But of all the scene before me, the thing that claimed and held my gaze was the pale checkered smudge of a town on the far-distant coast. Narbo Martius; and somewhere among its horse guards and in fields, the stallions and brood mares that I had come to buy; the horses of my dream.
AT sunset, with the dust haze that rose from the hooves of the pack beasts turned to red-gold clouds in the westering rays, we clattered under the gate arch into Narbo Martius, and found the place thrumming like a bee swarm with the crowds pouring in to the horse fair. It must have been a fine place once, one could see that even now; the walls of the forum and basilica still stood up proudly above the huddle of reed thatch and timber, with the sunset warm on peeling plaster and old honey-colored stone; and above the heads of the crowds the air was full of the darting of swallows who had their mud nests under the eaves of every hut and along every ledge and acanthus-carved cranny of the half-ruined colonnades. The smell of the evening cooking fires was the arid reek of burning horse dung, such as the herdsmen burn in the valleys of Arfon.
The two or three inns which the place still possessed were already full and spilling over with merchants and their beasts, but the open spaces within the city walls had been roughly fenced off with hurdles and rope and dead thornbushes, to serve as camps for the lesser folk and latecomers, and when the trading band broke up, we found a place in one of these, where a couple of score of mules and their drivers were already encamped among their newly unloaded bales, and an ancient merchant sat under a striped canopy, scratching himself contentedly beneath his earth-colored blanket robes, while his servants made camp about him. There was of course no service of any kind, no one in charge of anything, save for an immensely fat man with green glass earrings in his harry ears, who lolled under the awning of a wine booth — it was good wine, though; we tried it later — nor was there any food for the men, though we found that fodder for the beasts could be got close by. So while Fulvius and Owain, who were our best foragers, went off to buy cooked food, the rest of us watered and tended the horses and made camp as best we could in the corner of the corral not already occupied with kicking and snarling mules.
When the other two returned, we supped off loaves with little aromatic seeds sprinkled over the crust and cold boiled meat with garlic and green olives whose strange taste I was by this time getting used to; and washed it down with a couple of jars of drink from the wine booth. Then we lay down to sleep save for Bericus and Alun Dryfed, who took the first watch.
For a long while I lay awake also, listening to the nighttime stirrings and tramplings of the camp and the city, and looking up at the familiar stars that had guided and companioned me so often on the hunting trail, every fiber of me quivering with a strange expectancy that concerned something more than the horses that I should buy tomorrow. It had been growing in me all evening, that mood of intense waiting, the certainty that something, someone, was waiting for me in Narbo Marthas — or that I was waiting for them. So might a man feel, waiting for the woman he loved. I even wondered if it might be death. But I fell asleep at last, and slept quietly and lightly, as a man sleeps on the hunting trail.
The midsummer horse fair, held on the level ground above the shore, lasted for seven days, and so I should be able to make my choice with care and maybe time for second thoughts, but by evening on the second day I had bought well over half the horses I wanted, by dint of much vehement bargaining — duns for the most part, and dark brown, so dark as to be almost black, with a white flame Or star on the forehead — and it was beginning to be harder to find what I sought, or maybe I was becoming harder to please as I grew more used to the big powerful animals that filled the selling grounds.
Yet it was on the third day that, as I pushed my way through the crowd at the far end of the sale ground, with Flavian beside me, I found the best horse that I had seen yet. I suppose he had been brought in late, when the best of the others were gone. He was a full black, black as a rook’s wing. There are more bad horses among the black than any other color, but a good black is own brother to Bucephalus. This was a good black, standing a clear sixteen hands at the shoulder, with a good broad head and high crest, power in every line of him, and fire in his heart and loins to beget some of his own kind. But as I stopped to examine him more closely, I saw his eyes. I would have turned away, but the man in charge of him, a bowlegged individual with small twinkling eyes and a lipless gash for a mouth, stayed me with a touch on my arm. “You’ll not see a better horse than this in Narbo Martius this year, my lord.”
“No,” I said. “I should think most likely not.”
“My lord would like to look him over?”
I shook my head. “That would be a waste of your time and mine.”
“Waste?” He sounded as though I had used a forbidden word, almost awed at my iniquity; and then, his voice turning soft as fur, “Did ever my lord see such shoulders? And he just five years old. . . . One was telling me that my lord sought the best stallion in Septimania — I suppose he was mistaken.”
“No,” I said, beginning again to turn away. “He was not mistaken. A good sale to you, friend — but not with me for the purchaser.”
“Na then, what does my lord find amiss with him?”
“His temper.”
“Temper? The temper of a sucking dove, Most Noble.”
“Not with those eyes,” I said.
“At least let you see his paces.” We were on the edge of the open ground where the horses were shown off, and the crowd was packed dense behind me, but I could have pushed my way through easily enough. I do not know why I hesitated; not, I think, for the stallion’s sake, magnificent as he was, certainly not for the man’s persuading tone. The finger of Fate was on me, I suppose; for the enrichment and the bitter loss that came of that moment’s hesitating have been with me all my afterdays.
The horse dealer had summoned someone from the crowd with a jerk of the head; and a man stepped forward in answer. I had seen him before, distantly, among the men who showed off the horses for prospective buyers. I recognized him by the lock of fair hair that sprang from his temple, mingling oddly with the darkness of the rest of his head; but until now I had noticed nothing else about him. Yet there was enough to notice, when one came to look. He was a very young man, maybe midway between myself and Flavian for age, but lean and sinuous already as a wolfhound at the end of a hard season’s hunting; naked save for a kilt of lambskin strapped about his narrow waist, the wool showing at the edges, and something that looked surprisingly like a harp bag was slung from a strap across his bare shoulder. But in the brief moment while he stood looking to the horse dealer for his word, the thing that I chiefly noticed was his face, for it seemed to have been put together somewhat casually from the opposite halves of two completely different faces, so that one side of his mouth was higher than the other, and his dark eyes looked out from under one gravely level brow and one that flared with the reckless jauntiness of a mongrel’s flying ear. It was an ugly-beautiful face and it warmed the heart to look at it.