fires of the tattered War Host. But away down Glen Croe the great out-thrust shoulder of Black Crag was flowered in the like way, with Caledonian watch fires, so many watch fires, even after these past two days of fighting. And the dead of the Horse People lay mingled with the dead of the Caledones all down the glen.

Sitting before the blind doorway of what had once been the Chieftain’s Hall, Phaedrus put the situation into words, as much to get it clear in his own mind as anything else, for the men gathered about the Council fire knew it all as well as he did. ‘This is the way of it, then. We have not the strength left to drive them back to their own side of the Firth; and if we pull back ourselves, leaving them Lords of Black Crag and the lower glen, they’ll be over into our herding lands like a stampede of wild horses, and we’ll not get them out again until Cruachan falls into Loch Abha. We can keep them penned in the glen just so long as we can hold out here in Dun Dara. But you all know how it is. This has been the driest summer that the oldest of us can remember – see how the furze flares and crackles in the flame – and they have been here before us. They have drunk the old wells dry, and the spring runs so low that it will scarcely serve to water the men, let alone the horses, and the burn is foul with the dead men they heaved into it. We can last out the few days to burn our dead and get our wounded away; no more – while they have all the Firth-head above the burn’s outflow to drink dry before they feel the lack of water.’

‘May it rot their bellies!’ growled Oscair, his big, freckled hands clenched on his knees.

‘If it would, that would be the solving of our problem,’ Phaedrus said; ‘but it is in my mind that we will need to be doing something about it ourselves.’

Gault, with a bloody clout round his head, looked up from the fire. ‘And what thing would that be?’

‘I do not know yet. Before we can be making any plan, we must come at surer knowledge of the numbers that yet remain to King Bruide and the defences of his chariot-ring. So, my brothers, I am minded for a little night hunting and a closer look at this camp of the Caledones.’

There was a quick stir of movement among the Companions, and Diamid said, ‘We are with you, Midir.’

Conory, who had been playing lightly with his dirk as a girl might play with a flower, sheathed it, and made a small, soft throat-sound to Shân beside his knee, so that she ceased washing herself and with an answering cry, sprang to his shoulder. ‘So, all’s ready. We will have a fine hunting, eh, my fanged flower?’

‘Three of us should be enough,’ Phaedrus said quickly. ‘
Na
, not you, Finn; you’re as brave as a boar, and when you move you make as much noise as one. Nor you, Cathal, with that wound only half healed. Conory, and you, Baruch; you two I take; no more.’

‘One more.’ He had already risen heedless of protests, and begun to strip off his necklaces and arm-rings, when he heard the dry tones of Sinnoch the Merchant, who had ridden in that day with his last reserves of horses, and turned to meet the faintly amused gaze under the horse-trader’s wrinkled lids. ‘If this were a war-trail, I would bide quiet in the shadows, as befits a man of peaceful ways – seeing also that I am but half-born to the tribe and carry no warrior patterns on my skin. But since it is no more than a hunting trail after all – will you take me for a fourth? I can still move with less noise than a boar, and I know these hills maybe somewhat better than the rest of you.’

‘The smuggling of mares has its uses,’ Phaedrus said. ‘Come then, and show us the way, peaceful merchant man.’

And so in a little while, the four hunters stood ready to set out, each with the dirk in his belt for his only weapon, each stripped to the waist, his face and body daubed with fire-black over the blurred war-paint, and everything that could betray them by fleck of light or jink of sound laid aside. And already, in the light of the Council fire, they seemed to have become shadows; nothing quite distinct about them save for the eyes of the cat on Conory’s shoulder that caught the flame-light and shone like two green moons.

‘We are ready? Then good hunting to us all,’ Phaedrus said; and the other three caught it up and answered him:

‘Good hunting to us all.’

Sinnoch the Merchant soon proved his value, for it seemed that he did indeed know these hills as other men know the ways of their own steading-yard. They fell in with no Caledonian picket or scouting band and not much more than a Roman hour by Phaedrus’s reckoning, after setting out, they were crouched among the furze and bilberry-covers above Craeg Dhu, the Black Crag, peering down at the watch fires of the Caledones. Fifty fires at least, Phaedrus reckoned, covering all the great out-thrust shoulder of the hill-side; and if one allowed for the usual count of fifty men to a fire . . .

‘There’s always the chance that they have spread the men more thinly, to make us believe them stronger than they are,’ Conory murmured.

‘It could be. There is no telling from here. I am going in for a closer look.’

‘I also.’

‘You also – and Baruch. You are not called the Grass-Snake for nothing, Baruch. Get across to the far side yonder, and see what chance an attack might stand by way of the eastern scarp. Sinnoch, let you bide here. It is best that one should stay, lest we need warning of danger, or a diversion making for us. At worst, someone to carry word of what has happened to us back to Gault.’

‘Have a care, then – remember that they may have dogs. Remember also that there will be watchers posted beyond sling-range of the camp.’

‘
Sa
,
sa
, all this we will remember. Do you remember to keep your eyes and ears open for any threat behind us. Give us a vixen’s scream for a danger signal, if need be.’

And with the words scarcely spoken, Phaedrus was creeping forward again, Conory close behind him, and the little striped shadow that was Shân slipping ahead through the bilberry cover. Baruch had already disappeared.

The furze thickened as they dropped lower, so that soon, instead of crouching from clump to clump, they were belly-crawling by narrow winding ways among the furze roots, oozing forward, hand’s length by hand’s length, every sense on the stretch for danger; but no warning cry came, no sudden leap of spearman or fanged war-dog. In the end it seemed as though it was the furze itself that would stop them; an impenetrable wall of furze, black-dark in the light of the moon that had begun to rise. Only, as they cast about for a way through, the smell of dog-fox led them to the mouth of a fox-run almost hidden among root-tangle and spiney branches, at which Shân arched her back and spat, before flowing forward into it like a liquid shadow. The two men followed her. The run seemed very long, and the stink of it came up into Phaedrus’s throat and almost choked him; but just as he began to feel that it must go on for ever, it curved sharply downhill and he caught a glint of fire-light at the end of it, and a little later found open ground before him, and one of the picket fires scarcely a spear-throw away.