Book Review: Mark of the Horse Lord
At the beginning of Mark of the Horse Lord, the gladiator Phaedrus receives his wooden foil and is swiftly cast adrift into the world. But he doesn’t drift long before he finds himself recruited by some Dalriadain tribesmen: Phaedrus is the spitting image of their lost prince, and they want Phaedrus to impersonate said prince in order to take back the Dalriadain rulership from the usurping queen.
Naturally, this involves marrying the usurping queen’s daughter Murna. It’s not a proper Sutcliff book if no one is forced to marry!
Actually I’m quite fond of Murna - I think she may be my favorite thing about the book, with her conflicting loyalties. She helps her mother escape, but later helps Phaedrus and the Dalriadain fight against their former queen.
There is an underlying consistency to these actions: both are attempts by Murna to win and maintain some kind of independence from her mother’s emotional domination, which she describes to Phaedrus in a chilling passage about how she retreated inside herself, sometimes even beyond her own conscious thoughts, to try to maintain herself as a separate human being. (Murna’s description of her relationship to her mother reminded me somewhat of Sutcliff’s description of her own mother in Blue Remembered Hills.)
Plus, of course, Murna has a sword, and she knows how to use it. The scene where she and her women do their sword dance as a mixed honor and insult for the obnoxious envoy is a thing of beauty.
Murna is also the occasion of probably Sutcliff’s most egregious moment of “WTF how do you not notice that what you are saying about gender is completely the opposite of what this story has actually shown?” Phaedrus and his BFF Conory discuss the possibility that Murna might know Phaedrus is an imposter and might nonetheless feel no qualms about raising their child as a true royal heir. Because women, you know! They don’t really understand honor like men do!
How do Phaedrus and Conory, who have been conspiring to fool the tribe into believing that Phaedrus is a prince, believe they are in any position to scoff at anyone else’s honor? Especially given that their actions put Murna in this awkward position in the first place? It’s not like there’s ever going to be a good moment for Murna to be all, “BTW, everyone, the guy you thought was king? Secretly just a slave gladiator! Crazy, amiright?”
Conory is alone in the Sutcliff canon, I think, as an important (and positive) character whose self-presentation is - at least to Phaedrus’s Romanized eyes - very feminine. The first time he sees Conory, Phaedrus all but falls of the dais in horror. Conory’s wearing eye makeup! And bangle bracelets! And he’s curled his hair! Like a girl! (Eventually he realizes Conory is awesome and they become BFFs despite Phaedrus’s initial recoil.)
I wonder how much of Conory’s self-presentation is personal taste and how much of it is a result of trying to make the queen underestimate him…and how much of it is simply a cultural misunderstanding. When they’re teaching Phaedrus how to recognize everyone, none of the conspirators tell him, “You’ll know Conory, he’s the girly one,” even though that would seem to be a much easier way to recognize him than “his eyebrows are uneven.”
***
Also - I feel so proud of myself for noticing this allusion, I have to share - there’s a scene in this book that’s clearly borrowed from Kipling’s Kim: the Little Dark Person priest tries to make Phaedrus see a crust of barley bannock as a bird feather, but Phaedrus, to the priest’s stunned surprise, shakes off the illusion.
Naturally, this involves marrying the usurping queen’s daughter Murna. It’s not a proper Sutcliff book if no one is forced to marry!
Actually I’m quite fond of Murna - I think she may be my favorite thing about the book, with her conflicting loyalties. She helps her mother escape, but later helps Phaedrus and the Dalriadain fight against their former queen.
There is an underlying consistency to these actions: both are attempts by Murna to win and maintain some kind of independence from her mother’s emotional domination, which she describes to Phaedrus in a chilling passage about how she retreated inside herself, sometimes even beyond her own conscious thoughts, to try to maintain herself as a separate human being. (Murna’s description of her relationship to her mother reminded me somewhat of Sutcliff’s description of her own mother in Blue Remembered Hills.)
Plus, of course, Murna has a sword, and she knows how to use it. The scene where she and her women do their sword dance as a mixed honor and insult for the obnoxious envoy is a thing of beauty.
Murna is also the occasion of probably Sutcliff’s most egregious moment of “WTF how do you not notice that what you are saying about gender is completely the opposite of what this story has actually shown?” Phaedrus and his BFF Conory discuss the possibility that Murna might know Phaedrus is an imposter and might nonetheless feel no qualms about raising their child as a true royal heir. Because women, you know! They don’t really understand honor like men do!
How do Phaedrus and Conory, who have been conspiring to fool the tribe into believing that Phaedrus is a prince, believe they are in any position to scoff at anyone else’s honor? Especially given that their actions put Murna in this awkward position in the first place? It’s not like there’s ever going to be a good moment for Murna to be all, “BTW, everyone, the guy you thought was king? Secretly just a slave gladiator! Crazy, amiright?”
Conory is alone in the Sutcliff canon, I think, as an important (and positive) character whose self-presentation is - at least to Phaedrus’s Romanized eyes - very feminine. The first time he sees Conory, Phaedrus all but falls of the dais in horror. Conory’s wearing eye makeup! And bangle bracelets! And he’s curled his hair! Like a girl! (Eventually he realizes Conory is awesome and they become BFFs despite Phaedrus’s initial recoil.)
I wonder how much of Conory’s self-presentation is personal taste and how much of it is a result of trying to make the queen underestimate him…and how much of it is simply a cultural misunderstanding. When they’re teaching Phaedrus how to recognize everyone, none of the conspirators tell him, “You’ll know Conory, he’s the girly one,” even though that would seem to be a much easier way to recognize him than “his eyebrows are uneven.”
***
Also - I feel so proud of myself for noticing this allusion, I have to share - there’s a scene in this book that’s clearly borrowed from Kipling’s Kim: the Little Dark Person priest tries to make Phaedrus see a crust of barley bannock as a bird feather, but Phaedrus, to the priest’s stunned surprise, shakes off the illusion.