Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  By that time we must have been working on him for the best part of an hour, and the thing was almost done. ‘Gwalchmai – can you give him a respite? His heart is fading.’

  Gwalchmai gave an infinitesimal shake of the head. ‘Respite will not serve him now. Moisten his lips with the barley spirit.’

  And only a few moments later he sat back to draw his own breath, then leaned forward once more and took hold of the short end of arrow shaft which now lay in a little oozing blood-filled hole. I shut my teeth and for an instant my eyes. When I looked again, he was laying a reeking arrowhead on the ground beside him. Blood gushed out in a red wave, and Gault drew a great choking breath that seemed to tear itself free of breast and rattling throat, while a convulsive shudder ran through his whole body – and we, kneeling alive in the lantern light, knew that the hundredth chance had been denied to us.

  Gwalchmai sat back on his heels, and said with a great weariness in his voice, ‘Hang up the lantern again. We shall not be needing it any more.’ He rubbed his hands across his face, and when he took them away, his forehead was smeared with Gault’s blood. ‘We know so little – so hideously little.’

  ‘Better he should go now than in three days’ time,’ I muttered, trying, I think, to comfort myself as much as him. I got up, suddenly as tired as though I had just come out of battle, with no glow of victory to sustain me, and turned to hang the lantern again where it had hung before. And even as I did so, the pad of hurrying footsteps sounded outside, and Levin was in the doorway. ‘Gault bade me take over and see to the men while he made his report,’ he began in a rush, ‘and so I could not come before. I—’ His gaze fell on the body on the ground, and the rush broke off short, into silence. Then he said, slowly and carefully, as though he were a little drunk, ‘He is dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I knew something was amiss, but he would not tell me. He said only to see to the men while he came up here to make his report. So I could not come before.’

  He came a step nearer, and saw the bloody arrowhead and the few surgeon’s tools that Gwalchmai had begun to gather up for cleaning, and looked at Gwalchmai, his mouth flinching. ‘You killed him, you bloody butcher!’

  ‘We both killed him,’ I said. ‘Gwalchmai will tell you that if the barb was left in, he must die within three days; if it was cut out, there was one chance in a hundred of saving him. That’s long odds, Levin.’

  ‘Yes, I—’ He pressed the back of his hand across his forehead. ‘I am sorry, I – n-not sure what I’m saying ... Did he – say anything?’

  ‘He was already out of his body,’ Gwalchmai said, getting to his feet.

  But the other had knelt down beside his dead, bending forward to look into the set frowning face, and I do not think he was aware of us any more. He cried out sharply and shudderingly, ‘Why didn’t you wait for me? – Gault, why didn’t you wait for me? I would have waited for you!’ and slipped down full length with his arms around the body as a woman might have done.

  Gwalchmai and I looked at each other, and went out of the bothy.

  Outside the door hole, he said, ‘I’ll send a couple of men to carry the body away.’ And then, ‘Best have a care, or we’ll be needing a grave dug broad enough for two.’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ I said. I heard his footsteps die away into the darkness between the watch fires, gauging his tiredness by the slur of sound as he dragged his crippled foot after him. I stayed where I was, under the Red Dragon on its lance shaft beside the door hole, listening for any sound from within the bothy, until I heard the feet of the men Gwalchmai had sent; and then turned back into the lantern light. Levin was kneeling beside the dead man, staring down at him, and seeing them there with the lantern spilling its pool of dim yellow radiance on the two wild-barley-colored heads, I realized as I had never quite done before, how alike they were. It was as though the link between them was so potent that even in their outward seeming they could have nothing apart from each other. ‘The men are coming up from the camp to carry him away,’ I said.

  Levin raised his haggard gaze to my face. ‘I must help bear him.’

  ‘Very well, but return to me here, as soon as all is done.’

  He did not answer, but in the last moment before the men were at the door, he ripped his sword from its wolfskin sheath.

  I sprang forward. ‘Levin! No!’

  And he looked up again, choking with an ugly laughter. ‘Ah no, not yet. Time for that later,’ and with a movement as swift as the other had been, he drew the blade that lay by Gault’s side, where I had put it down when we cut away his harness, and slammed it home into his own empty sheath. ‘You’ll be returning one sword to store, but I’ll have the one he carried,’ and got to his feet as the newcomers ducked in through the doorway.

  When the heavy tread of men carrying a burden had stumbled away into the night sounds of the camp, I sat down again on the packsaddle to wait, and Cabal shook himself clear of the shadows and came, a little uncertainly, as though questioning whether the reason for his banishment was yet over, and collapsed with a gusty sigh in his usual lying place at my feet. After a moment he raised his head and looked up at me, whining and uneasy, and as I reached my hand down to stroke his head I felt the harsh hairs raised a little on his neck. He was a war dog, and killing in battle he understood, but not this. The lists that I had been working on lay scattered beside me. There was blood on them now, the stains turning brown around the edges as they dried. There was blood soaked into the beaten-earth floor, and the smell of it was everywhere, and the smell of death. It is one thing to have the friend killed beside you in battle (though that strikes sore enough), but quite another to feel him die under your hands in the cold blood that comes afterward. I wondered whether Levin would come back, or whether I should have to send for him, for I was not sure that he had even heard my order.

  I had waited a long time, and was on the point of sending, when he appeared once more in the doorway.

  ‘You have been a long time, Levin.’

  ‘The ground is hard and stony in these parts,’ he said dully. ‘What is it that you wish with me, Artos?’

  ‘Gault should have furnished me with a full report of what happened, but he had no time. Therefore, as his second, the duty falls to you.’

  He got through it quite creditably; there was not, after all, so very much to tell, and then, when it was finished, he broke down, with his arm along the rotting roof beam and his head on his arm. I gave him a little time, and then said, ‘A sorry business, and has cost us dear in men and horses. But it seems that no blame clings to Gault.’

  He swung around on me, his eyes wide and blazing. ‘No blame?’

  ‘None whatever,’ I said, pretending to misunderstand him. ‘And you have given your report well and clearly.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said bitterly. ‘Is there anything more?’

  ‘First, have you anything to say to me?’

  ‘Yes. I wish to ask for leave to go away from here.’

  ‘And fall on your sword?’

  ‘What is it to my Lord Artos what I do, when once I am no more of the Brotherhood?’

  ‘Only this – that we are short of men as it is, and I cannot spare another for no good cause.’

  ‘No good cause?’

  ‘None,’ I said. I got up and walked across to him. ‘Listen to me, Levin. For more than ten years I have counted you and Gault among the best and bravest of my Companions. That is because each of you has striven always to outdo the other in valor and endurance, not from any rivalry, but that each of you might be worthy of his friend. So it has been since you were boys; and are you going to be a shame to Gault, to break the old covenant between you, now in the first hour that he is dead?’

  He stared back at me with dilated eyes. ‘Maybe I’m not as strong as Gault. I can’t go on – I can’t.’

  I took him by the shoulders and shook him a little. ‘That is a weakling’s cry. There’s water in that ja
r in the corner; wash your face, and go down and take over command of the squadron. Choose whichever of your lads you judge most suitable for your second; that is your affair, so don’t come troubling me with it.’

  ‘You – you’re giving me command of the squadron?’

  ‘Assuredly. You have been Gault’s second for five years, and you have it in you to make a good leader.’

  ‘I cannot do it,’ he said pitifully. ‘Artos, have some mercy on me – I can’t. It is all true as you say, but I can’t go on!’

  But already, though he was not yet aware of it himself, I could feel him strengthening under my hands, bracing himself to take up the intolerable burden.

  ‘Oh yes you can. One can always go on. And as to mercy, I keep that for when and where it is needed. If Gault could break off the arrow shaft so that his men should not know and lose heart, and get the rags of you out of ambush and back to camp, with a mortal wound in him, then you can wash your face so that the rest won’t mistake you for a woman, and go and take over his squadron and keep it what he made it, one of the best squadrons of the Company.’ I gripped and gripped at his shoulders, driving in my fingers until I felt the bone. ‘If you cannot – then you were never as he thought you were, after all.’

  He stood unmoving for a long moment, though I had dropped my hands. Then his head went up very slowly, and I saw him swallow thick in his throat; and he turned and crossed to the jar of water in the corner.

  Through the rest of that summer I watched him anxiously. But there was little need. He proved, as I had believed he would, to be as fine a leader as Gault had been; and under his handling, the battered remnant gathered itself up and began to be a squadron again. He was careful of his men, but utterly careless of himself – so reckless that, though there was no more talk of falling on his sword, it was clear he hoped for death. And as so often happens when a man is in that state, death passed him by as if he had a charmed life.

  We campaigned late into October that year. At most times in the North, one cannot hold to the war trail much beyond the end of September, but it was a soft autumn, and the last yellow leaves were still clinging to the birches when at last we rode into Trimontium to make our winter quarters again.

  There were only a few days left, and many things to be seen to in them, before I must ride for Castra Cunetium to meet Guenhumara. But in the time that I had, I did what I could to make ready for her. I furbished up the much larger chamber next to the narrow one in the half-ruined officers’ block where I had slept since we first came to Trimontium. The commandant’s dining room, I think it must have been, to judge by the crudely painted trophies and goats’ masks that still showed here and there like shadows on the shreds of plaster that still clung to one wall. I bought a thick striped native blanket and a rug of soft beaver skins from Druim Dhu and his brothers, who bought and sold all things in common, to cover the piled fern of the bed place. I pegged up a fine embroidered hanging of some saint or other, all glimmering blues and russets, kingfisher colors, to cover the crumbling red sandstone of the most ruinous wall and give some richness to the chamber. It was part of the loot that we had taken from the Sea Wolves that summer, and they, I suppose, had reaved it from some rich religious house in the gentler Lowlands. Well, the Church could count it as part of the debt they owed me, there was a certain satisfaction in the thought.

  All the while I was aware of my men watching me, with a kind of suspended judgment that might turn into anything ... The awareness did nothing to ease the waiting days. I half longed for her coming, as those days went by, half dreaded it, sometimes wondered whether she would come at all.

  She came, and we swept her into Castra Cunetium by torchlight. It was a wild night, the feast of Samhain, and I remember how the torches flared in the wind, sending their tawny smoke billowing all across the forecourt, their light beating like bright wings in the darkness upon the faces of the men who thronged around us, and clatter and jink and hoof drum of the cavalry swept in after us through the gates. Guenhumara rode between her brother Pharic and myself, with her cloak flying loose from its shoulder clasp. I had not known her in the first moments of our meeting, almost a day’s march farther westward, for with her tall slight body clad in plaid breeks for the long ride, and her hair gathered up under a soft woolen cap, she looked for all the world like a fine-boned stripling. And indeed I think that few among the crowding garrison realized who she was, for I saw them craning behind her for the commander’s woman. That was until we clattered to a halt, and I dismounted and turned to help her down; for I remember, then the roar went up.

  I had not touched her until then, for we had not dismounted at our meeting. There were still grumblings of trouble in the hills, and we had ridden hard to reach Cunetium before full dark, and in the instant before she kicked free from the stirrup and slid into my arms, I knew a wild expectancy; but as it had been before, among the Nine Sisters, I felt as I caught and set her down that there was nothing there, that I might have been holding one of the cool gray standing stones; and this time there was no time for the fire and the life to kindle, for she turned from me at once, swaying with exhaustion as she was, to face the new life about her, with all her defenses like a drawn sword in her hand.

  Pharic and the rest were swinging down from their horses, and Bedwyr, who was once again in command of the outpost garrison, had come out from among his squadron to bid her welcome.

  I said, ‘Guenhumara, here is Bedwyr, my sword brother and lieutenant.’

  I had wondered how it would be between Bedwyr and Guenhumara when they came together, and I was left still wondering.

  I remember him making the bent knee to her that a man makes to a queen; I remember his ugly, crooked face smiling down at her, faintly mocking, his reckless eyebrow flaring like the windblown flames of the torches, saying with the drawling tenderness in his voice that I had never heard him use on a woman before, ‘I never thought to see a flower springing in the hard ground of this old fort – and it not even summer.’

  ‘A hand for the harp as well as the sword.’ Guenhumara’s gaze touched on the embroidered lip of the harp bag that cocked above his shoulder. ‘Was that grace note plucked from the last song you made?’

  ‘Na na – but I may find it fit in well enough when I come to make the next. There is something tells me that you set little store by the minstrel kind.’

  ‘I have known only the one harper in my father’s hall,’ she said gently. ‘He can outplay any of his kind along the west coast, when it comes to Oran Môr, the Great Music; but I have heard over-many light lilts to the Lady Guenhumara’s shining hair – especially when he would have another arm ring or a new bull calf for his herd.’

  ‘Be assured, at least, that I have no use for an arm ring, nor for a bull calf,’ Bedwyr said, with the smile flickering around his lips. ‘And alas! I have not yet seen the Lady Guenhumara’s shining hair!’

  Standing by, it seemed to me that I was watching two swordsmen playing for the feel of each other’s blades, but whether the foils were blunted or sharp, I could not yet be sure. I have thought since, that they were not sure themselves. I made the late rounds with Bedwyr that night, neither of us speaking any word of Guenhumara, and after he had gone back to the mess hall and the evening firelight, I lingered behind, leaning my elbows on the crumbling stone breastwork that still faced the old turf ramparts, and staring out into the blustery darkness of the hills. I meant to follow him at any moment, but I was still there when something moved below and behind me, and as I swung around, Guenhumara herself came up the rampart stair. She was close-muffled in the heavy folds of her riding cloak, but the light of a distant pine-knot torch behind her made a bright copper-dust nimbus through her unbound hair, and I knew by that, and by her way of moving, I suppose, that she had changed back into women’s gear.

  ‘Guenhumara! You should be in your bed.’

  She reached out her hand to Cabal, who had risen from his place beside my feet to welcome her better than I had
done. ‘I am too restless for my bed. Everything is so strange; I felt caged in that little room with its face turned nowhere save into a courtyard, and all the wind and the darkness outside.’ She came beside me, and set both hands on the cold age-eaten coping. ‘So this is a Roman fort – a Dun of the Red Crests?’

  ‘Is it not at all as you expected?’

  ‘I do not know. Yes, I suppose so. They say that the Romans like to have their lives boxed into squares and fenced with straight lines ... One was telling me, a while since, that in Roman cities the houseplaces have high square rooms to them, and that they are built all along ways so straight that they might have been ruled with a spear shaft. Would that be true?’

  Memory twinged at me, and out of the dark and under the wind it seemed for a moment that another woman’s voice was in my ears, a low voice, and mocking. ‘They say that in Venta there are streets of houses all in straight rows, and in the houses are tall rooms with painted walls; and Ambrosius the High King wears a cloak of the imperial purple.’ And I wanted to catch Guenhumara into my arms and hold her fast against all threat to take her from me, defying Ygerna, defying God Himself if need be. But I knew with a sick helplessness that I could not so much as touch her until she gave me leave.

  ‘It is true. The better houses, and the main streets, anyway,’ I said, and hoped that my voice was steady. ‘There are small crooked ways behind the straight ones, and they creep out farther in these days, as the grass creeps farther between the wheel ruts in the streets.’