Conory cried, ‘Thunder of Tyr! She’s heading straight for the bog!’
So she would take even that last hideous way out! Ahead of them as they crashed after her, heads low against the whipping hazel twigs, the bog lay smooth and deadly, and the girl was heading straight towards it, crouched over the mare’s straining neck, drumming her heels into the poor labouring flanks. Her voice blew back to them, crying endearments and encouragement. Phaedrus, driving in his own heels, had somehow flung the red stallion out before the rest; he was circling to ride her off as the herd lads rode to turn a break-away. The divots of soft black earth that spun from the mare’s hooves flew past him like a flight of swallows; behind him the muffled hoof-drum of his Companions, ahead and to the right, the mare floundering and swaying in her stride; and the livid greenness of the bog rushing nearer – nearer, in the evening light. The cold rooty smell of it was all about them. A few moments more, and they would be into it . . .
Shouting would be no use. Desperately, Phaedrus flung the horse-rod point-over-butt as though it were a dagger and saw it arch spinning past the mare and plunge into the bog myrtle just ahead of her and to the left. That was one useful trick learned in the Gladiators’ School, anyway. Startled, she swerved aside, snorting, and plunged on, but no longer straight towards the fringe of the bog. Now the red horse’s muzzle was almost level with the dark streaming tail, as the Princess struggled to head her mount back to the waiting greenness of the bog that was now so hideously close. But the mare was just about done, and Phaedrus clamped in his knees and hurled the stallion forward, and they were neck and neck. And with only a few strides to go and the ground softening at every hoof-fall, he wrenched round and deliberately took the black mare in the shoulder, all but bringing her down. She screamed with fear, and lashed out, but the crash had spun her in her tracks, away from the deadly verge. In the same instant Phaedrus felt his own mount side-slither under him, as one great round hoof slipped into the black quaking ooze beneath the green. For one long-drawn sickening moment the red horse lurched on the brink, and it seemed that in the next, they must be over into the bog, but his own speed carried him on, and the next flying stride found solid myrtle tussocks underfoot again.
The girl had turned with a cry of fury and lashed him across the face with her horse-rod, but he had her reins and they were racing along the flank of the bog, perilously locked together, floundering in and out of solid ground and sinking pocket, but drawing steadily away from the livid greenness of the hungry mire. Then with a sound between a laugh and a sob, Phaedrus had an arm round the Princess Murna and dragged her across the red horse’s withers. The wild-eyed mare, lightened of her load, sprang away and went streaking back towards the hills, with a couple of the Companions in pursuit. And Phaedrus, still riding full gallop, was clamping the Royal Woman against him with his free arm, while she struggled to break free and fling herself off.
Then quite suddenly the fight seemed to go out of her as they slackened pace from that wild gallop to a canter. Phaedrus freed one hand – he was controlling the panting stallion with his knees now – and caught at the red mare’s-skin mask.
Just for an instant, as his hand touched the hairiness of the hide, he wondered if it were the Moon Diadem trick over again, and the face beneath it would not be Murna’s. Wondered, with a little shiver of cold between his shoulder-blades, whether it would be a human face at all, or something else, something that was not good to see . . . Then he pulled away the mask, and flung it behind him among the following horsemen. It was Murna’s face looking up at him, grey-white and somehow ragged, as though in pulling off the bridal mask he had torn holes in something else, some inner defence that she was naked and terrified without. And for that one instant, despite the dusk, he could look into her face instead of only at the surface of it. Still feeling rather sick from the nearness of the bog, he laughed in sudden triumph, and bent his head and kissed her.
Surprisingly, she yielded against him and kissed him back. But as she did so, he felt her hand steal out, light as a leaf, but not quite light enough, towards the dagger in his belt.
His own hand flashed down and caught her wrist, twisting the weapon from her grasp before she well had hold of it, and sent it spinning into a furze bush. ‘Softly, sweetheart! Maybe we shall do better if we are both unarmed,’ he said, gently dangerous. She could have no other weapon about her, or she would not have gone for his dagger.
She gave a sharp cry of baffled fury, and became a thing as rigid and remote as one of the stocks of wood, charmed into human shape, that the People of the Hills left behind in its place when they stole a child of the Sun Folk. And yet the odd thing – Phaedrus knew it beyond all doubt – was that the kiss she had given him had been as real as her hand feeling for his dagger.
It was long past full dark by the time they came back to the Dun, and all down the steep track and massed in the gateways, the warriors were waiting, with pine-knot torches in their hands, so that they rode through a ragged avenue of light. Midir of the Dalriads, with the Royal Woman conquered and captive across his horse; and after them, the Companions, Conory triumphantly bearing aloft the red mare’s-skin mask on the point of his spear, as though it were a trophy.
The King was home from his hunting.
12
GOLDEN PLOVER’S FEATHER
WHEN IT CAME to getting away by oneself for a while, Phaedrus decided, the Lord of the Dalriads was in much the same case as a gladiator with his town leave stopped. All the past two days up here in the hill horse-runs, watching Sinnoch’s leggy two-year-olds in the first stages of their breaking, the Companions had been with him, friends and bodyguard in one, alert and willing to go anywhere and do anything as a knot of hounds at heel, and as difficult to get rid of.
In the end he had simply gone to the garbage pits – at least they let him go there alone – and from there strolled round by the back ways of Sinnoch’s steading to the stable huts, and bidden Brys, whom he found there playing knuckle-bones with three other charioteers, to bring out the dun colt for him.
‘Do I ride with you?’ the boy had asked.
And Phaedrus had said, ‘Neither you nor anyone. If Conory or any other of the Companions ask where I am gone or seek to follow me, tell them I’ve gone to find better company than theirs.’
And he mounted and clattered off by the lower gate where they brought the colts up to the practice yards. They would probably think that he had gone off after some girl glimpsed yesterday in one of the herdsmen’s bothies. Well, they’d not be surprised. The Horse Lord’s month-old marriage had been only a form, and nobody would be fool enough to think there was anything in it to keep him from going after other girls, or that the Queen would care or even notice if he did.
She had not changed since the night he brought her back to the Dun, with Conory carrying the red mare’s-skin mask on the point of his spear. The torn defence, whatever it was, was whole again, and she still seemed like some cold thing magicked into human-seeming that the Dark People might have left behind in the stealing of the real Murna away. Once he had said to her, ‘If I strike you with cold iron, will you fly up through the smoke-hole, or turn back into a log of wood?’
And she had said in a tone of complete indifference, ‘Try it, and see.’
He had been half minded to do it, too. But in the end – he had not quite dared to, in case what he had said in angry jest, was true . . . And yet there had been the moment when she kissed him back, even while she felt for his dagger. That had not been a clay-cold changeling’s kiss. And sometimes he wondered if the real Murna were there inside her all the while, looking out at him as he had so often looked out at the world through the eye-slits of a gladiator’s helmet. Well, it was not anything to him, either way; he simply visited the Queen’s Place as seldom as might be, and thought about her very little the rest of the time.
And he had better stop thinking about her now, because he had only been this way once before, and if he let his wits go, wandering o
ff down every gust of wind, he would almost certainly miss the half-dead birch-tree where one left the glen track.
But he found it easily enough in the end, and the little white thread of a burn that came chattering down from the high moors.
It was sear, dark country that he climbed through after that, leading the colt now because it was too steep to ride; outcropped with rock and pocketed with wetness. It would be fair in its own wild way, when the new fern came thrusting through the sodden wreck of last year’s bracken and the ancient hawthorns were in flower along the burn; but now, in the dark end of winter with spring still a long way off, it was desolate enough. That was why it was left to the little Dark People, Phaedrus supposed, the dispossessed, whose place was always the rock screes and the waste wet mosses that were no use to the later-come lords of the land.
It was all strange country to him, since leaving the track, and he had no idea how far he had to go. (‘Away up the burn – that way,’ Sinnoch had said yesterday, when they passed the birch-tree on the way to the outland horse-runs, and that was all), and he had begun to think he must have missed the way when suddenly between one step and the next – there it was.
No more than a tumble of stones and turf laced together with brambles, that might have been only a natural hummock of the hill-side, save for a dark opening in its side that was just too large and just too regular to be the mouth of a wild thing’s lair. Midway between the hummock and himself, as he checked to look, a great flat stone cropped through the blackened heather. Nothing moved or sounded but the hill wind and the burn water, and a golden eagle swinging in mile-wide circles far overhead.
He had heard before of places such as this, where one left something that needed mending, together with a gift, and came back later to find the gift gone and the broken thing mended; it was one of those things no one talked of very much, the places where the life of the Sun People touched the life of the Old Ones, the People of the Hills. Like the bowls of milk that the women put out sometimes at night, in exchange for some small job to be done – like the knot of rowan hung over a doorway for protection against the ancient Earth Magic – like the stealing of a Sun Child from time to time. Save for the few who were their slaves and bond-folk, the tribes had little else to do with the Old People, certainly they were used to taking less account of them than they did of their chariot horses and beef cattle, when it came to casting up the chances of war. Yet, assuredly, it was by the aid of the little Dark People that Liadhan had escaped to her Caledonian kin. Gault had said as much, and now, with the war horns sounding over the edge of spring, Phaedrus with the common sense of his Roman upbringing, felt that the time was come when the Dark People must count at least for as much as ponies and beef cattle. Sinnoch had said that this mender of worn and broken things, who had his lair and his leaving-stone up here, was the Old Man, the Chieftain of his village. A king in his way, and it seemed to Phaedrus that a visit to him was probably the best chance he would ever get of making contact with any leader among the Dark People.
The colt had begun to fidget, and Phaedrus quieted him and hitched his bridle over a hawthorn-bush, then walked forward, and pulling a good serviceable strap of tanned leather and three barley-cakes from the breast of his tunic, stooped and set them on the flat stone.
Then he retreated downstream to where he had left the pony, and turned again to face the dark hole in the turf hummock, that might almost have passed for the mouth of an animal’s lair, save for the betraying wisp of smoke that rose from the briar-tangle above it.
Slowly and deliberately, knowing that his every movement was being watched, he laid his spear on the ground, the blade pointing away down the glen, and his dirk beside it. He held out his hands, showing them empty, and called, ‘Old Man of the green hillocks – let you come out to me.’
Nothing moved but the thin hill wind. Phaedrus waited – waited – then he walked back slowly, part of the way, and checked again, feeling suddenly how little he knew of the Dark People, wondering what he should do about it if the man did not come. ‘Chieftain – see, I carry no cold-iron blade; let you be coming out to me.’
And from just within the dark mouth, a voice answered, speaking the tongue of the tribes in the lighter, softer tone of the Old People, ‘You have left me a gift, but nothing that needs my skill to make it whole again. Why should I come out to you?’
‘Because I have brought you the gift; and the thing that I ask for it is not the mending of a worn brogue or a sprung rivet in my dagger hilt, but that you should come out and speak with me.’
‘So–o, that seems fair enough,’ the voice said consideringly. But still nothing moved beyond the mouth of the dark hole. And then – Phaedrus realized afterwards that he must have glanced away, but at the time he could have sworn that he never took his eyes from the door-hole under the briar-tangle – suddenly a man was standing on the far side of the stone. A small, slight-boned man in a kilt of otter skins and with grey hair bushing from his narrow skull, and eyes that seemed at first glance like jet beads, until one looked again and saw that they were not black at all, but the dark-furred brown of a bee’s back. Phaedrus made the sign of the Horns behind himself, and then had an uncomfortable feeling that the other knew it. But he only said, looking at the forehead mark that was like a four-petalled flower, ‘What is it that you would speak with me about, Midir of the Dalriads?’
‘I would speak with you because it has been told me that you are a Chieftain among your own people, and because the war horns are sounding across Druim Alban. When the spring comes, the hosts of King Bruide will take the war-trail, and at such a time it is surely good that the Horse Lord should know something of all those within his hunting-runs, not of his own tribe alone.’
The little man gestured to Phaedrus to sit himself on the flat stone, and then squatted down at his feet. ‘You have more than one of our people among the slaves in your Dun. Why not ask them what you would know of the Dark People?’
‘Because a slave answers as a slave, and it is the answer of a free man that I am wanting.’
The other nodded. ‘Ask, then.’
Phaedrus knew that it would be no good trying to come at the thing slantwise, not with this little man who would understand slantwise methods all too well, so he made his question as direct as a dagger thrust. ‘When the fighting comes, this fighting that will not be only for cattle or boundaries, but for deciding whether the Dalriads shall be a free people any more, and what kings shall rule us, and what Gods we shall follow – have we to fear your little blue-flint daggers in our back while our shields are turned to the Caledones?’
‘If you had, should I tell you?’
‘No,’ said Phaedrus frankly, ‘but I have fought for my life to amuse a Roman crowd too often not to be able to judge men’s faces. I had hoped that your face might tell me before you were aware of it.’
‘And it does not? See now, I will be telling you myself, and I will be telling you the truth. We count for nothing, we, the people of the dark-blue flint, since the Horse People took our hunting-runs; we count for nothing, and we know it. But the tribes come and go like wind-waves through the heather, and we bide in our hills and let them pass. It is no concern of ours when they fight each other. We shall always be here as long as there are wolves on the hill. Kill and be killed as you choose, it is nothing to us.’
‘Yet you helped Liadhan to escape into Caledonia.’
‘Surely. She was the Mother, the Lady of the Forests. She was ours to us, and we were hers. Yet because she fled from it when her own Call came – aiee, though we helped her in her fleeing – I do not think that many of us will stir from our own fireside for her sake again.’
‘When her own Call came?’ The phrase caught at Phaedrus’s attention, and he was puzzled by it.
The other’s dark gaze was on his face, and the burn sounded very loud in the silence. High, high overhead, Phaedrus heard the thin, sharp yelp of the golden eagle. Then the little Dark Man said softly, ‘The Horse
Lord, of all men, should be knowing what that Call means . . .’ And then as though changing the subject, he reached out and took up one of the barley-cakes, and broke a long piece of crust from one side. ‘Lord, do you see what I am holding?’
‘Surely,’ Phaedrus said, surprised.
‘What is it, then?’
‘A crust of barley-cake.’
‘Are you sure?’
From being surprised, Phaedrus was puzzled, and somewhere deep within him was a flicker of warning that he did not understand. ‘I am quite sure. It is a crust from one of the barley-cakes I brought you.’
‘Look at it well,’ the man said.
And Phaedrus found himself obeying, his head bent over the crust as though it were something strange and wonderful that he had never seen before.
‘Are you still sure?’ said the soft, insistent voice.
And suddenly he was not so sure. Not sure at all. The thing in the narrow dark hand was growing blurred, losing its outline, changing into something else. Something – something—
‘What is it, then?’ said the voice.
‘It is – it is like a feather.’
He could see it taking shape, the strong slender line of it, as it were, filled in with mist. But the mist was thickening, taking on substance and colour. He could see the almost blackness of the strong pinion barred with gold – in another moment – but something in him had begun to resist.
‘What kind of feather would it be?’
‘A golden plover—’ he began, and checked. ‘No feather at all!’ He forced the words out, his eyes fighting for the lost outline of the barley crust. He could see it now very faintly like a shadow – showing through the feather that was growing misty again. For what seemed an eternity of time the two images hung equally balanced, so that he could see them both, one showing through the other. ‘It is only a barley crust – a barley crust!’
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