Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘Na,’ said Maelgwn, lordlywise. ‘I am no clerk.’

  ‘But good God, man, have you no clerk here with the means of writing a letter?’

  In the end he brought, with his own hands, a breviary rich with monk’s work in gold leaf and glimmering colors, that I think he loved next after his hawks and his women, though for its beauty rather than its content, and tossed it to me like a thing of no account. And I tore out the pages I needed, and tossed it back to him. One page, I remember, was half taken up with the initial S, fashioned into the likeness of a dragon with long arched neck and fantastic foliated tail, that was like the royal dragon arm ring that I had worn for twenty years. Another was gemmed with tiny trefoil flowers and leaves among the prayers, another bordered with delicate interlaced strapwork ending in birds’ heads. I turned them over and wrote on their blank sides on my knee, reading the hurried words aloud as I did so, that the others might know what orders I sent, and where.

  I wrote to Connory at Deva, to rouse the Northern war bands and bring them down as swiftly as might be; they could not reach us until many days after battle joined, but whichever way it went, they might serve some purpose later. I scrawled my orders to Aurelius the Dog, the Lord of Glevum, to rush every man he could gather, down the Sabrina coast to prevent a landing if it were not already too late. But it would be too late, I knew that in the dark of my bones. To Cador of Dumnonia to get his war bands out before the fangs of the trap closed, and join Cei at – I hesitated, looking at the country in my inner eye – at Sorviodunum. Lastly I wrote to Cei himself, honoring him with the dragon page, bidding him call back the war host from their harvesting (but he would be doing that already); bidding him take the gathered host westward as far as Sorviodunum, and make his rallying place there while he waited for my coming. That would put them about midway between Venta and the southern Mendips. If they pushed farther west they might become engaged with the enemy before I could reach them, and I dared not risk the outcome of that.

  I had already sent out a summons to any of the tribesmen of my own hills who could join me before moonrise, and Maelgwn had his orders to gather what troops he could within the next day, and bring them after me.

  When the letters were written, someone brought me balls of beeswax, and I sealed them with Maximus’s great amethyst seal in the pommel of my sword, with the spread-winged eagle and the proud surrounding legend IMPERATOR. I called up three of the young warriors about the lower fires, all well known to me as swift horsemen and for their knowledge of the hills and hill tracks, and gave Cador’s letter to the first, bidding him take the shortest way south to the Silures coast, and for God’s sake keep out of Vortiporus’s hands, and cross by fisher boat into Dumnonia. The letters for Aurelius the Dog, and for Cei, I gave to the other two, bidding them ride together as far as Glevum, and the one to drop off there while the other pressed straight on to Sorviodunum. And when they had snatched up the last of their supper, flung on their cloaks and gone from the hall, that left only Connory and the North.

  I remember looking across the fire to where the Minnow sat half asleep and propped against his father’s knee, and saw how Flavian’s hand with the great flawed emerald rested on the young man’s dusty shoulder. The last man to wear that ring had died in my service twenty years ago; in all likelihood Flavian would be dying with me in a few days from now. Three were too many to take in direct succession from one man’s line.

  ‘Minnow,’ I said, and as he roused and shook himself upright in his place, ‘eat first and sleep after. I can give you four hours for sleeping, after that take a fresh horse – see to that, Maelgwn my brother, since I shall be on the road south before then – and carry my summons up to Connory at Deva. If you can get two changes of horse on the way you should be there in less than three days.’

  ‘Sir – let someone else carry the message,’ he said after a moment. ‘I am one of your Companions, I have been your armor-bearer. It is my place to ride with you.’

  ‘It is your place to obey my orders,’ I said, and he got up and came and took the packet, hesitated a perceptible moment longer, then touched it to his forehead before stowing it in the sweat-stained breast of his tunic.

  When he flung on his cloak and went out into the night as the others had done, his father got up and strolled after him. And I knew that somewhere in the dark outside – probably Flavian would have taken him to his own sleeping place – they would be taking their leave of each other, almost certainly for the last time.

  They wasted no time over it; the Minnow needed his few hours’ sleep, and Flavian had work to do like the rest of us. He came back into the mess hall alone, just as we were making ready to leave it, looking much as usual, save that the old scar on his temple showed up more clearly than was its wont, an odd thing to betray a man. He gave me a long steady look of gratitude, and I noticed that the battered signet ring was no longer on his hand, only the skin was very white where it had been.

  We were tightening sword belts and kicking the last bones to the hounds, when he paused beside me and asked in an undertone the question that no other man had asked me yet. ‘Sir – of the men who followed Medraut, did Cei say were there any of the Company?’

  ‘Sixty-seven,’ I said, picking up the cloak that I had laid aside in the heat of the hall.

  ‘Oh God!’ he said, and choked on the words, and as he turned to pick up with needless care a fallen ale cup, I thought I heard him sob.

  ‘It will be mostly the young ones – the cubs grow weary of following an old leader.’ I gripped his shoulder for an instant in passing. ‘Not your cub.’

  And he was beside me, master of himself again, when I came with the rest of the fighting men behind me, to the entrance. Men and shadows were hurrying to and fro, and the soft blustery darkness of the hills was teased with torches. Maelgwn’s summons had begun to take effect already, for among our own big horses standing ready saddled or being walked up and down on the grass-grown parade ground, the fitful light touched on the shaggy flanks of more than a score of the wiry hill ponies and the bright hair and enameled dagger hilts of the tribesmen who rode them. And for a moment my heart lifted at the sight.

  The moon was just shaking clear of the mountains inland when we rode out from Segontium, each man with a rolled-up cloak and a bag of cheese and bannocks strapped behind his saddle, for on this road we must cover the ground too swiftly for even the lightest of pack beasts. At the last, Maelgwn with his household warriors behind him had come to my stirrup, and promised again to be after me with a full war host before the dust had settled behind our horses’ heels. I had leaned down to him from the saddle, and we spat and struck palms on it like men sealing a bargain. He meant his promise, but I knew that he would fail me, even then, as surely as I knew that old Cynglass and Vortiporus of Dyfed were already my enemies. There was a small son up at Dynas Pharaon, with Gwen Alarch, his mother.

  chapter thirty-six

  The Last Camp

  WE STRUCK AWAY INLAND BY THE MOUNTAIN ROAD TO THE head of the Lake of Bala – from there one may look up the long tangle of glens southwestward toward Coed Gwyn, not much over an hour’s ride away – and then turned farther southward by a half-lost herding track, and began the grueling business of getting the horses across country by ridge crests and up and down slopes of rock and scree where even the sure-footed mountain ponies could scarcely pass. Much of the way we walked and scrambled, leading and dragging the poor beasts behind us. The second night we slept chilled and dripping above the cloud line, slept for no more than a few hours and then pushed on again. Once we came near to losing three of the horses in a peat moss. But we got through at last, and in better time than if we had followed the long road around by Mediomanum. The sun was well up, and the mists of the summer morning rising, when we came down from the high moors, past the worked-out copper mines at the head of the stream that fed the first beginnings of the great Sabrina. The cotton grass was in flower and the first harebells in the shelter of the old mine work
ings, and the little amber bees were busy among the bell heather. And looking back I could still see Yr Widdfa upreared like a cloud shadow in the sky. I made my salute to it, as one does to a chieftain, in farewell, and we pushed on the flagging horses down the broadening streamside toward the Sabrina head, and Viroconium in the lush lowlands.

  At Viroconium we managed to get remounts for the worse spent of the horses, and pushed on again, south by Glevum and Corinium and on down the Cunetio road that carried us within a few miles of Badon Hill, and out along the last long rolling stride of the downs to Sorviodunum.

  And all the length of our wild ride, as the news spread like forest fire, men came in to join us in ones and twos and little reckless bands of horsemen, so that when we came in sight of the small fortress city crouched on its hilltop, I had more than four hundred flying cavalry behind me, in place of the two hundred that had followed me north. We had been just under six days on the road, but five of the horses died in their picket lines that night.

  The war camp was spread across the low ground about the gray walled mount which rose for a citadel in its midst, and the smoke of evening cooking fires lying over it in a haze that softened the outline of fodder stacks and branch-woven bothies; and out of the haze the familiar many-mingled sounds of a great camp came to meet us, the cracked bell note of hammer on armorer’s anvil over all. At any rate Cei had received my message. Our coming must have been seen by the scouts while we were still at a distance, for already men were hurrying down from the higher fringes of the camp to press about the stockade gateway and cheer us in – cheer us as though we had come to lead them to another Badon. And Cei was at my stirrup before I had well reined in – or rather, a gaunt, gray, red-eyed, avenging ghost in the likeness of Cei, with his buckler already clanging behind his shoulder.

  ‘What news?’ I demanded.

  ‘The Saxons and the Scots have joined shields, something over a day’s march to the west.’

  So we were too late. Well, I had had little hope of catching the two halves of the enemy host before they could combine. I swung a leg over my tired horse’s back, and dropped heavily to the ground. ‘How many do they muster?’

  ‘All told, some eight thousand, if the scouts make no mistake. Noni Heron’s Feather is in the camp now, if you would speak with him.’

  I nodded. ‘How many of ours?’

  ‘Not much above half that as yet. I dared wait no more than four days before marching. Marius and Tyrnon are gathering more to bring on after us, but the gathering is none so easy, in these times – may his soul rot for it!’

  ‘That he chooses harvesttime? In his place I should do the same,’ I said. Neither of us spoke Medraut’s name in that first moment.

  He looked at me with a furious grief in his hot blue eyes. ‘I was not thinking of the harvesttime, not so much of the harvesttime. I was thinking that one toad’s poison may spread a long way. It isn’t only the men who have marched out with him to join the Saxon camp; even over those that bide still in their own places, even over some of those who answered the muster call, he has smeared his own foul slime. Three days since a man said to my very face, “Why should we not have peace with Cerdic and his kind as we have with the men of the Saxon shore? With Artos it is all fighting, even with his own people among the hills, and we must leave the harvest to ruin. Medraut knows a better way.”’

  We stood grimly silent for a few moments; there seemed nothing to be said.

  Then I asked, ‘Have the Glevum troops come in?’ for the city had been empty of its fighting men when we rode through (one messenger rides faster than a whole war band) but they might still be scouring the Sabrina marshes for the landing that they had been too late to stop.

  ‘This morning. As soon as they found themselves too late to prevent the Scots landing, they pressed on to the hosting place – indeed, they were here and making themselves free of the city wineshops when our fore-guard came up.’

  I was glancing about the camp, seeing the great dragon standard upreared among the cooking fires, and farther off, the black deer-hound of Glevum, but nowhere the saffron flash of the Dumnonian banner. ‘What of Cador and Constantine?’

  ‘No sign as yet.’

  ‘No word at all?’

  He shook his head, like that of a gray and ragged old sheep dog beset by flies.

  ‘If they are not here by dawn tomorrow, it will surely mean that they could not get out in time,’ I said, ‘and we must count them lost to us and do as best we may without them. With the traitor princes of my own people already flighting south to join the Saxons, we cannot afford a longer delay, even for Marius and Tyrnon to come up. Call me a council, Cei; we can make plans as we eat as we did at Badon.’

  But of all that hurriedly called council I can remember little, save that I ordered a general advance westward at dawn, save also – and this I remember clearly indeed – that seeing how sorely we were outnumbered, I proposed a battle formation that had never been used before, but which seemed to offer some hope of holding off the threat of the longer enemy wings, and that somehow I hammered the rest of the council into agreeing to it. All the rest is lost in a gray shifting murk like the smoke of the cooking fires. Also it seems very long ago – longer ago than our council before Badon fight, and yet it cannot be many days – God knows how many or how few; it grows hard to keep count of time ...

  In the lag end of the night the long-awaited messenger got through to us from Constantine. ‘From Constantine?’ I said when he was brought to me. ‘What of Cador, the King?’

  ‘My Lord the King grows old before his time. He is sick and cannot ride,’ the man said, standing before me in the cold flare of torches in the windy dawn. ‘Therefore he sends his son to lead the war bands.’

  ‘How soon can they join us?’

  ‘Here?’ he said, doubtfully.

  ‘No, we march westward in an hour; we shall be within a few miles of the enemy when we camp again.’

  ‘So, then maybe not long past noon tomorrow. They make forced marching.’

  ‘By noon tomorrow the work may be for the wolves and ravens rather than for the men of Dumnonia,’ I said. ‘They must force the march still farther. How large is the force?’

  ‘The household warriors, and such of the war host as we could gather quickly. It is harvesttime.’

  Harvesttime, harvesttime!

  I said, ‘Go now and get something in your belly, then get back to Constantine and tell him the need that we have of his coming swiftly.’

  Within the hour, we marched; pushing westward over the great summer-pale combers of the Downs, following the Legion’s road at first, then by the alder green ridgeway into the low-lying country below the Mendips. And that night we camped on a patch of rising ground in a soft country of deep woods and ferny hillsides, with the downs of our day’s march rising cloud-dappled, chalk-scarred, behind us, and far ahead, the gleam of water and the curious lightening of the sky that told of marsh country. Far ahead also, unglimpsed, unhinted at in the summer quiet land sweep, were the enemy war host; the enemy war host led against me by my son and the man whom I would have had most joyfully for my son if Fate had woven the pattern that way. They were encamped some five miles off, reported the little dark scouts who brought in word of them, and I would have pushed on then and forced the battle, for there were still some hours of daylight left, and in that way we would have had the advantage of surprise with us; but half my men were blind weary, and to go into battle next day with men strengthened by a few hours’ sleep, would, I judged, be a thing to outweigh the loss of surprise. So we made camp, and mounted a strong watch, with a screen of outpost pickets beyond. And while the main camp was being pitched, I rode the rounds of the outposts with Cei, from one to another of the knots of men lying up wherever there was cover and command of the country westward, in small ferny hillside hollows, or the fringes of an alder thicket, among the last pink smoke of the summer willow herb, while the horses grazed nearby. In one such outpost as we rode nearer,
they were singing softly, with their mouths full of bannock; an unlikely war song, but I have noticed that men only sing of fighting in time of peace.

  Six bold warriors riding home from war,

  Five fair maidens, spinning at the door,

  Four swans flying, at the break of day,

  Three-leaved clover makes the sweetest hay ...

  Singing very softly with a swing that was at once grim and merry, their eyes on the track where it passed below them. They rolled over and scrambled to their feet at my coming, and the youngling in charge of them came and stood at my stirrup, looking up, eager for my approval because this was his first command of men. ‘All well?’ I said, in the usual form.

  ‘All well, Caesar,’ he returned, and then, forgetting his dignity, grinned, and flashed me the ‘Thumbs Up’ that men used to use in the arena, but only boys use now. I stuck my own thumb skyward, laughing, as I turned my horse away.

  I saw his head on a Saxon spear before the same time next evening. It was still recognizable by the big crescent-shaped mole on one cheek.

  It was sunset when, the round completed, we turned back toward the camp. But I remember that as though by common consent, with no word spoken between us, we wheeled the horses on a low billow of rising land, and looked westward once more, and having looked, could neither of us look away. I have seen wild sunsets in my time, but seldom, surely never, a sky quite like that one. It was as though beyond the dark, gold-fringed cloud bars of the west, the world itself were burning, and the torn-off rags of the burning, spreading into great wings as they went, were drifting all across the sky so that even when one looked upward to the zenith, still the sky was full of the rush of vast wings of flame. Far off toward the Island of Apples, the winding waters of the reed country caught fire from the burning west, and earth and sky alike blazed into an oriflamme. It was a sunset full of the sound of trumpets and the flying of banners, a sunset that made one feel naked under the eye of God ...