Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  We had snatched a few hours of sleep, and been astir at first light, with the fires fallen into ash, and after tending the horses, were gulping down our own hurried meal of hard barley bannock as we moved off into position, when the word came that the enemy were on the move – God knows how they got it through so quickly, for one could not send a beacon chain through the forest; but I thought that once just before first light I had felt rather than heard a distant rhythmic mutter of sound that might be a hollow log slapped by an open palm.

  And so now, in the chosen place a few miles north of the road, our battle line was formed, and we waited for the first sign of the enemy. I was not happy, for I have always been a cavalry leader; my ways of battle are the ways of the horse, and yet save for our light riders far out of sight on the advanced flanks, the struggle ahead of us must be fought out on foot. Impossible to use heavy cavalry effectively in this scrub woodland, though it was far less dense than a few miles farther north. Waiting with my own squadron in the reserve, a little behind the center, I looked along the battle line, wondering, now that it was too late to make any change, whether I had made the best use of my strength. I had dismounted the whole of the Company, the heaviest and steadiest troops that I possessed, and set Cei and Bedwyr to captain them in the center of the battle line. On either flank the light spearmen, and beyond again, on the outer horns, the archers and slingers in isolated groups, curved forward so that the whole line formed, as well as it could in that rough country, a deep bow to bring the advancing Wolves under flank attack before ever their center could make contact with ours. Beyond again, hidden from sight, I knew where the knots of light riders waited; and I prayed to all the gods that ever gave ear to fighting men, that no pony would betray them by whinnying at the wrong moment.

  We were strung across the neck of the watershed, making the best use of the natural slope of the country, with our left flank resting on a burn that ran down to join the young Cluta, and our right on the steep thorn-tangled scarp that dropped to the marshes of the Tweed. Behind me, if I looked southward, I should see the great hills of the frontier country, where half the rivers of Valentia were born, and through which, by way of Three Hills or its outpost fort, the roads ran to the Wall. Ahead of us opened a broad clearing where the young bracken was beginning to spring, and beyond, the forest rolled away and away like a dark sea washing about Manann the ancient heartland of the Pictish kingdoms; the Dark, the Forest, the ancient and savage and unknown; so that we stood as it were in the pass between two worlds, to hold it for one against the other.

  It was a gray spring day, early in the year for the start of the campaigning season, and the starry white wood anemones turned their shivering backs to the wind and the scuds of rain that blew in our faces and darkened the crimson of the dragon on our standard to the color of half-dried blood. I thought how Arian’s mane should be blowing back across my bridle hand, and I missed him sorely, missed his fidgeting and quickening, the thrusting urgency of him between my knees. My mail shirt dragged at my shoulders, weighing more heavily upon me with the long standing, the tramping up and down; and I wondered again if I had done a foolish thing in keeping the Companions in full war gear while dismounting them. But it was weight I wanted in the center, weight and steadiness; mobility was for the wings.

  Ahead of us the forest seemed very dark – and indeed I do not think that was fancy, for I have noticed always the same thing about Cit Coit Caledon; partly of course it is the pines, the dark slow tide of pines such as we do not know in the South, but it is the same in the thinner places where the hills and the high moorlands thrust up through the scrub of oak and birch and hazel like gaunt shoulders through the rents in a shaggy cloak; always in my mind there is this quality of darkness, of wolfish menace in the land itself. It was as though maybe it were a very old forest and crouched brooding over secrets that it would not be well for men to know.

  Something stirred behind me, and a dark shadow slid between my elbow and that of my standard-bearer. I caught the whiff of fox, and again Druim Dhu was there. ‘They are less than eight bowshots beyond the rim of the dark trees – a great host, a very great host. We shall have good hunting by and by,’ and he showed white teeth in a flash of silent laughter – his laughter was always silent, like his sister’s. With the stripes of clay and ochre ring-straking his slight brown limbs like the early light striking through the bushes, it was hard to be sure, save for his voice, that he was there at all; and then suddenly – he was not.

  But almost in the same instant, as though it were an echo or an answer to his words, we heard the roaring of the Scottish war horns, like some huge stag belling under the trees.

  I saw a ripple run through the ranks ahead of me as a cat’s-paw of wind through standing barley; and the whole center, who until now had been leaning on their spear shafts, crouched down, each man under his covering buckler, with his spear leveled in welcome to the nearing enemy.

  The wind fell away, and somewhere a magpie scolded sharply; then a long gust came booming up through the woods driving a dark scud of rain into our faces, and with the wind suddenly there was a crashing among the undergrowth that rolled swiftly nearer, and a flicker of movement all along the shore of the clearing. It strengthened and gathered form and substance and became a swarming of men under the spring-flushed trees. The Wolves were here. They set up a great shout at sight of us, and came on, keeping what line they could among the bramble hummocks and the tangle of last year’s bracken, sweeping toward us at a steady, menacing wolf lope that seemed slow and yet ate up the ground with a terrible speed. I had just time to make out the barbaric horsetail standards of the Saxons in the center, the white gull-wing gleam of the Scots’ lime-washed shields on the left wing and the brave blue war paint of the yelling Picts on the right. It was a very great war host, as Druim Dhu had said, spreading out as it seemed forever, and as they swung nearer, I felt the tremor of the ground under their feet, as one feels it when a river breaks its banks after rain in the hills, and the very rocks are afraid.

  Indeed I felt at that moment much as a man must feel who stands in the track of floodwater and sees the spate roaring toward him. I felt rooted in my heavy ring shirt, and knew that the same sense of nightmare was howling through every man of my heavily armed center.

  The foremost of the Barbarians’ rush was level with the tips of the curved horns now; and I prayed that the archers might not loose too soon. ‘Mithras, slayer of the Bull, hold back their arrow hands! Lugh of the Shining Spear – Christos, let them not loose too soon!’

  The Barbarians were well within the trap when first from one side, and then a heartbeat later from the other, a ragged flight of arrows leapt from the undergrowth and thrummed into their midst. Men pitched and fell in their tracks, and for an instant under the barbed hail the charge wavered and lost impetus; then with a yell, gathered itself together and stormed on, men stumbling and falling on the flanks where the arrows wrought most havoc. Before me I saw the tense backs and braced shoulders of the men crouching over their leveled spears ...

  A volley of light throwing axes came rattling against the bull-hide buckles of our front rank, and hard after it the enemy sprang forward yelling like berserkers upon the waiting spears. Shield rank and shield rank came together with a rolling thunder; the cries of men who had found the spears, the ring and clash of weapons and the grinding clangor of shield boss on shield boss; and the breath-held tension of the moments before had gone roaring up in bloody chaos. The Saxons were striving to take our spearpoints on their oxhide shields, jamming and bearing them down into uselessness, and in the first crash of the onslaught they were succeeding as, despite the weight, our center was forced back by the sheer ferocity of the rush. Then the Companions rallied and thrust forward again; swords were out now, and through the tumult and the weapon ring I heard Cei’s bull voice roaring to his men, and all along the center the two battle lines were locked together like two wild animals struggling for a throathold. Behind me and on either s
ide I felt the squadron taut as runners in the instant before the white scarf falls, but they were all the reserves I had, and I could not afford to fling them in too soon.

  The Companions were superb. Unused to foot fighting as they were, they were holding stubbornly to the ground that they had taken, in face of the furious pressure that was being hurled against them. Once they even thrust forward again, before they were once more slowed into clogged immobility. For long moments that seemed to stretch into an aching eternity of time, the two centers strained together, so that even above the boil of battle it seemed that one could hear the gasping breath and the throb of bursting hearts. Men were falling on both sides behind the shield-walls, tangling the feet of the living, as the long death-locked battle mass heaved and swayed to and fro, with never more than a stride’s length lost or won. God alone knew how long that hideous grapple might last, draining us of men, with nothing gained, and I knew that the moment to fling in the reserves had come. I put up my hand in signal to the trumpeter beside me, and he raised the aurochs horn on its baldric and sounded the charge, clear and high above the surf-roar of battle. It was the charge for the outlying cavalry knots as well as for us, and as we burst forward I was aware of a new sound swelling the tumult; the swift drub of horses’ hooves sweeping in from the wings.

  The struggling ranks ahead parted to let us through, as foot parts to let through a cavalry squadron. We had taken the blunt-ended wedge formation, and like a wedge we drove on into the battle mass of the enemy, yelling the old war cry, ‘Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!’ Chins driven down behind our shields, gray mailed wedge broadening behind the Red Dragon, we drove forward deeper and deeper into the Saxons, while at the same time – though I had no thought to spare for them now – the little bodies of horse had charged in on flank and rear, driving the Barbarians down upon our wedge. Archers and javelin men, tossing aside their now useless weapons, drew sword and closed in from either flank. The Wolves were driven in on each other, becoming so densely packed that each man’s shield hampered his comrade’s sword arm, and the dead clogged the feet of the living, and all their valiant efforts to force their way on only drove them the more deeply to our iron wedge.

  Even now I am not sure how the day would have gone had the enemy been one war host, instead of four, each with their own ways of fighting, with little idea of how to combine, and nothing save courage and savagery in common between them. As it was, quite suddenly their battle mass began to waver in its forward thrust as its ranks thinned, and at last the moment came when with one supreme effort, with a slow long straining heave, we seemed to lift and upsurge and spill over them. Then, split well nigh in two by our wedge, overwhelmed and battered blind, they broke and gave back and began to stream away, trampling their own dead and wounded underfoot, trampled down in their turn by the small unshod hooves of the light cavalry.

  We broke forward after them, cutting them down as they ran. Among the Saxons, only the great ones wore ring mail, while the lesser folk had no better body armor than a leather jerkin, and that only if they were lucky; the Scottish warriors, save again for their nobles, had little more, and the Picts, from the greatest to the least, had flung themselves into battle naked save for a leather loin guard. Yet some would not run but stood to face us, or retreated step by step, still fighting, and were cut down in their tracks, still proud beyond yielding. The hummocky ground among the bushes was clothed with trampled dead, and as we thrust on, I was aware of others running beside the war host; little shadows that slipped low from tree to tree. Something passed my ear with the high whine of a gnat, and the Saxon in front of me ran on a few steps with a small dark arrow no bigger than a birding bolt quivering between his shoulders, then dropped and lay writhing. The light riders were taking over the chase from us now, and I called off the Companions as one calls off hounds; most of them could not have heard me, and I dared not use the horn to sound the Retreat, for that would have called off the others also; but one by one, finding the chase taken up from them, they were dropping out, panting in their heavy war gear, wiping reddened sword blades on handfuls of long grass, turning back to me, gathering into their squadrons again. The sounds of the pursuit were dying away, and the wind and the soft chill rain still came scudding down from the north over our hunched shoulders as we turned back to our battle line and last night’s camp beyond.

  ‘Look there,’ said Bedwyr, suddenly walking at my shoulder. ‘And there—’ He pointed. And there was a man lying among the dead with a little dark arrow in his back; and then another man, and another ...

  ‘The Old Woman said they were the viper that stings in the dark,’ I said. ‘The pursuit is in sure hands, it seems.’

  It is in my mind that that was the cruelest fight I ever fought. It cost us dearly, too, for our own battle line was marked out now with its random line of bodies, piled in places two and three deep. More than fifty of the Companions died that day, apart from the auxiliaries, and jaunty little Fulvius lay among them, taking part of my boyhood with him; and Fercos who had followed me down from Arfon in the first spring of the Brotherhood. I looked up at the faint brightness beyond the drifting cloud wrack overhead, and saw that it was not yet much past noon.

  The sun was still above the western moors and the weary work that follows battle not yet completed, and I was with Cei and Gwalchmai snatching a brief respite beside one of the watch fires while the tatterdemalion gaggle of women who had followed us as usual got some kind of meal together, when a crashing and rattling came through the undergrowth as though some great beast were heading our way, and as I turned quickly toward the sound, a man rolled, or rather was thrust, into the firelight. A tall man, naked and war-patterned with the Pictish woad, with a mane of tawny hair and frowning tawny eyes, who stumbled and almost fell, then caught himself proudly erect once more. I saw that he was dripping blood from a wound in the left knee; his hands were twisted behind his back and he was surrounded by a knot of little dark warriors. In the first moment of seeing him as he stood there in their midst, I thought suddenly of some proud wild thing brought to bay by a pack of little dark hounds, save that no hounds were as silent or as deadly as those that thronged about him.

  ‘My Lord Artos,’ one of them said, and I saw that it was Druim Dhu, ‘we have brought you Huil, the spearhead of your enemies. Here is his sword,’ and he stooped and laid it at my feet.

  The man in their grip was far spent, panting like a beast that has been run hard; sweat gleamed on his forehead when he raised his head to give me look for look, flinging back the tawny hair that he had no free hand to thrust out of his eyes.

  ‘Is that true?’ I demanded.

  ‘I am Huil, Son of Caw.’ He gave me the answer in Latin little worse than my own. ‘And you, I know, are he that they call Artos the Bear, and I am in your power. That is all that we need to know, you and I. Now kill me and be done with it.’

  I did not answer at once. The man before me was not a Great One in the way of Hengest, but he was a man whom other men follow; I am such a one myself, and I recognized the kind. He was too dangerous to let go free, for if I did so, men would gather to him again. There were three courses open to me: I could have his sword hand struck off, and let him go. None of his own would follow a maimed leader, for by their way of thinking to do so would be to run upon disaster. I could send him south to Ambrosius, safely chained like a wild beast for the arena; or I could kill him now ...

  ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked, and the question sounded stupid in my own ears.

  ‘Revolt against my rightful Lords and masters?’ He looked at me with something of laughter even in his despair and white exhaustion. ‘Maybe because, like you, I would be free, but for me, freedom is a different thing.’

  Others were gathering about us to look on, his name running from one to another, but he never spared them a glance; his fierce tawny gaze held unwavering to my face, as though he knew that it was the last thing he would see. ‘Kill me now,’ he repeated, and the tone was an order. ‘But s
trike from in front; I never yet took a wound in the back, and even in death a man has his vanities. Also let you first unbind my hands.’

  ‘There is nothing to bruise any man’s vanities in dying with his hands bound,’ I said. I have wondered since whether I was wrong, but at the time I was taking no risk. I made a small gesture to Cei, who had stepped forward, his own sword drawn, to the captive’s side. Huil Son of Caw smiled a little, confronting the blow with open eyes. Under the blue war patterns I saw how white his skin was, where the brown of the strong neck ended at the collar bone; white as a peeled hazel nut – until the red fountained out over it. The blow was swift, and he made it swifter by leaning to meet it.

  That was the only time I ever had to do that particular thing.

  We cut his bound hands free, then, and later, when our own dead had been laid away, we gave him honorable burial, deep against the wolves, and his sword with him. Only we raised no mound or cairn to mark the spot for a place of gathering. The wind was dying away and the rain turning soft and steady, what the folk of the Cornlands call a growing rain, as Cei and I turned away from the dark plot of newly turned leaf mold.

  ‘It is in my heart that we shall not need to fight another pitched encounter among these hills,’ Cei said. ‘Your sword hand is something heavy.’

  ‘There are more Wolves in Caledonia than died today.’

  ‘Truly. But I think that they will not again face the Bear as a war host in open battle. Better from now on, to look for the ambush behind the hill shoulder and the knife in the back, Artos my friend.’

  chapter fifteen

  Midsummer Fires

  CEI WAS RIGHT. THERE WERE NO MORE ENEMY HOSTINGS, no more pitched battles among the lowland hills. Instead, from that time forth began a different kind of war, a war of raids and counter-raids, a patrol ambushed and cut to pieces in the hill mists, a village burned out in return, a stream poisoned by having dead bodies dumped into it ... It was more wearying than any campaign of open fighting could have been. For one thing it never quite ceased, even in winter, and so there was never a time when one could sit back and sigh and loosen the sword belt. That first summer and autumn I was striving by every means in my power to strengthen my hold over the great boss of lowland hills that was the chief barrier between the northern wilds and the rest of Britain; gaining the friendship, where I could, of the surrounding British chieftains, putting the fear of the gods into those that needed it. Presently I must follow up Cit Coit Caledon by turning on the last coast settlements to drive back the Sea Wolves, as I had done around Lindum. But first the lowland hills must be secured. And we carried fire and avenging sword and the terror of heavy cavalry that they had never known before, among the Duns and villages and the old turf-walled hill forts west and northward even into the heart of the Pict Country.