Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  More than light enough.

  A young woman, hardly more than a girl, lay there among the beer jars, in the ugly, contorted attitude in which she had been flung down and kicked aside. She was no taller than a girl of fourteen or fifteen would be among our own folk, but she was of the Little Dark People, and among them a grown woman is no taller than that. I thought, looking at her upturned face among the tangled masses of black hair, that she had once been very good to look upon, in the narrow, fine-boned way of her people; but she was not good to look upon now, though her skin was still honey soft between the bruises and clawings of the brutal handling she had received, and her contorted limbs slim and fine. She was stark naked, and from the stains upon her she had been raped not once but again and again. The man who held the torch moved his arm, and as the light shifted I looked again into the girl’s battered face. I had thought the look on it was one of torment and unutterable horror, but now I saw that beneath these things there was something else; a look of escape. She had possessed, this girl of the Old Race, the power which some birds and animals possess, when the outrage of living mounts beyond a certain point, of making the final withdrawal into the refuge of death where no tormentor can follow.

  Cei was cursing in a sustained flow, his blue eyes blazing with a rage such as I had never seen in them before. ‘May their souls rot in Hell! By Christ! If I had the man here I’d unman him with my naked hands, and tear his living heart out afterward!’

  ‘You’d need to unman a good few, I’m thinking – and maybe you’d need help,’ said Bedwyr’s voice just behind me, still and cool as deep water by contrast with the hot rage of the other’s.

  One of the men looked to me. ‘What are we to do with her, sir?’

  I hesitated. If she had been one of our own kind she could have gone into the same long grave as our battle dead. But she was of the Old Race, the Little Dark Ones. Many of our own scouts and camp followers had something of that blood in them (I have sometimes thought that there was a strain of it in the Royal House of Arfon itself, for Ambrosius, though taller, was narrow-boned and dark as the Fairy kind), and our own people worked alongside them contentedly enough, especially since Irach; though many a time I have seen one of my own Companions make the Sign of the Horns before sharing food from the same dish with one of them. But I knew that if I ordered the girl’s body to be laid with our own dead, I should have trouble with my men, for fear that the nearness of the Fairy’s dead might harm our own in some way.

  ‘Scoop her out a grave to herself somewhere among the bushes,’ I said.

  There was a sudden movement, a many-voiced murmur of dissent behind me, and swinging around I saw that a crowd had gathered, peering over each other’s shoulders at the small outraged body in the torchlight. One of the mule drivers came thrusting his way through, or was thrust by those behind him; a small dark hairy man with prick ears like a faun’s. ‘My Lord Artos, there is another word as to that.’

  ‘Speak it, then.’

  He stood with his feet apart, staring into my face, stubborn as one of his own mules. ‘My Lord Artos, I know something of these things, for my grandmother came from the Hollow Hills. They are not wont to lie alone, my people – my grandmother’s people. If you lay her as you have ordered, she will grow lonely, and in her loneliness she may walk. Women who die as she died are given to walking, anyway; and she will be angry, not only with those who killed her, but with us, who cast her out. But if you bury her here in the midst of the camp, she will be quiet with life going on about her and the warmth of the cooking fires overhead. Her anger will be all for those who killed her, and she will bring us luck and help us to hold the Place of Three Hills.’

  Young Brys Son of Bradman protested furiously. ‘My Lord, do not listen to him, he will let her loose in our very midst!’ And another added his word. ‘I’ve no wish to sleep at nights with that under my pillow!’ And the refrain was taken up by others, while the mule driver stood his ground, still staring into my face, and behind him, the men who had thrust him forward muttered among themselves.

  Cei demanded in his deep grumble, ‘Are you going to give ear to a bunch of mule drivers, rather than to your own Companions?’

  ‘We shall still need mule drivers,’ I said. And then suddenly I had the answer: not perfect, but the best that I was likely to find.

  Only a few paces from where we stood, there was a deep broad pit, probably once a supplementary grain store, for mildewed shreds of the hides with which it had been lined still clung to its sides and to the remains of the timbers that had once closed it in. It could never be used again, and I had given orders that the dead horses were to be tipped into it and covered over for tonight with whatever came to hand of clods and debris and old thatch. That would be a lighter task than to drag the carcasses outside and far enough from the camp. There had not been time yet for the order to be carried out, though the first of the carcasses had been dragged close in readiness; and horses were creatures of the Sun, sacred among the Sun people once, while nine has ever been a number of Power.

  ‘Lay her in the old grain pit before the horses go in,’ I said. ‘Thrice three horses above her should make all safe, without keeping off the warmth of the cooking fires.’ And before anyone had time to raise further objections: ‘Go, someone, and bring a couple of baggage ropes,’ for I had no wish to tumble her into her grave as one flings a dead cat on a garbage pile; and while someone went to do my bidding and the rest stood by, few I think, even of her own kind, overeager to touch her, I flung off my old weather-stained cloak, and spread it on the ground, and lifted the poor broken body onto it. She weighed no more than a child, and some of the suppleness of life was still in her, so that I was able to lay her decently, and not in the crumpled attitude in which we had found her. Bedwyr knelt beside me, helping me to draw the dark folds close. ‘Cover her face,’ he said; and then, ‘I’ll carry her.’

  But she seemed in some way to be my charge. I shook my head, and got up with the small close-wrapped body in my arms, and went outside with her to where the mouth of the old grain pit gaped darkly in the torchlight. Half the camp had come thronging around by that time, but there was no sound save a low muttering as here and there men looked at each other or at the burden I carried, and made the Sign of the Horns. In the end we did not need the baggage ropes after all, for Gault and Levin, making a jest of it, but a gentle jest, sprang down into the pit themselves, and one standing on the other’s shoulders (they were much given to fooling together like a pair of acrobats) took the girl from me, and dropping clear as his friend crouched down, laid her kindly on the rough earth. We flung down fresh bracken to cover her, and the two warriors carefully wedged above her the beams that we passed down to them, so that they might keep the main weight of the horses off her. Then Levin climbed again onto his friend’s shoulders, and caught the edge of the hole and scrambled out, ignoring the hands reached to his aid, and turned about to help Gault out after him. But the depth was too great. Straining, they could just touch fingertips, but could not get a grip on each other’s hands. For the instant I saw them looking at each other, half laughing, one up from the pit that had become a grave, the other down into it, straining to reach each other. Then somebody tossed down the end of a knotted baggage rope and Gault swarmed up easily enough, and was standing among us again, panting a little.

  The thing was over, and most of the weary fighting men were drifting away, while those that remained were stripping the dead horses of their gear before they went into the pit. I turned away to go and make sure that the whole baggage train had been got safely in, and find out the state of the wells. It was as I had expected; they had fallen in. There was water far down in one of them, enough for the wounded, anyway; the rest of us must do without water until the time came for taking the horses down to the river in the morning.

  Morning was not so very far off, by that time, and a quiet was falling over the old red sandstone fort; dark shapes of sleeping men huddled in every corner, who st
irred and cursed without moving if one fell over them; and the wind was lulling into soft fitful gusts with long exhausted stillnesses between, when I passed the old grain pit again. The last of the horses had been toppled into it, and the pit covered over with clods and half-charred thatch until tomorrow when it could be filled in properly. As I came toward it I saw that Bedwyr was ahead of me. I suppose he had checked in passing on some errand of his own. His little harp was in his hands, but I had not heard the notes of it until the moment before I saw him. He was playing very softly, faint plucked notes at long intervals, and the fitful wind was blowing the other way. He turned his head toward me (but I could not see his face for the nearest watch fire was sinking low), and went on playing, a note, and then a pause as though he listened for the next note before playing it, and then another note, spun so far apart that one could not carry the thing in one’s head as any kind of tune, only as single moments of beauty that tore at one’s heart, strung on those long dark silences of the dying wind.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, when it seemed that the wind and the darkness had closed for good over the last note, and cursed myself for breaking the circle of perfection.

  He struck another note with his thumbnail. ‘What does it sound like?’

  ‘A lament – but I think not for the horses.’

  ‘Na. Another time I will make a lament for the horses; a fine lament, set with words to the harp song, swift and shining like the wind under the sun, for the Nine Steeds of Artos, and men shall sing it around their watch fires for a thousand years. This is only a small lament for a small matter, the merest spray of blackthorn blossom crushed under heel; and see’ – he struck a final descending ripple of three notes and reached for the harp bag that hung over his shoulder – ‘it is finished.’

  Even as he spoke, I felt rather than saw his gaze go past me. He caught his breath in a snatch instantly stilled. ‘Look behind you, Artos my Brother. Were nine horses not enough after all?’

  But I had already swung around. The fire, as a dying fire will, had leapt up as though in greeting; and on the fringe of the firelight something moved, then came forward into the full gold of the flames; a girl, a woman, though she was no taller than a fourteen-year-old child, with straight dark hair falling loose on either side of her narrow face, and huge eyes set long and slantwise in it. She was not naked as the other had been, but clad in a piece of some dark stuff – green and blue checker it was, when I saw it by the light of day, but in the firelight it looked almost black – flung across one shoulder and wrapped about her with a strap to hold it at the waist. Behind her came seven young men not much taller than herself and of the same dark, narrow make, naked save for kilts about their loins of the same dark plaid as hers or of otter or wildcat skin, and each carrying a light spear and a small bow and quiver. In the first moment of their stepping forward into the firelight, they made a strange and not easily forgotten picture, and a gasp ran through the men about me. Cei began to pray under his breath. But oddly enough it never even touched my mind that the girl was a ghost, though indeed she was white enough for one; and my first thought was to curse the men of the guard for sleeping on watch. But that was before I knew the pure-blooded People of the Hills as I came to know them later. When I did, I never again was hard on a sentry who let the Dark Ones slip through, for they move like shadows on the grass.

  The men around the campfires had turned about to stare, and others loomed out of the shadows of the tumble-down barrack rows, drawn by some sudden sense of happening; and a great stillness took us all so that for a long moment we stood and looked at each other, the girl with the seven lithe young warriors, and ourselves in the firelight.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘And what do you here?’

  ‘I am Daughter among the People of the Hills, up yonder,’ she said, then, speaking the Celtic tongue with a hesitance and a strange cadence that betrayed it for a tongue that was not her own, ‘As to what I do here, I come – we come, my brothers and I, to say to you, Oh my lord, let you give back to us our sister.’ ’

  There was a stirring and a harsh indrawn breath among the men around the campfire, and she looked about her quickly. ‘You know, then. You have seen her?’

  ‘We have seen her ... How did she fall into the hands of those who were here before we came?’

  ‘She was cutting sallows to make a basket, by the river; we both were by the river. And they came upon us – the Sea Wolves and the Painted People.’ She showed small teeth between drawn-back lips, teeth sharp and pointed as a field vole’s, but there was no expression in her voice. ‘We ran, and they came behind us. Then I suppose she tripped and fell, and her hand was torn from mine, and when I looked around, they were upon her.’ She came a step closer, her eyes fixed on my face, her hands held out toward me. I smelled the faintly vixen smell of her, and the firelight splintered on the little bronze dagger, pointed as a bee’s sting, that was thrust into her belt. ‘You are the one they call Artos the Bear, are you not? Let you give her back to us, my lord.’

  ‘Gladly, if I could,’ I said. ‘She is dead.’

  There was no change in the still, narrow face. ‘It has been in my heart all this night that she is dead. You found her dead when the strong place fell to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then give us her body, that we may take it and lay it in the Long House, among her own people.’

  In the silence, we heard the wind harping softly across the crumbling ramparts, and the sudden spurt and crackle of the watch fire. Somewhere among the picket lines a horse fidgeted and was still. It was unthinkable to get those nine great carcasses out again; it would be a week’s work with ropes and levers; and if it could have been done by the lifting of a finger, I knew that I would not let this girl see what came out from under them, for it seemed to me that they had been near each other, these sisters. ‘If I had known that her own people would come for her, surely I would have delayed. Now I cannot give you her body, for she is buried already.’

  ‘Where?’

  I moved aside, so that she might see the mouth of the old grain pit with its rough covering of sods and thatch. Better that she should know it all, as swiftly as might be. ‘Here at the bottom of the pit, with the carcasses of nine war-horses laid above her. We wrapped her in a cloak and covered her thick with yellow bracken before we tumbled the horses in.’

  There was a sudden flicker of wild mocking laughter in her face, like summer lightning; the very air about her seemed to quiver with it, but she made no sound. ‘And all men know that horses are creatures of the Sun, with power over such as we are who belong to the dark warm womb of the Earth. You have taken pains that she should not walk in your sleep. Nine war-horses above her should surely hold her deep enough.’ And then the laughter died out of her face. ‘If indeed she lies there at all.’

  ‘If?’

  ‘Listen. Listen, Great Man, Sun Man whom they call Artos the Bear. You have told us that our sister is dead. You have told us that you found her so when the strong place fell to you. You have told us that she lies here with nine horses to keep her down. But what proof have we of these things? It is in my heart that she is dead indeed, but fear and longing may trick the heart. If I may not see her body, how may I be sure that you do not hold her here alive for your pleasure? If she be dead, how may I be sure that it was the Sea Wolves and not yourself that brought her to it?’

  ‘How could you be sure of that, though I showed her to you ten times over?’

  She looked at me in silence for a while, her eyes wide and still like the dark bitter willow-bark water under trees. Then she said, ‘No, I am sure of that, though you will not show her to me at all.’

  ‘I cannot set my men to hauling nine horses out of a pit, when they are weary from battle, Daughter among the Dark People of the Hills.’

  She sighed. ‘Na, I see that you cannot. So be it then, she must lie where she lies. Only come back with me to the Old Woman in my hills, that you may tell her, and she may give you the
Dark Drink to pour and the sacred herbs for her sleep-place.’

  There was a startled silence, and I was aware of the young warriors she had called her brothers, drawn close about her and watching me as intently as she herself, with dark inscrutable eyes.

  Bedwyr, who had stood at my shoulder all the while, was the first to speak. ‘If there be need of this Dark Drink and the herbs, then send one of your brothers back here with them.’

  ‘It is for the Sun Lord to do,’ the girl answered, but her eyes never left my face.

  ‘I am as the Sun Lord’s sword hand. I will come, then, in his name.’

  ‘You will not, then,’ I muttered.

  But it was as though neither of them heard me. ‘Thinking maybe that music is a powerful talisman against the spells of the dark.’ The low tone of mocking was back in her voice again. ‘But we also have our harpers in the Hollow Hills.’ Then abandoning him as though he had ceased to exist: ‘Will you not come, my Lord Artos? It is such a simple thing, but it must be done by the Leader, the Lordly One.’

  ‘Why should I come?’ I asked at last.

  And she moved closer still and set one hand on mine that was clenched on the hilt of my sword. ‘For a token of faith, maybe,’ she said.

  So I knew that I must go, and I knew why. ‘When do we start?’

  ‘So soon as you have laid aside your sword and dagger.’

  ‘That also?’ I said.

  ‘That also. Did I not say “for a token of faith”?’

  I pulled off my sword belt, with the dagger that was thrust into it, and handed both to Bedwyr, who took them without a word. It was Cei who cut in, his voice rough with urgency. ‘Artos, don’t be a fool – armed or unarmed, for God’s sake don’t go with her!’ His big hand was on my arm as though he would have held me back by force. ‘It’s a trap!’

  ‘I think not.’