Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Historical Note
1. The Threshold
2. Corstopitum by Night
3. Midir of the Dalriads
4. The House of the Fighting-Cocks
5. Frontier Post
6. Eyes!
7. The Road to Dun Monaidh
8. The King-Slaying
9. ‘You are not Midir!’
10. The King-Making
11. Royal Hunt
12. Golden Plover’s Feather
13. War-Dance
14. Chariots in the Pass
15. ‘Begun Among the Spears’
16. The Last Weapon
17. The Protection of Rome
18. The Whistler in the Dark Woods
19. The Dirk-Thrower
20. The Hostage
21. The Mark of the Horse Lord
Place Names
About the Author
Also by Rosemary Sutcliff
Copyright
Bonnie Dundee
The Chronicles of Robin Hood
Flame-Coloured Taffeta
Frontier Wolf
Knight’s Fee
Blood Feud
Simon
Song for a Dark Queen
Tristan and Iseult
Warrior Scarlet
The Witch’s Brat
Beowulf: Dragonslayer
Brother Dusty-Feet
The Armourer’s House
Sun Horse, Moon Horse
Sword Song
The Hound of Ulster
The Capricorn Bracelet
The High Deeds of Finn MacCool
The Shining Company
The Light Beyond the Forest
The Road to Camlann
The Sword and the Circle
THE MARK OF THE HORSE LORD
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 17297 9
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Penguin Random House Company
This ebook edition published 2014
Copyright © Sussex Dolphin Limited, 1965
Cover artwork copyright © Pam Smy, 2014
First Published in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, 1965
The right of Rosemary Sutcliff to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Everyone knows that at one time Scotland was inhabited by Picts and Scots, but most people are a little hazy as to the difference between them. Broadly (very broadly) speaking, they started out the same; both part of the great Western drift of peoples who rose somewhere in the great emptiness of Asia and spread across Europe in succeeding waves through the last two thousand years or so before Christ. The Picts were a confederacy of tribes whose ‘Master Tribe’, the Caledones, settled in the land that later became Scotland. The Scots were the tribes who went on farther to make their homes in Ireland and, long after, returned – some of them – to settle in the Western Islands and coastal districts of Scotland. At the time of this story, the Caledones had begun to be great among the tribes, but the Pictish confederacy did not yet exist; while ‘Scot’ or rather ‘Scotti’ was the Roman name for a people who called themselves Gael, or Dalriad. So in The Mark of the Horse Lord I have written of Caledones and Dalriads, and not of Picts and Scots, but it comes to much the same thing in the end.
In the years since they parted company, the Gael had become a Sun People, worshipping a male God, while the Caledones had held to the earlier worship of the Great Mother, and like most people with a woman-worship, they traced their family and inherited even the kingship through the mother’s side. (Even in medieval Scotland it was quite common for a king’s eldest son to find his claim to his father’s throne after him indignantly denied by his sisters’ husbands, who claimed that they were the true heirs by right of being married to the Royal Women.)
The traditional founder of the Dalriads is the Irish Prince Cairbre Riada, who, driven out from his own land of Munster by famine, led his kinsmen and followers first north into Ulster and then overseas to the Western Islands and Highlands, in the year A.D. 258, which is quite a bit later than the date of this story. But there are traces and traditions of Irish settlement on the West Coast in A.D. 177, in 200 B.C., and even 300 B.C.; so that the answer would seem to be that no one knows quite when they came, but that they probably arrived in waves over several hundred years, and the most famous Irish leader would come in time, in the usual way of folklore, to have the credit for all the rest.
You will not find the Cave of the Hunter anywhere; but on the coast, close by Oban, there are caves that show clear traces of Stone Age occupation, and the coastline has changed so much through the ages, that the cave with the Horned One daubed on its back wall might have been among them once, and been claimed by the sea.
Nor, at present, will you find the ruins of a Roman Naval Station at Dumbarton Rock; though a strong tradition says that there was once one there, and that it was called Theodosia.
But if you go looking for it a few miles south of the head of Loch Awe, not far from the modern Crinan Canal, you will find Dunadd, which was once Dun Monaidh, with the traces of its five courts cropping through the turf, and in the highest court but one, the great Rock of the Footprint, where Phaedrus the Gladiator (whom you will not find anywhere outside this book) was crowned Horse Lord and King of the Dalriads.
IN THE LONG cavern of the changing-room, the light of the fat-oil lamps cast jumping shadows on the walls; skeleton shadows of the spear-stacked arms-racks, giant shadows of the men who crowded the benches or moved about still busy with their weapons and gear; here and there the stallion shadow of a plume-crested helmet. The stink of the wild beasts’ dens close by seeped in to mingle with the sharper smell of men waiting for the trumpets and sweating a little as they waited. Hard to believe that overhead where the crowds had been gathering since cock-crow, the June sun was shining and a fresh wind blowing in from the moors to set the brightly-coloured pennants flying.
But the man in the farthest corner, who sat hunched forward, arms crossed on knees, seemed lost to all that went on around him, deep sunk in his own thoughts. One or two of his fellows glanced at him in passing, but left him alone. They were used to Red Phaedrus’s moods before a fight; he would come out of it and laugh and turn tiger when the trumpets sounded.
Phaedrus was indeed very far away, back beyond the four years that he had been a sword-fighter here in the Gladiators’ School at Corstopitum, and the two years before that; back in the small, pleasant house in Londinium on the night his father died . . . Ulixes the Arcadian, importer of fine Greek wines. He had never owned Phaedrus for his son, only for a slave, the son of Essylt who kept his house for him. But he had been fond of them both, when he could spare a thought from his business; he had seen that the boy got some schooling; he had been going to free them, one day. But in the end he had died too suddenly, slumped over his office table with a half-drafted letter to his agent in Corinth under his hand, and the autumn wind whirling the leaves of the poplar-tree against the window.
Everything had been sold up, the household slaves included. Everything but Phaedrus’s mother. ‘I am too old to go to a new master,’ she had said on the last day before the sale, and she had sent him on an errand into the town. And when he came back from the errand, he had found her in the arbour at the foot of the narrow garden, where the master had liked to have his breakfast on fine summer mornings. She had used the slim, native hunting-dagger that had served Ulixes as a papyrus knife; but there was not much blood because she had stabbed herself under the breast, not cut her wrists as a Roman woman would have done. Phaedrus, not yet come to his fourteenth birthday, had changed from a boy into a man that day.
He had been sold off next morning, along with the part-Lybian chariot-horses, for he had the makings of a charioteer – and after changing hands a couple of times, and learning something of sword-play from his last master who wanted someone to practise on, had been sold into the arena to help pay a gambling debt. (‘It’s you or the team, and it won’t be easy to get another pair of matched bays,’ his master had pointed out.)
At first he had been wild with loathing of his new life, but in four years it had become part of him, so that whether he hated or loved it no longer mattered. It ran in his veins like the fiery barley-spirit that the tribesmen brewed: the roar of the crowd that set one’s pulses jumping, the warmth of sunlight and the sweetness of cheap wine and the fierce pleasure in one’s own strength and skill, all heightened by the knowledge that tomorrow, next week, in an hour’s time, it might all end on the squared point of a comrade’s sword.
Four years. Not many lasted so long at the deadly trade. If he could last another year or so, they might give him his wooden foil with the silver guard, and he would be free. But his mind never got beyond the first triumphant moment of gaining his freedom, any more than it got beyond the sting of the deathblow, because he had been born a slave and knew no more of what it would be like to be free than he knew of what it would be like to die.
‘Wooden foil?’ Somebody’s voice exploded beside him. ‘You’ve been dreaming, lad!’ And the words, striking in so exactly upon his own thoughts, splintered them apart and brought him back to the present moment and the scene around him.
‘I have not, then,’ said Lucius the Bull, leaning back and stretching until the muscles cracked behind his thick shoulders. ‘Someone is to get their wooden foil, earned or no. Trouble and expense no object in these games, so long as the Province remembers them afterwards and says, “Good old Sylvanus! Jolly old Governor Sylvanus! Gave us the best games we ever had.” I heard the Captain talking to Ulpius about it – neither of them best pleased by the sound of it; Ulpius was cursing by all the Gods he knows.’
‘Well, you couldn’t expect any arena master to be pleased,’ someone said. ‘Maybe he reckons he’s going to lose enough of his little game-cocks without losing that one more.’ And there was a burst of reckless laughter from those near enough to overhear and join in.
Phaedrus stooped and rubbed his palm on the sanded floor, an old trick when one’s sword-hand grew sticky. In the moment of silence that followed the laughter he heard the rising murmur of the crowd, and from the beast-dens a wolf howled, savage and mournful as a lost soul; they knew that it was almost time. Without meaning to he glanced across the crowded place to where Vortimax stood under a flaring lamp, preening the crest plumes of his helmet before he put it on. The big-boned Gaul turned his head in the same instant, and their eyes met. Then both looked away . . .
In the ordinary way, the master of a frontier circus could not afford to use up his gladiators too fast, but SylvanusVarus, the new Governor, who was giving these games to celebrate his appointment, had paid for four pairs of sword-and-buckler men to fight to the death. Four pairs – including Phaedrus and Vortimax. Phaedrus still could not quite believe it. They had come up the School together from the first days in the training yard. They knew each other’s sword-play as well as they knew their own; they had shared the same food-bowl and washed each other’s hurts in the same water; and in all the School, the big fair-haired Gaul was the only man Phaedrus had ever counted as a friend.
A forceful step sounded in the corridor, and Automedon, the Captain of the gladiators, appeared in the dark entry. He stood an instant looking down at them, and the livid scar of his own gladiator days burned in a crimson brand across his cheek, as it always did in the moments before the trumpets sounded.
‘Time to helm-up, lads.’
Phaedrus got to his feet with the rest, catching up his plumed helmet from the bench beside him, and stepped forward from his dark corner. The light from the nearest lamp showed him naked like the other sword-fighters, save for the belted leather loin-guard and the sleeve of supple bronze hoop-mail on his sword-arm; a young man with hair the colour of hot copper, lithe and hollow-flanked as a yearling wolf, the tanned pallor of his face slashed across by red brows and a reckless, faintly smiling mouth.
He put on the heavy helmet and buckled the chin-strap. Now he was seeing the world through the long eye-slits in the moulded mask, and thought, testing the buckle, ‘My last sight of the world will be like this, looking out at it sharp-edged and bright from the darkness inside my helmet.’ And then he pushed the thought away. It wasn’t lucky to have that kind of thought, going into the arena. That was the way one’s nerve began to go.
Automedon stood in the entrance, watching from the vantage point of the two steps that led up to it, while they took down spears and heavy, bronze-rimmed oblong shields from the arms-racks and straightened themselves into roughly ordered ranks; then looked them over with a nod. ‘Good enough. Now you know the order of events for the day: The Wild Beast show first, the boxers and then the General Fight; the Net-and-Trident men, and to wind up with’ – his glance went to Phaedrus and Vortimax and the rest of the rear rank, and his voice was grimly sardonic – ‘you lucky lads in the place of honour . . . For the rest of you – I don’t want any more careless casualties like we had last month! Casualties of that kind don’t mean courage – nought but slovenly sword-play, and the circus doesn’t pay for your keep and training for you to get yourselves hacked to bits before it has had its money’s worth out of you! Any man who comes out of the arena today with a hole in his hide deep enough to keep him out of the Consualia Games will have to account for it to me, and if I am not satisfied with the accounting’ – he smiled at them with narrowed gaze and lip lifted over the strong, yellow dog teeth – ‘both he and the man who gave it to him will wish they had never been born! Understood?’
They grinned back, one or two tossing up their weapons in mock salute. ‘Understood, Automedon! Understood, noble Captain!’
‘That’s well.’ His face lost something of its grimness in a gleam of humour. ‘This new Governor is fresh out from Rome, and maybe he doesn’t expect much from a frontier circus, so show him that even if he has seen bigger fights in the Colosseum, man for man the Corstopitum lads can give Rome a bloody nose any day of the week!’
They shouted for him then in good earnest, tossing up swords and javelins as though to Caesar himself, and while their shouts still rang hollow under the roofbeams, Phaedrus heard the silver crowing of the trumpets, and the grinding clang as the arena doors were flung wide.
Automedon turned on his heel with a rapped-out command, and the arena guard stood back on each side of the broad stone stairway that led up to the open air. Two by two, the gladiators stepped off and swung forward.
Phaedrus shortened his stride at the foot of the stairway, clipped steps, head up, sword drawn, and shield at the ready. The lamplit gloom fell away behind, and the light of day came down to them with the swelling voice of the crowd. They were out from the echoing shadows of the arched stairway into the sudden space and wind and sunshine of the arena, the yielding sand underfoot, the greeting of the multitude bursting upon them in a solid wave of sound, hoarse under the clash of the cymbals and the high strident crowing of the trumpets. They swung left to circle the arena, falling into the long swaggering pace of the parade march, past the Altar of Vengeance at which they had sacrificed at first light, as always before the games; past the mouth of the beast-dens, past the dark alleyway giving on to the rooms where the Syrian doctor and his slaves were waiting to deal with such of the wounded as seemed worth trying to save, past the shovels and sand-boxes and the Mercuries with their little, flapping gilded wings and long hooks. Phaedrus looked up, seeing the tiered benches of the amphitheatre packed to their topmost skyline: Roman and Briton, townsfolk and tribesmen, easy figures in purple-bordered tunics in the Magistrates’ Gallery, and everywhere – for Corstopitum was a depot town for the frontier – the russet-red cloth and glinting bronze of the Legions. Faces stared down at them, hands clutched the barriers in the excitement of what was to come. The usual flowers and sweetmeats began to shower down upon favourite gladiators. Phaedrus caught a white briar-rose in the hollow of his shield, and flashed his trained play-actor’s gesture of thanks up at the fat woman in many jewels who had thrown it.
Full circle round the wide rim of the arena, they were close beneath the Governor’s box now. Automedon snapped out a command, and they clashed to a halt, and wheeled to face the big, bull-necked man who leaned there with the glowing wine-red folds of his cloak flung back from the embossed and gilded breastplate beneath: Caesar’s new representative, the giver of the games. Their weapons flashed up in the windy sunlight, and they raised the full-throated shout as though Caesar himself had leaned there.
‘Hail Caesar! Those about to die salute you!’
Then they were breaking away to take station round the barricades. Phaedrus swung his shield into its resting position behind his shoulder, and straddling his legs, stood with hands on hips, deliberately wearing his courage at a rakish angle. That was what the crowd liked to see; the crowd that had come to watch him or Vortimax die.
The attendant Mercuries were hauling back the bars that closed the dark mouth of the dens, and the proud ten-point stag came flying in, half mad already with fear of the wolf-smell in his nostrils; and a few moments later the wolves were loosed after him. Six wolves in a dark, low-running pack. He killed two with his terrible antlers and left them ripped and broken on the bloody sand, before the rest pulled him down to a red rending death amid a great yelling from the onlookers. The bodies were dragged away; a third wolf who lay snapping and snarling with a broken back was finished off by one of the Mercuries. The remaining three were decoyed back to their cages for use another day, and fresh sand was spread over the stains in the arena. After that came the boxing-match, and the big sham fight which pleased the crowd better, especially when blood began to flow – for despite Automedon’s orders, there was seldom a sword-fight that did not end in a few deaths and maimings. Now it was the turn of the Net-and-Trident men, and all across the arena they and the swordsmen matched against them were zigzagging like mayflies in a wicked dance of death.
Suddenly Phaedrus realized that the open expanse before him was empty of tense and running figures, the Mercuries with their hooks were dragging another dead man away, and for the last time the filthy sand was being raked over and the worst of the stains covered.
And he thought in a perfectly detached way, ‘Our turn now.’
The trumpets were crowing again, and as one man, the chosen eight strode out from their station close under the Governor’s box to the centre of the arena, where Automedon now stood waiting for them.
They were being placed in pairs, ten paces apart and with no advantage of light or wind to either. It was all happening very quickly now; from the Governor’s box came the white flutter of a falling scarf, and the trumpets were sounding the ‘set on’.
Phaedrus took the customary two steps forward and one to the left, which was like the opening move in a game of draughts, and brought sword and shield to the ready. With that movement he ceased to be aware of the other pairs, ceased even to be aware of the suddenly hushed onlookers. Life sharpened its focus, narrowed to a circle of trampled sand, and the light-fleck of Vortimax’s eyes behind the slits of his visor. (‘Watch the eyes,’ Automedon had said on the very first day in the training-school. ‘Always be aware of the sword-hand, but watch the eyes.’) They were circling warily, crouching behind their bucklers, ready to spring. Phaedrus’s head felt cold and clear and his body very light, as it always did the moment the fight began, whether in earnest or in practice. Practice. He had fought out so many practice bouts with Vortimax. The surface of his mind knew that this was different, that this was kill or be killed, but something in him refused to believe it. This could be no more than a trial of skill between himself and Vortimax; and afterwards they would slam the swords back into the arms-racks, and laugh and go off to the wine-booth together . . . He made a sudden feint, and the Gaul came in with a crouching leap. Their blades rang together in thrust and counter thrust, a fierce flurry that struck out sparks from the grey iron into the windy sunlight. The sand rose in little clouds and eddies round their feet; they were circling and weaving as they fought, each trying to get the sun behind him and the dazzle of it in the other’s eyes. Phaedrus felt the hornet-sting of the other’s blade nick his ribs, and sprang back out of touch. Vortimax was pressing after him, and giving back another step before the darting blade, he knew that the Gaul’s purpose was to drive him against the barricade, where he would have no space to manoeuvre. He could sense the wooden barrier behind him, some way off still, but waiting – waiting – and side-sprang clear, at the same time playing a thrust over the shield that narrowly missed the other’s shoulder. ‘A feint at the head, a cut at the leg, and come in over the shield with a lunge.’ Automedon’s voice sounded in his inner ear as he had heard it so often at practice. The crowd were crying ‘Habet!’ as a fighter went down; and almost at once the shout was repeated, one wave crashing on the tail of another, and the Mercuries were dragging two bodies away. Only two pairs left now. Phaedrus knew it, on the outer edge of his consciousness, but it had no meaning for him; it was beyond the narrow circle of trampled sand and the sparks of living danger behind the eye-slits of Vortimax’s visor. They had returned for a while to more cautious play, and the blades rang together lightly, almost exploringly; but they had no need to explore, they knew each other’s play too well. It was that, partly, that made the whole fight seem faintly unreal, a fight in a dream. And the sense of unreality took the edge from Phaedrus’s sword-play; he knew it, and tried to break through, and could not.
Ah! Vortimax’s guard was a shade more open that time! Phaedrus’s blade leaped, and it was the other’s turn to spring back out of touch, with a red gash opening like a mouth in the brown skin over the collar-bone. He had the Gaul now, and began to press him back – back – Vortimax’s turn to feel the waiting barrier. But still the odd sense of fighting in a dream was upon Phaedrus, and the inability to bring his sword-play out of the practice yard and set it to the real work of killing . . .
He saw the flicker behind Vortimax’s eye-slits in the split instant before the deadly low stroke came. He sprang sideways, pivoting on the ball of his foot, and felt a white-hot sting like that of a whip lash across the side of his left knee. The stroke which, had it landed square, would have cut the tendon and left him ham-strung and helpless on the sand. It was a brilliant, wicked stroke, an almost outlawed stroke for it crippled instead of killing, and could bring your enemy down broken and at your mercy; but if it failed, it left your own guard wide open. Like the sudden opening of a cavern in his head, reality burst upon Phaedrus, and in that ice-bright splinter of time he understood at last that this was a fight to the death; that he was fighting, not his comrade Vortimax, whom he had fought scores and hundreds of times before, but death – red rending death such as the stag’s had been, and the hooks of the Mercuries in the dark alleyway. And the man before him was the enemy, and he sprang to finish him. But in the same instant the Gaul, almost knee-down in the sand, twisted aside and up in an almost miraculous recovery, and again sprang back out of touch.
Phaedrus set his teeth and went after him, warned by the warm flow down his leg that he had not much time. He did not hear the crowd cry ‘Habet!’ for the third time, nor the mounting roar as all along the benches they shouted for himself or Vortimax. He had another enemy to fight now: the rising weakness of blood-loss creeping through him. Soon he felt his sword-play growing less sure. No onlooker could guess it as yet, but he knew, and so did Vortimax. Once, the Gaul’s blade was within a nail’s breath of his throat before he turned it aside. His heart was lurching in the sick hollow of his body, his teeth were clenched and his breath whistled through flared nostrils. The crowd had fallen suddenly oddly silent, but he heard their silence no more than he had heard their yelling. He was fighting on the defensive now, he had begun to give ground – a little – a little – and then a little more – and he knew with sick despair that he was very nearly done. Suddenly his blade wavered glaringly out of line, and Vortimax sprang in under his guard. How he avoided that thrust he never knew, but as he leaped sideways without thought – like a wounded wolf, Vortimax’s foot slipped on Phaedrus’s own blood in the sand, and in the instant that he was off balance with lowered shield, Phaedrus gathered the last of his strength and struck home.
Vortimax gave a small surprised grunt, and pitched forward, twisting as he fell, so that he landed face upward, still part covered by his buckler.
Phaedrus stumbled to one knee over him, and caught himself back from crashing headlong. He heard the voice of the crowd now, but distantly, as one heard it from the underground changing-rooms, and stood with raised sword, drawing his breath in great sobbing gasps, while he waited to hear the ‘Habet’ and see the thumbs turned down. But the signal did not come; instead, a long roar of applause, and then he understood. Vortimax’s chin-strap had snapped in his fall, and the plumed bronze helmet had fallen off, leaving his face bare. He was quite dead.
Phaedrus thought without emotion, looking down at him, ‘That was almost me.’
He just remembered to turn and salute the Governor’s box, which swam in his sight as the arena floor was swimming under his feet, then Automedon was beside him, growling in his ear, ‘Hold on! Hold up, lad! If you go down now I swear I’ll get the Mercuries with the hot irons to you!’ And the Captain’s hand was clenched on his arm, turning him back towards the arched entrance of the changing-rooms. The Mercuries were already dragging Vortimax’s body away. ‘Come on now, a drink is what you need!’ And he thought with a sick shock of laughter, ‘I’m being decoyed away, just like the wolves from their kill – decoyed away for another day.’ He managed something of his usual swagger as he passed out of the westering sunlight, leaving a heavy blood-trail behind him, into the gloom of the stairhead and the smoky glimmer of the lamps still burning below. His foot missed the top step, and he stumbled forward, and somebody caught him from a headlong fall, saying cheerfully, ‘Drunk again? This is no time to go breaking your neck!’
He was sitting on a bench, with head hanging, while the long, crowded changing-room swirled around him. They had taken off his helmet, and the Syrian doctor was lashing his knee in linen strips, so tightly that he could not bend it. There was a sudden splurge of voices with his own name and the words ‘wooden foil’ tangled somewhere in the midst of them. They were thumping him on the shoulders to rouse him, pouring the promised drink down his throat. The barley-spirit ran like fire through his veins, and the world steadied somewhat.
‘Now – up with you!’ Automedon said. ‘Up!’
And he was being thrust back towards the entrance stairway and the evening sunlight wavering beyond the great double doors; and all at once the truth dawned on him!
Somehow – the barley-spirit helped – he pulled himself together and put on the best swagger he could with a rigid knee, and managed the few paces to the Governor’s box with a kind of stiff-legged, fighting-cock strut. Sylvanus’s coarse, clever face seemed to float in clouds of bright nothingness and the rest of the world was the merest blur so that he never saw the sandy, withered-looking man with silver and coral drops in his ears, who leaned forward abruptly from a near-by bench to stare at him out of suddenly widened eyes.
He saw nothing but the Governor’s big fleshy nose and small shrewd eyes, and the foil with its blade of smooth ash-wood as white almost as the silver guard. He took it from the Governor’s hands into his own, feeling how light it was after the heavy gladius that he was used to, how lacking in the familiar balance when he brought it to the salute.
The crowd were shouting for him: ‘Phaedrus! Red Phaedrus!’ The fat woman who had tossed him the briar-rose threw an enamelled bracelet at his feet, and two or three others followed her example. But Phaedrus was scarcely aware of the gifts. He knew only that he was a free man; that he had come to one of the two thresholds that had waited for him, and for all the triumph and the shouting, he must step over it alone, into the unknown world that lay beyond.
HE STOOD OUTSIDE the gateway of the Gladiators’ School, under the sculptured helmet and weapons of the pediment, and pulled his cloak round him against the chill mizzle rain that was blowing in from the moors. It was a new cloak, very fine, of saffron-coloured wool with a border of black and crimson and blue, and had been given him by a certain admiring merchant who had seen him kill Vortimax and win his wooden foil. A tall man, dried and withered and toughened like a bit of old weather-worn horse-hide, but with heavy drops of silver and coral swinging in his ears. He had brought his gift in person, on the morning after the games, and stared into Phaedrus’s face as he gave it, so intently that the gladiator laughed and said, ‘You’ll know me another time, even if I should not be wearing this sunburst of a cloak!’
And the man had lowered the fine-wrinkled lids over his eyes, but gone on staring, under them, and said, ‘Aye, I’d know you another time,’ with something in his tone behind the words that had made Phaedrus suddenly wary. But he had kept the cloak; it was a rich cloak and he had not lived four years in the Gladiators’ School without learning never to turn down a gift.
He looked up the street towards the transit camp, and down the street towards the baths and the lower town, wondering which way to go, now that all ways were open to him, and feeling suddenly a stranger in the town that he knew as well as he did the cracks in the wall plaster beside his sleeping-bench. Well, no good standing here all day; he must find another sleeping-bench. He hitched up the long bundle containing his few possessions, including the wooden foil, and set off down the street, limping because the half-healed gash on his knee (they had kept him until it was half healed; a clear fortnight) was still stiff.
He found lodgings at the third attempt, a filthy room in a house down by the river, kept by an ex-army muledriver with one eye, and leaving his bundle there, went out again to the baths. He had the full treatment, with a breath-taking cold plunge after the scalding steam of the Hot-room, and then lay like a lord while a slave rubbed him with scented oil and scraped him down with a bronze strigil; finally, he had the tawny fuzz of his young beard shaved. It cost a good deal, but there was the fat woman’s bracelet and a few other bits and pieces in the small leather bag which hung round his neck, and in the circus one got out of the way of saving for tomorrow in case there was no tomorrow to save for. Also it helped to pass the time.
But the Depot trumpet was only just sounding for the noon watch-setting when he came out again into the colonnade. Two or three men strolling there looked at him and said something to each other, recognizing him. The rain had stopped and a pale gleam of sunlight was shining on wet tiles and cobbles and drawing faint wisps of steam from sodden thatch. He went down the colonnade steps, the red hair still clinging damply to his forehead, and the beautiful cloak, flung back now from his shoulders, giving him a kind of tall, disreputable splendour like a corn-marigold, and strolled off along the street as though he were going somewhere, because he knew that they were still watching him.
For the next few hours he wandered about Corstopitum. He bought a brown barley loaf and strong ewe-milk cheese at a stall, and ate them on the river steps in another scurry of rain, and then wandered on again. He was free! A free man for the first time in his life! His official manumission, signed by the circus master and a magistrate, in the small bag round his neck, his name struck off the muster roll of the Gladiators’ School with the words ‘Honourably discharged’ instead of the more usual ‘Dead’ against it. No man was his master, there was nowhere that he must report back to after his day’s leave. Yet more than once that day he found himself back at the double doors with the sculptured weapons over them, or wandering in the direction of the turf-banked amphitheatre beyond the South Gate.
The last time it happened, he pulled up cursing, and looking about him, saw that it was dusk and a little way down the street someone had hung out the first lantern of the evening. The first day was drawing to a close, and suddenly he thought, ‘This is only one day, only the first day, and there’ll be another tomorrow, and another and another . . .’ And panic such as he had never known in the arena, where one only had to be afraid of physical things, whimpered up in him so that for a moment he leaned against a wall, feeling cold in the pit of his stomach. Then he laughed jeeringly and pushing off from the wall, turned back the way he had come, towards the narrower streets where the less respectable wine-shops were to be found. ‘Fool! You want a drink, that’s what’s the matter with you – a lot of drinks. You can get as full as a wineskin tonight, and sleep it off like an Emperor! Won’t have to be out on the practice ground with a head like Hephaestus’s forge and seeing two of everything, at first light tomorrow.’
The first wine-shop he came to, he passed by. It was a favourite haunt of the gladiators on town leave, and he didn’t want to run into old comrades. It was odd how he shrank from that idea now – a kind of embarrassment, a feeling that they would not know quite how to meet each other’s eyes. There was only one of them he would not have minded meeting again, and he had killed him the week before last.
Jostling and jostled by the people who still came and went along the streets, he pushed on until the ‘Rose of Paestum’ cast its yellow stain of lamplight and its splurge of voices across his way. He went in, swinging his cloak behind him with the play-actor’s swagger of his old trade, and thrusting across the crowded room to the trestle table at the far side, demanded a cup of wine. He grinned at the girl with greasy ringlets hanging round her neck, who served him, and flung down the price of the wine lordly-wise on the table, with a small bronze coin extra.
She half moved to pick it up, then pushed it back. ‘This is over.’
‘Best keep it for yourself then.’
‘Best keep it for yourself,’ she said. ‘I reckon you’ve earned it hard enough, lad.’
‘Sa, sa, have it your own way. This instead—’ Phaedrus leaned across the table, flung an arm round her shoulders, and kissed her loudly. She smelled of warm unwashed girl under the cheap scent, and kissing her comforted a little the coldness of the void that had opened before him in the street.
He picked up his cup and the extra coin – she was his own kind, part of his own world, and to leave the coin after all would have been a sort of betrayal – and lounging over to a bench against the wall, sat down.
He gulped down most of the wine at a draught, though it hadn’t much flavour somehow, and sat for a long time with the almost empty cup in his hand, staring unseeingly over the heads of the crowd towards the opposite wall and the faded fresco of a dancing-girl with a rose in her hand which gave the wine-shop its name.
What was he going to do with the days ahead? It had been stupid, that moment of panic in the twilit street, the appalling vision of emptiness that was simply today repeated over and over again for all eternity; stupid for the beautifully simple reason that to go on living you had to eat, and to go on eating you had to work – the fat woman’s bracelet wouldn’t last for ever. What about the Eagles? Oh, not the regular Legion, the Auxiliaries of the Frontier Service? It might be worth trying, but he didn’t see old, one-armed Marius who commanded up at the Depot taking on an ex-gladiator. Well then, if he could get a job as a charioteer? Any kind of job to do with horses? But men who owned horses didn’t want free grooms and drivers when they could get a slave for twelve aurei. No, sword-play was the only trade for him; he could probably get himself taken on by a fencing-master somewhere in one of the Southern cities, and end up teaching the more showy and safest fencing-strokes to young sprigs of the town. The prospect sickened him.
There was a movement in the crowd, and a shadow fell across his hand holding the winecup, and he looked up quickly to see that a young man had risen from a near-by table and checked beside him. Phaedrus knew him by sight, Quintus Tetricus, the Army Contractor’s son, and recognized one or two others among the faces at the table, all turned his way.
‘See who sits drinking here alone!’ Quintus said, clearly speaking for the rest. ‘Ah now, that’s no way for a man to be celebrating his wooden foil!’
‘I fought for it alone, and I may as well drink the Victory Cup alone – the wine tastes just as sweet,’ Phaedrus said harshly, ‘and snore alone under the table afterwards.’
‘Come and drink with us, and we’ll all snore under the table afterwards,’ Quintus said, and the men about the table laughed.
‘I do well enough where I am.’ In the mood they were in, if a showman’s sad bear had shambled in through the door they would have called it to drink with them, and Phaedrus was in no mood to dance to their whim.
‘Even with an empty cup? Na, na, my Red Phaedrus! Come and drink off another with us; we’ve got a flask of red Falernian – Eagles’ blood!’
Other voices were added to his; the rest were shifting closer on the benches, making room for one more.
And suddenly, because nothing mattered much anyway, it was too much trouble to go on refusing. He shrugged, and got up, and not quite sure how it happened, found himself sitting with Quintus and his friends, the cup brimming with unwatered Falernian in his hand. Flushed faces grinned at him round the winedabbled table. A complete stranger with hair bleached lint-white as some of the young braves among the tribesmen wore it – it was the fashion just then to be very British – leaned forward and clapped him on the shoulder, shouting, ‘Here he is then; let’s drink to him! Aiee, my lucky lad, that was a pretty fight!’
Cups were raised on all sides: ‘Red Phaedrus! Joy and long life to you!’
Phaedrus laughed, and drank the toast with them, gulping the cup dry. It would be good to get drunk. ‘A pretty fight. You saw it?’
‘Wouldn’t have missed it for all the gold in Eburacum’s mint!’
‘I thought the Gaul had you with that low stroke,’ another said.
‘I thought so, too.’ Phaedrus drained his cup and threw the lees over his shoulder, where they lay dark as the grains of old blood on the dirty floor. ‘What’s a friend after all? I’ll drink again if anyone asks me.’
Presently, he had no idea how many winecups later, he realized that the place was emptying, and the serving-girl and a couple of slaves were gathering up empty cups and mopping spilled wine, while at the far side of the room, benches were being stacked one a’top the other. ‘Shutting up, by the look of things.’ A plump, dark youth who had been quieter than the rest of them all evening looked about him somewhat owlishly. ‘S’tonishing how quick an evening runs its course in – good comp’ny.’
‘Ah now, who says it’s run its course? I’m shtill – still thirsty.’ Quintus flung himself back against the wall behind him, and beckoned imperiously to the girl. ‘Hai! Pretty! More wine.’
The girl looked up from her task. ‘We’re shutting up now.’
‘Not while I’m here, we’re not.’
She glanced towards the wine-shop owner, who came waddling across the room towards them, his paunch thrust out beneath a dirty tunic stained with old wine splashes. ‘We don’t keep open all night in the “Rose of Paestum”. This is a decent house, sirs, and we need our sleep same as other folks.’
Quintus lurched to his feet, flushing crimson, his hand fumbling for his knife, but Phaedrus, with a few grains of sense still in him, put a hand on his shoulder and slammed him down again. ‘Softly! The “Rose of Paestum” isn’t the only wine-shop in Corstopitum.’
And a big red-faced young man with a loose mouth grinned in agreement. ‘Tired of that girl on the wall, she’s coming off in flakes, anyhow. Le’s go ’nd find some real dancing-girls.’
Somehow matters were sorted out, and the remains of the score paid, with a good deal of bickering, and they were spilling out into the street, hotly arguing as to where they should go next. They had been no more than loudly cheerful and from time to time a little quarrelsome in the hot room, but the fresh air went to their heads and legs like another kind of wine. ‘I’m drunk,’ Phaedrus thought. ‘I haven’t been as drunk as this since Saturnalia!’
Well, he had meant to get as drunk as an Emperor tonight, and the feeling was good. He was not lonely or cold any more, and tomorrow could look after itself; he felt eighteen hands high and curiously remote from his own feet. He could fight a legion single-handed, and whistle the seven stars of Orion out of the sky. It was not such a grey world after all.
They had forgotten about the quest for dancing-girls, and for a while they wavered their way about the streets, singing, with their arms round each other’s necks. Respectable people scurried into doorways at their approach, which seemed to all of them a jest for the Gods, so that they howled with laughter and began to kick at doors in passing and yell insults at any protesting face that appeared at an upper window. They had no clear idea of where they were heading, but presently they found themselves in the centre of the town, with the square mass of the Forum buildings and the Basilica rising before them cliff-wise out of the late lantern-light into the darkness. Among the small lean-to shops, closely shuttered now, that lined the outer colonnade, the gleam of a lantern here and there told where a late wine-booth was still open, and the sight of the little groups gathered about them made Phaedrus and his boon companions thirsty again.
‘C’mon,’ Quintus said. ‘Let’s have another drink.’
‘Had enough.’ The dark, plump boy still had more sense left in him than any of the others. ‘Maybe we’d best be jogging home.’
‘Roma Dea! The night’s still in swaddling-bands, there’s two full watches of it left yet.’ And another of the band lifted up his voice in mournful song:
‘Oh do not drink so deep, my son,
My dear and only child!
And do not lie down in the street
And look so strange and wild.’
The others joined in the chorus:
‘Yellow wine of Chios
And dark wine of Gaul,
But the blood-red Falernian,
The ruby-red Falernian,
The fire-red Falernian,
Is the Emperor of them all.’
Then in a blurred gabble, ‘I’ve-a-fine-and-noble-reason-for-lying-here-a-season-but-what-it-is-I-cannot-quite-recall.’
And baying each other on to further efforts, they headed for the nearest of the still open wine-booths, close beside the main gate, with its triumphal inscription and attendant stone lions.
The booth, which was no more than a trestle table under the roof of the colonnade, with a couple of coarse wine and water jars behind it, a few horn cups and a red pottery lamp in the midst of all, was kept by an ex-Legionary who had had trouble with drunks before. He eyed them with grim disfavour as they drew near, and began ostentatiously to stack the horn mugs together.
‘And what might you be wanting?’
Quintus propped himself against the trestle table. ‘What’s one generally come to a wine-booth for, eh? – Tell me that. Wha’s one gener-rally—’
‘Well, you’ve come too late,’ said the booth’s owner. ‘Can’t you see I’m shutting for the night?’
Quintus shook his head, while the rest crowded closer, and said with elaborate care, ‘That was what they said at the “Rose of Paestum”. The very words they – and it wasn’t true! They jus’ di’n’ – didn’t like our faces. You don’ like our faces either, do you?’
‘I’ve seen ones I’ve liked better.’
‘Our money’s good ’nough, though.’ Quintus flung down a scatter of coins and thrust a suddenly darkening face into that of the ex-Legionary. ‘An’ tha’s all that matters t’you, isn’t it? Now we’ll have some wine. Me an’ my frien’s, we’ll all have some wine.’
‘Not here, you won’t.’ The man pushed the money back at him. ‘Now pick up this lot, and get off to bed, the pack of you.’
The rest of the party had begun crowding closer, and there was an ugly murmur. Phaedrus, with his beautiful prancing mood suddenly checked, aware once more, through the bright haze of the Falernian, of the grey, flat future that he had thought successfully drowned, had a strong desire to fight somebody. It did not much matter whom. He elbowed his way to the forefront of the group beside Quintus. ‘And supposing there’s no wish in us for bed? Suppose we feel like a cup of wine all round, and nothing else in the world?’
The mood of the whole band was turning ugly; he felt the ugliness growing and gathering strength behind him, and saw the recognition of it in the ex-Legionary’s suddenly alerted gaze. Legionary of the Eagles that he, Phaedrus, was not good enough to join! For the moment it seemed to him that he had actually gone up to the Depot, and been turned away.
‘Then you’ll have to try another booth, gladiator. I’m shutting up for the night!’ The man raised his voice abruptly to a parade-ground bellow, as he clattered horn cups into a basket that a boy behind him had dragged out from under the trestles. Out of the tail of his eye, Phaedrus was aware of several other men moving up; the wine-booth owners were mostly old Legionaries, and held together when there was trouble.
‘Right! Then we’ll help you!’ Quintus shouted, and kicked over the biggest wine-jar; and in the same instant, even as the booth keeper lunged into battle like a bull with a gad-fly on his tail, Phaedrus seized one end of the trestle board and heaved it up, sending everything on it to the pavement with a deeply satisfying crash. On the instant a free fight was milling round the wreckage, and the raw-red Sabine wine running like blood between the cobbles. The lamp had gone over with the rest, and little rivulets of burning oil mingled with the wine. Then someone shouted, ‘Look out! It’s the Watch!’ And the thing that had begun as little more than a savage jest tipped over into nightmare.