The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

gates are closed to us. Is it written all over me, then?’
    ‘It is my business to know the looks of fightingmen. You are a fighting-man, but you have the look that does not come from Legionary training.’
    Phaedrus grinned. ‘Is it only the training then, that makes the war hound or the arena wolf?’
    ‘Generally something more, I grant you. Assuredly the gladiator, once trained to the sand, makes a very bad soldier.’
    ‘I was right then. I did think to go up to the Fort – that was at Corstopitum; but I reckoned it would be a waste of time.’
    The other nodded, his hand still on the little mare’s neck, while she nuzzled with delicately working lips against his breast. Then he added abruptly, ‘The Frontier Wolves, of course, might be another matter. We also make very bad soldiers by Legionary standards.’
    Phaedrus was silent a moment in blank surprise. ‘You would not be offering me a Scout’s dirk for my wooden foil?’ he said at last.
    ‘Hardly. But if you were to go to the Commandant at Credigone, I
think
you might not find it a waste of time.’
    They stood confronting each other while the slow heartbeats passed; the silence full of the soft stamping and sucking of the horses, and the woodwind call of an oyster-catcher from the marshes. Phaedrus thought, with detachment, what it would be like to break away from the wild venture he was bound on, and ride behind this man or another of his kind, one of a closeknit company again. It was a thought to play with for an instant, like a little sharp dagger that one throws up and catches by the blade . . .
    Then he shook his head. ‘Too late now; I’ve another trail to ride.’
    ‘No turning aside from it?’
    Phaedrus had a sudden vision of the kind of thing that would happen to him if he tried to turn aside from this particular trail now; and knew in the same instant that if there had been no bargain made in the back room of the ‘Rose of Paestum’, no mark like a blue-and-crimson four-petalled flower tattooed on his forehead under the close Phrygian cap, still he would have done no more than play with the thought for an instant.
    ‘No turning aside. To speak plain, I’d not care to spend the next twenty years patrolling this desolation of Valentia, with a skirmish with cattle-raiders now and then by way of salt in the stirrabout. Not that I’d be lasting twenty years. I’d be cutting my throat by spring.’
    ‘So? Are you so much of a townsman? The hills are lonelier, north of the Wall, than the hills of Valentia.’
    ‘But maybe not so desolate. There are too many dead villages and cold hearths between here and the Southern Wall.’
    ‘That is an old story now, though it was an ugly one in its day,’ said the Roman officer. ‘Punitive work is always ugly.’
    ‘More than forty years old, they tell me, but the little villages are still dead and the hearths cold, as Lollius Urbicus left them.’
    ‘You’re British, aren’t you?’ the Captain said. ‘Well, upward of half my scouts are native to the land.’
    ‘They have chosen their loyalties, and I choose mine,’ Phaedrus said, and checked, trying to find words for what he meant. ‘My mother was from somewhere in these Northern parts, and knew the inside of a slave-market. My father was – of another conquered people. There are too many conquered peoples in Rome’s world.’
    ‘At least we have brought some kind of order, even some kind of peace, to a world that was ancient chaos before.’
    ‘The
Pax Romana
,’ Phaedrus said. ‘My fa— my first master had me taught to read and write, though I have lost the trick of it now. He let me read his books. There was one, a history that a man called Tacitus wrote of the General Agricola’s campaigns, a hundred years ago. He fought a great battle, this Agricola, with a war-leader called Calgacus, far to the north somewhere; and there was a fine fiery speech that Calgacus was supposed to have made to his warriors before the battle joined