‘Conory?’ said Midir’s voice behind him.
‘Conory was – is my cousin, born in the same summer to Iorwen, my father’s younger sister. I know him by his having one eye set higher than the other, and a brown fleck in the apple of it.’ There were other things he knew about Conory, a great many other things, including some that Midir had never told him. But he did not recite them now. They had had to be learned, but though the arena years had hardened him to most things, he still disliked trampling more often than need be in another man’s private territory. ‘It was to Conory that the Queen sent her token at Beltane,’ he said, and then, watching a pigeon on the opposite roof, ‘It seems the Queen likes her kings young.’
‘The Sacred King must be always young, and strong, lest the harvest fail and the mares grow barren. It is maybe a fine thing for the Queen, but the needs of the harvest come first.’
‘You’ve not told me much of Liadhan the Queen. Very little beside all that you have told me of other men and women.’
‘What should I tell you of her? She has long fair hair and a long fair face, and all her movements are slow and strong and rich – like corn that is heavy in the ear. They say that Maeve of Connacht was such a one, who fought against us in the High and Far Off days, in the land our people came from. But there’s small need to tell you the look of her, you’ll not be mistaking her for another woman. I saw her in the Royal Woman’s place at the feasts and sacrifices, but her life never touched against mine, until—’ He broke off and Phaedrus, looking round, saw his face for the moment no more than a mask – like the calmly moulded features of the helmet mask over the sweating, snarling features of the gladiator beneath. Even his voice seemed masked with that same artificial calm, when he spoke again. ‘The boy Midir hated and feared her always, that is all that the Prince Midir, returned to his rejoicing tribe, need remember of Liadhan. Not even that she had him blinded to make him unfit for the kingship, and stood by to see it done. That story is done with and best forgotten, now that there is a new story to take its place.’
‘Nevertheless, the part of me that remains Phaedrus the Gladiator will not quite forget that story until the account is settled with Liadhan.’
‘Na! Forget it!’ Midir dropped the mask, and springing up, came striding across to him. ‘You’ve a wild enough team to drive without that mare yoked among them.’
‘It was you who bade me to avenge you, that first night behind the “Rose of Paestum”.’
‘I spoke in a black moment,’ Midir said.
And there was a small, sharp silence. Then Phaedrus said, ‘You must have hated me.’
‘You can scarce expect I would be loving you.’
A cart came rumbling up the street, the wagoner cursing his team; there was the crack of a long raw hide whip, the slow hoof-beats of the file of oxen died into the distance. Then Phaedrus said:
‘Give me a right to the kingship, Midir.’
‘I have told you—’
‘I want more than words.’
Midir stood thoughtful for a moment, then he pulled the dagger from his belt where he wore it night and day (‘A man needs to know where to lay hand on his knife in the dark,’ he had said once), feeling with a finger along the blade to the tip, and made a small precise movement quicker than the eye could follow. A thread of crimson sprang to life on the fine brown skin inside his wrist, and a few beads of blood welled up. He reversed the knife with a flick, and held it out by the blade. ‘Now you.’
Phaedrus took it, and stood for a moment balancing it in his hand. He was not even sure that he liked this uncomfortable man, certainly he felt none of the easy comradeship with him that he had felt with Vortimax; but none of that mattered. During this long enclosed month they had grown together at the edges in a way that had nothing to do with liking, but belonged somewhere far down at the root of things.
He made his own small quick movement; watched the blood spring out on his own wrist.
Midir flicked up his head at the sound of the movement. ‘Done?’
‘It is done.’
‘Bring yours to mine, then.’
Phaedrus did so, feeling the mouth of the tiny wound on the mouth of the other as they pressed their wrists together. Three drops of mingled blood escaped between them and made three brighter spots among the spilled lees of the wine on the floor where Midir had poured his libation to the Gods.
‘So now we are of one life blood, you and I,’ Midir said, ‘and you have the blood of the Horse Lord mingled with your own, if ever the Gods call you to account for taking the kingship.’ There was a note almost of laughter in his voice. Then as he took back the knife and sheathed it and brought up his hands to feel for Phaedrus’s shoulders, he spoke in deadly earnest. ‘Listen! You cannot be taking the kingship from me. Liadhan did that, once and for all. But it is not hers, even by riever’s right, for she has turned back to the Old Ways and so there is no Horse Lord to lead the Dalriads and answer for them to Lugh of the Shining Spear. The kingship lies free and waiting . . .Take it if you can – and a good war-trail to you, Phaedrus, my brother-in-blood.’
Phaedrus set his own hands for an instant on the other’s, as he had done that first night of all. ‘It may be that we shall meet again one day,’ he said. ‘The Sun and the Moon on your path, Midir.’
He turned and caught up his bundle, and went clattering down the rickety stair and out into the street, all but colliding with a man carrying hot loaves. The man swore at him, and Phaedrus swore back, with flowers and flourishes of insult learned in the arena which left the other open-mouthed and envious, then turned to look up at a small window high under the gap-toothed slates, from behind which came the sound of whistling, a short five-note phrase jaunty as a water wagtail, that he and Midir had used for a signal at their comings and goings, all this month. He whistled back, and hitching up his bundle, set off for the inn on the outskirts of the town, where Sinnoch and the horses were lodged, falling as he went into the old play-actor’s swagger.
He had entered into this business partly for the sake of the thing that Gault had offered as a price, partly because of that sudden feeling of oneness with Midir; and then he had not been sure what strange waters he was getting into, nor where he was heading. But now, striding up the already crowded street where light and colour were seeping back into the world, and the pigeons wheeled above the roof-tops, suddenly he felt light on his feet and lucky. Every gladiator knew that feeling; the day when the God’s face was towards you, your lucky day, when it was your adversary’s guard and not yours that flew wide. He dodged a cart laden with wineskins, and swaggered on. Once or twice a head turned to watch the tall man with the red hair under a Phrygian cap pulled down to his eyebrows, who wore the rough clothes of a pack-train driver and walked with the braced instep of a dancer or a swordsman.
It was almost full daylight when he came to the stable court of the ‘Golden Fleece’.
5
FRONTIER POST
TOWARDS EVENING, SIXTEEN days later, with all the broad, slow heather hills of Valentia between them and the Onnum Gate, the little pack-train swung northward from the broadening Cluta which they had been following since dawn, and turned into the track that rose gently from the river marshes. And it was then that Phaedrus saw a faint haze of smoke hanging beyond the ridge, and said to the merchant riding beside him, ‘What lies ahead? It does not look like heath fire, though Typhon knows the furze is dry enough.’
‘It isn’t heath fire,’ Sinnoch said. ‘That is the smoke of the Northern Wall cooking its supper.’
It was late into August by now, and the dust-cloud rose from the track under the ponies’ hooves, and settled slowly again after their passing; a grey bloom of dust that powdered beasts and men from head to foot, parched the throat and stung the eyes, and seemed to fur over even the sound of the bell that the train leader wore about his neck to warn off the evil eye. And Phaedrus, constantly on the move to and fro along the plodding line, enviedVron, who had been Sinnoc
h’s fore-rider for a score of years, ambling ahead on his small, ragged pony, his feet almost brushing the ground on either side, his old sheepskin hat hanging loose and easy on the back of his head.
It was a very small pack-train, only four burdenbeasts and the three riding ponies; for Sinnoch was a horse-trader before all else. Once a year he made the trip south with a score or more rough-broken three-year-olds, herded by drovers on little shaggy ponies much as sheep-dogs herd their flock. He would give the lads a few days to make Corstopitum a still wilder place than it was the rest of the year, and then send them north again, and himself follow later with no one but Old Vron and maybe one other, his ponies’ yellow balecloths laden with a few luxuries chosen with care and long experience of knowing his market: a few fine bronze weapons, ornaments of amber and jet, a cup of violet-coloured glass, a length of emerald silk, a couple of jars of Etruscan wine slung one on either side of a pack-saddle.
Phaedrus had asked him one day why he did not keep the drove-boys with him to act as guard for his small, rich cargo, and Sinnoch had said, ‘Ah now, that would be to cry aloud to the very hills that the goods in my bales were worth taking; and what could a handful of drove-lads do against a rieving party? Na, na, it is better not to be putting ideas into honest folks’ heads.’
A short while later they had crested the ridge, and were looking down at the Cluta marshes again, where the river flung one of its great loops northwards. A broad tongue of low, sodden land reaching far back into the hills, flaming with gorse along its backward fringes, blurred with saltings and mouse-pale dunes towards the coast. And away across the flatness of it, where the land began to rise again, was the square-set mass of a big turf and timber fort with the usual huddle of native bothies in the stockaded cantonment; and on either side, the turf banks and ditches of the Wall itself. The Wall that ended, westward, in some kind of blockhouse or signal-station far out on the marshes, and eastward, climbed away and away on to higher ground, strung with other forts – Phaedrus could make out two, from the low ridge where they had checked to breathe the ponies – until it lost itself in distance and heat-haze and the great, dust-dark Caledonian Forest that lay like a thundercloud over all the inland country. And beyond the Wall, range behind range, trembling and transparent on the sultry air, the mountains of the North, seeming less substantial than the smoke of the cooking-fires that hung above the fort . . .
Eight years ago, the smoke hanging above the forts of the Northern Wall had been war-smoke, the dark smitch of burning timbers, rolling over dead men in the ditch. That was the last time that Dalriads and Caledones had joined spears; the second time that the Wall of Lollius Urbicus had gone up in flames. But each time it had been patched up and garrisoned again, and now the smoke was the quiet evening smoke of cooking-fires and the place looked secure and set in its ways between the marshes and the wooded hills.
‘A pleasant change, to see smoke rising from a hearth again,’ Phaedrus said, his mind going back over the cold hearths, the remains of deserted villages, the steadings and cattle-folds whose stones were laced together with brambles and bindweed about their doorways, that they had passed more than once on their way north. Oh, there had been living settlements, too, but even they had had a chill about them: too many old women with hollow faces, too few men, and too few children.
‘Aiee! Lollius Urbicus made a fine clean sweep of Valentia while he was about it,’ Sinnoch said. He spoke the General’s name as though it smelled: a tone which Phaedrus had heard before among the men of the North. ‘More than forty summers ago, but the scars still show. And still ache when the wind is in the east, as old scars have a way of doing.’
Phaedrus glanced round, with quickly raised brows. ‘Meaning another rising, one day?’
But the merchant, sitting loosely on the saddle rug, the great ox-hide whip resting across his pony’s withers, had nothing in his eyes but distance and heat-haze. ‘Maybe one day when and if the lowland tribes grow strong enough. That won’t be in your time or mine; Lollius Urbicus knew what he was doing when he made his demands on the province – draughts for the Auxiliaries has a fine respectable sound to it – and marched all the young men away to serve the Eagles at the other end of the Empire.’
‘One might be calling that a kind of murder,’ Phaedrus said thoughtfully, ‘only the murder of a whole people instead of one man.’
Sinnoch’s voice was dryly and bitterly amused. ‘Ah, na, it is just the Red Crests making the Pax Romana.’ He whistled to the pack team, cracking the long whip above their backs to set them moving again.
‘And then he built his fine new Wall,’ Phaedrus pondered, as they plodded on and the choking dust-cloud rose again, ‘to say to all men: “The Pax Romana runs to here. This far the sun shines, and beyond it is the dark, that had best keep out.”’
‘Not quite. There were forts along that line a hundred years ago, so I’ve heard, and there are still outpost forts and the old warship base at Are-Cluta, a full day’s trail beyond it. And as for keeping anything in or out . . .’
‘What purpose does it serve, then?’
Sinnoch shrugged. ‘It serves as a check-line, by which the Red Crests can keep track – after a fashion – of who comes and who goes, and how many, and how often.’
‘After a fashion?’
‘There are ways through without troubling the Red Crests. There are the coastwise marshes at either end, if one knows the tides and troubles to learn the habits of the patrols. But the game’s not worth the lamp-oil unless there is something of especial value to be smuggled through.’
‘Such as?’
‘Arab mares, for instance. The Romans will wink quite happily at the odd stallion, fairly bought in the horse-market, going through to improve the stock – the more so that they buy our three-year-olds for Cavalry re-mounts. But mares are another matter.’
Phaedrus nodded. A stallion could sire many foals in a year, but a mare bears only one. That was why no War Host ever put its mares in the fighting-line unless it was desperate for horses, why no province would allow good mares out over its borders if they could possibly be stopped. ‘Then if it is only to improve the stock, why not leave the mares alone and bring north only the stallions that the Red Crests wink at?’
Sinnoch looked round at him. ‘A charioteer, you have been, among other things, but it is in my mind that you know little of horse-breeding. Have you never heard that a horse gets his strength from his sire, but his courage from his dam? And valiant though our little hill-run mares may be, there’s nothing like an Arab mare for setting fire in her foals. Besides, it would be a poor cold world in which a man was only doing what the Red Crests allowed.’
Phaedrus said softly, ‘Have you taken mares through, yourself?’
‘I may have done, from time to time, when I was young and rash. If it served no other purpose, it taught me the hidden ways of my own hills as few save the little Dark People know them. But this trip we are not looking for trouble; also I’ve a mind to visit an old friend who keeps the wine-shop in the Cantonment yonder. So tonight we shall sleep safe and respectable under the fortress walls, and pass through with Rome’s blessing in the morning.’
And so late that evening, having unloaded the pack bales and left Sinnoch in the back room of the wine-shop, exchanging the news of the Frontier with his old friend, who proved to be an immensely fat old woman in a dirty pink tunic, Phaedrus and Vron took the ponies down to water them at the stream below the fort, that, born somewhere among the furze and birch scrub inland, came down in a chain of looped shallows and widening pools on its way to join the Cluta.
A patrol of the Frontier Scouts had just come in and were watering their mounts, and Phaedrus, well aware of the cast-difference between pack-pony and cavalry mount – though, indeed, these particular cavalry mounts were just as rough-coated as his own charges and not much larger – followed Vron down to the pool below that at which the troop ponies were drinking. It was cool under the alders that trailed their branches
towards the water, though the midges still danced in the sunlight, and a breath of air stole up from the marshes, salt-laden after the heat of the day. You could see the long, soft breath of it coming, silvering the marsh grasses all one way. Phaedrus and the old fore-rider dismounted, knotted up the halters, and let the ponies make their own way down the bank, and the cold peat-brown water rippled round the seven eager muzzles as the weary little beasts dropped their heads to drink.
Vron squatted on to his heels, his back against an alder trunk, tipped his sheepskin hat over his eyes and became instantly and peacefully one with the landscape. But Phaedrus, making sure that the halters were secure so that the ponies could roll without danger of getting entangled, before going back to the corral, kept one eye on the men upstream.
He had seen bands of the Frontier Scouts once or twice since coming north of Hadrian’s great wall, but they were a strange breed to him, not like the Legionaries, or the Auxiliaries of the Wall garrisons who came down to Corstopitum on leave. Of course he had heard stories . . . They were lean, rangy men who he knew could cover the hills on foot almost as quickly as on horseback if need be; many of them British born. A wild lot, the stories said, but said it in a tone of unwilling respect, and watching them as they stood by, relaxed but watchful while the ponies drank, one leaning against a hazel trunk and whistling through his teeth, one frowning over some adjustment to his bow – a light horn bow such as the Cretan Auxiliaries used, good for work on horseback; two more arguing softly and fiercely, an argument that looked as though it had gone on all day and might well go on all night, but each with an eye on his mount to make sure that he drank what he needed and no more, Phaedrus could believe something of their reputation and understand something of the respect. No Legion would have been seen dead in their company, breeched like barbarians, wolfskin cloaked, some with the wolf’s head drawn forward over their own in place of cap or helmet. Something about them seemed familiar, waking an odd pang of longing in Phaedrus that surprised and puzzled him, until he realized that it was the oneness of the pack, the strong bond that he had known in the Gladiators’ School.
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