Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  On that moment, even above the dazing roar of battle, I heard the high, wolfish, blood-stirring howl of the Dark People’s war cry, and Irach streaked forward, running with his dagger at the seething mass of warriors. He can have had no thought of breaking through, he was following again the custom of his own people who believe that victory must be bought with deliberate and willing sacrifice. And in that belief he flung himself upon the enemy spears. Truly the little man had eaten his father’s courage – or maybe he had enough of his own.

  ‘Come on, lads!’ I shouted. ‘To me! Follow Irach! Follow me! Follow me home!’ And the hunting horn took up the call; ahead of me, with his few remaining house carls about him, I saw the giant figure of Octa Hengestson, his golden hair matted with blood from a scalp wound, and the chain mail of his breast and shoulders stained brown with it, as though with rust. He had lost his shield, or cast it aside. I urged Arian toward him, and with a high defiant yell he leapt to meet me; and as he swung up his sword I saw for an instant his eyes that seemed to burn with a gray-green flame. I took him with the sword point in the strong curve of the throat above the golden collar. Blood spurted out, and I saw his eyes widen as though in surprise; and he crashed backward among his house carls without a sound.

  After that, the heart went from them, and they began to give way more quickly.

  Someone had fired the thatch of a Saxon hovel and before the fresh evening wind the flames were spreading as wisps of blazing straw drifted from one roof to another; smoke began to hang over the broad street that was narrowed now by garbage piles spread half across it; the high white basilica that stood like a cliff above the huddled rook’s-nest bothies of the Barbarians was dimmed in drifting smoke, and the acrid smitch of it caught at our throats. Men with unlikely weapons in their hands and thrall rings about their necks were running beside me, all among the horses of the Companions ... And then the Sea Wolves broke and streamed back, and the thing was no longer a battle but a hunt.

  Presently, with the fires already half quelled, I was sitting on the rim of the ornate fountain in the midst of the Forum, my arm through Arian’s bridle while he drank, while cavalry, foot and war-painted warriors ran questing through Eburacum in search of fugitives, and Cei and a handful of the light horsemen swept on after the others toward the coast, and the roaring flood of victory surged all about me. A big man was standing at my elbow. I had seen him in the forefront of the wild rabble at the gate; a man fair-haired as any Saxon, but with the gray iron thrall ring on his neck, and in his hands a naked sword which he was cleaning with care on a tuft of grass pulled from the base of the fountain.

  ‘Whoever you may be, friend, I have to thank you.’ My own voice, thick and heavy in my ears, surprised me into wakefulness.

  ‘As to who I am, I am Jason the Swordsmith – it is so that I have this instead of a fence pole or a butcher’s cleaver. And that’ – he pointed with the blade to another who passed staggering under the weight of a big wine jar – ‘was a clerk in the tower corn store; and that is Sylvianus who had land of his own and a whole roomful of books to read – and that is Helen, our golden Helen.’ (Looking where he pointed, I knew the woman again for one whom I had seen in the thick of the fighting.) ‘The Sea Wolves treated her as a common whore, and she liked it little, having been mistress of her own house of girls for ten years and more. Thralls, most of us now, as you can see.’ He touched the ring about his neck. ‘A fine following for the Count of Britain, are we not?’

  ‘A fine following,’ I said. ‘As to the thrall rings, doubtless you can deal with those, Jason the Swordsmith, with my armorers to help you. But for you and your war host, the larger part of mine would like enough be baying before the gates of Eburacum tonight, while I and the foremost of us lay hacked to red rags in the city gutters.’ I looked up at him. Clearly he was the leader of the tatterdemalion band. ‘How did you contrive the thing?’

  He shrugged thick shoulders. ‘We made our plans – two or three of them to be worked according as we found one better than another when the time came; a pleasure, that was. It was easier to come at each other with so many of the masters off on the war trail; easier to escape, too, when that time came. At first we meant just to break out, and then when word came of their defeat and Hengest’s slaying, we guessed how the thing must go, and we thought we’d bide for a while, and then break out to join you or lend a friendly hand from inside, as seemed best.’

  ‘That was your plan, I think.’ The boldness of it accorded with the set of his mouth.

  ‘Mine and Helen’s.’ He jerked his chin toward the woman in her gaudy rags and glass bangles, who had turned in passing, to flash her painted eyes at the nearest of the Companions. ‘Helen’s a jewel of a girl. She’s worth ten of the rest of us any day, and she don’t much care to be tossed around from one ratting boar to another without so much as a “By your leave” or a “Thank you dearling,” after being so long a madam in her own right.’ He chuckled, a warm rumble of amusement deep beneath the golden fleece of his chest. ‘’Twas her idea to keep watch for you by sending up one after another of the girls with a bite of food and a beer pot for a kiss and cuddle with the men on the ramparts. And when the shout went up, and the girl that was up there then came flying down skirling that you rode upon the Sea Wolf’s very tail, we knew that the time had come to set things rolling. We was most of us lying hid among the bushes of the old temple garden, by that time, and some of us crept up on the ramparts and dealt with the lookouts up there—’ He made a small hideous jabbing motion with his thumbs. ‘Easy enough if you can get close enough to your man to come at the back of his neck before he hears you. There wasn’t many of them, but their weapons added a bit to our store. The first of the Sea Wolves were falling back on to the bridge by that time, and the rest you know.’

  ‘The rest I know.’

  ‘Simple enough, when you come to think of it.’

  ‘When you come to think of it,’ I said, and we looked at each other with content.

  All this while the hunt had been baying through the town, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther off, and the smitch of quenched burning came and went on the wind. A hurrying step sounded on the grass-grown pavement, and I looked around as Flavian came to a halt beside me. ‘Oisc is clear away, sir,’ he said. He was black with burning and none too steady on his feet, but he managed the old proud legionary salute with unusual precision. ‘We’ve turned the whole town out of doors, but there’s neither hide nor hair of him to be found.’

  I shrugged wearily. ‘Aiee well, I should have liked to have made the kill complete and finished the whole brood, but I suppose that two generations out of three is not to be sniffed at. If he wins back to the Cantii then he’ll be for Ambrosius to deal with – or for us another day ... It can’t be helped, Minnow.’

  ‘No sir,’ said Flavian, and then quickly: ‘Sir – there’s something else. We found a boy in one of the houses over toward the east gate. We think he’s one of their great ones.’

  ‘Then why would they be leaving him behind? Is he wounded?’

  ‘No, sir, he—’

  ‘So then. Bring him along.’

  Flavian stood his ground in silence for a moment. Then he said, ‘I think perhaps – I think you should come, sir.’

  I looked at him, surprised and questioning, and then got up. ‘Very well, I’ll come.’ I set my hand for an instant on the shoulder of the big swordsmith. ‘Later, I shall want to speak to all your band. Meanwhile, get whatever wounded you have to my surgeon Gwalchmai; any of my men will tell you where to find him.’

  I called to another of the Companions who was passing, and handed Arian over to him with a final pat on the horse’s moist drooping neck; then turned toward the Forum arch, Flavian falling in behind me, and walked out into the main street. ‘The east gate, you say?’

  ‘Down a narrow street just short of it.’

  We walked on in silence. The street, where smoking Saxon hovels huddled among the flaking walls of the Roman ci
ty, seemed strangely empty, for the hunt had swept to the farther end of the town and discovered the corn store; empty of the living, that is to say. There were enough bodies lying darkly sprawled in the glare of the angry sunset. Once a party of weeping women and children passed us, herded along by my men in the direction of the old fortress, where they could be more easily pent than in the town, but there were not many, even of them. A good number, I think, had escaped and would be heading for the coast; for the rest, there had been something of a massacre in Eburacum that fiery golden evening. Well, it might put the fear of God as well as Artos the Bear into the coastwise settlements ...

  We reached the narrow street just short of the east gate, and turned into it; and instantly the fierce sunset light was cut off and the cool waters of the dusk flowed about us. Halfway down the street a gleam of saffron light shone from an open doorway, spilling already a faint yellow stain across the way. Several of the Companions stood beside the door, and they parted in the silence of men utterly weary, to let me through. Someone had brought a torch, kindled I suppose from a smoldering roof or someone’s forsaken hearth; and by its light I saw that the floor beneath my feet was of fine tesserae, though white with the droppings of swallows from their nests in the ragged thatch, and there were traces of color as well as damp stains on the plastered evil-smelling walls. Another door at my shoulder was open, and one of the Bearers of the Blue War Shield stood aside from before it. I glanced at Flavian, and then turned in through it, the man with the torch following me.

  The room was a smallish one, but even so the makeshift torch left the walls in shadow, the light, as the man raised his arm, falling full upon the two figures in its midst. A woman lay there on a low pallet bed; a woman in the long straight folds of a crimson gown, with the glint of royal gold-work about her head. And beside her crouched a boy of about fourteen, with one arm circled protectingly across her body. For one wing beat of time, stillness held the scene within it as a bee is held in the heart of a tear of amber. Then as I entered, the boy sprang up like a wild beast and whirled about to face me. But from the woman there came no movement, no quiver under the straight folds of the crimson gown that ran unbroken as the fluting on a column from the white neck to the rigid feet.

  ‘Don’t touch her!’ he said between his teeth. I have seldom known anyone to do that in truth, but this boy did it. They were white strong teeth, and I felt that I was looking at some beautiful, shining wild animal that at any moment might spring at my throat. ‘Do not you dare to touch her!’ And I scarcely noticed at the time that he spoke – after a fashion – in the British tongue.

  I moved slowly forward, my hands open at my sides. ‘I’ll not touch her.’ I stood looking down at the woman, hearing the distant uproar of the city, the growl of voices in the outer chamber; hearing the short panting breaths of the boy beside me; and underneath, more potent than all else, the silence in the room. A great lady, dead and made ready for her pyre, in her finest gown with the gold-work of her rank wreathed about her head. A royal lady among her own folk, by the look of her; and a most beautiful woman. She was not young. It is hard to judge the summers of the dead, for sometimes youth comes upon the face, and sometimes age; but the hair that was spread over the pillow caught the torchlight with the ripe glow of a wheat field in low sunshine, despite the gray hairs in the brightness of it; and not all the gauntness of long fever, not the first faint stains of death beneath the eyes and at the corners of the winged nostrils, could dim the beauty of the face, nor soften its utter ruthlessness. Her eyes were decently closed, but as I looked down at her, the conviction grew on me that open, they would be the same greenish-gray as another pair of eyes that I had seen lately. I had never seen this woman before, I was as sure of that as I had been in Ygerna’s case. But I was glad they were shut; I did not like the thought of them open – there might be too much power in them, and the power not for good. Suddenly, for no seeming reason, I remembered the words of old Aquila, describing to me the Lady Rowen, who in the days of his captivity he had seen once in her father’s hall. ‘A witch, a golden witch in a crimson gown.’ The Lady Rowen, Earl Hengest’s daughter, who had spell-drawn Vortigern the Red Fox into casting aside his own wife for love of her, and then used her power as a weapon against him in her father’s cause. The Lady Rowen who had deserted him and returned to her own people when his shamed and outcast days came upon him – but not, it was said, before she had conceived his son.

  I turned and looked at the boy who stood on wide planted feet, still as far as he could come between me and her, and found myself looking into a pair of gray-green eyes, the color of shallow water on a cloudy day – Hengest’s eyes, though they had been smashed and full of blood the last time I saw them; Octa’s eyes, blazing up at me under the white horsetail standard only that evening, in the moment before I struck. But the boy’s hair was darker than theirs, darker than his mother’s; it was the fierce russet of a fox’s pelt.

  So I knew the answer to my question even as I asked it. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am Cerdic, son to Vortigern King of Britain. And the Lady Rowen who was my mother was daughter to Earl Hengest of the Jutish folk.’ His voice was level, with the levelness of a boy’s who is desperately afraid that it may break.

  ‘And what do you here, Cerdic, Son of Vortigern?’

  ‘I bide with my mother.’

  ‘You must think of a better story. Oisc is safe away; and would you ask me to believe that your own people, your mother’s people, would leave you here to the power of Artos the Bear?’

  He was a valiant stripling; I could see that he was desperately afraid of me, but the strange gray-green eyes never wavered, and his head was thrown back, above the slim golden tore that circled his throat. ‘Not if they knew it. In a turmoil such as there has been here, it is easy enough to slip aside. They will be thinking me killed, no more.’

  ‘Your mother is dead,’ I said after a silence. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘She died yesterday. I saw her made ready for the pyre.’ The voice was steadier than ever.

  ‘Then what purpose could you think to serve by staying here?’

  This time the answer came at me like the clawed leap of the wild beast I had been thinking him. ‘I hope to guard her a little while. I hoped to kill at least one of you and maybe fire the thatch before you could come at her with your filthy ways, but you were too quick for me.’ His hand went to his belt, where the hilt of his dirk should have been, then fell away again. ‘Is it that you think I don’t know the foul ways that you Christians have with the bodies of the dead? Is it that you think I don’t know about the flesh and the chalice of blood when you feast with your God?’

  And with the words scarce spoken, suddenly he was upon me as though he would have torn my throat out.

  I caught and held him, pinioning his arms and crushing him against me, while a burst of voices and the thud of a swift footstep came behind me. ‘Let be, damn you!’ I said to the voices and the footstep. I was crushing the boy’s body to mine as hard as I dared. I was afraid to hit him. I was always afraid of hitting; the blow was prone to do too much damage. He struggled like a wildcat in my grasp. Once he managed to drive his head down and got his teeth in my arm, and held on; but his struggles were growing weaker because he could not breathe. I could feel his young breast fighting and thrusting for air under my own ribs, and tightened my hold still further. ‘Stop it, you young fool! Stop it or I shall have to hurt you.’ But my words never reached him.

  And then suddenly he was drooping in my arms, half fainting; I loosed him slowly, letting the air come back into his lungs, and as he began to find his legs again, held him off at arm’s length. He was quiet enough now, drawing his breath in great sobbing gasps, but I doubted whether if I relaxed my hold completely, he would not be at my throat again next instant. And all at once, looking into the sullen stone-set face, I knew that I could have loved this boy if he were my son. This boy and not the son whom I knew in my dark innermost
places, was being reared for me by another witch among my own mountains. Indeed I think that in that one moment we were neither of us far from love of the other, so strange and wayward and terrible are the ways of the human heart.

  The moment passed. ‘Who told you that?’ I demanded. ‘About the flesh and the blood?’

  He controlled his panting in one long shaken breath. ‘My mother. But all men know that it is true.’

  ‘Listen – listen to me, Cerdic, and believe me: it is not true, as you understand it. Your mother was – mistaken.’