Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Flavian’s face was troubled but perfectly steady in its resolve. ‘Sir, the bond is forged already; going before witnesses can make no difference. We belong to each other, Teleri and I.’

  ‘In every way?’

  ‘In every way.’ His eyes were clear and quiet, and they never wavered.

  ‘Then if it makes so little difference, why marry her?’

  ‘So that if – if there’s a child, no one can point a finger at her.’

  ‘So the Minnow also has done his begetting under a hawthorn bush.’ I was silent for a while, crumbling the chill emerald moss from the back of the bench under my fingers. I understood the three snowdrops now. Teleri must have stuck them there with the fingers of love, while they spoke, no doubt, of how he would come to me for my leave to marry her. ‘Who and what is she, this girl?’ I asked, after a while.

  Flavian had been standing stiffly before me all the while. ‘Just a girl – little and brown like a bird that you hold in your hand. Her father is a wool merchant.’

  ‘You have little enough to offer. Will he give her to you?’

  ‘Yes, because I am of your Companions, and because there might be the babe.’

  ‘If I give you leave to marry her, you know how it must be, don’t you? You leave her in her father’s house when we march in the spring; and it may be that one day we shall come back to make our winter quarters in Deva again, and it may be not; and it may be that one day you will be able to send for her to some other place, or again it may be not; but either way you leave her in her father’s house. I’ll have no virtuous wives following the camp to cause trouble, only whores.’

  ‘I understand – we both understand that, sir.’

  I heard myself sigh. ‘So be it, then. Go and tell her. And Minnow, hand over the squadron to Fercos first. You need not come back into camp tonight.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He looked down and then up again. ‘I don’t know how to thank you, sir, I have not the words – but if I could serve you more truly than I have done since the days that I was your armor-bearer, I would.’ His grave face flashed for a moment into its rare laughter. ‘If it would give you the least satisfaction to have my hide for a riding rug, you have but to say the word.’

  ‘I think Teleri might like it better on your back than Arian’s,’ I said. ‘Go now. She will be waiting.’

  He drew himself up in the old formal legionary salute, and turned and strode away.

  I remained sitting on the weather-stained bench, hearing his tread fade into the distant sounds of the camp, and I knew that I would have given everything I possessed in the world, to be as the Minnow was tonight. Everything save the leadership of three hundred men and the thing that we fought for. But when I came to think of it, that was all I did possess.

  Spring came, and we heard the curlews calling far into the night as they came in from the salt marshes to nest on the higher ground. Bedwyr set off once more for Arfon, and once more got back with the grain carts filled; green flame ran through the woodlands, and above the marshes the furze was on fire. A wild unrest seized us all, but as yet there was nothing we could do save wait.

  There began to be rumors of black war boats on the coast far north of the Wall; of Pictish envoys having been seen in this place and that. One day a hunter with wolfskins for sale came to me from the North, saying: ‘My Lord the Bear, last autumn the Cran Tara went out, and now the Scots and the Painted People and the Sea Wolves are hosting. I saw a band of the White Shield Warriors on the track from the west with my own eyes, and they say that Huil Son of Caw stands at the Dun of his forefathers to lead them.’ Two days later one of my own scouts came in with the same story and showed me a Scottish arm ring with dried blood like rust between the coils to prove it. Kinmarcus had been right, and this year would indeed be a race against time ... And still, as yet, there was nothing that we could do but wait, praying that the waiting time would not be long.

  That is the disadvantage of cavalry in the North or in mountain country; one cannot march until long after the true start of the campaigning season. One must wait until there is grass enough to feed the horses, and that may be May, even the start of June in a late season; whereas those who go to war for the most part on foot, as the Saxons do, can take the war trail a month earlier. We had no means of knowing whether Hengest and Octa would use that advantage to march on us while we were still bound in winter quarters, or whether they might be waiting for reinforcements, or planned to make their stronghold at Eburacum and hold it against us when we came. It was hard to wait so, for Hengest to take the initiative, and for myself, I have always hated to fight on the defensive, though many of my greatest fights have been defensive ones. But I thought that in the long run, our advantage might equal theirs, simply because if the battle was finally joined close to Deva, we should have short supply lines, whereas theirs would be perilously long – always supposing that the menace from the North did not strike before Hengest did. Everything depended on that.

  So we lived through that April in a growing fever with one eye always cocked toward the dark moorland shoulder of Black Bull, a day’s march away, where the nearest of our watchers and signal fires waited. And at last it came to May Day Eve ...

  That evening Cei and I had been out to sup with old Lucianus. Bedwyr was not of our company, for it was a law among us that all three were never out of camp at the same time. We had drunk a good deal, for it was one of those parties of the old imperial pattern one seldom met with now, in which the women withdrew as soon as the meal was over, and the men chose a drinking master and got down to the business of the evening. Our host had brought up in our honor the last of his treasured amphorae of Red Falernian, and when at last we came up the street and turned in through the fortress gates, the rich fumes of it were still in our heads, making the stars dance widdishins and our feet seem curiously far away. And as neither of us wished to wake next morning with dizzy heads and tongues like old leather, we turned aside from the sleeping quarters as by mutual consent, and climbing the steps to the narrow rampart walk, leaned there side by side, with our hot foreheads to the little thin east wind.

  ‘Ah now, that is better!’ said Cei, thrusting back the russet hair from his forehead, and snuffing like a hound. ‘No air down there in that cursed house.’

  Fulvius, whose turn it was to take the second watch, had come strolling along the rampart walk to lean his elbows on the coping beside us. He laughed, the quiet laugh of a man on night watch. ‘Too many vine leaves in your hair?’

  Yesterday, with the long strain of waiting which had begun to shorten tempers all around, Cei would have flown into a fury over that, but tonight the wine seemed to have mellowed him, and he answered peacefully enough. ‘Did you ever see a man with vine leaves in his hair walk up that deathtrap of a rampart stair without a stagger?’

  ‘I’ve seen you walk the Bath Gardens wall at Lindum without a stagger,’ I said, ‘when you were so dripping with vine leaves that most other men would have been lying on their backs in the kennel singing murky love songs to the stars.’

  ‘I have a headache,’ said Cei with dignity. ‘It was too hot in that cursed place of Lucianus’s. Shouldn’t have had the brazier glowing like that – May Eve, not midwinter.’

  ‘There’ll be plenty of folk besides Lucianus keeping good fires tonight,’ said Fulvius. ‘You can see fifteen Beltane fires from the ramparts here – I’ve counted them a score of times since I came up, for want of something better to do.’

  Almost without thinking, with some idea, I suppose, of finding more than Fulvius, I began idly to do the same. I have always loved to see the fires on the hills at Beltane, making the old magic of returning life. One always burned on the high hill shoulder behind Dynas Pharaon, and many a time when I was a boy I have helped to drive the bellowing cattle through the sinking flames to make them fruitful in the coming year. I leaned my back against the rampart, and looked across the camp toward the western mountains, thinking of those fires; but that way the hi
lls were dark. It must have been more than fifty miles away, even had there been no mountains in between.

  Plenty of other fires, though, some near, some very far, like red seeds scattered in the dark bowl of the night. Turning slowly I also counted my fifteen, and could make it no more. And then suddenly, so far off that I could not be sure in the first few moments whether I was seeing it at all, there was another. I looked away, and then back again; it was still there, the faintest spark of ruddy light clinging to the skyline of the mountains away eastward. ‘Sixteen,’ I said. ‘Sixteen, Fulvius – there, on the rim of the mountains.’

  They both looked where I pointed, and were silent a moment, picking it up. ‘It is a star rising over the rim of High Wood,’ said Cei.

  Fulvius made a swift gesture of denial. ‘Na! This isn’t the first night I’ve kept watch up here; there’s no star rises at this hour over the crest of High Wood, no star as red as that anywhere, not even the Warrior. It’s a fire all right – but it wasn’t there when the Beltane fires were lit. It wasn’t there fifty heartbeats ago.’

  A sudden silence caught us all by the throat. I felt my own heartbeat quicken and knew that it was the same with the other two. And then, on the bare crouched shoulder of Black Bull, only fifteen or twenty miles away, in almost direct line between us and the sixteenth fire, there was a sudden blink of light that wavered and sank and spread, and sprang up even while we watched with straining eyes, into a ragged flower of flame.

  ‘The Saxons,’ I said. And I remember the relief that broke over me like a wave that the long months of waiting were over and Hengest was here while the Northern menace still hung on the edge of breaking. I remember also that the last fumes of the Falernian were gone from my head as though a wind had risen and blown them clear away.

  ‘God be praised that they chose Beltane!’ Cei said.

  I had been thinking the same thought. It had troubled me a good deal that any fire or smoke signal lit for us must be clear to the Saxons also, warning them all too surely that their advance had been seen and the advantage of surprise lost to them, and so putting them on their guard. But on May Eve, with the whole country aspark with Beltane fires, the signal would carry no meaning for them.

  ‘How long do you reckon we’ve got?’ Cei said.

  ‘Four days, maybe. Enough, but not more than enough.’ I had turned back to the rampart steps. ‘Go and rout me out Prosper and his trumpet. I want everybody on the parade ground.’

  This time it should be we who picked the battleground. The enemy must advance by the old military road, for to trust to the mountain herding paths, or strike across country through the damp-oak scrub and the peat bogs that filled the valleys would be to go leaping on disaster. And knowing this, we had in fact chosen our place some time ago. It was a spot some five or six miles in advance of Deva, where the road from over the mountains, dipping into a marshy valley, forded a little river, then climbed again gently, almost lazily, up the western slope. The soft upward swell of the valley on that side, the Deva side, was crested by a long comb of thorn and tangled oak woods that reached for a mile or more in either direction; and through this narrow belt, as through a hedge, the road ran straight to the west gate of the City of Legions. In the old ordered days the trees had been cut back in the usual way, for a bowshot on either side of the road, but now all manner of quick-growing scrub had come creeping back, hazel, crack willow, blackthorn and bramble, making a tangle that was almost as difficult to break through as the woods on either hand – and as good cover for men.

  In this place, on May Day morning, we set about preparing a welcome for Hengest and the Sea Wolves.

  We began by felling trees to make a couple of rides through the woodland belt, for the quick bringing up of cavalry, and toward noon on the second day (we had taken our time over this work, not wishing to make a clumsy havoc that would show at a distance) a little dark mountain man of the breed that we sometimes used as scouts came drumming up the road on a shaggy black pony about the size of a big dog, to bring us word of the Saxon war host.

  He was brought to me, where I was overseeing the careful screening of one of the ride mouths, and dropping from his pony’s back, stumbled and stood swaying, his head bent, his arm across the neck of the wretched little beast that stood with heaving flanks beside him.

  ‘You have ridden hard, my friend,’ I said. ‘What news do you bring?’

  He tipped back his head slowly, thrusting the matted hair out of his eyes, and looking up at me with narrowed gaze as a man looks up into a tree. ‘You are he that they call Artos the Bear?’

  ‘I am Artos the Bear.’

  ‘So. It is good. Then the Sea Wolves passed at sundown last night, and made their camp among the fringes of Forest Dhu.’

  ‘How many? Can you number them at all?’

  ‘I did not see them. They are as the ants that swarm out when a child kicks at an ants’ nest; so said the man from beyond Broken Hill. But he carried this – it was given to him by the man before him, and he passed it on to me.’ The little man took from the breast of his mangy wolfskin mantle a slim billet of wood which reminded me of the peeled willow wands on which Hunno kept his tallies. But this was the tally, not of a horse herd but a Saxon war host; and as he gave it into my hand I read the roughly carved numbers on the shaft: MCDLXX. Close on fifteen hundred men, maybe somewhat more, maybe somewhat less – I knew how difficult it could be to judge numbers when one was not used to it. But still, somewhere around fifteen hundred. The Saxon war host had already trebled its size since last autumn. Had the Picts, despite Kinmarcus’s opinion, already leapt over the Wall to join forces with the Sea Wolves of Eburacum? Or had Earl Hengest called up reinforcements from across the North Sea? Well, it made no difference for the moment; it was the numbers that mattered, not where they came from. Against them, allowing for the usual hurts and sickness, I could put something over two hundred and fifty of my own heavy cavalry into the field, and about five hundred tribesmen, more or less trained by now, who had gathered to me as auxiliaries and irregular troops during the winter. If I put the drivers into the fighting line, about a hundred more; and doubtless when the time came there would be a rabble of citizens, valiant and willing, but not much use save in pursuit. The horses would do something, a great deal, to even the desperate odds against us; but not enough ...

  I handed the man over to my own lads, with orders to feed him and the exhausted pony, and let them rest in the field camp while someone else belted back to Deva with their news. Then I sent for Bedwyr and Cei, and showed them the tally stick. Cei swore at sight of it, and Bedwyr, with his left eyebrow flying more than usually like a mongrel’s ear, whistled long and liquidly. ‘It seems that we shall have hot work when the time comes, my brothers.’

  ‘Something too hot for my liking,’ I said. ‘Therefore I think, since I’ve no mind to gamble against loaded dice when there’s any other way, that we must do something to ease the odds a trifle.’

  ‘And that something?’

  ‘Bear traps,’ I said.

  ‘Strange. I always thought that bear traps were dug for the bear, not by him.’

  ‘Not in the case of this particular bear.’

  So we set the tribesmen to digging; midway between the stream and the woodshore a long string of trenches and potholes with gaps between for the passage of cavalry, cutting straight across the road and reaching for somewhat over half a bowshot on either hand. The road crossed the stream on a broad paved ford, at a spot where the bank was fairly firm, but save for that one spot the water ran wide and shallow, in a chain of pools between marshy sallow-fringed banks where a man could become bogged down by a single unlucky step. Therefore we judged that the Saxons would not be able to fan out until they were well clear of the valley bottom and the half bowshot was enough. We cut the trenches about three feet deep and three to four feet wide, and set a few short stakes, their ends sharpened and hardened by fire, along their floors for good measure. And then, just as one does with a
bear trap, covered all over with a light latticework of branches, scattering above it the sodden tawny wreck of last year’s bracken still clothing the hillside at that point. The place where the trench crossed the road might have been a difficulty, but as the valley was soft, the road just there was a corduroy of logs carried on a brushwood bed, and it was a simple matter, after we had cut the trench across, to lay the logs back over a flimsy hurdlework just strong enough to carry them but no more. One or two of the logs had rotted through and had to be replaced, but that might have been done simply in an attempt to keep the road in some kind of repair; and when the thing was finished, the hillside looked just as it had looked before.

  The spare earth we carried back into the trees, in every trug and basket that Deva could provide.

  The thing was finished, and with maybe a day to spare.

  That night we camped behind the belt of woods, as we had done ever since the work started, and I called Bedwyr to me. ‘Beer all around, I think, Bedwyr. The men are all tired; they have worked like heroes and tomorrow they must fight like heroes. But for God’s sake see that they don’t drink too much. I can’t afford to find myself with a camp full of walking corpses in the morning.’ I went to look for Cei myself, and when I found him in the horse lines, took him aside and issued a private ultimatum. ‘Cei, I’ve given the order for beer all around. Don’t swill too much of it.’

  His indignation was, as usual, ludicrous. ‘Have you ever known me drunk?’

  ‘I’ve never known you show drunk; but nevertheless, it makes you reckless afterward.’

  He looked at me, half laughing, half indignant still, then flung an arm clashing with blue glass and copper wire bracelets across my shoulder. ‘I’ll not lose you Britain, for the sake of a horn of sour beer.’