Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  About a month after Cit Coit Caledon the supply train got through to us from Corstopitum, bringing, besides the grain and arrow sheaves, the spearheads and tallow and bandage linen in the great leather-covered pack panniers, the money (less than had been promised) to pay the men. And not many days later the supplies from Deva arrived at Castra Cunetium, together with that year’s draft of young horses, which Cei, who had taken over the outpost by that time, sent on to me. With the supply trains came our first news of the outside world in half a year. For me the news came in a long dispatch from Ambrosius. Oisc and the boy Cerdic who had escaped from Eburacum had both reappeared in Cantii Territory. The Saxons under Aelle had captured Regnum and sacked Anderida, slaying every man of the British garrison, but Ambrosius had succeeded in hemming them into the narrow coastal strip under the South Chalk though as yet he had failed to drive them from their new hills. It did not make particularly good hearing, but it all seemed oddly far away.

  For Flavian also there was news, but his came up with the Deva supplies. He took the letter off by himself to a quiet corner of the camp before breaking the thread that held the two leaves of the tablet together; and later he came to me where I was looking over the new horses, the letter still in his hand. ‘Artos – sir—’ He was almost stammering in his eagerness, filled with a kind of grave delight.

  ‘It is from Teleri. She has got a child!’ But I had known as soon as I saw the fool’s face.

  I said the due things and asked, because clearly he was waiting for that: ‘Is it a boy – or a girl?’

  ‘A boy,’ he said. ‘A son.’

  ‘Then we will wet his head in his absence, this evening when the day’s work is done.’ I set my hand on his shoulder in congratulation. But God knows how I envied him.

  Autumn came, and found us well strengthened in our position, with a fruitful summer’s work behind us. Winter passed and again the alders by the horses’ drinking pool flushed red with rising sap. I had had few dealings with the Dark People since Cit Coit Caledon; they brought us news from time to time, and in return we gave them all that we could spare from the winter grain stores. That was all. But I knew always that I had only to hang a garland on the Lord of the Alder Trees, and before night, Druim Dhu or one of his brothers would come walking into the fort, and the knowledge was good.

  That spring also, I had another earnest of the Dark People, for a small plant with silvery leaves and a fragile white flower sprang up in the rough grass that now covered the place where the girl lay with our nine war-horses above her. I suppose a seed must have fallen from the dried herbs that Old Woman had given me, when I burned them for the girl’s spirit, and lain fallow for a year. I never saw that flower growing anywhere else.

  In the second spring, leaving Cei now in command at Trimontium, and Bedwyr harrying the East Coast Settlements, I took Amlodd my armor-bearer, Flavian and Gault and a few others, no more than would make up a hunting party, and rode far to the southwest, into Dumnonia hunting runs. To me it felt almost painfully homelike to be in that land of heather moors and little shining lochs within the sounding of the western sea; for the tribesmen were the same breed as those of Cador’s kingdom who were my own kin. But I had not come into those western moors to savor the sour-sweet of homing hunger, but in the course of my efforts to bond together the loyal tribes and draw them to the Red Dragon.

  Maglaunus, one of the greatest of the clan chieftains, proved also one of the most chancy to deal with. He was not in the least hostile, merely determined, as it seemed at one time, that I should have no opportunity of speaking at all of the matter that had brought me to his Dun, and I knew, as one knows with a shying horse, that it would be useless and worse than useless to force him willy-nilly at the thing that startled him.

  On the first and second of the three days that I had determined to spend on him, we hunted by day, and by night listened to the harper in his high painted timber hall, while around the lower fire his three black-browed sons and the younger of the household warriors tussled together like hound whelps or diced or tried to fly their hawks at sparrows among the house beams; and there was no chance to speak apart with the chieftain at all.

  And then on the third day – it was the eve of Midsummer – he seemed to change his mind and be ready at any rate to talk; and for most of the daylight hours we walked to and fro in the little orchard below the Dun where the fisherfolk hung out their nets to dry among the apple trees, arguing.

  Maglaunus had a grievance, though he put the matter temperately enough and without rancor. ‘Since you burst asunder Huil’s war host, the Scots raiders have returned to their usual ways; already by last summer’s end they were slave-reeving along the coast. It is no good turn that you have done us, my Lord Artos, and if I give you this help that you press for in men and weapons, I shall but have the less with which to defend my own coast.’

  ‘Would you rather, then, have had the whole Barbarian war host sweeping through your lands?’ I demanded. ‘You may have that yet, Maglaunus the Chieftain, if I run short of fighting men and the wherewithal to arm and feed them.’

  ‘That is as may be,’ he said, ‘but the Scots raiders are sure.’

  And from that, reason how I would, as we paced and turned and paced again under the small wind-bent apple trees, it seemed that I could not move him.

  The day had seemed much like any other at first, save that most of the men were out rounding up the cattle for the ceremonies of the night; but when the light began to fade, a change came, the change that comes over every Dun and camp and village when the light fades on the eve of Midsummer. And when Maglaunus and I turned back to the evening meal with our arguing still unfinished, the Dun within its strong turf walls was throbbing like a softly tapped drum. In the chieftain’s hall as in every lesser houseplace, men and women ate quickly and silently, as though their thoughts were turned to another place. And when the eating was done, the women quenched every hearth fire and torch flame, so that the whole Dun held its breath in a waiting darkness; and in the darkness they went out, men and women, children and dogs, every soul in the Dun whose legs would bear them, a thin trickle at first but gathering more from every houseplace as they passed, through the gateway in the strong turf wall and away toward the moors that rose a mile or so inland.

  Flavian and I and the rest of us, following Maglaunus and his household warriors, joined ourselves to the dark silent ripple of passing shadows, and went with them, no more than shadows ourselves in the deepening summer dusk.

  It was an evening of warm whispering airs, when even the darkness that bloomed the earth seemed no more than a transparent wash of shadow over the day, and the sky was a vast green crystal bell still echoing with light in the north. But as we climbed higher, the night grew less clear, and faint diaphanous wisps of mist began to drift about us, the chill smell of the sea seemed stronger than it had done lower down, and the earth became an older and a stranger place touched with the same dark potency as I had sensed in Melanudragil. We came to a place where the heather swept up into a little boss crowned by a circle of standing stones; nine tall stones I counted, that seemed, with their feet in the heather and the faint mist wreaths about their heads, to have checked into stillness from some mysterious movement of their own, only in the moment that our sight touched them.

  On the level ground below the circle, where the heather fell back to make a dim dancing floor, a great stack of logs and brushwood waited in darkness, as the Dun was waiting, for the Need Fire, the Fire of Life, to be reborn.

  So it had been among the Arfon hills in my own boyhood, and when the crowd spread into a great expectant circle, and from their midst nine young warriors stepped out to work the fire drill, I remembered like a physical thing the vibration of the bow cords under my hands, and my father’s world meant nothing to me and my mother’s world claimed me for its own.

  They made the fire at last, after the usual long-drawn struggle, the curl of smoke and the sparks that fell on the waiting tinder, th
e sudden miracle of living flame. A great cry of joyful relief burst from the watching crowd – odd how one always has that fear: ‘This year the fire will not come and life will be over.’ To me it was this year – this year the dark will close over our heads, this is the black wilderness and the end of all things, and the white flower will not bloom again ... The small licking tongue of flame, so easily to be quenched, was a promise, not of victory maybe, but of something not lost, shining on in the darkness. And I shouted with the rest, out of the sudden hot exultancy leaping in my belly. They crowded forward to kindle torches at the wisp of crackling straw and thrust them into the dark waiting fire stack. And the inert mass of logs and brushwood woke from its sleep of darkness and roared up into the heat and smoke and leaping glory of the Midsummer Fire. The dark shadows leapt into reality as the red light touched them, and became rejoicing men and women, and as the licking flames spread farther and farther into the pile, long-drawn shout on shout of joy rose from them, breaking at last into a chant of praise that seemed to beat like great wings about the hilltop.

  The chanting sank and the joy changed to merrymaking, and for a while the wonder was gone from the night. The thing became a beer-drink, as it always does, as though men, having come too near to the mystery, sought now to shut it out behind a comfortable barrier of noisy and familiar things.

  When the fire had sunk low, presently they brought in the cattle from the great hill corral where they had been penned in readiness, and began to drive them through the sinking flames that they might be fruitful in the year ahead. That too was from my boyhood; the wild-eyed, wide-horned heads uptossing in the firelight, the terrified mares with their foals at heel, the torrent of bobbing fleeces, embers scattered under a smother of sharp hooves, sparks caught like burrs in the horses’ manes, the tumult of neighing and lowing, the shouts of the herdsmen and the barking of the driving dogs.

  Men ran to dip branches into the scattered embers behind them, capturing the Need Fire before it was lost again, whirling them aloft until they became mares’ tails of smoky flame. Some set off running back toward the Dun, the flames from their branches streaming bannerwise behind them. Others began to caper and dance, fantastic as marsh lights in the faint mist. Men and women began to be drawn into the dancing, and suddenly there was music for them to dance to – or perhaps the music came first; I have never known.

  It was a thin music, a silver ripple of piping, but strong, for it drew the dancers after it as though strung on its shining strand. And as they pranced by, two by two in a chain that lengthened every moment, weaving in and out of themselves in the ancient intricate patterns of fertility, circling always sunwise about the scattered fire, I saw the woman.

  She was standing somewhat aside, strangely remote from the wild scene around her; half lost in shadows save when the whirling torchlight touched her tawny unbound hair,

  I knew well enough who she was; Guenhumara the chieftain’s daughter. I had seen her again and again during the past three days as she waited on us, her father’s guests, with the other women of the household. I had even received the guest cup from her hands, but beyond knowing with the surface of my mind that she was there, I had had no awareness of her. Now, it may have been the mood of the night, the piping and the mist and the tossing firebrands; it may have been only the heather beer – she entered in at my eyes as I looked at her, and I was aware of her in every fiber of my being. It was the first time in ten years that I had looked at a woman so, and even as I looked, she started and turned as though I had touched her, and saw me.

  I started toward her, laughing like a conqueror: God help me, I was very drunk, but I think not with beer alone, and caught her by the wrist and swung her into the dance. Others joined on behind us, and far ahead, drawing us on and on, rose the white piping. We were flinging the circle wider now, to noose the nine stones within it, weaving in and out between them as garland makers weave the stems of flowers for a festival, casting our noose about the glowing embers of the fire, sometimes, at the will of the leader, crossing between fire and stone circle to form a vast figure of eight, twisting, looping, on and on until the mist circled with us above the heads of the stone dancers ... and the loose hair of the woman flung the scent of vervain in my face ...

  The spell was broken by a far-off cry, and the urgent blaring of a horn, small with distance, from below the Dun. The dancers checked and scattered apart, all eyes straining toward the coast, where, from the direction of the boat strand, fire that was certainly not the fire of Midsummer leapt up into the night.

  ‘The Scots! The Scots are come again!’

  I dropped the woman’s wrist and shouted for my Companions. ‘Flavian! Amlodd! Gault – here to me!’

  They gathered to my summons, shaking off the fumes of heather beer and ancient magic as they came, and freeing their swords in the wolfskin sheaths. Many of Maglaunus’s warriors had come to the Midsummer Fire with no weapon save their dirks, according to the old and honorable custom; but we had learned the unwisdom of such custom, and paid away honor long ago, as part of the price for success against the Sea Wolves; and so the cry of Scots raiders found us better ready than it did many of our hosts.

  Ahead even of the chieftain and his household warriors, we raced for the coast and the distant flames. We stumbled among the heather roots, hearts hammering within us, into the little sea wind that brought us the smell of burning ever more strongly as we plunged downward. There were two big skin-covered war currachs in the shallows below the boat strand, and dark figures leaping between us and the blazing bothies of the fisherfolk. Maybe they had counted on there being no watch kept when the Midsummer Fires were burning. They set up a shout, and closing together, swung around to meet us; and yelling with the little breath that was left in us we charged down upon them.

  I remember little but confusion of what came after. Maybe that was the heather beer and the lingering spell of the past hour. To go into battle drunk is a glory worth experiencing, but it does not make for clear and detailed memory. Certain things I do remember, through a red mist of personal rage for the cutting short of wonder and beauty that I felt dimly might never come again. I remember how the heather ran out into soft sand, and the sand slipped and yielded beneath our feet; I remember the chill of surging water around our ankles when we had driven them from the keel strand to fight in the shallows; and the white lime dust of the Scottish shields turned golden by the flame of the burning currachs. I remember the uncouth tumble to and fro of a dead body at the water’s edge, and somebody crying out with a great and savage laughter, that here were two less crows to come to supper uninvited in another year. And the surprised discovery that some time during the fighting I had taken a spear thrust in the shoulder and my left arm was dripping red.

  I turned landward, sober now that the fighting was done, with my lovely red rage sunk to ashes, and holding my shoulder, began to make my way back toward the Dun. One of the women would bind the wound for me. The dead lay scattered like storm wrack along the tide line, rolling to and fro in the shallows as the little waves came in. Dawn was not far off, and between the flare of burning fisher huts and burning currachs there was enough light to see by; and close under the turf wall of the orchard where Maglaunus and I had walked up and down arguing yesterday, I saw the dark body of a man sprawled somewhat apart from his fellow dead. Something else I saw, too, and halted abruptly in my tracks, looking, not at the dead raider, but at the living dog who stood guard over him. I had heard – who has not? – of the great Hibernian wolfhounds; now I was seeing one. Standing there, head up and alertly turned to watch me, he was magnificent; tall at the shoulder as a three-month foal, his coat brindled in shadow bars of black and amber, save where his breast shone milky silver in the flame light, just as Cabal’s had used to do. He must have belonged to the chief of the raiders; such a dog would be worth his place in any war party, and the gaping wound in his flank showed that he had not shirked the fight. I took a step toward him. He never moved, but he rum
bled deep in his bull throat. I knew that if I took another, he would crouch to spring, and at the third, he would be at my throat. But I knew also, in a flash of certainty, as swiftly irrevocable as the moment of lost virginity, that this was what I had been waiting for ever since old Cabal died, the reason why I had never called another dog by his name.

  Flavian and Amlodd were with me, and the chieftain’s three sons. I gestured them back. ‘Sir – what—’ Flavian began.

  ‘The dog,’ I said. ‘I will have the dog.’

  ‘My lord, you should get that arm tended before you start troubling about any dog,’ young Amlodd urged.

  ‘My arm can wait. If I lose the dog I shall not find his like again.’ I knew how they were glancing at each other behind my back, telling each other with their eyes that the Bear was still battle-drunk or maybe dulled in his wits from loss of blood.