The Mark of the Horse Lord (6 page)

‘I am not certain what you mean.’ Phaedrus heard his own voice after a sharp pause, without even being aware that he had spoken. ‘But it is in my mind that you would have me play this lost prince for you.’

‘We need Midir.’

Phaedrus flung back his head and laughed. ‘Fiends and Furies! You’re more of a fool than you look, if you think I could be doing
that
.’

The tawny eyes never swerved. ‘You can if you will.’

‘If I will? I have the choice then?’

‘It is a thing that can only be done of the free choice.’

‘Are you asking me to believe that if I refuse, you will let me go free, loaded with all this that you have told me? Tell that to the green plover.’

‘
Na
, we will not be troubling the green plover. Refuse, and bide captive in our hands until all is over, then go free and shout your story where you will. I will swear that, if you like, on all our hopes of victory.’

Phaedrus said, ‘But if he is dead, she will know – all the tribe will know it for a trick.’ It seemed to him as he spoke, that the rug that hung across that inner doorway stirred, but when his gaze whipped in that direction, the heavy folds were hanging straight and still. It must have been only a trick of the lamplight.

‘The tale runs that the boy was drowned bathing in the loch, and his body never washed ashore. Only the Queen, and those who did her will, can know it for a trick, and for good reasons they will not be seeking to prove it.’

‘A pity, for her, that she did not have the body washed ashore, for all men to see.’

‘That would have been beyond even her powers,’ Gault said. ‘He was not dead.’

The words seemed to hang echoing among the bales and boxes, until Phaedrus said at last, ‘Not dead?’

‘Even Liadhan would not quite dare the slaying of the King. She – made sure of him.’

‘Then what if he comes back to claim his own?’

‘He will not come back to claim his own.’

‘How can you know? If he is lost—’

‘He is not lost.’ Gault’s finger had returned to its half-unconscious pattern tracing in the spilled wine. ‘He works for a leather merchant in Eburacum. We sought him from the first, and found him three years and more ago.’

Phaedrus was beginning to feel that he was caught up in some fantastic dream. ‘Then if you have your own prince to your hand, why me?
Why me?
There is something here that smells strange to me, and I do not think that I like the smell!’

‘There is a price offered.’

‘This time, I am not for sale.’

‘For gold, maybe no. There are other kinds of price.’

‘A kingdom? How much of a king should I be when all is done?’

‘As much of a king as you would be showing yourself strong for. That I promise you, I who am not without power in the tribe . . .The price I had in mind was no more than the balance of a sword in your hand, a few risks to be run, maybe a lost flavour to be caught back into life.’

‘You choose the price you offer well,’ Phaedrus said after a moment.

‘And your answer?’

‘Give me a sword, and I’ll use it well for you. I’ll not meddle with a kingship that isn’t mine; ill luck comes that kind of way.’

Silence lay flat and heavy in the room, a silence that seemed as tangible as the air one breathed. And in the silence, Sinnoch the Merchant looked on as though at some scene that interested him but was no concern of his; and the two pairs of eyes, slate-grey and tawny, held each other across the table.

Then Gault turned on the bench, and shouted into the gloom behind him: ‘Midir!’

And even as Phaedrus’s gaze whipped towards that inner doorway, the hanging rug was dragged aside, and a man stood on the threshold. A young man in the rough tunic of a craftsman, who checked on the farthermost edge of the lamplight, his head alertly raised like a hound’s when it scents the wind. Phaedrus caught the glint of red hair, and something in the shadowed face and the line of throat and shoulders and long flank that made the hair lift a little on the back of his neck. He might have been looking at his own fetch.

‘Did someone call my name?’ The voice was different at all events, lighter and harder, glinting with a bright febrile fierceness that flashed into Phaedrus’s mind the image of a panther he had once seen in the Londinium Circus.

‘I called,’ Gault said. ‘I have failed, Midir. Now let you try if you can do better.’

The young man walked forward. Phaedrus with a quick suspicion of the truth, thought that he followed the sound of the other man’s voice, and as he came full into the lamplight, saw that there were only scarred hollows under the straightened brows where his eyes should have been. Saw also the great puckered scar on his forehead where something, some pattern that had been tattooed there, had been dagger-gashed across and across and across in a sickening savagery of destruction, a long time ago.

He had enough of his mother in him to know that among the tribes no maimed or blind or crooked man could hold the kingship, lest his rule bring disaster on the people. So that was how the Royal Woman had made sure of Midir, the rightful King, whom she had not quite dared to kill! His gorge rose in his throat.

‘Will you speak, Phaedrus the Gladiator, that I may hear where you stand.’

‘I stand here, a spear’s length from you, Midir of the Dalriads.’

‘You give me a name that I have not borne these seven years. I am Midir the leather-worker.’ The other had turned full face to him at the first sound of his voice, and came towards him unerringly, seeming to know the position of table and benches by the sound of his own footsteps, or by that mysterious ‘shadow’ that blind men speak of. ‘And so you are like-looking to me. Like enough to take my place?’

‘It is in my mind at least that any man who has seen neither of us in seven years might well take one for the other.’

‘That should make you proud. It is not every slave gladiator who could pass for a prince of the Dalriads.’

Phaedrus felt the angry blood rushing to the roots of his hair, but before he could retort, the other added with a crack of laughter, ‘Or, of course, every prince of the Dalriads who could pass for a leather-worker.’

‘I do not see why not, if he had the training of his craft,’ Phaedrus said in a tone of cool effrontery; but his sudden anger had begun to flicker out.

‘I wonder. Is it the same with the prince’s craft, should you be thinking?’ The laughter still lingered in Midir’s voice.

‘
Na
. The prince’s craft is another matter. No man needs to be born a leather-worker and the son of a leather-worker, but can you think of any training that would change a slave gladiator, in truth and not mere seeming, into a prince of the Dalriads?’

‘The seeming might be enough – if he were not afraid.’

‘Afraid?’

‘A man who set out to play such a part would have good cause to be afraid . . . But if you are like enough to pass for me, and not easily made afraid, then maybe the God has sent you to us.’

Phaedrus asked with a detached interest – he could still think himself detached, because he still believed that he was going to refuse – ‘And you? Could you stand aside while another man took your place?’

Midir’s head was up, the lines of laughter in his face suddenly thin and hard as sword-cuts. ‘Listen, my friend, Gault has used me as a weapon against you tonight – Ach, yes, he has, you know it as surely as I do – and if old fox Sinnoch had not found you, they would have used me as a weapon against Liadhan, for want of a better. They would have made me their accusation against her before all the tribe. “See, warriors of Earra-Ghyl, lords of the horse-herd, here is Midir who should have been your King, but the She-Wolf clawed out the daylight for him and made him an insult to the Gods! Strike now against the Woman who has done this accursed thing!” It is better than no weapon at all. But to shout: “Brothers! Here is Midir your King! Liadhan would have slain him, but he escaped and now he is come back to be the Battle Standard of the War Host!” – that is a sharper weapon, and the sharpness of the weapon is all I care for, now.’

His hands had come up while he spoke, feeling for Phaedrus’s shoulders, and clamped down on them with a fiercely urgent grip.

And Phaedrus thought again of the chained panther, and was not sure why; only as surely as though he had shared these seven years, he knew that this red-haired other self had never come to any kind of terms with his fate, never for an instant accepted, never for an instant ceased to rage against the darkness, unbroken, unsubmitting, unreconciled. Knew also that he was without pity either for himself or for anything under the sky. For that instant, as though one life flowed through them both through the other’s hands on his shoulders and his own that he had brought up to cover them, he knew the Prince Midir as he had never known anyone since the day that he was born.

The two onlookers had ceased to matter; the world contracted and sharpened its focus as it had used to do in the arena, until it contained only himself and the man before him.

‘You bid me to take your place, Midir?’

Midir was faintly smiling, and he spoke lightly, but the words came widely spaced like small bright drops of blood. ‘Take my place, Phaedrus, and with it, take my vengeance and keep it safe – warm with your own warmth, like a little polished throw-stone in the hollow of your shield, until the time comes to throw. But cry my name when that time comes, so that both the Sun Lord and the Woman may know that it is
my
vengeance, not yours.’

COCK-CROW HAD just sounded from the fort, and the long, narrow sprawl of native hovels, wine-shops and bath-houses, granaries, married quarters, horse corrals, and temples to a score of alien Gods, that made up the town of Onnum on the Wall, was stirring into wakefulness. Not that any of the Wall towns ever slept, save twitching and with one ear cocked and one eye open.

In the loft of a ramshackle house close to the fortress gate, where Florianus the old Syrian archer bred his fighting-cocks, the birds roused and rattled their feathers, stretched their necks and crowed defiance to the Roman trumpets.

Most mornings, the crowing of the cocks roused Phaedrus and Midir in their quarters beyond the rough partition wall. Then whoever’s turn it was to forage would go down the rickety loft ladder and out to the well at the street corner, draw himself a pail of water for a hurried splashing wash, and on the way back, collect the platter of oaten bannock and jug of buttermilk or sour watered-wine which the old crone who owned the house would have left out for them overnight. The one whose turn it was to have his food brought up to him like an Emperor, went without washing that day. They never broke cover together, for though it was still half dark the lantern burned until dawn above the doorway of the ‘Bacchus’s Head’ close by, and they took care not to impress it needlessly on the minds of chance beholders that there were two men lodging in the House of the Fighting-Cocks, two men who looked exactly alike, unless you came near enough to realize that one was blind.

But today they had been astir before the cocks, and were sitting on the edge of the makeshift plank bed, the jug and platter almost finished with, between them. The lamp on its niche high on the wall was getting short of oil; the flame leaped and fluttered, and its unstable light sometimes found and sometimes almost lost the two young men, showing them stripped to their plaid breeks as they had slept, for it was close in the little room, and already the day creeping up behind the narrow window gave promise of heat later.

Perhaps it was because of the thundery heat, Phaedrus told himself, that he was not hungry. But he knew it was not. Fiends and Furies! One would think to be glad enough at the prospect of getting out of this place!

He looked round at Midir, sitting with a half-eaten lump of the mouth-drying oatcake in his hand, and realized with a kind of exasperation that the heat had killed Midir’s hunger as well. The flaring lamp made harsh shadows where his eyes should have been, and cast the puckered scar on his forehead into cruel relief. It was almost a month now, since the night just after they came here, when they had lain side by side while Gault with his curious skill for such things, had remade the lost pattern with a cock’s hackle dipped in woad, and then copied the main lines of it on to Phaedrus’s forehead; those potent, interlocking lines and spirals and double curves of Sun Cross and Stallion Symbol that formed between them a device not unlike a four-petalled flower. And after that, the old woman he had brought with him had taken over, with her tattooing needles and pots of woad and crimson dye. The memory of that small, prickling torment made the nerve-ends crawl between his brows even now, and Phaedrus put up his hand unconsciously and felt the faintly raised lines on the skin. The Royal Flower, the old woman had called it, the Mark of the Horse Lord.

‘Does it still feel strange?’ Midir said, with that disconcerting awareness he sometimes had of what one was doing.

‘Not so strange as it did a month ago.’

‘A few months older, and I’d have had more than the Mark of the Horse Lord for the beldam to prick into your hide with her sharp little needles.’

Phaedrus thought of Gault who had gone north again now; Gault the Strong, with the warrior pattern tattooed on breast and shoulders, thighs and cheeks and temples.

‘All the warrior patterns that they prick on to the boys’ skins at the Feast of New Spears,’ Midir was saying. ‘At the next Feast it would have been my turn to go into the darkness of the Place of Life, and come out from it a man, to take my place among the Men’s Side, with the warrior patterns princely thick upon me.’

Beyond the thin partition a cock crowed in fiercely shining challenge, and was answered faintly across the roof-tops from some other cock-loft on the far side of the town.

‘Why not Sinnoch?’ Phaedrus asked suddenly.

‘Sinnoch is only half of the tribe. His father was a Roman merchant – they get everywhere, the merchant-kind – who came to his mother on the night she hung up her girdle for the Goddess. There was a bad harvest that year, so I’ve heard. The priestess said the Great Mother was angry and must be appeased; and when they drew lots among the maidens, to sleep at the river crossing for the first stranger who passed that way, the lot fell upon her. And so Sinnoch was born and she died bearing him . . . I think he never greatly wanted to be a warrior; I suppose his father’s wandering was in him, too, so he trades horses to the Roman kind, with an unmarked skin, and Gault says there is not a noble of the tribe he could not buy up if he wanted to. It is strange – he did not want to be a warrior, and the Dalriads have always accepted him in other ways; but it hasn’t made him love the folk who whisper in the dark to the Great Mother.’