The feather was no more substantial than a wisp of wood-smoke and with a supreme effort of will, he snuffed it out, the dark slender shape and the golden shadow-bars, and there was nothing in the other man’s hand but the strip of crust with the grains of parched barley scattered on top.
He looked up with a gasping breath, and drew the back of one hand across his forehead. Despite the little chill wind, it was wet. ‘Why did you do that?’
There was sweat on the little Dark Man’s forehead too, as he set the barley crust back beside the cake that it had come from. ‘That? It was no more than a small piece of Earth Magic, such as may be made between the eyes of one man and the eyes of another. I made it – for the answering of a question that was in my mind.’ He looked up from fitting the crust back into place with a craftsman’s care, and his eyes rested consideringly on Phaedrus’s face. ‘It is strange; I could have sworn that there was not one among the Sun People that I could not have made to see that golden plover’s feather and forget altogether the barley crust, until I bade them remember it again.’
There was a little pause, and then Phaedrus said, ‘I have spent seven years in the Romans’ world, which is a different world from ours; maybe that is why you could not work your magic on me perfectly.’
‘Maybe,’ the other said, but his eyes still brooded on Phaedrus’s face.
And meeting the question in them, Phaedrus conjured up the old swaggering arena smile that he had learned as he learned his sword strokes. ‘Na, now, do you think that I am not Midir of the Dalriads, not the Horse Lord after all, but another wearing his forehead mark?’
‘I do not know,’ the man said slowly. ‘But when you see that golden plover’s feather again, you will be the Horse Lord; and the forehead mark your own.’
‘Rede me the riddle, Old Man.’
‘Time will do that. But this I will tell you, that you may be knowing I speak true: within three days one of the Old People will reach out to touch your life again, but it is in my heart that he will be already dead.’
So – Phaedrus had his answer; it was only the horses and the beef cattle that need be reckoned, after all. The People of the Hills were part of a different world, and no more to be counted as strength or weakness than the glen woods or the snows of Cruachan . . .
Next day he rode back with the Companions to Dun Monaidh, and after that there was little time for remembering the scrap of Earth Magic that was already fading in his mind like a dream, or for thinking of the things that Old Man had foretold. Little time for anything save the matter in hand. And the matter in hand was war! War, when the wild geese flew north in the spring.
In Dun Monaidh, as in every other dun and rath and steading of Earra-Ghyl, the smiths and armourers, the horse-breakers and chariot-builders were at work. All day long from the huddle of blackened bothies in the outer court came the red lick of flame and the roar of the sheepskin bellows, and the ding of hammer on anvil, as here the fresh iron felloes were fitted to chariot wheels, and there the dints were beaten out of the rim of a dappled ox-hide shield; and every warrior sharpened and resharpened his weapons on the great Pillar Stone.
And then on the second day after his return, Phaedrus came out of the long chariot shed with a couple of the Companions behind him, and heard somewhere over towards the northern rampart, a sudden worry of sounds that were all human, and yet made him think of the moment at the end of a hunt, when the hounds close in and make their kill.
The small tumult died out almost as he began to run, the other two at his heels, and when he came out between two store-sheds into the clear space just within the dry-stone curve of the rampart, the little group of warriors he found there were quite silent, their dirks still in their hands, looking down at a body that lay crumpled on the ground among them. One of them was turning it over with his foot as Phaedrus arrived, much as a man might turn over a dead rat, and as it fell all asprawl, he saw that it was the body of one of the Dark People, stabbed in four or five places about the breast and belly.
‘What has happened here?’ he demanded.
And the man who had turned the body over answered him, ‘A rat-hunt, Midir.’
‘It seems that you have made your kill. What was he doing in the Royal Dun?’
Another man shrugged. ‘Spying. We found him hiding in the wood-store yonder. He must have come over the rampart in the night.’
‘Or up by the way that the She-Wolf went.’
A small crowd had begun to gather; someone came cleaving his way through them like a strong swimmer in a rough sea, and Gault stood there, arms folded on barrel chest, looking down with hard, wolf-tawny eyes at the slight dark body in its blood-soaked deerskin. ‘A spy, most assuredly.’ He bent forward abruptly for a closer look. ‘Aye, he’s out of the Caledonian hunting-runs, by the patterns on his hide. Doubtless, if you had not found him he would have been out over the rampart again tonight, and away back to King Bruide with word of how many chariots Dun Monaidh can muster.’ He straightened and half turned away, as though, for him, the thing was finished. ‘Make a fire on the eastern slopes beyond the outerbank – good and high, for the blaze to show far across country – and burn me this rat.’
There was a sharp, half-surprised silence, and then little Baruch said, ‘Why do more than tip him into the bog – or throw him out for the wolf-kind?’
‘Fire is the fitting end for rats.’
Phaedrus, his eyes narrowing under the red brows, suddenly took command. ‘Why are you so firm set on this burning, Gault the Strong?’
‘His litter-brothers will come to know of it. It will maybe serve for a useful warning.’
‘They will come to know that he is killed. Will that not serve for warning enough?’
‘I am doubting it,’ Gault said harshly. ‘The Old Ones are so close to Earth Mother, that death is to them no more than a short journey.’
And so, the fire . . . Phaedrus had been long enough out of the four-square Roman world to have some idea of what all this was really about. To the Sun People it made little real difference whether earth or fire took their bodies when they were done with them; but with the children of Earth Mother, it was very different. Grain thrown into the fire would never quicken, and for them, burning took not only the body but the life that had belonged with it. Gault, in fact, was proposing to destroy whatever this little dark creature had of a soul, for a warning to his kind. Phaedrus had never cared overmuch for the laws of men, but this was another thing, and the laws of men had nothing to do with it. Until now, feeling his way in a new and unfamiliar world, he had left the real leadership to Gault and the inner Council. But now he knew, suddenly and with absolute certainty, that he had come to the end of that . . .
‘But to my mind, the killing is enough,’ he said, ‘and Gault, it is I that am the King! Whatever he was doing, his death settles the score. There will be no burning!’
Gault’s wolf-gaze whipped round to meet his, and Phaedrus read in the other’s frown that he, too, knew the time had come for a trial of strength between them. ‘You are the King, but it seems that you have forgotten much of your own world in the arena. And until you remember, best be leaving such matters as this to those of us who will better understand what we do.’
‘I have forgotten much,’ Phaedrus agreed, ‘but I learned some things, too. Even in the arena, we count the fighting ended with the kill, and do not seek to carry it beyond the death-stroke.’
The knot of onlooking warriors was growing moment by moment, but no one attempted to take any hand in this odd quiet battle of wills. It was a thing between Gault and the Lord Midir, with the body of the little dark hunter lying between them.
‘You speak like a gladiator – a mere bought butcher,’ Gault said at last.
‘There might be worse things to be than a gladiator.’
‘Such, for instance, as Lord of the Dalriads?’ It was easy enough to read the meaning behind that: ‘I made you and I can break you. No need to be Lord of the Dalriads another hou
r, if it displeases you.’
Phaedrus’s mouth lifted at the corners in the faint, insolent smile that his fellow sword-fighters had come to know. ‘Surely it is a fine thing to be Lord of the Dalriads; and Lugh Shining Spear himself forbid I should forget it was you who took me from Corstopitum city gaol and set my foot on the Coronation Stone.’ He let Gault see the meaning behind that, too: ‘You made me and you can break me, but you will be broken with me, if you do.’
There was a feeling of battle in him, under the quiet surface. He had again the old sense of life narrowing and sharpening its focus until there was nothing in it but himself and Gault, and both of them knowing that the thing they fought for was the leadership of the tribe.
So they confronted each other, eye looking into eye, neither speaking again nor moving, until the silence between them drew out thin and taut, so that Phaedrus felt he could have plucked sparks from it like notes off a harp-string; and he heard his own voice break it, saying very clearly, each word separated from the next, ‘There will – be – no – burning.’
Something flickered far back in Gault’s eyes, and he shrugged his bull shoulders. The fight was over, and the victory to Phaedrus. ‘You are the King, the thing must be as you choose. But the Gods help you and all of us, if you choose a’wrong.’ But there was no enmity in his tone; indeed, his dark frowning gaze held a new respect.
On the surface, it had been such a small battle; it had not even concerned a warrior of the tribe, only one of the little Dark People, who, in the eyes of the Dalriads, were half animal and half uncanny. Yet it was now, and not in the moment of his King-Making, that Red Phaedrus felt the Lordship of the Dalriads come into his hand.
‘Take him away and throw him out for the wolves,’ he said to the men who had done the killing. The wolves did not matter; it was only the fire that mattered.
It was only then, watching them dragging the little body away, that he remembered the Old Man’s foretelling, of just three days ago.
That night, when the evening meal was over and the harping silent in the Fire Hall, and Phaedrus went to the King’s Place to sleep, he checked on the threshold with a caught breath of surprise. Beside the central hearth, where Brys should have been waiting for him, sat a woman. She had drawn his own stool to the fire, and sat there, with her loosened mantle dark about her. Her face was hidden from him by her hair which she had unbraided and begun to comb, as though to pass the time while she waited, but the falling curtain of it was unmistakable: the soft dove-gold, mouse-gold hair of the Royal Woman.
‘Murna! What is it that you do here?’
She flung back the mass of hair and turned her face to him. ‘May the Queen not come to the King’s quarters when she chooses?’
‘Surely. But has the Queen chosen to come so often?’ He pulled off his heavy cloak and flung it across the piled skins of the bedplace, and came to stand beside the fire, and look down at her, his shoulder propped against the roof tree.
‘I was wishing to have a word with you,’ she said, ‘and so I sent your armour-bearer out for a while.’
‘Yes?’ Phaedrus’s guard was up.
‘You gained a victory today.’
‘In the matter of the spy? So you have heard about that?’
‘There is little that the Women’s Side does not hear about,’ she said, and the cool, hazel eyes that he suddenly realized were like Conory’s, for all that they were set level, rested on him consideringly. Then, as though making up her mind to something, she added, ‘But he was not here for spying.’
‘No? For what, then?’
‘He came to get speech with me.’
‘And did he get it?’
‘Yes. He brought me word from my mother – and a gift, for you.’
Phaedrus’s red brows flashed up. ‘For me? I’d not have thought she loved me so greatly.’
‘There are gifts and gifts,’ Murna said.
‘And this one? Are you going to give it to me?’
For answer, she laid down the ivory comb she was still holding, and brought something from the breast of her gown, and held it out to him.
He took the thing and looked at it warily; a leather flask so small that it lay like a chestnut in the palm of his hand, plugged with a bone stopper carved into the likeness of a tiny snarling head – human or animal, there was no telling which. The thing had an almost palpable smell of wickedness, and he took care not to interfere with the waxed thread that kept the stopper in place.
‘What is it?’
‘Death,’ Murna said.
‘Poison?’ He had been half prepared for that, but something twisted coldly in the pit of his stomach all the same. He stood for a few moments turning it over and over, and looking at it. Odd to see one’s own death lying in the palm of one’s hand. ‘Why have you told me this – shown me this?’
She held out her hand for the thing’s return. ‘Because I do not think I will be using it, after all.’
‘After all?’ Phaedrus, surprised and amused to find what a fool he was, gave it back to her.
She sat cradling it in her hands and looking up at him between the falls of mouse-gold hair. ‘You have changed, in seven years. The Midir I knew when I was a child would have let Gault have his burning without another thought – unless it seemed to him amusing to pit his strength against Gault’s and he chanced to be in need of amusement just then.’
‘And how do you know that I did not chance to feel in need of amusement today?’
For the first time there was the shadow of a smile in her face. ‘Did you?’
‘No.’
‘And most assuredly, if it had been like that, the Midir I knew would not have troubled himself to lie to me.’
‘I was a boy, seven years ago. Boys do change, growing into men.’
‘It is more than that – another kind of change.’
‘You have said “the Midir I knew” twice, but in truth you were little more than ten when your mother put an end to that Midir. You were never knowing much of him, were you, Murna?’
Her face tightened, and for a moment he wondered if she was going to fly out at him for that word of her mother. But she let it pass. ‘I knew maybe better than others guessed at; more than you remember. But you were never one to care much what you broke, or even remember the breaking of it, were you, Midir?’
‘Was I not? If I was never one for remembering, what use to ask me?’ He dropped the light, hard tone. ‘Tell me – if your mother’s messenger had escaped, and so the thing between Gault and me today had not happened, would you have used the poison?’
‘In the day that I have a use for poison,’ Murna said simply, ‘I have no need that my mother should send it to me.’
She snapped the thread and pulled out the bone plug; and poured the contents of the tiny flask into the heart of the fire, then dropped the flask itself after it. The fire spat like an angry cat, and a bluish flame leaped up, wavered, and slowly died out.
As it did so, Murna picked up the ivory comb and rose, wrapping the folds of her cloak about her. ‘Sa, there is no more that I came to say. Brys will be within call, I do not doubt, like the good, well-trained hound he is.’
And she was gone.
Phaedrus did not at once call his armour-bearer, but stood staring after her, a frown bitten deep between his brows, trying to make sense of many things that he did not understand, his own feelings among them.
13
WAR-DANCE
THE SNOW WAS shrinking in the lower corries of Cruachan, and the nights were alive with the green sounds of running water and the mating calls of curlew flighting in for the high moors, when the Caledonian Envoy came.
The Lord of the Dalriads received him and his escorting nobles seated on the High Place of black ramskins in the Fire Hall, with a group of the Companions about him; made them welcome, feasted them as honoured guests, and afterwards bade his harper play for them. The pretence must be kept up that the green juniper brand in the Envoy’s hand really mean
t that he came in peace.
But the knowledge of what was going forward, and the presence of the Caledonian nobles in their ceremonial cloaks of wildcat skins was like a thin, dry wind blowing round the Hall, and a mood was rising in the young men that needed more than harping. The Companions had begun to make another kind of music of their own, little Baruch beating out the rhythm with an open palm on one of the cooking-pots, others taking it up from him, clapping and stamping it out on the beaten floor where they had kicked the fern aside. And six or seven of the young warriors spilled out on to the paved dancing space and began to crouch and stamp in a hunting-dance, among the very fringes of the fire.
Diamid of the devil’s eyebrows was the hunted, the rest were the hunters – men or hounds, it made no difference. The quarry fled from them, and turned back to them, to dance, as it were, with his own death, and fled from them again, drawing them after him; and the hunters followed, miming the chase to that wild, throbbing rhythm of stamping feet, led by the strangely bell-like drumming of Baruch’s open palms on the cooking-pot, until the Old Magic filled the Fire Hall and Phaedrus could have sworn that the roof had become the interlaced branches of forest trees, and the shadows of the dancers, spun outward by the fire, were the shadows of a flying stag and a pack of hounds. They danced the Kill, the rhythm rising to fever pitch, closed in about the panting quarry and pulled him down, and ran in with their spears. The drumming ceased, as though cut by the spear-thrusts, and the dancers stood laughing and breathless, the mystery dropping from them like a cloak – so that they were no more than young men, who had been letting off some of the pentup strain in the air.
But now the mood was on them and soon the dancing began again, the dancers constantly changing, until the whole night seemed to dissolve into stamping and whirling figures, and even the older men were adding their bit to the heady rhythms beaten out for the dancers.
But presently, in a pause for breath, Forgall the Envoy, seated beside Phaedrus, turned to him with an air of scarcely veiled boredom and said, ‘Tell me, is it not the custom with the Dalriads, as it is with us, for the women to dance also?’