8
THE KING-SLAYING
LATER THAT EVENING Phaedrus feasted among the charioteers of the Chiefs and nobles, in the foreporch of the great, round, heather-roofed Fire Hall. They were not slaves after the way of charioteers among the Romans, nor even servants; they were sons and younger brothers, close friends, lesser kinsmen, but there was quite simply no room for them in the Hall. There was little enough room for them here, and they were packed like spearheads in an armourer’s basket, but that was a thing that had its advantages, for little warmth reached them from the peat fire that glowed on the central hearth, filling the high crown of the roof with smoke, and small spiteful draughts that cut the ankles like a fleshing-knife hummed under the outer door; but close-packed as they were, their cloaks huddled about them, they had worked up a steaming fug that was next best thing to the warmth of the fire, and they ate whatever came their way, and filled and refilled the mead-horns from the bronze-bound vat with the boar’s-head handles just beyond the inner doorway.
Phaedrus, drinking as little as might be – the smell in the foreporch was enough to make a man drunk without the help of mead, and he would need a clear head later – was sharply aware of the winter darkness beyond the smoky torch-flare; the blurred moon and the mist thickening over the icy marshes. Aware of men crouching in that ghostly mist, among the furze and winter-pale rushes, behind alder stumps and the tangle of hawthorn wind-breaks. Each man with his spear beside him – waiting for the signal . . . Men within the Dun, too, gathered about the fires over which whole pigs and oxen were roasting. Men here in the Hall itself . . .
He had managed to get a seat on the third rung of the loft stair from which, craning his neck, he could see most of the Hall through the open doorway, which was larger than any outer door could be. He saw the circle of seven great standing timbers that upheld the roof, and between the crowding shoulders of the warriors stray glints and flame-flickers of the fire on its central hearth. The pine-knot torches in their iron sconces on each of the seven roof trees, flooded the heart of the place with a fierce tawny light, though it left the walls in crowding shadow; and letting his gaze wander, as though idly, from face to face, he saw many that he knew; Gault and Sinnoch, Dergdian, Gallgoid the Charioteer. Wherever he looked he saw men with red or dark, grey or russet hair, or the bleached locks that many of the young warriors affected, hanging in slender braids against their cheeks. But he saw, too, that they were outnumbered by men whose hair hung loose in the usual way. More than ever he realized that their one real advantage was surprise, and that even with surprise on their side, in the first flare of the attack, the thing would hang by a thread . . .
Most of the Gate Guards were their own men, but everything would depend on whether, having raised the war-cry, they could keep their feet with only the short dirks they had used for eating (for there was no certainty that they would be able to gain the armoury before the Queen’s Party) until the men from the outside dark could swarm in to their support.
A picked handful of the Bodyguard, the Companions, the only men who might carry weapons at such a gathering as this, stood leaning on their spears behind the High Place, and Phaedrus’s questing gaze found Conory in their midst. Not that he needed much finding. He must have bleached his hair freshly for the occasion, for it shone almost silver against the brown of his skin, and his odd-set eyes were painted like a woman’s. Under the dark folds of the cloak flung back from one shoulder, he wore kilt and shirt of some soft, fine skin, dyed green. There were fragile wire-strung bracelets on his wrists, and strings of crystal and gold and blue faience about his neck; and on his shoulder, arched and swaying to his every movement, the striped hunting-cat, whose collar, like his own belt, was studded with enamel bosses. But it was something more than all this, Phaedrus thought, that singled him out from his fellows. Perhaps it came from the fact that in this hour, whatever was to happen later, he was the Chosen One, the King-Slayer and the Young King. It was a kind of lustre on him, a sheen such as one may see when the light strikes aright on the petals of certain flowers; the purple orchis or speckle-throated arum, the dark wild hyacinth . . .
Someone jerked an elbow into his ribs, and he found that the mead-horn was being thrust under his nose. ‘Wake up, my hero! The man who sleeps when his turn comes round, maybe doesn’t get another chance!’ It was a youngster with a mouth like a frog, and a thatch of rough, broom-yellow hair, the front locks doing their best to burst out of rather unsuccessful plaits.
Phaedrus took the mead-horn, grinning. ‘I was not asleep then. I was taking a look at this new Seven-year King.’
And an older man leaned across to him from the other side. ‘A good long look, then. Aye well, he’s worth looking at, and he knows it,’ he snorted, but there was a hint of admiration in the snort. ‘Ever since he came to manhood he’s been one that women watch – aye, and men too, and there’s times I think he makes a sport of seeing just how far he can go. He only has to come out one day with his cloak caught in a particular fold, or a woman’s ear-ring in one ear, and next day half the young braves of the tribe are doing the same. If he cut off a finger-tip tonight, the other half would lack a fmger-tip tomorrow. Fools!’
Phaedrus drank, and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Someone else was saying the same thing – almost the same thing – a while since.’
The other held out his hand for the horn, and drank in his turn, still grumbling. ‘Now it’s this new notion of plaiting their front hair. You can’t expect sense from young fools like Brys’ – here jabbing a finger towards the yellow-haired boy – ‘who only Took Valour at the last Feast of New Spears, and scarcely counts for a man yet at all; but when it’s the grown men, the seasoned warriors who should be having more sense—’
But Phaedrus seemed to have lost interest in both the new Seven-year King, and his own sour drinking companion, and was craning his neck as he had done more than once that evening, for a better sight of the woman seated on the piled crimson-dyed sheepskins of the High Place. The woman who had stood by to see Midir blinded. Others of the Women’s Side were moving to and fro to keep the mead-cups filled, for among the tribes, slaves did not serve in the Hall. But Liadhan sat to be waited on, for no man there, not Conory who would sit beside her in the King’s place tomorrow at the Midwinter Feast, certainly not the dark, silent man who sat there now, were her equals; she who was Goddess-on-Earth, the beginning of all things, without whom there could be neither sons to the tribe nor foals to the horse-herd nor barley to the fields.
She sat leaning a little back among the piled skins and pillows, one hand resting idly on the bronze-work branch with its nine silver apples that lay in the lap of her blood-red gown, relaxed as a great cat half asleep in the sun. Her pride, like a cat’s, was huge, too complete in itself to need any outward showing. She must have been beautiful when she was young. The broad heavy bones of her face were beautiful still, framed in the braids of still fair hair that were thick as a warrior’s wrist, and her forehead was broad and serene under the tall, silver head-dress she wore. But looking at her, Phaedrus felt a little cold creeping of the skin that was not so much fear as a kind of physical revulsion such as some people feel for spiders – big female spiders who devour their mates.
The dark man beside her sat very upright, his stillness tense as hers was relaxed, his brooding gaze fixed on the torches as though he would drink the light of them into his soul. ‘The Old King has the old blood in him,’ Gault had said, that night in the back room of the ‘Rose of Paestum’. ‘For him it is the pattern . . .’
Logiore had accepted his destiny and there could be no saving him.
The feasting was long since finished, even the mead-horns had begun to go round more slowly. The buzz of voices and bursts of laughter and the stray struck notes of a harp that had filled Hall and foreporch alike, began to die down. There began to be a quietness and a sense of waiting. Phaedrus, too, was waiting for the thing to begin. He had been told what to expect, but some
thing in him, even so, expected war-horns – a clash of weapons – some kind of outcry to fill the place of the silver braying of circus trumpets. And he was taken by surprise to find that waiting was over and the thing begun almost before he noticed it.
The curtain of heavy stuff over the doorway to the women’s quarters was flung back, and a girl came stooping through, and stood erect as the folds swung to again behind her. A tall girl, holding between her hands a wonderful shallow cup of worked amber. Her tunic of dark chequered stuff that seemed almost black in the torchlight, was hung about with thin disks of bronze that kissed and rang lightly together as she moved; heavy gold serpent bracelets were on her arms, and her face, with the peat smoke curling across it, was like a ritual mask. There was a look of Liadhan in that mask, but it was lighter boned than Liadhan could ever have been, and the thick braids of hair that ended in swinging balls of enamelled bronze, were of a very different colour, almost as fair, but warmer, with the gold softened and somehow greyed – dove-gold, he thought suddenly; dove-gold, and soft and unmanageable, so that it was springing free of its braids much as the broom-yellow hair of the boy Brys was doing; hair that was almost living a life of its own in flat contradiction to the face that was only a mask.
Murna, the Royal Daughter, who, if tonight’s rising failed, would be Queen one day in her turn – if they failed. But they would not fail. He thrust the thought aside as unlucky.
The girl moved forward with small, swaying steps. Her shadow, cast by the nearest torch, fell across Logiore as she stooped and gave him the cup. He took it without rising, without looking at it, and sat an instant, holding it in his hands, his eyes still full of the torchlight; then flung back his head and drank, and gave the cup into her hands again.
Phaedrus wondered if the drink were drugged.
For the first time, Liadhan turned to look at the man beside her, and it was clear that she was waiting. The whole crowded Fire Hall was looking to him now. It was he who must make the next move in the ritual pattern, and Phaedrus saw that he knew it, and perhaps had a last moment of dark laughter in making them all wait. Even Liadhan for this one time. But he would make the move, all the same.
Someone unseen had opened the outer door, and the cold mist blew in. And in the foreporch the charioteers were on their feet, crushing back against the dry-stone wall to leave a clear path, forcing Phaedrus farther up the loft stair as they crowded the lower rungs, a few even slipping out through the open door.
Logiore got to his feet, and stood an instant, then came walking stiffly across the paved central dancing-floor, past the fire, and through the foreporch, moving a little like a sleep-walker, and out into the winter night. Two of the Guard had stepped forward to follow him, each lighting a fresh torch from the fire as they passed, and behind them went two more, naked swords in hand. Then Conory, his striped cat clinging lithely to his shoulder; behind him, the rest of the Guard with drawn swords and torches. Then the Chiefs and nobles, draining out of the Hall like wine out of a cup, and leaving it to the women gathering on to the dancing-floor.
The charioteers and armour-bearers had spilled outside, Phaedrus among them, but in the shadow of the door-post he hung back until the squat, bow-legged figure of Gault the Strong came by, then slipped out to join him.
Gault never turned his head or gave any other sign of being aware of him, only as they came to the gateway of the Citadel he muttered, ‘Pull that cap off; no time for fumbling later.’
In a patch of dark between torch and torch, Phaedrus dragged off the close-fitting charioteer’s cap and tossed it away, shaking his head as he felt his hair fall loose, and the unaccustomed touch of the two slim braids against his cheeks. Then he pulled the loose hood of his cloak well forward to shadow his face and the device on his forehead.
Sinnoch had come up on the other side, and glancing round as he walked, he saw Gallgoid, black-browed and grimly cheerful, close behind. Other faces that he knew caught the torchlight, and he realized without knowing quite how it had been managed, that he was walking in the midst of a kind of bodyguard of his own.
The mist had thickened since he stabled the horses. It came smoking in over the turf and dry-stone walls of the Dun, smudging the torches into blurred mares’ tails of flame. More and more torches as the crowds came thrusting in from feast-fire after feast-fire to join them. Surely, Phaedrus thought, Dun Monaidh could not seem more of a blaze from end to end, if this were tomorrow night; the night of the Midwinter Fires.
So they went down, a growing river of men and torches and wreathing golden fog, from the Citadel, looping through one after another of the five courts of the Royal Dun, until each had been visited, and they came to the lowest and outermost court of all.
In the wide outer court, seven fires – the farther ones already blurred with mist – were blazing in a wide circle about the mighty upreared shape of the King Stone; and already the crowd was thickening between the fires, a crowd without visible weapons, and – strange among the tribes – without dogs, for the hound-pack, like the slaves, had been shut safely out of the way for the ceremony that was to follow.
Phaedrus and the knot of warriors with him, took up their places not far from where the Companions already stood leaning on their spears, with Conory in their midst. Of Logiore there was now no sign.
And then they heard it, winding down from the Citadel; a wild, wordless chanting of women’s voices, and the thin white music of pipes wailing in and out through it. ‘I must be careful!’ Phaedrus thought suddenly. ‘Gods! I must be careful or this music will draw me into it and I shall be lost! I must think of something else – think of the arena sand underfoot and the swing of the parade march! Here we go, past the knackers’ sledges and the Altar of Vengeance. If that woman on the third bench eats another honeycake she’ll have a seizure. Typhon! This helmet-strap’s rubbing. I ought to have had it seen to after the last fight. Ah! Here’s the Governor’s box; “Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant. . . .”’ The swaggering stamp and go of the parade march came to his help out of the world of familiar and daylight things, and he thrust it between him and the white wailing music that something in him understood rather too well.
It was very close now. Something stirred in the mist at the edge of the fire-light, and Liadhan stepped into the circle of seven fires. The girl Murna, who seemed to be priestess of the rite, followed close behind her, and the women crowded after, bearing among them the crimson-dyed sheepskins of the High Place. They were chanting still, but the piping had separated itself, and while they piled the sheepskins into a throne it ran on in little thrills and ripples round the circle of fires. Phaedrus half saw grotesque shadow-figures that ran and flitted behind the fires and the torchlit crowd, the piping going with them; thin shimmers of sound, flutings and half bird-calls that were as though they talked to each other on the pipes in some tongue older than human speech. Something made Phaedrus look over his shoulder, and he saw one of the shadows standing quite close to him. A man – a thing like a man, stark naked in the bitter cold that made men’s breath smoke into the mist, save for the streaks of red ochre that daubed his body, and the bracelets and anklets of shells and feathers and dried seed-pods; a pipe that might have been made from the thigh-bone of some big bird was in his hands and on his shoulders, where his head should have been, was the snarling mask of a wild boar. For an instant the hair rose on the back of Phaedrus’s neck, and then the thing crouched, and raised the pipe to some hole hidden in the black shadow under the grinning snout, and he realized that there was a human mouth within the bristly hide. Masked priests, then, but priests of a very different kind from Tuathal the Wise. The man’s long fingers moved on the pipe, and the shrill bird-twittering notes scurried up and down, and Phaedrus felt eyes upon him from somewhere within the mask, and turned back to the lighted circle.
Liadhan had taken her seat on the piled sheepskins, between two of the sacred fires, with the women and the Companions of the Guard about her. She sat very upright now, still as t
he great standing stone that formed the hub of the wheel of light, her eyes going past it, out past the blurred fires of the farther side, into the darkness beyond. This was her hour, and the small, still smile on her lips was such a smile as no mortal man or women should wear.
The chanting had ceased now, and the fluting pipe calls had grown silent. Only the Royal Daughter sang on, a high white singing that had nothing human in it. She was moving from one to another of the fires, weaving an intricate dance pattern of swaying and shuffling steps, and at each fire she paused to feed the flames with leaves and herbs from a basket she carried on her hip.
A strange smell began to rise in the smoke, bitter and pungent, yet dangerously pleasant, bringing forgotten things hovering in from the edges of the mind . . . somewhere in the drifting, milky dark beyond the flame-light, the wolfskin drums began to throb, softly, like a sleeping heart, and something seemed to stir into wakefulness and run through the concourse, like the chill breath of wind before a thunderstorm.
Standing at Gault’s side, his head bent and shoulders hunched into shapelessness under his cloak, Phaedrus stole a quick glance at Conory. His head was up, eyes and nostrils wide in his face, the look of a hound still in leash that scents the boar. One of the Companions had taken both spear and sword from him and he had loosed his cloak and slipped it free from one naked shoulder; but the striped cat still clung to its accustomed perch. He could not be going to carry it into the actual fight with him, but meanwhile, everyone seemed to take as little heed of it being there as though it were a part of Conory, like his sword-hand.