Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘Take your sword. Take your long war boats and any of your own war band who choose to follow you,’ I said. ‘You are free of all the sea that your keel can sail over, and any landfall that opens to you. Only you shall be gone from these shores in nine days.’

  ‘Sa! You offer a prospect strangely pleasant,’ said the adventurer in him, in a tone of lingering and half-mocking surprise, and then with a sudden snarl of fury as though the beast crouched to spring: ‘Tell me in what I have differed from these others, that my fate should differ from theirs? That I should bear a wolf’s head and go landless and driven out, while they hold the lands that Hengest my grandsire took by the strength of his arm?’

  Oisc of the Cantish lands looked up from the fire and thrust his word angrily between us. ‘Hengest was my grandsire also, let you remember!’ but neither of us paid him heed.

  ‘I will tell you: for the unjust, yet sufficient reason that you are your father’s son, the blood of your father’s line running in your veins.’

  ‘The royal blood of Britain!’ he said.

  ‘I would call it, rather, the blood of a Prince of Powys, who married and abandoned a High King’s daughter, and claimed through her the kingship in his turn. The sorry thing for you is that there are still men in Britain who support your father’s claim, and so you are a danger to Britain, Cerdic, son of Vortigern, for your heart goes with your Saxon kin. Therefore run your war boats down the beach and gather your sword companions, and carve yourself a kingdom if you can, elsewhere.’

  He stared at me in silence for a long moment, with his eyes half closed over their cool flickering affrontery. ‘The first time we met you bid me go. You bid me go free and said that I should come again when I was a man, and you would kill me if you could, and if I could, I should kill you.’ The flash of a smile that had no mirth in it showed for an instant those strong white dogteeth, and his hand went to the scar on his neck. ‘The thing is not yet ended between us, my Lord Artos the Bear of Britain.’

  He would have swirled about, then and there, and stridden out through the doorway, but I called him to heel. ‘It may be that the thing is not yet ended between us, as you say. But the end must wait for another day. The women are busy about the cooking fires and soon we shall be at the evening meal. Bide then, and eat and drink and be warm at the fire with the rest of us.’

  ‘If I am to be away from my father’s shores within nine days, I have more pressing calls upon my time.’

  ‘Yet all men must eat. I give you half a day’s grace, that you may find the time to sup with the rest of us tonight.’

  The smile still lingering at one side of his mouth grew sardonic. ‘Do you fear that I shall fire this somewhat battered thatch over your heads if you let me from your sight?’

  ‘No more, I think, than you fear my ambush on your road to the coast.’

  And suddenly, his gaze still locked with mine, the smile that had been shut and ugly flashed open in his face, fierce and oddly joyful, and he said swiftly in the British tongue, ‘So be it, oh my brother and my enemy; we two, both of King’s blood, will drink the stars out of tonight’s sky, among this pirate royalty!’

  So presently, when the deer and badger meat was brought in smoking from the spits, and the mead began to go round, Cerdic and I drank from the same cup and dipped our fingers in the stir-about bowl together, among the rest of the Companions and house carls who had played no part in the council that went before. The two boys had, as foretold, ‘come back when their bellies bade them’ and took their supper squatting among the hounds. What they had done with their day no one asked, nor did they tell without the asking, but from the state of their faces, it seemed likely that they had spent part of it fighting, and another part in eating blackberries. Now they sat bunched shoulder to shoulder, the dark head and the fair one together in the firelight, while they picked companionably at each other’s brier scratches.

  That seemed to me a thing that had in it the seeds of hope for the future. But every time I glanced that way, I saw beyond them the face of Medraut my son, among the other squadron captains, and every time the shuttered and yet strangely devouring gaze, lit to the color of sapphires by the firelight, was on me or on Cerdic beside me, so that at last, even when I did not look, there seemed no escaping it.

  The night seemed so full of him that I was not surprised when later, as I went to the sleeping place that had been made for me of turf and branches against the wall of the ruined fodder store, I found him waiting for me. He unfurled his height from the sleeping bench as I entered, and asked in a suppressed voice if he might speak with me alone.

  I said to Riada, who had followed me according to custom, ‘I’ll not be needing you for a while. Go and keep a lookout that we are not disturbed. I’ll call you later.’ And when he had gone, I moved forward, letting the heavy wolfskin apron fall again behind me. ‘Medraut? What is it then, that brings you here?’

  ‘Is it so strange that a son should come to his father’s bothy?’

  ‘It is scarcely a habit, with you.’

  ‘Is that all of my choice?’ he said. ‘If my company gives you pleasure, you have hidden it well.’ And then suddenly, ‘Father, what is it that is amiss between you and me?’

  I went and sat on the piled sheepskins of the bed place, and stared into the sea-blue heart of the tallow candle flame. ‘Is that what you came to ask me? I don’t know. Before God, I don’t know, Medraut; but whatever it is, I admit the fault of it, I and my house – I who kindled the spark of your life in your mother’s womb, my father who first taught her mother how to hate.’

  ‘Hate, yes,’ he said broodingly. ‘I am your guilt made flesh, am I not, Father? You will always smell the dark birth-smell of my mother’s hate on me, and hate me in turn.’

  ‘God forbid that I should hate any man who has done nothing to earn it,’ I said. ‘It is not so simple as that. There is a shadow cast between you and me, Medraut, a web of shadow that there is no escape from, for either of us.’

  He came toward me, and before I knew what he was about, knelt beside me and bowed his head onto my knee. It was a horrible womanish gesture. ‘No escape ... It is in what you are and in what I am.’ His voice came muffled against my knee. ‘No, don’t draw away from me. Whatever else I am, I am your son – your most wretched son. If you do not hate me, try to love me a little, Father; it is lonely never to have been loved, only devoured.’

  I did not answer. I have never been a man to whom words came easily in the time of most need. The wrongs that had been done to him sickened me, I was torn with furious pity as for some hideous bodily hurt. And for the first time, in that desperate cry against loneliness, I knew something of myself in the son I had begotten, and through my own dread of loneliness, that had made me flinch from the Purple, like called to like. In a moment more, I think that I should have put my arm around his bowed shoulders ...

  But before I could do so, he wrenched himself away and sprang to his feet, and the chill, jibing note was back in his voice when at last he broke the silence between us. ‘Ah, na, that is too much to ask for, isn’t it?’

  And the moment was gone beyond catching back. ‘That would be to ask for a gift, and I must not ask for a gift, I am only your son. If I were a chieftain of the Sea Wolves, then the thing would be different, and we might laugh together, even with the dagger naked between us. Sa, then I demand only my rights.’

  I got up from the bed place, and we stood facing each other. ‘Your rights, Medraut?’

  ‘A son’s rights in place of a son’s gift.’ He was speaking half wildly now. ‘Today you sat in council with the lords of the Sea Wolves, Flavian with you, and Cei – the son of a Roman house who cannot even speak our tongue without the gutturals of the Rhenus half drowning whoever stands nearest him – and Connory and that young whelp Constantine and the rest; and where was I? Outside sitting on my rump with mere squadron captains around the cooking fire!’

  ‘Are you not, then, one of my squadron captains?’ />
  ‘I am also Prince of Britain; it was my right to sit at the council table – all men know that by blood I am Prince of Britain.’

  ‘By blood, yes,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, my father the Emperor, there is small need to remind me that we are both bastards; have you found it to stand in your path?’

  In the long silence that came after, the wind lifted the wolfskin over the doorway and teased the candle flame, and high in the darkness overhead, over toward the marshes, I heard the whistle of the wild duck passing. I was thinking suddenly that even on that last night in the upper room, Ambrosius had never spoken of Medraut; it was as though we both knew and tacitly agreed that his entrance into any plans for Britain’s future was unthinkable. Now I was thinking of Medraut coming after us, his hand on the Sword of Britain, and the fear was black on me, for all that I believed in and held sacred.

  ‘If I were to bid you sit in council with me, it would be as though I stood up and cried before all men, ‘This is my heir, to come after me! But that is the thing you have in mind, isn’t it?’

  ‘I am your son,’ he said again.

  ‘Among the wearers of the Purple, the diadem has never passed of necessity from father to son. Your son’s rights, Medraut, do not include the Sword of Britain after me, unless I speak the word.’

  The usual veil over his eyes seemed to thicken until the blueness of them was completely blank; and he said after a moment, in a voice that was suddenly silken: ‘How if I speak a word, then? How if I shouted the whole foul truth of my begetting to the camp?’

  ‘Shout, and be damned to you,’ I said. ‘The chief shame will not fall on my head, who had no knowledge of that truth, but on your mother’s, who knew it well!’ There was another pause, filled with the sea-surge of the wind in the trees. Then I said, ‘You see, it is not so easy after all.’

  ‘Na,’ he agreed, in the same silken voice. ‘It is not so simple after all. Yet maybe we shall find a way one day, my father. It is in my heart that we shall find a way.’ The threat was clear.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but meanwhile it is time for sleep, for the rising time for both of us must come early in the morning; and truth to tell, I wish to be alone.’

  And when he had made me his low bow that was a mockery of respect, and ducked out through the skin-hung door hole, I sat thinking for a long while before I called Riada to me. I thought, among other things, that it was as well that there should be no public talk of Constantine coming after me. Cador and I understood each other well enough, that in the nature of things, the boy must be my heir; but it would be better – safer for Constantine and for the kingdom – that the thing should not be put into words and cried aloud in the Forum.

  chapter thirty-two

  The Queen’s Captain

  BEFORE THE END OF THE MONTH I WAS BACK IN VENTA. We rode in between roaring crowds who surged forward to fling golden branches and jewel-colored autumn berries under our horses’ hooves, and it seemed that the rejoicing of the whole city clamored like a clash of bells.

  It was conqueror’s weather, not the half-regretful glancing back to summer that occurs sometimes in early autumn, but the sudden valiant flare of warmth and color on the very edge of winter that often comes toward the time of Saint Martin’s Mass. The sun shone like a bold yellow dandelion flower tossed into a cloudless sky, and a wind last night had dried the mud of the autumn rains so that the dust curled up beneath the horses’ hooves, the poplar trees stood along the streets as yellow torches, with their shadows under them reflecting the blue of the sky. And next day, when I was able at last to draw breath and turn my back for an hour on matters that concerned the war trail and the kingdom, the sun was still warm to the skin in the Queen’s Courtyard, where Bedwyr and I lounged side by side on the colonnade steps. The light was westering, and the sand-rose in its great stone jar laid an intricate tracery of shadow at our feet, and denser shadow stole out from the far side where the pigeons crooned and strutted on the roof of the store wing. But on the colonnade steps out of the wind, there was warmth to let one’s cloak hang open, a still warmth, lingering like the savor of old wine in an amber cup. The smell of the evening meal stole out from the cook place, and the movements and voices of women, and the fat bubbling laugh of the woman who had taken Blanid’s place when the old creature died last year.

  I had been telling Bedwyr of all that had happened at the council table, and the course that I had taken as to the Saxon settlement, while he sat forward with his maimed arm supported across his knees, his narrowed gaze following the pigeons, listening to me without a word. I wished that he would speak, it was hard to tell the thing against this wall of silence. But when I had finished he still maintained it, until I asked him directly, ‘When I was young, I’d have torn out their living hearts, and my own also, before a Saxon should be left on British ground. Am I learning other things than the use of the sword, Bedwyr? Or am I merely growing old and losing my grasp?’

  He stirred then, still watching the pigeons strut and coo. ‘Na, I do not think that you are losing your grasp; it is that you must learn to play the statesman now. For Artorius Augustus Caesar it is no longer enough to be a soldier, as it was for Artos the Count of Britain.’

  I rubbed my forehead which felt as though sheep’s wool were packed behind it. ‘I have not slept much, these past nights, wondering if I have chosen the wrong course and maybe the ruin of Britain. And yet it is still in my mind that it is the lesser of two dangers.’

  ‘In mine also,’ Bedwyr said. ‘We cannot stretch our shield-wall to cover the Forth to Vectis Water – it may be that this way will at any rate gain us more time.’

  Time ...

  We were silent again. And then I heard my own voice, as it were thinking aloud. ‘I remember once, long ago, Ambrosius said to me that if we fought well enough we might hold back the dark for maybe another hundred years. I asked him, seeing that the end was sure, why we did not merely lie down and let it come, for the end would be easier that way. He said: “For a dream.”’

  ‘And you? What did you say?’

  ‘Something about a dream being often the best thing to die for ... I was young, and something of a fool.’

  ‘Yet when there is no dream left worth dying for, that is when the people die,’ Bedwyr murmured, ‘and there is the advantage to it, that the dream can live on, even when hope dies. Yet hope has its value too ... ’

  ‘Sa sa.’ I turned abruptly on the colonnade step, to face him. ‘Bedwyr, all our lives we have fought a long fight without hope’ – I hesitated, seeking the words I needed – ‘without – ultimate hope. And now, for the first time, it is in my heart that there is a kind of hope for us, after all.’

  He turned from the pigeons. ‘What hope would that be?’

  ‘You remember that I asked Flavian to bring the Minnow with him to the council camp?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘There was another boy there, a little younger than the Minnow, the son of one of the Saxon nobles. Like enough, he was brought for the same purpose. They walked around each other on stiff legs at first, like young hounds, and then they went away, and no man saw them again until evening. They came back at suppertime, being hungry, and told no one what they had done with their day, and no one asked, but they looked as though they had spent part of it fighting, and the rest in eating blackberries. They shared the same broth bowl and spent the evening among the hounds by the fire, picking bramble thorns out of each other’s feet. And suddenly I knew, watching them – Ambrosius never knew it – that the longer we can hold off the Saxons, the more we can slow their advance, even at the cost of our heart’s blood, the more time there will be for other boys to pick thorns out of each other’s feet and learn the words for hearth and hound and honey cake in each other’s tongue ... Every year that we can hold the Saxons back may well mean that the darkness will engulf us the less completely in the end, that more of what we fight for will survive until the light comes again.’

  ‘It is
a good thought,’ Bedwyr said softly. ‘It would be a better one if you could live three or four lives.’

  ‘Surely. And there’s where the harness chafes. Having only one, and that more than half spent – If God had but given me a son to take my sword after me.’

  He turned sharply to look at me, but did not speak, for the thought of Medraut leapt naked between us. ‘In the end it must fall to Constantine,’ I said at last. ‘Cador knows that.’

  ‘And Constantine is – a fine cavalry leader in his own wild way, and will doubtless make a fine prince for Dumnonia.’

  ‘He burns with a steadier flame than his father. But the young ones are of a lesser stature, a lesser breed – both Saxon and British, they are a lesser breed. The giants and heroes are dead, and all save one, the men grow smaller than they used to be when we were young.’

  ‘And that one?’

  ‘If I could have had Cerdic for my son,’ I said slowly, ‘I should have been well content.’

  Neither of us spoke again for a long while. Bedwyr returned to his watching of the pigeons, I to staring down at that arabesque of shadows that the sand-rose cast across the pavement at my feet, neither of us thinking much of what we saw. And the slow long silence fell like the soft dust of years over the things that we had been speaking of.

  A dry-edged poplar leaf, caught by an eddy of wind, came spinning across the sunlit courtyard to flatten itself for an instant against the bottom step, and in the way that one does such small pointless things, Bedwyr flung out a hand – his left – to catch it, and snatched at his breath swearing softly, and let his arm settle gingerly onto his knees again, while the leaf whirled away.

  I looked around at him, seeing afresh the discolored hollows around his eyes and the way the bones stood out under the skin that had bleached from its usual brown to a dingy yellow, and the parching of long-recurrent fever that had left his mouth dry and chapped. ‘It still catches you, then?’ I said. I had asked for that arm of his before, but he had swept my questions aside, caring for nothing but to hear what had happened at the council table.