Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘And this is the sixth summer,’ I said.

  ‘This is the sixth summer. But— ’ I heard a small bitter laugh of self-mockery. ‘Scarcely two summers were gone by before I knew that I had been a fool. I tried to hold his memory, but it turned thin like woodsmoke and melted through my fingers, and I had nothing left.’

  ‘Why did you not tell your father?’

  ‘I was too proud. If you were a girl of seventeen who had shrieked down the roof of her father’s hall, vowing to die for her dead love if she were forced into another man’s bed, could you have gone to your father and said, “Oh my father, I made a mistake, a simple mistake; anyone might make it. It was not love; I have forgotten what his face looked like, and the sound of his voice, and now I am ready for a living husband, after all.”’

  I took up my sword and carried it across to the bed place and laid it to hand. Then I lay down beside Guenhumara. The moon-moth fluttered across my face, but there was no other movement in the dark beside me.

  Her body was good to the touch, to explore; the skin smooth and silky despite its brownness, and I could feel the strong light bones under it; the light cage of her ribs, the long slim flanks. She was too thin for most men’s taste, but suddenly I loved the feel of her bones. I had seen, while she lay there in the firelight, that there was a rose mole on her left breast, and I searched for it by touch and pressed my finger onto it. It was soft and curiously alive, like the bud of a flower, like another smaller nipple, infinitely small and soft, and the feel of it sent a shimmer of delight through my body and into my loins. I flung my arms around her and strained her against me. She lay completely passive, neither giving nor withholding, as the furrow lies passive for the seed at sowing time ... And in that instant came like a black frost the memory, the very flavor, of the last time that I had lain with a woman, a mating half battle, half ecstasy, like mating with a wildcat. The cold miasma of hate seemed all about me, suffocating, chilling me to the soul, sapping all my powers. I clutched Guenhumara closer – no, rather I clung to her as one drowning – struggling to drive out the horror of my spirit, struggling to drive out the chill with her warmth, the death with her life. Her body was no longer passive under mine, and I must have hurt her, for she cried out, and I knew in that moment that she was a virgin; but even so, I hurt her more than is the nature of things, and I had no mercy. I was fighting desperately against some barrier, some denial that was not of her making ... It was, save for one other, the bitterest fight that ever I have known.

  In the end I managed the man’s part none so ill, but it was empty and joyless, the mere husk of what had once been a living thing; and I knew that for Guenhumara also, there had been no joy to transmute the pain. I remembered my first girl, taken laughing in the warm lee of a bean stack, clumsily but with delight. That had been whole and sweet, but this was a maimed thing. And I knew to the full then what Ygerna had done to me; that in some way she had robbed me of the spearpoint of my manhood.

  I released Guenhumara, and rolled away from her. I think I groaned. I know that I was sweating and shaking from head to foot like a man after a mortal struggle; and I buried my head in my arms, waiting for her to turn away from me in disgust or bitter mockery.

  Instead, she said calmly, but as though something in her throat was tight, ‘It should not be like that, should it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It should not be like that.’ I drove my face harder onto my arms and little clouds of colored light whirled through the darkness before my eyes. I heard my own voice, muffled in my arms. ‘A few days since, I was watching one of your dunghill cocks. He was tethered with his hens about him, but the one he wanted was beyond his reach, and every time he leapt on her his tether brought him up short at the last moment, and tumbled him in the dung, until his feathers were all mired and draggled. God have mercy on me, I thought at first that it was funny.’

  There was a long silence; and then Guenhumara said, ‘Has it always been so?’

  ‘If it had, do you think that I’d have taken you with a whole war host for your dowry? I haven’t been with a woman for ten years. I did not know.’

  Another silence; the flutter of the flames had died away and outside I heard the soft whisper of falling rain; the scent of it on the warm earth breathed in at the open doorway. And beyond again, I heard the silence of the forsaken Dun.

  Then Guenhumara said, ‘What happened? Let you tell me the once, and be done with the telling.’

  And lying there with my head still buried in my arms, I told her the whole foul story that I had not told in ten years, even to Bedwyr who was nearer to me than my own heart. It was her right to know.

  When the thing was told to the last word, I waited for her horror and her drawing away. She did not speak for so long, in the end I lifted my head from my arms and turned again to look at her in the dark. And as I did so, a strange thing happened, for she turned a little toward me, and felt for my face and took it between her hands, and kissed me like the mother I never had. ‘God help us both, my dear,’ she said.

  chapter eighteen

  The Lovers

  WORD OF WHAT HAD HAPPENED WAS IN CASTRA CUNETIUM and the Place of Three Hills ahead of me. Maybe the word had run through the tribes, maybe it had been carried by the Little Dark People, who know everything. I saw it in men’s eyes that met mine a little too long or not quite long enough, as I rode in, but only two of my Companions spoke of the thing without waiting for me to speak first.

  Gwalchmai came limping into my quarters while I was still washing off the dust and sweat of the summer tracks. He had ridden in only a few hours ahead of me, on some business of supplies, and began by giving me a report of how things were going with Bedwyr among the Saxon settlements, so that at first I thought that was all he had come for. Indeed he had actually got up to go, when he turned back to me, clearly hesitating over something more that he wished to say. He was a man who seldom found it easy to speak of the things that mattered to him. ‘The whole fort is throbbing with the word that you have taken a wife from the Damnonii,’ he managed at last, ‘and that she comes here to join you when we settle into winter quarters. Artos, is it true?’

  ‘It is true that I have taken a wife, yes,’ I said.

  ‘And that she comes here?’

  ‘Yes, also a hundred of her father’s best horsemen, captained by her brother.’

  ‘The hundred will be welcome, at all events.’

  ‘But not the one?’

  He hesitated. ‘We are not used to the thought of the one and the thought is strange to us. You must give us a little time.’ He changed the subject. ‘Artos, they did not send up any bandage linen or salves with the last supplies. We have had a good few wounded, as I told you, and we cannot go on tearing up our cloaks forever. I cannot go myself, I must get back to Bedwyr tomorrow, but give me leave to send Conon down to raise hell at Carbridge and get some more sent up.’

  But Cei was less forbearing, later that night, before we started out to make the late rounds together. ‘In God’s name, if you wanted the girl why didn’t you take her – and leave her with a pretty necklace, and no harm done?’

  ‘Maglaunus her father would perhaps not have given me a hundred well-mounted men for tumbling his daughter under a broom bush.’

  ‘Aye, there’s no denying that it is a dowry worth the having,’ Cei admitted; and then in a deep grumble between disgust and speculation: ‘But a woman prinking in her mirror. I suppose she’ll bring a swarm of giggling girls to serve her?’

  ‘One woman. I told Guenhumara she might bring one henchwoman: she chose her old nurse – no teeth, Cei, one foot already in the grave and the other on a lump of tallow.’

  ‘An asset indeed!’ Cei’s speculation was swallowed up in disgust.

  ‘Agreed, my old ram, and a foul nuisance here in the fort, but by the God’s grace, the other foot will slip one day,’ I said savagely. I was angry and sickened with all the things under the sun, myself most of all.

  ‘Love d
oes not seem to have sweetened your temper, Artos mine.’

  I was pulling on my rawhide boots, and I did not look up. ‘Who spoke any word of love?’

  ‘Na, it was a hundred horsemen, wasn’t it? But great God! Man, you can’t have her here, just her and the hag in a fort full of men.’

  ‘There are the gay girls of the baggage train,’ I said, and stood up and reached for my sword which lay on the cot beside me.

  ‘If she’s a good woman, she’d sooner die than touch little fingers with one of the sisterhood.’

  ‘Cei, do you know much about good women?’

  He laughed unwillingly, and shrugged, but looked up from the lamp flame with trouble in his fierce blue eyes. ‘You must have the thing your own stubborn way. But Christos! I foresee storm water ahead!’ Then he shook himself as though shaking off the trouble like an old cloak, and laughed again, and flung his heavy arm around my shoulders as we went out from the lamplit room into the darkness of the hills. ‘Like enough I shall try seducing her myself, in the pursuit of further knowledge.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning,’ I said, tranquilly enough, and tried to ignore the black pain of jealousy that stabbed through me. In that moment I first understood that I loved Guenhumara.

  In the next I fell headlong over a pig – we kept a good deal of livestock by that time – who rose in squealing affront and lumbered off into the night, leaving me to rub a bruised elbow and curse the Fates who must need strip a man even of his dignity, making a clown of him even while they turn the knife in the wound that they have made.

  Everything in Trimontium was in good shape, for despite his hot temper and his wenching, Cei was as reliable as a rock, and so next morning when Gwalchmai headed eastward again, with the reliefs who were going up to free some of the other men for rest, I rode with them. And a few evenings later, I stood with Bedwyr in the lee of a clump of wind-shaped elder scrub that marked the lower end of our picket lines. There was a smell of smoke about him, not the fresh tang of campfires, but the acrid and faintly greasy reek that comes of burning out the places where men live. Bedwyr had been busy since I saw him last.

  He was saying, ‘It is in my mind that the world would be a simpler place if the God that Gwalchmai believes in had never taken a rib from Adam’s side and made a woman for him.’

  ‘You would miss her sorely, when you came to tune your harp.’

  ‘There are other matters for a harp song, besides women. Hunting and war, and heather beer – and the brotherhood of men.’

  ‘It is not many days since I found that I must ask the Minnow not to desert me,’ I said. ‘I did not think that I should have to ask it of you, Bedwyr.’

  He stood looking out over the camp, where the smoke of the cooking fires trailed sideways into the dusk, and a faint mist was creeping in over the moors from the sea. ‘If I were to desert you, I think that it would be for something more than a woman.’

  ‘But this goes beyond the woman, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is more than any woman.’ And then he swung around on me, his nostrils flaring, his eyes brighter and more fierce than I had ever seen them in his twisted, mocking face. ‘You fool, Artos! Don’t you know that if you were deservedly frying in your Christian’s Hell for every sin from broken faith to sodomy, you could count on my buckler to shield your face from the flames?’

  ‘I believe I could,’ I said. ‘You are almost as great a fool as I.’

  And we went up past the horse lines together, through the salt-tasting mist that was thickening across the high moors.

  Two days later, Gault’s squadron was ambushed and cut to pieces by a Saxon war band. They rode back into camp – what was left of them – battered and bloody, their dead left behind them, the more sorely wounded roped to their horses.

  I saw them ride in, and the rest of the camp turn out with grim acceptance of the situation, and few questions asked, to rally around them, help down the wounded and take charge of the horses. I bade Gault see to his men and get a meal, and come to me with a full report afterward – he looked very white and staggered for an instant in dismounting, as though the ground had tilted under his feet; but to see one’s squadron cut to bits is enough to account for that in any man. Then I went back to finish looking through Bedwyr’s muster lists, in the half-ruined shepherd’s bothy that I had taken for my own. It is good for a commander to have some such place when he can, he is easier to find at night, and matters which are not for the camp’s ears can be spoken of in private.

  I was sick at heart for the dazed and tattered remnant of my fourth squadron now gathering to the fire and the hastily brought-out food, sick for the loss of so many of my Companions, but it would serve no useful purpose to neglect the muster lists. So I crouched on the packsaddle which generally served me for a seat in camp, and returned to the work in hand. I had just reached the end when a figure loomed into the opening where the door had been, shutting out the blue dark and the flare of the campfire beyond; and looking up, I saw that it was Gault.

  He moved in from the doorway, and there was no doubt that he staggered now. ‘I’ve come to report, sir,’ he said in a strained voice that was not like Gault’s at all, and stretched out his hand to the crumbling turf wall and leaned there. I could see the sweat on his ashen face in the lantern light. ‘But I think I’ve – left it too late.’

  I sprang up. ‘Gault, what is it? Are you wounded?’

  ‘I’ve – got a Saxon arrow in me,’ he said. ‘I broke off the shaft so that the rest shouldn’t see it, but I—’ He made as though to push aside his cloak, and in the act of doing so, pitched head foremost into my arms. I laid him down and hurriedly thrust back the concealing folds of his cloak and found the short bloody stump of an arrow shaft projecting from just below the cage of his ribs. The horn scales of his war shirt had been split there by a glancing axe blow some while since, and for days he had been intending to get the weak place mended. Now it was too late. He was quite unconscious, not much blood on him, but he must have been bleeding inwardly for hours. I sat for a few moments on my heels beside him, then got up and strode to the door and shouted to the man who stood outside leaning on his spear against the light of the nearest watch fire. ‘Justin, go and fetch Gwalchmai; no matter what he’s doing – he must have finished with the worst wounded by now. Get him here at once!’

  ‘Sir,’ he said, and I turned back to the lantern-lit bothy and the still figure crumpled on the floor. I thrust away Cabal’s inquiring muzzle, and ordered the great hound to lie down in the far corner. I felt Gault’s heart and found it still beating faintly, and straightened him into an easier position, thinking as I did so, that it was so that one straightened the crumpled dead.

  Gwalchmai came very soon. I heard his uneven step outside, hurrying, and next instant he was in the doorway. ‘What is so urgent, Artos?’

  ‘Gault,’ I said, and moved aside to give him more space. ‘He’s taken an arrow under the ribs.’

  Gwalchmai limped forward and knelt at Gault’s other side. ‘Reach down the lantern and hold it for me. I can’t see in this gloom.’

  I did as he bade me, and we leaned together over the wound in the pool of yellow light. ‘Who broke off the shaft?’ Gwalchmai demanded. He had already drawn his knife and was cutting the lacing of Gault’s war shirt.

  ‘He did it himself, so that his men should not know.’

  ‘So – well, I daresay it will make little difference in the long run. It would have given me a better purchase ... ’ He cut the last thong that held the battle shirt together on the right side, and lifted it back, with the blood-sodden linen tunic beneath; and was silent, looking down at the wound that was laid bare. At last he raised his eyes to mine. ‘Artos – what am I to do?’

  ‘Light of the Sun, man, that’s for you to say. Get the barb out, I suppose. Why else should I have called you?’

  ‘Not quite so simple. If I leave the barb where it is, he’ll be dead in three days – an ugly death. If I try
to get it out, the chances are around a hundred to one that I shall kill him here and now.’

  ‘But there is the hundredth chance?’

  ‘There is the hundredth chance.’

  We looked at each other across Gault’s body. ‘Do it now,’ I said, ‘while he is unconscious. At the worst, death will be quicker and kinder that way.’

  Gwalchmai nodded, and got to his feet, and I heard him shouting from the doorway for hot water and barley spirit and more rags. He remained there until the things were brought, then returned and knelt down, setting out the tools of his trade beside him. ‘Get something to put under his back – we must have him arched backward to draw the belly taut.’

  I grabbed the old cloak and an armful of bracken from my bed, and made them into a firm roll, then lifted Gault while Gwalchmai arranged it under him, so that when I laid him down again his body was bent backward like a half-drawn bow, the skin drawn tight over breast and belly.

  ‘So, that will serve. Now the lantern again.’

  I knelt there for what seemed as long as a whole midwinter night, intent on holding the horn-paned lantern perfectly steady, that no tremor of light might confuse eye or hand at the crucial moment, while Gwalchmai, working with the complete absorption that shut him off from all men at such times, bathed away the blood so that he might see exactly the edges of the wound, and again took up his knife. I watched the sure, intent work of his hands as he began with infinite care to enlarge the wound. Later, he laid down the knife and took up a fierce little probe, then another, and later still, returned to the knife again. It seemed to grow unbearably hot in the bothy, I could feel the sweat prickling in my armpits, and beads of it shone on Gwalchmai’s forehead, and yet the night was a cool one, and I had no fire under the turf roof. From time to time, whenever Gwalchmai bade me, I felt Gault’s heart. His upturned face was frowning, the teeth bared as though in intolerable pain, but I think that in truth he did not feel anything. I hope to God that he did not. At one time I thought his heart was stronger and his breathing more steady, but maybe it was only my own desire that deceived me; or maybe it was a last flicker of life ... Quite suddenly, both began to grow fainter.