Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  A knot of women sat before the doorway of the long timber hall, in the thin shade of the ancient half-sacred whitethorn tree that grew there. ‘Sa sa! The fine weather has brought the women out like midges in the sunlight,’ Cador said, as we came in sight of them. The sight was a good one to see. The dappling sunspots quivered on the blue and russet and saffron of their tunics, as the small lazy breeze stirred the whitethorn branches and brought down the first thin drifts of fading petals; and they were talking softly, like a huddle of colored birds, some of them spinning, one girl combing out wet hair to dry in the sun; while Esylt, Cador’s wife, sat in their midst, restringing a broken necklace of amber beads, with something small and mewing like a kitten in the soft folds of a fallow doeskin at her feet.

  I knew that Cador had a son, born since Ambrosius’s crowning, and named Constantine for my grandsire, but I had not seen him before, though I had heard him yelling like a hungry lamb in the women’s quarters. Cador had been ashamed to show any interest in the thing before other men, but now that he could do so without seeming eager, I think he was pleased to show it off to the stranger within his gates. At all events, his step quickened as we came into the inner court.

  Esylt looked up with a melon-shaped bead of amber between her fingers, her eyes narrowed against the watering sunlight. ‘You are come home early, my lord. Was the hunting not good?’

  ‘Good enough to show the Bear that there are other hunting runs than those of his own mountains,’ Cador said. ‘We killed twice.’ He bent down, his hands on his knees, to peer at the small squirming thing in the doeskin, then glanced aside at his woman with a snapping flash of white teeth. ‘Why then, should I not come home early from my hunting? Is it that I might find something or someone that I am not meant to find?’

  ‘There are three men hidden in the folds of my skirt, and the fourth lies there,’ said Esylt, pointing to the child with the hand in which she held the thread. ‘If you would know his father, you have but to look at him.’

  It sounded like a quarrel, but it was a game, the kind of half-fierce, half-laughing game that boys and hounds play together in mimic war. Also it was born of the fact that Cador knew that there was no one that he was not meant to find, and so could afford the jest. I had never seen a man and a woman make that kind of play together, and it seemed to me good.

  ‘So, but I cannot see it all; it might be a small pink pig. What is it bundled up like that for?’

  ‘Because the sun is westering and the wind grows cold,’ Esylt said, suddenly laughing. ‘He is much the same as he was this morning. But see, if you would have it so,’ and she turned back the folds of deerskin, so that the man-child lay naked in its nest, save for the bead of coral that every babe wears around its neck to keep off the Evil Eye. ‘There is your pink pig.’

  Cador grinned at it. ‘Small and useless,’ he said, studying to keep the pride from his voice. ‘When he comes of an age to bear his shield, that is the time when it may be worth while to have a son.’

  And for me, at his words, there was suddenly a shadow over the sky, and the hounds were on my track again.

  Cabal, who should have been a bitch for his interest in all young things, thrust forward his muzzle to snuff at the babe, and I stooped quickly to catch his collar and pull him back. He would not have dreamed of harming the thing, but it was in my mind that the mother might be frightened. And as I stooped, Maximus’s seal in my sword hilt sprang from its faulty setting, and fell into the nest of deerskin beside the babe and rolled against his far neck, to lie there an instant holding the fires of the sunset in a small fierce flame of imperial purple.

  Esylt stooped and caught it up next instant and gave it back to me, and everybody spoke at once, the women exclaiming over the lucky chance that it had not fallen somewhere among the heather, Cador peering into the empty socket of my pommel; while my men and his crowded around to see. And I laughed, and made a jest of the thing, and tossed the gem in the hollow of my hand. It was all over in the time that it takes a gust of wind to sweep up over the shoulder of Yr Widdfa and die into the grass. But an old woman under the May tree whispered something to her neighbor, and they looked from the child to me and back again, as I turned to follow Cador into the hall. And I caught the gist that was not meant for my ear. ‘It is a sign! A sign! Constantine is an emperor’s name ... ’

  That was the first time I ever saw Constantine Map Cador face to face. The last was only a few days ago – I am not sure how many, it is hard to keep count of time – when I named him as my successor before the whole war host. That was on the eve of the battle. The Lord God knows how he will bear the leadership, but he is the last of the line of Maximus, and at least he is a warrior. The choice had to fall on him ...

  ‘You had best take that down to Urian my swordsmith,’ Cador said. ‘Blades are the business of his heart, but he can make shift to bed a jewel as surely as any goldsmith of Venta Belgarum.’

  And so I went down to the lower Dun, following the directions that he gave me, and found Urian the Smith to reset the great seal for me.

  I was still standing propped in the forge doorway, watching the little bullock-shouldered smith – for I would not let the seal out of my sight until it was once more securely in its place – when a step sounded behind me, and I turned to find Fulvius, who had gone down to the coast with a couple of Cador’s men to see about our passages, coming from the direction of the stables.

  ‘Well?’ I said. ‘What fortune?’

  He grinned, the grin that even when we were boys had always made me think of the little jaunty rough-haired dogs that one puts down rat holes, and wiped the dust and sweat of his ride into streaks across his forehead with the back of one hand. ‘Well enough. I found a ship sailing for Burdigala in two days’ time, and contrived to strike a bargain with the master. She’ll be coming back with a cargo of wine, but she’s going out in ballast with only a few raw bullhides for cargo, and he was glad enough to hear of some passengers to make the trip more profitable.’

  ‘How much?’ I demanded.

  ‘An arm ring to every four heads – that’s if we don’t mind the likelihood of drowning.’

  ‘All things must have a first time,’ I said. ‘Does she leak like a sieve?’

  ‘She looks sound enough, but nigh as wide as she’s long. Na, I’d say on second thoughts we are more like to die of seasickness than drowning.’

  That night we sat late after the evening meal, discussing the problem of horse transport. Cador had promised to find me two suitable vessels and have them ready on the far side of the Narrow Sea by the middle of August, which, with luck, would leave us six weeks or so before the autumn gales, for the five or six trips that would be needed to get all the horses across. But the problem was how they should be adapted in such a way that they could be returned to their normal use again afterward. The Roman horse transports had been built with entry parts below the waterline, through which the horses were loaded while the vessels were high and dry, and which were closed and caulked afterward. But what shipmaster would allow his ship to have great wounds cut in her underwater body? And we could not afford to buy ships, nor build them, even if there had been the time to do so. In the end it was decided that part of the decking must be torn up, and the horses drugged and slung into the holds by means of slings and pulleys, the deck planks being replaced after them. It was a desperate measure, and I think we all prayed to God that it would not result in the deaths of either men or horses; horses almost more than men, for they would be harder to replace. But there was no alternative that any of us could see.

  The next day, leaving Cabal chained in an empty byre and howling his furious despair behind us, we rode down to the coast. (It was the only time in his life that he was parted from me, and I felt much like a murderer.) And on the morning tide of the day after that, we sailed for Burdigala, packed close into the space left by the stinking bullhides, in a vessel that, as Fulvius had said, was almost round, and wallowed like a sow in litter, int
o the troughs of the seas, so that one wondered at each weltering plunge whether she could ever shake clear again in time for the next crest. We were very wretched, and presently we lost count of time, so that we had little idea of how many days we had been at sea when at last, having neither foundered nor fallen in with Sea Wolves, we ran into the mouth of a broad Gaulish river. When we came ashore I was surprised to find, never having been to sea before, that the wooden jetty heaved up and down beneath my feet with the long slow swing of the Atlantic swell.

  At Burdigala we found a party of merchants gathering for the next stage of the journey, for it seemed that to the horse fairs of Narbo Martius, the merchant kind gathered from all over Gaul and even from the nearer fringes of Hispana beyond the mountains that men call the Pyrenaei; not only horse traders, but those who came to trade among the horse traders, in anything from sweetmeats to swords and painted pottery to ivory Astartes and cheap horoscopes. We joined ourselves to this party, and while we waited for the latecomers, set about buying the nags that we should need for the next stage. We picked small sturdy brutes, with no looks or graces to add to their price, yet such as we might be able to sell again at Narbo Martius without too much trouble. I had thought that the strange tongue might make bargaining difficult, but everyone spoke Latin of a barbarous kind – at least it sounded barbarous in our ears, but maybe ours sounded as barbarous in theirs – and with the aid of a certain amount of counting on our fingers and shouting, we managed well enough. They are a goodly people to look upon, the Goths; tall men, some as tall as I am, and I have met few men of my own height in Britain; fiercely proud, fair-haired but with more of yellow and less of red than our own mountain people have. Strange to think that these loyal vassals of the Eastern Empire were the great-grandsons of the men who, seventy years ago, had sacked Rome and left it a smoking ruin. If they had not done so, perhaps the last Legions would not have been withdrawn from Britain ... But there is no profit in such speculating.

  The last comers joined the band, and we set out for Tolosa.

  All the wide valley of the Garumna seemed, as we made our way eastward along what remained of the old road, to be wine country. I had seen a few vineyards, mostly falling into neglect, clinging to a terraced hillside here and there throughout southern Britain, but never great stretches of vine country such as this. A smaller, darker people than the Goths were at work tying the vines along the roadside, and from time to time we could see the great river that cast its gray sinuous curves across and across the countryside – but myself I have always loved best a mountain stream.

  On the fifth evening, our numbers swollen by other, smaller bands that had joined us on the road, we came in sight of Tolosa where the distant mountains began to thrust up into the sky. We spent a day there to rest the horses and mules before the roughest part of the journey and get in supplies for ourselves. Everything for four camps among the mountains, said the fortune-teller, who had taken that road many times before, and liked to bestow advice. And next morning, our numbers increased still further by the men who had joined us in the town, we rode out again with our faces to the hills.

  As the road lifted, and the vast vale of the Garumna fell behind us, the tall crests of the Pyrenaei, deeply blue as thunderclouds, marched in a vast rampart across the southern sky. But by the second day I saw that we should not touch the mountains; they rose on either hand, maybe twenty miles away, and between them lay a lesser hill country through which the broad paved road ran, terraced sometimes, or causewayed across a ravine, toward Narbo Martius and the coast. We jogged on at the same slow pace, pausing in what shade we could find during the heat of the day, passing the nights huddled about our fires, for even in summer it could be chill at night, while the beasts stamped in their picket lines at the distant smell of wolf, and the guard sat huddled in their cloaks and longed for morning. We – the Companions and I – slept sword in hand, with the precious riding pads for pillows. We did not distrust our fellow travelers; in such bands it is a law that no man robs his brother, for the sufficient reason that in robber country where there are broken men among the hills, any breach in the traveling band may let in the enemy, and therefore any man caught in such an act is driven from the band to make his own way, which, lacking the protection of their numbers, is likely to be a short one. None the less, there was always the risk of a night attack by the hill robbers themselves, and we were running no risks.

  But on the fifth day, without having met any worse trouble than somebody’s mule being overbalanced by its load and slithering into a ravine, we reined aside from the road into the shade of a long skein of pine trees where a brown hill stream ran quietly over a paved ford, to make our last noontide halt. And sitting in the shade after we had sparingly watered the horses, and washed the worst of the white dust out of our own eyes and mouths, I looked down over the gently dropping countryside to Narbo Martius and the sea.

  This was a different world from the vine country around Tolosa; the hillside covered with a dense mat of aromatic things – thyme and broom and stone bramble were the only ones I knew – and the quivering air was full of the hot rising scent of them and the darker scent of the pines. The land turned pale and sunburned below us, growing more and more bleached and barren as it went seaward, and the sea was a darker blue than any that I have looked down on from the headlands of Dumnonia, though I have known that the color of a kingfisher’s mantle. A little wind shivered up through the woods that followed the valleys, so that the thin scatter of gray-green trees turned to silver – wild olives, somebody said they were, later – and here and there the pale discs of the threshing floors caught the heat-drained sunlight and shone like silver coins. Strange to be in a land where one could be so sure of the weather that one threshed in the open.

  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.

  chapter five

  Bedwyr

  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 hairy 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 Martius – 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.