Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  SWORD AT SUNSET

  First published in Great Britain in 1963 by Hodder & Stoughton,

  an imprint of Hachette Livre.

  This edition published in hardback in Great Britain in 2012

  by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Rosemary Sutcliff, 1963

  The moral right of Rosemary Sutcliff to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 0 85789 243 0

  E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 244 7

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Hic Jacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus

  1. The Sword

  2. Left-Hand World

  3. The Birds of Rhiannon

  4. The Horses of a Dream

  5. Bedwyr

  6. The Laborer and the Hire

  7. Frontiers

  8. Wind from the North

  9. War Horns in the Spring

  10. Battle Before Deva

  11. The Witch’s Son

  12. Trimontium

  13. The People of the Hills

  14. Cit Coit Caledon

  15. Midsummer Fires

  16. Lammas Torches

  17. Guenhumara

  18. The Lovers

  19. The House of Holy Ladies

  20. The Beast and the Flower

  21. Earth Mother

  22. The Last of the North

  23. Threnody

  24. The Fetch

  25. Shadows

  26. The Sword in the Sky

  27. The King’s Hunting

  28. Rex Belliorum

  29. Badon Hill

  30. Hail Caesar!

  31. The Bargain

  32. The Queen’s Captain

  33. ‘It Was Warm Between Thy Breasts, Lalage’

  34. Thinning Ranks

  35. The Traitor

  36. The Last Camp

  37. The Corn King

  Glossary

  Note on the Author

  Author’s Note

  Just as the saga of Charlemagne and his paladins is the Matter of France, so for fourteen hundred years or so, the Arthurian Legend has been the Matter of Britain. A tradition at first, then a hero-tale gathering to itself fresh detail and fresh glories and the rainbow colors of romance as it went along, until with Sir Thomas Malory it came to its fullest flowering.

  But of late years historians and anthropologists have come more and more to the belief that the Matter of Britain is indeed ‘matter and not moonshine.’ That behind all the numinous mist of pagan, early Christian and medieval splendors that have gathered about it, there stands the solitary figure of one great man. No knight in shining armor, no Round Table, no many-towered Camelot; but a Romano-British war leader, to whom, when the Barbarian darkness came flooding in, the last guttering lights of civilization seemed worth fighting for.

  Sword at Sunset is an attempt to re-create from fragments of known facts, from likelihoods and deductions and guesswork pure and simple, the kind of man this war leader may have been, and the story of his long struggle.

  Certain features I have retained from the traditional Arthurian fabric, because they have the atmosphere of truth. I have kept the original framework, or rather two interwrought frameworks: the Sin which carries with it its own retribution; the Brotherhood broken by the love between the leader’s woman and his closest friend. These have the inevitability and pitiless purity of outline that one finds in classical tragedy, and that belong to the ancient and innermost places of man. I have kept the theme, which seems to me to be implicit in the story, of the Sacred King, the Leader whose divine right, ultimately, is to die for the life of the people.

  Bedwyr, Cei and Gwalchmai are the earliest of all Arthur’s companions to be noted by name, and so I have retained them, giving the friend-and-lover’s part to Bedwyr, who is there both at the beginning and at the end, instead of to Lancelot, who is a later French importation. Arthur’s hound and his white horse I have kept also, both for their ritual significance and because the Arthur – or rather Artos – I found myself coming to know so well, was the kind of man who would have set great store by his dogs and his horses. When the Roman fort of Trimontium was excavated, the bones of a ‘perfectly formed dwarf girl’ were found lying in a pit under those of nine horses. An unexplained find, to which, in Artos’s capture of the fortress and in the incident of ‘The People of the Hills,’ I have attempted an explanation. So it goes on ... Almost every part of the story, even to the unlikely linkup between Medraut and that mysterious Saxon with a British name, Cerdic the half-legendary founder of Wessex, has some kind of basis outside the author’s imagination.

  Having, as it were, stated my case, I should like to express my most warmly grateful thanks to the people who have, in one way or another, contributed to the writing of Sword at Sunset – among them the Oxford University Press, for allowing me to use certain characters which have already appeared in The Lantern-Bearer. Among them also the authors of many books from Gildas in the sixth century to Geoffrey Ashe in 1960; the oddly assorted experts who returned detailed and patient answers to my letters of inquiry about horse breeding; the Canadian friend who sent me the poem ‘Hic Jacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus’ and the Intelligence Corps Sergeant and his young woman who found its origin for me after both I and the aforesaid Canadian friend had dismally failed to do so; the Major of the 1st East Anglian Regiment, who sacrificed three sunny afternoons of his leave from Staff College to help me plan Artos’s campaign in Scotland, and to work out for me in three colors on a staff map the crowning victory of Badon.

  Hic Jacet Arthurus

  Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus

  Arthur is gone ... Tristram in Careol

  Sleeps, with a broken sword – And

  Yseult sleeps Beside him, where the westering waters roll

  Over drowned Lyonesse to the outer deeps.

  Lancelot is fallen ... The ardent helms that shone

  So knightly and the splintered lances rust

  In the anonymous mould of Avalon:

  Gawain and Gareth and Galahad – all are dust!

  Where do the vanes and towers of Camelot

  And tall Tintagel crumble? Where do those tragic

  Lovers and their bright-eyed ladies rot?

  We cannot tell – for lost is Merlin’s magic.

  And Guinevere – call her not back again

  Lest she betray the loveliness Time lent

  A name that blends the rapture and the pain

  Linked in the lonely nightingale’s lament,

  Nor pry too deeply, lest you should discover

  The bower of Astolat a smoky hut

  Of mud and wattle – find the knightliest lover

  A braggart, and his Lily Maid a
slut;

  And all that coloured tale a tapestry

  Woven by poets. As the spider’s skeins

  Are spun of its own substance, so have they

  Embroidered empty legend – What remains?

  This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak

  That age had sapped and cankered at the root,

  Resistant, from her topmost bough there broke

  The miracle of one unwithering shoot

  Which was the spirit of Britain – that certain men

  Uncouth, untutored, of our island brood

  Loved freedom better than their lives; and when

  The tempest crashed around them, rose and stood

  And charged into the storm’s black heart, with sword

  Lifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmed

  With a strange majesty that the heathen horde

  Remembered after all were overwhelmed;

  And made of them a legend, to their chief,

  Arthur, Ambrosius – no man knows his name –

  Granting a gallantry beyond belief,

  And to his knights imperishable fame.

  They were so few ... We know not in what manner

  Or where or when they fell – whether they went

  Riding into the dark under Christ’s banner

  Or died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent.

  But this we know: That, when the Saxon rout

  Swept over them, the sun no longer shone

  On Britain, and the last lights flickered out;

  And men in darkness murmured: Arthur is gone ...

  FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG

  SWORD AT SUNSET

  chapter one

  The Sword

  NOW THAT THE MOON IS NEAR TO FULL, THE BRANCH OF an apple tree casts its nighttime shadow in through the high window across the wall beside my bed. This place is full of apple trees, and half of them are no more than crabs in the daylight; but the shadow on my wall, that blurs and shivers when the night wind passes and then grows clear again, is the shadow of that Branch the harpers sing of, the chiming of whose nine silver apples can make clear the way into the Land of the Living.

  When the moon rises higher, the shadow is lost. The white radiance trickles down the wall and makes pools on the coverlet, and then at last it reaches my sword lying beside me – they laid it there because they said I was restless when it was not ready to my hand – and a spurt, a pinpoint, of blazing violet light wakes far, far down in the dark heart of Maximus’s great amethyst set into the pommel. Then the moonlight passes, and the narrow cell is cobweb gray, and the star in the heart of the amethyst sleeps again; sleeps ... I reach out in the grayness and touch the familiar grip that has grown warm to my hand in so many fights; and the feeling of life is in it, and the feeling of death ...

  I cannot sleep, these nights, for the fire of the wound in my groin and belly. The Brothers would give me a draught stronger than the fire, if I let them; but I have no wish for the sleep of poppy juice and mandrake that leaves a dark taste in the mind afterward. I am content to wait for another sleep. And meanwhile there is so much to think of, so much to remember ...

  Remember – remember across forty years, the first time that ever I held that blink of violet light in my hand, answering not to the cold whiteness of the moon, but to the soft yellow radiance of the candles in Ambrosius’s study, on the night that he gave me my sword and my freedom.

  I was sitting on the foot of my sleeping couch, busy with the twice-daily pumice stone. On campaign I generally grew my beard and clipped it short, but in winter quarters I always tried to keep a smooth chin in the Roman manner. Sometimes that meant the butchery of goose grease and razor, and left me scraped and raw and thanking many gods that at least I was not, like Ambrosius or old Aquila my friend and mentor in all that had to do with cavalry, a black-bearded man. But there was still pumice stone to be got when one was lucky, for it took more than the Franks and the Sea Wolves to quite close the trade routes and pen the merchant kind within their own frontiers. One of the merchant kind had come into Venta Belgarum only a few days since, with pumice stone and dried raisins and a few amphorae of thin Burdigala wine slung in pairs on the backs of his pack ponies; and I had managed to buy an amphora, and a piece of pumice almost the size of my fist, enough to last me through the winter and maybe next winter also.

  When the bargaining was over, we had drunk a cup of the wine together and talked, or rather he had talked while I listened. I have always found pleasure in hearing men tell of their travels. Sometimes the talk of travelers is for listening to by firelight, and best savored with much salt; but this man’s talk was of a daylight kind and needed little salt, if any. He talked of the joys of a certain house in the street of sandalmakers at Rimini, of the horrors of seasickness and the flavor of milk-fed snails, of passing encounters and mishaps of the road that brimmed with laughter as a cup with wine, of the scent and color of the roses of Paestum that used to serve the Roman flower markets (he was something of a poet in his way). He told of the distances from such a place to such another place, and the best inns still to be found on the road. He talked – and for me this had more interest than all the rest – of the Goths of Southern Gaul and the big dark-colored horses that they bred, and the great summer horse fair at Narbo Martius. I had heard before of the horses of Septimania, but never from one who had seen them with his own eyes and had the chance to make his own judgment of their mettle. So I asked many questions, and laid by his answers, together with certain other things that had long been in my heart, to think over, afterward.

  I had thought of those things a good deal, in the past few days, and now it came upon me as I sat there rubbing my chin with the pumice stone and already half stripped for sleep, that the time had come to be done with the thinking.

  Why that night I do not know; it was not a good time to choose; Ambrosius had been in council all day, it was late, and he might even have gone to his bed by now, but I knew suddenly that I must go to him that night. I leaned sideways to peer into the burnished curve of my war cap hanging at the head of the couch, which was the only mirror I had, feeling my cheeks and chin for any stubble still to be rubbed away, and my face looked back at me, distorted by the curve of the metal, but clear enough in the light of the dribbling candles, big-boned as a Jute’s, and brown-skinned under hair the color of a hayfìeld when it pales at harvesttime. I suppose that I must have had all that from my mother, for assuredly there was nothing there of dark narrow-boned Ambrosius; nor, consequently, of Utha his brother and my father, who men had told me was like him. Nobody had ever told me what my mother was like; maybe no one had noticed, save for Utha who had begotten me on her under a hawthorn bush, in sheer lightness of heart after a good day’s hunting. Maybe even he had not noticed much.

  The pumice stone had done its work, and I set it aside, and getting to my feet, caught up the heavy cloak that lay across the couch and flung it around me over my light undertunic. I called to my armor-bearer whom I could still hear moving in the next room, that I should want him no more that night, and went out into the colonnade with my favorite hound Cabal padding at heel. The old Governor’s Palace had sunk into quiet, much as a war camp does about midnight when even the horses cease to fidget in their picket lines. Only here and there the china saffron square of a window showed where someone was still wakeful on watch. The few colonnade lanterns that had not yet been put out swung to and fro in the thin cold wind, sending bursts of light and shadow along the pavements. The snow had driven in over the dwarf wall of the colonnade, but it would not lie long; already the damp chill of thaw was in the air. The cold licked about my bare shins and smarted on my newly pumiced chin; but faint warmth met me on the threshold of Ambrosius’s quarters, as the guards lowered their spears to let me pass into the anteroom. In the inner chamber there was applewood burning above the charcoal in the brazier, and the aromatic sweetness of it filled the room. Ambrosius the High King sat in his big cross-legged chair beside t
he brazier, and Kuno his armor-bearer stood in the far shadows by the door that opened into his sleeping cell beyond. And as I halted an instant on the threshold, it was as though I saw my kinsman with the clear-seeing eye of a stranger: a dark fine-boned man with a still and very purposeful face; a man who, in any multitude, would wear solitude almost as tangibly as he wore the purple mantle flung about his shoulders. I had been aware always of that solitude in him, but never so sharply as in that moment, and I was thankful that I should never be High King. Not for me that unbearable peak above the snow line. Yet now I think that it had little to do with the High Kingship but was in the man himself, for I had known it in him always, and he had been crowned only three days.

  He was still fully dressed, though he sat forward, his arms across his knees, as he did when he was tired. The slender gold fillet that bound his dark brows gave back a blink of light to the brazier, and the straight folds of the cloak that glowed imperial purple in the daylight was ringstraked with black and the color of wine. He looked up as I entered, and his shuttered face flashed open as it did for few men save myself and Aquila. ‘Artos! So you too do not feel like sleeping.’

  I shook my head. ‘Na; and so I hoped that I should find you awake.’

  Cabal padded in past me, as one very much at home in that place, and cast himself down beside the brazier with a contented sigh.

  Ambrosius looked at me for a moment, and then bade his armor-bearer bring some wine and leave us. But when the stripling had finally gone, I did not at once begin on the matter that had brought me, only stood warming my hands at the brazier and wondering how to make the beginning. I heard the whisper of sleet against the high window and the thin whining of the draft along the floor. Somewhere a shutter banged in the wind; steps passed along the colonnade and died into the distance. I was acutely aware of the small firelit room, and the darkness of the winter night pressing in upon its fragile shell.

  A gust of wind swooped out of the night, driving a sharp spatter of sleet against the window, the aromatic smoke billowed from the brazier, and an apple log fell with a tinselly rustle into the red cavern of the charcoal. Ambrosius said, ‘Well, my great Bear Cub?’ and I knew that he had been watching me all the time.