Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  He took up again the heavy gold bracelet that he had laid aside when he rose to fetch the sword. ‘You mistake. I could not give you this that can be worn by right only by the princes of the House. The other was Maximus’s private seal and nothing more. In its way it is more potent than the arm ring, but it is mine to give – to my houndboy if I choose, and I choose that it should follow, shall we say, the dexter line of the royal blood ... I have known for a long while that a night such as this must come, and I have known as long, that when it came you must take my sword with you, Bear Cub, because I love you; and Maximus’s seal because you are its true lord.’

  ‘The light burns like a star in the heart of it,’ I said. ‘Maybe I can make it shine a small way further, into the dark ... I think we’re both a little drunk, Ambrosius.’

  But I do not think that we had touched the wine.

  chapter two

  Left-Hand World

  MORE THAN TWO MONTHS LATER I WAS SQUATTING BESIDE another fire – of crackling furze and heather roots that blazed on the open turf before a herdsman’s bothy. It seemed to me bright as only a hill fire could be, just as the clear luminous darkness that pressed behind it could only be the darkness of the hills.

  Behind me in Venta I had gathered my hundred men, and now, with a handful of those who were closest to me, I had come up into the Arfon herding grounds to see for myself what Ambrosius’s promised drafts might be likely to yield in the next few years, and choose out the best brood mares for my great stallions from among my own horse kind.

  Spring had come to the valleys of Arfon though the white mane of winter snows still lay far down the north side of Yr Widdfa; and the night was full of the voices of running water, and from the heather slopes behind the bothies, the curlews were calling as they would call almost all night long. But under the voices of the high hills, my ears seemed still to throb with the soft thunder of unshod hooves. All day they had been rounding up the horse herds, bringing them in to this deep valley of Nant Ffrancon that in time of danger could give sheltered grazing to all the horses and cattle of Arfon. The made horses had been brought up in small bands, sometimes even singly, to show their paces; and I had stood here in the loop of the stream where the herdsmen had their bothies and their branding pens, to see them brought in; and afterward the leggy two-year-olds whose breaking had been begun that winter, the wild-eyed colts with matted manes and tails, and burrs in their woolly winter coats; awkward and scary, the short hill turf flying in sods from under their stampeding hooves; the mares brought up more quietly, nervous and willful, with bellies beginning to drop as foaling time drew near; the herdsmen on their little swift beasts handling them as a dog handles sheep. It had been a good sound, a good sight. All my life the sight of a made stallion or a mare with her foal running at heel has been to me a thing to shake the heart with delight.

  Now the sweating business of the day was over and, herdsmen and Companions, we had gathered together around the blaze, huddling our cloaks about us against the cold that prowled with the darkness at our backs even while our faces scorched. We had eaten broiled mountain mutton and great hunks of rye bread and mare’s-milk cheese and wild honey; our bellies were full and our work done, and as we sat talking, most of us, I think, still about the horses, content folded us around like a homespun blanket.

  But for me, the blanket was somewhat threadbare, and a little cold wind blew through. It was good, unbelievably good, to be in the mountains again; but I had come to them as a man comes to the house he has longed for – and found that among my own hills and my own people, something in me had become a stranger.

  Beside me, huddled in a wolfskin mantle, sat old Hunno, lord of my own horses, who had known me all my life. We had withdrawn from the general talk around the fire, but we too were speaking of horse matters, at least horses came into it.

  ‘So the mountain horse runs will not be good enough for you, after these lowland years,’ the old man was grumbling into the beard that clothed his face as gray lichen clothes a twisted thorn branch.

  I had a strong desire to shake him until the yellow fangs rattled in his head, since it seemed that I could reach him in no other way. ‘There is no question of that. Have I not told you three times already? The mountain pastures are good, but they are too remote for the training herd. How long, think you, it would take to bring a draft of horses down from here even to the beginning of the lowlands? Seven days at the least; seven days that we could maybe ill afford; and if our need came at a time of storms when the rivers are in spate, we might not be able to get them out at all. The horse runs of the Deva Promontory are good also, and from Deva the roads run clear across to Eburacum or south even to Venta, for quick movement.’

  ‘And so you will speak with Kinmarcus of Deva?’

  ‘I have already spoken with him – before he rode north again from Ambrosius’s crowning, and he will yield me the grazing leave. There has always been a strong link, remember, between Deva and the Lords of Arfon.’

  He snorted like an aged ram. ‘And doubtless you will be picking out men of the Deva runs to herd these great new horses for you? Men that only know how to ride on a flat level and have never roped a wild stallion among the rocks on a slope like a falcon’s stoop.’

  ‘You know the answer to that well enough, you sour old devil,’ I said; and then as he remained stubbornly silent, ‘Well? Will you come?’

  He lowered at me under the fringe of his shaggy sheepskin hat. ‘If I come to be your horse master in the lowland runs, who’s to take the reins here and handle these great new breaking runs that you plan?’

  ‘Amgerit, your son,’ I said. ‘You know that he will take them anyway, when you grow too old.’

  ‘It is in my heart that I begin to grow old already – too old to be dragging up my roots from the mountains that saw me born.’

  ‘If you say so,’ I said. ‘It is for you to choose.’ And I left him to it. I thought that in the end he would come; but I could not do as I would once have done, taking him by the shoulders and shaking him, laughing and threatening until I had his promise, because of the strangeness that had come between me and my own world; and I knew that he was as much aware of the strangeness, the barrier, as I was.

  Young Flavian, Aquila’s son and my armor-bearer, was deep in argument with one of the herdsmen. I saw the white scar on the boy’s temple, heritage of a riding fall in his childhood, when the night wind lifted his dark forelock, and the bright eagerness of his eyes as he drove home some point with a finger into the pahn of his hand; and the brown wind-burned face of the herdsman, as vehemently denying the point, whatever it was. I saw Owain and Fulvius who had been boys with me and knew these hills as well as I did, as one passed the beer jar to the other, and wondered whether they also felt the strangeness of their homecoming. I saw Bericus tossing a greasy knucklebone from hand to hand and watching the fall of it idly as a man playing right hand against left watches the fall of the dice. I saw the farsighted hard-bitten faces of the herdsmen, most of them as well known to me almost as the faces of my Companions. I felt the harshness of Cabal’s mane under my fingers, and the softness of his pricked ears; I listened to the calling of the curlews in the dark, trying to lay hold of familiar things again for a defense against the desolation that had come upon me out of nowhere and for no clear reason.

  Presently somebody called for a tune, and a boy among the herdsmen, with a smooth olive face and warts on his hands, brought out an elder pipe and began to play, softly as a wandering wind at first, then jauntily as a water wagtail, passing with little runs and trills from tune to tune, while the men about the fire joined in from time to time, or were silent to listen. Some of his tunes were those of working lilts and old songs that we all knew; others, I think, he had made himself from something that he heard in his own head. A small merry piping, but it seemed to me that it spoke to me with a tongue that I had known before I was born, and that Yr Widdfa crest itself stooped nearer to listen. And when the boy finished and sho
ok the spittle from the end of his pipe and thrust it again into his belt, it was as though for a few moments we all went on listening to its echoes.

  Then someone moved to throw more furze branches on the blaze, and the silence broke; and most of us had some praise for the piper, so that he flushed like a girl and stared at his feet. And when the talk had turned to other things, I said to old Hunno beside me, ‘It is a long time since I have heard the music of my left-hand people among my own hills.’

  ‘Your left-hand people?’ said Hunno.

  ‘My left-hand people ... Half of me is Roman, Hunno. I think that is so strong in your mind tonight that you have wakened it in mine. My right-hand people are those who built squared forts and drove the great roads straight from city to city through whatever lay between; men who deal in law and order and can argue a question in cold blood – a daylight people. The left side is the dark side, the women’s side, the side nearest to the heart.’

  ‘A sore thing, you’ll be telling me, to belong to two worlds.’

  ‘At the worst, it might be to be torn between the tree and the stallion. At the least, it is to be always a little in exile.’

  He nodded under his shaggy hat. ‘Sa sa.’ And then, grudgingly, ‘It is in my mind that I will come down into the Deva runs when you are wanting me.’

  The next day I spent for myself. I had done what I came to do, and tomorrow I must take the road down from the mountains; the long road south through Britain and across the Narrow Sea and south again all the length of Gaul to the horse markets of Septimania; and once I set foot on that road, God knew when I might walk my own hills again. In the cool first light of morning, with a crust of rye bread in the breast of my tunic, and Cabal, eager for the day, loping ahead, I left the rest of my little band to their own devices, and took to the hills, as I had done when I was a boy, before ever Ambrosius led his war hosts down to drive out the Saxon hordes and retake his father’s capital; in the days when Arfon was still my world, and the world still whole and undivided.

  At the head of the valley, the stream came down in steep white water, and the alders gave place to rowan and bird cherry. The day was strengthening; the hillside still in shadow, but the light suddenly thrilling like birdsong. I struck away from the stream and began to make my way up the open hillside, Cabal leaping on ahead as though the feathers of his heels were wings. Below me, when I turned to look back, the great valley of Nant Ffrancon fell away, green under the gray and blue and russet of the mountains. I could make out the loop of the stream with its rusty smoke of spring-flushed alders, and the huddled bothies where we had slept, and all down the valley the darkling speckle of the horse herds at graze. Then I turned my back on the valley and climbed on, up into the solitude of the high hills, into a world that was very old and very empty, where sound was the crying of the green plover and the siffling of the little wind through the dun grass, and movement was the cloud shadows racing from hill to hill.

  I walked for a long time, keeping to the high ground, with the white crest of Yr Widdfa rearing always above the shoulders of the mountains northward; and long past noon, came to the crest of a mountain ridge, where an outcrop of starling-colored rocks, stripped by storms on the seaward side, made a rampart against the wind, so that landward of it there was shelter and a thin warmth. It was a good halting place, and I settled there to my hunk of bread. Cabal lay down beside me with a sigh, and watched me eat. A small mountain flower, a star of petals royally purple as the amethyst in my sword hilt, sprang from a cushion of hairy leaves in a cleft of the rocks within reach of my hand, and before me I had the whole mile-wide sweep of the hillside to myself, save for the carcass of a sheep picked bare by black-backed gulls. I finished the dark nutty bread, tossing the last piece to the expectant Cabal, and did not at once push on, but sat with my arms around my updrawn knees, letting the high solitude soak into me. I have always dreaded to be lonely, but it was the loneliness of being set apart that I dreaded in those days, not the mere fact of being alone ... It was warm, surprisingly warm, here in the sun and out of the wind, and it was as though sleep came creeping up through the grasses; little by little I slipped into an easier position, my head on Cabal’s flank; and sleep gathered us both in the same instant.

  I woke to hear Cabal’s troubled whining, and felt a changed air on my face; and opened my eyes and came to my elbow in the same instant, staring about me. Where the mile-wide sweep of hillside had dropped away to rise again to the crests across the valley was nothing but soft wreathing whiteness, a few paces of tawny hill grass, blurring into the drift. The mist had come rolling up from the sea while I slept, as such mists do come, without warning, and swiftly as a horse may gallop. Even as I looked, it thickened, smoking across the crest of the rocks above me in swathes of drifting moisture that tasted salt on the lips.

  I cursed, but cursing was no good; and considered what next, for I was not familiar with this particular stretch of the Arfon mountains. I could wait where I was for the mist to clear, but I knew these sudden uncanny hill mists; it might be three days before that happened. Or I could find a stream and follow it down. One was never far from running water, among the high hills. The danger of that was that the stream might lead me over a rock fall or into a bog, instead of safely off the hills; but to a hillman born and bred as I was, that danger was small so long as I kept my wits about me.

  Cabal was already up, stretching first his front and then his hind legs, and stood watching me expectantly, his tail swinging behind him as I got up and stretched in my turn. I stood for a few moments to get my bearings. Then I whistled him after me and set off downhill into the mist. I moved slowly, steering by the fall of the land and pausing now and then to listen, until at last I caught the purl of quick-running water seemingly still very far below me; and three steps farther on, all but stumbled head foremost into a stream coming down in green spate from the melting snows. It would lead me in the wrong direction for Nant Ffrancon, but that could not be helped; the rest would know, when the mist came down, that I was safe enough among my own glens, and wait for me until I could make my way back to them.

  Presently, as I followed the water down, the steep fall of the valley leveled somewhat, and the ground underfoot changed from moor grass to a dense aromatic carpet of bog myrtle interlaced with heather; and I began to feel for the firmness of every step. Then it dropped again, and the stream plunged after it in a long slide of black water smooth as polished glass under the overarching tangle of hawthorn trees, and rough pasture came up to meet me among the hillside outcrops of black rock, and almost in the same instant I snuffed the faint blue whisper of woodsmoke.

  I whistled Cabal in closer and, with a hand on his bronze-studded collar, checked to listen, then went on again. Below me I heard the lowing of cattle, and through the mist a huddle of squat buildings loomed into view. There was a soft flurry of hoofbeats and horned shapes shouldering up through the smoking wetness; a knot of cattle being driven in for folding. I had not realized it was as late as that. One of the little rough-coated milch cows broke away from the rest and headed into the mist, her eyes wild and her heavy udder swinging. I stepped into her path, waving my free arm and making the noises that came to me from my boyhood and I had not used since; and she wheeled away, lowing, her head down, and cantered back toward the opening in the turf wall. Cabal would have bounded after her but for my hand on his collar. A sullen-looking boy in a wolfskin came panting up at the heels of this herd, with a great walleyed bitch running low at his knee, and as the last of the cattle pelted through, we came together in the gateway.

  He looked at me, slantwise a little, under down-drawn brows, while the dogs – seeing that the other was a bitch, I had released Cabal – walked around each other in inquiring circles. ‘She is forever wandering away. My thanks, stranger.’ The boy’s gaze moved over me appraisingly, and fastened upon the heavy gold Medusa-head brooch that clasped my tunic at the shoulder, then returned to my face. Clearly he wanted to know what a man with a b
rooch like that was doing alone in the mountains, but a kind of sullen courtesy forbade his asking.

  I said, ‘I was caught way up the glen yonder by the magic mist – I am from Nant Ffrancon over the mountains. Will you give me shelter for the night?’

  ‘The shelter is not mine to give; you must ask the woman.’

  But I had turned in beside him, after the cattle. We were within the gate gap now, and a man who by his face was the boy’s father had appeared to help him close the entrance with its dry thornbush for the night. He too stared at me slantwise under his brows, while the cattle milled around us. They seemed a very silent couple.

  I was in a farmsteading like many another below the mountains; a huddle of low-browed bothies of turfs and gray stone, roofed with a dark rough thatch of heather; store sheds, byres and house-place, all huddled within the turf walls that gave nighttime shelter from the wolves and the dark. But I had never been in this steading before, this steading with the white wetness of the mountain mist smoking out of its hunched shoulders. And for a moment I had the unpleasant fancy that it lay at the very heart of the mist as a spider lies at the heart of its web; and that when the mist lifted, there would be only bare hillside where the steading had been.

  But even as the thought brushed across my mind, I knew suddenly that I was being watched – watched, that is, by someone other than the man and the boy. I turned quickly, and saw a woman standing in the houseplace doorway. A tall woman clad in a tunic of rough saffron wool worked about the neck and sleeves with crimson, which gave her the look of a flame. A heavy mass of dark hair was loosely knotted about her head, and her eyes looked coolly back into mine out of a face which bore what I took at that first sight to be the burned-out remains of great beauty. Yet she could not, I thought, be more than a few years older than myself, twenty-seven or -eight, maybe. She stood with one hand on the leather door apron which still quivered where it had just fallen back into place behind her; yet there was a stillness about her, as though she had been standing there a very long time, maybe a lifetime or so – waiting.