HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton Page 5

  Then Gault turned on the bench, and shouted into the gloom behind him: ‘Midir!’

  And even as Phaedrus’s gaze whipped towards that inner doorway, the hanging rug was dragged aside, and a man stood on the threshold. A young man in the rough tunic of a craftsman, who checked on the farthermost edge of the lamplight, his head alertly raised like a hound’s when it scents the wind. Phaedrus caught the glint of red hair, and something in the shadowed face and the line of throat and shoulders and long flank that made the hair lift a little on the back of his neck. He might have been looking at his own fetch.

  ‘Did someone call my name?’ The voice was different at all events, lighter and harder, glinting with a bright febrile fierceness that flashed into Phaedrus’s mind the image of a panther he had once seen in the Londinium Circus.

  ‘I called,’ Gault said. ‘I have failed, Midir. Now let you try if you can do better.’

  The young man walked forward. Phaedrus with a quick suspicion of the truth, thought that he followed the sound of the other man’s voice, and as he came full into the lamplight, saw that there were only scarred hollows under the straightened brows where his eyes should have been. Saw also the great puckered scar on his forehead where something, some pattern that had been tattooed there, had been dagger-gashed across and across and across in a sickening savagery of destruction, a long time ago.

  He had enough of his mother in him to know that among the tribes no maimed or blind or crooked man could hold the kingship, lest his rule bring disaster on the people. So that was how the Royal Woman had made sure of Midir, the rightful King, whom she had not quite dared to kill! His gorge rose in his throat.

  ‘Will you speak, Phaedrus the Gladiator, that I may hear where you stand.’

  ‘I stand here, a spear’s length from you, Midir of the Dalriads.’

  ‘You give me a name that I have not borne these seven years. I am Midir the leather-worker.’ The other had turned full face to him at the first sound of his voice, and came towards him unerringly, seeming to know the position of table and benches by the sound of his own footsteps, or by that mysterious ‘shadow’ that blind men speak of. ‘And so you are like-looking to me. Like enough to take my place?’

  ‘It is in my mind at least that any man who has seen neither of us in seven years might well take one for the other.’

  ‘That should make you proud. It is not every slave gladiator who could pass for a prince of the Dalriads.’

  Phaedrus felt the angry blood rushing to the roots of his hair, but before he could retort, the other added with a crack of laughter, ‘Or, of course, every prince of the Dalriads who could pass for a leather-worker.’

  ‘I do not see why not, if he had the training of his craft,’ Phaedrus said in a tone of cool effrontery; but his sudden anger had begun to flicker out.

  ‘I wonder. Is it the same with the prince’s craft, should you be thinking?’ The laughter still lingered in Midir’s voice.

  ‘Na. The prince’s craft is another matter. No man needs to be born a leather-worker and the son of a leather-worker, but can you think of any training that would change a slave gladiator, in truth and not mere seeming, into a prince of the Dalriads?’

  ‘The seeming might be enough – if he were not afraid.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  ‘A man who set out to play such a part would have good cause to be afraid . . . But if you are like enough to pass for me, and not easily made afraid, then maybe the God has sent you to us.’

  Phaedrus asked with a detached interest – he could still think himself detached, because he still believed that he was going to refuse – ‘And you? Could you stand aside while another man took your place?’

  Midir’s head was up, the lines of laughter in his face suddenly thin and hard as sword-cuts. ‘Listen, my friend, Gault has used me as a weapon against you tonight – Ach, yes, he has, you know it as surely as I do – and if old fox Sinnoch had not found you, they would have used me as a weapon against Liadhan, for want of a better. They would have made me their accusation against her before all the tribe. “See, warriors of Earra-Ghyl, lords of the horse-herd, here is Midir who should have been your King, but the She-Wolf clawed out the daylight for him and made him an insult to the Gods! Strike now against the Woman who has done this accursed thing!” It is better than no weapon at all. But to shout: “Brothers! Here is Midir your King! Liadhan would have slain him, but he escaped and now he is come back to be the Battle Standard of the War Host!” – that is a sharper weapon, and the sharpness of the weapon is all I care for, now.’

  His hands had come up while he spoke, feeling for Phaedrus’s shoulders, and clamped down on them with a fiercely urgent grip.

  And Phaedrus thought again of the chained panther, and was not sure why; only as surely as though he had shared these seven years, he knew that this red-haired other self had never come to any kind of terms with his fate, never for an instant accepted, never for an instant ceased to rage against the darkness, unbroken, unsubmitting, unreconciled. Knew also that he was without pity either for himself or for anything under the sky. For that instant, as though one life flowed through them both through the other’s hands on his shoulders and his own that he had brought up to cover them, he knew the Prince Midir as he had never known anyone since the day that he was born.

  The two onlookers had ceased to matter; the world contracted and sharpened its focus as it had used to do in the arena, until it contained only himself and the man before him.

  ‘You bid me to take your place, Midir?’

  Midir was faintly smiling, and he spoke lightly, but the words came widely spaced like small bright drops of blood. ‘Take my place, Phaedrus, and with it, take my vengeance and keep it safe – warm with your own warmth, like a little polished throw-stone in the hollow of your shield, until the time comes to throw. But cry my name when that time comes, so that both the Sun Lord and the Woman may know that it is my vengeance, not yours.’

  4

  THE HOUSE OF THE FIGHTING-COCKS

  COCK-CROW HAD just sounded from the fort, and the long, narrow sprawl of native hovels, wine-shops and bath-houses, granaries, married quarters, horse corrals, and temples to a score of alien Gods, that made up the town of Onnum on the Wall, was stirring into wakefulness. Not that any of the Wall towns ever slept, save twitching and with one ear cocked and one eye open.

  In the loft of a ramshackle house close to the fortress gate, where Florianus the old Syrian archer bred his fighting-cocks, the birds roused and rattled their feathers, stretched their necks and crowed defiance to the Roman trumpets.

  Most mornings, the crowing of the cocks roused Phaedrus and Midir in their quarters beyond the rough partition wall. Then whoever’s turn it was to forage would go down the rickety loft ladder and out to the well at the street corner, draw himself a pail of water for a hurried splashing wash, and on the way back, collect the platter of oaten bannock and jug of buttermilk or sour watered-wine which the old crone who owned the house would have left out for them overnight. The one whose turn it was to have his food brought up to him like an Emperor, went without washing that day. They never broke cover together, for though it was still half dark the lantern burned until dawn above the doorway of the ‘Bacchus’s Head’ close by, and they took care not to impress it needlessly on the minds of chance beholders that there were two men lodging in the House of the Fighting-Cocks, two men who looked exactly alike, unless you came near enough to realize that one was blind.

  But today they had been astir before the cocks, and were sitting on the edge of the makeshift plank bed, the jug and platter almost finished with, between them. The lamp on its niche high on the wall was getting short of oil; the flame leaped and fluttered, and its unstable light sometimes found and sometimes almost lost the two young men, showing them stripped to their plaid breeks as they had slept, for it was close in the little room, and already the day creeping up behind the narrow window gave promise of heat later.

  Perhaps
it was because of the thundery heat, Phaedrus told himself, that he was not hungry. But he knew it was not. Fiends and Furies! One would think to be glad enough at the prospect of getting out of this place!

  He looked round at Midir, sitting with a half-eaten lump of the mouth-drying oatcake in his hand, and realized with a kind of exasperation that the heat had killed Midir’s hunger as well. The flaring lamp made harsh shadows where his eyes should have been, and cast the puckered scar on his forehead into cruel relief. It was almost a month now, since the night just after they came here, when they had lain side by side while Gault with his curious skill for such things, had remade the lost pattern with a cock’s hackle dipped in woad, and then copied the main lines of it on to Phaedrus’s forehead; those potent, interlocking lines and spirals and double curves of Sun Cross and Stallion Symbol that formed between them a device not unlike a four-petalled flower. And after that, the old woman he had brought with him had taken over, with her tattooing needles and pots of woad and crimson dye. The memory of that small, prickling torment made the nerve-ends crawl between his brows even now, and Phaedrus put up his hand unconsciously and felt the faintly raised lines on the skin. The Royal Flower, the old woman had called it, the Mark of the Horse Lord.

  ‘Does it still feel strange?’ Midir said, with that disconcerting awareness he sometimes had of what one was doing.

  ‘Not so strange as it did a month ago.’

  ‘A few months older, and I’d have had more than the Mark of the Horse Lord for the beldam to prick into your hide with her sharp little needles.’

  Phaedrus thought of Gault who had gone north again now; Gault the Strong, with the warrior pattern tattooed on breast and shoulders, thighs and cheeks and temples.

  ‘All the warrior patterns that they prick on to the boys’ skins at the Feast of New Spears,’ Midir was saying. ‘At the next Feast it would have been my turn to go into the darkness of the Place of Life, and come out from it a man, to take my place among the Men’s Side, with the warrior patterns princely thick upon me.’

  Beyond the thin partition a cock crowed in fiercely shining challenge, and was answered faintly across the roof-tops from some other cock-loft on the far side of the town.

  ‘Why not Sinnoch?’ Phaedrus asked suddenly.

  ‘Sinnoch is only half of the tribe. His father was a Roman merchant – they get everywhere, the merchant-kind – who came to his mother on the night she hung up her girdle for the Goddess. There was a bad harvest that year, so I’ve heard. The priestess said the Great Mother was angry and must be appeased; and when they drew lots among the maidens, to sleep at the river crossing for the first stranger who passed that way, the lot fell upon her. And so Sinnoch was born and she died bearing him . . . I think he never greatly wanted to be a warrior; I suppose his father’s wandering was in him, too, so he trades horses to the Roman kind, with an unmarked skin, and Gault says there is not a noble of the tribe he could not buy up if he wanted to. It is strange – he did not want to be a warrior, and the Dalriads have always accepted him in other ways; but it hasn’t made him love the folk who whisper in the dark to the Great Mother.’

  ‘I think it would not make me, either,’ Phaedrus said.

  He got up and crossed to the window. The lamp was finally dying in little gasps of flame, and the roofs opposite were already touched with morning, though night still lingered in the narrow chasm of the street below. He stood gazing down into it while he tied his hair back out of the way with a leather thong as he had been used to do before putting on his helmet. He knew that street – what one could see of it from the window – as well as he knew the room behind him, with its gap-toothed floorboards and the scattering of bright feathers that drifted through with the smell of droppings from the cock-loft, and the places where the daub had fallen from the walls and the laths showed through like the bare ribs of something dead.

  ‘Close on time for you to be away,’ Midir said behind him.

  ‘Sa, sa. No time for a wrestling-bout this morning.’

  Every morning, since they had been cooped up here, they had wrestled together, at first simply to keep themselves from going soft, because they had no other way of getting exercise; but later, because they enjoyed pitting strength and skill against each other. Well, all that was done with now . . . ‘I must not be keeping my new master waiting,’ he added, and thought, ‘It seems a lifetime that I have been mewed up in this place, learning my trade, and in a little while, it will still be here, but I shall be gone. I shall be away up the street to join Sinnoch and take the pack-beasts north – to win myself a kingdom that isn’t mine, or more likely end as wolf-bait. And Midir?’ Somehow the past month had seemed so shut away from the run of life, so turned in on itself that he had never wondered before. He swung round from the window. ‘And you? What road for you now, Midir?’

  Deep in the shadows the other shrugged. ‘The road back to Eburacum and my old master and the dressed hides. This was only to be a free time to visit my Aunt in Segedunum. He’s a good old man; he said I had earned the holiday.’

  ‘One advantage of being a free man. A slave never earns a holiday.’ (Midir had never been sold as a slave, Phaedrus knew. Who would buy a blind slave unless he could sing? He had simply been turned adrift like an unwanted dog among the beggars of Eburacum, and his one piece of good fortune had been when the harness-maker who was now his master had seen him rough-mending a broken pack-strap for a traveller outside the posting inn, and noticed the skill in his hands.)

  ‘I’ve an idea he did not mean so long a holiday as this one,’ Midir said wryly.

  ‘But he will take you back?’

  ‘Ach, yes. I’m a good craftsman. You don’t need to be able to see to work the skins or cut a belly-strap – only to be a king . . . I am wondering if this looks a noble jest to any God that chances to look this way. I wonder if the Gods laugh at the things that happen to men, as we laugh at someone slipping on a kale stalk – or if they simply don’t care . . . My father went out to meet his boar. There had been much fighting, and the Red Crests had burned off all the pasture that they could reach, and then a wet autumn and the cattle died. It was famine time, you see. And look what came of it. That will have made the Gods laugh, too.’

  ‘Don’t be talking like that,’ Phaedrus said quickly. He did not understand what Midir was talking about, but he knew that it was dangerous. ‘It is only a fool who sets out like a man poking at a stallion with a little stick, to make the Gods angry!’

  Midir shrugged. ‘Ach, well, it is I that said the thing, not you.’ He leaned forward and felt for the jug, and with a quick gesture, flung the lees of the watered wine on the already stained and filthy floor. ‘See, I am making an offering – what is it you call it in your Roman tongue? I pour a libation to the Sun Lord, a peace offering.’ Then leaning back against the wall, hands behind head, ‘Come now, I’ll be hearing you your lessons one more time while you make ready for the road.’

  Phaedrus had begun to move about their cramped quarters, gathering his few belongings and bundling them into an old cloak. A small part of his mind was wondering what had happened to his wooden foil and the fat woman’s bracelet – probably the lodging-house people had taken them and whatever else was in the bundle, when they heard he was dead. The rest of him was waiting, his mind poised to leap this way or that, for whatever question Midir would toss at him first.

  Midir said, ‘What happened after Liadhan had you stunned and flung into the river?’

  Phaedrus frowned. (‘Do not seem too sure,’ Sinnoch had said when his training began, ‘not so sure as to make men think “this is a lesson learned by heart”.’) ‘How would I be knowing in the dark and I hit on the head with a stone? The last thing I remember is Liadhan’s man; the one of them with a stone in his hand. For the rest—’ He shrugged. ‘I suppose the man did not strike hard enough – maybe he did not mean to. Or else it was that my time had not come. I must have lodged among the rocks under the overhang of the shore, with my
face above water. And seemingly they did not wait to be sure the work was finished, for when I woke, there was no one there. I was half drowned and very sick, and there was no strength in me to make the bank again and I – I must have struggled, and rolled clear of the rocks, and the run of the river took me and carried me away, and washed me up at last, away down at the Crinan ford, where the chariot road runs south. A trader going that way with horses to sell to the Wall garrisons found me—’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘A small man – I do not remember clearly. I was in no state to be taking account of faces; and it was a long time ago.’

  ‘That is fair enough. Go on.’

  ‘He would not believe me when I told him who I was; he was a stranger and did not know the Royal Mark. He took me south with the horses and sold me when he sold them; and the man who bought me sold me again, and – shall I go on?’

  ‘No need. So far the story is a credit to Sinnoch. For the rest – you should know your own story well enough without my hearing it again. Na, we’ll try something else.’ He made no move from his lounging position, but the next question came silken-swift as a dagger thrust. ‘You see a man with a small sickle-shaped scar slicing through one eyebrow. Who is he?’

  ‘Dergdian, Son of Curoi, one of the Guard in my grandsire’s day.’

  ‘Which eyebrow does the scar cut through?’

  ‘The left.’

  ‘How is it that you remember so clearly? It is a longer time since you saw Dergdian than it is since you saw the horse-trader.’

  ‘It was I that gave him the scar, throwing a stone at what I thought was a fox in the tall bracken; and he gave me the choice of taking my beating from my father, or from himself and no more said.’ Phaedrus sounded rueful, hitching at his shoulders as he spoke, as though indeed remembering the weight of Dergdian’s arm. It was like that with him sometimes, now. He turned to the narrow window and stood looking out. ‘Conory helped me wash the blood off, and begged some wound-salve from old Grania to ease the smart.’