Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘Is he—’ I began, and changed the end of the sentence. ‘How bad is the wound?’

  ‘Much as an arrow through the elbow joint usually is,’ Gwalchmai said. ‘I have cut out the barb, and the wound itself will not kill him, unless he takes the wound fever. But—’

  He hesitated an instant, and I heard myself speaking the last word after him. ‘But?’

  ‘He has bled almost white – the arrow severed an artery.’

  I remember noticing the little red streaks in Gwalchmai’s eyes, the eyes of a man who needs sleep and knows that he will not get it for a long while yet. I said, ‘Has he any chance at all?’

  Gwalchmai made a small expressive gesture with his hands. ‘If he still has the life in him three days from now, I believe that he will live.’

  I found Bedwyr lying flat under the old otter-skin rug on my bed place, surprisingly flat, not like a grown man at all, but like a young boy, or a woman who has given birth. His left arm, swathed in bloody rags and laid across his body, seemed a thing that did not belong to him at all, and his fantastic face, when I squatted down beside him, had the whiteness of something long since drained of life, fine-lined and skeletal, empty shell and sea-scoured bone, so that for a long moment not so much of grief as of a curious stillness, I thought that he was already dead.

  Then as one of the camp women, who had been pounding something in a bowl in the far corner of the bothy, got to her feet to take herself elsewhere, he opened his eyes and lay looking up at me, frowning a little as though not quite sure that either he or I were there. ‘Artos,’ he said after a while, half questioningly, and I do not think he knew that he had fumbled out his sound hand to find mine; and then, ‘Was it – a good night’s hunting?’

  ‘A good night’s hunting,’ I said. ‘It will be a while and a while before the wolf pack can be done with licking its wounds and gather against us once more.’

  ‘You will – know about Aquila – all the bodyguard.’

  ‘I have Aquila’s signet ring around my neck,’ I said. ‘He gave it into my keeping for Flavian, the night before.’

  He was quiet for so long after that, that I thought he was drifting off to sleep, but in a while he opened his eyes again and fixed them on my face, and I think that by a conscious effort he saw me for the first time. Until then he had only seen someone bending over him, and known that it was me. ‘Hail Caesar!’ he said, and then – his voice was no more than a spent whisper, but that wild mocking left brow of his flickered up and flew like a banner – ‘Greatly am I honored! It is not given to every man to die in an emperor’s bed!’

  I had forgotten that I was still wearing the diadem of withering yellow oak leaves. I put up my free hand and pulled it off and let it drop onto the old skin rug beside Bedwyr. ‘That was a jest in vile taste! Listen to me, Bedwyr, if I am Caesar, you are Caesar’s captain. I cannot and will not do without my captain – listen to me, Bedwyr, listen!’ I was bending over him, trying to hold him by the eyes, but already they were closing again. He was not listening any more – I doubted if he could even hear me, and I had to reach him for my own sake I think as much as his, before maybe he went altogether away from me. I bent lower quickly and kissed him on the forehead. The taste of the black pain-sweat was sour and salt on my mouth.

  Then I got up and went out to find Flavian and give him his father’s ring, to take up the reins of the many tasks that waited for Caesar’s handling.

  chapter thirty-one

  The Bargain

  THE MIGHTY WAR HOST OF THE SAXON CONFEDERACY HAD been broken asunder, and we drove the scattered war bands out of the White Horse Vale, out of the Tamesis Valley basin where they had had their settlements for twenty years and more; everywhere, from Portus Ardurni around to the Metaris, we flung them back to their coastal runs, and indeed I believe – I still believe – that we could have flung them into the sea.

  But be that as it may, a day came, an autumn day with the gale booming up through the forest from Anderida Marshes, when Artorius Augustus Caesar (few men called him Artos any more) and three Wolf Kings, each with a picked handful of chiefs and captains behind them, met together in the main chamber of the long-derelict posting station on the Londinium road.

  Outside, the horses stamped and fidgeted in the old cavalry corral, made restless by the wind, and the wind swooped all ways at once through the holes in the fire-scarred thatch, filling the place with smoke from the burning ashe logs on the hearth that had been cold for years. Always an ashe fire for a peace council – maybe because it is the only wood that will burn green? The green branch of all envoys and those who come in peace ... ? We had brought our green branch in another form also, Flavian’s young son. I had asked Flavian to bring the boy with him (to his mother it would be excuse enough that he was rising thirteen and it was time that he began to see the ways of men) for an added sign that we had no ill intent and the council was indeed one of peace, for no man takes his twelve-year-old son on the war trail. The Saxons had had the same thought, it seemed, and one of the East Anglian chieftains had come to the meeting place trailing a son like a half-trained puppy at heel. Anlaf and the Minnow; they had eyed each other under their brows at first, stiff-legged and wary; finally they had departed together, walking at arm’s length. ‘They will come back when their bellies bid them,’ someone had said.

  We sat, British and Saxon, facing each other across the hearth. I had Perdius with me, and Cei, and Cador of Dumnonia and young Constantine, and Flavian, sitting with the hand on which his father’s ring blinked green as a wolf’s eye in the firelight, clenched on his knee. I longed for the help and support of old Aquila’s wisdom now, almost as deeply as I longed to have Bedwyr beside me.

  But at least Bedwyr was alive. It had been five days before we could be sure that he would live, and then after all the wounded had been got back to Venta, the wound had turned sick, and he had been like to die all over again. That had been when I took him out of his bare little cell in the old officers’ quarters and brought him across to my own, for Guenhumara to tend as once she had tended me. If I had not done so, I think he would indeed have died, for we had many sore wounded and there was fever among the troops that summer besides, so that Gwalchmai and his henchmen and even Ben Simeon had more work than any man could do with; and the wound kept shedding bone splinters, and reopened again and again, so that even now it seemed not sure that it was truly healing.

  I looked across at the big fair men on the far side of the hearth. They were the lords of a broken kingdom, for the most part very young or very old. Cissa of the South Seax and Ingil of the East Angles were the young untried sons of newly slain fathers, one gray-bearded warrior with the long white scar of an ancient spear wound on his forearm spoke for the Northfolk and the Southfolk who had no king left to them at all. They were defeated, but they did not bow their heads, and despite myself, I felt the stirring of respect for them. They were Barbarians – they are still Barbarians, the Saxon kind, and they will be for centuries yet, for they are a younger people than we, and have never known in any way the Rule of Law. But they had courage, not merely the hot valor that flares in battle, but the courage that continues after the fires are out. These men were of the breed that had burned out Irach’s village and slaughtered his kin; creatures who in some ways were less like men than beasts – the Sea Wolves that we had named them. But now they faced me as though we were equally met, and prepared to fight still for their continuance. And courage I have always loved in any man, no matter what else I have hated in him. Even in Medraut – even in my son.

  So we spoke together, to and fro across the blazing ashe logs and through the smoke, with the boom of the wind through Anderida Forest sounding behind our words.

  The graybeard had been chosen – for the garnered wisdom of his years I suppose – to act as spokesman for the rest, a gaunt old man with eyes under a gray shag of brows, that were as yellow as a wolf’s, and teeth like an old wolf’s, too, yellow and long in his beard. ‘We are th
e conquered, and you are the conquerors,’ he said. ‘Therefore it is for us to ask your mercy and for you to give it.’ But he did not ask so much as demand.

  I leaned forward with my arms on my knees, and stared into his proud old face. ‘I am thinking of burning farmsteads and nuns slaughtered like cattle at their altar steps,’ I said. ‘I am thinking of living men mutilated on spent battlefields. I am thinking of a girl I saw once, whose spirit had been driven from her body not by one man’s rape but by many. What mercy did you ever show, when yours was the conqueror’s hand?’

  There was a dim growl of voices from both sides of the fire. The old man gave the ghost of a shrug. ‘War is war. Nay then, we do not ask for mercy, we propose a bargain.’

  ‘A bargain?’ I said. ‘You would talk of bargains with me?’

  ‘A bargain which would be of advantage to us both. It is this, my Lord Artos the Bear. You shall grant to those of us who are left in Britain (the high gods know we are something fewer than we were) leave to abide in the coastal strips where our first settlements were made; cornland and timber and common land sufficient for our needs; and in return, we will undertake to hold those same southward and eastward facing coasts secure from the incoming of others of our kind.’

  ‘I seem to have heard such a tale before,’ I said. ‘Ah, but tell me now, in your country, beyond the North and Narrow Seas, is it a common custom for the hunter to bid the wolf in over his threshold?’

  A brief, appreciative twinkle lit the wolf-yellow eyes of the old warrior. ‘Yet a wolf brought in over the threshold, warmed by the hunter’s fire and fed the occasional bone from the hunter’s hand, may become as a guard dog, in time, and bold to drive the wild wolf pack from the door.’

  ‘So Fox Vortigern thought, forty years ago.’

  There was a small, quickly controlled movement among the Saxons behind the spokesman, and looking up to meet the eyes of the man who had made it – the tall red-haired man leaning against the wall a little withdrawn from the rest, as though proclaiming, even with something of a flourish, his awareness that this talk of bargains was a thing that he had no part in – I saw again the newly healed scar on his throat, between the copper of the young beard and the gold of the collar he wore. It had been something of a shock to see Cerdic at the council fire, even though I knew by then that my blade had somehow missed the life spot. I suppose the first sight of a face one last saw in the moment of striking what one believes to be the deathblow, must always be a little as though one saw a ghost. The flickering gray-green eyes were hot with anger at any reference to his father, and yet I could see that he accepted the inference, because he knew as well as I did that it was just.

  ‘Vortigern was one man, and Artos the Bear is another,’ said the ancient.

  ‘Honey drips from thy tongue, Old Father,’ I said mockingly.

  And he shook his head, coughing sharply as a puff of smoke curled across his face, suddenly pettish. ‘Na na, I speak the thing that all men know. Vortigern was one man and Hengest knew it, Artos is another, and we, the kings and chiefs who follow after Hengest, know that also. We are not fools!’

  And looking into the fierce red-rimmed eyes of the old man as the smoke cleared, I knew that at least he was no flatterer of kings. ‘Yet though I were Tyr himself, and Woden, and the first Caesar joined in one, why should I accept this most dangerous expedient of keeping the brood of Hengest within my borders, when I have the strength to thrust them off the last headland into the sea?’

  ‘Because maybe a thousand miles of coastline facing the Saxon and the Anglish and the Jute lands and needing always to be defended, needing always vigilance and a shield-front maintained, while the Scots folk creep in from the back with their long knives, has its dangers also. I know the land that we come from, from Manopia and the Rhenus mouth around to the northern coast of Juteland; I remember the lean harvests and sea shifting among the sodden islands, and the folk driven too close for the poor land to feed them, and I tell you that so long as ever a wind blows from the east or from the north, my people and the Saxons and the Jutes will come down upon these richer shores.’ His face spasmed for an instant into a mass of sword-gash wrinkles, which was his nearest approach to a smile. ‘It was not we alone who lost good fighting men this summer.’

  I was silent, my chin sunk between my fists, hearing the wind roaring up from Anderida marshes; and I knew that what he said was true. I had known it for a long while past, or I would not have been sitting here today, not have bidden Flavian to bring the boy with him. If I had been still the man to whom Ambrosius gave his freedom and his wooden foil, I think that I should not have been there at all, that nothing would have seemed possible to me save to hurl the last Barbarian into the sea. But I had the first white hairs in my muzzle now ...

  ‘Tell me why I should trust you the length of my thumbnail?’ I said at last, lifting my head from my hands.

  ‘Sa, I will tell you: over that way’ – he jerked his head southeastward toward Dubris – ‘over that way, I saw once a winged horse carved over a gateway, and one told me it was a Totem of the Second Legion, because they had held that place and so marked it for their own. Now from where did the Second Legion draw its men?’

  I was silent for a long moment, looking at him. ‘From the tribes along the Rhenus,’ I said slowly.

  ‘From the tribes along the Rhenus. Aiee! I have heard also that the great Magnus Maximus, my lord’s great-grandsire, served a while with the Second Legion and loved them well, and that long, long before that, the Emperor in Romeburg himself made them an Augustan Legion, and none, I think, accused the Second Legion of broken trust!’

  And that also was true.

  And I had learned some things and lost others in the process of growing old – for I felt old that evening, with the weight of five and forty winters lying heavy on me as though there had been added to them another score. And so I made my decision, though I did not yet let it appear that I had done so, to the men about me. It was a decision that proved sound, insane though I know that many of my own folk thought it; and when the black sorrow came, it was not from the Saxon shore, not from the men with whom I struck that day’s bargain, after all.

  ‘It is in my mind that you speak both truth and something of wisdom,’ I said at last. ‘So be it then, let us go further into this matter of a bargain between your people and mine.’

  There was much talk after that, much argument, while the clerks waited to make copies of a treaty, and beyond the door the tawny sunset flamed and faded between the trees, and the light of the burning ashe wood began to bite into the deepening shadows. And then at last the arguing was done, and I stood up to state the final terms, while the clerks scratched on their parchments, a small, hurried, insect sound. I spoke of boundaries and tribal territory, of landholding in yard-lands per man, and rights of wood and water, pasturage and the hunting spear, and of the military service to be rendered in exchange. (‘The coasts from Portus Adurni around to the Metaris we will keep for you from all inroads,’ the aged spokesman had said, after conferring with the others of his kind, ‘but you shall not call upon us to carry our spears into any other war of yours, in any other part of Britain.’ And I had agreed, for the thing seemed fair enough.) And all the while, as I spoke, something yammered within my head, in stupid astonishment at myself and the words that I was measuring out, as a man issues out arrowheads from a basket. Northfolk and Southfolk, East Angles and South Seax and the Cantii Kingdom, I dealt with them each in turn, so far as they could be dealt with before the agreed frontiers were drawn out in detail.

  Last of all, I turned again to the red-haired man with the scarred throat. And when, meeting my gaze, he straightened and stepped forward between two others to the hearthstone, it was as though he had been waiting for me all the while, and I for him. ‘Cerdic, son of Vortigern, between you and me there can be no bargain struck.’

  He stood looking at me, half smiling so that the white dogtooth just lifted his lip at one side. And mo
re even than at our first meeting, he seemed like some fierce and beautiful and dangerous animal. ‘Is it death, then, my Lord Artos?’

  ‘I do not kill in the council circle,’ I said and there was a small thunderous stirring among the Saxons, an eye cocked here and there among my own men, for every man there knew the old ugly tale of how Hengest had called a council feast for Fox Vortigern, and bidden his warriors of the feasting circle to slay each the Briton at his left hand, and how Vortigern had bought his own life with half a British princedom that was not his to pay with.

  Cerdic knew it, too. His nostrils dilated, quivering like a stallion’s, and his hand went to the place where his sword hilt should have been – but the weapons were stacked outside, for no man comes armed to the council, unless, like Hengest’s Saxons, he carries his knife hidden in his sleeve. His hand remembered and fell away again. ‘What does my Lord the Bear propose for me, then?’ he said, breathing quickly.

  ‘Nine days to be gone from Britain.’

  I saw the surprise flicker in his eyes, and the red brows twitched together. I think he had been prepared for death, but he had not thought of the other thing. ‘Do I go alone? And in what like? Am I to thank Most Noble Caesar for leave to take my sword with me? If not, I will find means to gain another before I come again.’