Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘And to Arfon for corn?’

  I shook my head. ‘That counts as tribute from my people. Some will come actually from my own estates. I am of the breed of the Lords of Arfon, as your chieftain here put it. They will let me have the corn ... For the rest, there’s always the hunting – the stored grain in the granary and the boar in the woods; that is the way the outposts used to live in the old days, isn’t it?’

  Silence fell between us for a while, and then at last Kinmarcus said, ‘What thing was it that you would have come to the Dun to speak with me about?’

  I turned a little, leaning one-elbowed on the coping, to look at him. ‘I want men.’

  He smiled, that swift fierce smile that leapt into his face and out again, leaving it grave. ‘It is in my heart that you can gather men to you with little help from any princeling, my friend.’

  ‘Given a free hand, yes.’

  ‘In Lindum, the hand was not free?’

  ‘Free enough, while the men were needed only to clear the Sea Wolves from within their own frontiers. I must have men to follow me out of the Deva hunting runs without let or hindrance from their Prince, and across the mountains to Eburacum in the spring.’

  ‘Your hand is free,’ he said. ‘Set up your standard, and the young men will come like June bugs to a lantern. Only leave a few to defend our own women and our own hearth places.’

  ‘The Scots raiders?’

  ‘The Scots raiders, and others. Maybe the Saxon wind blows across the mountains.’ He shifted abruptly, before I could ask his meaning, head up into the wind that lifted back his fallow-streaked mane of hair. ‘What after Eburacum?’

  ‘It is not only Eburacum, though Eburacum is the heart of it. It is the whole eastern end of the Brigantes country. After that we go wherever the sorest need calls us; southeast into the Iceni territory in all likelihood. The Saxons call all that part for their own Northfolk and Southfolk, already.’

  Kinmarcus said abruptly, ‘And yet I believe that if you are wise, you will take the way north, beyond the Wall, and that without overmuch delay.’

  I looked at him quietly, aware that this at last was what he had come to say. ‘What is the reading of that riddle, my Lord Kinmarcus?’

  And he returned my look, eye into eye. ‘I also have a thing to speak of and a tale to tell,’ he said. ‘It is so that I did not wait your coming, but hunted toward Deva. If the signs and portents do not lie, by next midsummer the heather will be ablaze through half the lowlands of Caledonia; by harvest, the fire will have leapt the Wall.’

  ‘Another riddle to answer the first. What does it mean?’

  ‘There has been unrest in southern Caledonia for a year and more. We have felt it stirring, we who hold the princedoms of the North. Even so far down from the Wall as this, we have felt it, but the thing was formless, like a little wind on a summer’s day that blows all ways at once through the long grass. Now the thing has taken form and we know from whence the wind blows. The Saxons have called in the Painted People to their aid, promising them a share of the fat pickings when Britain goes down; and the Painted People have sent out the Cran Tara, even overseas into Hibernia, summoning the Scots, and made common cause with certain of the British chieftains who think they see the chance to break free of all bonds and stand proud and alone – the fools, hastening to set their necks under the Saxon’s heel.’

  ‘Earl Hengest’s heel?’ There was a small shock of cold in me.

  ‘I think not. Possibly Octa has a hand in it, but it is more likely in my mind that the thing lies with the true Saxons of the north coast. Oh aye, with us the one name serves for all, but Hengest is a Jute, remember, and the Sea Wolves have not yet learned to combine.’ His voice dropped to a brooding note. ‘If they learn before we do, then that is the end of Britain.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ I said, after a pause.

  ‘By a mere trick of chance, or as some might say, by the Grace of God. Not many days since, a currach bound for the Caledonian coast was driven off course by a northwesterly wind and came ashore on ours. The men on board were an embassy of some kind, for they carried no weapons save their dirks, though they were of the warrior kind, and among the wreckage there were green branches such as men carry on an embassy for a sign of peace, and nowhere any sign of the whitened war shields. Only one man came alive out of the wreckage, and he had been broken senseless across the rocks. The men who drew him to land would have finished him then and there, as one finishes a wounded viper, but he cried out something about the Painted People and the Saxon kind. That was enough to make the man with the dagger hold his hand. They carried him up to the fisher huts in the hope that there might be more to be got from him – and sent word to me.’

  ‘Torture?’ I said. I am not squeamish where the Scots or the Saxons are concerned, but I have never liked the business, needful though it be at times, of roasting a man over a slow fire or slipping a dagger point under his fingernails to come at the thing he has to tell. It is not pity, but merely that I feel too sharply the skin parch and blister, the dagger point shrieking under my own nails.

  ‘In the state he was in, if we had tried torture then, he would have found his escape by dying under our hands; so we let him bide for a few days, in hope that he might regain strength a little, and in the end there was no need. The fever took him. It was a talking fever, and he talked for a day and a night before he died.’

  ‘You are sure that his story was not the mere raving of delirium?’

  ‘I have seen many men die in my time; I know the difference between the raving of delirium and a man crying out in fever the secrets on his heart ... Besides, when one comes to think of it, the story is a likely one, isn’t it?’

  ‘Horribly likely. If it be true, pray God they cannot get the fire blazing before we have had time to deal with Hengest in Eburacum. That must come first – it is in my mind that next year is likely to be something of a race against time.’

  That night we did indeed feast like heroes, and afterward made merry, though we missed Bedwyr and his harp. And next morning after we had made certain plans and exchanged certain promises between us, Kinmarcus rode off with his companions, the little wild-eyed mare dancing under him like a bean on a bake stone.

  The day that followed was a good day; one of those days that do not greatly matter in the pattern of things, but linger, comely-shaped and clear-colored in the memory when the days of splendor and disaster have become confused. I had had no time until then to spare for anything farther afield than the in-pastures where some of our mounts were already out at grass. But that morning, after Kinmarcus was away, I sent for Arian, who was rested by that time, and with Cei and Flavian and young Amlodd, rode out to look at the horse runs.

  Winter, which had seemed almost upon us, had drawn back a little, and the day had the softness of early autumn; a light west wind soughing across the gently undulating levels, the sun veiled by a silver haze, and the shriveled brown leaves drifting from the long belts of oak coppice shaped askew by the Atlantic gales, that crested many of the faint lifts of land. Here and there, little dark cattle turned to stare at us with slowly moving jaws as we rode by – fewer than there would have been last month, before the autumn slaughtering – or a knot of ponies would scatter and canter a bowshot away, then turn to stare also, tossing their rough heads and snorting. Near the villages men were at the late autumn plowing followed by a wheeling and crying cloud of gulls, and the smell of moist freshly turned earth was a thing to shake the heart. A few miles from Deva we came to the huddle of turf bothies among hay and bracken and bean stacks, where the herdsmen lived; and were told by a small man with a squint to make one cross one’s fingers and the bowlegs of one born on horseback, that Hunno was out with the herd. So we headed for the long shallow valley of our own training runs.

  In Arfon our breeding runs were enclosed for the most part with dry-stone walling, for loose stone is plentiful among the hills; here, too, there was some stone, but it was less easily
come by, and in some places, taking advantage of scrub and coppice there already, the dry-stone gave place to hedges of roughly steeped thorn, while at the lower end, which was marshy, the valley was closed by a dike and turf wall.

  We met old Hunno on a small rough-coated pony, with a stripling whom I did not know riding another behind him, jogging up from the marsh end of the valley. Clearly he had been making his daily round of the boundaries. He looked exactly as he had done when I saw him last, exactly as he had done since I first remembered him; the wide lipless mouth, the little bright eyes peering out from the shadow of the enormous sheepskin hat he always wore – I could swear it was the same hat, too. ‘Heard you was back in Deva.’ He greeted me as though we had last met maybe a week ago. And then, faintly accusing, ‘I been expecting you any time these last three days.’

  ‘I could not come before,’ I said. ‘Too much else to see to. How does it go, Hunno old wolf?’

  He gestured with a hand like a knotted furze root. ‘How does it look?’

  But I had no need to follow his pointing finger. I had been looking, all the way down from the head of the valley, joying in the sight of young horses grazing by the stream, war-horses in the making, as a miser joys in the gleam of gold trickling through his fingers. ‘It looks well enough from here,’ I said. We had never dealt in superlatives together, but we smiled, eye into eye.

  ‘Come and take a look at closer quarters.’ He jerked his chin toward the water, and we rode on together. Amlodd my young armor-bearer, who was a friendly soul, had dropped behind to join the unknown stripling, and Hunno and Flavian, Cei and I rode ahead in a bunch. Many stallions had sprung from those five Septimanian sires, three-, four-, and even a few five-year-olds; and one look at the big-boned youngsters who scattered at our coming and then turned back in curiosity was enough to tell me that the plan was working out. Not all of them were as tall or as heavy in build as their sires, but all stood at least two hands higher than our native breed.

  ‘All broken?’ I asked.

  ‘All rough-broken. A few of the three-year-olds are not finished yet. It’s none too easy to get enough men for the task, not what I’d call skilled men, not in these fat Lowlands.’ Hunno spat with great accuracy into the silky head of a seeding marsh thistle, in token of his opinion of the Lowland horsemen.

  ‘You’ll have enough breakers this year, at all events.’

  By the time that we had seen all we wished to see in the training runs, and Hunno had signaled finish to the lads whom he had called up to put the best of the young stallions through their paces, the autumn day was drawing on. And as we went up over the brow of the ridge heading for the one breeding run that we had in the Lowlands, Hunno said, ‘Best come up to the corral, and we’ll drive the rest for you. If you try riding the whole valley, ’twill be dusk before we’re half done, and you’ll likely miss the best of the colts.’

  I nodded; we were in Hunno’s hands, and this was his kingdom, and on the crest of the ridge, among the wind-shaped thorns that grew there, reined in and sat looking down the gentle slope seaward, toward the breeding run maybe half a bowshot away. The valley before us was better sheltered than the one we had left, with thick low oak woods on the seaward side, a good place for its purpose; and at the upper end of it, among his quietly grazing mares and their foals, I could see the dark masterful shape of the stallion. The long sweep of the valley was only lightly enclosed, for there were few wolves in those parts, and if any of the little native stallions who ran free on the marshes should attempt to break into the mares, the lord of the herd would deal with him; while, with a stallion contented among his own thirty or forty mares, there was far less risk of a breakout than among the unmated youngsters in the training runs.

  I wheeled Arian and we set off again for the stone-walled corral at the head of the valley, passing as we went the furze-roofed shelters for the mares at foaling time, and coming to the corral gate we tethered the mounts to a thornbush and Cei and Flavian and I settled down to wait, while Amlodd went off with the other two to help drive the horses.

  The black stallion had been watching us ever since we came down to the edge of his domain, not uneasy, but wary on behalf of his mares; he snorted and tossed his head, his mane flying up in a dark cloud, and came up at the trot, in a wide unhurried circle to come between us and them.

  ‘The Black One takes good care of his own,’ Flavian said.

  Old Hunno called out to him softly and unintelligibly as he trotted by on his shaggy pony, and the great horse ruckled down his nose in greeting. Bedwyr had been right about that one.

  Hunno and his little troop trotted on, dwindling small into the distance, casting about the lower end of the valley, half out of sight among the furze and thorn scrub that dipped toward the marshes. And presently we saw the whole valley moving toward us. We heard the shouting of the drivers, and a few moments later the soft smother of unshod horses on the grass. They came up at a trot, long-drawn-out like a great skein of flighting duck, the herdsmen on their little rough ponies shepherding them on the flanks; and for a moment I was snatched back to a spring day in Nant Ffrancon, eight years ago. They were being herded in through the opening with shouts and cries, the wild-eyed mares with their colts still running at heel, the yearlings and the rough-coated two-year-olds who would be for that winter’s breaking; awkward, scary, curious as to the meaning of this thing. And among them still, a little gray in the muzzle now but still mighty, on guard over his own, the Black One. I saw Amlodd riding with the herdsmen, flushed under his freckles and bright-eyed as a girl in love; and after the hurdles had been set up at the wide entrance, he dropped from his horse’s back and came to me with the bridle looped over his arm, laughing and breathless. ‘Oh my Lord Artos – sir – I should have made a good herdsman if I were not your armor-bearer!’

  ‘By the time that you are captain of the third squadron,’ said Flavian, naming his own rank and speaking from experience, ‘you’ll have served often enough as both, I promise you.’ And he tossed the knot of bright hawthorn berries that he had been playing with, into the hand that the boy flung out to catch it, and turned to the trampling mass of horses.

  I went first to the Black One, who in the way of his kind had drawn out from the rest to stand a little to one side, where he could have all things under his eye. He stood with his head alertly up to watch our coming, swishing his tail behind him, but no more uneasy than he had been at first, because of the familiar figure in the old sheepskin hat who walked with me.

  ‘If you had been Bedwyr the Harper,’ Old Hunno said, ‘he would have come to you.’

  ‘I wonder – does a horse remember so well from year’s end to year’s end?’

  ‘He doesn’t forget the man that won and mastered him,’ Hunno grunted. ‘No more than a woman forgets the man that had her virginity – it’s the same thing in a way.’

  I gave him a lick of salt, which he took with aloof deliberation, accepting with it the fact that I was not an enemy; and having made that clear to him, I turned in with Flavian and Cei to see my fill of the mares and their young. We moved in and out among them, pausing to look at this one and that, examining, judging, feeling latent strength and responsiveness in slim haunches and supple neck, while Hunno forced up a head with back-laid ears or slapped aside a woolly rump to make way for us in the press. And afterward, those that seemed to me the finest were brought out to us separately, mare and foal, yearling and two-year-old, colt and filly. In all of them the same thing was apparent, the increase of height, the added weight of bone.

  ‘God is good,’ said Cei, who was a religious man after his own fashion.

  Finally I beckoned Hunno over again. ‘The chestnut mare over there, with the white foal – bring them out to me.’

  I had been noticing that mare and foal ever since they were driven up to the corral, or rather, I had been noticing the foal, but had kept him until the last, childishly enough, lest the rest of the day, coming after, should seem a lesser thing.
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  Hunno cut them out from the herd and brought them to me, and I had a feeling, seeing his grin, that he also had been saving this foal for the last, hoping that I would not call for him before. I set about gaining the dam’s confidence first, fondling her neck and making small love talk into her twitching ear (for with the mother’s confidence the foal’s would come the more easily), before I turned my attention to the young one. He was a rawboned stallion foal, much younger than most of his kind; indeed, I judged him to have been born at summer’s end or early autumn, as sometimes happens when a mare comes late into season or remains horsey after her proper time. He was not white as yet, but gray as a signet, yet any who had encountered such a foal before could see that by the third year he would be white as a swan. An uncommon color nowadays; but they used to say that there was Libyan blood in most of the Roman cavalry mounts, and there were many white horses of that breed, and he must have been a throwback in color through his mother to some cavalry horse of the Eagles. One could sense the promise in him already, as he stood beside his mother, uncertain of himself, torn between his desire for the reassurance of the milk that he had almost outgrown, and his curiosity as to these men he had never seen before. The fire of his mother’s race was in him, and the power and steadiness of his sire’s. He was only a very little afraid of me, especially when he saw that his mother was content to let my hand rest on her neck. Among my own hills, the foals that run wild on the mountain grasslands and are rounded up only twice a year come wild as hawks to the breaker’s hand; but those that are born of tamed mothers in the home runs, we are accustomed to handle from the day of their birth, and these ‘gentled’ foals are always the more easily broken when the time comes. So the smoky foal was used to men’s hands on him. He was a little shy of me, because my hand was a stranger’s, but my palm to lick – there must have been the taste of salt on it still – soon won him over, and he allowed me to gentle the harsh furry tuft where his crest would be, and draw a finger down his nose to the soft muzzle, caressing him, feeling the promise of him, the small half-shy response under my hand. I knew all at once and with complete certainty that here was my war-horse of a future day when staunch old Arian should come to honorable retirement. I always rode a white horse in battle; it is not that I find them better than horses of another color, but that a white horse marks out the leader clearly for his men to follow; it also marks him clearly for the enemy, but that is a thing that there is no help for. Besides, it is not to the Saxons alone that the White Horse is sacred, else why should men, before even the Legions came, have cut a white Dragon Horse half a hillside high in the chalk above the vale that runs to the very heart of the land? It is fitting that a white horse and no other color should lead the war hosts of Britain into battle ...