Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  This, clearly, was the woman of whom I must ask my night’s shelter. But she spoke first, low-voiced and with less courtesy than her herdboy. ‘Who are you, and what do you come seeking here?’

  ‘For the one, men call me Artos the Bear,’ I said. ‘For the other, a night’s shelter if you will give it to me. I am from Nant Ffrancon over the mountains, and the mist came upon me unawares.’

  I had the odd impression, as I spoke, that something had flashed open behind her eyes; but before I could tell what lay beyond, it was as though she veiled them again, deliberately, so that I should not look in. She stood as still as before, save that her gaze moved over me, from my head to my rawhide shoes. Then she smiled, and drew aside the door apron. ‘So – we have heard that Artos the Bear was running among the horse herds of Nant Ffrancon. It grows cold since the mist came down; let you come in to the hearth fire, and be welcome.’

  ‘Good fortune on the house, and on the woman of the house.’ I had to duck low to pass in through the doorway, but once inside, with the thick peat reek stinging in my throat and eyes, the house-place was roomy enough to be half lost in shadows beyond the reach of the firelight.

  ‘Wait,’ the woman said, moving past me. ‘I will make more light.’ She disappeared into the farther gloom, and I heard her moving there, softly, as though on furred paws. Then she was back, and stooping to kindle a dry twig at the central hearth. The twig blossomed into flame at the tip, and from the flame-flower she kindled the waxen candle she had brought with her from the shadows. The young candle flame sank and turned blue as she shielded it with her hollowed hand, then sprang erect, and the shadows crowded back under the deep thatch as she reached up and set it on the edge of the half loft in the crown of the roof.

  I saw a spacious living hut, the usual standing loom beside the door with a piece of striped cloth on it, piled sheepskins on the bed place against the farther wall, a carved and roughly painted chest. The woman drew forward a stool spread with a dappled deerskin to the flagged space beside the hearth. ‘Let my lord be seated; there will be food by and by.’

  I murmured something by way of thanks, and sat down, Cabal watchful at my feet; and sitting there with my elbows comfortably on my knees, I fell to watching her as, seemingly brushing off all consciousness of me, she returned to the cooking of the evening meal. Watching her so, as she knelt in the fire glow, turning from the herb-scented stew in its copper cauldron to the barley cakes browning on the hearthstone, I was puzzled. Her tunic was of rough homespun, scarcely finer, though certainly brighter in color, than that which any peasant woman might have worn, and the hands with which she turned the barley cakes were rough-skinned, the hands of a peasant woman in texture though not in shape; and yet I could not see her as woman to the man outside. Also, the more I looked at her face in the firelight, the more my mind was teased with a half-memory like a fugitive scent that always eluded me, just as I thought I had it. Yet I was sure that I had never seen her before. I should never have forgotten that ruined beauty once I had seen it. Maybe she was like someone? But if so, who? I had an uneasy feeling that in some way it mattered deeply that I should remember, that a great deal depended on it ... But the more I tried to lay hold of it, the further the nagging memory slipped away.

  At last I turned from it to the puzzle that could be more easily solved. ‘The man I saw outside ... ’ I began, and left the end of the sentence trailing, for I was feeling my way.

  She looked up at me, her eyes bright and faintly mocking, as though she knew what was in my mind. ‘Is my servant. So is the boy, and so is Uncle Bronz, whom you will see in a while. I am the only woman here, and so I cook for my servants – and for my guest.’

  ‘And for the lord of the steading?’

  ‘There is no lord of the steading.’ She sat back on her heels and stared into my face; the hot barley cake must have scorched her fingers, but she seemed not to feel it, as though her whole awareness were in her eyes. ‘We are such barbarians, here in the mountains where Rome’s feet seldom trampled, that a woman may possess both herself and her own property, if she be strong enough to hold them.’

  She spoke as one half scornfully explaining the ways of her country to strangers, and I felt the blood rise in my forehead at her tone. ‘I have not forgotten the customs of my own people.’

  ‘Your own people?’ She replaced the barley cake on the hearthstone, laughing a little. ‘Have you not? You have been long enough in the lowlands. They say that at Venta there are streets of houses all in straight rows, and in the houses are tall rooms with painted walls, and Ambrosius the High King wears a cloak of the imperial purple.’

  I laughed also, pulling at Cabal’s twitching ears. This woman was not like any that I had known before. ‘Do not hold the straightness of the Venta streets against me. Do not deny me a place in my mother’s world because I have a place in my father’s.’

  chapter three

  The Birds of Rhiannon

  PRESENTLY THE THREE MEN AND THE WALLEYED BITCH CAME to their supper, shouldering in like oxen out of the wet, with a silver bloom of mist drops hanging in their hair and the homespun and wolfskin of their garments, and took their places about the fire, squatting on their haunches in the spread fern. I had the only stool in the place, and they looked at me sidelong and upward, knowing me for who I was, and more silent even than I judged was usual with them because I was there.

  The woman gathered the hot barley cakes into a basket, and unhooked the bronze stewpot and set it beside the hearth, and fetched hard white cow’s-milk cheese and a jar of thin heather beer. Then she poured her own share of the stew into a bowl, took a barley cake, and withdrew to the women’s side of the hearth, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves on the men’s side.

  It was the most silent meal that I have ever eaten. The men were tired, and wary in my presence like animals with a stranger’s smell among them; and on the far side of the fire, the woman kept her own dark counsels, though more than once when I glanced toward her, I knew that the instant before she had been watching me.

  When we had thrown the bones to the dogs, and wiped the last drops of soup from the bottom of the crock with lumps of barley bannock, when the last lump of cheese was eaten and the beer jar drained, the farm men rose, and shouldered out once more into the night, bound, I supposed, for their own sleeping places somewhere among the byres. Thinking that maybe I should go too, I drew one leg under me to rise. But the woman had risen already, and was looking at me through the peat smoke. It seemed as though her eyes were waiting for mine; and when I met them, she shook her head, smiling a little. ‘Those are my servants, and when they have eaten they go to their own places; but you are my guest; therefore stay a while. See, I will bring you better drink than you had at supper.’

  And as I watched her, she seemed to melt rather than draw back into the shadows under the half loft. She was an extraordinarily silent creature in all her movements, silken-footed as a mountain cat; and I guessed that she could be as fierce as one also. In a while she returned, bearing between her hands a great cup of polished birchwood darkened almost to black by age and use, and ornamented around the rim with beaten silver; and I rose as she came toward me, and bent my head to drink from the cup as she raised it, my hand resting lightly over hers in the gesture which custom demanded. It was more heather beer, but stronger and sweeter than that which I had drunk at supper; and there was an aromatic tang under the sweetness that I did not recognize. Maybe it was no more than the flavor of the wild garlic in the cheese lingering still in my mouth. Over the tilting rim of the cup I saw her looking at me with an odd intensity, but as I caught her gaze, I had once again that impression that she had drawn a veil behind her eyes so that I could not look in ...

  I drained the cup, and released it again into her hands. ‘I thank you. The drink was good,’ I said, my voice sounding strangely thickened in my own ears, and sat down once more on the skin-spread stool, stretching my legs to the fire.

  The woman st
ood looking down at me; I felt her looking; and then she laughed, and tossed to Cabal some dark sweetmeat that she had been holding in the hollow of her hand. ‘There, for a dog that is better than heather beer,’ and as Cabal (greed was his failing always) snapped it up, she sank to her knees beside me and letting the empty cup roll unheeded into the folds of her skirt, began to mend the fire. She settled on more peat, and heather snarls and birch bark to make a blaze, and as the dry stuff caught and the flames licked out along the strands of it, the light strengthened and leapt up and reached to finger the very houseplace walls. A strange mood of awareness was coming over me, so that it was as though I had one less skin than usual. I was aware as though they had been part of my own body, my own soul, of the houseplace brimming with light as the great cup had brimmed with heather beer, and with the same wild sweet half-forgotten, half-remembered tang of magic; I was aware of the dark thatch like sheltering wings, and beyond the golden circle the night and the mountains and the salt mist crowding in: the very texture of the pale night moth’s fur as it fluttered about the candle flame, and the last year’s sweetness of the sprig of dry bell heather in the fern by my foot.

  There was another scent, too, that I had not noticed before, a sharp aromatic sweetness lacing the mingled homespun smells of thatch and cooking, wet wolfskins and peat smoke. It came, I realized, from the woman’s hair. I had not seen her take the pins from it, but it fell now all about her, a dark silken fall like the slide of water under the hawthorn trees, and she was playing with it idly, flinging it this way and that, combing it with her fingers, so that the disturbing sweetness came and went like breath, whispering to me in the firelight ...

  ‘Tell me where I may find a place to sleep among your byres, and I will be going now,’ I said, more loudly than was needful.

  She looked up at me, holding aside the dark masses of her hair and smiling in the shadow of it. ‘Ah, not yet. You have been so long in coming.’

  ‘So long in coming?’ Something in me that stood aside from the rest knew even then that it was a strange thing for her to say; but the firelight and mist and the scent of her hair were in my head, and all things a little unreal, brushed with a dark moth-wing bloom of enchantment.

  ‘I knew that you would come, one day.’

  I frowned, and shook my head in a last attempt to clear it. ‘Are you a witch, then, to know the thing that has not yet come to happen?’ And even as I spoke, another thought sprang to my mind. ‘A witch, or—’

  Again she seemed to read my thinking; and she laughed up into my face. ‘A witch, or—? Are you afraid to wake in the morning on the bare mountainside, and find three lifetimes gone by? Ah, but whatever happens tomorrow, surely tonight is sweet?’ With the speed and liquid grace of a cat, she slip-turned from her kneeling position, and next instant was lying across my thighs, her strange ravaged face turned up to mine and her dark hair flowing over us both. ‘Are you afraid to hear the music of the Silver Branch? Are you afraid to hear the singing of Rhiannon’s birds that makes men forget?’

  I had not noticed the color of her eyes before. They were deeply blue, and veined like the petals of the blue cranesbill flower, the lids faintly stained with purple like the beginning of corruption. ‘I think that you would not need the birds of Rhiannon to make men forget,’ I said thickly, and bent toward her. She gave a low shuddering cry and reared up to meet me; she tore the bronze pin from the neck of her tunic so that it fell loose, and caught my hand and herself guided it down into the warm dark under the saffron cloth, to find the heavy softness of one breast.

  The skin of her hands was hard, and her throat brown where it rose above her tunic, but the skin of her breast was silken, full and unblemished; and I could feel the whiteness of it. I dug in my fingers, and the delight under my hand set up a shivering echo like a small flame in my loins. I was not like Ambrosius; I had had my first girl when I was sixteen, and others since; not more perhaps, or less, than most of my kind. I do not think I ever harmed any of them, and for me, the taking had been sweet while it lasted and not much mattered afterward. But the thing in me that stood aside knew that this would be different, promising fiercer joys than ever I had known before, and that afterward, for all the rest of my life, the scars would last.

  I struggled to resist – drugged, enchanted, whatever I was, I strove to fight her; and I am not weak-willed. She must have felt the struggle in me. Her arms were around my neck, and she laughed, softly and crooningly. ‘Na na, there is no need that you should be afraid. I will tell you my name in exchange for yours; if I were one of Them, I could not do that, for it would give you power over me.’

  ‘I do not think I want to know it.’ I dragged the words out.

  ‘But you must; it is too late now ... I am called Ygerna,’ and she began to sing, very softly, almost under her breath. It might have been a spell – maybe it was, in its way – but it only sounded like a singing rhyme that I had known all my life; a small caressing song that the women sing to their children, playing with their toes at sleeping time. Her voice was sweet and soft as wild honey; a dark voice:

  Three birds perched on an apple spray,

  And the blossom was not more white than they.

  And they sang to the souls who passed that way.

  A King in a cloak of white and red

  And a Queen with goldwork round her head

  And a woman with loaves of barley bread ...

  The song and the voice were calling to me, calling to the part of me that had its roots in my mother’s world, offering the perfect and complete homecoming that I had failed to find. The Dark Side, I had called it, the women’s side, the side nearest to the heart. It was calling to me now, arms wide and welcoming, through the woman lying across my knee, finally claiming me, so that the things I had cared about before the mist came down were forgotten; so that I rose when she did and stumbled after her to the piled sheepskins against the wall.

  When I awoke, I was lying still fully clothed on the bed place, and the leather apron had been freed from its pegs and drawn back from the doorway; and in the gray light of dawn that watered the shadows, I saw the woman sitting beside me, once again with her stillness upon her, as though she had been waiting maybe a lifetime or so for me to waken.

  I smiled at her, not desiring her any more, but satisfied, and remembering the fierce joy of her body answering mine in the darkness. She looked back at me with no answering smile, her eyes no longer blue but merely dark in the leaden light, the discolored lids more deeply stained than ever. I came to my elbow, aware, without full looking, of Cabal lying still asleep beside the hearth, the fire burned out to frilled white ash, and the cup with its silver rim lying where it had fallen among the fern. And in the woman, too, it seemed that the fires were burned out and cold, deadly and dreadfully cold. A chill fell on me as I looked at her, and the thought came back to me of waking on a bare mountainside ...

  ‘I have waited a long time for you to wake,’ she said without moving.

  I glanced at the light that was still colorless as moonstone beyond the doorway. ‘It is still early.’

  ‘Maybe I did not sleep as sound as you.’ And then, ‘If I bear you a son, what would you have me call him?’

  I stared at her, and she smiled now, a small bitter twisting of the lips. ‘Did you not think of that? You who were chance-begotten under a hawthorn bush?’

  ‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘No, I did not think. Tell me what you would have me do. Anything that I can give you—’

  ‘I do not ask for payment; none save that I may show you this.’ She had been holding something hidden between her two hands; and now she opened them and held out what they contained. And I saw that it was a massive arm ring of red gold, twisted and coiled into the likeness of the Red Dragon of Britain. I had seen the mate of it on Ambrosius’s arm every day of my life. ‘On a morning such as this one, Utha, your father and mine, gave this ring to my mother before he rode on his way.’

  It was a long moment before I
understood the full meaning of her words. And then I felt sick. I drew my legs under me and got up, pressing back from her, while she sat watching me under her dark cloak of hair. ‘I do not believe you,’ I managed at last. But I knew that I did believe her; the look in her face told me that if she had never told the truth in her whole life, she was telling it now; and I knew at last, now that it was too late, that the likeness that had so puzzled me was to Ambrosius. And she had known; all the while she had known. I heard someone groan and scarcely knew that it was me. My mouth felt stiff and dry, so that I could scarcely form the words that were in my throat. ‘Why – what made you do it?’

  She sat playing with the dragon arm ring between her hands, turning and turning it, just as Ambrosius had done, that night in Venta. ‘There could be two good reasons. One is love, and the other, hate.’

  ‘I never harmed you.’

  ‘No? For the wrong, then, that Utha, Prince of Britain, did to my mother before you were born. Your mother died at your coming – oh, I know – and because you were a son, bastard or no, your father took and reared you at his hearth, and so you see the thing with your father’s eyes. But I was only a daughter; I was not taken from my mother, and she lived long enough to teach me to hate, where once she had loved.’

  I wanted to look away, not to stare into her face any more, but I could not turn my eyes from her. She had given me her body in a kind of faming and devouring ecstasy, last night; and it was an ecstasy of hate, as potent as ever that of love could have been. I smelled hate all about me, tangible as the smell of fear in a confined space. And then, as though at last the veil were torn aside, I saw what was behind her eyes. I saw a woman and a child, a woman and a girl, beside the peat fire in this place, the one teaching and the other absorbing that caressing, soul-destroying lesson of hate. All at once I saw that what I had taken for the ruins of beauty in Ygerna’s face was the promise of beauty that had been cankered before ever it could come to flowering, and for one instant pity mingled with the horror that was rising like vomit in my throat. But the two figures in the peat smoke were changing, the girl becoming the mother, and in her place a boy, with his face, his whole soul, turned to hers, drinking in the same lesson. Dear God! What had I let loose? What had my father let loose before me, into the world?