The Mark of the Horse Lord (3 page)

The crowd were shouting for him: ‘Phaedrus! Red Phaedrus!’ The fat woman who had tossed him the briar-rose threw an enamelled bracelet at his feet, and two or three others followed her example. But Phaedrus was scarcely aware of the gifts. He knew only that he was a free man; that he had come to one of the two thresholds that had waited for him, and for all the triumph and the shouting, he must step over it alone, into the unknown world that lay beyond.

HE STOOD OUTSIDE the gateway of the Gladiators’ School, under the sculptured helmet and weapons of the pediment, and pulled his cloak round him against the chill mizzle rain that was blowing in from the moors. It was a new cloak, very fine, of saffron-coloured wool with a border of black and crimson and blue, and had been given him by a certain admiring merchant who had seen him kill Vortimax and win his wooden foil. A tall man, dried and withered and toughened like a bit of old weather-worn horse-hide, but with heavy drops of silver and coral swinging in his ears. He had brought his gift in person, on the morning after the games, and stared into Phaedrus’s face as he gave it, so intently that the gladiator laughed and said, ‘You’ll know me another time, even if I should not be wearing this sunburst of a cloak!’

And the man had lowered the fine-wrinkled lids over his eyes, but gone on staring, under them, and said, ‘Aye, I’d know you another time,’ with something in his tone behind the words that had made Phaedrus suddenly wary. But he had kept the cloak; it was a rich cloak and he had not lived four years in the Gladiators’ School without learning never to turn down a gift.

He looked up the street towards the transit camp, and down the street towards the baths and the lower town, wondering which way to go, now that all ways were open to him, and feeling suddenly a stranger in the town that he knew as well as he did the cracks in the wall plaster beside his sleeping-bench. Well, no good standing here all day; he must find another sleeping-bench. He hitched up the long bundle containing his few possessions, including the wooden foil, and set off down the street, limping because the half-healed gash on his knee (they had kept him until it was half healed; a clear fortnight) was still stiff.

He found lodgings at the third attempt, a filthy room in a house down by the river, kept by an ex-army muledriver with one eye, and leaving his bundle there, went out again to the baths. He had the full treatment, with a breath-taking cold plunge after the scalding steam of the Hot-room, and then lay like a lord while a slave rubbed him with scented oil and scraped him down with a bronze strigil; finally, he had the tawny fuzz of his young beard shaved. It cost a good deal, but there was the fat woman’s bracelet and a few other bits and pieces in the small leather bag which hung round his neck, and in the circus one got out of the way of saving for tomorrow in case there was no tomorrow to save for. Also it helped to pass the time.

But the Depot trumpet was only just sounding for the noon watch-setting when he came out again into the colonnade. Two or three men strolling there looked at him and said something to each other, recognizing him. The rain had stopped and a pale gleam of sunlight was shining on wet tiles and cobbles and drawing faint wisps of steam from sodden thatch. He went down the colonnade steps, the red hair still clinging damply to his forehead, and the beautiful cloak, flung back now from his shoulders, giving him a kind of tall, disreputable splendour like a corn-marigold, and strolled off along the street as though he were going somewhere, because he knew that they were still watching him.

For the next few hours he wandered about Corstopitum. He bought a brown barley loaf and strong ewe-milk cheese at a stall, and ate them on the river steps in another scurry of rain, and then wandered on again. He was free! A free man for the first time in his life! His official manumission, signed by the circus master and a magistrate, in the small bag round his neck, his name struck off the muster roll of the Gladiators’ School with the words ‘Honourably discharged’ instead of the more usual ‘Dead’ against it. No man was his master, there was nowhere that he must report back to after his day’s leave. Yet more than once that day he found himself back at the double doors with the sculptured weapons over them, or wandering in the direction of the turf-banked amphitheatre beyond the South Gate.

The last time it happened, he pulled up cursing, and looking about him, saw that it was dusk and a little way down the street someone had hung out the first lantern of the evening. The first day was drawing to a close, and suddenly he thought, ‘This is only one day, only the first day, and there’ll be another tomorrow, and another and another . . .’ And panic such as he had never known in the arena, where one only had to be afraid of physical things, whimpered up in him so that for a moment he leaned against a wall, feeling cold in the pit of his stomach. Then he laughed jeeringly and pushing off from the wall, turned back the way he had come, towards the narrower streets where the less respectable wine-shops were to be found. ‘Fool! You want a drink, that’s what’s the matter with you – a lot of drinks. You can get as full as a wineskin tonight, and sleep it off like an Emperor! Won’t have to be out on the practice ground with a head like Hephaestus’s forge and seeing two of everything, at first light tomorrow.’

The first wine-shop he came to, he passed by. It was a favourite haunt of the gladiators on town leave, and he didn’t want to run into old comrades. It was odd how he shrank from that idea now – a kind of embarrassment, a feeling that they would not know quite how to meet each other’s eyes. There was only one of them he would not have minded meeting again, and he had killed him the week before last.

Jostling and jostled by the people who still came and went along the streets, he pushed on until the ‘Rose of Paestum’ cast its yellow stain of lamplight and its splurge of voices across his way. He went in, swinging his cloak behind him with the play-actor’s swagger of his old trade, and thrusting across the crowded room to the trestle table at the far side, demanded a cup of wine. He grinned at the girl with greasy ringlets hanging round her neck, who served him, and flung down the price of the wine lordly-wise on the table, with a small bronze coin extra.

She half moved to pick it up, then pushed it back. ‘This is over.’

‘Best keep it for yourself then.’

‘Best keep it for
your
self,’ she said. ‘I reckon you’ve earned it hard enough, lad.’

‘
Sa, sa
, have it your own way. This instead—’ Phaedrus leaned across the table, flung an arm round her shoulders, and kissed her loudly. She smelled of warm unwashed girl under the cheap scent, and kissing her comforted a little the coldness of the void that had opened before him in the street.

He picked up his cup and the extra coin – she was his own kind, part of his own world, and to leave the coin after all would have been a sort of betrayal – and lounging over to a bench against the wall, sat down.

He gulped down most of the wine at a draught, though it hadn’t much flavour somehow, and sat for a long time with the almost empty cup in his hand, staring unseeingly over the heads of the crowd towards the opposite wall and the faded fresco of a dancing-girl with a rose in her hand which gave the wine-shop its name.

What was he going to do with the days ahead? It had been stupid, that moment of panic in the twilit street, the appalling vision of emptiness that was simply today repeated over and over again for all eternity; stupid for the beautifully simple reason that to go on living you had to eat, and to go on eating you had to work – the fat woman’s bracelet wouldn’t last for ever. What about the Eagles? Oh, not the regular Legion, the Auxiliaries of the Frontier Service? It might be worth trying, but he didn’t see old, one-armed Marius who commanded up at the Depot taking on an ex-gladiator. Well then, if he could get a job as a charioteer? Any kind of job to do with horses? But men who owned horses didn’t want free grooms and drivers when they could get a slave for twelve aurei. No, sword-play was the only trade for him; he could probably get himself taken on by a fencing-master somewhere in one of the Southern cities, and end up teaching the more showy and safest fencing-strokes to young sprigs of the town. The prospect sickened him.

There was a movement in the crowd, and a shadow fell across his hand holding the winecup, and he looked up quickly to see that a young man had risen from a near-by table and checked beside him. Phaedrus knew him by sight, Quintus Tetricus, the Army Contractor’s son, and recognized one or two others among the faces at the table, all turned his way.

‘See who sits drinking here alone!’ Quintus said, clearly speaking for the rest. ‘Ah now, that’s no way for a man to be celebrating his wooden foil!’

‘I fought for it alone, and I may as well drink the Victory Cup alone – the wine tastes just as sweet,’ Phaedrus said harshly, ‘and snore alone under the table afterwards.’

‘Come and drink with us, and we’ll all snore under the table afterwards,’ Quintus said, and the men about the table laughed.

‘I do well enough where I am.’ In the mood they were in, if a showman’s sad bear had shambled in through the door they would have called it to drink with them, and Phaedrus was in no mood to dance to their whim.

‘Even with an empty cup?
Na, na
, my Red Phaedrus! Come and drink off another with us; we’ve got a flask of red Falernian – Eagles’ blood!’

Other voices were added to his; the rest were shifting closer on the benches, making room for one more.

And suddenly, because nothing mattered much anyway, it was too much trouble to go on refusing. He shrugged, and got up, and not quite sure how it happened, found himself sitting with Quintus and his friends, the cup brimming with unwatered Falernian in his hand. Flushed faces grinned at him round the winedabbled table. A complete stranger with hair bleached lint-white as some of the young braves among the tribesmen wore it – it was the fashion just then to be very British – leaned forward and clapped him on the shoulder, shouting, ‘Here he is then; let’s drink to him!
Aiee
, my lucky lad, that was a pretty fight!’

Cups were raised on all sides: ‘Red Phaedrus! Joy and long life to you!’

Phaedrus laughed, and drank the toast with them, gulping the cup dry. It would be good to get drunk. ‘A pretty fight. You saw it?’

‘Wouldn’t have missed it for all the gold in Eburacum’s mint!’

‘I thought the Gaul had you with that low stroke,’ another said.

‘I thought so, too.’ Phaedrus drained his cup and threw the lees over his shoulder, where they lay dark as the grains of old blood on the dirty floor. ‘What’s a friend after all? I’ll drink again if anyone asks me.’

Presently, he had no idea how many winecups later, he realized that the place was emptying, and the serving-girl and a couple of slaves were gathering up empty cups and mopping spilled wine, while at the far side of the room, benches were being stacked one a’top the other. ‘Shutting up, by the look of things.’ A plump, dark youth who had been quieter than the rest of them all evening looked about him somewhat owlishly. ‘S’tonishing how quick an evening runs its course in – good comp’ny.’

‘Ah now, who says it’s run its course? I’m shtill –
still
thirsty.’ Quintus flung himself back against the wall behind him, and beckoned imperiously to the girl. ‘
Hai!
Pretty! More wine.’

The girl looked up from her task. ‘We’re shutting up now.’

‘Not while I’m here, we’re not.’

She glanced towards the wine-shop owner, who came waddling across the room towards them, his paunch thrust out beneath a dirty tunic stained with old wine splashes. ‘We don’t keep open all night in the “Rose of Paestum”. This is a decent house, sirs, and we need our sleep same as other folks.’

Quintus lurched to his feet, flushing crimson, his hand fumbling for his knife, but Phaedrus, with a few grains of sense still in him, put a hand on his shoulder and slammed him down again. ‘Softly! The “Rose of Paestum” isn’t the only wine-shop in Corstopitum.’

And a big red-faced young man with a loose mouth grinned in agreement. ‘Tired of that girl on the wall, she’s coming off in flakes, anyhow. Le’s go ’nd find some real dancing-girls.’

Somehow matters were sorted out, and the remains of the score paid, with a good deal of bickering, and they were spilling out into the street, hotly arguing as to where they should go next. They had been no more than loudly cheerful and from time to time a little quarrelsome in the hot room, but the fresh air went to their heads and legs like another kind of wine. ‘I’m drunk,’ Phaedrus thought. ‘I haven’t been as drunk as this since Saturnalia!’

Well, he had meant to get as drunk as an Emperor tonight, and the feeling was good. He was not lonely or cold any more, and tomorrow could look after itself; he felt eighteen hands high and curiously remote from his own feet. He could fight a legion single-handed, and whistle the seven stars of Orion out of the sky. It was not such a grey world after all.

They had forgotten about the quest for dancing-girls, and for a while they wavered their way about the streets, singing, with their arms round each other’s necks. Respectable people scurried into doorways at their approach, which seemed to all of them a jest for the Gods, so that they howled with laughter and began to kick at doors in passing and yell insults at any protesting face that appeared at an upper window. They had no clear idea of where they were heading, but presently they found themselves in the centre of the town, with the square mass of the Forum buildings and the Basilica rising before them cliff-wise out of the late lantern-light into the darkness. Among the small lean-to shops, closely shuttered now, that lined the outer colonnade, the gleam of a lantern here and there told where a late wine-booth was still open, and the sight of the little groups gathered about them made Phaedrus and his boon companions thirsty again.

‘C’mon,’ Quintus said. ‘Let’s have another drink.’

‘Had enough.’ The dark, plump boy still had more sense left in him than any of the others. ‘Maybe we’d best be jogging home.’