Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  They got the door open just as I arrived, and the red furnace burst of flame that leapt up behind it on the instant drove them back as though from a charge of horsemen. I forced my way through them, yelling, ‘Leave that, you fools! The flames are spreading to the barn roof. Get the stores out!’ Pharic and I and a couple more of us, heads down behind our arms, managed to get the door shut again, while Bedwyr was already busy organizing a bucket chain from the well, with any and everything capable of holding water – we had enough men to fight a score of fires, scarce enough water to quench a candle. But there was the snow; it did not serve so well as water, but it was better than nothing. We blanketed the flames with it as best we could, while men swarming onto the roof strove to tear away the thatch and rafters in the path of the fire. The ponies in their nearby shed were shrieking in terror as the smoke reached them, but they were in no danger as yet. Others of us, the women among them, were working desperately to get out the stores. They might have saved the whole, but the door, which we had made ourselves to close the gap where the old one had rotted away, was of green wood because we had no seasoned timber, and prone to jam. It jammed now; perhaps the heat had something to do with it; and by the time it had been broken in, while several of the lads getting onto the roof and tearing up the smoldering thatch, dropped through into what might like enough have been their deathtrap, the fire was there ahead of them.

  Our store of mutton tallow added to the blaze, making the whole store shed a torch. Rags of blazing thatch had begun to tear off and whirl away downwind like birds of fire, and I sent men running to watch against other outbreaks. The flames leapt higher, bending over at the crest, and the flickering light beat upon our scorching eyeballs, the thick smoke cloud choked us, and the fire seemed to be in our very lungs. In the end we got less than half the stores out, before the roof came down with a rending crash and a roar of flame, engulfing two men.

  The fire was beginning to sink, the darkness creeping back over the fort, and we had kept the flames from spreading to any other building. But that was the best that could be said. I remember, as one remembers a dark dream, men bringing lanterns, now that the fire was low, to light the work of salvage, and myself standing in the trampled slush that was already freezing over again, surrounded by scorched men and half-charred carcasses of meat, and grain baskets with the coarse meal seeping out through the blackened slits in their sides. I was rank with sweat, and the sweat was turning icy on me in the bitter wind, and the palms of my hands seemed fayed and full of pulsing fire. Guenhumara was there too, with a great smear of black across her forehead. I suppose I must have asked her what she did there – I always made her go with Blanid to her own quarters, and bolt the door, when the drinking started – for she said breathlessly, ‘Carrying water. Was I to stay in my rooms, with the horn sounding the alarm, and men crying fire through the camp?’ And then, ‘Artos, your eyebrows are singed off,’ and then in quick concern as Cabal crouched panting against my legs, and I made to fondle his poor scorched head, ‘Oh my dear, your hands! Your poor hands! Come up with me and let me salve them.’

  But I had other things to do just then. There would be time presently for Guenhumara’s salves, there was none now.

  We had lost three men, and half the rest of us had burns and scorches to show for that night’s work. Three men not counting the mule driver. We found the charred stump of his body next day, lying in its snug corner behind the millstone with the shriveled remains of a burst beerskin beside it. He seemed never to have moved at all, so deep in drink that like enough he never even realized what was happening until the smoke suffocated him. We did not trouble to give him decent burial, but simply flung what was left of him over the ramparts at the place where the hill dropped almost sheer to the river, and left him to the wolves if they did not mind their meat somewhat overcooked.

  That day after taking exact stock of the stores that were left to us, we held a hurried council to decide our course of action. But, in truth, there was little choice left to us. To try to break out and get south to Corstopitum through the drifts and the blinding blizzards would have been nothing but a deliberate marching on death, and it would be equally impossible – as well as useless – to attempt getting a message through to them. The same applied to any attempt to get word through to Castra Cunetium; the deep mountain roads were utterly impassable to anything heavier-footed than a hare, and even supposing that the word could be got to them, and the stores got back again, the garrison was so small that if they parted with enough to make any appreciable difference to us, it would result merely in their starving in our stead. There was nothing to be done but stay where we were and make the remaining food last out as long as possible. After working the matter out carefully, it appeared that if we went on half rations from that day, we could hold out until about midway through February.

  ‘An early spring might save us,’ said Gwalchmai, who, though no captain, always had his place at our councils.

  And Bedwyr laughed. ‘The sun cannot complain that we did not make him a fine enough Midwinter blaze!’

  But the weeks went by and the weeks went by, and winter seemed to have claimed the world for good. There was never a day that offered a chance of hunting, only snow and gales, and bitter black frost that bound up the land even under its white furs. The snow lay drifted in slow curves to the eaves on the northern side of every building, and every day fresh paths must be cleared to stable and well and store sheds, not that that was altogether a bad thing, for digging keeps a man warm – though it also makes him hungry. Now and then, by putting out the bones of a finished carcass in a good spot of a moonlit night, and then putting a couple of archers on the walls, we managed to get a wolf or two, but they were so famine-thin themselves, poor brutes, that there was little that the women could do with them save make broth; and already the men grew gaunt and hollow-eyed, with heads that seemed too big for their sharp shoulders.

  One day Cei came to me and said, ‘Maybe the Dark People have food. Why do we not go foraging? You know where one village is, at all events.’

  ‘They will have little enough for themselves; they will have none to spare for those that come asking.’

  ‘Asking was not in my mind,’ Cei said grimly.

  I caught him by the shoulders to drive home what I had to say. ‘Listen, Cei; the Dark People are our friends. Na na, I am not being womanish, I do but use my head as it seems that you have forgotten to do. They are our friends, but they are not the kind that hold to friendship in the face of an injury. I have no wish to find the water supply fouled and our men on the walls picked off with those hellish little poisoned arrows of theirs.’

  So we did not go foraging, and whatever the Dark People had, they kept. We saw nothing of them in all that winter, but then we never did, during the dark of the year. It has often been my thought that the People of the Hills burrow deep into their holes and sleep through the cold months almost as the field voles and the badgers do.

  After a while we gave up sleeping in separate quarters and barrack rows, and huddled all together in the big mess hall, for though our fuel stocks had not suffered, we needed more warmth than in other winters, because our hunger let in the cold; and by the same token, a man needs less food when he is warm. So we put all the peat and firewood to one blazing fire that served both for cooking and for warming the hall, and which we could keep up even at night when need be. And there we crowded at nights, and in off-duty hours in the daytime also, from the captains to the mule drivers, the women of the baggage train, the dogs curled among us, and even the three ponies in the foreporch stamping and fidgeting through the bitter nights; drawing, all of us, I think, comfort and encouragement, even in a strange way life itself, from each other’s nearness.

  The behavior of the men in all that time is a thing I scarcely understand even now, looking back on it across the gulf of more than thirty years, but at the time it seemed nothing strange. At first the usual stresses and strains of winter quarters seemed stretched
unbearably by hunger and hardship and the little hope that any of us had of seeing the spring again. Old quarrels flared up, the troublemakers stirred up whatever mischief came to hand, again and again men were rightly or wrongly accused of trying for more than their share of the day’s allowance. But as time went by and our state became more desperate, all that changed, and men drew further away from the wolf pack. It was as though we all felt death too near to waste our substance in such barren ways; as though under the shadow of the Dark Wings, there was a growing quietness, a growing gentleness among us.

  Not that this quietness had any outward seeming; indeed our evenings were louder-voiced that winter than ever they had been in Trimontium before; and besides the old heroic sagas that he could declaim as well as any king’s bard, I do not think that ever harper made so many songs as Bedwyr made in that one; songs of hunting and drinking, lewd love snatches that made the women of the camp squeal and giggle; songs that called down mockery on all things under the sun, from my height, which was supposed to tempt the eagles to rest on top of my head with disastrous effect upon the shoulders of my war shirt, to the master armorer’s habit of scratching his behind when thinking out any problem of his craft, and Cei’s supposed adventures with a great many girls, each of which was more outrageous than the last. And never a lament in all those long dark months.

  February came at last, and the evenings were growing lighter. But the White Beast still had his fangs locked in our throats. Sometimes there was a little thaw at noon; always it froze again an hour later, and indeed as the days lengthened, so the cold increased. We were down far below half rations now, to one small rye cake a day for each man, and every two days a lump of meat about the size of three fingers, black as coal and hard as boiled leather. When the dried meat was all gone, we began to eat the dogs, drawing lots for the next to go; they had lived so long only by killing the weaker among themselves and if we kept them longer, they would be nothing but staring hide over dry bones. Even as it was, they had no more on them than the wolves. I began to regret bitterly that we had not kept back more of the ponies, for then we could have eaten them too. As it was, we ate one, but the other two must at all costs be kept until the very last.

  By mid-February not only starvation but sickness was among us. There was always scurvy in the camp by winter’s end, owing to the salt meat, but this year it was more widespread than usual. Guenhumara and old Blanid worked with the other women, tending the sick, and their days were full. Old wounds opened and refused to heal – I was having trouble myself with the old gash in my shoulder, and with my burned hands which refused to skin over properly. Men began to die, and we scraped shallow graves for them in the iron-hard ground outside the fort, and piled the frozen snow high over them and hoped that the wolves would not find their bodies.

  Young Amlodd died holding to my hand, with his eyes on my face like those of a sick dog that expects you to help it when there is no help to be given. And it was after his burial that Levin said, ‘Who will bury the last of us? I wonder.’

  ‘The wolves, Brother,’ said Bedwyr, and glanced up at a golden eagle quartering the sky. There were always one or more of the great birds over Trimontium. ‘And maybe an eagle or so. Sa sa, it is an ill winter that blows nobody any good.’

  The Minnow said, ‘And yet I could have sworn that there was a softer feel in the air this morning,’ and there was a raw longing for life in his voice. None of us answered him. I too thought that the icicles were at last beginning to lengthen under the eaves; but we knew, all of us, how small our chances were, even if the thaw came tonight. In the state that we had sunk to, with scarcely the strength left to dig a comrade’s grave, we could never reach Corstopitum, even if we abandoned our sick, and as for help coming from the depot, they had no reason to suppose that we needed any. The winter had been the worst for a score of years, but so far as they knew, we were well stocked with corn and meat; the first supply wagons would come up as usual toward the end of April, and that, I reckoned, would be too late for most of us by something over a month.

  ‘All that we need is a talking eagle such as that Tuan who told his tale to Saint Finnen. The flight south would be nothing to him,’ said Pharic, and his straight mouth quirked into laughter that did not touch his eyes. ‘A sad thing it is that the high days of heroes and marvels are over!’

  The next day Levin was missing, and so was the day’s food for his whole squadron. I remember, when the news was brought to me, feeling a little sick (but it did not take much to make one feel sick, just then). What had happened? Had he run mad, as happens sometimes when strain becomes too much for the spirit of man? Had he crept out into the white emptiness to meet death because he could not wait for it any longer? The disappearance of the food did not look like that, and I remember, also, sending in my own squadron of walking corpses to beat up a few swords, when Levin’s squadron gathered themselves to do murder on the spearmen who maintained that Levin had stolen the food and then fled away to join the Little Dark People because he dare not face his own kind. I had another thought, but I did not voice it. If there was the least chance of a man getting through before the thaw came, and the snow waters had had time to abate, I should have sent one long ago.

  That night the air turned suddenly soft, and we thought, all of us, that the thaw that was too late to save us was coming at last. For two days the snow sank before our eyes, and everywhere there was the sound of running water. In three days more it might be possible to try to send a messenger out; a faint flicker of the hope that had been dead in us so long, revived. But on the third night the frost came back, with a black bitter wind swooping over the white skirts of Eildon, and then a soft air and snow that whirled in mealy clouds across the ramparts, blotting out the world, and then frost again. The White Beast had not yet loosened his grip. I forget how many days it froze, that time, but I know that they seemed as long as the whole winter over again, before the wind went booming around to the southwest with a new smell on its wings, and the slow steady thaw set in.

  That must have been the best part of three weeks after Levin’s disappearance; and with the steady drip and trickle of melting snow once more in our ears, we knew that the time had come to draw lots, not for the dogs this time (we had eaten most of them by now, anyway), but for two of us to make the desperate attempt to get through to Corstopitum for help. Castra Cunetium we did not take into the account at all; apart from anything else, the mountain road would remain impassable long after the road south was open. That night I could not sleep. I knew, as we all did, that whoever drew the two longest straws tomorrow would be going out to almost certain death; and yet there was the one chance in a thousand, and it must be taken ... Anyway, what was the death of two men, now, when we were all for the Dark Road close after them? And yet I knew that whoever they were, those two, their deaths would lie heavy on my heart when my own time came – unless – I prayed to Mithras and the Horned One and the White Christos that I might draw one of those two straws. I even began to wonder if there was any means by which I could tamper with the draw. But the choice belonged to Fate, not to me. And still I could not sleep. We no longer kept any watch at night; nothing could come at us, and in our cold and weakened state, the two hours’ guard duty would have been too likely to kill the man who stood it on the walls. But I had grown into the way of getting up some time in the midst of the night, and taking a look around the fort to make sure that all was well. What I thought to find, I do not know; the thing had become a habit. That night, too restless to lie still any longer, I got up rather earlier than usual, quietly, so as not to wake Guenhumara. We had done our best to keep her a little privacy, by giving her the place at the farthest and darkest end of the mess hall, with only one sleeping space beyond her; that, the cold place against the wall, was taken in turn by myself and Bedwyr and her brother Pharic, the other two sleeping between her and the rest of the war host. Looking down at her now, as I stood stretching, I thought how, on the first night, Bedwyr had drawn his s
word and laid it between them, laughing, and said, ‘No man shall say that I was not as nicely nurtured as Pwyl, Prince of Dyfed.’ But it is not good to lay sword between one and another when the need is to huddle close for warmth, and his sword remained in its sheath now.

  There was nothing save for a glint of distant firelight on her tumbled hair to show that a woman lay there, for the slim leg from which the muffing folds of her cloak had fallen back showed cross-gartered breeks. She had taken to her boy’s riding dress long ago, for the great warmth. Her cheek was cuddled against Pharic’s shoulder, and there was a certain likeness between them that was not there when both were awake.

  I stretched until the muscles cracked behind my shoulders, trying to draw a little strength into myself. My belly felt weak, and my head swam so that it was as though the whole mess hall lifted and fell gently under my feet like a galley in a quiet sea. I doddered down the hall, picking my way among the sleepers, but in the light of the fire that threw enormous shadows under their sunken cheekbones and pinched noses and brows, they had the gaunt set jaws and sunken eye sockets of those already dead. The famished shadow that had been Cabal stalked at my heels. So far he had escaped the death draw, but his turn must come soon ... I opened the door, and thrusting it gently to behind me, went out past the two wretched ponies into the night.

  After the crowded mess hall (not so crowded as it had been, though) that stank like a fox’s earth, the smell of the thaw struck at me keen and chill as the blade of a knife; there were no stars, and despite the snow it was very dark, with the kind of breathy darkness that makes one aware of the world as a living thing.