The Mark of the Horse Lord Read Online Free Page A

doors with the sculptured weapons over them, or wandering in the direction of the turf-banked amphitheatre beyond the South Gate.
    The last time it happened, he pulled up cursing, and looking about him, saw that it was dusk and a little way down the street someone had hung out the first lantern of the evening. The first day was drawing to a close, and suddenly he thought, ‘This is only one day, only the first day, and there’ll be another tomorrow, and another and another . . .’ And panic such as he had never known in the arena, where one only had to be afraid of physical things, whimpered up in him so that for a moment he leaned against a wall, feeling cold in the pit of his stomach. Then he laughed jeeringly and pushing off from the wall, turned back the way he had come, towards the narrower streets where the less respectable wine-shops were to be found. ‘Fool! You want a drink, that’s what’s the matter with you – a lot of drinks. You can get as full as a wineskin tonight, and sleep it off like an Emperor! Won’t have to be out on the practice ground with a head like Hephaestus’s forge and seeing two of everything, at first light tomorrow.’
    The first wine-shop he came to, he passed by. It was a favourite haunt of the gladiators on town leave, and he didn’t want to run into old comrades. It was odd how he shrank from that idea now – a kind of embarrassment, a feeling that they would not know quite how to meet each other’s eyes. There was only one of them he would not have minded meeting again, and he had killed him the week before last.
    Jostling and jostled by the people who still came and went along the streets, he pushed on until the ‘Rose of Paestum’ cast its yellow stain of lamplight and its splurge of voices across his way. He went in, swinging his cloak behind him with the play-actor’s swagger of his old trade, and thrusting across the crowded room to the trestle table at the far side, demanded a cup of wine. He grinned at the girl with greasy ringlets hanging round her neck, who served him, and flung down the price of the wine lordly-wise on the table, with a small bronze coin extra.
    She half moved to pick it up, then pushed it back. ‘This is over.’
    ‘Best keep it for yourself then.’
    ‘Best keep it for
your
self,’ she said. ‘I reckon you’ve earned it hard enough, lad.’
    ‘
Sa, sa
, have it your own way. This instead—’ Phaedrus leaned across the table, flung an arm round her shoulders, and kissed her loudly. She smelled of warm unwashed girl under the cheap scent, and kissing her comforted a little the coldness of the void that had opened before him in the street.
    He picked up his cup and the extra coin – she was his own kind, part of his own world, and to leave the coin after all would have been a sort of betrayal – and lounging over to a bench against the wall, sat down.
    He gulped down most of the wine at a draught, though it hadn’t much flavour somehow, and sat for a long time with the almost empty cup in his hand, staring unseeingly over the heads of the crowd towards the opposite wall and the faded fresco of a dancing-girl with a rose in her hand which gave the wine-shop its name.
    What was he going to do with the days ahead? It had been stupid, that moment of panic in the twilit street, the appalling vision of emptiness that was simply today repeated over and over again for all eternity; stupid for the beautifully simple reason that to go on living you had to eat, and to go on eating you had to work – the fat woman’s bracelet wouldn’t last for ever. What about the Eagles? Oh, not the regular Legion, the Auxiliaries of the Frontier Service? It might be worth trying, but he didn’t see old, one-armed Marius who commanded up at the Depot taking on an ex-gladiator. Well then, if he could get a job as a charioteer? Any kind of job to do with horses? But men who owned horses didn’t want free grooms and drivers when they could get a slave for twelve