Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  ‘What is the thing that you come to say to me?’

  I stooped, and took up a lichened log from the basket beside the brazier, and set it carefully on the fire. ‘Once,’ I said, ‘when I was a cub indeed, I remember hearing you cry out for one great victory to sound like a trumpet blast through Britain, that the Saxon legend might be broken in men’s minds, and the tribes and the people might hear it and gather to your standard, not in ones and twos and scattered war bands, but in whole princedoms ... You gained that victory at Guoloph in the autumn. For a while at least, the Saxons are broken here in the South; Hengest is fled; and the princes of Dumnonia and the Cymri who have held back for thirty years got drunk three nights since at your Crowning Feast. It is maybe the turning of the tide – this tide. But still it is only a beginning, isn’t it?’

  ‘Only a beginning,’ Ambrosius said, ‘and even that, only in the South.’

  ‘And now?’

  He had pulled off the great arm ring he wore above his left elbow; an arm ring of red gold wrought in the likeness of a dragon, and sat turning and turning it between his fingers, watching the firelight run and play in the interlocking coils. ‘Now to make strong our gains, to build up the Old Kingdom here in the South into a strength that can stand like a rock in the face of all that the seas can hurl against it.’

  I turned full to face him. ‘That is for you to do, to make your fortress here behind the old frontier, from the Thames’s valley to the Sabrina Sea, and hold it against the Barbarians ... ’ I was fumbling for the words I wanted, trying desperately to find the right ones, thinking the thing out as I went along. ‘Something that may be to the rest of Britain not only a rallying place, but as the heart is to a man and the eagle used to be to a legion. But for me, there is another way that I must go.’

  He ceased playing with the arm ring and raised his eyes to mine. They were strange eyes for so dark a man; gray like winter rain, yet with a flame behind them. But he never spoke. And so after a while, I had to stumble on unaided. ‘Ambrosius, the time comes that you must give me my wooden foil and set me free.’

  ‘I thought that might be it,’ he said, after a long silence.

  ‘You thought? How?’

  His face, normally so still and shut, again flashed open into its rare smile. ‘You show too clearly in your eyes what goes on behind them, my friend. You should learn to put up your shield a little.’

  But as we looked at each other, there was no shield for either of us. I said, ‘You are the High King, and here in the South it may be indeed that you can rebuild the kingdom and restore something of the heritage; but everywhere the Barbarians press in; the Scots from Hibernia harry the western coasts and make their settlements in the very shadow of Yr Widdfa of the Snows; the Picts with their javelins come leaping over the Wall; northward and eastward the war boats of the Sea Wolves come creeping in along the estuaries, near and nearer to the heart of the land.’

  ‘How if I made you Dux Britanniorum?’ Ambrosius said.

  ‘I should still be your man, under your orders. Do you not see? – Britain is broken back into as many kingdoms as before the Eagles came; if I hold to any one king, even you, the rest of Britain will go down. Ambrosius, I shall always be your man in the sense in which a son going out into the world remains son to his father. Always I will play my part with you as best I may in any wider plan, and if you should be so sore pressed at any day that without me you cannot hold back the tide, then I will come, no matter what the cost. But short of that, I must be my own man, free to go where the need is sorest as I see it ... If I were to take a Roman tide, it would be the one borne by the commander of our mobile cavalry forces in the last days of Rome – not Dux, but Comes Britanniorum.’

  ‘So, the Count of Britain. Three calvary wings and complete freedom,’ Ambrosius said.

  ‘I could do it with less; three hundred men, if they were a brotherhood.’

  ‘And with three hundred men you believe that you can save Britain?’ He was not mocking me, he never mocked at any man; he was simply asking a question.

  But I did not answer at once, for I had to be sure. Once the answer was made, I knew that there could be no unmaking it again. ‘With three hundred men properly mounted, I believe that I can thrust back the Barbarians at least for a while,’ I said at last. ‘As for saving Britain – I have seen the wild geese flighting this autumn, and who can turn them back? It is more than a hundred years that we have been struggling to stem this Saxon flighting, more than thirty since the last Roman troops left Britain. How much longer, do you think, before the darkness closes over us?’ It was a thing that I would not have said to any man save Ambrosius.

  And he answered me as I do not think he would have answered any other man. ‘God knows. If your work and mine be well wrought, maybe another hundred years.’

  The shutter banged again, and somewhere in the distance I heard a smothered burst of laughter. I said, ‘Then why don’t we yield now, and make an end? There would be fewer cities burned and fewer men slain in that way. Why do we go on fighting? Why not merely lie down and let it come? They say it is easier to drown if you don’t struggle.’

  ‘For an idea,’ Ambrosius said, beginning again to play with the dragon arm ring; but his eyes were smiling in the firelight, and I think that mine smiled back at him. ‘Just for an idea, for an ideal, for a dream.’

  I said, ‘A dream may be the best thing to die for.’

  Neither of us spoke again for a while after that. Then Ambrosius said, ‘Pull up that stool. It seems that neither of us has much thought of sleep, and assuredly there are matters that we must speak of.’ And I knew that a part of my life had shut behind me, and ahead lay a new way of things.

  I pulled up a stool with crossed antelope legs – it was stronger than it looked – and sat down. And still we were silent. Again it was Ambrosius who broke the silence, saying thoughtfully, ‘Three hundred men and horses, together with spare mounts. What of baggage?’

  ‘As little as may be. We cannot be tied down to a string of lumbering wagons, we must be free-flying as a skein of wildfowl. A few fast mule carts for the field forge and heavy gear, two to three score pack beasts with their drivers – those must be fighting men too, when need arises, and serve as grooms and cooks in camp. The younger among us to act as armor-bearers for their seniors. And for the rest, we must carry our own gear as far as may be, and live on the country.’

  ‘That may not make you beloved of the country on which you live.’

  ‘If men would keep the roofs on their barns, they must pay with some of the grain in them,’ I said. It was the first of many times that I was to say much the same thing.

  He looked at me with one eyebrow faintly raised. ‘You have the whole thing at your fingers’ ends.’

  ‘I have thought about it through many nights.’

  ‘So. Three hundred mounted fighting men with spare horses, mule carts, pack beasts – geldings I take it? – with their grooms and drivers. Have you thought where they are to come from?’ He leaned forward. ‘I make no doubt that you could raise the whole number and more, many more, from among the ranks of the war host; you have whistled all the best of the young men to follow you, as it is; and I should be left with Aquila and a few veterans who held to me for old time’s sake.’ He tossed the glinting arm ring from right hand to left, and back again. ‘Only I cannot raise and man my fortress with a few grandsires. I will spare you a hundred fighting men of your own choosing, from among the trained troops, and a draft of twenty horses every other year from among the Arfon horse runs for so long as you need them. The rest, both mounts and men, you must find for yourself.’

  ‘It’s a beginning,’ I said. ‘The problem of horses troubles me more than the men.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘Our native horse breeds have dwindled in size since the Legions ceased to import mounts for their cavalry.’

  ‘They acquitted themselves none so ill at Guoloph last
autumn – you of all men should know that,’ Ambrosius said, and began to hum very softly, part of the triumph song that old Traherne our harper had made for me on the night after that battle. ‘Then came Artorius, Artos the Bear, thundering with his squadrons from the hill; then the world shook and the sods flew like startled swallows from beneath his horses’ hooves ... like leaves before a wind, like waves before a galley’s prow the war hosts of Hengest curled back and scattered ... ’

  ‘It is in my mind that Traherne had been drinking to our victory and the Gods of the Harp spoke to him in a blaze of heather beer,’ I said. ‘But as for the horses: they are fine little brutes, our native hill breeds; swift and valiant, and surefooted as mountain sheep – and not much larger. Save for Arian there’s scarce a horse in all our runs that is up to my weight with even the lightest armor.’

  ‘Armor?’ he said quickly. We had always ridden light, in leather tunics much like the old Auxiliary uniform, with our horses undefended.

  ‘Yes, armor. Chain-mail shirts for the men – they would have to come as and when we could take them in battle, there are no British armorers that have that particular skill. Boiled leather would serve for the horses’ breast guards and cheekpieces. It was so that the Goths broke our Legions at Adrianople close on two hundred years ago; but the Legions never fully learned the lesson.’

  ‘A student of world history.’

  I laughed. ‘Was I not schooled by your old Vipsanius, whose mind was generally a few hundred years and a few thousand miles away? But he talked sense now and then. It is the weight that does it, the difference between a bare fist and one wearing the cestus.’

  ‘Only you need the bigger horses.’

  ‘Only I need the bigger horses,’ I agreed.

  ‘What is the answer?’

  ‘The only answer that I can think of is to buy a couple of stallions – the Goths of Septimania breed such horses – of the big forest strain, sixteen or seventeen hands high, and a few mares, and breed from them and the best of our native mares.’

  ‘And as to price? You’ll not get such beasts for the price of a pack pony.’

  ‘They cost, on the average as I gather, the stallions each as much as six oxen; the mares rather more. I can raise perhaps the price of two stallions and seven or eight mares from my own lands that you passed on to me from my father – without selling off the land, that is: I’ll not betray my own folk by selling them like cattle to a new lord.’

  Ambrosius was staring into the red heart of the brazier, his black brows drawn together in thought. Then he said, ‘Too long. It will take too long. With twice as many you might have enough of your big brutes grown and broken to mount at least your best men in three or four years; within ten you might well be able to mount your whole force.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, and we looked at each other through the faint smoke drift and the tawny upward glow of the brazier that threw into relief the old brand of Mithras between Ambrosius’s brows that scarcely showed by daylight.

  ‘You spoke of yourself a while since, as of a son going out into the world,’ he said at last. ‘So be it, you are all the son I ever had or ever shall have, and the Lord of Light forbid that I should send you out with an empty hand. We are none of us rich in these days, and one cannot build a fortress for nothing, or you should have more. I will give you the price of another ten beasts.’ And then before I could thank him, he rose with the controlled swiftness that was part of him, and turned away, saying, ‘More light, Bear Cub, the candles are at your elbow.’

  And while I lit a twig at the brazier and kindled the thick honey-wax candles on the writing table, he crossed to the big chest against the far wall, and stooped and flung back the lid. The candle flames sank, and then sprang up into the shape of laurel leaves, gold fringed with the perfect blue of the sky’s zenith at the heart, and the room that had been lost in shadows sprang to life, the bull’s-head frescoes on the walls, the scroll ends of Ambrosius’s treasured library making a dim black-and-gold lozenge pattern in their shelves; and the storm and darkness of the night seemed to crouch back a little.

  Ambrosius had taken something long and narrow from the chest and was turning back the folds of oiled linen that had been bound about it. ‘A while since also,’ he said, ‘you spoke of my giving you your wooden foil. Let this serve instead – Give me your own in exchange for it.’ And he turned and put into my hands a sword. It was a long cavalry spatha exactly like the one that I had carried since I became a man; and not knowing quite what to do, I drew it from its black wolfskin sheath, and let the light run like water on the blade. It was a fine weapon, perfectly balanced so that as I cut the air with it, it came up again into my hand almost of its own accord; but so did my own blade. Then I made a discovery. ‘Ambrosius, it is your sword!’

  I suppose he saw my bewilderment, for sitting down again in his chair by the fire, he half smiled. ‘Yes, it is my sword. But not all my sword. Look at the pommel.’

  The hilt was of bronze finely inlaid with silver along the shoulders, the grip bound with silver wires, and as I reversed it, holding it point down, I saw that set into the pommel was a great square amethyst. It was so dark in color as to be almost of the imperial purple, and as I moved it, suddenly the light of the candles gathered in it, and far down through the lucid depth, a spark of violet radiance blazed for an instant like a small fierce jet of flame. And above it, clear on the pale surface sheen of the gem, I saw an imperial eagle, intaglio cut, grasping in its claws a double M; and spelled out around the edge, turning the sword to catch the light on the letters, the single word IMPERATOR.

  ‘Do you remember that?’ Ambrosius asked.

  ‘Yes, you showed it to me once; it is Maximus’s seal.’ It had been kept always at Dynas Pharaon in the home hall of the Laborer, and so had escaped the rising that swept so much away. ‘But it was not in any sword then.’

  ‘No, I had it set for you, and the sword seemed the most fit setting.’

  I remember that I stood for a long time looking at the great seal, waking and losing the star in the heart of the amethyst, oddly moved by the link across the years with my great-grandsire, the proud Spanish general who had married a princess of Arfon and so founded our line before his own legionaries had proclaimed him Emperor and he had marched out to his Gaulish campaigns and his death at Aquileia. After his execution, one of his officers had got his seal back to Arfon, to the princess his wife; and now it seemed to me that I was holding the whole history of our line in the dark depth of the gem that was so nearly the color of an emperor’s mantle. A stormy and a bitter history, but a proud one; of Maximus himself; of Constantine, the son he had left, sweeping down from the Arfon glens, out of the very snows of Yr Widdfa, to drive back the Saxon hordes, dying at last of a murderer’s javelin in the throat, here at Venta in his own hall. Ambrosius had told me that story often enough; he had been only nine years old, and Utha two years older, for they were the sons of their father’s old age; but he had told me once that he still dreamed of the firebrands and the shouting, and being carried off across somebody’s saddlebow with a cloak flung over his head. It had been days before he knew that he and Utha, snatched away by a faithful few of their father’s household warriors, were all that was left of the Royal House of Britain; months before he knew that Vortigern of Powys, Vortigern the Red Fox, their marriage-kinsman, had usurped the chief power in the land. Vortigern’s story was in the seal, too; Vortigern the dreamer of magnificent twilight dreams, to whom all that had to do however distantly with Rome was a worse thing than the menace of the Saxon hordes; who had brought in Saxon war bands to hold down the Picts for him, and found too late that he had called the Wolves in over his threshold. And there in the seal, too, was I, who now held it ... My mother died when I was born, and either because he felt himself guilty of her death, or because I was, after all, a son, Utha took me into his household and put me to nurse with the wife of his chief hunter; and after Utha’s death on a boar’s tusk, Ambrosius took me in his
stead. I was four summers old then, and thrust among the hounds for the place next to his knee, and when I got it, was content. I was, as he had said, the only son he ever knew, and assuredly he was all the father I had ever needed. Through the years of waiting and making ready that were the years of my own growing up, through the years of long-drawn warfare that followed, quickening at last to our autumn’s victory, I had ridden with Ambrosius since I was fifteen and first judged man enough to carry my sword. Therefore it had not been easy to tell him tonight that henceforth I must ride alone. But I think that he had known it already.

  Again the star blazed up in the royal depth of the amethyst, and I thought of another thing, and looked up. ‘Ambrosius – you cannot give me this. The sword, yes, I take that gladly in exchange for mine; but the seal is another matter. It is of the Royal House, even as you say.’

  ‘Well? And are you not of the Royal House? Not your father’s son?’

  ‘My mother’s also,’ I said.

  ‘Who, then, should I give it to?’

  ‘You have not so many gray hairs that you need take much thought of that as yet. When the time comes – Cador of Dumnonia, I suppose.’ I saw in my mind’s eye the dark reckless face of the Prince of the Dumnonia, close to Ambrosius’s at the coronation feast. Thin and fiery like the fierce spirit that our people make from grain. A warrior, yes; but a High King ... ?

  ‘He has less of the royal blood in him than you, and that on the mother’s side.’

  ‘He is not a bastard,’ I said. And the word sounded harshly in my own ears.

  There was another silence; Cabal whimpered in his sleep, chasing dream hares, and the sleet spattered more sharply at the window. Then Ambrosius said, ‘Bear Cub, has that left a scar?’

  ‘No, for you took care that it should not. But because of it, you must not give me this seal of the Royal House.’