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

to act as guard for his small, rich cargo, and Sinnoch had said, ‘Ah now, that would be to cry aloud to the very hills that the goods in my bales were worth taking; and what could a handful of drove-lads do against a rieving party?
Na
,
na
, it is better not to be putting ideas into honest folks’ heads.’
    A short while later they had crested the ridge, and were looking down at the Cluta marshes again, where the river flung one of its great loops northwards. A broad tongue of low, sodden land reaching far back into the hills, flaming with gorse along its backward fringes, blurred with saltings and mouse-pale dunes towards the coast. And away across the flatness of it, where the land began to rise again, was the square-set mass of a big turf and timber fort with the usual huddle of native bothies in the stockaded cantonment; and on either side, the turf banks and ditches of the Wall itself. The Wall that ended, westward, in some kind of blockhouse or signal-station far out on the marshes, and eastward, climbed away and away on to higher ground, strung with other forts – Phaedrus could make out two, from the low ridge where they had checked to breathe the ponies – until it lost itself in distance and heat-haze and the great, dust-dark Caledonian Forest that lay like a thundercloud over all the inland country. And beyond the Wall, range behind range, trembling and transparent on the sultry air, the mountains of the North, seeming less substantial than the smoke of the cooking-fires that hung above the fort . . .
    Eight years ago, the smoke hanging above the forts of the Northern Wall had been war-smoke, the dark smitch of burning timbers, rolling over dead men in the ditch. That was the last time that Dalriads and Caledones had joined spears; the second time that the Wall of Lollius Urbicus had gone up in flames. But each time it had been patched up and garrisoned again, and now the smoke was the quiet evening smoke of cooking-fires and the place looked secure and set in its ways between the marshes and the wooded hills.
    ‘A pleasant change, to see smoke rising from a hearth again,’ Phaedrus said, his mind going back over the cold hearths, the remains of deserted villages, the steadings and cattle-folds whose stones were laced together with brambles and bindweed about their doorways, that they had passed more than once on their way north. Oh, there had been living settlements, too, but even they had had a chill about them: too many old women with hollow faces, too few men, and too few children.
    ‘
Aiee!
Lollius Urbicus made a fine clean sweep of Valentia while he was about it,’ Sinnoch said. He spoke the General’s name as though it smelled: a tone which Phaedrus had heard before among the men of the North. ‘More than forty summers ago, but the scars still show.
And
still ache when the wind is in the east, as old scars have a way of doing.’
    Phaedrus glanced round, with quickly raised brows. ‘Meaning another rising, one day?’
    But the merchant, sitting loosely on the saddle rug, the great ox-hide whip resting across his pony’s withers, had nothing in his eyes but distance and heat-haze. ‘Maybe one day when and if the lowland tribes grow strong enough. That won’t be in your time or mine; Lollius Urbicus knew what he was doing when he made his demands on the province – draughts for the Auxiliaries has a fine respectable sound to it – and marched all the young men away to serve the Eagles at the other end of the Empire.’
    ‘One might be calling that a kind of murder,’ Phaedrus said thoughtfully, ‘only the murder of a whole people instead of one man.’
    Sinnoch’s voice was dryly and bitterly amused. ‘Ah,
na
, it is just the Red Crests making the
Pax Romana
.’ He whistled to the pack team, cracking the long whip above their backs to set them moving again.
    ‘And then he built his fine new Wall,’ Phaedrus pondered, as they plodded on and the choking dust-cloud rose again, ‘to say