The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff Read Free Book Online Page A

you not fight?’
    ‘Some of us fought.’ Gault fingered a long white scar that writhed up his forearm, and left it streaked with the crimson of the spilled wine that stained his fingers. ‘Most of us died. She had the Northern clans, where the old blood runs strong, behind her; she had the support of the priest-kind, who hoped for greater power under the Mother than they had known in the Sun Lord’s day; she had made sure of young Midir. The thing was done between a winter’s dusk and a winter’s dawning and we of the Southern clans were weak with fighting, for we had joined shields with the Caledones in the past summer, to break the Red Crests’ Northern Wall. We had no rightful king to raise for a battle-cry against her. The longer-sighted among those that were left of us urged peace; and in the end we made what peace we could – such peace as may be made with the wolf-kind – and waited for a later time.’
    He paused, and dipped his finger yet again in the spilled wine, and added a carefully judged flourish to his pattern. A small muscle twitched in his cheek. ‘At Midwinter, it will be the seven years that we have waited.’
    ‘Seven years?’ Phaedrus said, puzzled.
    And from the rug-piled bench, Sinnoch the Merchant put in dryly, ‘You have been too long among the Roman kind, for all the colour of your hair. You forget the ways of your own people.’
    ‘Every seventh year the king dies,’ Gault said, as though there had been no interruption. ‘Liadhan has chosen already the man who is to fight the Death Fight with Logiore and take his place, until in another seven winters it is time for his own death, and another king.’
    For an instant, Phaedrus’s arena training almost made him say, ‘What if it is the Old King who wins the Death Fight?’ He had lived all his life among the Roman kind, but something in him was beginning, all the same, to remember the ways of his own people, a memory of the nerve-ends rather than the mind. And he knew that the Old King would not win the Death Fight. Maybe there was a drug used; maybe it was simply that he knew winning that fight was not in the pattern of his fate.
    He began to catch the first and most distant flicker of an idea as to where all this might be leading. ‘And the Old King does not care for the end made ready for him?’
    Sudden and unexpected laughter twitched at the corners of Gault’s bitten lips. ‘Ach no. The Old King has the old blood in him. For him it is the pattern of things. It is the Young King who baulks. At Beltane, the Queen sent her token to young Conory of the Kindred. The gift proved unwelcome.’
    ‘And so?’
    The dark man leaned forward, one elbow smearing out his pattern to a red blur on the table-top; and all at once his eyes were burning like those of a man with fever. ‘And so the time has come that the Dalriads set aside Liadhan the Queen, having borne her rule long enough. Already the horns are blowing in the hills, and the black goat dies. Even among the Northern clans many have come over to us in their hearts, weary of this dark Women’s-rule that calls for the death of men. We of the Kindred, the Royal Clan, are of one mind in this matter; Conory stands with us, and certain of the Companions, the Bodyguard will follow him. There is yet one more that we need – Midir!’
    Phaedrus stared at him under frowning brows. ‘And since Midir is dead?’
    Gault made a quick gesture of one hand, as though to say, ‘Let that pass for the moment,’ and went on, ‘We need our rightful King to raise and follow against the Woman, as we needed him seven winters ago. He would have been worth two – three thousand fighting men to us then, boy that he was. As a man, he would be worth more.’ The tawny eyes were fixed upon Phaedrus’s face. ‘A man much about your age; much such a one to look at, too.’
    ‘I am not certain what you mean.’ Phaedrus heard his own voice after a sharp pause, without even being aware that he had