The Mark of the Horse Lord (5 page)

A few paces into the darkness, Phaedrus sensed rather than saw the door that barred their way. It opened to the merchant’s hand as though it had been left on the latch for them, but once inside the man said, ‘Wait!’ And standing in the dark, Phaedrus heard the sounds of key in lock, and then the light grating of a bar being slipped into place. If this were a trap after all, he had walked into it, and the trap was sprung. It was odd, still to hear the voices and the blackbird piping, and know that on the far side of the lath-and-plaster wall was the lamplight and the cheerful evening gathering of the wine-shop, while he was here in the dark with whatever was coming towards him out of the Unknown.

Sinnoch the Merchant led the way to another door, which also opened to his touch, and this time did not pause to secure it behind them. They were in a narrow, walled space, half courtyard, half garden, where a lantern hanging from a rickety vine-trellis lit up the nearest of a few dejected rose-bushes growing in old wine-jars. There was a stable close by, to judge from the smell of hay and horse dung, and at the far side of the place a thin line of light showed through the chink of a door in what looked like a barn or a range of store-rooms.

The man crossed to it, breaking into a soft, haunting whistle, as though to give warning of his coming to someone inside, and lifting the wooden door-pin, went in. Phaedrus followed close behind.

The light of a fine red earthenware lamp hanging by a chain from the rafters showed him a store-room of sorts, with dim-seen bales and boxes stacked along the walls together with coiled hide-ropes, a couple of riding-pads and all manner of horse gear; showed him also a couple of benches strewn with rugs and pillows of striped native cloth, and a table with a bronze wine-jug and cups on it. Clearly this was a private room of the ‘Rose of Paestum’, such as a merchant who did not wish for the company of the big posting inn by the South Gate might take for himself and his wares.

But though his first glance took in all these things, his whole attention went in the next instant to the man seated at the table, and remained there. A man in his full prime, certainly well under forty, and of giant strength, to judge by the almost grotesque thickness of neck and shoulder and the hand clenched, as though it did not know how to hold anything lightly, about the bronze winecup he had just set down. His mouth was dry and ragged at the edge, as though he had a habit of chewing his lower lip; black brows almost met across the bridge of his nose, and on cheek and forehead showed the fine blue spiral lines of tattooing that had earned the far Northerners the name of the Painted People.

Whatever Sinnoch might be,
this
was certainly no merchant, Phaedrus thought.

He heard the door-pin falling, and Sinnoch passed him, pushing back the hood of his cloak and letting it drop from his shoulders, and the lamplight jinked on a silver and coral ear-ring. It was the man who had given him the saffron cloak.

More and more, there were things here that he did not understand.

‘I have brought him,’ Sinnoch said.

The man at the table answered him with a nod, and spoke directly to Phaedrus in an outlandish form of the Celtic tongue: ‘Take off that cloak.’

Still deliberately going with the current, Phaedrus flung back the hood without a word and let the heavy folds drop to the floor, and stood confronting the stranger, his head up and on his lips the faintly insolent smile that his comrades of the arena knew.

There was a long moment of complete silence, in which Phaedrus could hear the distant hubbub from the wine-shop, mingled with the drubbing of his own heart. Then the stranger said, ‘It is in my mind that you will have spent an evil day.’

Phaedrus took one long pace to the table, and stood looking down into the eyes that were tawny as a wolf’s. ‘That was your doing?’

‘It was needful to make sure you would be lodged alone. It was needful also that there should be something – some mark of sickness on you to be remembered afterwards.’

‘Afterwards?’

‘After they find the body.’

Phaedrus felt a small icy shock in the root of his belly, and his hand flew to the place where his dagger should have been, then dropped away. It was in that instant that he became aware, for the first time, of a curtained inner doorway half lost in the farther shadows.

‘Ach no, not
your
body,’ Sinnoch, who had sat himself down on the bench a little to one side, said in his dry, amused voice. ‘There are always bodies to be had in every city – a beggar in a back street – anybody not too closely seen, will serve the purpose – and once it has been tipped into a hole in the prison yard . . .’

Phaedrus said slowly, ‘And all that is arranged?’

‘All that is arranged. It might have been a harder matter if he they call the Chief Magistrate had not been off on the hunting trail; but it is wonderful what a few little lumps of yellow gold will do among them; most wonderful. Merchant that I am, I know the buying-power of gold . . .They will put him in his hole quickly, lest the thing spread in the summer heat, and when the hunter returns from his hunting, there will be nothing left to see of Phaedrus the Gladiator, but a little turned earth in the prison yard.’ The dry tone deepened into melancholy. ‘It is very sad. He was young and strong and good to look upon; but he took a sudden sickness in the gaol, and was gone like a lamp pinched out between thumb and finger.’ Sinnoch made the gesture sharply and precisely, then dusted his leathery fingertips together as though to rid them of the smitch of the charred wick.

Phaedrus caught the gesture out of the tail of his eye; he had never taken his gaze from the man at the table, while he listened to Sinnoch the Merchant.

‘You must have wanted me sorely, to go to so much trouble,’ he said, and his mouth felt dry.

‘We – had a certain need of you.’

‘What need?’

All this while, the other man had sat unmoving, the bronze winecup gripped in his hand. Now he pushed it away, so sharply that a few drops of wine leaped over the rim and splashed like blood upon the table-top, and lunging to his feet, came tramping round the table to where Phaedrus stood. Seated, he had seemed a big man, but the gladiator found with a sense of shock that he was looking steeply down at him, for his body was set on strong bow legs so short that he was almost a dwarf.

‘Turn to the light.’

Phaedrus obeyed. He could scarcely see the other’s face now, only the darkly blotted shape of him with the lamplight on the top of his head and shoulders: but he was aware of the bright tawny stare that raked him from head to foot; and aware also, though he could not have said how, when the purpose of the stare changed, and it was no longer his outer seeming but his mettle that was being judged.

Until now, he had gone unresisting where the current carried him, but something in that ruthless probing scrutiny raised his hackles, and he locked his gaze with the other man’s and strove to beat it down as though it were an opponent’s weapon.

It was the merchant, lounging among the striped rugs on the bench, who broke the silence at last. ‘I was right, Gault the Strong?’

The other nodded, turning back to the table. ‘You were right, Sinnoch my brother. He may serve the need.’

Phaedrus shot out a long arm to the shoulder of Gault the Strong, and swung him round again. ‘And now that seemingly you are satisfied, in Typhon’s name you shall tell
me
this need, and we will see if
I
am satisfied also!’

Suddenly the dark man smiled, and with a lightning movement, chopped Phaedrus’s gripping hand away, so that he felt for an instant as though his wrist was broken. ‘When you lay hands on me, do it in fellowship and not in anger! Now pull that stool to the table and sit down, for you have a long listening before you.’

Phaedrus stood for a moment, his fists clenched, then shrugged, and pulled up the stool. When they were facing each other across the table, Gault said, ‘Can you be understanding all that I say, or shall Sinnoch here turn the words from my tongue to yours?’

Indeed, the tongue he spoke was full of odd inflexions and cadences that would have made it almost a foreign tongue to most of Phaedrus’s kind. But his mother had been part of the spoils of some far Northern battle before ever she came to a Roman slave-market, and had spoken in much the same way when they were alone together. ‘I understand well enough,’ he said.

‘
Sa
. First then, drink, my friend.’ Gault the Strong splashed more wine into his own cup and pushed it across the table.

Phaedrus left it standing there. ‘I’ve an empty belly and I’d as soon listen to what you tell me with a clear head.’

‘Maybe there is wisdom in that. Later then, we will eat and drink together.’ Gault had dipped a finger in the spilled wine, and as though not conscious of what he was doing, had begun to draw patterns on the table-top as he talked. It was a trick that Phaedrus was to come to know well as time went by.

‘In my grandfather’s time, we, the Dalriads, the People of the Gael, came from Erin over the Western Sea and conquered the land and the people of the hills and the sea-lochs below Cruachan; the people who were called the Epidii in those days; and we made our hunting-runs where theirs had been, so that all that land became Earra-Ghyl, the Coast of the Gael.’ He looked up, his finger pausing an instant in its making of curved and crosswise lines. ‘Since long and long before that, we have been a Horse People, a people of Lugh the Sun Lord, holding to kings who passed the kingship down from father to son. But the Epidii, though they, too, were a Horse People, were even as the Caledones are still, a people of Cailleach, the Great Mother, and to them the queen was all, and the king for little save to give the queen children. Therefore our king mastered and mated with their queen, as the Sun Lord masters and mates with the Mother who is both Earth and Moon; and we and the Epidii became in some sort, one.’

‘This one may learn from any harper who sings of the old days and the death of kings. Why will you be telling it to me now?’

‘For a good reason, that you shall know in time . . . Seven winters ago, Levin of the Long Sword died when the boar of his hunting turned at bay; and the kingdom should have gone to Midir, his young son. Maybe that would have been the way of it, if the boy’s mother had been yet living; but she was dead, and Liadhan the King’s half-sister was the Royal Woman of the tribe – a woman like a she-wolf in a famine winter. The earthling blood was in her, and the Old Ways, for her mother was a princess among the Caledones. She chose out one of the Royal Bodyguard to be her mate – her first marriage-lord was lately dead – and seized the rule. So for seven years we have followed the Old Ways again.’

‘Just like that. Did you not fight?’

‘Some of us fought.’ Gault fingered a long white scar that writhed up his forearm, and left it streaked with the crimson of the spilled wine that stained his fingers. ‘Most of us died. She had the Northern clans, where the old blood runs strong, behind her; she had the support of the priest-kind, who hoped for greater power under the Mother than they had known in the Sun Lord’s day; she had made sure of young Midir. The thing was done between a winter’s dusk and a winter’s dawning and we of the Southern clans were weak with fighting, for we had joined shields with the Caledones in the past summer, to break the Red Crests’ Northern Wall. We had no rightful king to raise for a battle-cry against her. The longer-sighted among those that were left of us urged peace; and in the end we made what peace we could – such peace as may be made with the wolf-kind – and waited for a later time.’

He paused, and dipped his finger yet again in the spilled wine, and added a carefully judged flourish to his pattern. A small muscle twitched in his cheek. ‘At Midwinter, it will be the seven years that we have waited.’

‘Seven years?’ Phaedrus said, puzzled.

And from the rug-piled bench, Sinnoch the Merchant put in dryly, ‘You have been too long among the Roman kind, for all the colour of your hair. You forget the ways of your own people.’

‘Every seventh year the king dies,’ Gault said, as though there had been no interruption. ‘Liadhan has chosen already the man who is to fight the Death Fight with Logiore and take his place, until in another seven winters it is time for his own death, and another king.’

For an instant, Phaedrus’s arena training almost made him say, ‘What if it is the Old King who wins the Death Fight?’ He had lived all his life among the Roman kind, but something in him was beginning, all the same, to remember the ways of his own people, a memory of the nerve-ends rather than the mind. And he knew that the Old King would not win the Death Fight. Maybe there was a drug used; maybe it was simply that he knew winning that fight was not in the pattern of his fate.

He began to catch the first and most distant flicker of an idea as to where all this might be leading. ‘And the Old King does not care for the end made ready for him?’

Sudden and unexpected laughter twitched at the corners of Gault’s bitten lips. ‘Ach no. The Old King has the old blood in him. For him it is the pattern of things. It is the Young King who baulks. At Beltane, the Queen sent her token to young Conory of the Kindred. The gift proved unwelcome.’

‘And so?’

The dark man leaned forward, one elbow smearing out his pattern to a red blur on the table-top; and all at once his eyes were burning like those of a man with fever. ‘And so the time has come that the Dalriads set aside Liadhan the Queen, having borne her rule long enough. Already the horns are blowing in the hills, and the black goat dies. Even among the Northern clans many have come over to us in their hearts, weary of this dark Women’s-rule that calls for the death of men. We of the Kindred, the Royal Clan, are of one mind in this matter; Conory stands with us, and certain of the Companions, the Bodyguard will follow him. There is yet one more that we need – Midir!’

Phaedrus stared at him under frowning brows. ‘And since Midir is dead?’

Gault made a quick gesture of one hand, as though to say, ‘Let that pass for the moment,’ and went on, ‘We need our rightful King to raise and follow against the Woman, as we needed him seven winters ago. He would have been worth two – three thousand fighting men to us then, boy that he was. As a man, he would be worth more.’ The tawny eyes were fixed upon Phaedrus’s face. ‘A man much about your age; much such a one to look at, too.’