The Mark of the Horse Lord Read Online Free

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2
C ORSTOPITUM BY N IGHT
    HE STOOD OUTSIDE the gateway of the Gladiators’ School, under the sculptured helmet and weapons of the pediment, and pulled his cloak round him against the chill mizzle rain that was blowing in from the moors. It was a new cloak, very fine, of saffron-coloured wool with a border of black and crimson and blue, and had been given him by a certain admiring merchant who had seen him kill Vortimax and win his wooden foil. A tall man, dried and withered and toughened like a bit of old weather-worn horse-hide, but with heavy drops of silver and coral swinging in his ears. He had brought his gift in person, on the morning after the games, and stared into Phaedrus’s face as he gave it, so intently that the gladiator laughed and said, ‘You’ll know me another time, even if I should not be wearing this sunburst of a cloak!’
    And the man had lowered the fine-wrinkled lids over his eyes, but gone on staring, under them, and said, ‘Aye, I’d know you another time,’ with something in his tone behind the words that had made Phaedrus suddenly wary. But he had kept the cloak; it was a rich cloak and he had not lived four years in the Gladiators’ School without learning never to turn down a gift.
    He looked up the street towards the transit camp, and down the street towards the baths and the lower town, wondering which way to go, now that all ways were open to him, and feeling suddenly a stranger in the town that he knew as well as he did the cracks in the wall plaster beside his sleeping-bench. Well, no good standing here all day; he must find another sleeping-bench. He hitched up the long bundle containing his few possessions, including the wooden foil, and set off down the street, limping because the half-healed gash on his knee (they had kept him until it was half healed; a clear fortnight) was still stiff.
    He found lodgings at the third attempt, a filthy room in a house down by the river, kept by an ex-army muledriver with one eye, and leaving his bundle there, went out again to the baths. He had the full treatment, with a breath-taking cold plunge after the scalding steam of the Hot-room, and then lay like a lord while a slave rubbed him with scented oil and scraped him down with a bronze strigil; finally, he had the tawny fuzz of his young beard shaved. It cost a good deal, but there was the fat woman’s bracelet and a few other bits and pieces in the small leather bag which hung round his neck, and in the circus one got out of the way of saving for tomorrow in case there was no tomorrow to save for. Also it helped to pass the time.
    But the Depot trumpet was only just sounding for the noon watch-setting when he came out again into the colonnade. Two or three men strolling there looked at him and said something to each other, recognizing him. The rain had stopped and a pale gleam of sunlight was shining on wet tiles and cobbles and drawing faint wisps of steam from sodden thatch. He went down the colonnade steps, the red hair still clinging damply to his forehead, and the beautiful cloak, flung back now from his shoulders, giving him a kind of tall, disreputable splendour like a corn-marigold, and strolled off along the street as though he were going somewhere, because he knew that they were still watching him.
    For the next few hours he wandered about Corstopitum. He bought a brown barley loaf and strong ewe-milk cheese at a stall, and ate them on the river steps in another scurry of rain, and then wandered on again. He was free! A free man for the first time in his life! His official manumission, signed by the circus master and a magistrate, in the small bag round his neck, his name struck off the muster roll of the Gladiators’ School with the words ‘Honourably discharged’ instead of the more usual ‘Dead’ against it. No man was his master, there was nowhere that he must report back to after his day’s leave. Yet more than once that day he found himself back at the double