The Mark of the Horse Lord (17 page)

They gave him a spear with a collar of black horsehair. And lastly, they set on his head the great maned and crested head-dress of the Horse Lord. He felt the scalp-cap gripping, from his brows to the nape of his neck, and the side fringes with their little gold disks that swung against his cheeks and chimed at every movement of his head, felt the heavy balance of the great arched stallion crest and the sweep of the mane between his shoulders, and for the last time before they faded altogether, he remembered those dreams of racing four-legged among the horse-herd.

He crouched his way down the arched tunnel followed by the three Companions, his head ducked low between his shoulders to keep the great crest clear of the roof, and stood erect on the threshold, between the huge stone entrance posts; then stalked forward into the flare of pine-knot torches, where the rest of the Companions waited for him, and beyond the standingstones of the forecourt, horses were being walked to and fro in the bitter dark. After the still and heavy air of the tomb-chamber, the thin wind of the winter night seemed to whine through his very bones, and the torchlight was flecked with spitting sleet. The warriors raised a great clamour at sight of him, drumming their spears across the rims of their bucklers. Then someone – Phaedrus saw that it was the boy Brys – brought him a red horse with a mealy mane and tail, and he made the steed-leap on his spear, and was away, the others mounting and pounding after him – Conory a bare half length behind, lest at any time he should be uncertain of the way.

Down every narrow side glen as he headed south, from every rath and village among the snow-puddled moors, mounted men came in to join them, many carrying torches, until the whole countryside was speckled with flame; herdsmen on little, sure-footed hill-ponies, ragged-fleeced in their winter coats, men in their best cloaks and carrying their finest weapons; here and there a knot of men on fine horses with the Arab strain in them; once a fat man with a flame-red beard, riding a mare with twin foals at heel. More and more, until Phaedrus found himself riding at the head of a fiery cloud of horsemen, that churned the glen trails to a puddled slush; and his ears were full of the soft, rolling thunder of hooves and the exultant throat-cries of the riders.

It was midnight when they set out on that wild ride, and dawn was not far off when they came in sight of Dun Monaidh across the marshes; dark-humped against the half-thawed, half-frozen snow that pooled and paledappled Mhoin Mhor, and crowned with torches. The men set up great shouts at the sight, heels were struck into horses’ flanks, and the whole mass drummed forward into a gallop, strung out along the looping causeway track, splashing through the paved ford, and sweeping left-hand wise to come at the fortress track. A flying skein of horsemen were out from the Dun itself, sweeping down to meet them at the foot of the fortress hill; and all around him was a great shouting above the smother of hooves; saffron and black and crimson cloaks flying in the torch-flare and the spitting sleet, weapons tossed up and caught again.

So with a great riding of horsemen before and behind him, Phaedrus swept on up the steepening track and in for the second time through the gates of Dun Monaidh, and reined in before the tall Pillar Stone.

The Sun Priests were there, and their chanting rose into the pallor of the winter dawn, full-voiced and strong in the invocation to Lugh of the Shining Spear; and there also were the elders of the Kindred, to receive him as he swung down from the red horse. Tuathal the Wise stood foremost among his priests, wrapped in his horse-hide robe, with the amber sun-cross on his breast: he came forward and put a stone-hilted dagger with a strange, leaf-shaped copper blade into Phaedrus’s hand. A knot of young warriors were bringing up the sacred white stallion.

Midir, and later Gault, had warned him that he would have this to do, this making of the Horse Sacrifice before the Pillar Stone of the Royal House. ‘I am no priest and no butcher,’ he had said angrily. ‘I have killed men but not horses; I shall bungle it.’ And Gault had said, in the tone of one giving an order he will have obeyed:

‘You will not bungle it! A clumsy killing is taken as an ill omen, and there will be no room for ill omens, that day.’

And he did not bungle it, or not much. A clean kill enough, though the white horse reared up, screaming defiance as a stallion screams in battle, when he felt his death upon him, tearing at the ropes and swinging the men who held them from side to side. For one moment he towered over Phaedrus like a great wave before it breaks, ready to come plunging down and engulf him. Then the powerful haunches gave way, and the great horse crashed sideways to the ground, gave one convulsive shudder, and lay still. Tomorrow there would be a new Lord of the Sacred Horse-herd.

There was a smell of blood mingling with the smell of burning that still clung about scorched timber and blackened thatch, and a great wailing rose from the watching crowd. The old High Priest dipped a finger in the blood and made a sign with it on Phaedrus’s forehead, above the Mark of the Horse Lord. And the wailing of the Women’s Side was taken up and engulfed by a triumphant roar from the men, and that in turn was drowned in the deep booming splendour of sound that seemed to loosen the very thoughts in one’s head, as two of the priests raised and sounded the huge, curved bronze trumpets of the Sun that had not been heard in Dun Monaidh for seven years.

The torches were quenched and the grey light of dawn all about them, as Phaedrus was led up through the Dun, the Sun Priests going ahead, the Companions and Kindred, and then a great comet-tail of people following on behind, until they came to the court next below the Citadel, where the Rock of the Footprint jutted up from the natural outcrop; the Crowning Stone of the Dalriads.

There were more things to be done, but they were short and soon over; mare’s milk to be drunk from a battered black pottery bowl that was never used save at the King-Making; a ritual washing of hands and feet in the bowl-shaped depression at one end of the same great rock slab, where the gathered sky-water was more than half-melted sleet; the priests with short prancing steps making sacred patterns of words and movements that passed him by like a dream. They had brought the freshly flayed hide of the King Horse, and spread it across the end of the stone opposite to the bowl depression, so that it covered the third thing that was cut there: the wild boar beloved of warriors.

Sleet was still spitting down the wind, but the yellow bar of a low dawn edged the eastern sky, and as Phaedrus mounted the Crowning Stone, and with his left foot on the hide of the King Horse, set his right into the deep-cut footprint that had held the right foot of every king of the Dalriads since first they came from Erin across the Western Sea, the first sunlight struck the high snow-filled corries of distant Cruachan.

Gault brought the spear of Lugh, and put it into his hand in place of the other that he had brought with him from the Place of Life. Conory knotted the sheath thongs of the King’s sword to his belt. Now they were loosening the bindings of the stallion head-dress, lifting it away. Tuathal the High Priest was standing on the horse-hide beside him, holding up a narrow circlet of fiery pale gold that caught the morning light for an instant in a ripple of white fire, like the leaves of the white aspen when they blow up against the sun. Phaedrus bent his head to receive it, felt it pressed down on to his brows.

The bronze Sun Trumpets were sounding again; the deep earthshaking note booming out over the marshes and the hills and the high moors, to be caught up from somewhere on the very edge of hearing, and passed on, carrying the word from end to end of Earra-Ghyl that there was a Horse Lord again in Dun Monaidh.

THE NEXT TIME Phaedrus woke, it was to the flicker of fire-light through eyelids still half gummed together with sleep and the morning sky milk-silver beyond the smoke-hole in the crown of the King’s Place roof. He lay for a few moments basking in the sense of wellbeing that lapped him round; the aching stiffness and the leaden weight of exhaustion all washed away by the black warm tide of sleep. Then gradually a weight of some other kind settled on him in its place as he remembered. Yesterday he had been crowned Horse Lord, but today was the day of his marriage to the Royal Woman.

He opened his eyes and came to one elbow with something between a groan and a curse; and a small rhythmic sound that had been going on all the while without his noticing it, stopped abruptly. The young warrior Brys, squatting by the great fire that glowed warmly in the centre of the big square hut, looked up alertly from the great war-spear with the black horsehair collar he had been burnishing across his knee.

Phaedrus scowled, startled for the moment at finding he was not alone. ‘What in Typhon’s name are you doing here?’

‘I was burnishing your gear and weapons while you slept, Lord. Gault bade me come to serve you.’

‘Gault!’ Something in Phaedrus seemed to snap. ‘Gault bids this thing – Gault bids that thing – Gault will choose me my armour-bearer,
and
my wife—’ He checked at sight of Brys’s face, and quietened his tone somewhat. ‘You have served me well; that spear blade looks as though it had this morning come fresh from the armourer’s hands. Now go back to your own Lord, and if you should be seeing Gault on the way, tell him I thank him for his care of me, but I will choose my own armour-bearer.’

There was a moment’s pause, and then Brys said, ‘My own Lord is dead.’

And suddenly Phaedrus was remembering the place where the fortress stream dived through the outer wall, and Brys holding the torch that called that answering gleam from the silver apples under the water. Gault had said, ‘Your Lord Gallgoid,’ and the boy had said, ‘My Lord Gallgoid is dead.’ He rubbed the back of one hand across his forehead, trying to clear the confusion that still blurred all the edges of that night. ‘Of course. You will be – you will have been Gallgoid’s armour-bearer.’

‘His armour-bearer and his charioteer.’

‘It is in my mind that to suit Gallgoid, a charioteer would need to be good at his trade.’

‘I am,’ Brys said with conviction.

‘
Sa
– and modest as well. And now you would be mine?’

‘I am of the Kindred,’ the boy said proudly, stating his claim. ‘You would not be remembering; I was only in my first year in the Boys’ House when you – when the Bad Thing happened. But I am of the Kindred.’

‘Gallgoid had no one with him all that moon and more that he was with me in the Cave of the Hunter.’

‘He left me behind in his Hall, until the time came to join him here in Dun Monaidh. There had to be those that he could trust, while he was supposed to be lying sick in his own place.’

‘And you were one that he could trust.’

‘Nobody found out that he was not there.’

Phaedrus looked at Brys with fresh eyes, noticing the good straight look of him, and the stubborn mouth. ‘
Sa, sa
– it may be that I shall need someone to trust, one day . . . I will take Gallgoid’s charioteer after him.’

‘In spite of Gault the Strong?’ Brys said slowly.

‘In spite of Gault the Strong.’ Suddenly Phaedrus laughed. ‘If Gault had sent me Cuchulain himself this morning to be my armour-bearer and drive my team, I would have spat in Cuchulain’s eye, if I could not be coming at Gault to spit in his.’ Then as the slow smile broadened on Brys’s face, ‘Now leave that burnishing, and go and find me something to eat, for my belly’s cleaving to my back-bone.’

The unpegged curtain of skins across the doorway had scarcely fallen behind Brys when voices sounded outside and the heavy folds were thrust back once more, and Conory, with Shân draped across his shoulders, strolled in. ‘A fine and fortunate day to you,’ he said pleasantly, and deposited on the low stool by the fire, a gaming board and a carved wooden box. ‘Since there’s no going out for the bridegroom until they summon him out to his marrying, it was in my mind that a game of Fox and Geese might serve to pass the time.’

Phaedrus flung off the bed-rugs with a sudden violence, and sat up. ‘Conory, it’s madness! I can’t be going through with this marrying!’

Conory had settled on to his heels, and taken up the gaming box to open it. He said very softly, ‘Midir, it is in my mind that you have no choice.’

‘She will know!’

‘Keep your voice down, you’ve a King’s Guard outside. Here – let you put that cloak round you and come to the fire.’

‘Fiends and Furies!’ Phaedrus swore, but he picked up the heavy saffron cloak that lay tumbled on the bedplace, and flung it round him over the light under-tunic which was all he had on, and came to squat beside the fire, facing Conory across the checkered board on which he had begun to set out the pieces of red amber and narwhal ivory. ‘
She will know!
’ he repeated desperately.

‘She will not. She was only ten – eleven summers old when it happened. A babe who would scarcely have begun her weapon training.’ (To Phaedrus, it still seemed strange that the women of the Northern tribes shared the training of the young warriors, becoming as used to the throw-spear as to the distaff; and unconsciously, he frowned.) ‘You have nothing to fear on that count. She will not know the balance of the blade.’

Phaedrus had just drawn breath for one more furious protest, for, indeed, it seemed to him a horrible thing, not only on his own account but on Midir’s also, that he should take this She-Wolf’s daughter for his woman; but at that moment Brys returned, with a beer-jar in one hand and a bowl piled with cold pig-meat and barley bannock in the other, and the protest must be left unmade. Instead, while they ate together – Brys had brought more than enough for two – he turned to the questions he had longed to ask yesterday. And Conory answered him as best he could, while Shân, springing down from his shoulder, pounced on and played with and tormented a lump of pig-fat that he had tossed for her beside the fire, until she wearied of the game and stalked out, tail erect, in search of better hunting elsewhere.

By the time they had finished eating, it was all told: the number of the dead, and how many women were among them, the success of the rising that had swept like heath fire through Earra-Ghyl, freeing the Dalriads of the dark bondage that had held them for seven years; the flight with Liadhan of the Earth Priests not killed in the fighting.