Free The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff

path, Midir.’
    He turned and caught up his bundle, and went clattering down the rickety stair and out into the street, all but colliding with a man carrying hot loaves. The man swore at him, and Phaedrus swore back, with flowers and flourishes of insult learned in the arena which left the other open-mouthed and envious, then turned to look up at a small window high under the gap-toothed slates, from behind which came the sound of whistling, a short five-note phrase jaunty as a water wagtail, that he and Midir had used for a signal at their comings and goings, all this month. He whistled back, and hitching up his bundle, set off for the inn on the outskirts of the town, where Sinnoch and the horses were lodged, falling as he went into the old play-actor’s swagger.
    He had entered into this business partly for the sake of the thing that Gault had offered as a price, partly because of that sudden feeling of oneness with Midir; and then he had not been sure what strange waters he was getting into, nor where he was heading. But now, striding up the already crowded street where light and colour were seeping back into the world, and the pigeons wheeled above the roof-tops, suddenly he felt light on his feet and lucky. Every gladiator knew that feeling; the day when the God’s face was towards you, your lucky day, when it was your adversary’s guard and not yours that flew wide. He dodged a cart laden with wineskins, and swaggered on. Once or twice a head turned to watch the tall man with the red hair under a Phrygian cap pulled down to his eyebrows, who wore the rough clothes of a pack-train driver and walked with the braced instep of a dancer or a swordsman.
    It was almost full daylight when he came to the stable court of the ‘Golden Fleece’.

5
F RONTIER P OST
    TOWARDS EVENING, SIXTEEN days later, with all the broad, slow heather hills of Valentia between them and the Onnum Gate, the little pack-train swung northward from the broadening Cluta which they had been following since dawn, and turned into the track that rose gently from the river marshes. And it was then that Phaedrus saw a faint haze of smoke hanging beyond the ridge, and said to the merchant riding beside him, ‘What lies ahead? It does not look like heath fire, though Typhon knows the furze is dry enough.’
    ‘It isn’t heath fire,’ Sinnoch said. ‘That is the smoke of the Northern Wall cooking its supper.’
    It was late into August by now, and the dust-cloud rose from the track under the ponies’ hooves, and settled slowly again after their passing; a grey bloom of dust that powdered beasts and men from head to foot, parched the throat and stung the eyes, and seemed to fur over even the sound of the bell that the train leader wore about his neck to warn off the evil eye. And Phaedrus, constantly on the move to and fro along the plodding line, enviedVron, who had been Sinnoch’s fore-rider for a score of years, ambling ahead on his small, ragged pony, his feet almost brushing the ground on either side, his old sheepskin hat hanging loose and easy on the back of his head.
    It was a very small pack-train, only four burdenbeasts and the three riding ponies; for Sinnoch was a horse-trader before all else. Once a year he made the trip south with a score or more rough-broken three-year-olds, herded by drovers on little shaggy ponies much as sheep-dogs herd their flock. He would give the lads a few days to make Corstopitum a still wilder place than it was the rest of the year, and then send them north again, and himself follow later with no one but Old Vron and maybe one other, his ponies’ yellow balecloths laden with a few luxuries chosen with care and long experience of knowing his market: a few fine bronze weapons, ornaments of amber and jet, a cup of violet-coloured glass, a length of emerald silk, a couple of jars of Etruscan wine slung one on either side of a pack-saddle.
    Phaedrus had asked him one day why he did not keep the drove-boys with him