Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘The Lammas torches are lit,’ he said. And that was all.

  chapter seventeen

  Guenhumara

  AN OLD WARRIOR WITH A HEADDRESS MADE FROM THE feathers of a golden eagle – it is in my mind that he was one of the chieftain’s many uncles – came forward to stand beside the turf throne and speak with me as to my taking Guenhumara, as to the bonds of friendship, and the dowry that she would bring me. For it was not for the Horned One to speak of these things, though it would have been well enough for Maglaunus the chieftain at other times. I heard the old man talking, and the mention of a hundred armed and mounted men with the chieftain’s second son to head them; I heard my own voice making the replies that courtesy demanded. I saw the little blue veins that writhed about the old man’s forehead, and the torchlight shining through the silvery down at the base of the eagle’s feathers. But all the while my awareness was going out beyond the old man, beyond even the Stag-Headed One on the throne, to the place where the torches had moved apart, leaving a gap of smoky darkness; and in the darkness something stirred and was still, giving no more to the torchlight than a blink of gold.

  I turned once more full to the still figure on the throne. ‘The dowry is good, for horses and armed men are of greater worth than much gold to me, and gladly I accept it with the maiden.’ I made my voice ring against the standing stones, so that all the shadows lost in the farthest dark might hear it. ‘The Lammas torches are lit, and now that it is no longer taboo, I ask that I may take the Maiden Guenhumara from her father’s hearth to mine. So shall the bond of kinship be made complete between Maglaunus, Clan Chieftain of the Damnonii, and Artos, the Count of Britain.’

  There was a long pause, and then very slowly the antlered head inclined; and the hollow voice spoke behind the mask, using the old form of words that belong to every asking: ‘What can you give the maiden in place of what she leaves for you?’

  ‘My hearth for her warmth, my kill for her food,’ I returned. ‘My shield for her shelter, my corn for her quickening, my love for her contentment, my spear for the throat of the man who offers her harm. There is no more that I have to give.’

  ‘It is enough,’ said the hollow voice.

  And Guenhumara with the golden apples swaying at the ends of her hair came through the gap of darkness that they had left for her between the torches.

  The thing was done, and not to be undone again. The Horned One himself had taken the flint knife and nicked first my wrist, and then Guenhumara’s where the vein showed blue under the brown skin, and let them bleed a few drops into the cup of wine. We had drunk from the cup, both at the same time, our hands linked on the rim as custom demanded, and all the while we were strangers looking at each other with stranger’s eyes, when we looked at all; as though there had never been that other moment up here beside the Nine Sisters, when I had held her under my cloak and felt the life in her leap toward mine.

  But stranger or no, she was my woman now, and together we were swept into the wild merrymaking that had begun to boil up through the wonder and the awe. The central part of the mystery was accomplished, and the god had stepped down from his throne to lead the dance that whirled and spun, as the torchlight and the shadows flew, its flaming circle about the smaller circle of standing stones that seemed to join in some secret dance of their own that had nothing to do with movement. We were dancing to the rhythmic stamping of our own heels, to the music of the pipes that whirled us this way and that as a wind whirls through dry leaves and sends them skyward and spins them along the ground – until at last the ring dance burst apart of its own spinning, into groups and couples and single leaping dancers.

  Guenhumara danced with me. She had moved through the rituals of her marriage as one moving perfectly, but in her sleep, through the complicated patterns of quite another kind of dance, but now she was awake and under the same spell as the rest of us. The same laughter came from her as from the others around us, the same soft cries from deep in the throat. And we danced our own dance to our own patterns, among all the swirling multitude (but indeed many were doing that, by now), the man-and-woman dance that is one with the buck tearing with his antlers at a bush and the goldfinch showing off the yellow under his wings.

  The beer pots had begun to go around and men and women crowded to light more and more torches from one another, and dance with them whirled aloft in ragged mares’ tails of smoky flame, that shone on laughing or sweating faces and clinging hands and flying hair. In one place, a man in a wildcat-skin kilt had withdrawn into a world of his own, and with drawn dirk was spinning and stamping in the complicated rhythms of the war dance. Close beside me, a half-naked girl slipped from the arms of a young warrior and went down, skirling with laughter, and I saw the love-bites on her throat and shoulder before the youngster flung himself joyfully upon her.

  With the drum-pulse of stamping heels throbbing in my blood and the pipe music breaking in little sharp waves against me, I do not know how long it was before the knowledge came to me, nor quite how it came at last, that unless I found a way out quickly, I was going to have to take Guenhumara then and there. It seemed only after my brain had begun to clear that the long glances cast in my direction warned me what was expected of me.

  And I knew that the thing expected of me was not possible. If it had been any girl plucked at random from the women’s side, I could maybe have played the stallion without much more thought of the rest of the herd than the stallion has when he covers his mare. If I had loved her, then the rest might not have mattered to either of us. As it was ...

  In the same instant I caught the frowning red-brown gaze of Pharic, across a dozen heads between. He was half laughing, but the message was serious; and receiving it, I knew why he had shown me the ancient stronghold, why he had so arranged matters that my horse was within reach.

  Scarcely knowing that I did so, I had caught Guenhumara by the wrists and swung her out of the dance. Gault and Flavian were close at hand and still looked to be in their right minds; and I called them up with a jerk of the chin. ‘Go and get Arian up here, as close as may be,’ I muttered to the Minnow, making believe to play with the golden apples on the end of Guenhumara’s braids, while she stood panting a little, with her face in the shadows.

  ‘The other horses, too?’

  ‘No, just Arian. Bring him up to the edge of the torchlight, and whistle for me when you are there. Gault, go and get Amlodd and the rest. It is time to be carrying off the bride, and we shall need you to cover our retreat.’

  The thing had passed over so swiftly that I think no one of the swaying, prancing throng about us knew that we had fallen out of the dancing for anything much but to fetch our breath, or maybe because we too were ready for the next thing. And as Gault and Flavian slipped away on their separate errands, I reached out and caught a beer jar from a passer-by, and held it for Guenhumara to drink. There was little enough left in it; a mouthful for each of us, but it served to cover a few moments of time, and she looked up at me over the rim, with a swift and willing understanding of what I was about, her eyes in the ragged torchlight no longer those of a stranger. I flung the empty jar aside, not caring under whose feet it fell, and it was caught by Pharic, who I had not known was still so near. I flung my thanks after it and he put up his hand in a swift odd gesture as though to catch and toss them back. ‘Am I not one of your captains now?’ he said, and was gone again into the swirling crowd as I caught Guenhumara’s hands and swung her in the opposite direction. Then I heard beneath the tumult and the sweet fierce piping, the dull trample of a horse’s hooves on turf, and a moment later caught the moth-pale gleam of Arian’s flank on the farmost fringes of the torchlight, and the high white whistle that a boy makes with his fingers in his mouth.

  I laughed, and a sudden warm drunkenness took me, and I was every man who had ever carried off his chosen woman from among her kin. ‘That is for us! Come, Guenhumara!’ and I caught her up and ran. She began to laugh too, and flung her arm around my neck to eas
e her weight for me, as I headed for that white gleam on the edge of the torchlight. Only the dancers nearest to us could know what was happening, and for an instant, surprise held them from breaking the dance or making any offer to prevent us. And in that instant I reached my horse and flung Guenhumara up across the saddlebow. But as I mounted behind her, Pharic raised the shout, ‘See! He Carries off our sister!’ and instantly the tumult of half battle that ends most bride feasts broke out.

  I caught the reins from Flavian as he leapt back, and driving my heel into Arian’s flank, swung him half around; my own few lads were springing in behind me for a rear guard, the young warriors, headed by Guenhumara’s three brothers, striving to break through to her rescue. Glancing over my shoulder as the startled horse plunged and snorted under me, I saw Flavian and Pharic straining together in a wrestling grip that was only half laughing. ‘Ride!’ Flavian shouted. ‘We’ll hold them while we may!’

  I jabbed my heel into the white flank and we were away at a full flying gallop, leaving the laughter and the shouting of battle behind us. And Guenhumara was clinging to me, laughing still, with her hair bursting loose of its braids flying like cool spray across my face and throat.

  So soon as I was sure of no hunt on our heels, I slackened to an easy canter, for it is not good to ride full tilt among unknown hills by the light of a fading moon, especially with a woman to hamper your bridle arm. And as though with the wind of our going, that other wild warm wind that had swept us together for a while fell away. Guenhumara had drawn herself together, and sat light and undemanding in the crook of my arm now, so that I scarcely felt her there at all. ‘Where are we away to?’ she asked in a little, as though nothing of the past hours was left in her at all. I spat out hair.

  ‘To the Old Dun. Where else?’

  ‘Do you know the way?’

  ‘I hope so. Pharic showed me the place of it – I think in case of need.’

  ‘You do not mind, that I told Pharic?’

  ‘You could scarcely do otherwise,’ I said, ‘seeing that his life also is caught into the thing.’

  ‘Into the tangle,’ she amended.

  ‘I did not say that.’

  ‘No, you did not say it.’ She put up her hand and very gently gathered the long strands of hair that had snarled into my beard and the Medusa-head brooch at my shoulder, and took them back into her own keeping.

  And we rode on, not speaking any more, for there seemed nothing more to say.

  The blurred moon was still up when we came over the last wave crest of the moors, and looked down into the valley where the small upland tarn caught the glimmer of the sky. And in the soft white light, the ruins of the forsaken Dun looked more than ever like a village of the Little Dark People.

  ‘They use the tower sometimes for a herding hut, nowadays,’ Guenhumara said then, much as her brother had done, a few hours earlier. ‘But when there is a mating in the chieftain’s line it remembers again that once it was the chieftain’s hall.’

  We rode down through the heather that had long ago engulfed the track, and in through the gap in the soft wavelike ridge of turf that showed where the gateway had once been. The heather had flowed in, washing to the very walls of the tower; and in the blurred moonlight the late harebells which drifted against the rough-piled walls of the cattle yard were shadow-white. And all the while the faint summer lightning flickered along the hills.

  On a patch of open turf I dropped from the saddle and lifted Guenhumara down after me. I gave her my strike-a-light, and leaving her to gather sticks and heather snarls and get the fire going, set to unsaddling Arian and rubbing him down with a handful of grass. I took the old horse down to the tarn shore to drink, and afterward knee-haltered him and turned him free to graze where the runnels of open turf wound among the heather and bush-grown mounds, and went back to the tower.

  A light as dimly and threadbare gold as fallen sycamore leaves shone out to greet me. Guenhumara had made the fire, and now she sat beside it, shaping little cakes of rye meal and honey, ready for the hearthstone when it grew hot. The round stone walls ran up out of the firelight and disappeared into the shadows overhead, so for all one could see, the ancient strong point might have been standing again to its full height; and behind her against the far wall, her shadow fell across the high-piled bracken and tumbled skins of the herdsmen’s broad bed place.

  She looked up when I entered, with a faint shadow of a smile, and pointed to the black pottery jar she had set just within the doorway. ‘I have found their store, you see; I dare say they’ll not grudge us a wedding feast. Do you take that down to the lochan for water, and then be gathering some fresh fern for bedding.’

  I took up the jar and brought the water, and then armfuls of fern to scatter over the stale stuff on the bed place, kicking aside the stinking skins. And by the time I had done, the fire was burning with a clear red heart and the honey cakes were browning on the hearthstone. I sat down on the man’s side of the hearth, my hands hanging across my knees, and sometimes looked at Guenhumara and sometimes away. And Guenhumara on the woman’s side turned her hot rye cakes and fed the fire with heather sprigs, one at a time, and never looked at me at all. And from time to time there came the faint low mutter of thunder among the hills.

  It was hard and harder to believe that I had not imagined that moment of wild response in her; but I knew that I had not; it was there somewhere, waiting to be wakened again ... Presently the cakes were done, and we ate them, hot and sweet and crusty, washing them down with cold lochan water from the black pottery jar; and still neither of us could think of anything to say.

  The uncomfortable wedding meal finished, I got up and went out to see that all was well with Arian. The night was stiller than ever, the stillness of it seeming only intensified by that faint half-heard muttering below the skyline, and the occasional summer lightning was all but lost in the milky whiteness of the moonlight. I could hear lochan water sucking at its pebbly shore, and a hunting owl cried among the bushes; that was all. And suddenly I wished that the storm would break, longing for the relief of crashing thunder and storm wind, and rain lashing down the valley.

  When I ducked under the lintel stone back into the tower again, Guenhumara was already lying on the bed place where I knew that I should have carried her. She had stripped off her gown and shift, and laid them with her copper and enamel arm rings and her shoes at the foot of the bed place, and in the close warmth of the tower she lay naked on my old weather-worn cloak, with her hair unbraided and flung about her. And a little white moon-moth, drawn indoors by the fire, danced and flickered about her head. And looking at her, I saw even in the uncertain mingled light of the fire on the hearth and the low moon through the doorway, that the skin of her body was not white where the clothes had covered it, but the pale brown of clover honey. She was a tawny woman from head to heel. She turned a little, her head on her arm, to watch me as I crossed to the hearth and set down the saddle which I had brought in in case it rained later. Oddly, the strain between us had relaxed, as though we had both been holding off something, and now we had let go and opened ourselves to the inevitable.

  ‘I left you the fire to undress by,’ she said, ‘but I think the moon would have been light enough.’ And then, as I kicked off my shoes, and freeing my sword belt began to strip, ‘How many scars you carry! You are fang-gashed like an old mastiff that has spent its life fighting wolves.’

  And I think that she must have been seeing me for the first time in the way that I had first seen her four days ago, for she must have seen most of the scars often enough when she tended me in my sickness, and never spoken of them before.

  Standing by the hearth, I looked down at the new crimson scar on my shoulder, and the white seams of old ones on my thighs and sword forearm. ‘I suppose that is what I am.’

  ‘Why do they come again and again so close about the same places?’

  ‘You can always tell a heavy cavalry man by the position of his scars. They come on the thigh
s below the edge of one’s war shirt – I have heard of thigh guards, but they hamper one in mounting – on the thighs and on the sword arm.’

  ‘Why not a long sleeve?’ she asked, practically. It was an odd conversation for a wedding night.

  ‘Because it would hamper the sword swing; also because the Saxon armorers do not make their sarks that way.’

  I stood by the fire, stretching, then stooped to set on the turfs that I had laid by for smooring it. As I did so, she said in the same tone of quietly detached interest, ‘You’re beautiful. How many women have told you so?’

  I thrust the fire together and set on the sods, and the firelight died, leaving only the fading moonlight to bar the darkness. ‘A few,’ I said, ‘but very long ago.’

  ‘How long? How old are you, my Lord Artos?’

  ‘Thirty-five. That is another reason why you should not have married me.’

  ‘And I am twenty – almost one and twenty. We are old, you and I.’

  I had not thought of her as being of any special age, but I had realized, without much thought, that she was long past the age at which most women go to a husband’s hearth; and I wondered for the first time why it was that she had not done so. As though she caught the question in my mind, as though, also, she had lowered her own defenses a little further, with the quenching of the too-probing firelight, she said, ‘When I was fifteen, I was betrothed to a chieftain’s son from farther south. It was arranged in the usual way, but I loved him, none the less – I thought I loved him. I am not sure now; I was only fifteen. He was killed hunting, before the time came for him to take me, and I thought that the sun and moon had fallen from the skies. His memory came between me and all things, between me and all men, and when my father would have betrothed me again, I begged and prayed – I swore that I would kill myself; and in the end – I was beside myself, and I think he feared that I had it in me to carry out my threat – he yielded partway, and promised that at least I should have five summers’ respite.’