The Mark of the Horse Lord (12 page)

Again there was that faint note of surprise; and Phaedrus thought, ‘Typhon! I must not be making that kind of mistake too often!’

They walked in silence after that, cross country through birch and heather and bilberry scrub that was ill-going in the dark, and maybe an hour later, hit the old trade road from the south and the mainland crossing. And a short way down it, came upon a small rath or a farmstead within its ring stockade, with a saffron flicker of fire-light shining from an open doorway, and three or four chariots squatting with yokepoles cocked up against the house-place wall.

Someone was waiting to draw aside the dead thorn-bush that stopped the gateway; somebody quieted the baying hounds. Coming in out of the cold and dark of the midwinter night, the blast of fire-light and warmth, the smell of warm animal skins and broiling meat, and the crowding of men in the small, rough hall met them like a buffet. There must have been a score of men there beside the lord of the house and his sons. Gault looked up from the pattern he was tracing among the hearth ashes with a bit of charred stick. ‘So, you come at last. Now we can shut the night out and fill our bellies.’

One of the sons rose and went to slam the heavy timbered door, and the lord of the house rose without a word, and came and dropped to one knee before Phaedrus and took his hands and held them to his forehead as the Chieftains had done in the Cave of the Hunter. His front hair, like that of every man in the house-place, hung in slim braids on either side of his face.

Next morning they slept late – no knowing when they might sleep again – and spent a good while in burnishing their gear and the bronze horse ornaments and whetting their short dirks to a final keenness. And when, well past noon, they headed north again by the old trade road, Gault had a new charioteer.

It was a fine chariot that Phaedrus found himself driving, not so fine to look at as that of the master who had sold him into the arena, for it lacked all ornament that could add a feather’s weight, but so finely balanced that one scarcely realized that it was heavier than Gallgoid’s, and like many British chariots, it was nowhere pinned or dowelled but lashed together with thongs of well-stretched leather, so that the whole structure was lithe and whippy, almost vicious underfoot, giving to every rut in the trackway, every hummock and hole and furze root when a stretch of track washed out by the winter rains turned them aside into the heather, like a living thing, a vixenish mare that one loves for her valour.

Phaedrus, shifting his weight on wide-planted feet, to trim the chariot on the slope of a hill shoulder, felt the vibrating of the woven leather floor under him, felt the proud and willing response of the team flowing back to him through the reins that were like some living filament between them, hearing the wheel-brush through the heather, and the axle-whine, and the softened hoof-beats, and the shouts of the other charioteers behind him, began to whistle softly through his teeth.

He heard a brusque laugh beside him, where Gault sat on the sealskin cushion of the Warrior’s Seat. ‘It begins to be good.’

‘It begins to be good,’ Phaedrus said, with only half his mind, steadying the team down once more to the track ahead. The countryside that had seemed so empty yesterday, was suddenly alive with riders and chariots; even – well clear of the trails – little bands of the Dark People loping along, with paint on their arms and faces, and their full ritual finery of dyed wildcat skins and necklaces of animals’ teeth, and here and there a girl with green woodpecker feathers in her hair. And the track from the south, which had been bad enough before, was rapidly sinking into a quagmire under the passing feet and hooves and chariot wheels, as Earra-Ghyl gathered in to the Royal Dun and the Midwinter Fires and the seven-year King-Slaying and King-Making.

The grey light of the winter’s day was fading into slate colour when they came down from the low grazing hills where the horse-herds ran loose even in the coldest weather, into the sodden flatness of Mhoin Mhor, the Great Moss, and westward a faint, chill mist that had been kept at bay by the wind, now that the wind had dropped was creeping in over the marshes from the loch of last night’s crossing. Northward, the hills rose again, and everywhere was the gleam of water, sky-reflecting pools like tarnished silver bucklers, and winding burnlets that wandered down from the hills to join the broad loop of the river that flowed out through the Mhoin Mhor to the sea. And on the nearside of the river, not much more than a mile away, stood Dun Monaidh, on its fortress hill that rose abrupt and isolated out of the waste wet mosses.

At that distance, and in the fading light, Phaedrus could not make out much more than the crown of ramparts, and a haze of smoke that hung low over the hill-top. But as they drew nearer, the ramparts stood up high, timber-faced, pale with lime-daub against the tawny winter turf; and the faint gleam of torches, strongly yellow as wild wallflowers in the way of torches at first twilight, began to prick out here and there, and the blurred freckling of things no larger than ants along the foot of the slope became chariot ponies grazing, for the most part two by two as they had been loosed from under the yoke, in the narrow infields between fortress hill and the marsh. To judge by the number of teams, especially remembering that the horses of the Chiefs and Captains would be stabled above in the Dun, a huge company must be gathered already, for on the track that Gault and his party followed, and dim-seen on the track from the north, and on foot by the unseen paths of the marsh, men were still drawing in from the farmost ends of the tribal hunting-runs, to Dun Monaidh.

Their own trail ran on into the marsh, paved with logs over a bed of brushwood, winding to follow the firmest ground, to the foot of the fortress hill, giving better travelling than the hill tracks had done – so long as one did not overrun the side.

‘Let them feel the goad, you’re not driving a pack-train now,’ Gault said. But Phaedrus had not waited for the words. If it had not been in his nature in the first place, the circus would have taught him the importance of making a good entrance, and on this entrance, so very much might depend. For afterwards, men would remember, and say to each other, ‘That was the first that we saw of Midir at his home-coming.’

He tickled up the flanks of the team with the goad that he had scarcely used before – he had never been one to drive on the goad – shouting to them, ‘Ya-a-ya! Hi-a-hup! Come up now. Hutt – Hutt – Hutt!’ And the ponies, snorting from the sting, sprang forward with stretched neck and laid back ears into a full gallop. The wind of their going ripped by, filling his dark plaid, the chariot leaped like a demon underfoot, its axles screeching, and the rest of the little band, riders and chariots, came drumming along behind.

There was another chariot on the track ahead of him, and he misliked the sight. It was not for the Prince Midir to enter the Dun Monaidh at the tail of another chariot. He passed it going like an arrow, with an inch to spare between hubs and his off wheel skimming the drop to the marsh; and when he was back in the centre of the track again, Gault, who had not moved or spoken, said simply, ‘It is a fine thing to make a hero’s entrance, but I’ll be reminding you that other lives hang on yours – and even on mine.’

‘It was not right that the Prince Midir should come home with his mouth full of another team’s mud. There was no risk; you have good horses.’

The black-browed warrior seemed on the point of choking. ‘And you know how to handle them. Nevertheless, if you fail as a king, do not you be coming to me, to be my charioteer!’

‘If I fail as King, I’ll have no need to come to anybody for anything,’ Phaedrus said, his eyes unswerving on the track that had begun to rise as they reached the first slopes of the fortress hill. He eased the team from their flying gallop, steadying them as the slope steepened. The track turned sharply back on itself where a small rocky stream came leaping down to join its lowest stretch, and yoke-pole and axles groaned as he gentled the team round it and urged them forward again. Not a good place to attack, Phaedrus thought, no reasonable way up, seemingly, save for this one steep hill-side gully that looked as though it would be as much torrent as track, after heavy rain, and which, moreover, was angled so that in the last stretch, the unguarded right side of any man making for the gate must be open to the spears of the defenders. He could see now why Gault and the rest of the Council had been so decided that the rising must have its beginning
within
the ramparts.

The huge timber-framed gateway was close before him. He caught the dark glint of iron and bronze, saw the dappled red and white of the bull’s-hide bucklers where the warriors and hunters thronged the turf ramparts to watch the late-comers in. The rest of the band behind him, the chariot that he had overtaken still caught among them, he drummed across the ditch causeway. The great carved gate timbers lurched past on either side, the iron tyres howled on the broad lintel stones, the sparks flying from under them as from blade on anvil. He swept through into the broad outer court of the Royal Dun, and brought the team to a plunging halt before the tall, grey Pillar Stone of the Horse Lord.

LATER THAT EVENING Phaedrus feasted among the charioteers of the Chiefs and nobles, in the foreporch of the great, round, heather-roofed Fire Hall. They were not slaves after the way of charioteers among the Romans, nor even servants; they were sons and younger brothers, close friends, lesser kinsmen, but there was quite simply no room for them in the Hall. There was little enough room for them here, and they were packed like spearheads in an armourer’s basket, but that was a thing that had its advantages, for little warmth reached them from the peat fire that glowed on the central hearth, filling the high crown of the roof with smoke, and small spiteful draughts that cut the ankles like a fleshing-knife hummed under the outer door; but close-packed as they were, their cloaks huddled about them, they had worked up a steaming fug that was next best thing to the warmth of the fire, and they ate whatever came their way, and filled and refilled the mead-horns from the bronze-bound vat with the boar’s-head handles just beyond the inner doorway.

Phaedrus, drinking as little as might be – the smell in the foreporch was enough to make a man drunk without the help of mead, and he would need a clear head later – was sharply aware of the winter darkness beyond the smoky torch-flare; the blurred moon and the mist thickening over the icy marshes. Aware of men crouching in that ghostly mist, among the furze and winter-pale rushes, behind alder stumps and the tangle of hawthorn wind-breaks. Each man with his spear beside him – waiting for the signal . . . Men within the Dun, too, gathered about the fires over which whole pigs and oxen were roasting. Men here in the Hall itself . . .

He had managed to get a seat on the third rung of the loft stair from which, craning his neck, he could see most of the Hall through the open doorway, which was larger than any outer door could be. He saw the circle of seven great standing timbers that upheld the roof, and between the crowding shoulders of the warriors stray glints and flame-flickers of the fire on its central hearth. The pine-knot torches in their iron sconces on each of the seven roof trees, flooded the heart of the place with a fierce tawny light, though it left the walls in crowding shadow; and letting his gaze wander, as though idly, from face to face, he saw many that he knew; Gault and Sinnoch, Dergdian, Gallgoid the Charioteer. Wherever he looked he saw men with red or dark, grey or russet hair, or the bleached locks that many of the young warriors affected, hanging in slender braids against their cheeks. But he saw, too, that they were outnumbered by men whose hair hung loose in the usual way. More than ever he realized that their one real advantage was surprise, and that even with surprise on their side, in the first flare of the attack, the thing would hang by a thread . . .

Most of the Gate Guards were their own men, but everything would depend on whether, having raised the war-cry, they could keep their feet with only the short dirks they had used for eating (for there was no certainty that they would be able to gain the armoury before the Queen’s Party) until the men from the outside dark could swarm in to their support.

A picked handful of the Bodyguard, the Companions, the only men who might carry weapons at such a gathering as this, stood leaning on their spears behind the High Place, and Phaedrus’s questing gaze found Conory in their midst. Not that he needed much finding. He must have bleached his hair freshly for the occasion, for it shone almost silver against the brown of his skin, and his odd-set eyes were painted like a woman’s. Under the dark folds of the cloak flung back from one shoulder, he wore kilt and shirt of some soft, fine skin, dyed green. There were fragile wire-strung bracelets on his wrists, and strings of crystal and gold and blue faience about his neck; and on his shoulder, arched and swaying to his every movement, the striped hunting-cat, whose collar, like his own belt, was studded with enamel bosses. But it was something more than all this, Phaedrus thought, that singled him out from his fellows. Perhaps it came from the fact that in this hour, whatever was to happen later, he was the Chosen One, the King-Slayer and the Young King. It was a kind of lustre on him, a sheen such as one may see when the light strikes aright on the petals of certain flowers; the purple orchis or speckle-throated arum, the dark wild hyacinth . . .

Someone jerked an elbow into his ribs, and he found that the mead-horn was being thrust under his nose. ‘Wake up, my hero! The man who sleeps when his turn comes round, maybe doesn’t get another chance!’ It was a youngster with a mouth like a frog, and a thatch of rough, broom-yellow hair, the front locks doing their best to burst out of rather unsuccessful plaits.

Phaedrus took the mead-horn, grinning. ‘I was not asleep then. I was taking a look at this new Seven-year King.’

And an older man leaned across to him from the other side. ‘A good long look, then. Aye well, he’s worth looking at, and he knows it,’ he snorted, but there was a hint of admiration in the snort. ‘Ever since he came to manhood he’s been one that women watch – aye, and men too, and there’s times I think he makes a sport of seeing just how far he can go. He only has to come out one day with his cloak caught in a particular fold, or a woman’s ear-ring in one ear, and next day half the young braves of the tribe are doing the same. If he cut off a finger-tip tonight, the other half would lack a fmger-tip tomorrow. Fools!’