Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘Well?’ Guenhumara said without looking up, when I went back to the outer room.

  ‘She was asleep with her thumb in her mouth.’

  She flung back all her hair and looked up at me then, with a pinched spent face. ‘If you say maybe it is because she is hungry, I shall hit you!’

  ‘I was not going to,’ I said quickly, for I knew how she hated that she had not enough milk.

  But she flared out at me like the veriest spitcat, none the less. ‘And do not you use that quieting voice to me! I am not a child nor yet a mare to be gentled past a white rag in a thornbush!’ And then before I could answer, though indeed there was no answer in my mind, she got up and tossed the comb aside and came and laid her head against my breast. ‘Artos, I’m sorry. It is that I am tired. We are both so very tired, the bairn and I, that is why she looks so gray.’

  I put my arms around her and kissed the top of her damp head – I always loved the smell of Guenhumara’s hair when it was clean and wet. ‘Go to bed, love. I must find Bedwyr and make sure that all is well with the lads, and wash off a layer or two of dust. But I’ll not be long behind you.’

  ‘I can’t go to bed yet, I’m too restless. Maybe I’m homesick.’ She looked up at me. ‘When do you take the war trail and leave me alone in this great strange place?’

  ‘Not for ten days. Ambrosius will give you his mother’s chambers that he has let no one use since her day, and I shall be able to see you settled in there before I go. Venta will not seem so great and strange to you, then.’ I kissed her again. ‘Try to be happy here in the South; it is not my country either, but it is a good land, none the less.’

  ‘At least we can be homesick together in the winter evenings,’ she said with a shaken breath of laughter.

  A familiar step came along the colonnade and she moved back quietly out of my arms as Bedwyr’s voice sounded beyond the part-closed door.

  I bade him enter, and he pushed the door open and stepped into the lamplight, with my iron cap in his hand and a shapeless load of glimmering mail flung across one shoulder. ‘I’ve seen your baggage ponies unloaded,’ he said, and flung down cap and war shirt with a chiming crash onto the end of the big olivewood chest. ‘Riada will bring up the rest of your gear later.’

  ‘That should all have been Riada’s work, but thanks, Bedwyr.’

  He shrugged. ‘The boy had not eaten, and I had. The rest of the lads are fed and in some kind of shelter for the night. Cei is seeing to the horses, still – some difficulty about finding a good place for them in the picket lines – you know what horse masters are when there is any question of disturbing their own arrangements.’

  ‘I also know what Cei is. I will go down to the horse lines and see what goes forward, before I head for the bathhouse.’ I turned again to Guenhumara. ‘I may be some while seemingly – longer than I had thought. If you will not go to bed, wake Blanid to keep you company.’

  ‘I shall do well enough with the fire for company.’

  But I hated to think of her sitting there alone, combing and combing her hair, it might be far into the night. And then I had a happier idea. ‘Bedwyr – can you bide for a little? Maybe she will give you a cup of wine for a song. Can you weave a harp spell that is good for the homing hunger?’

  He put a hand to the strap of his harp bag, and checked, looking at her with that wild left brow of his flying in inquiry. ‘If my Lady Guenhumara would have it so?’

  Guenhumara hesitated also, and then stooped for her comb. ‘Anything, so that you play softly and do not wake the baby.’

  And he lounged down onto the chest beside my war gear, unslinging his harp as he spoke. ‘As soft as the wild swan’s down ... Bide while I tune the darling, and you shall have the very birds of Rhiannon sung from their tree into your hollow hands, if that will help to pass the evening.’

  I whistled Cabal to heel, and went out; Guenhumara’s voice in my ear, calling after me, ‘Come back soon,’ as though I were going, not merely to the horse lines, but on a long journey.

  I wished that Bedwyr had not said that, about the birds of Rhiannon.

  Within half a moon the old struggle with the Sea Wolves had claimed me again, and with the Brotherhood I was far up into the old Icenian hunting runs. We saw fierce fighting all that summer; but what remains of it to me now? No man remembers the battles of his later years with the clearness, the joy and fire and anguish of the warfare of his youth. I had fought out half a score of pitched battles by then; how many skirmishes and forays and lesser fights, the war gods only know; and the details of one encounter become confused with the details of another, so that now, of all those battles of the later years, the only one to stand out clearly in my mind is the one we fought below Badon Hill. And that was the red flowering and the crown of all that had gone before. But in that first summer of our coming south, Badon was still five years away; and better than the whistle of arrows and the smoke of burning camps, I remember the smell of the saltings, and the wide wind-rippled marsh skies that reminded me of those first campaigns about Lindum when all things were younger and we were still a Brotherhood in the making.

  I returned to winter quarters on a day when, after a month of bitter wind and rain, with the evenings already drawing in to early lamplight, the year turns back for a last regretful look at summer. And when I came to the Queen’s Courtyard, I found Guenhumara and another woman sitting on the colonnade step in the late sunshine, while Hylin and two more babies tumbled about the old beaver-skin rug at their feet, and a dark grave boy of eight or nine, with a wooden sword, went gravely through the practice position of sword fighting. One look was enough to tell me whose son he was, and therefore who the other woman must be – and indeed she was little and brown, even as Flavian had described her. Guenhumara had risen and stood waiting. I think that in all our years, she never ran to meet me, but stood waiting for me to come to her, quite still, not from any lack of welcome but as though she were making something last, not wasting it in flurry and soft outcries; and with the same wish to make the moment last, I seldom hurried toward her. I checked for an instant beside the boy, and asked, ‘Do they call you Minnow?’

  He lowered his guard and looked up. ‘How did you know, sir?’

  ‘I just thought they might. Keep your point two inches lower when you make that lunge, Minnow. You’re laying yourself open to a belly thrust else.’

  He made the movement again, stamping his small feet and recovering as neatly as many a grown man. ‘Sir – is my father come back?’

  ‘He is with the horses now.’

  I went on, Cabal stalking behind me, to where Guenhumara waited at the entrance to the colonnade, while Teleri gathered her brood and flurried softly away into the shadows behind her.

  The winter that followed has a sheen to it, a silken texture in my memory, like a flower with the light through its petals, and not much longer-lived. Hylin seemed much stronger, the summer sun had burned her soft skin brown and bleached the ends of her soft wispy hair; she had filled out, and though she could not talk yet – I had half thought she might, but Guenhumara said no, that a year was too young – she had learned to laugh, a small crooning bubbling laugh that was the prettiest sound I had ever heard. I bought her a white boarhound that winter, choosing her a bitch since they are more gentle than dogs and less likely to stray – out of a litter of squirming and whimpering whelps in a huge willow basket which one of Ambrosius’s hunters brought to the courtyard with their anxious mother sniffing behind. I got Bhan the leather-worker to make a puppy collar with tiny five-petaled silver flowers on it, where a grown hound would have had studs of bronze. It was the first time in my life that I had bought a pretty thing for my daughter, and I enjoyed it more than I should have enjoyed laying captured treasure at the feet of a queen. It was a mild winter, so mild that at midwinter there was still one tattered blossom on the little thorny white rose that grew in an old clay wine jar at the angle of the colonnade; and Guenhumara picked it and brought it in to lie on t
he table at suppertime on the Eve of Lights, and the scent of it in the warmth of the brazier was fit to tear the heart out of the breast.

  With spring came the time to ride the old weary war trail again. And by the next autumn Hylin was growing thin once more, and had begun to get strange little sweats that came at night and were gone again in the morning; and Guenhumara, tending her, seemed to have gone away from me to a great distance. I got Gwalchmai to look at the child, and he came with me for kindness’ sake, but when he looked, he said only, ‘Na na, I have become something of a surgeon in these years; but I know nothing of the sicknesses of bairns. Get Ambrosius’s leech to see her.’ So I asked Ambrosius for the loan of Ben Simeon his physician, and the little burly Jew came and looked at her, and shook his head, snapped his fingers and clicked his tongue to make her laugh, and went away using strange words that we did not understand and I think were not meant to understand, and saying that he would send something to help the cough, and soon he would come again.

  All that winter the only thing that seemed to soothe Hylin when the fever was on her was the sound of Bedwyr’s harp. And God alone knows how many evenings he came up weary from the colt-breaking yards, the sweat of his day’s work still rank on him, to squat beside the Small One’s cot and make little tunes for her – tunes simple enough to teach to a whistling starling, which must have seemed to him as it would have seemed to the man who carved the marble Demeter in the Forum, had he set himself to fashioning dolls from grass stalks and poppy heads turned inside out.

  I was glad that I had already given him a farm from my own estates in Arfon, Coed Gwyn, where the snowdrops whitened the woods in spring, for if I had done it afterward, I should have been afraid that it might seem like payment, and unforgivable.

  I carried a heavy heart with me down the war trail that spring, and yet there was relief in the familiar feel of my battle harness. I have always been a fighting man, and for me there was the release, the small sweet death of forgetting, in the clash of weapons and the dust cloud of battle that other men find in women or heather beer.

  We were encamped a short way east of Combretovium with the Saxons across the valley within their laager of wagons, and I had gone out to a small isolated knoll to get a good view of the enemy and make some guess at their movements, when a messenger came seeking me out, with word from Guenhumara that Hylin was dying.

  It was a very still evening, I remember the shadows lying long from our camp toward the Saxons, and in the stillness I could hear the faint small sound of shouting voices and the ring of the armorer’s hammer across the valley between.

  I do not know what I said to the man; something about getting a meal, I think. Then I went on studying the enemy camp. Cabal looked up into my face, whimpering, sensing something amiss. Presently Bedwyr brushed out from the furze bushes and came to a silent halt beside me. I looked around at him, carefully, and saw it in his eyes, that he knew. I suppose the messenger had spread it all over the camp by that time. Neither of us spoke, but he laid his hand briefly on my shoulder, and for an instant I set mine over it. We very seldom made any outward showing of the long-familiar bond. ‘I have told Riada to saddle Signus,’ he said at last.

  ‘Then you must be telling him to unsaddle again. I’ll not be needing Signus until the morning.’

  I suppose he thought that I was stunned by what had happened, for he said, ‘Artos, don’t you understand? The message has been a day and a night on its way to you, already—’

  ‘And if I do not leave now, I may not see the bairn alive. Yes, I understand.’

  ‘Then why—’

  ‘If I go now, I leave my men to face tomorrow’s Saxons without their leader.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Artos. Have Cei and I never led troops against the Saxons, yet?’

  ‘Never troops that the Bear had deserted on the eve of battle, to ride off about his own affairs ... With three squadrons away, the chances hang unevenly balanced between us and this particular pack of the Sea Wolves. Listen, Bedwyr, I know you and love you, every man, and I know that I can depend on your loyalty to the last ditch; I know there is not one man among the Company will blame me, if I ride away now. But there are the others – I know also what a chancy thing is the mood of a war host. I do not think that I can be well spared until tomorrow’s fighting is over.’

  ‘How if you were killed or laid out in the first charge? We should have to spare you then.’

  ‘That would be another thing. I believe that you would all fight like fiends out of Tartarus to avenge me.’ I patted his shoulder clumsily. ‘Go and tell Riada I shall not be wanting Signus until mounting time at first light tomorrow.’

  ‘And Guenhumara?’

  ‘Guenhumara knows that I will come when I can. She will remember that I was Comes Britanniorum before ever I took her from her father’s hearth; and the old bargain between us.’ But in that, I suppose I was expecting Guenhumara to think like a man.

  Of the next day’s fighting I remember nothing at all. They told me afterward that at one time we were as near to defeat as ever we had been without being actually driven from the field. And I heard men talking among themselves outside the bothy as I was stripping off my harness while Riada brought around my spare horse, and one said to the other, ‘Trust the Bear to know the perfect moment to fling in his charge,’ and spat appreciatively. So I suppose that I played my part none so ill. A wonderful thing is habit.

  I left the clearing up of the day’s end to Cei and Bedwyr, the wounded to Gwalchmai as usual; and when I had snatched a bite of bannock and a hurried draught of beer, and went out to the horse which Riada had brought around, I was surprised to find that the shadows had scarcely begun to lengthen. The smoke of a great burning rose from the Saxon camp, and all across the valley the women were moving among the dead and wounded; and already the ravens were gathering overhead.

  I mounted, and rode out of the camp that was silent and full of faces, and set my horse’s head toward the low ridge of hills that carried the old Icenian Way. Riada had provided for me the swiftest and most enduring of my remounts, since Signus, having been in battle, was in no state for a long hard ride that day; but I would have give much to have had him between my knees now, for I never knew his like for speed and endurance. I came near to breaking the willing heart of my mount, for I rode as though the Wild Hunt were on my heels. I rode the sun out of the sky and the moon clear of the hills, drumming mile after long mile down the old ridgeway without let or pause or mercy. Toward midnight I came to the hill fort at Durocobrivae, the first outpost of Ambrosius’s stronghold, and there changed my foundered horse for a fresh one, and rode on again.

  Dawn was not far off when, my horse rocking in his stride, I came up the last straight stretch to the north gate of Venta, and the guards opened the great valves, the ironshod newels shrieking in their stone sockets, and passed me through. I was clattering up the still-sleeping streets. The guards at the palace gates passed me through in turn, and I dropped from the saddle in the outer courtyard, staggering as the solid pavement heaved up to meet me like the deck of a galley in a swell. I tossed the reins to someone who came with a stable lantern as though he had been waiting for me, and headed at a drunken stumbling run for the inner court and the Queen’s Court beyond.

  The moonlight broke in a silver wave against the far side of the courtyard, whitening the leaves of the rose in its great jar and casting its tracery of shadow in perfect echo on the wall behind it. The door of the atrium stood open and the lantern light spilled its yellow pool across the colonnade, together with the sound of a woman keening. Guenhumara came into the doorway, and stood outlined against the light waiting for me; but it was not she who was keening.

  I had checked my headlong pace, and came across the courtyard at a walk – it seemed very wide, a vast space like an arena – and up the step of the colonnade into the lantern light. I remember trying not to hear the keening, trying not to hear its meaning in my heart and loins and belly.

 
‘The bairn?’ I croaked; and put out a hand to steady myself against the doorpost, for I was almost as near to foundering as the horse that I had ridden half to death that night. ‘How is it with the bairn?’

  Guenhumara never moved. She said, ‘The bairn died an hour ago.’

  chapter twenty-four

  The Fetch

  GUENHUMARA WAS STILL STANDING IN THE DOORWAY. I SAID something, or tried to, I do not know what, and she replied in a hoarse flat tone that had nothing of her voice’s usual beauty. ‘Why did you not come before?’

  ‘I came as soon as I could, Guenhumara.’

  ‘I suppose you had some fighting to finish first.’ Still the same hoarse level tone.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. And then as she never moved from the doorway, ‘Let me in, Guenhumara.’

  She moved back quickly, before I could touch her with the hands I held out, and I lurched through into the atrium. The room seemed strange, the lantern set low so that the shadows leapt gigantic up the walls; making the blue and russet saint in the tapestry stir as though on the edge of life, and I was vaguely aware of the black huddle that was Blanid in the corner, rocking to and fro and keening as the Northern women keen for their dead, and another woman on the edge of the lantern light, who I suppose must have been Teleri.

  ‘Where is she?’ I said.

  ‘In her usual sleeping place.’

  I turned to the open doorway of the sleeping chamber, and went in, all but stumbling over Margarita, the boarhound bitch, who lay across the threshold. There was a quietness in the room that seemed to shut out the keening from the atrium, as though it had passed beyond such things. There was a scent of burning herbs, and the rushlight on its pricket glimmered like a small high star, its yellow light quenched and washed away by the silver tide of moonlight that flooded in through the window and lay across the bed. Small Hylin lay as she had always done, in her soft nest of beaver skin at the head of the bed, but straight and stiffly neat, not curled like a kitten. Why could they not have left her thumb in her mouth, I wondered dazedly, and buried her as one buries a favorite hound, in the familiar position of his lifetime sleeping? Cabal, who had followed me in, thrust forward his muzzle inquiringly, then looked up into my face and whimpered, crouching away into the shadows. Margarita had crawled to my feet, whimpering also, and pawing at the bed rugs, frightened by what she could not understand. Guenhumara stood at the foot of the bed and never moved.