Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘Don’t go!’

  I shook off his hand. ‘I must.’

  ‘She has laid her spell on you! Don’t you understand what she is? If you go with her you’re risking your soul!’

  I had thought of that, too. ‘I do not think so; but in any case, I must go.’

  ‘At least let me come with you,’ Bedwyr said, standing with my sword and dagger in his hands.

  I shook my head, but I think I felt less steadfast than I seemed. ‘This is a thing for one man alone ... I am ready.’

  We went out through the narrow northern gate, leaving a hushed camp behind us; the girl moving ahead and I following. The young warriors, silent as they had come, insubstantial now as shadows, as though they had lost all reality when the firelight ceased to touch them, moved behind me and on either hand. From the foot of the fortress wall the hillside dropped almost sheer to the river, thinly covered with broom bushes, hazel and bramble scrub. ‘This way,’ said the girl. ‘Come,’ and dropped from sight almost as though over a cliff. I followed, and found my feet on a faint path, half lost, narrow and precipitous as a wild-sheep track, that swooped down through the scrub.

  ‘Come,’ said the girl again; and the shadow-warriors fell back into single file behind me, as we started down. It seemed to me that we followed many paths that night, the thin faint trails made by the deer and the Dark People before ever the Legions drove their roads north. We crossed the road once, and running water at least twice – not the Tweed, but little swift hill streams coming down to join it. It seemed a very long way, but I realized afterward that the girl had led me by ways as twisting and mazy as the dance of a marsh light, and maybe my own weariness made it seem farther still, for I had ridden far and fought hard since last I snatched an hour’s sleep. And dawn was spreading up the shining wind-tumbled heights of the sky, when at last we came up by some small patches of oats and barley, over a last shoulder and the open moor, into a shallow upland hollow where three small lost valleys came together.

  A little below us, toward the far side of the hollow, where I suppose there was some shelter from the wind, I saw what looked in the first moment like a cluster of small bush-grown barrows – I had seen such a barrow torn open once in my boyhood, when a stream had burst its banks in sudden spate and changed course; and in the heart of it there was the skeleton of a man crouched on his side as a child lies in the womb, and a bronze dagger and an amber necklace. But almost in the same instant as I checked, looking down in the growing light, I saw the pale blur of peat reek rising from among the bushes.

  ‘This is my home,’ said the girl, looking back over her shoulder. ‘I am sorry the way has seemed so long.’

  And we dropped into the hollow where the newly roused little dun cattle lifted their heads to stamp and stare at us as we passed, forded the stream under its stunted moss-grown elder trees, and followed the path that led to the village or steading. Heather washed to the very foot of the turf wall that fenced it around, and even when we passed within, and the small prick-eared hounds came out yawning their pleasure at their lords’ return, the dwarfed bushes and briers that grew on the humped turf roofs still gave the place the air of a thicket. The girl made for the largest bothy, which stood, a mere turf hummock with a stunted whitethorn springing above its door hole, in the midst of the others. She ducked into the darkness under the roughly carved lintel beam, and I, following, had to crouch almost onto all fours to make my own way through the hole which was more like the mouth of an animal’s lair than a houseplace doorway. The fetid smell that came out of the gloom was animal, too, the same foxy smell that clung about the girl herself, and the thick peat reek caught at my throat and for the moment blinded me, so that if the girl had not cried out a warning, I must have plunged headlong down the four uneven steps within. As it was, I groped and stumbled my way down them awkwardly enough, and found even when I had reached the foot, that I could not stand upright under the willow spears that upheld the roof.

  The young warriors and their dogs entered behind me, and with their coming the place grew very full. My sight had begun to clear, and blinking, I saw the folk who were huddled there already; a couple of graybeards and three or four youngish women, and a tumble of dogs and children about the newly awakened central fire. The warriors who had returned last seemed to be all the young men that there were in the place, and I wondered if they were indeed brothers, or if the girl had used the term simply as we of the Company sometimes spoke of ourselves as a brotherhood. I never came completely to understand the relationships of the Dark People, maybe because they do not marry as we do, but seem to hold the women in common.

  The girl had gone straight to a white-haired old woman who sat or rather squatted on a low stool beside the fire; a creature obscenely fat, thick-haunched and bag-throated and panting, like an immense toad; and flinging herself on the ground before her, burst into a quick torrent of words in her own tongue. I could understand nothing of it, but I knew that she was telling the old woman of all that had passed at the fort; and the huddled men and women in the big bothy listened to her and watched me. I was increasingly aware of their eyes watching me, seeing, as it were, without giving anything of themselves in return; while the girl and the old woman spoke together, question and answer, question and answer, in that quick dark tongue that reminded me of the patter of thunder rain on broad leaves. The young women against the walls had begun to rock themselves to and fro, wailing softly in the beginning of ritual grief. The place grew stifling so that there seemed no air to breathe, only the peat reek and the stench of fox.

  At last the old woman looked up, shaking the cobweb hair back over her shoulders, and beckoned to me with a crooked earth-colored finger. I came and stood before her, with my head bent under the roof, and she craned back her head and beckoned again, downward this time. ‘Down, kneel down, Sun Man. How may I see you, let alone speak with you, while you stand above me with your shoulders thrusting off the roof?’

  ‘Do as she says,’ murmured the girl. ‘She is the Old Woman.’

  I knelt down, squatting onto my heels so that my eyes were not so much above hers as she sat on her stool, and she leaned forward, peering into my face with bright toad’s eyes. ‘You are he that they call Artos the Bear?’

  ‘I am Artos the Bear, Old Woman.’

  ‘So, they said that you were tall as a fir tree, and mouse-fair, and they spoke truth. They said also that you come to drive the Painted People north again, and the Sea Wolves back into the sea.’

  ‘Who are they, Old Woman?’

  ‘The wild geese when they fly north, maybe, or the wind through the hill grasses.’ She reached out suddenly and set her hands like twisted claws on either side of my face, drawing it close to her own. Her breath smelled of wild garlic and old sick flesh, and I wanted to look away from the dark eyes with their opaque bloom of light. Even now I am not sure whether I held her narrowed gaze because I would not look away, or because I could not if I had tried. ‘And so she is dead, the little one,’ she said at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you laid her in a pit with nine war-horses piled above her.’

  ‘If I had known that her own kind would come for her, I would have done otherwise.’

  ‘As to that, the earth will be as warm and dark for her there, as in the Long House of the Mother.’ Her eyes still held mine, and the wide toothless toad’s mouth worked a little. ‘How did she come to the Great Sleep?’

  ‘As to a way of escape, at the last.’ I heard my own voice saying: ‘She had been vilely used, and by many men, but though they would surely have killed her in the end, I think that she found her own freedom before that.’

  ‘So, you too have something of the Old Wisdom, the Earth Wisdom in you, Sun Man ... And indeed you speak the truth.’ Suddenly I felt my gaze released, as though she had seen all that she needed to see, but the touch of her hands was still on either side of my face. Then she released that hold also, and dropped them into the fine blue-stained marten ski
ns on her lap. ‘She is not the first of our kind to take that way into death ... Men have always hated us; that is because they are fools, and always fools hate what they fear; but for the most part they have left us alone. But these men that swarm now in our hills, with them it is another thing, the Sea Wolves and the Pirates from the West and the Painted People. They think that because we are small they can crush us and so crush the fear too. They think also that there is gold in the place where we bury our dead. They burn us out as one burns out unwanted bees at the start of winter.’ (I thought of Irach, who had eaten his father’s courage, and the small burned-out village above the road from Deva to Eburacum.) ‘They drive off our cattle and our women. This place is well hidden, and so far we have been safe from them, we small kindred. But now we too have our sorrow to avenge.’

  She was silent, and I grew more aware of the thin high keening of the women, and one of the warriors drawing in his breath with a sharp hiss.

  ‘Are you afraid of us, Sun Man?’

  ‘A little,’ I said. ‘But I have come in under your roof, Old Woman, when I need not have come at all, with neither a weapon nor a bunch of rowan in my hand.’

  ‘That is true,’ she agreed, ‘and because of that, and because you are who you are and your sword is a lightning against the Sea Wolves and their kind, it may be that if you call for the People of the Hills when you have need of their aid, the People of the Hills will come to your call. We are small and weak, and our numbers grow fewer with the years, but we are scattered very wide, wherever there are hills and high lonely places. We can send news and messages racing from one end of a land to the other between moon-rise and moonset; we can creep and hide and spy and bring back word; we are the hunters who can tell you when the game has passed, by a bent grass blade or one hair clinging to a bramble spray. We are the viper that stings in the dark—’ She turned a little as she spoke, and summoned one of the young warriors with the same crooked finger with which she had summoned me. He came, and knelt beside me at her feet, not looking at her. Indeed I noticed that none of the men looked her in the eyes; she was sacred, taboo: ‘The Old Woman.’

  ‘Show the Sun Lord one of your arrows.’

  He reached to the quiver behind his shoulder, and drew out an arrow no larger than a birding bolt. It lay across his narrow palm, shafted with reed, flighted with widgeon’s feathers, and barbed with the most wonderfully dressed blue flint. It was a beautiful little thing, a child’s toy like the slender bow he carried; but as weapons of war, oddly pitiful.

  ‘It is well made, is it not?’ said the Old Woman. ‘And it flies like a bird. Be careful how you handle it, and do not touch the barb. It has only one fault, that it cannot be used for hunting – the poison remains in the kill.’

  ‘Poison?’ I had taken up the small thing to examine it more closely, but laid it back with both care and speed in its owner’s palm.

  ‘One scratch from that barb – quite a small scratch – and you would be dead in a hundred heartbeats. Therefore it can only be used against man.’

  ‘With such weapons to your hand, I find it wonderful that you have not yet driven the Sea Wolves from your hunting runs.’

  ‘If we had enough of such weapons, well might you find it wonderful. But the plants that yield the poison are rare and hard to find, and there must be three to poison one arrowhead. None the less, we have some store, and all that we add to it from now is in the hollow of your hand, Sun Lord. It is better and stronger when mixed with the black venom of hate; and we are good haters, we the People of the Hills.’

  The owner of the arrow slid it back into his quiver as casually as though no death hung in the barb, and getting up, moved back to rejoin his brothers in the shadows; and I heard him playing with a young hound, teasing it and rolling it on its back as I had done with Cabal when he was a puppy.

  ‘Old Woman, I will remember the promise,’ I said, ‘for I think that I shall need good haters and skilled hunters in the time ahead.’ I did not speak of the poisoned arrows.

  She settled back on her stool, planting her hands on her knees, clearly finished with one thing and turning to another. ‘Ah, but I grow old, and dim from walking with dreams, and forget the thing that should come first of all. You must have the Dark Drink, and the herbs to burn on the little one’s grave about your nine great Sun Horses.’ She looked down at the girl who crouched, not rocking or wailing like the rest, beside the fire. ‘Fetch them, Itha, daughter’s daughter; and fetch also the Cup, for the Sun Lord is weary, and must drink to the promise that has been made between us, before he goes again to his own people.’

  A sudden finger of chill touched me between my shoulders, as the girl Itha rose to obey. How often, in my earliest years, the woman who reared me had impressed on me the warning, ‘If ever you should be in the Hollow Hills, which the Lord of Life forbid, never let you touch anything to eat or drink. So long as you remember that, they cannot get you in their power, but one cup of milk or a crust of barley bread and you are theirs forever, and your own soul lost to you.’ It was the thing that all mothers and nurses told to all children; it was the thing one grew up knowing.

  I went on kneeling before the Old Woman, trying not to let my hands tighten on my knees, a long time, a very long time; and then the girl was back, bearing in one hand a black pottery flask and a small leather bag, and in the other a cup of age-blackened leather, bound with bronze at the rim, and brimming with drink of some kind.

  She laid the flask – which had no base to stand on – together with the bag on the filthy fern-covered floor beside my knee, and held out to me the cup. ‘Drink, my Lord the Bear, it will shorten the long way back.’

  I took the cup slowly, and sat looking down into the faintly amber depths of it, holding off the moment ... The Old Woman said, ‘Drink; there is no harm in it. Or do you fear to sleep and wake on a bare hillside and find when you return to it, the fort empty and your spear brothers dead a hundred years ago?’

  And the chill that was on me seemed to deepen, with the memory of another woman who had spoken almost those same words.

  I had drunk then – of all that she had to give; and wakened on my cold hillside, and though I joyed in the comradeship of my men, in the warmth of the sun and the balance of a sword and the willing power of my horse under me, something of myself had been on that cold hillside ever since.

  But I knew that if I did not drink, I should have lost forever the friendship of the Little Dark People, I should have failed in the thing that brought me, and maybe gained enemies as deadly as the little poison arrow sheathed so lightly. I should quite possibly have lost Britain.

  I made my stiff face smile. ‘No man fears to drink in the house of a friend – I drink to the Dark People and the Sun People.’

  I would have stood up, but under that roof I could not stand fully erect and put my head back. So I drank on my knees, draining the cup to the dregs, and gave it back into the girl’s hands. The drink was cool and without the sweetness of heather beer, a forest drink with a flame at the heart of the coolness. I have never tasted its like again.

  Then I picked up the flask and the little bag of herbs.

  ‘Burn the herbs at sunset on the little one’s sleeping place, and scatter the Dark Drink with the ashes over all, and it will be well with her,’ said the Old Woman; and then as I murmured some form of leave-taking and turned to the steep steps and the entrance hole: ‘Stay. My daughter’s daughter will go with you to lead you back to your own world.’

  This time I think we traveled straight, for we left the valley at a different point from our entering it and without fording the stream, and the three peaks of Eildon were before us all the way; while the distance was not a quarter of that which we had covered in the darkness. We came to the foot of the fortress hill and began the upward climb. The wind had died away, and in the warm sunlight among the broom bushes the midges danced in shining clouds. How we escaped the sight of the watchers on the ramparts that time, I do not know, save that the
girl Itha was with me and I suppose something of her own cloak of shadows covered us both. I know that at the time the silence from above added to my uneasiness, until vague sounds of movement and the whinny of a horse did something to ease the fear that was still chilly between my shoulder blades. We were almost under the red sandstone walls when Itha turned aside from the deer track, saying for the last time, ‘This way – come.’

  I had followed her so far that now I followed her unquestioningly this little way farther. She brought me to a small secret hollow among hazel bushes, not half a bowshot below the walls. Something in the formation of the hillside there must have blanketed sound, for it was not until I was on the very edge of it that I caught the least voice of falling water. It was only a small sound, even then, and oddly bell-like. The girl moved down into the tiny dell, and stooping, lifted aside a mass of bramble and hart’s-tongue fern. ‘See,’ she said, and I saw a minute upwelling of water that sprang out between two rocks and dropped into a pool the size of a cavalry buckler, and then disappeared under the rocks and fern again. A man might pass within his own length of the water and never know that it was there.

  ‘This is a wonderful thing,’ I said. ‘If you had not shown it to me it might have remained hidden until we came to clear the scrub.’

  ‘That was in my mind,’ she said. ‘At least it will save much water carrying uphill from the burn. The water is good and sweet ... When you have need of my people, hang a straw garland on the branch of the big alder tree that grows above the pool for watering the horses, and someone will come.’

  I was on my knee beside the water, splashing the cold sweetness of it into my eyes; and I asked, ‘Can I be sure of this tree? How do you know where we shall water the horses?’

  ‘There is one place that is clearly better than all others, where the burn comes down to join the open river, close above the ford. We water our cattle there when we move them from pasture to pasture. You will know the place, and the tree.’