Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  By then, in my efforts to keep the four tribal runs of the Old Kingdom knit together, I had come to spend almost as much time in Sorviodunum, Aquae Sulis and Calleva as I did in Venta, and that year about midsummer, I took the court up to Sorviodunum. It was a dim and sultry summer, the kind of weather in which fever breeds, and the Yellow Hag had come earlier than usual to the towns; but I had never taken the fever – indeed I have seldom in all my life been sick without a wound on me – and so when an aching head and a shiver between the shoulders came upon me on the day after our arrival, I thought only that I had got chilled in the thunder rain that had drenched us on the long ride up from Venta. But within two days I was raving.

  At first there were clear intervals, when I returned from the whirling flame-touched world of the fever-madness to the misery of my own body; to darkness that suffocated me or light that clashed like a hammer even when my eyes were closed. And swimming out of a fiery fog into one such interval, I was aware of sounds of gathering and preparation in the world outside, feet, and voices, and the yelp of a trumpet call that was answered from the far side of the city, aware also of Cei and Gwalchmai in urgent low-voiced conclave in the doorway of the long room among the rafters of the King’s Chamber where I lay.

  They looked toward me, and with the preternaturally sharpened hearing that comes sometimes with fever, I heard Gwalchmai say: ‘Yes, now. Be as swift about it as you can; there’s no means of knowing how long before the Yellow Hag claims him again.’

  Then Cei was standing over me, with his thumbs thrust into his sword belt in the way that he had, bending forward to peer into my face. ‘My Lord Artos,’ he said, faintly questioning.

  ‘What – is it, Cei? What – all that trampling and trumpeting – outside.’ My tongue felt as though it was made of boiled leather, and the worried weather-burned face and burly big-paunched figure slipped to and fro on my sight the more I tried to hold it still.

  ‘It is Cerdic – Artos. Can you hear what I say?’

  ‘What of Cerdic?’

  ‘He’s landed on the west side of Vectis Water, and a young war host with him. They got in in the rain and murk two days since and were ashore before the coast wardens knew a thing of their coming. We got the news last night.’

  I remember struggling to my elbow and cursing him that I had not been told before – as though any word could have reached me; I remember striving to be out of my bed, and shouting to Gwalchmai for a draught of some kind that would give me the strength to ride for a few days even if it killed me after, and the two of them holding me back and striving to quieten me as though I were a fire-maddened horse ... Later, when I was quiet again, I have a dim half memory of setting some kind of scrawl that might serve for a signature to the marching orders and to an authority for Cei to take command of the war host, and pressing Maximus’s seal onto the hot wax, while Cei steadied the blade of the great sword above my wavering hand. No memory of Cei leaving the room, for I was off and away on my travels once more.

  It seemed a very long while later, and indeed I think it was many days, when I began to know myself within the dark shell of my body again, and later still, grew slowly sure that there was a dagger in my back, below the left shoulder blade. Presently I found there was no dagger there, only the blade-shaped pain of the dagger. But the pain pierced deeper and deeper all the while, until I was snatching at my breath like a winded runner, and the world that had just begun to return dissolved about me again into fiery chaos in which the only sure thing was Medraut’s face like a white death mask hanging in the air wherever I looked, until at last that too was burned up in the fires, and the fire itself engulfed in a last great darkness.

  How long I lay slung between life and death, I have never been able to judge with any certainty, but it cannot have been far short of a month between the time I first fell sick and the time I awoke in fading lamplight and felt the air of very early morning on my face, and knew that I could breathe again and that I was lying cool and sodden in a pool of sweat.

  I tried to drag myself out of it, and could not. And then the Minnow, who was now my armor-bearer, was bending over me, feeling my body with eager hands. He said, ‘Oh sir, we thought that you would die!’ and most surprisingly I felt what seemed to be a drop of warm rain on my face.

  I mumbled something about being wet enough already, and the boy began to crow and whimper with laughter, and then Gwalchmai was beside me also, and they were lifting me out of the sodden rugs and spreading over me dry warm ones that smelled of the storage herbs. And sleep gathered me into a gentle darkness.

  Day after day I lay flat on the rug-piled bed place under the musty-smelling thatch that twittered with swallows’ nests (it was the King’s Chamber, but conditions were harsher at Sorviodunum than at Venta), tended by Gwalchmai and the Minnow, and the small tubby Jew who had stepped into old Ben Simeon’s shoes. There was a sense of gulf behind me, and everything about me seemed small and bright and far off, like its own reflection in a silver cup. I had no more strength at first than a half-drowned puppy, but at least my mind was my own again, and I was able to demand and attend to news of the fighting – though indeed there was little news that had any form or coherence to it, only a long confused talking of skirmishes and small-scale indecisive actions; of Cerdic’s brilliant use of salt marsh and sea inlet and steaming damp-oak forest, which were home conditions to him now to hold off our own war host from coming to grips with the Saxon kind. At any other time I should have been wild and fuming to take the command myself, but I was so weak, so newly back from the edge of all things, so possessed still with the sense of everything being small and far away, that I was content to lie still and leave the campaign, such as it was, in Cei’s hands.

  Gwalchmai was the impatient one, wanting to be with his wounded. He took pains to hide it, but I had not known my Hawk of May for the better part of a lifetime without being able to read his mood and his longings ... One evening, when he came to see me after supper as he always did, I remember grumbling to him at the snail pace of my returning strength, and he raised his brows at me. ‘It is not usual that a man who has passed straight from the Yellow Hag to the Lung Fever finds himself ready to outwrestle the wild aurochs within the week. You are mending, my friend. You’ll do well enough now.’

  ‘And so I suppose you want to leave me and be away to the war host,’ I said.

  He sat down in the big carved cross-legged chair beside the hearth, with a small grunting sigh, and rubbed his knee. ‘I’ll bide as long as you need me.’

  I turned toward him, seeing with a sudden warm rush of affection, the tired old man that he had become, dried and withered like the wild pear branch in the well courtyard, and I knew that he was not fit for the camp and the war trail, and knew also that he must go. ‘As to that, I’ve Ben Eleaza to brew my poisons for me. There’s others needing you more than I do now.’

  ‘I’ll not deny that I’ll be glad to get back to the war host and the wounded,’ he said simply. ‘My chief business has been with them a good few years.’

  ‘A mere thirty or so. There’s a good few of us would be dead at least once before this, if it wasn’t for your sharp little knife and stinking fever potions.’

  ‘There’s a good few of us dead, even so,’ Gwalchmai said soberly, and we were both thinking back, as men growing old do think back, remembering comrades living and comrades dead, who had been young with us when the Brotherhood itself was young. So the thing was settled and we bided talking for a while, until it was time for Gwalchmai to make his preparations for the journey.

  When he got up to go, he swayed suddenly and caught at the back of the chair to steady himself, and for the moment, as he stood brushing his hand across his forehead, it seemed to me that a gray shadow stole over his face, and fear brushed me by. ‘What’s amiss? Oh good God, Gwalchmai, not you, now!’

  ‘Eh?’ He looked up, shaking his head as though to clear it. ‘Na na, maybe a little tired, that’s all. Sometimes I think I’m gettin
g old.’

  ‘You’re ten years younger than I am.’

  ‘I daresay I’ll last a few years more,’ Gwalchmai said, and limped serenely to the door – his limp had worsened in the last few years.

  I never saw him again.

  I had regained just enough strength to crawl from the bed place to my chair beside the hearth, and sit there muffled in rugs, generally with a couple of hounds at my feet (but no hound of mine was ever called Cabal again) when there came to me a certain dispatch from Cei. My lieutenant’s writing was never overeasy to decipher, oddly small and cramped for such a big tempestuous writer, and I pored over it, holding it to the flickering light of the fire, for though it must be still daylight outside, the shutters were closed over the small ragged windows in the thatch, to keep out wind and rain. Moreover, the letter deserved careful reading, for at last there was something to report; the Saxons brought to action at last, and a full-scale battle on the Cloven Way, almost half distance between Venta and Cerdic’s landing beach. Cei had written me the plain account of it, move by countermove and phase by phase, together with certain facts or seeming facts concerning the left cavalry wing which made ugly reading. I could imagine how he would have bitten at his quill and glared in trouble at the lines as he set them down. And in the end, though the Sea Wolves had indeed been halted and even turned back, at cost of bitter man-loss to ourselves, no decisive victory to report; little gained from the whole summer’s campaigning, save that Cerdic was still penned to the south side of the Forest. And the first of the equinoctial gales was beating its wings against the rattling shutters as I read, and I knew that the campaigning season was over for that year.

  When I had reached the cramped signature, I sat for a long time holding the unrolled parchment in my hand. Then I called up the Minnow, who was squatting between the hounds burnishing a shield, and sent him for one of the clerks to take down a letter in my turn. But mine was to Medraut. I don’t know quite what purpose I hoped to serve by summoning him; I suppose I had some idea that if I confronted him with the thing face to face, I might know whether my almost formless suspicions of him were just or not.

  A few days later, sleeping before the fire – I slept a great deal at that time – I dreamed of Coed Gwyn, the White Wood, dreamed of the struck notes of a harp, and Guenhumara combing her hair beside a peat fire and Bedwyr sitting with his head against her knees; and great wings that beat me back when I cried out and would have gone to them ... And woke with the wet feel of tears on my face, to the wings of another storm drubbing at the shutters and driving the smoke down from the fire hole, and Medraut standing by the hearth.

  The rain was still dark on the shoulders of his flung-back cloak, and he stood with one foot on the warm hearthstone, staring into the red eye of the fire, and stripping and stripping his riding gloves between his fingers; the look on him, as always when one saw him suddenly and alone, of having stood there, quite patiently waiting, for a very long time. His cloak was clasped at the shoulder by a new brooch, a black opal set in braided gold wires, that had the look of a gift from some woman. Generally he had something of the sort about him, for I have seen that often an aging woman with a young lover will make him such gifts, and Medraut picked and handled his loves with care, always older women, and those that would dance the man-and-woman dance charmingly with him and raise little trouble when the dance was over. And yet, lightly and cynically as he turned from one woman to another, I think that some part of him was seeking always his mother. It was that that made his womanizing both foul and oddly piteous.

  For an instant, I saw him without his being aware of any eye upon him save those of the hounds at my feet, yet his face betrayed no more than it would have done had he known himself under scrutiny. He had grown a shell of cool assurance that he had not possessed ten years ago, and looking at him it was easy to believe that he was a magnificent cavalry commander – but it would have been as easy to believe that he was anything else, in the empty chamber behind his eyes. As he could blend into the surroundings of his life, so it seemed that he could take on the color of one’s own thoughts, so that I could never be quite sure whether I saw Medraut, or only what I imagined Medraut to be. Only in the opal on his shoulder, the flame and peacock colors woke and shimmered and died again, and I had the strange fancy that in the dark fires of the jewel one might read what never showed behind his eyes.

  Then one of the hounds stirred, growling very softly – most dogs disliked Medraut – and he looked my way and saw that I was awake and watching him and stopped playing with his wet riding gloves. ‘God’s greeting to you, Artos my father. You are better, they tell me.’

  ‘God’s greeting to you, Medraut my son; I grow stronger each day.’ It was the first time in ten years that he had stood before me in my own quarters.

  ‘You sent for me,’ he said at last.

  ‘I sent for you – in the first place that you may explain to me why this summer’s campaigning against Cerdic and his followers has had no better success.’

  He stiffened for a moment and then said quickly, ‘At least we halted their northward advance, and thrust them back into the lower forest and the marshes.’

  ‘But not back to the coast – and that by the loss, it seems, of many men to our war host and few to theirs.’

  ‘My father knows that the fever has thinned our own ranks; and also what like of country that is to fight over.’

  ‘A land blurred between land and water, swamp and forest. A country, more than any other part of our coastline, well nigh impossible to clear of an enemy, once they have made good their landing.’

  ‘Well?’ he said softly and on the faintest note of challenge.

  ‘I have been thinking it something strange that Cerdic should know so well where the soft belly lies most open to the knife. I have been thinking it fortunate for him that he should choose a summer when the Yellow Hag is rife among the war host ranged against him.’

  I wondered if it was possible, remembering the night we made the East Coast treaty, that this son of mine, who had come to me eaten with jealousy of Cerdic my enemy, should have common cause with him now. I had a sick feeling that it was perfectly possible. Christos! If only I could look just once behind his eyes ...

  ‘Doubtless Cerdic has his scouting parties – and alas! there are traitors in every camp.’

  ‘Not in every camp,’ I said, ‘but undoubtedly in some.’ I pulled myself up in the great chair, thrusting back the dark warm wolf furs, for suddenly I seemed suffocating, and reached for the narrow parchment roll that lay on the table beside me, but I did not open it, I knew the contents by heart. ‘Your arguments are unanswerable. See if you can do as well with the final engagement on the Cloven Way.’

  He dropped his gaze for an instant to the letter I held, then raised it again blandly to my face. ‘Cei will have given you a better and fuller account of that than I can do.’

  ‘Better, doubtless, but not so detailed at certain points. There is, for instance, a curious lack of detail in his account of the breakup of the left wing that robbed us of a fully decisive victory.’

  ‘The left wing being my command,’ Medraut said, and began again to play with his gloves. ‘The detail is very easily supplied. Cei failed to second me at the crucial moment.’

  ‘Cei states that you were in no need of seconding, and he had sharper call for the reserves elsewhere, until the whole center of the wing crumpled without warning.’

  ‘But then, Cei has always hated me,’ he said.

  ‘Cei doesn’t know how to hate – not as we understand the word,’ I said. ‘He’s too like a Saxon. It takes the Celtic blood to know truly how to hate.’

  And we looked at each other, eye to eye, in a small and powerful stillness in the heart of the storm that battered the shutters and drove the white rain hushing across the thatch. But the opal at his shoulder caught fire from an infinitesimal movement and for an instant was an eye opened on some strange and beautiful half-hell.

 
Then Medraut retreated a little. ‘In battle it is not always easy to choose – even to know – where lies the sharpest need. I know that my need of seconding was as the need of lifeblood, but it seemed that Cei did not. Let my father believe I fought the best action that I could without.’

  ‘Cei states here that you wheeled your charge-back on too close a curve, so that the formation became clogged and ragged, and consequently the impact lost its force.’

  ‘It seems that the account was not so lacking in detail!’

  ‘There is no more to it than that,’ I said. ‘But Name of Names! That is the mistake of a raw squadron captain on his first maneuvers; you are among the most able of cavalry commanders, Medraut; that kind of mistake is not for you!’

  He gave me a small bow; his face had drained of color so that in the light of the fat-lamp, the faint discoloration of the lids made his eyes seem painted like a woman’s. ‘My father is overlavish with his praise ... There is always, of course, the question of land shape to be considered; this has been a wet summer, and the valley turned oversoft for horses a short distance below our fighting ground. Unfortunately even the most able of your cavalry commanders cannot command a countryside to give him sufficient elbow room.’

  I had the sense of trying to hold a marsh light between finger and thumb that one always felt when dealing with Medraut, and knew that whatever purpose I had hoped to serve by this interview, I had served none; none in the world. ‘So.’ I laid Cei’s letter back on the table beside me. ‘You have accounted for all things most nobly,’ and my voice sounded old and hopeless in my own ears.

  ‘That was all my father wished to say to me?’

  ‘Yes. No, one thing more.’ I struggled to clear my mind from the gray cloud of weariness that still descended upon me so easily. ‘I have said that you are among the most able of my cavalry commanders, and that is no more than the truth; you also have the trick of drawing good fortune to you in battle, and so you have a large following. But men do not follow you for love, any more than you lead them for love. If you make more mistakes of that kind you will begin to lose your reputation not only for skill, but for luck, and if you lose that, you will lose your following.’