‘You were not wrong. To have hunted tired hounds blindly into those no-man’s hunting-runs would have been moon madness. At least the halt will give us a while to rest and bait the horses and put something into our empty bellies that may make us feel less like ghosts ourselves.’ Conory laughed. ‘I can smell the fat smell of cooking-fires: they do say that captured bullock meat tastes ever the sweetest.’
‘Then twice captured should be twice as sweet.’ No good to bide there staring down at the ford and raging. He turned his horse’s head back towards their own chariot-ring. ‘Come, then, or we shall miss our share.’
Conory wheeled beside him, but as he did so a stone rolled under his horse’s off forehoof and the tired beast stumbled heavily. He caught his breath in a little choking gasp of pain, and Phaedrus looked round again just in time to fling sideways and catch him as he sagged forward over the horse’s neck.
‘Steady! What now?’
Conory managed a rather ghastly smile. ‘I took a spear-thrust in the hip – it must have gone – a bit deeper than I thought.’
‘You fool!’ Phaedrus shouted at him in another kind of fury, because he had already lost too many friends for one day. ‘You fool! Why were you not telling me?’ Then as the other murmured something quite unintelligible: ‘Give me the reins. Can you hold on as far as the camp, if I steady you?’
Conory made a great effort against the deadly faintness that was turning him grey-white to the lips, and said quite clearly, through shut teeth, ‘I’ve never fallen off a horse yet.’
And he did not, though he was riding blind and slumped over the horse’s neck as they came up to the picket lines, and Phaedrus, riding knee to knee with him, with a steadying grip on his arm, was almost all that kept him from sliding limply to the ground.
By the nearest of the fires he reined in and called, ‘Hai! Diamid!’ before he remembered that it was no use calling Diamid any more. Two or three others came running, young Brys ahead of them, to catch the bridles, as he dropped from his borrowed horse to aid Conory down.
‘Nor have I ever been lifted off a horse like a screeching captive maiden,’ said Conory sweetly, opening his eyes which had been half closed, and he set his hands on the horse’s withers to swing his sound leg over, and crumpled quietly into Phaedrus’s arms in a dead faint.
Phaedrus gathered him up, shaking his head impatiently at the hands that came out to help. ‘Na, leave be. I have him – where are the Healer Priests?’
Aluin Bear’s Paw pointed, with a hand whose back was furred with thick dark hair. ‘Up yonder by that hazel-tump in the loop of the burn.’
Conory was extraordinarily light to carry, even unconscious. Phaedrus thought suddenly that Murna would not be so very much lighter. But the weight of his own weariness was added to the weight of the slight figure in his arms, so that he was gasping when he reached the hazel trees where several Sun Priests with their strangely crested heads were moving among the men who sat or lay there stretched out in the shade.
For one horrible moment, as he laid his friend down, Phaedrus thought that he was dead, but when he put a hand over Conory’s heart he felt it beating faintly under his fingers; and the Healer Priest who had come up behind him said, ‘Na, na, his spirit is out of his body, but it will come back.’
‘You are sure?’ Phaedrus demanded.
A grey smile touched the priest’s face. He also was a tired man. ‘There is always a risk that the spirit may lose its way. I shall know better when I have seen the wound.’ He sent one of the women for water from the low-running stream and kneeling down, began to cut away the plaid cloth of Conory’s breeks to come at the spear-thrust in his hip, and clicked his tongue over it like an old woman, and called to a priest for his instruments.
Phaedrus said nothing, but stood by while the wound was cleansed and salved, glad that for this while at least, Conory was out of his body and need not feel the surgeon’s probe that fetched out splintered bone. When the thing was finished and the wound lashed tight, he said, ‘Will it mend?’
The priest looked up with a start, having quite forgotten his presence. ‘He’ll go lame on that leg to the end of his days; but if he does not take the wound fever, he’ll be astride a horse again by winter.’ His tired face gentled. ‘There’s no good that you can do here, my Lord Midir. Go you and eat and get what rest you can.’
Back among the cooking-fires, the lumps of halfraw bullock meat were being given out to men who ate like starving wolves, or were too weary to eat at all; and one of the scouts had just come in with word of having picked up the trail of Liadhan and the small band with her, and followed until it was sure that they were making for the Black Glen and the Waters of Baal’s Beacon.
Phaedrus listened, gnawing his way through a great wedge of meat that was black on the outside and still dripped red within. Then he spoke urgently with Gault the Strong. ‘Scrape me together two- or three-score men; there must be so many among the War Host who can keep on horseback a few hours longer.’
‘The War Host is something smaller than it used to be,’ Gault said savagely.
‘That I had noticed. None the less, I must have at least two-score to push on with me now. For the others, let you rest the men and horses but gather every single one you can and hold them ready to bring on after me when I send back word.’
‘That I will do,’ Gault said. ‘But as to the two-score – do your own dirty work, my Lord of the Horse Herd. They’re asleep on their feet; but if you can wake them, they’ll answer to your call better than they will to mine.’ He smiled, that harsh, bitten-off smile of his. ‘Did I not promise you that you should be as much the King as you showed yourself strong for?’
‘You did, and behold, I am the Horse Lord, and men come at my call.’
And for an instant, eye looking into eye, both of them remembered that quiet-surfaced struggle for the soul of a little dark hunter, that had been also a trial of strength for the leadership of the tribe.
There were only seven of the Companions left now, and of those, Baruch the Grass-Snake was away with the scouting band. Brys brought the number up to seven again; and surprisingly, Vron, Sinnoch’s old fore-rider, came forward to make the eighth, with his disreputable sheepskin hat still on the back of his head. Dergdian joined them, leaving the leadership of his own men to a kinsman, and Tyrnon and Nial Mac Cairbre . . . They came forward in ones and twos, men with red-rimmed eyes and scorched and blackened faces, several with a bloody rag knotted somewhere about them, until in a little while Phaedrus had more than the three-score that he had first called for.
It took longer to find the horses than it had done to find the men, for the poor beasts were utterly spent, and while that was being done, each man was making ready as best he could, bundling five days’ supply of bannock and meat in his rolled-up cloak. Brys, still proudly careful of his duties as the King’s armour-bearer, though now he was one of the Companions, had brought Phaedrus’s cloak with the great war-brooch still in it, down from Dun Dara in the before-dawn darkness, that the Horse Lord should not ride into battle without it, and dealt with making up his Lord’s bundle as well as his own, and seeing to both their weapons.
For while the ready-making was going on, Phaedrus had gone upstream to the hazel-tump where the Healer Priests were still busy with the wounded.
Conory had come back into his body again, and lay with his head and shoulders propped against the leaning stem of a hazel, looking down at something that crouched against his flank. He looked round at Phaedrus’s step, and moved his hand quickly in a tiny gesture that was at once warning to Phaedrus and restraint and reassurance to the thing that crouched there so tensely still, and Phaedrus, checking beside him, and looking down, saw that it was Shân.
Her collar was gone and she was a pitiable sight, her striped fur almost all singed off; but somehow she had come out of the fighting and found her Lord again, and her spirit was quite unquenched, judging by the way she tensed and spat at his approach, before she quie
tened under Conory’s hand; and her narrowed eyes looking up at him were as bright and wicked as ever he had seen them.
It was stupid, he thought, at a time like this, to feel this rush of relief and gladness because one small, wicked-tempered wildcat had come alive through the fighting and the fire. And yet – it would have been even harder to leave Conory here and go on without him, if she had not . . .
‘So – she is back from her hunting yet again,’ he said. It was the easy and obvious thing to say, when the things that needed saying were too difficult and stuck in one’s throat. ‘They do say that every cat is born into the world with nine lives.’
Conory was fondling the poor singed ears, and Shân, her fierceness now quite laid aside, was butting her head into the hollow of his hand and crooning to him. ‘Then counting the day I found her, that should be leaving her six yet to run,’ he said, speaking as lightly as Phaedrus had done.
Phaedrus squatted down beside him and looked questioningly into his face. ‘How is it with you, now?’
‘None so ill. What news is in the camp? It seems so long that I have been lying up here.’
‘The first scout has come back with word of Liadhan’s trail towards the Black Glen. I’m away after her now with three-score or so of our warriors. That counts what are left of the Companions.’
‘How many are left of us? Of the Companions?’ Conory asked after a moment.
‘Seven, fit to ride, and you here.’
‘I am sore at heart, to be missing this hunting.’
‘We have hunted well together, these past months,’ Phaedrus said.
And looking down into the pale, bright eyes that were so like Murna’s despite the odd set of them, he thought suddenly of how they had first met his across the heads of other men in the Cave of the Hunter, less than a year ago. Gods! Less than a year! And yet he seemed to have lived a whole lifetime since the night in that private room in the ‘Rose of Paestum’, almost as long since that first meeting with Conory – and the Roman world had gone away from him, small and remote and unreal as a scene reflected in a polished helmet. He remembered with sudden piercing clearness, how he had seen Conory then – a wasp-waisted creature with paint on its eyelids and strung glass beads on its wrists. And he had always thought himself a good judge of men! Fool that he had been not to see the tempered blade inside the fantastic silken sheath.
‘If you should be back in Dun Monaidh ahead of me, tell Murna – tell Murna to be looking out for me. Remember, if the need be, I give them into your charge.’
Pain was pulling at the corners of Conory’s mouth, but a trace of his old lazy smile was there too. ‘Surely, I will tell her, but I do not think that she will need the telling. Be easy in your heart for Murna and the babe.’
Phaedrus put a hand on his shoulder and gripped it an instant, wordlessly – Shân watching the while with laid-back ears in case he meant some harm after all – then he scrambled to his feet and went back downstream to where the horses stood ready, too weary to stamp and fidget in their usual way, though not much more weary than the men who were to ride them.
They had trouble with the horses at the ford, for the smell of blood was strong there, and a raven, flapping up under the very nose of Finn’s mount, sent the poor beast half wild with terror. But they got across at last, and turning aside from the trail of the main retreat, that was marked here and there by dead horses in the trampled grass, here and there by dead men, headed south-west to pick up the trail of the She-Wolf. It was Old Vron, riding ahead as he had been used to do with the pack-train, who found it first, and sat waiting for them to come up, then pointed out the hours’-old horse-droppings. ‘They had horses waiting on the other side,’ he informed them with gloomy triumph.
The shadows were lengthening and they had come three or four Roman miles, pushing themselves and the weary horses to the very limit of endurance, when a darker shadow uncoiled itself from a tump of hill juniper, and came to meet them.
‘Sa, sa – Baruch the Grass-Snake.’ Phaedrus looked down at the little man standing at his horse’s shoulder. ‘What word?’
‘I followed the She-Wolf and her pack till they were over the ridge yonder into the Black Glen.’ He turned and pointed towards a lift of the high moors maybe a mile away. ‘There, there was a camp of the Caledones, and King Bruide’s Queen was waiting for her Lord. I lay hid under cover – there is good bracken cover – and watched while she and Liadhan spoke together awhile. Then the first fringe of their beaten War Host came over the hill, and down to the camp, and then I heard her scream. It must have been when they told her her Lord was slain. She screamed and pulled out handfuls of her own hair. There began to be a great crowd, and I could not see what happened, nor hear anything that passed between her and Liadhan, but at last Liadhan came out from the throng in the Queen’s own chariot and with her few priests riding about her, and with no one else at all – aiee! But the horses had terror on them! And when the Caledones harnessed up and turned northward again for the Druim Alban passes, they took the old chariot-way that leads south along the loch shore to the Red Crests’ fort on the Cluta.’
With the muttered exclamation of the war band in his ears, Phaedrus said, ‘A Roman fort! She could not be making for that!’
‘There is no other place, I am thinking, that she could be making for, down that trail,’ put in Old Vron, who had shared his master’s special knowledge of the border hills.
‘But – Light of the Sun! Liadhan to throw herself on the Red Crests’ mercy!’
‘And what can have parted her from the Caledones?’
Aluin asked the question, and grey-muzzled Dergdian answered it. ‘Bruide who was her kinsman is dead. It is in my mind that left without a strong King, the Queen, maybe even her people, may well feel that there is no room for another Goddess-on-Earth in the Cailleach’s hunting-runs. I’d not put it past belief that Liadhan smells danger in that, too.’
‘As I smell danger in her going to the Red Crests,’ Phaedrus said harshly. ‘Wherever she goes, she carries with her deadly danger to the Dalriads; and among the Red Crests, who do not know her, she will be fire in stubble . . . Little Grass-Snake, get back again to Gault the Strong, and tell him all that you have just told me.’ Then to the horsemen behind him, ‘Come – it seems we have a clear trail to follow, anyway, but we must ride quickly on it.’
Towards evening, three days later, the little war band rode out from the thick breathless shadows of Coit Caledon, the Wood of the Caledones, and checked among the tangled thickets of hazel and elder that made up the forest verge, looking out across the emptiness of cleared land that shone tawny pale in the hazed sunlight, and up the steep tumble of thin grass and black outcrop to where the old fortress of Theodosia crouched on the crest of its great out-thrust rock above the waters of the Cluta. It might have been a further outcrop itself, it seemed so deeply rooted in its rock, with the white wing-flicker of the gulls rising and falling all about it. Even at that distance it had a half-deserted look, but Roman standards hung limp and straight in the still air above the Praetorian Gate, vivid as streaks of coloured flame against the sombre masses of storm-cloud piling up behind. And as Phaedrus sat his tired horse under the broad eaves of the forest verge, and looked up towards it with eyes narrowed against the glare, the brooding stillness was torn across by the sound of Roman trumpets that he had not heard for a year.
All their efforts to ride the She-Wolf down before she could reach the shelter of the old Naval Station had been hopeless from the start, for she had fresh horses, while their own poor beasts had been far spent before ever they began that ride. They had had to rest them again and again, and more than once they had had to lie close to avoid an Auxiliary patrol, which had not made for speed. And so – Liadhan was safe behind Roman walls. And what now?
‘What now?’ Dergdian asked, like an echo of his own thoughts.
‘We will try first what the mere asking will do,’ Phaedrus said, his gaze still on the distant gatehouse. ‘
That may at least tell us whether she is still within the fort.’
And so, when they urged the weary horses on again, each man carried his spear reversed, for a token that he came in peace; and Phaedrus, riding a little in advance, had broken a green branch from a wayfaring tree and carried it in his hand.
Trumpets sounded again, high above them, as they passed through the huddle of the small, native town at the foot of the rock and headed up the zigzag track beyond. And when Phaedrus let the red mare stumble to a halt – poor beast, he had no need to rein her in – before the high timber gate, the ramparts were manned on either side, and an Auxiliary Centurion looking down from the Guardhouse roof, demanded, ‘Strangers, what is your business here?’
‘To speak with your Commander.
‘And who would you think you are, to demand to speak with the Commander?’
‘I am Midir, Lord of the Dalriads. I come in peace.’ Phaedrus raised the green branch in his hand. ‘But it would be well that the Commander come out to speak with me, none the less.’
‘Midir of the Dalriads, d’ye say?’
Knowing that with Liadhan behind those walls, the name must have an effect one way or the other, he had gambled on it working in the way they needed. He could only hope that it was doing so, when the Centurion stared a moment, muttered something half under his breath, and disappeared. There was a quick barking of orders from within the gates, and then nothing more for a while.
He sat the red mare in the sultry sunlight, on the ditch causeway, reining her head up with a ruthless hand, and ignoring the sallies that the sentries on the ramparts did not suppose he understood, about One-Valley kings riding broken-winded nags and mistaking themselves for Caesar.
At last the sentries grew abruptly silent, and stood back, and a new head and shoulders appeared over the timber breastwork above him. A bronze helmet shimmered in the veiled sunlight and a red horsehair crest cut its own shape out of the heat-pearled sky; and under the forehead band was a thin, dark face with a nose too big for it, that he had seen before.
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