Phaedrus demanded thickly through shut teeth, ‘Where is Brys my charioteer?’ But in his heart it was all those others he asked for, as well.
‘Somewhere behind us, with a spear hole in his thigh,’ Conory said. ‘Mine is dead. You must be making do with me for your charioteer this time.’ And he crouched lower yet over the haunches of the team, calling to them by name: ‘Come on now, Whitefoot – Wildfire! They run now; keep them running! Drive them as the wind drives the storm-clouds from Cruachan’s crest – so shall thy mares be proud to bear thee many sons!’
It became a kind of song in Phaedrus’s head, a triumph-song that rose and fell with the hideous war-song of the great cat. The fog of unreality was thickening all about him, so that he knew nothing very clearly any more, save for the smell of blood and the fiery throbbing of his wound. Certainly not how the hunt ended, or who gave the order to call the hunters off.
But suddenly there was no more tumult, no more lurching chariot floor under him; and he was sitting on the stinking yoke-pole, while the spent horses, with hanging heads and heaving flanks, were led away. Someone was bending over him, holding a cold wet cloth to his face, and a voice said, ‘He’s left his beauty behind him up the glen, I’m thinking.’ And another answered, ‘The bleeding has slacked off, anyway, and that will be the chief thing.’ And then a third voice – he thought that both it and the hand holding the wrungout cloth were Conory’s – said, ‘Gods! He’s come near to losing that eye!’
And he wondered, as though he were wondering it about someone else, what would have happened if he had. Did one eye count the same as both, where the kingship was concerned?
Someone was holding a flask of mead to his mouth. The rim jolted against his teeth, and he raised his head and tried to suck the drink between them. His face was set rigid as though with a grinding cramp, and some of the fiery stuff came out again through the great torn place in his cheek. But he managed to swallow a few mouthfuls, and the fog seemed to roll back a little.
He looked about him through the sick throbbing that seemed to pound inward from the wound and fill his whole head, and saw that it was evening, the shadows lying long across the woods and marshes; Cruachan towering sloe-dark against the sunset, with gold and purple storm-clouds flying like banners from its crest. Across the level towards Loch Abha, the shadowy scrub was alive with camp fires, and between the fires the horses were tethered to their chariot rails. But again, it seemed that there were surprisingly few of them, fewer of everything, chariots, horses, men – many fewer men . . .
Phaedrus made to struggle to his feet, but someone pushed him down again by the shoulders. ‘Bide still, the Healer Priest is coming.’
He shook his head, and put up an exploring hand to the ruins of his left cheek. ‘It is scarcely bleeding now. Let you give me that clout to take with me, and I’ll do well enough.’ The words came thick and slurred between his teeth, for his throat and even his tongue were swollen.
‘Wait for the Priest.’
‘That can come later. I’ve other things to do now – and so has he.’
But the hands were on his shoulders still, and he was too weak to rise against them. Instead, he asked after a moment, ‘What of Dergdian’s chariot bands?’
And the voice of Dergdian himself answered him. ‘Here in the camp, and wolfing stir-about – those that are left of us.’
Phaedrus heaved up his head – it was so heavy he could scarcely lift it – and saw the old warrior bending over him. ‘We – came as fast – as we could.’
‘Surely,’ the other nodded.
‘And the rest of us? There – seems so few.’
There was a small, leaden silence, and then Conory said with an odd gentleness quite different from his usual silken tone, ‘It is in my mind that the Caledones have their wounds to lick, too – more and deeper than ours.’
‘Ours are deep enough, seemingly! Na, I must – see for myself—’ Phaedrus gathered whatever strength was still in him, and lurched to his feet. ‘Take your hands away – I must – see—’
They let him go, and he never knew that Conory was close behind him, as he stumbled away towards the nearest fire.
Before he reached it, a voice called weakly, ‘My Lord! My Lord Midir!’ and he checked and looked round. Only a few paces away, his red horses were tethered to the rail of what remained of the Royal Chariot, a few armfuls of cut grass piled before them, and close beside them lay young Brys, straining up on to one elbow, blood still seeping through the strips of someone’s cloak that had been bound about his thigh.
Phaedrus turned unsteadily in his tracks and doddered towards him. ‘Lie still, you’ll start bleeding – like a pig again if you – writhe about like that. And – we’ve lost enough men as it is, seemingly.’
‘My Lord, I—’ The boy glanced at his bandaged thigh. ‘I got this, and – when I could get up again, I had lost you – and I wasn’t good for much more, save to get the horses out of harm’s way.’
‘You did that finely, and there was – no more you could do. Ach now, lie still, will you – I’ll be wanting my charioteer another day.’
He tried to grin, but his whole face seemed set rigid as though clay had been plastered over it, and pain clawed at the wound, almost blinding him again, and he turned away quickly, so that the boy should not see.
The sudden turn set the world spinning round him. For a moment the camp fires swam into a bright sun-wheel, and a roaring cavern seemed to open in his head. And then straight in front of him, but a long way off, he saw a face. A face that was curd-white under the coloured streaks of war-paint, with the eyes in it so dark that they seemed to cast a shadow over all. And he saw without the least surprise, that it was Murna’s.
He did wonder vaguely why she looked like that, not knowing what he looked like himself, blood-stained from head to foot and with that terrible torn face like a ragged crimson mask. Without knowing what he did, he started towards her, and the ground tipped under his feet and began to slide away. Somebody caught and steadied him – and in the same instant Murna was there, and above the roaring in his ears, he heard her say, ‘Give him to me.’ Her arms were round him, and he felt her brace herself under his weight as his knees gave under him and he slipped to the ground. She was kneeling beside him and holding him as he leaned against her with his broken and bloody face in the hollow of her shoulder.
The world steadied again, and he pulled his head up with a great effort, leaving dark stains on the shoulder of the boy’s tunic she wore. And then a thing happened that seemed surprising afterwards, but at the time did not surprise him any more than finding her there had done. She took his ruined face between her hands and kissed him. And this time she did not feel for his dagger afterwards.
He mumbled thickly, ‘Now you have blood on your face as well.’
‘It will wash off with the war-paint,’ she said.
15
‘BEGUN AMONG THE SPEARS’
PHAEDRUS LAY ON piled bracken in the little branch-woven bothy, covered by his cloak with the worst of the blood washed out of it, and watched Murna burnishing his weapons by the light of the fire that burned before the opening. Outside, he could hear the voices of the Companions – not Loarne’s voice or Domingart’s, or Ferdia’s – they had gone with so many others, on to yesterday’s death fires, in the Glen of the Black Goddess, and their voices would not sound among the Companions again. He could catch a glimpse of Conory leaning on his spear, and Shân beside him playing some small, selfcontained deadly game with her own leash.
He stirred uneasily, made restless by the fever in him, though the salves of the Healer Priest and the life that he had driven into the wound through his forefingers had eased some of the pain; and she checked in her burnishings and looked up, her eyes anxious and questioning. It was strange how different her face looked, now that it had come to life. The same shape as it had always been, the same colour, and yet even in the fire-light the difference was there.
He said, ??
?If you burnish my weapons, who will burnish yours?’ It was still hard to talk, and the great wad of salve-soaked cloth that covered all the left side of his face did not make it easier. But there were so many things that he wanted to say to Murna, and he could not wait any longer.
‘I lost my spear in the fighting; I’ve only a dirk like the foot-fighting women.’
‘So you called out your Wildcats.’
‘When the word came to Dun Monaidh, we knew that there would be need of everyone who could hold a weapon.’
‘Even the Queen?’
‘I could not be asking the other women to make the War-Dance, and I refuging behind the queenship,’ she said, almost exactly as she had said it on the night the Caledonian Envoy came. And suddenly there was a rather piteous twist to her mouth. ‘Not even though you forbade me because I was my mother’s daughter, and not to be trusted.’
Phaedrus watched in silence as she turned his shield to come at the other half of the rim. ‘Don’t be holding that against me, Murna,’ he said at last. ‘Murna – she is your mother!’
‘And so? Did I give you the poison at her bidding?’
‘That is one thing, but to take the war-trail against her is another.’
‘How if I say to you that the Caledones have always hated us, because they fear that one day we shall grow strong? That when Liadhan my mother fled to her own kin among them, they saw their chance and took it, and that I take the war-trail against them, because I would not have them trailing their cat-skin cloaks lordlywise through Earra-Ghyl?’
‘I should say that you spoke the truth – but not all the truth.’
‘I will try again, then – I am my father’s daughter as well as my mother’s. Do you remember how big and warm and golden he was, before she drained him out until he was only the poor hollow husk of a man? Just such a husk as Logiore was at the end?’
‘Yet it was your cloak that saved her from Conory; and you stayed behind, wearing the Moon Diadem, that she might escape.’
‘She was the Goddess-on-Earth.’
‘You believe that?’
‘I did not have to believe it. She was the Goddess-on-Earth. I do not have to believe that you are the Horse Lord. I saw you crowned.’
‘Then how is it different now? If she was the Goddess then—’ He checked, not knowing quite how to go on.
Murna did not answer him for a long moment, then she said in a voice so low that he could scarcely catch the words, ‘Maybe she lost that, when she fled – when the time came for her and she – would not make her own sacrifice.’
The words made a kind of echo in Phaedrus’s mind as though, somewhere, he had heard them – something like them, spoken before. But he could not remember where, or when. ‘If so, it is small loss,’ he said. ‘She made a somewhat ungentle Goddess.’
She said, patiently, as though she was explaining something to a small child, ‘What has the Great Mother to do with gentleness or ungentleness? She does not do, she only is. She is the Lady of Life and Death. When a man and a woman come together to make a child, she is in it, and when a pole-cat finds a thrush’s nest and tears the young to shreds while the parents scream and beat about its head, she is in that, too.’
‘And when a boy is – made away with, that another may take what is his?’ Phaedrus wished that he could stop this probing, but something in himself could not stop. There were things that he must get unsnarled between himself and Murna.
She ceased her burnishing, and laid the shield aside before she answered. Then she said, ‘Let you believe me. I knew nothing of that until the night you came back. I knew only what all Earra-Ghyl had been told; that you were drowned in the river that runs by Dun Monaidh, and your body carried away.’
Still he could not stop. ‘That I believe; but Murna, you were knowing, when you would have knifed me on the night I pulled the bride-mask from your face.’
‘What does a hunted wild-thing do when the hounds bring it to bay? It turns and uses whatever weapons it has of teeth or claws or antlers.’
‘As simple as that,’ Phaedrus said, after a surprised pause.
‘As simple as that. You hunted me and I was – very much afraid.’ Suddenly and surprisingly, she laughed, but it was laughter with a little catch in it. ‘No, you still do not understand, there is so much that you do not understand, Midir. Listen – my mother loved my father, and she loved Logiore, until she had sucked out all that there was in them to love. And – she loved me.’
Phaedrus, a chill shiver between his shoulders, reached out in the half dark and caught her hand without speaking, and she turned it over inside his until they came palm to palm and fitted.
‘I can scarcely remember a time when I did not know that I must keep her out, and – I do not know how to be explaining this – I learned to go away small inside myself, where she could not reach me. I made walls to keep her out, and all these years that I have done and said and maybe even sometimes thought as she bade me, I have been safe from her behind my walls. Only, to be strong enough to keep her out – they had to keep me in . . . If I had passed, that would have broken them down, you see.’
Phaedrus’s hand tightened on her. ‘I am trying to see. Go on, Murna.’
‘And then you came back and turned the world to red fire, and when you stood leaning on your sword and looked at me, after the fighting was over, I knew that presently you would come breaking through my walls and find me, however small I had gone away behind them.’
‘And was that such a bad thing?’
‘It is frightening, to come to life. I do not think I should be so afraid to die, as I was when I knew that I must come to life.’
‘Does it seem so bad now, Murna?’
‘No, not now. I think maybe I should have been a little less afraid if I had known – how much you have changed.’
There it was again, this talk of the change in him. Phaedrus was brought up with a jolt, and found himself on the edge of dangerous ground. But he had to know. ‘Murna, you said before that I had changed, you said that I did not care what I broke and did not remember afterwards. Murna, I don’t remember; let you tell me what I did.’
There was a little pause, and then Murna said, ‘In the early times, I had one chink in my wall. Just one. It was a tame otter. I found him abandoned when he was a cub – maybe his mother had been killed – and I reared him in secret, lest my mother should know. You found him and set your dogs on him one morning when you had nothing better to do. He didn’t know about being hunted, so he was very easy to kill. Too easy, you said; there was no sport in it.’
Phaedrus felt sick. ‘I couldn’t have known! I must have thought it was a wild one,’ he said after a moment. ‘Murna, I couldn’t have known he was yours!’
‘Oh yes, you knew; I was there. But I was not ten, then, a girl-child of no account, and you hated and feared my mother. Maybe you did it because I was the nearest thing to her that you could hurt. But my otter was the only thing I had to love, and after, I closed up the chink, and never dared to love so much as a mouse again, for fear of what might happen to it.’
So Midir had done that, and not even remembered afterwards, or he would have told him during those lessons in the cock-loft at Onnum on the Wall. But though the story sickened Phaedrus, it did not hit him with any feeling of discovery about Midir, nor make him feel the bond between them any less close. Instead, he felt a sudden rush of pity for the boy who had been so much afraid, and he’d had good cause to be. And fully and freely he took the weight of that long-ago piece of wicked cruelty on to his own shoulders, not only because he had to, but because in some odd way it seemed as though by doing so, he could lift it from Midir’s. ‘Oh, Murna, I’m so sorry – so sorry! It is in my heart that I deserved the dirk!’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I know that, now. It was because you – because that boy was so afraid. We were both so afraid.’
‘You’re not afraid any more?’
‘No.’
‘But you’re shiv
ering – I can feel you.’
‘Only because I am tired.’ Murna made a little sound that was almost like a whisper. ‘I am so tired.’
Phaedrus flung back the folds of his cloak with his free hand. ‘Then come and lie down, there’s room for us both.’ And when she was lying in the piled bracken, he pulled his cloak over both of them, and sleep gathered him in like a tired hound after a hard day.
The wound-salves of the Healer Priest did their work, and before many days were passed Phaedrus was out with the war bands again, as sound as ever, save for the great half-healed scar that dragged the left side of his face askew. He had most assuredly ‘left his beauty behind him up the Glen of the Black Goddess’; and he knew it and did not like it, for he had been good to look at – the arena had taught him that; a gladiator’s good looks, if he had any, were part of his stock-in-trade – and now he was only good to look at if he stood with the left side of his face turned away. He caught himself actually doing that one day, and for the rest of the day the Companions wondered why he was in such a vile temper. Only Conory, whom he had been speaking to at the time, knew the answer. He never did it again.
But, indeed, he had other things than his lost beauty to think of in the months that followed.
All summer, though there were no more full battles, the fighting went on, now dying down like a fitful wind into the long grass, now flaring up in some new place, or in many places at once, as the People of the Cailleach drove in thrust after thrust, now down the Druim Alban glens, now across the fords and narrows of the Firth of War-Boats. But gradually, as summer wore on, the scattered fighting began to draw in to one point, narrowing into the country round Glen Croe that ran up north-westward from the Firth. It started with a skirmish there, no greater as it seemed, than a score of others that had gone before, but where the Caledonian war bands had been driven off, others, many others, came spilling back. Quite suddenly it seemed that the country for half a day’s trail up and down the Firth shore was swarming with them. And always there was enough going on elsewhere to make sure that Phaedrus could not concentrate his whole War Host to the one task of driving them out. The dwindling war bands of the Dalriads swept down on them again and again, but even when for the moment they were driven back, almost before the defenders of Earra-Ghyl could draw breath, they were flooding in again, more and always more, until it seemed to Phaedrus and Conory and grim, bow-legged Gault, struggling to hold the whole coastline of the Firth against them, and close the narrow lands between the Firth-head and the loch of Baal’s Beacon, that they were springing out of the ground like the War Hosts magicked from puff-balls and thistlestalks of which the ancient legends told.