Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘If it is a boy,’ said Ygerna, and her gaze went beyond me, as though she too were seeing past and future, ‘I shall call him – Medraut. I had a little white rat with rose-red eyes called Medraut, when I was a child. And when he is a man, I will send him to you. May you have much joy of your son when that day comes, my lord.’

  Without knowing it, my hand had been fumbling with the hilt of my sword which had lain beside me – strange that she had not disarmed me while I slept. My fingers tightened on it, and it was half out of the wolfskin sheath. A little hammer was beating in my head. ‘I should like – very much – to kill you!’ I whispered.

  She swept up from the floor, dragging back the torn breast of her gown. ‘Why do you not then? See, here is the place. I will not cry out. You can be well away from the steading before my servants find what is left.’ All at once there was a wailing note in her voice. ‘It might be the best way for both of us. Now – kill me now!’

  But my hand dropped away from the sword hilt. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I groaned. ‘Because I am a fool.’ I blundered past her, thrusting her aside so that she stumbled to her knees, and sprang for the door as though all the fends of darkness were behind me. Cabal, who had roused and come to crouch against my legs, snarling and shaking his head in a way that I remembered afterward, leapt past me into the milky daylight. The steading was already astir. I heard the milch cows lowing, and the thorn-bush had been pulled aside from the gate gap. I plunged out through it, and behind me heard the woman laughing, a wild, wailing laughter that followed me long after I had ceased to hear it with the hearing of my body.

  The mist was thinning fast, growing ragged and fitful, sometimes smoking around me as thick as ever, at others lifting to show half a hillside of sodden bilberry and last year’s heather. At the foot of the valley my feet found a track that crossed the stream and headed in the direction I needed, and I turned along it, splashing thigh-deep through the ford. Presently the distance cleared, and Yr Widdfa frowned down on me from the north, with mist still scarfing its lower glens. I knew where I was now, and turned aside into the steep hazel woods that flanked the lesser heights.

  Once I stopped to vomit; but I had not eaten that morning, and though I seemed to be retching my heart up, nothing came but a little sour slime. I spat it into the heather, and went on. Cabal ate grass in an urgent and indiscriminate way very different from his usual careful choosing, and was sick also, throwing up all that was in him with the ease of a dog. It would have been the drugged sweetmeat she gave him last night. I have wondered, in after years, why she did not poison him and be done with it, especially since she must have seen that I loved the dog. But I suppose her hatred was so focused on me that she had none to spare. Maybe she even feared to lessen its power by dissipating it.

  A long while after noon, I struck the hill track from Dynas Pharaon, and came dropping over the last hill shoulder into the head of Nant Ffrancon. Among the first birch and rowan trees I checked, and stood looking down. The valley lay outstretched below me, sheltered under the dark hills. I saw the greenness of it freckled with the grazing horse herds, smoke rising from the clustered bothies in the alder-fringed loop of the stream. It was all as it had been yesterday, when I turned here to look back; and the sight steadied me with its message that whatever happened to a man or a thousand men, life went on. Something in me deep down below the light of reason had been dreading to find the valley blasted and sickness already rife among the horse herds. But that was foolishness; I was not the High King that my doing should bring evil on the land. The doom was for myself alone, and I knew already that it was sure. However unknowingly, I had sinned the Ancient Sin, the Great Sin from Which there is no escaping. I had sown a seed, and I knew that the tree which sprang from it would bear the death apple. The taste of vomit was in my very soul, and a shadow lay between me and the sun.

  Cabal, who had been waiting beside me with the patience of his kind until I should be ready to go on again, suddenly pricked his ears and looked away down the track. A moment he stood alert, his muzzle raised into the little wind that came up from Nant Ffrancon; then he flung up his head and gave a single bell-deep bay. From below among the birch woods was a boy’s voice calling, long-drawn and joyful. ‘Artos! My Lord Arto-os!’

  I cupped my hands about my mouth and called back. ‘Aiee! I am here!’ and with Cabal leaping ahead of me, I went on downhill.

  Below me two figures came into view where the track rounded the shoulder of the birch-clad outcrop, and stood looking up; and I saw that they were Hunno and young Flavian. The old horse master flung up an arm in greeting, and Flavian, outstripping him, came springing eager as a young hound up the track to meet me. ‘Sa sa! It is good to see you safe! We thought that you might be somewhere on this track.’ He was shouting as he came within word range. ‘Did you find shelter for the night? Did you—’ He reached me and I suppose saw my face, and his voice stammered and fell away. We looked at each other in silence while old Hunno climbed toward us; and then he said, ‘Sir – what is it? Are you hurt?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, I – I am well enough. I have dreamed evil dreams in the night, that is all.’

  chapter four

  The Horses of a Dream

  I CAME DOWN FROM ARFON, HAVING SETTLED WITH HUNNO all things as to the new grazing grounds, and gathered the few fourteen and fifteen hand mares that I could find among my own horses. Having gathered also the best part of a score of tribesmen to swell the number of the Companions – fiery youngsters with small idea of obeying orders, but maybe I and the men they would be serving with could hammer that lesson into them; and they were as brave as boars and rode like the Wild Hunt itself.

  We descended upon Venta to find that Ambrosius had ridden westward to inspect the Aquae Sulis end of the old frontier defenses, and I snatched with a sense of reprievement the delay in coming face to face with him again. There were plenty of other men that I must face and drink with as though the world was still as it had been when I rode for Arfon earlier in the spring. It was hard to believe that it was still the same spring, but I had had time by now to raise a shield of sorts, and I made a good enough showing. I think that Aquila, my father in arms and horse management, guessed that something was amiss, but he was a man with the ancient scar of a Saxon thrall ring on his neck, and too deep and painful reserves of his own, ever to poke into another man’s hidden places. At all events, he asked no questions save about the horses, and I was grateful. But indeed I had small leisure for brooding, in the few days that I remained in Venta. There were arrangements to be made for the horses, my score of tribesmen to be divided among the squadrons of the Companions, under the captains best able to handle them. Arrangements also for the Companions themselves in my absence; the question of the Septimanians’ purchase gold to be dealt with. Ambrosius had already given me his promised share in weighed gold armorings – coinage meant nothing, nowadays – but what I had been able to scrape together from my own lands and even my personal gear took many forms from iron and copper currency rings to a silver brittle bit set with coral, and a fine red and white bullskin and a pair of matched wolfhounds. And the better part of one day I spent with Ephraim the Jew in the Street of the Golden Grasshopper, changing all these things, save for the hounds, into weighed gold, and haggling like a market crone over the price. Even at the end, I remember, he tried to leave his thumb in the scales, but when I pricked it up with the point of my dagger, he smiled the soft smile of his people, and held both hands up to show me that the measure was fair, and we parted without malice.

  The hounds were bought by Aquila. I do not think that he could afford them, for he had nothing but his pay from the war chest, and a wife to keep on it, even now that Flavian had become my affair. Save for his horses the only thing of value that he possessed was the flamed emerald signet ring engraved with its dolphin badge, which had come to him from his father and would one day go to his son; and there was generally a
patch somewhere about him. But I would have done the same for him in a like need.

  All the multitude of nameless preparations to be made for a long journey were made at last and with nineteen of the Company, I set out from Venta. So many would eat badly into our gold, but I did not see how we were to do with less, especially if we were to get the stallions overland to Armorica and so avoid the long sea voyage. The gold we carried sewn into the wadding of the thick riding pads, and wore above our elbows only an arm ring each for immediate use.

  Three days later we rode into this place, this place among the reedbeds and the western marshes, which the Celts among us call the Island of Apples; and found Ambrosius’s big black stallion Hesperus tethered with a few other horses among the trees of the monks’ orchard – for there were holy men here then, even as there are now, and as they claim there had been almost since the time of Christ. We tethered our horses with Ambrosius’s, under the apple trees where the grass grew sweet and tall for grazing, and followed the young brown-clad Brother who had taken us in charge, up to the long hall beside the wattle church, which formed as it were the center of the cluster of small thatched cells, like the queen cell in a humblebee’s nest. The place was thick with the smoky light of the fat-lamps hanging from the rafters, and the Brothers were already gathering to the evening meal of bread and kale broth, for it was a fast day, and Ambrosius and his handful of Companions sat with the Abbot at the head of the rough plank table. I had been dreading the meeting, fearing, I think, not so much what he might see in my face as what I might see in his; fearing in some confused and nightmare way that because I had seen the likeness to him in Ygerna, I must see the likeness to Ygerna in him. Indeed if it were not for shame, I would not have taken this road at all, but held westward by the lower way and so shirked the meeting ...

  I did not look at him fully as I walked up the timber hall, and knelt with bowed head before him, according to the custom. He made the gesture to me to rise, and I got slowly to my feet, and looked at last into his face.

  Ygerna was not there. There was a surface likeness of form and color, the dark skin and the slender bones beneath it, and the way the brows were set. It was that that had tugged at my memory with its unavailing warning. But the man whose face flashed open to smile at me out of the strange rain-gray eyes was Ambrosius as he had always been. The breath broke in my throat with relief and I bent forward to receive his kinsman’s embrace.

  When the simple meal was over, we left the Brothers to their souls and our own men to playing knucklebones about the fire, and went out, the two of us, with Cabal stalking as usual at my heel, to sit on the low turf wall that held the orchard from the marsh; and talked together as we had had no chance to since the night that Ambrosius gave me my sword.

  The moon was up and the mist rising over the marshes and the withy beds like the rising tide of a ghost sea; the higher ground stood clear of it, islands above high-water mark, rising to the steep thrust of the hill crowned with its sacred thorns; but at the lower levels of the orchard a lantern tossing its way along the horse lines had a faint golden smoke about it. The first pale petals were drifting from the apple trees, with no wind to flurry them abroad. Behind us we heard the quiet voices of the camp and the holy place. The marsh was silent until somewhere far out in the mist a bittern boomed, and was silent again. It was a very peaceful place. It still is.

  After a while, carefully keeping to the obvious, Ambrosius said, ‘So we meet on your road to Septimania.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You still feel that you must needs go yourself on this journey? You do not feel that the sorer need of you is here?’

  I was dandling my sword between my knees, looking out into the mist that crept nearer across the marsh. ‘God knows I have thought the thing over through enough of nights. God knows how bitterly I grudge a whole summer’s campaigning; but I cannot trust another man to pick my war-horses for me; too much depends on them.’

  ‘Not even Aquila?’

  ‘Aquila?’ I said reflectively. ‘Yes, I’d trust old Aquila; but I cannot find it in my mind to think that you would lend me Aquila.’

  ‘No,’ Ambrosius said. ‘I would not – I could not lend you Aquila; not both of you in one year.’ He turned toward me abruptly. ‘What of your men, Bear Cub, while you’re away?’

  ‘I lend them back to you. Hunt my pack for me, Ambrosius, till I come again.’

  For a while we talked over the mares I had chosen for my breeding herd, and the plans that I had made with Hunno, and the money I had raised off my own estates; of the defenses that Ambrosius had been riding here in the West, and a score of other things, until at last we fell silent again, a long silence while the mist and the moon rose together, until presently Ambrosius said, ‘It was good, to get back to the mountains?’

  ‘It was good, yes.’ But I suppose something in my voice rang false, for he turned his head and sat looking at me fixedly. And in the stillness, somewhere among the reedbeds the bittern boomed again, and again was silent.

  ‘But something I think was not so good. What was it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  I felt my hands tighten on my sword hilt until the pommel with its great square-edged amethyst cut into my palm, and forced a laugh. ‘More times than once, you have told me that I show all things too clearly in my face. But this time you ride your own fancy. There is nothing there to show.’

  ‘Nothing?’ he said again.

  And I turned deliberately to face him in the full white moonlight. ‘Do I seem changed in some way?’

  ‘No,’ he said slowly, consideringly. ‘More as though you found us – our world – changed; or were afraid to find it so. When you came into the holy men’s hall this evening, you held yourself as long as might be, from looking into my face. And when you looked at last, it was as though you feared to see the face of a stranger – even an enemy. It is—’ His voice dropped even lower, and all the while he had been speaking scarcely above his breath. ‘You make me think of a man such as the harpers sing of, who has passed a night in the Hollow Hills.’

  I was silent a long time, and I think I nearly told him all the story. But in the end I could not; I could not though my soul had depended upon it. I said, ‘Maybe I have passed my night in the Hollow Hills.’

  And even as I spoke, up beyond the apple trees the bell of the wattle church began to ring, calling the Brothers to evening prayer; a bronze sound, a brown sound in the moonlight, falling among the apple trees. Ambrosius went on looking at me for a moment, but I knew that he would press the thing no further; and I remained for the same moment, playing with the hilt of the great sword across my knees, and letting the quiet of the moment soak into me before I must rouse myself to go forward again. ‘If I were indeed newcome from the Hollow Hills, at least this must be the place of all others, with the bell calling my soul back to the Christian’s God ... It is a good place – peace rises in it as the mist over the reedbeds. It would be a good place to come back to in the end.’

  ‘In the end?’

  ‘When the last battle is fought and the last song sung, and the sword sheathed for the last time,’ I said. ‘Maybe one day when I am past fighting the Saxon kind, I shall give my sword to whoever comes after me, and come back here as an old dog creeps home to die. Shave my forehead and bare my feet, and strive to make my soul in whatever time is left to me.’

  ‘That is the oldest dream in the world,’ Ambrosius said, getting to his feet. ‘To lay down the sword and the Purple and take up the begging bowl. I don’t see you with bare feet and a shaven forehead, Artos my friend.’

  But even as he spoke, it seemed to me that the great purple amethyst in my sword pommel tilted a fraction under my finger, as though it were not quite secure in its bed. I bent quickly to examine it and Ambrosius checked in the act of turning away. ‘Something amiss?’

  ‘I thought Maximus’s seal felt loose in its setting. Seems secure enough now, though; probably
I imagined it ... I’ll get the next goldsmith I can find, to take a look at it, all the same.’

  But the bell was ringing louder, and the sound of singing stole down through the apple trees, and if we were to pay the Brothers the small courtesy of joining them at prayer, we must move. I got up, stirring the unwilling Cabal with my foot. ‘Up, lazy one!’ and with the hound’s cold muzzle thrusting into my hand, walked with Ambrosius up through the orchard. I thought no more about the loosened amethyst, until a later day reminded me ...

  Well before spring had given place to summer, I and my small band were in Dumnonia, and lodged with Cador the Prince, while we waited for a ship. I had thought to find him in the old frontier town of Isca Dumnoniorum, or at his summer capital on the Tamara River; but it seemed that Cador had as little liking for cities as have the Saxons, and so those few waiting days were spent up on the skirts of the high moors where he had his Dun with his warriors and his women and his wealth of cattle gathered about him, like any wild Hibernian chieftain.

  On the last evening, we came back from hunting with a couple of the proud red deer that roam those hills slung across the backs of the ponies. It had been a good day’s hunting, and for a while, just for a while, I seemed to have outdistanced certain pursuing hounds of my own. We came up to the Dun, with our shadows running far ahead of us through the brown of last year’s heather and the fragile green of the spring-sown barley; and the pleasant tiredness that comes of a day’s hunting was in all our limbs. Cabal ran at my horse’s forefoot apart from the rest of the pack. He was the greatest of them all though Cador had fine hounds, too. We clattered through the broad gateway of the Dun, and among the byres and stables of the forecourt, where the tall weapon stone stood for the warriors to sharpen their blades in time of battle, we handed over the ponies and the kill to the men who came for them, and went on together, toward the inner court.