Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Someone laughed thickly in his throat, and I knew it for Owain. ‘Na, Pharic and his wild men dropped off to help rifle the baggage wagons.’

  ‘I did not, then!’ Young Riada pushed up beside me. ‘I am my lord’s armor-bearer.’

  ‘And there are likely a good few of us back among the wounded!’ someone else put in.

  ‘What of Bedwyr?’ I asked after a moment. ‘Does anyone know?’

  Flavian answered me, that time. ‘I saw him go down. No more than that.’

  And the nightingale was singing as it had sung in the old palace garden on the night small Hylin died.

  In a while, when we had breathed and watered the horses, and ourselves drunk and bathed our hurts at the stream, I gave the order to remount, and got them going again.

  The moon was well clear of the Downs by now, and as we turned the horses’ heads back the way we had come, there shone out at us, from the turf of the Downs glimmering and gigantic, distorted by the slopeway of the hillside, the chalk-cut sacred Sun Horse of the White Horse Vale.

  At the same time we saw, far up the curve of the Vale and sweeping closer, the flare of torches; and a few moments later caught the first faint throb of hooves. ‘Sa, they have rifled even the watch fires!’ someone said. ‘They have finished with the wagons and remembered the hunt again.’

  A flying cloud of dark shapes was taking substance under the torches, heavy cavalry and men on little fiery mountain ponies; some of the light cavalry from the battle had come up, the riders leaning sideways in their saddles, with men on foot leaping along beside them clinging to their stirrups, and man after man carrying makeshift torches kindled from the Saxon watch fires, that streamed in mare’s tails of flame above their heads. Signus stamped and snorted at the nearing fire, and the foremost of the wild riders saw the Red Dragon on the edge of the stream, and set up a great hoarse shout and swung toward us. In a few moments the first of them were dropping from their horses all around, then more and more until the whole loop of the stream was full of men and horses and the swirling, dancing flare of torches that drove out the white light of the rising moon. Some were dumb and dazed with utter weariness, others beginning to be drunk, as much with the aftermath of battle as with the honey beer that they had found in the wagons. One – a long lean man with a brilliant eye – capered wildly in an open spot, wearing a woman’s flame-colored gown hitched to his knees; and another, dismounting from his weary horse while it drank, sat on the stream bank with his head on his knees, and wept bubblingly for a dead friend. It might as well have been myself. Many had twists of blood-soaked rag somewhere about them, and the horses too showed gashes on breast and flanks, so that some of them it was pitiful to see. Men and beasts alike made for the water – even those men who were already awash with Saxon ale, so that for a little, with the bathing of many hurts, as well as drinking, the stream below the torchlight must have run fouled and reddened.

  They were all around me, also, a sea of torchlit faces turned up to mine as I sat the great battle-weary horse above them. Men were thrusting in for a closer look, to touch my knee or my sword sheath or my foot in the stirrup, and all I wanted was to get them into some kind of order and back as far as the wagon laager for the night. And then – even now I do not know how it started – one of the veterans, with enough years behind him to remember the old way of things and the last imperial troops still in Britain, set up a shout of ‘Hail Caesar!’ And those nearest about him caught it up, and the thing spread like the ripples in a pool, until the whole of the war host – or such of them as were mustered there – were shouting, bellowing it out and beating it home upon their shields and the shoulders of their comrades. ‘Hail Caesar! Caesar! Caesar!’

  Wounds and weariness were forgotten, and the whole night took fire about us and roared up in triumphal chaos. They plucked me from Signus’s back and flung me up again onto a royal throne made of the shoulders of men; a tossing and swaying throng that lurched to and fro, the whole night lurching with it as the mob surged about us. Cei and Pharic with his tall Caledonians and the rest of the Companions fought their way in to make a bodyguard about me, baying as loud as any. I looked down on battered and filthy faces exultant in the torch glare, spears shaken aloft, a vast, blasphemously uproarious mob, and flung out my arms, shouting too – I do not know what, save that it was no order to be still. Few of them could have heard the words, anyway; but at sound of my bellow they ceased for a moment the roar of ‘Caesar! Caesar!’ and began to cheer, a fierce hot thunder of cheering that rolled the breadth of the war host and curled back and burst upward in waves of sound that set the horses plunging. And then as the cheering sank, somebody cried out, pointing with a spear toward the great beast that pranced half-hillside-high, cut from the turf of the White Horse Down. And that cry too was taken up, and still carrying me shoulder high in their midst, they set off toward it at a stumbling run, the torch flames streaming out behind, until their speed slackened with the steepening slope of the ground.

  The White Horse lost all shape as we drew nearer, becoming only a series of vast white scars across the turf, but never shall I forget the sight of swarming dark figures running low under the moon and the torches, panting up the steepening hillside toward it, myself in the midst of them, in the midst also of a kind of running fight among those who would take next turn when my bearers changed beneath me.

  The crowd swelled moment by moment, as the men who had remained behind to tether the horses came panting after us, and others fresh from looting the wagons, some of them still on horseback, joined the comet tail of torches.

  We were across the shallow outline ditch and out on the bare chalk now, and the featureless whiteness of it under the moon dizzied and made the head swim, so that any clump of couch grass or sprawl of rest harrow that had escaped the yearly scouring was good to let the eyes cling to, and I could feel the panting of my stumbling steeds under me, as they faced the last steep slope up which, like a royal road, the arched neck of the sacred horse ran to a head that had looked bird-small from the valley. In the midst of the lake of whiteness that was the head, a spear-blade-shaped island of grass, maybe four or five times as long as a man is tall, formed the eye, proud and open, staring back at the sun and the moon and the circling stars and the winds of the sky. In the very midst of this eye, the spark that is the Sun’s answer and touch place, the divine point of power, where Earth Life and Sun Life meet and quicken, stood a rough boulder, a block of limestone, green on the north side with moss almost as the grass about it, but as the torches beat upon it, the probing glare picked out strange circles within circles of eternity, that the weather had all but worn away.

  And on this great roughhewn boulder, where I think the forgotten kings of a forgotten people had been enthroned, they set me down for my own throning – not as High King, after all, but as Emperor, even as his own troops had crowned Magnus Maximus my great-grandsire Emperor. Assuredly no emperor of the Roman line ever had a stranger crowning, nor a stranger congregation to see it done. For by this time the uproar had called back the men from the villages who had rounded up their cattle and taken to the hills when they got word of the Sea Wolves coming, and sometimes I thought, though I was never sure, that I glimpsed little dark men in skins on the edge of the torchlight.

  And I was made Emperor, I think, with something of the rites of every faith that could still claim a follower among the war host. Pharic and his Caledonians set a circle of seven swords point down in the grass about me, and in all that followed, no man entered the circle save between the two swords at my face, and I was chrismed with armor grease brought from the captured wagons, but the priest who anointed me was a wild-eyed creature who came out of the dark with the villagers, a Christian priest by his frock of undyed sheep’s wool and his shaven forehead, but he wore the Sun cross carved from red amber around his neck, and he made the King marks on my forehead and breast, feet and hands, not in the Christian form but in older symbols. And my own men brought a hastily made circl
et of oak leaves from the hill spinney close by, where the young leaves still retained a flush of their springtime gold, and thrust it down on my head for an imperial diadem; and someone – who, I never saw – hoisted an old cloak on a spear point above the heads of the crowd and tossed it to those nearest me, who caught and flung it about my shoulders. It was ragged, and spattered at the hem with dried blood, but it was of wine-red so deep and rich that in the torchlight it had the proud glow of the Purple. I got up and stood before my war host while they roared their acclamation, aware of the Purple and the Diadem as though I were clothed in flame. My sword – I did not remember having drawn it – was naked in my hand. I felt the great carved stone at the back of my heel, and something in me, in the touch of my heel against the stone, in my very loins that linked me with the earth and the gods and the stones of the Earth, and the Sun and the Power of the Sun, and in the thing in the dark at the back of my head that came from my mother’s world and knew the secret of the strange concentric circle that my father’s world had forgotten, told me that this was not a throne but a coronation stone like the Lia Fail of the High Kings of Erin, a stone for the King to stand on at his kingmaking, and I sprang onto it and flashed up my sword to the shouting war host, and all around me a thousand weapons were tossed up in reply, and for a while and a while I knew my feet one with other feet that had been planted on that flaking stone, and other men’s hearts beating in my breast, and a wild weeping exultancy swept through me and on through the human sea around me. And then behind the exultancy, my father’s world pressed in again and I knew soberly that I was a man wearing a crown of oak leaves and a tattered cloak that was almost, but not quite, of the imperial purple, but that none the less, I was chosen by these men, my men, to carry the ragged heritage; and I had as much right to it as many another sword-made emperor of Rome’s latter years.

  So I stood above them, alone in my circle of seven swords, and looked down on the roaring sea of torchlit faces, chilled suddenly by a foreshadow of the loneliness above the snow line. And when at last the tumult sank enough for me to make myself heard, I cried out to them in the greatest voice that I could muster, that it might reach to the farthest fringe of them. ‘Soldiers! Warriors! Ye have called me by the name of Caesar, ye have called me to be your Emperor as your great-grandsires called mine, whose seal I carry in the pommel of my sword. So be it then, my brothers in arms. After forty years there is an Emperor of the West, again ... It is in my heart that few beyond our shores will ever hear of this night’s crowning, assuredly the Emperor of the East in his golden city of Constantine will never know that he has a fellow; but what matters that? The Island of Britain is all that still stands of Rome-in-the-West and therefore it is enough that we in Britain know that the light still burns. We have fought today such a battle as the harpers shall sing of for a thousand years! Such a battle as the women shall tell of to the bairns at bedtime to make them bold, and the young men whose fathers’ fathers our great-grandsons shall beget, shall speak of when they boast among themselves at the harvest feast. We have scattered the Sea Wolves so that it will be long and long before they can gather the pack again. Together, we have saved Britain for this time, and together we will hold Britain, that the things worth saving shall not go down into the dark!’ I must speak also to my mother’s world. ‘But because I am not Emperor alone, but Prince of Arfon and a lord in Britain, because I am native-born and native-bred, and learned my first words in my mother’s tongue, I can claim to be yours as no other emperor has ever been, and therefore I swear my faith to you now, by the oath that we of the Tribes have counted most sacred since first we came out of the West. And after, you shall swear your faiths to me.’

  I sheathed my sword. Some oaths are sworn weapon in hand, but that one must be taken with the hands empty, since it concerns things that no man may hold. ‘If I break faith with you, may the green earth gape and swallow me, may the gray seas roll in and overwhelm me, may the heaven of stars fall upon me and crush me out of life forever.’

  There was a moment’s silence after I had sworn, and then a tempest-roar of acclamation and a drumming of spear butts on shield, such as even that night I had not heard before. But I was so tired that it boomed and roared hollow in my ears as the sea in a cavern, and when I would have stumbled down from my high place, they had pulled up the circle of swords, and from all sides the chiefs and princes and the captains were thrusting in to kneel and set their hands over my battle-fouled feet. Connory the son of old Kinmarcus, Vortiporus of Dyfed, big wild Maelgwn my kinsman who held the reins of Arfon for me and had brought my own war bands down from the hills; young Constantine, dark and blazing as his father had used to be, but burning, I thought, with a steadier flame. In cold blood he might have been my enemy in this, but caught up with the rest, he swore his faith to me with the rest, and I knew that he would keep it. And among the others came Medraut my son. He cast himself down before me with the grace of a woman or a wildcat, and made the solid, ritual gesture of faith-taking into a thing as airy and delicate as though he played with a feather. Yet there was a filthy rag bound around his sword wrist, and the blood that clotted it was as red as any other man’s, and the face he turned up to mine gray-weary, the face of a man who had spent all his fires. His eyes were without expression, not blank, but veiled over their secrets more closely than I had ever seen them before, so that one could see nothing but the blue color and the surface light reflected from the dying torches. ‘I fought well for you today, did I not, my father?’

  ‘You fought well today, Medraut my son,’ I said, stooping to take his hands and raise him up, and so felt him shaking again. Dear God! Why must he always shake like a nervous horse? And once again the old sense of doom was upon me, a floating down of dark wings, because of the thing I could not see behind my son’s eyes.

  In the first gray light of a morning that had turned wild and squally, we returned to Badon, and heard the trumpets sounding from the green ramparts for watch setting. And those who were in the forts cheered us in through the soft rain, but we were far too spent to make a gallant entry.

  The Saxon wounded had been dispatched in the usual way, and our own carried up to the hill fort and housed in the wattle huts that normally served the garrison; and cooking fires were bright in the rain under their ragged shelters of wet skins. Men came thronging around me, spoke to me, looked at me with alerted and oddly lengthened gaze, and dazed and drugged as I was with the aftermath of the day and night, I scarce thought to wonder why ...

  Presently there would be many things to see to. Perdius came with a report of sorts, Marius hard behind him, almost before I was dismounted. I listened, a little drunkenly, while they told of Aelle of the South Seax dead among his house carls, and no sign of Oisc among the bodies, nor of Cerdic. (‘Maybe his own men carried him away,’ I said. I could have sworn that my blade had found the life.) While they reported on the numbers of dead and wounded both in men and horses; while around us the camp clamored with demands for news, and the news itself shouted from man to man.

  I listened, and asked further details of this thing and that, the present placing of troops, the supply situation ... And then at last, as Signus was led away, I was free to ask, not Caesar’s questions, but one question of my own. ‘Bedwyr – what of my old Bedwyr?’

  Someone pointed up toward the wattle barrack huts. ‘Up there, my lord. They have taken the wounded up there.’

  For a moment I felt stupid with relief. ‘Not dead, then?’

  ‘It would take more than a smashed elbow to kill that one,’ somebody said. But their tone toward me was subtly changed, and they stood a little farther off, and when I turned to make my way up to the barrack huts, I heard the burst of low eager voices behind me, and felt eyes following me as I went.

  The scout Noni, who came running to me before I had gone a dozen paces, was the first person to look at me with unchanged eyes since I entered the fortress; but the eyes of the Dark People seldom betray much, and his mind was full of
other things. ‘My lord, it is the great hound – him you call Cabal.’

  I stopped in my tracks. I had accepted in my heart that the old hound was dead. ‘What of Cabal?’

  ‘I have him under one of the wagons. It was in my belly to hope that I might save him for you, but the hurt is too sore.’ He laid a narrow brown hand on my wrist; it is very seldom that the men of the Dark People or their near kin will touch a Sun man (it is different, with a woman); but I think he must have hoped very greatly to be able to come to me with the word that he had saved me my dog. ‘Come now, and do what must be done.’

  I turned aside toward the wagon park, Noni moving like a shadow beside me.

  The disemboweling knife had done its work too well, but Cabal knew me and tried to thump his tail, though clearly the whole hinder part of him was as good as dead, and as I knelt down beside him and touched his great savage head, he even began a whisper of the old deep throat-song that had always been his way of showing his contentment in my company. I did what had to be done with my dagger and got up quickly to go, but checked a moment to look back at the small dark brooding figure of Noni Heron’s Feather. ‘Who brought him up here?’

  ‘He crawled some of the way himself – Aiee! He was a hero! The throat of the man he slew was torn clean out – and the rest of the way we carried him, one of the drivers and I.’

  I thanked him, and again checked on the edge of going my way, because he still seemed to be waiting for something. ‘What is it, Noni Heron’s Feather?’

  ‘Are you not going to take his heart?’ He spoke with a hint of reproach. ‘He fought well for you; it was a great heart – worthy even of an emperor.’

  I shook my head. ‘That is not the way of the Sun People. We believe that to each man and each hound his own courage.’

  But I remembered Irach, as I went on toward the barrack huts.

  The camp women were moving to and fro among them, and there was an all-pervading smell of pungent salves and torn humanity mingled with the acrid smoke of the horse-dung fires where the great water crocks were boiling, and once or twice, passing a doorway, I heard a man curse or cry out in pain. In the doorway of one bothy, I found Gwalchmai with a couple of the men he had trained to help him, laving his hands in a pail of reddened water. His face was blotchy and leaden with weariness, but he too looked at me with a suddenly arrested eye. ‘We laid him in your own quarters when the barrack huts grew overfull,’ he said in answer to my question, beginning to dry his hands on a piece of rag.