Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  It was very early summer when we marched out through the Hunnum Gate, and we had numbered nearly seven hundred, counting the drivers, but the first heather was coming into flower over the moors, and we had lost something like a fifth part of our strength, when we came at last in sight of the great red sandstone fort crouched at the foot of three-peaked Eildon; Trimontium, the Place of Three Hills.

  I had drawn the war host closer as we neared the place, and sent out a handful of light horse to scout ahead. And just as we were making the noon halt they rode in again with their ponies in a smother, and their leader came straight to me, breathless and stumbling in his run. ‘My Lord Artos, they are ahead of us in Trimontium. Saxons too, for there’s one of their accursed horsetail standards peering over the wall. And Scots to judge by the glint of white shields on the ramparts.’

  I had been half expecting that. The Place of Three Hills must have been a good rallying point for them as it was a good base and headquarters for us. I called Bedwyr who was overseeing the noon issue of biscuit, and told him. ‘The wolf pack is ahead of us. We are going to have to fight for Trimontium if we want it. Pass the word to the rest.’

  But indeed the word was already running, as such tidings always do, like heath fire through the host. I sent a rider galloping back to summon up the foot and the rear guard, and when they came up with us we marched again, in changed formation ready for battle.

  But before marching, the Companions, I also, picked sprigs of the big rose-purple bell heather and stuck them into our helmets and shoulder buckles, in the way that had become custom with us.

  For a good while the fort was hidden from us by the slow moorland billows of the land between. But all the while three-peaked Eildon stood up before us, rising taller into the changing sky as the long miles passed. It was drawing toward evening when Bedwyr and I left the war host behind the last ridge, and riding forward alone, came out through the hazel and birch woods that had clothed the hills of the past day’s march, and saw the lean red menace of the old fort, no more than five or six bowshots away. The scouts had spoken truth. Heads crowded the ramparts, and there was a dark swarm about the gateway where pack ponies were hurriedly being got inside and the barricades flung up behind them, and the smoke of many cooking fires billowed sideways in the wind that had begun to rise.

  ‘I would to God I had some means of knowing their numbers,’ I said to Bedwyr, who had ridden out of the woodshore at my side. ‘The fort was built to hold a double cohort of a thousand for months on end; it would hold three or four times as many for a short space.’

  ‘So long as the water holds out,’ said Bedwyr.

  I glanced aside at him. ‘You think they mean to stand siege here?’

  ‘I think nothing – as yet – but I was ready to see them drawn up to make us welcome, on the clear ground yonder. They have had warning enough of our coming, and the Saxon at least has small love for fighting behind walls.’

  I was silent. I too should have thought to see them drawn up ready for us. It could be the siege, of course. If they were well provisioned they might be counting on the fact that we, in an alien and hostile country, would be likely to run out of supplies before they did. But there was the water; after the years that the place had been deserted, the wells had probably fallen in, and in any case, since there would be many more than the place had been built for, and the pack beasts also must be watered, it could not be long before the supply began to fail. They might of course merely be waiting for morning, believing that we should start nothing so late in the day as this. Or they might be planning a night attack of their own, when we had been lulled into a false security. I wished to God I knew. Meanwhile I remained silent for a while, taking in the lay of the land. From the shallow valley that ran down ahead of us, the land on the right rose gently in a kind of broad spur to the fortress walls, not cleared back, as it must have been in the old days, but overgrown with the wildest tangle of hazel and elder scrub. Beyond the fort and on either side, it seemed, as well as I could see, that the hillside fell away steeply as the swoop of a falcon, into the wooded river gorge below Eildon. The place, in fact, was a spur above the river, and if the three farther sides were what they seemed, only this, the southern side, could be attacked in any force.

  A blast on Prosper’s aurochs hunting horn brought no response save the ghost of an echo out of the river gorge.

  The light was beginning to fade, and the rising wind sounded like a charge of cavalry when we turned back to the others beyond the ridge. I gathered a handful of our best scouts and trackers, and gave them their orders. ‘Get down the valley and lie close for a while. As soon as the day has dimmed to half-light, work your way in close to the fort. They may have pickets posted – I doubt it, but it is a thought to keep in mind. Work around the whole circuit, and bring me back word how steep the fall of the land is on the sides that one cannot judge from here, and what possibility there may be of sending in an attack from the river side. Notice also the condition of the walls, how the gates are held, any smallest detail that may aid us in the planning of the next move. Understood?’

  When they had melted into the wind-swayed thickets, we made camp as best we could in the shelter of the ridge, leaving a few men to keep watch on Trimontium from the ridge itself; watered the horses at the stream which, rising somewhere in the high moors southward, flung its ferny loop around the far shoulder of the ridge and went purling down to join the Tweed; ate the evening meal of barley bannock and the inevitable hard yellow cheese, and settled down to wait as patiently as might be for the return of the scouting party. Sometime after dark – there was no moon that night, and the clouds were racing across the stars – they came slipping one after another out of the night and the wind-lashed woods to drop beside the campfire, and tell their story between ravenous mouthfuls of the food that had been set aside for them. There were no pickets, but also no possibility of mounting an attack of any strength from the farther side of the fort. ‘Scarce footing for the whin bushes,’ said the leader when I put it to him. But there was a deer track, and a postern gate on the north side, and in one place the wall was down to not much over the height of a man, with plenty of stone and rubble still outside to aid climbing, so that it might be possible to get a small band around that way to mount some kind of decoy attack to draw attention from the main gates. The gates themselves had rotted apart, but all of them were strongly closed with thornwork and stout timber barricades. Of the numbers of the motley war host gathered in Trimontium, save that they were very many, the scouting party had of course been able to gain no idea.

  When it was all told, we looked at each other, Cei and Bedwyr and I, in the wind-torn firelight. Bedwyr had brought out his beloved harp as he did most evenings when the food was eaten; he plucked a little inquiring flight of notes from it that seemed to leap into the wind and be whirled away like the first yellow birch leaves. ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Tonight,’ I said. ‘For one thing, we may not have a wind like this again, to cover the sound of Cei plunging through the undergrowth.’

  Indeed the wind stood friend to us that night in more ways than one. It covered the sound of our general advance as we made our way over the ridge and down through the birch and hazel woods into the shallow valley. (For though the main part of our horses were under guard on the far side of the ridge, even a few horses make more noise than many men in dense undergrowth.) It covered, with its soft turmoil among the bushes of the steep fortress hillside, the movements of Bedwyr and his dismounted squadron as they crept and clambered around beneath the red sandstone walls toward the unmended breach that the scouts had spoken of; though I think that they would have made little sound in any case, for they had laid aside their ring-mail shirts, which always chimed a little in action, however carefully one moved in them, and gone into their venture with nothing but buckler and drawn sword ... It covered the sound of brushwood and wagon straw being piled against the main barricades (five men it cost us, though, to keep it there) and when
it caught light from the firebrands that we flung into it, the wind caught and fanned the flames and roared them up and drove the licking tongues against the timbers of the barricade so swiftly that the first warning shouts had scarcely broken from the men within before the whole gateway was ablaze.

  The archers, whom we had kept standing by, had light for shooting now, and crouching among the nearer bushes began to loose with a high trajectory that carried the arrows over the ramparts on either side of the gate towers, to fall on the heads of the defenders. Some of the arrows had faming spirit-soaked rags tied to them, and their arc showed like shooting stars on a winter’s night. A few enemy arrows answered, but not many; the defenders were too intent on the gate itself to have much time for shooting (surely we had their whole attention now, and Bedwyr had his chance if ever he was to have it!). The uproar inside the gate was so wild that at one moment, sitting old Arian with my own squadron, just beyond the reach of the flame light, I was troubled lest I should not hear Bedwyr’s signal from the far side of the fort to tell me that he was ready, fearing even that he might not hear my horn sounding the charge. Where timing meant so much, we could ill afford to miss each other’s signals.

  The barricade went with a roar and a crash, and a sheet of flame leapt toward the stormy sky, its crest caught by the wind and bent over like the crest of a wave before it breaks; rags of flame were flying across the fortress; and faintly, in the moment’s stunned hush that followed the fall of the barricades, I heard the war cry of Arfon sounding across the distance and the storm: ‘Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!’ and knew that the moment had come.

  Arian was sweating; I felt him start and tremble under me, for like all horses, he was terrified of fire. All horses ... How if they refused to face the faming gateway? I should have ordered the whole assault on foot, but we needed the crash and sweep of a cavalry charge. No time for regrets or wavering now; no time to let the flames die down, though already our lads, close under the wall where the arrows and throw spears of the defenders could not reach them, were flinging on masses of fresh bracken to damp them down for the moment. The white steam hissed up, and the flame-wall sank and grew ragged as I called to my trumpeter, ‘Now, man – the Charge!’

  The familiar notes of the hunting horn leapt into the wind, and I bent forward onto Arian’s sweating neck. ‘Now! Now, brother!’ He snorted and shook his head, beginning to swerve aside, and I flung a fold of my cloak across his eyes. Blind, I knew that he would go where I urged him, because he trusted me. ‘Git up! On, boy!’ He hesitated an instant longer, and then with a defiant and despairing neigh broke forward into a canter, and I heard the hooves of the others drumming on his heels. The heat of the gateway struck at my face like a blow, the smitch of half-quenched flames choked and blinded me. My face was down against Arian’s neck, partly to shield my own eyes, partly that my voice might reach him above the tumult. I was managing him with my knees alone, the reins loose on his neck, that I might have one hand for my spear and the fold of my cloak across his eyes. I sang to him, shouted in his laid-back ear. ‘On, brave heart! Sa sa sa – up, come up, bold and beautiful! Come up, my hero!’

  And old Arian answered me like a hero indeed. He gathered himself together, greathearted as he was, and with the terror of the fire in his nostrils, galloped straight forward into the dark, through the steaming and crackling inferno of the gateway and the massed spears beyond. And after me crashed the rest, tramping the fire under round hooves and scattering the red embers like sparks from a swordsmith’s anvil. I raised the war cry, and heard it echoed back to me from across the roaring chaos of the camp. ‘Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!’ The hunting horn was sounding again, and suddenly from the heart of the camp ahead of us came the hollow booming of the Saxon war horns, and the deep throbbing snarl of the eight-foot war horns of the Scots. We charged on toward them.

  The fire arrows and torn-off flames from the burning barricades had fired the rough thatch on some of the buildings; and by the leaping wind-torn light, we charged and charged again through the solid masses of the enemy, carrying the Red Dragon of Britain on toward the heart of the camp where the war horns and the up-reared standards told us that we should come at Huil Son of Caw, his household warriors and his allied chieftains. Our foot swarmed in over the still-smoking embers that we had scattered for them, and hand-to-hand fighting had spread into every corner of the great fort. And from the northern quarter, where Bedwyr and his war band had leapt in over the crumbling wall, the war cry, taken up by a score of triumphant voices, was sweeping nearer.

  I remember little of the last phase. When once all vestige of the pattern is gone, there is little to remember of any battle save the chaos and the smell of blood and sweat that are common to all battles; and one is very tired, and not very clear in the head ... In the end they broke and streamed away – those who could – over the broken parts of the wall, leaping from the rampart walks and down the bush-grown hill scarp, leaving their dead behind them.

  The time came when the last fighting was done, and a sudden quietness fell over the great camp; and even the wind seemed to drop for the moment. Men were putting out the flames of the roofs that had caught, and I was standing beside the remains of a cooking fire, with an arm over Arian’s neck, praising and consoling him for the red spear gash in his flank. Presently, I thought dimly, I must get it bathed; presently, if there was any water. Surely there had been something about a shortage of water, a long while ago? My head began to clear slowly, and I saw Bedwyr limping toward me, with the blood trickling from a gash just above his knee.

  ‘A good hunting,’ I said, when he came up.

  ‘A good hunting.’

  ‘Any sign of Huil?’

  ‘None so far, but they have only just begun to go through the dead and wounded. There’s a good few of them.’

  ‘What of our own losses?’ (It might have been Eburacum over again, but after most battles there are much the same questions to be asked.)

  ‘So far as we can tell as yet, not heavy. I lost several men getting in from the north rampart, but most of the wolf pack was faced to your blazing gate; yet it is in my mind that that charge of yours through the flames seemed more like a lightning flash than a thing that one could strike back at.’ And then he said, ‘We’ve lost nine horses; that I do know.’

  And the last of the fog lifted from my brain. (I think, looking back, that I must have taken a bang on the head without knowing it, for that kind of heaviness after battle was not usual with me.)

  I looked at Bedwyr, scarcely noticing even when Arian muzzled at my shoulder. It was a worse loss than that of the same number of men; but there was no help for it, no help even in cursing. ‘Well, we have our winter quarters – though they stand somewhat in need of scrubbing out,’ I said. Amlodd came to take Arian from me, and I handed the old horse over, and then turned to the multitude of tasks and decisions, the general clearing up, that always wait for every commander after the fighting’s over.

  Gwalchmai as usual was serenely at work among our own wounded, gathered into a roofless barrack row; I heard a man cry out in pain, and his quiet voice in command and reassurance as I passed the tumble-down doorway.

  Some of our men were throwing the Saxon dead and wounded alike over the ramparts at the spot where the escarpment fell almost sheer to the river; but not before they held a torch to each dead face to make sure that it was not Huil Son of Caw. Our own dead were being gathered and laid aside for burial in the long grave that their comrades were digging for them among the bushes where the ground was soft. I had made it a rule, years ago, that however hard and hot the day had been, however spent our bodies or sick our heads, however near the enemy and however little time remained to dawn, no dead body should be left unburied within the camp overnight. I do not know how it is; maybe evil spirits gather to bodies left lying so; but that way comes pestilence. I have seen it happen before, especially in summer weather. There would be no attack on Trimontium for a while and a while, and save for a few picket
s, we could take the sleep we needed tomorrow.

  The searchers found more than one Saxon chieftain, and a huge Pict with the blue spirals of his race tattooed from brow to ankle, and the gold collar of a noble, lying among the dead under the blood-dabbled horsetail standard where the last stand had been made. But when the last of the enemy slain had been dealt with, there was still no sign of any man who could be Huil Son of Caw.

  ‘It is as well to have something saved for another day,’ said Cei, who had discovered a store of Saxon beer jars in one of the old store barns and was inclined to take a cheerful view. ‘Sir, will you give the order for an issue of beer all around? I’m thinking the lads could do with it.’

  For Cei was ever one to share good fortune.

  ‘Well enough,’ I said. ‘Get in a couple of the captains and half a dozen of the Company to see to it.’

  But there was more than beer jars in that barn. A short while later, one of the Companions came to me in a hurry where I was standing with Bedwyr to see the baggage train brought in. ‘Sir, my Lord Artos, we have found a girl’s body over there among the beer jars. Will you come and look?’ He was a veteran of many fights, hardened in the fire, I should have said, as any one of my Companions, but from the color of his face, I thought for a moment that he was going to spew.

  chapter thirteen

  The People of the Hills

  I CURSED INWARDLY AS I TURNED TO GO WITH HIM. IT WAS Eburacum all over again. I seemed fated always to find myself with the body of a woman to dispose of when the fighting was done. But this was no golden witch in a crimson gown.

  The men had been working by the light of a pine-knot torch, and so there was light enough to see what lay at their feet, when they moved back with an odd hush on them to let me through.