Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘The grass is not Roman,’ Guenhumara said with a small tired whimper of laughter. ‘It flows in curves when the wind blows over.’

  ‘You will grow used to it all in time.’

  ‘I will grow used to it in time,’ she agreed, ‘but tonight it is all so strange – so many strange faces in the torchlight. Do you know, save for your trout-freckled armor-bearer, I have not seen in this Red Crest’s eyrie, one of those who were with you in my father’s hall.’

  ‘They will be most of them at Trimontium,’ I said. ‘Flavian rode this far with me, and then on south, to winter with his wife and bairn.’

  She looked around quickly. ‘Was that his price?’

  ‘His price?’ I did not fully grasp her meaning for a moment, and could only repeat the words, stupidly. ‘His price?’

  And I think she must have seen how it was, for suddenly she was trying to catch her words back. ‘Na na, that was a wicked thing to say – stupid, which is worse; I shall be less stupid when I am not so tired. You told me before, that it might be you could let him go this winter, and it might be not, and I am glad that you could let him go.’ She moved a little nearer to me as she spoke, as though to make up for some hurt or failure, and I knew that I had the beginning of the leave that I had waited for, and put my arm around her as we propped side by side against the rampart wall.

  ‘What of the one with the barley-colored hair – Gault, his name was,’ she asked in a little.

  ‘Why Gault in particular?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought of him at that moment – just a thought that passed by.’

  ‘Maybe it was himself that passed, coming in to the fire,’ I said, thinking of the empty places kept beside the mess hall hearth, and the food and drink set ready for men who came no more in the body to the evening meal among their comrades. But it would be at Trimontium that Gault’s place was kept for him, beside Levin, this Samhain night.

  I felt Guenhumara startle and stir in the curve of my arm. ‘Dead?’

  ‘Almost two months ago.’

  ‘Was there a woman left lonely for him – or a bairn?’

  ‘No, Guenhumara.’ I put both arms around her then, and pulled her close, as though trying to shield her from something, I am not sure what. She was too weary to quicken, spent as a bird that one finds sometimes fallen on the shore after a long storm-driven journey over the sea. But she leaned against me as though there was some kind of shelter in that. And standing there in the wind and the sharp spitting darkness, I had a sudden sense of light and strength and quietness, and it seemed to me that Ygerna’s power could not last forever; that it might even be fought off and broken, and in the end I might be free, and Guenhumara with me.

  ‘May the fire be warm for him,’ Guenhumara said softly, against the breast folds of my cloak, ‘or may the birds of Rhiannon sing for him, if it hurts less, to forget.’ (‘Forget ... Forget ... Are you afraid to hear the singing of Rhiannon’s birds, that makes men forget?’)

  And the light went out, and I knew that the Samhain wind was dreary cold, and the rain spitting down my neck, and no man may escape his doom. I kissed Guenhumara, and it was like kissing her good-bye. ‘Anwyl, you must go in to your bed.’

  She kissed me again, with a great and lovely kindness, as she had kissed me on our wedding night. ‘Come soon, then, Artos the Bear, for it is lonely in this place.’

  ‘I will come soon,’ I promised.

  And she drew back out of my arms, and went away down the rampart stair.

  chapter nineteen

  The House of Holy Ladies

  FLAVIAN RETURNED TO US EARLY IN THE SPRING, BEFORE even the first supply carts of the year got through. I was out on old Arian, beginning the long business of getting him back into condition after the winter, and we came together with a suddenness that set the horses trampling, at the bend where the Cunetium road ran out from the shadows of the river gorge. ‘Artos!’ he shouted, and I, ‘Minnow!’ and laughing and exclaiming and cursing the horses, we leaned together from the saddle to strike hands, while Cabal sprang around us with his tail lashing.

  ‘How is it with Teleri and the bairn?’ I asked, when we had quieted the beasts and turned them back toward the gates of Trimontium.

  ‘It is very well with both of them; he is a fine cub and uses his fists like a warrior already.’ He spoke with the lingering tone and inward-turning smile of a man looking back on past contentment so strong that the flavor of it lingers with him still. And then in a changed note, ‘She came then?’

  ‘Guenhumara? She came. But what tells you so?’

  ‘You have a new cloak.’

  I glanced down at the dark thick plaid I had flung about me against the March wind that cut like a fleshing knife. Guenhumara had not been two days in Trimontium before she asked for a loom, and when two of our craftsmen made it for her, the first thing that she wove on it had been a cloak for me. ‘I have a new cloak,’ I agreed, ‘but must it be of Guenhumara’s weaving?’

  ‘They always weave a cloak for their lord, to keep him warm,’ said Flavian, with the air of one grown suddenly wise in the ways of women. ‘Mine wove this for me,’ and he shook out and resettled the folds of a fine dark blue cloak bordered with black and flame red.

  ‘It is a bonny cloak,’ I said, ‘and a bonny target for Saxon arrows you’ll make wearing it. Now I have but to squat still enough in this dim plaid of mine, and the Dark People themselves will take me for a hole in the hillside.’

  ‘Ah, you are jealous, my Lord the Bear!’ And so I was, but not of his cloak with the black and scarlet border.

  We rode on, exchanging the news of the camp for news of the world outside, until we came down to the ford, and splashed through; and as we set the horses to the steep rough-paved slope on the far side, Flavian said suddenly, ‘Fool that I am. I should have told you at first. Hunno bade me remind you that he will be sending your Signus up with the horse drafts, this spring.’

  I had almost forgotten that the white foal would be three years old now. In war and in the wilderness one easily loses count of time. I twisted in the saddle to look at my companion. ‘You have seen him? He has fulfilled his promise?’

  ‘I believe you will think so. He’s a good hand taller than Arian, and more powerful, and his heart is as high as his crest. Hunno says he is the crown and the flowering of all the colts that ever came under his hands, and that the Horned One has granted it to him to make a perfect horse at the end of his days ... I think he forgets that the dam had anything to do with it.’

  ‘The end of his days?’ I said quickly. ‘Is anything amiss with Hunno?’

  ‘Nothing but that he grows old,’ Flavian said, and suddenly he sighed. ‘It happens – it happens to all of us.’

  ‘You have noticed that? Sa! You are growing up, my Minnow.’

  ‘Even Teleri was a little older than when I saw her last. Her breasts are not pointed any more, but round. Maybe by the time I see her again she will have found a white hair and pulled it out and grown seven more.’

  It was the best part of a month later that Hunno sent up the yearly draft of horses. They were a good lot. Trained on for battle (that was the task that fell to the summer garrison every year), they would serve to remount some of Pharic’s contingent before the end of the campaigning season.

  And among them, as promised, was Signus. The big white war-colt was certainly, I thought, walking all around him in the first moments of our reunion, everything that Hunno had claimed for him. He stood rising sixteen hands at the shoulder, strength and endurance promised though not yet fulfilled in his deep shoulders and long, finely sloping haunches, pride and fire in every line of him from high crest to sweeping, restless tail, and as he stamped and tossed his head and wheeled about to keep me in view, my soul went out to him as it had done at our last meeting, when his muzzle was still flecked with his mother’s milk. I went closer, and felt the quivering bowstring fineness of the tendons at wrist and hock, the life and the instant response shiv
er through him as I ran my hands over his body. He swung his head toward me in interest, his wariness forgotten, his ears pricked forward, nuzzling with delicate outthrust lip for the lick of salt that he was all at once sure I had brought him. I shook some into my palm from the small rawhide bag I usually carried with me, and gave it to him, drawing my free hand again and again down his nose from forelock to quivering nostril, while he sucked and slobbered at the gray salt. His head was broad and intelligent, his eyes like a falcon’s, dark and luminous, under the veil of white lashes. ‘Did I not say that we should go into battle together, you and I? Did I not tell thee?’ I said, in the British tongue that he would be used to. And he ruckled softly in his nose, butting against me for more salt.

  I had him saddled up, and called to Amlodd standing by to bring a spear and follow me, and took him down then and there to the practice field to try him out. We had cleared the old practice field during our first long months in winter quarters, hauling out the elder bushes and the furze that had overrun it, and setting up the brushwood jumps and spear targets. And there I spent the better part of that evening, one of the happiest evenings, I think, that I have ever known. I tested his paces, and tried him for ease in maneuvering, bending him this way and that, reining him up short and wheeling him almost on his haunches; and found his mouth sensitive and his heart high and willing even when clearly he did not understand what I wanted of him. I took him over the jumps and ditches – it is very seldom that one needs a war-horse to jump, but when one does, one needs it as never anything in life before. In his eagerness he was prone to stretch out his neck and jump off too soon, but confidence and scorn of the obstacle ahead was in the very gathering of his lean haunches under him, and his landings were sure as a cat’s. He must be schooled against overconfidence; ah, but too much fire, too fierce a scorn of obstacles, are better than too little, in horse or man. I took him at full gallop down the curved line of practice posts, swerving him in and out with the torn sods flying back from his hooves, and fell more and more in love with him at every drumming hoofbeat. He shook his head, when I brought him to a halt at last, scattering foam on his breast, and I could sense in him as though one life flowed through both of us, the joy in his own speed and power and the hand beginning to grow familiar on his reins. This would make a war-horse indeed! Only when I took the spear from Amlodd and set him at the target, he was somewhat lacking, for he did not yet understand what was wanted of him, and the target itself, which looked like a man and yet was not a man, was a thing to be shied and snorted and trembled at, lest there be some hidden menace in it. But time and training would amend that. And in the ultimate task of a war-horse I knew that he would need scarce any training at all, for the use of his own teeth and front hooves as weapons is born into every stallion.

  By the time that I had done, the sun was low and the three-peaked shadow of Eildon had engulfed the whole river valley and the old red fort on its headland and the marshes eastward. I turned Signus toward the gateway, and saw what looked like half the war host crowded there to watch the show. From deep within the gloom of the gate arch one figure moved forward and started down the length of the practice field toward me, and I saw with a small sharp stab of pleasure that it was Guenhumara. Cabal, who had gone through every trial and test with us, bounded to meet her, and mouthed the hand she held to him in his great jaws. That gentle pretense at savaging, which had in it all the loving laughter of intimacy, was a thing that he bestowed sometimes on me, very occasionally on Guenhumara, on Bedwyr and Druim Dhu, never on anyone else. I noticed that in the curve of her other arm, she carried a small deep rush basket, tenderly as though it contained something fragile and precious.

  I had dropped from the saddle, with my tunic sticking to my back, for the evening was warm for April and Signus had been no armchair ride; and when she reached me with Cabal stalking beside her, she stood watching while I rewarded the big colt with another lick of salt. ‘Flavian told me that you were trying out the white colt, and so I came to watch. Is he all that he should be?’

  ‘He is all that I hoped and believed he would be,’ I said, fondling the muzzle that thrust against my breast.

  ‘Believed? You have seen him before, then?’

  ‘Three years ago – a foal still running at his mother’s heel. I marked him for mine, then, and gave him his name for a covenant between us.’

  ‘And the name?’

  ‘Signus. He was an autumn foal, and a white one, and I called him for the star of the Great Swan that rises at the time of the first autumn gales.’

  ‘So – and he is swift and fierce and beautiful like the wild swans that used to fly over my home. It is a good name for him.’

  Amlodd had come panting up from the far side of the practice field, and I handed the white colt over to him, and once more turned toward the fortress gates with Guenhumara.

  ‘What will you do now, with Arian?’

  ‘For the next year or two, God willing, I shall ride him equally with Signus. In two years the young one will have gained experience, and I shall send Arian back to Ambrosius who first gave him to me. He will be past his best by then, poor old lad.’

  ‘He will hate that.’

  ‘He will remember Ambrosius. It would break his heart to hear the trumpets and know that I had gone into battle without him.’

  ‘Poor Arian. It is sad to grow old.’

  ‘It happens,’ I said, ‘to men and horses, and I suppose to the stars themselves, until the time comes that they fall from the sky on a winter’s night ... You sound like Flavian; he says that Teleri’s breasts are not pointed any more, but round.’

  ‘That is not age,’ said Guenhumara, softly. ‘That is because she has borne a child and given suck.’

  And a sudden silence took us as we walked, a small silence, but painful.

  All through the autumn, even while I dreaded her coming, I had hoped, hoped for some kind of miracle, I don’t know what. But when she came, nothing had been changed between us. And Guenhumara, though she never spoke of it, I think had hoped for a miracle, too. If we could have spoken of the trouble, we might have drawn closer together, but we could not. And the silence made a sword-blade barrier between us more impassable than the thing itself. The fact that I could not be fully a man to her made me shy of her in other ways, and as I held back and drew away, so, by no will of her own, it seemed, must she draw away also. And yet I believe she loved me then. I know that I loved her.

  ‘What have you in that basket that you carry as though it were eggs?’ I asked at last; anything to break the silence.

  And she laughed a little breathlessly and hurried to help me. ‘But it is eggs! Look!’ And coming to a standstill, she turned to me and put back a wad of grass and moss with which the basket seemed to be filled, and showed me, lying as it were in a nest of moss, seven greenish waxen-surfaced mallard’s eggs. ‘Gwalchmai found them in the marshes and brought them to me to hatch.’

  As she carefully re-covered them to keep their warmth in, I thought that that was like Gwalchmai, thought also that the gift showed the place that she had found for herself among us and taken with quiet certainty as her own. ‘I’ll have no married women to raise trouble among the men,’ I had said, long ago, to Flavian. But if trouble of that kind were to come with Guenhumara, it still lay hidden in the future days. Maybe that was in part because she was mine, and I was Artos the Bear, with a bear’s blow to defend my own; maybe, a little, because they too were mine; but chiefly, I think, it was something in Guenhumara herself.

  ‘And how is it you think you are going to hatch them? Will you make a nest and sit on them turn and turn about with Blanid?’ I asked, making a foolish jest of it.

  We had moved on again, and the onlookers about the gate, now that the show was over, were beginning to drift away.

  ‘One of Caradawg’s hens has gone broody,’ she said. ‘That was why Gwalchmai brought them to me, because he thought that there was a good chance of hatching them.’

  I
t was more than I did. Caradawg the armorer whiled away the time when work was slack by breeding fighting cocks and trading them through the fort and with the merchants who came occasionally in the summer, and I could not see one of his fierce little red game hens sitting placidly on a clutch of mallard’s eggs. ‘I was going to find Caradawg when Flavian told me about the colt, and I saw the crowd gathering and came down to watch with the rest.’ Guenhumara checked, and added after a moment, ‘Only of course I shall not be here to see them hatch out; Caradawg must see to that for me. That was the one thing that Gwalchmai forgot.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that is the one thing that Gwalchmai forgot.’

  ‘Let me stay a while longer,’ she said suddenly, ‘until the ducklings are safely hatched.’

  I shook my head. ‘Mid-April is late enough for you to be making the journey. It is not even as though I could spare the time to ride all the way with you and leave you safe in your father’s hall.’

  ‘Is not Pharic’s arm strong enough to get me there, even with an escort behind him?’

  ‘In mid-April, yes. By mid-May, for all that we can know, it might take the whole war host.’

  There was a small pause. We were out on the roadway now, and had slackened to a snail’s pace; as though without actually admitting it by stopping, neither of us wished to reach the gates. Then Guenhumara said, ‘Very well, if you fear an ambush for me on the journey, let me stay here all summer. I shall be safe enough within these great red walls.’

  ‘Will you? We hold Trimontium with a garrison cut to the very bone in summer, to free every possible man for the war trail. You have a certain value as a hostage, and if word that the Bear’s wife was here with so small a force to guard her came to the ears of our enemies, broken and divided as they are, you might bring deadly peril both on yourself and Trimontium. I can’t afford to lose either of you.’