The Mark of the Horse Lord

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  The whole glen was theirs now, and the heights on either side, and they held the old forsaken strong-point of Dun Dara on the high shoulder of Beinn Na Locharn that commanded the pass through the mountains to Royal Water. Soon, when they were just a little stronger, they would come pouring over that pass, and now that they held the coast all about Glen Croe mouth, there was little to stop them bringing over every warrior they had.

  The leaders looked at each other with one question in their eyes. How much more strength had the enemy still in reserve? It was as the Envoy had said: the Caledones were a great people and the Dalriads a small one; the Caledones had other tribes to call on, while the men of the Western coasts and islands had only themselves, and had come to the end of their reserves, even the boys and women. Yet surely even the Caledones must come to the end of their strength one day . . .

  But for Phaedrus, that wild and bitter summer had a kind of broken-winged happiness of its own. All through the long night rides and the swift bloody fighting, while the rowan-trees blossomed and the blossom fell into the hill burns running low with drought, Murna rode with him and Conory among the Companions, proving herself as hardy and as skilled with the throw-spear as any of the young warriors. And at night among the steep glens and wooded hollows of the moors, or in some hill dun long since cleared of cattle and all else that could be driven or carried away, when the warriors slept with their spears beside them and their shields for pillows, she spread her own cloak on the ground between the wheels of the chariot for Phaedrus to lie on, and lay down beside him with his cloak to cover them both. And there were times when they would laugh together at some foolish jest; and once when there was a night attack on the chariot ring, they fought together behind one shield.

  But as summer drew on towards its end, and the heat-parched heather began to fade, Murna had a look about the eyes that Phaedrus did not understand – and he knew the looks of her well enough by then. He wondered if the sword-cut she had taken across the ribs a few weeks back were troubling her. But when he asked, she laughed and showed him the place, and he could see that it was cleanly healed.

  He told himself that he was imagining things, and turned his whole mind towards gathering the remains of the War Host for what all men knew must be the last battle.

  Through those last crackling, drought-baked days of summer, they gathered in from the scattered ends of Earra-Ghyl; war bands brought up to strength with men who were too old for fighting and boys who were too young, hastily mended chariots drawn by unmatched horses, each the survivor of some other team. They gathered in the steep glens northward of Dun Dara, and in the midst of them the Horse Lord and the men of Dun Monaidh made their great chariot-ring on the grassland slopes of Green Head.

  And then one morning, with the last battle as it were already brewing, Murna disappeared when the scouting chariots were being harnessed. And Phaedrus, going in search of her, found her crouched beside the low-running, hazel-fringed burn, being very sick. He squatted down and held her head for her, just as he would have done for Conory or young Brys, and waited until the spasm was over and she was gathering up palmfuls of the cold peat-brown water and bathing her face. Then he demanded urgently, ‘What is it? Are you ill?’

  She turned to look at him, with the colour creeping back into her face, smiling at him a little behind her eyes. ‘No, I am not ill. But it seems that I must turn to women’s work after all. I am carrying a child for you, Midir.’

  It was a time of lull, one of those uneasy lulls that come on the edge of fighting, or he would have sent her away at once. As it was, there were a few hours more, and the scouts reporting no signs of movement from around Glen Croe, Phaedrus was even able to leave the War Host for a little while, to set her on her way.

  And so at about the same time next day they stood together on a ridge of the high moors a mile or so westward of the main Host, to take their leave of each other, while the small escort of Companions who were to take her back to Monaidh waited at a little distance. Early as it was, the sky arched, cloudless and already heat-pearled, over hills that were shadowed with fading heather or tawny as a hound’s coat; a warm, dry wind went blustering across the moors, making a sea-sound in the dark glen woods below, and Phaedrus remembered afterwards that there was a scattering of late harebells among the furze.

  Murna said almost accusingly, ‘Why did you come seeking me yesterday? If you had not come then, you need not have been knowing. Not yet, not for a few days more. It was only a few days more I hoped for.’

  And the warm wind through the furze and the impatient harness-jingle of one of the horses were the only sounds again.

  A few days more . . . in two or three days now, the thing would be settled, one way or the other, and she knew it as surely as any of them, and had tried to keep her secret long enough to share the last battle with him; and part of him wished sore that she had been able to keep it; she had been a good fighting-mate.

  ‘Let me stay, then,’ she said, as though she knew what he had been thinking. ‘Just three more days.’

  ‘They might be three days too many.’ He looked her very straight in the eyes. ‘Murna, this one time, you will obey me!’

  ‘Sa; this time I will obey you.’ There was a small wry attempt at a smile on her mouth. ‘I am not wanting to – but the babe is stronger than I am. And he wants to be born and live.’

  ‘He? You are sure, then, that it will be a man-child?’

  ‘Of course. A son to lead the Horse People after you.’ She flung up her head and laughed, a laughter that seemed to ache in her throat. ‘How could he be anything else? He was begun among the spears!’

  Ever since he had first known about the babe Phaedrus had been taking care not to think too closely about the fact that Murna believed it was Midir’s, but now, at her words, suddenly everything in him was crying out to tell her the truth. She had the right to know, and for himself, he felt that something at his heart’s core would tear out by the roots if he had to part from her with the thing untold, raising a barrier between them. But he never must tell her; never in all his life or hers, no matter how long or how short that might be.

  He put his arms round her, loosely, and carefully at first – strange that he was holding two people in the circle of his arms – then fiercely close. ‘Listen now: whatever happens, whether I come back to Dun Monaidh to make the victory dance, and we grow old together and watch this son who was begun among the spears become a man, or whether we are not together any more this side of the sunset – whatever comes, whatever you hear of me, remember I love you, my Murna.’

  She put up her hands and took his scarred face between them, and kissed him, and stood for a few moments straining up to rest her forehead against his. ‘I love you, my gladiator, that shall be helping me to remember.’

  Phaedrus held her tight against him for a heartbeat longer, then he almost pushed her away. ‘Go now, go quickly.’

  And she obeyed without a backward glance.

  He stood and watched her going away from him through the tawny, knee-high grass between the furze, striding like a boy in her breeks and tunic, towards where the Companions waited. He saw her fling up her hand to them, and mount into the waiting chariot . . . He went on standing on the ridge, watching until a distant fold of the moors took the chariot and its little escort from his sight.

  Then he turned, cursing in his heart with the dark enduring curses of the Gael, so much more potent than any that he had learned in the Gladiators’ School at Corstopitum, and headed back towards the camp on the skirts of Green Head.

  Midway, he met Conory, strolling up through the hazel scrub with Shân’s leash swinging in his hand. ‘You’ll not have seen my striped she-devil?’ he inquired. ‘She has slipped her collar.’

  Phaedrus shook his head. ‘Never a tail twitch of her.’ But he had a feeling that it was not really to look for Shân, who was skilled at slipping her collar and was sometimes away on the hunting trail for whole days at a time, that the Captain
of his Companions had come that way.

  ‘Ah well, she will come back when she has killed,’ Conory said, and turning about, fell into step beside Phaedrus.

  They walked some way in silence, and then Phaedrus said, ‘Murna should be safe in Dun Monaidh within three days.’

  And Conory said, ‘She will be finding it dull in the women’s quarters, after this summer, and she almost alone in there.’

  ‘The whole War Host will have heard by now,’ Phaedrus said savagely after a moment.

  ‘Most of them.’

  ‘It is an accursed tangle.’

  ‘Were you never thinking it was a thing that might happen?’

  ‘Ach, I suppose so.’

  ‘And were you never wanting it should happen?’

  Phaedrus said, ‘Murna is my woman – mine to me, in the way that no woman ever was before, and it is warmth in my heart, to know that we have begun the making of a child between us.’

  ‘But.’

  ‘It is my child – but not Midir’s.’

  ‘The few who know will keep silence.’

  Phaedrus made an impatient gesture. ‘That is the kind of thing Sinnoch the Merchant might say. Sa, sa, I know it is true. They will keep their side of the bargain as I have kept mine. Besides, they have too much to lose if they let it through their teeth.’

  ‘But?’ Conory said again.

  ‘Fiends and Furies! She thinks that I am Midir,’ he groaned, ‘and I had to let her go, still thinking it.’

  Conory looked at him thoughtfully, as they walked. ‘It is in my mind to wonder – just to wonder – if she does – or if for her too, the balance of the blade was wrong, after all.’

  And Phaedrus stopped dead in his tracks, remembering how she had said ‘You’ and then changed it into ‘That boy’ when she told him the cruel story of that long-ago otter-hunt. How she had said, ‘I love you, my gladiator’; not giving him Midir’s name. ‘You think – that?’ he said very slowly.

  ‘I don’t know. You may know one day; no one else ever will.’

  ‘She would never foist a child that she knew was not Midir’s on to the tribe to rule as Horse Lord after me.’

  ‘She is a woman, not a man; there’s a difference,’ Conory pointed out kindly. ‘Women will do strange things for a man, and never feel that they are breaking any faith so long as they do not break it with that one man.’ And after a silence, ‘There is this, also, that for the tribe your son may be better than no Royal Son at all – if it is a son. Remember it will be of the Royal Blood on its mother’s side, the same blood as Midir – or as Conory the Captain of your Guard, come to that.’

  They were moving forward again, threading the steep midge-infested hazel woods that skirted the lower slopes of Green Head, and again they kept silence for a while. Then Phaedrus laughed savagely. ‘It is a jest for the Gods, isn’t it – Liadhan seized the rule and brought back the old worship and the Old Ways; and the kings killed each other and came to kingship only by marriage with the Royal Woman; and the daughters were all and the sons nothing. Then Gault and the rest of you rose against Liadhan, to bring back the ways of the Sun People, and you set me up to be Lord of the Dalriads in her place. And what have I done? I killed the Old King and married the Royal Woman, and my son will draw his right to rule after me from his mother.’

  ‘I am not Tuathal the Wise,’ Conory said after a moment, ‘but it is in my mind that maybe all the Gods men worship blur into each other a little at the edges. It is in my mind also that there must be Earth Lady as well as Sun Lord, before the barley springs in the furrow.’

  Phaedrus nodded. He supposed that was the answer. All the answer there was, anyway. Meanwhile they were getting close to the camp, and there was something else he wanted to say to Conory, something that had been in his mind to say to him, ever since he knew about the babe. ‘Conory, if I am killed tomorrow – if I go beyond the Sunset before the boy comes to his time for taking Valour – and you live after me, let you guard him and Murna for me.’

  ‘You are very sure that it will be a son.’

  ‘Murna says that it will be a son.’

  ‘The women have ways of knowing – so they say. See then if the rule passes to a son, the old pattern is broken after all.’

  ‘And you will guard them?’

  ‘I will swear to it, on whatever thing you choose.’

  ‘A plain promise will serve.’

  Conory’s sweet, mocking smile was in his voice. ‘You forget that I also am of the Royal Blood, and may have sons of my own one day. I will swear.’

  ‘Swear then, on the bare blade.’ They were both half laughing, both in earnest under the laughter. Phaedrus whipped out his dirk, and held it out to Conory as they walked. And Conory, his hand flat along the blade, swore the oldest and most binding oath of the Gaelic People.

  ‘If I break faith with you, may the green earth open and swallow me, may the grey seas roll in and engulf me, may the sky of stars fall and crush me out of life for ever.’

  Something had happened in the camp of the War Host while they were away, maybe some news come in. It was in the very air as they came up towards the chariot lines, and glancing aside at his companion, Phaedrus saw that his head was up and his nostrils widened as though to catch an unfamiliar smell. A knot of charioteers parted at their approach. Phaedrus called to one of them, young Brys who had lately returned to him, and the boy came, running lame like a bird trailing a broken wing.

  ‘What is in the wind?’ Phaedrus asked.

  ‘My Lord Midir, it is all over the camp that the She-Wolf herself is yonder in Dun Dara!’

  Phaedrus and Conory exchanged glance. ‘So,’ Phaedrus said softly, ‘the Goddess herself come to be in at the Kill.’

  ‘That or’ – Conory checked an instant, his odd eyes narrowed in thought – ‘could it be that the Caledones have brought her to put fire into the hearts of their warriors? Could it be that even their strength has an end, and they are throwing in their last weapon against us?’

  Phaedrus said, ‘We have already thrown in ours. Ah well, one way or the other, we shall soon enough be knowing.’

  16

  THE LAST WEAPON

  WHEN THE SUN went down behind Cruach Môr two evenings later, the Dalriads were once again masters of Dun Dara; and as the great hills dimmed into the dusk the old stronghold within its turf banks, and the steep slopes that dropped away from it on three sides, were red-flowered with the watch fires of the tattered War Host. But away down Glen Croe the great out-thrust shoulder of Black Crag was flowered in the like way, with Caledonian watch fires, so many watch fires, even after these past two days of fighting. And the dead of the Horse People lay mingled with the dead of the Caledones all down the glen.

  Sitting before the blind doorway of what had once been the Chieftain’s Hall, Phaedrus put the situation into words, as much to get it clear in his own mind as anything else, for the men gathered about the Council fire knew it all as well as he did. ‘This is the way of it, then. We have not the strength left to drive them back to their own side of the Firth; and if we pull back ourselves, leaving them Lords of Black Crag and the lower glen, they’ll be over into our herding lands like a stampede of wild horses, and we’ll not get them out again until Cruachan falls into Loch Abha. We can keep them penned in the glen just so long as we can hold out here in Dun Dara. But you all know how it is. This has been the driest summer that the oldest of us can remember – see how the furze flares and crackles in the flame – and they have been here before us. They have drunk the old wells dry, and the spring runs so low that it will scarcely serve to water the men, let alone the horses, and the burn is foul with the dead men they heaved into it. We can last out the few days to burn our dead and get our wounded away; no more – while they have all the Firth-head above the burn’s outflow to drink dry before they feel the lack of water.’

  ‘May it rot their bellies!’ growled Oscair, his big, freckled hands clenched on his knees.

  ‘If
it would, that would be the solving of our problem,’ Phaedrus said; ‘but it is in my mind that we will need to be doing something about it ourselves.’

  Gault, with a bloody clout round his head, looked up from the fire. ‘And what thing would that be?’

  ‘I do not know yet. Before we can be making any plan, we must come at surer knowledge of the numbers that yet remain to King Bruide and the defences of his chariot-ring. So, my brothers, I am minded for a little night hunting and a closer look at this camp of the Caledones.’

  There was a quick stir of movement among the Companions, and Diamid said, ‘We are with you, Midir.’

  Conory, who had been playing lightly with his dirk as a girl might play with a flower, sheathed it, and made a small, soft throat-sound to Shân beside his knee, so that she ceased washing herself and with an answering cry, sprang to his shoulder. ‘So, all’s ready. We will have a fine hunting, eh, my fanged flower?’

  ‘Three of us should be enough,’ Phaedrus said quickly. ‘Na, not you, Finn; you’re as brave as a boar, and when you move you make as much noise as one. Nor you, Cathal, with that wound only half healed. Conory, and you, Baruch; you two I take; no more.’