Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  And I said, ‘That is not such a bad record. Bear with me in my injustice, Flavian, I am only a mortal man with my sins heavy on my shoulders, not an archangel.’

  ‘We are not the kind to know much about archangels, we of the Brother hood; we have thought of you always as – maybe a little larger than life, that is all,’ he said, and moved very slowly toward the doorway.

  I let him almost get there, but I could not let him go through it. I was fiddling with my sword belt, on the point of slipping it free, for I had sent Amlodd away early; then I abandoned it. I said, ‘Minnow, don’t desert me.’

  He turned instantly, and I saw by the jumping light of the seal-oil lamp, the suspicious brightness of his eyes. ‘I think I could not.’ He came back quickly and dropped on one knee to free the sword belt himself. ‘Where does Amlodd keep the silver sand? This clasp needs burnishing. He’s not such a good armor-bearer as I was.’

  But I lay awake most of the night with a bad taste in my mouth.

  In the days that followed, the life of the Dun went on seemingly much as usual, but down in the dark beneath the surface of familiar things, a wild tide was rising. No outward sign told of its rising, and had I been of my father’s world, I doubt that I should have sensed anything at all; but my mother in me knew the look in men’s eyes, and heard the dark familiar singing in the blood.

  Three days before Lammas, Maglaunus the chieftain was not in his accustomed place at supper in his high hall; but no man glanced at the empty seat with its great black bearskin spread over it, nor spoke of his absence, for we knew the reason for it. No man can take the godhead upon himself without time apart to make himself ready ... Always there must be one to wear the Horns; one to give life and fruitfulness out of his own substance, the King and the Sacrifice in one, to die for the life of the people if need be, as the Christos died. Sometimes it is a priest that becomes the Incarnate God, sometimes even a Christian priest, for in the wilds and the mountain places men do not set such rigid frontiers to their faiths as they do in cities; sometimes it is the king, the chieftain, and that is the old way, and holds within it the true meaning. Lammas fell on a Sabbath that year, and for the first part, the day was as other Sabbaths.

  Early in the morning we went down from the Dun to hear mass in the small bracken-thatched church that served both the Dun and the fisher village below it. For once, Cabal was not with me, being too much taken up with the hut where Maglaunus’s favorite hunting bitch was in season; but I remember that Pharic had his hawk with him – indeed he seldom moved far without her – and carried her still, when we reached the church door and went in under the stone lintel. There was room in the church for Maglaunus’s household, and for the small band of Companions who followed me, but for few more, and so for the most part the lesser folk of both Dun and village remained outside in the forecourt like a low-walled sheepcote. It made little difference, for they could hear all that went on through the open doorway, and at the appointed time the three monks of the Holy House at Are Cluta, who lived in the humpbacked bothy beside the church, would bring out to them the Bread and Wine.

  I heard little of the service, for with my eyes schooled straight in front of me, I seemed all the while, with every sense I possessed, to be watching Guenhumara with her maidens about her, in the women’s part of the church. When the time came for the Sacred Meal, I knew how she looked around for her brothers, for Pharic most of all, that they might go up together, and I knew that they had always gone up together. I went up next, and knelt at Pharic’s other side – his left side on which he carried his hawk; and it is so that I remember the small unvoiced battle of wills between priest and princeling, the one denying and the other maintaining the right to bring his hawk to the Lord’s Table. Clearly it was a longstanding struggle, and when after a few moments the priest lowered his eyes in defeat, it was a defeat that he had known many times before.

  The three dark-frocked brethren must have realized the chieftain’s absence, and understood its reason. They must have known, when they carried out the Host to the kneeling warriors and fisherfolk in the forecourt, that in a few hours they would be up on the moors with the Nine Sisters, stretching eager hands to an older and deeper-rooted Lord than the Christos. But they made no sign; they were withdrawn, showed nothing in their quiet faces; and I knew that they would ask no questions.

  When we came out again through the forecourt gate, with the mass of worshippers already thinning, Pharic, still carrying his hawk, was gentling the back of her neck with one finger, so that she bobbed her unhooded head, hunching her shoulders in pleasure. ‘It is a good hawking day,’ he said suddenly, and glanced about him, at his brothers and the rest of us. ‘The Lord knows we may not have many more chances before the autumn molt, and I am away up to the moors. Laethrig, my Lord Artos – Sulian – Gault – who comes with me?’ And swinging on his heel without pause for any answer, to shout for horses and others of his hawks to be brought down.

  But indeed the plan fell in with our mood well enough, for I think all of us wanted some outlet for the unrest that was growing in us, something to fill the hours until dark. And when the horses were brought and a couple more hawks, each with its familiar glove, we mounted, and gathered up a few dogs to flush game for us, and headed for the marshy glens northward, in search of heron.

  We had a good day’s hawking, but the thing that remains clearest of it in my mind came when Pharic had seemingly wearied of the sport; and lagging behind with him, while the rest moved on to try some pool farther up the glen, we came walking the horses up a long slope where the midges rose in clouds from the bracken as we brushed by, and over the crest of the ridge reined in and sat looking down into a widely shallow valley running to the marshes and the sea. Directly below us a small leaf-shaped tarn lay as in the hollow of a big quiet hand; and listening, I thought that I could catch the whistling call of sandpipers that always haunt such places. And between us and the pebbly shore lay all that time had left of an ancient steading, the ground dimpled with hollows and bush-grown mounds that must once have been bothies and byres and store pits, and showing here and there curved outbreaks of stones that had faced a turf wall, so that I was reminded of a village of the Little Dark People. But in the midst of the place, on ground a little higher than the rest, the stone drum of the old strong point, the chieftain’s tower still stood to almost twice the height of a man, and had a roof of ragged thatch.

  ‘What happened to it?’ I asked, after we had sat looking down in silence for a few moments.

  ‘No fire nor sword; not the Scots this time. The place was too prone to flooding in the winter, and some forefather of mine with a misliking for wet feet abandoned the place to build the present Dun on higher ground.’

  I had something of the story from this one and that. ‘It seems not quite abandoned, even now. So far as one may see from here, that thatch is sound enough, and someone has been cutting bracken fodder over yonder on the far side of the valley, not more than a week or ten days since, to judge by the clean yellow gleam of it.’

  ‘The herdsmen use it at the spring and autumn herding, and sometimes in the summer, on passage from one grazing ground to another. They keep a roof on the tower for shelter, and fodder for the beasts and maybe a creel or two of rye meal for themselves stowed above the house beam. It’s a humble end, isn’t it, for a stronghold that’s known the clash of weapons and the music of the chieftain’s harper – but there’s times, even now, when the place comes into its own again for a while and a while.’

  ‘And what times would those be?’

  ‘When there is a marrying in the chieftain’s line. Always it has been our custom that when the sons of the chieftain’s house bring home their brides, they must pass the first night in the old Dun. That is for courtesy to the chieftains of the older time – to bring the incoming women to their hearth.’

  I glanced around at him. ‘The daughters, too?’

  ‘The daughters, maybe, though for them it is not greeting but far
ewell. When a woman marries she goes to her husband’s hearth.’ He turned his head deliberately, and looked at me under black brows as level as his hawk’s wings when she rested on the upper air. ‘It is not forbidden to the daughters, too.’

  We looked at each other, the horses shifting under us eager to be moving on, and the little breeze that could not reach down into the midge-infested glen behind us stirred the hair on our heads and brushed through the tawny late summer grass. ‘Guenhumara has told you, then,’ I said at last.

  ‘Something – it is a matter that concerns me, after all, since if she brings you a war band for her dowry, it must be I who lead it.’

  ‘You especially?’

  ‘It is for one of the chieftain’s sons to lead such a band. Laethrig is my father’s first son, and Sulian is already knotted in a girl’s long hair, while I – I am free, and have an itch to the soles of my feet that I shall not find easement for, here in my father’s hall.’

  I looked at him in the clear upland light, the set of his head that matched that of the hawk on his fist, the hot red-brown eyes under the black brows; and I thought that he might be well right in that, and thought also that it would be good to have this frowning youngster among my captains.

  ‘I can maybe find the means for easing the soles to your feet,’ I said. ‘And if there is a like itching in the palm of your sword hand, I can find you a fine way to appease that also.’

  ‘Then while my sister is your woman, I am your man. But I forget—’ He flung up his head and laughed. He had a hard short laugh that when he grew older would be a bark like a dog-fox’s. ‘You may not speak of such matters until the Lammas torches are lit!’

  ‘It is none so simple a thing, to be faced with the offer of a wife, all unwarned, in a hall full of strangers,’ I said, ‘and with more matters than a bride-wreath hanging on the Yea or Nay.’

  ‘Sa sa, I can well believe it, and a man might snatch at any means to gain him breathing space. Only when the breathing space is past, and he has made his choice, and struck his bargain, let him abide by it, remembering that hall full of strangers, who are not strangers to the woman, but her own people, and remember that among them she has three brothers, and among those three brothers, one in particular.’

  I had liked the boy before, and I liked him the better for that clumsy threat. ‘I will remember,’ I said. And I suppose I must have shown my liking in some way, for suddenly his dark bony face lit up as though in answer, and the moment of stress was gone like a plume of thistle seed on the small soft wind.

  ‘And speaking of the Lammas torches,’ I said, ‘the shadows are growing long – time, maybe, that we were away back to the Dun.’

  He shook his head, looking back the way that we had come. ‘Ach, no need for a while yet. It is good out here; a good time of the evening, and we are none so far, across country. We can meet up with the others at the glen head, and send two or three of the young ones back with the hawks and the dogs; no need for the rest of us to be making for the Dun at all. We can ride straight over to the gathering place, and leave the horses in the little wood close by.’

  So it was that dusk had deepened into the dark, and a blurred moon was rising over the high moors, when we dismounted and tethered the horses in the hazel thicket below the gathering place, and set our faces to the steep heathery slope beyond. The little soft wind of the day had quite died away, and the sky was overspread with the faintest rippled sheet of thunder haze, and even as we climbed, there was a flicker of summer lightning along the hills. The circle of the Nine Sisters stood above us on its shoulder of the moors, darkly outlined against the snail-shine of the moon, and about its feet the dark multitude was already gathering. We could hear the awed hushed murmur of tongues, the faint brush of feet in the grass ... As we stepped out from the heather onto the smooth turf of the dancing floor I saw that every face was turned inward to the circle of standing stones, and looking the same way, I saw – or thought I saw – that despite the luminous clearness of the night, a faint mist clung there still; no, not so much a mist as an obscurity that one could neither see nor see through. So must the magic mists have been, that the priests of the older world could raise for the cloaking of an army.

  Pharic had disappeared, with his own lads about him, and young Amlodd, still panting with the speed that he had made from the Dun after his errand with the hawks, came dodging through the multitude to join the little knot of Companions. But he, too, kept his face turned all the while to the Nine Sisters. The tension of thunder was on us all, but another tension also, that rose and rose as the moments passed, until it reached almost to the limit of physical endurance; as certain prolonged notes of a horn will do. I heard Flavian gasp beside me. I was sweating in the palms of my hands, and it began to seem to me that at any moment now the whole night must crack wide open under pressure of this intensity of waiting.

  The faint whisper of scuffing feet and low-pitched voices had fallen away into complete stillness, and out of the stillness came the Beginning. Not any note of horns, but the sudden overwhelming stench of animal potency, as though some great rutting beast were nearby.

  A low thrilling murmur, a kind of moan, rose from the crowd, and as one man they surged inward almost to the outer surface of the standing stones, as though drawn by the thing within them, the thing that drew me with the rest, as it had drawn me when I was a boy among my own hills, but so long ago that I had forgotten ... The mist seemed to have gathered more thickly within the stone circle, and out of the midst of it, tangible as the musky stink of rut, was flowing a vast Power. Somewhere a pipe called silverly, small and remote as a bird over the moon-washed moors, more compelling than the war horns of an army. And as though at the command of the pipe, the mist began to lift. Somewhere at the heart of it came a blurred blink of bluish light, that strengthened into a small clear jet of flame springing from between a huge sweep of shadowy antlers.

  On a throne of piled turf in the exact center of the Nine Dancers, his arms folded on his breast, sat a tall man, naked and shining, with the head of a royal stag.

  At sight of him the people set up a great throbbing cry that rose and rose and seemed to beat vast wings about the hill shoulder; and then in one great surge of movement like a breaking wave, they flung themselves to the ground.

  And I, I was on my knees with the rest, the old men and women, the warriors and the children, the maidens with the magic vervain and the white convolvulus braided in their hair; my face hidden in my hands, and the feel of young Amlodd’s shoulder shaking against mine.

  When I looked up, the Horned One had risen and was standing with arms upstretched, showing himself to his people. The flame between the glorious crowning sweep of antlers bathed his breast and shoulders in a radiance that was like the cold blue fire that drips from the oar blades in northern seas; his flanks and thighs seemed insubstantial as woodsmoke, and the shadows engulfed his feet. And slowly, as though drawn upward by his raised arms, the crowd rose to their feet, and again the wild greeting cry was beating about the hill shoulder; and this time it did not die away, but changed by little and little into a rhythmic chanting, into the ancient intercession for the harvest and the mating time that one hears with the loins and belly rather than the head.

  It was not quite as we sang it among my own hills, but though word and cadence may vary a little, the core of the mystery remains the same. The ritual slaying of the God, the dark gleam of the sacrificial knife, and the wailing of the women, and the rebirth coming after ... I remembered Bedwyr with his harp beside the horse-dung fire at Narbo Martius when the world was young, and the merchant in his blanket robes swaying to and fro. ‘So the women used to sing when I was a boy – singing the lament for Adonis, when the crimson anemones are springing from the rocks ... ’ And I remembered the bracken-thatched church in the cool light of that morning and Guenhumara kneeling at the Lord’s Table; and I saw the oneness of all things.

  And then the ritual was over, and the reborn Lord had seated
himself once more on his throne of turfs; and I thought that there had been other beast-headed figures among the standing stones, but could not be sure for the mist that seemed to hang there still. And people were catching up unlit torches from the fringe of the dancing floor, and crowding forward to kindle them from the blue flame burning on the very forehead of the God.

  The light flared brighter moment by moment, a wheel of ragged fire-tongues circling the Nine Sisters. The fierce coppery light beat farther and farther up the weathered flanks of the standing stones, driving back the moonlight; and among the tawny smoke, now glimpsed, now lost, were surely uptossed heads, horned and winged, hound-snouted and prick-eared ... And in the very heart and center of the faming circle, the stag-headed figure sat immovable, the red patterns of ritual death and ritual birth still on his breast and thighs, and the old dry scars of war and hunting such as men carry who are not gods. I had lost my sense of oneness, and I could have wept for it like a child who falls asleep at the warm hearth and wakes to find itself in the alien dark beyond a closed door; only I knew that it had been there ...

  Something of the godhead was fading from him, as the blue light dimmed before the red flare of the torches, so that one became aware once more of the man’s head within the mask. And yet he lost nothing by returning humanity. The god was incarnate. None the less the Life of the People because we knew that he was also Maglaunus the chieftain, none the less terrible and apart.

  All at once the crowd fell back a little, and there was empty torchlit space between me and the still figure on the high turf throne. The antlered head was turned toward me, and I felt the eyes behind the mask reaching out to mine across the emptiness; felt at the same time, as though it were in myself, the appalling weariness of the man, the first lonely and terrible awareness of returning self.

  ‘My Lord Artos, Count of Britain.’

  Maglaunus’s voice was scarcely recognizable, hollow under the mask. He made a small summoning gesture with one hand and was still again. And I knew that the moment had come. I walked forward across the trampled turf and stood before him. He tipped his head far back to look at me, and for an instant I caught the flicker of reflected torchlight behind the eye slits under the stag’s muzzle. ‘I am here,’ I said.