Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  The stillness seeped with an icy chill into my heart, numbing it, and I could have turned away I think without much show of my grief ... Then a nightingale began to sing somewhere in the tangled wilderness of the old palace gardens, and the white throbbing ecstasy of the notes pierced through the merciful numbness with a sharp sword of beauty that was more than I could bear. And I knelt down by the bed and drove my face into the soft darkness of the fur beside the little still face that no longer looked like Hylin’s, and cried.

  The moonlight was graying into the cobweb darkness of day-spring when I stumbled up from my knees, and the song of robin and willow wren was waking in the wild garden. Guenhumara still stood at the bed foot, unmoving as the Nine Sisters on the moors above her father’s Dun and as remote. I would have put my arms around her, but she stepped back, saying quickly, ‘Na, don’t touch me, not yet.’

  And I let my arms fall to my sides. ‘I could not come before, Guenhumara.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ she said drearily. ‘All that I accepted for part of the bargain on the day that you took me from my father’s hearth ... It was of no great matter that you were not here, it was not you she cried for – she cried for Bedwyr and his harp, before she fell asleep.’

  The blow was struck quite deliberately, and she was not a woman given to striking with such weapons. Suddenly I had a panic sense of Guenhumara’s going away from me, and I caught hold of her whether she would or no. ‘Guenhumara, what is it? For God’s sake tell me what you are holding against me!’

  For a moment, standing there beside the Small One’s body, she put out all her strength to fling me off; then the resistance went out of her, and she said in a low wail, ‘Why did you leave us those three days and nights in the Fairy Howe?’

  ‘Because you were both too weak to be carried off within an hour of bearing and being born. If I had carried you off then, I might so easily have lost you both.’

  ‘If you had, then at least I should have died very happy, and the bairn would have escaped all that she has suffered these past months,’ she said. ‘As it is, I think that you have lost us both, now,’ and the chill of her words struck me through as the nightingale’s song had done.

  ‘Guenhumara, cannot you understand? I left you safe among friends for three days, because I was afraid for you if I did otherwise. In God’s name tell me, is that so great a sin?’

  ‘Safe among friends,’ she flashed. ‘Because you were afraid? What do you know of being afraid? Oh yes, you know the tightening of the belly that comes before battle. You have never known in all your big trampling sword-smiting life, what it is to be afraid as I was afraid, those three long days and nights! I begged you – I knew how it would be, and I begged you to take us away, but you would not listen, you would not even hear – and now the bairn is dead.’

  ‘Because she spent her first three days of life in a house of the Dark People? Heart-of-my-heart, how can you believe such a thing?’

  ‘Everyone knows what the Dark People do to the children of men – it was in the very air of that place. And on the last night, the third night, I dreamed dark dreams and woke with a start, and they had taken the babe from my arms! That terrible old woman was sitting by the fire, holding her up and crooning over her – a little dark song that made my heart beat cold. And there was a man there, with a badger’s pelt over his head and shoulders and his face painted in badger stripes, and he was making signs on her forehead with his thumb as a potter marks clay; and Itha and all the other women were there, and they threw herbs on the fire so that it leapt up with a strange bitter smell and curled all about the bairn. I cried out, and Itha brought her and gave her back to me and said that I had dreamed ill dreams and must sleep again, and despite all that I could do, I slept as she bade me.’

  ‘Anwylin, Anwylin, there was no waking; it was all the same ill dream.’

  ‘The smell of the bitter smoke was still about her in the morning.’

  ‘Then it was some ceremony of purifying. All faiths have their hidden ceremonies.’

  ‘They were drawing her life out,’ Guenhumara said. ‘I know. They were drawing her life out, to give it to their own sick child – it began to mend next day – and they left her not enough for three years.’

  The thing was hopeless. I would have trusted the household of Druim Dhu with my own soul or hers, but I knew that nothing I could do or say would change her own belief in the matter. Nevertheless, I tried once more, desperately. ‘Guenhumara, there was good faith between me and the people of Druim Dhu, and whatever of evil the Dark People may work from time to time, they do not break faith unless one first breaks faith with them. If I had let slip Cei to forage among their corn pits that winter—’

  But she was not even listening. She was not conscious of my hands on her, and I dropped them to my sides with a feeling of leaden hopelessness. When she spoke again, it was more gently, but the gentleness brought her no nearer to me than she had been before. ‘I know that you loved her too, and I know that you could not understand what you were doing. But I shall remember always that it was because of you that the bairn died ... No, don’t touch me; I don’t want to touch you or be touched by you – not for a long while, maybe never any more.’

  I was defeated, and I knew it with a helpless despair.

  I took one last look at the Small One’s body, and went past Guenhumara, Cabal faithful at my heels. It was her right to be left alone with the child. I went out through the dim-lit atrium and across the courtyard to the storeroom, where a cot was always kept furnished with rugs and a pillow in case I sent back a messenger or came myself too late at night to rouse the household, and flung myself down there. And the strange thing is that I slept until close on noon.

  We buried Hylin the next night, and so I was able to help carry the little bier, before I rode back to join the Brotherhood next day. Aquila, who was at home nursing a breast wound, came with me; and Ambrosius and a few others. I had not many friends in Venta at that time of year. We carried her from the house after dark, with torches, in the Roman manner. The men of the Roman heritage who were old when I was a boy used to say that a woman’s whole life was ‘lived between the torches,’ for she left her home at night and by torchlight only twice, the first time in her bridal litter and the second on her bier. But for small Hylin there was only once, and she would never know a bridal litter.

  It was a windy night, and the torches streamed raggedly in the wind that made a soft turmoil in the leaves of the poplar trees; and the shadows leapt and ran all about the small grave.

  Afterward there was no funeral feast. It was such a little death, too little for such things. We walked back in a silent knot, the torches quenched, and parted at the gate of the old Governor’s Palace. Aquila would have walked with me all the way and so I think would Ambrosius, but I wanted no man with me, and they knew and loved me well enough to let me go alone.

  The moon was several nights past the full, but when I came into the Queen’s Court there was enough light to show me the figure of a man sitting on the broad rim of the old cracked fountain basin.

  Cabal growled softly in his throat, until I stilled him with a hand on his collar. And the man got up and turned toward me. I could see little in that light, save that he was of nearly my own height, fair-haired, and very young, but something in his voice, when he spoke in the British tongue, stirred and crept in my memory. ‘You are Artos the Bear, him that they call the Count of Britain?’

  ‘I am Artos the Bear. You have some business with me? A message?’ But I knew he was no man of the war host that I had ever seen.

  ‘No message,’ he said. ‘A matter of my own, but hearing of the sorrow upon your house, it seemed better that I wait for you here, rather than walk in unheralded at such a time.’

  ‘Surely it must be a matter of great urgency, that it will not keep until the morning, even over such a night as this one.’

  He said, ‘Forgive me. I am a stranger here, new come from the mountains and unused to cities
of any kind. What place should I turn to on my first night in Venta Belgarum, save to my father’s house?’

  Utter silence came upon me; a dark and icy stillness. And in it the words seemed to spread and spread like the ringwise ripples when a pebble is dropped into still water. And when the last ripple died into the dark edge of the stillness, I could only repeat his last words, and set them spreading again.

  ‘Your father’s house?’

  So Ygerna had kept her word. I knew the timbre of his voice now. Across the years I heard it again: ‘May you have much joy in your son, my lord – much joy in your son – much joy ... ’

  ‘I am called Medraut,’ he said. ‘My mother said that she told you I should be called Medraut, after the pet white rat that she had, with ruby eyes.’

  ‘She did; and that she would send you to me when you came to manhood. It will have cost her something to redeem that promise, for she must miss you sorely – or are there others born after you?’ I tried to catch the insult back, remembering that she was his mother. ‘Forgive me, Medraut, I should not have said that.’

  He gave a small bitter laugh. ‘Na na, I make no mistake as to the cause you had to love my mother, or she to love you. But she will not miss me. She is dead. It was when she lay dying that she bade me come to you.’

  We were silent again, and then I said, ‘For your sake, I should be sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Doubtless you loved her.’

  ‘Loved her?’ he said musingly. ‘I do not know. I have learned more of hate than of love. I only know that I was part of her and she of me, as though there was still some cord between us ... ’ He was fingering the carved acanthus leaves of the old fountain curb, watching his own hand in the moonlight. Then he looked up, and said a horrible thing – horrible in its piteousness and self-betrayal. ‘It is cold outside my mother. I know now why the newly born draw their first breath in weeping.’

  And in reply I had a thought that was equally horrible. I wondered if he was in truth born into life even now, or whether his mother had devoured him as a wildcat in captivity will devour her young. But I only said, ‘It is cold in this wind. Come into the house, Medraut.’

  ‘As my father bids me,’ he said.

  There was no one in the atrium, but a low fire still burned in the brazier, and the candles were lit as usual in their tall prickets, and from Guenhumara’s private chamber came the click of a shuttle to and fro. I left him standing by the brazier and crossed to the farther door and went in, letting the heavy curtains fall again behind me.

  Guenhumara stood weaving at her loom – a piece of saffron cloth with a border of some intricate many-colored design. She never turned around when I entered, though she must have heard me, and Margarita, crouched against an upright of the loom, lifted her head from her paws and thumped her feathered tail as Cabal padded into the room. ‘Guenhumara,’ I said.

  She tossed the shuttle across and let it fall into its resting place; then turned slowly to face me, and I saw by the dry brilliance of her eyes that she had not shed one tear. ‘Artos – it is over, then.’

  ‘It is over.’ I glanced about me into the shadows. ‘How long have you been here alone? Where is Teleri and old Blanid?’

  ‘I do not know. I sent them away, sometime. They did not want to go.’

  ‘It is not good that you should have been alone!’

  The gray shadow of a smile touched her mouth but never the hot bright eyes. ‘You mistake. It is good for me to have been alone. Better than to be stifled by the soft sympathy of other women. Who is the man that I heard come in with you? I thought it was agreed there was to be no death feast for the child.’

  ‘A man I found waiting for me outside. Bring wine into the atrium, Guenhumara.’

  ‘Wine?’ she said. We had a very small stock of wine, three amphorae at that time, I think, but we saved it for the greatest of occasions.

  ‘Wine, Guenhumara.’

  She turned without another word and went out by the far door into the colonnade, and I heard her footsteps going quickly along it to the storeroom. Then I went back to the atrium.

  Medraut stood where I had left him, beside the brazier, and for the first time I was able to see him clearly. His head was up, a half smile on his lips. He waited for me to take stock of him at my leisure, at the same time taking his own stock of me. He was as tall as I had thought, his shoulders not yet broadened into a man’s, under the shapeless garment of sheepskin with the wool inside, which was belted by a wide bronze-studded strap about his waist. His legs were very slightly bowed, as are the legs of most of us who are bred in the saddle; ‘suckled on mare’s milk,’ as we say in the mountains. His hands too, like my own, were horseman’s hands, and when I looked into his face under the mane of mouse-pale hair, it was as though I looked across five and twenty years or so, at my own fetch, in the days when my beard was a golden chicken down along my jaw, as his was now. And I knew the chill stirring at the back of his neck, that a man may well feel, seeing his own fetch in the firelight. Only his eyes were his mother’s, deeply and hotly blue, veined like the petals of the blue cranesbill, and with the same discolored shadows under them, and they gave to his face a startling beauty that I had never possessed. He was so nearly a son to be deeply proud of; and yet something, somewhere, was horribly amiss with him. He had been too long within his mother, and some part of him was marred and twisted – I could feel the deformity as I could feel Ygerna in him. Lame flesh may be carried off like a tattered cloak, without harm to the spirit – I thought of Gwalchmai; but Medraut was crippled somewhere in his inmost self, and that is another matter.

  I told myself that I was merely remembering Ygerna and grafting what I remembered onto her son, and almost made myself believe it.

  Then he turned a little, quite deliberately, shaking back the heavy fold of sheepskin from his upper arm, and I saw above the elbow the coiled and entwined dragon of red gold that his mother had shown me on the morning after his begetting. ‘No need to show me that,’ I said. ‘No man, seeing you, could doubt the truth of your claim.’

  He smiled a little, and turned back to the fire, but left the fold of dappled sheepskin flung back from his shoulder.

  The outer door opened, and Guenhumara came in, bearing the great silver guest cup with the ram’s-head handles. ‘Drink, and be welcome,’ she said, bringing it to Medraut.

  He took it from her with bowed head, saying, in place of the usual formula, ‘God comfort you, my lady, and ease the sorrow of the house.’ I came to know in after time, that he might always be counted on to say the right thing when he wished to. Guenhumara looked up at him, a long clear look that turned from him to me and back again. Then she took the guest cup from his hands, and set it down on the table within easy reach, and without another word, went back through the curtained doorway into her own chamber.

  After she was gone, I pulled a stool to the brazier, bidding Medraut to do the same, and we both drank from the guest cup, but the thin cool wine of Burdigala brought no fellowship; only after we had drunk it, it seemed easier to speak.

  ‘It is in my mind that your mother will have taught you to hate me well,’ I said, scarcely knowing that I was going to, until the words were spoken.

  The dark blue eyes met mine, but I could not see into them, as I had not been able to see into Ygerna’s. ‘Did I not say? I have learned more of hate than of love. Is it my fault?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘What is it that you wish of me?’

  ‘A horse and a sword. I am your son. It is my place and my right to ride among your squadron and sleep at your hearth.’

  ‘Do you care a jot for our struggle against the Saxon flood?’

  He shrugged very faintly. ‘It will not submerge the mountains.’

  And I leaned forward, studying him through the faint smoke of the brazier. ‘Then how if I say to you that there is no place among my squadrons for a man who neither knows nor cares what he fights for?’

  ‘I should s
ay to you that surely it matters little if a man cares what he kills for, so that he is skilled enough as a killer. Give me a horse and a sword, and I will prove to you that I can use both.’ He smiled, an odd, unexpected, tremulous smile. ‘One day I may even learn from you to care for the cause behind the fighting.’

  I was silent, still studying him across the brazier. I did not believe in this sudden hint of a hunger after better things, and yet I think that at the moment, he believed in it himself. He was one of those who can always believe as they wish to believe. At last I said, ‘Tomorrow I ride to rejoin the Company. You shall have your sword and your horse.’

  ‘I thank you, my father.’

  ‘But first, you shall take off that arm ring.’

  ‘It is mine,’ he said quickly, and made as though to cover it with the protection of his other hand.

  ‘You fool. I have no wish to take it from you. You can carry it in your breast for all I care. Only I say that you shall not wear it above your elbow, in the sight of all men.’

  ‘My mother gave it to me, and she had it from her mother—’

  ‘Who had it from Utha, my father and your grandfather, on the morning after he mated with her. All that I know as well as you do, and it is for that very reason that you shall take it off.’