Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘If tomorrow we go down into the Dark,’ Cei said at last, with awe in his deep grumble of a voice as the radiance began to fade, ‘at least we have seen the sunset.’

  But for the moment I was looking at something else, at red petals of fire brightening far out in the dusking marshes. The campfires of the Saxon war host.

  In a while we turned the horses and rode on into camp, to find Marius and Tyrnon there with their hastily gathered reinforcements who had marched in just ahead of us. God’s face was not turned from us in all things, it seemed.

  When all things were in train, we ate well that night, knowing that there would be little time for food in the morning, and as soon as the meal was done with, men began to roll themselves in their cloaks and lie down with their feet to the fires.

  I withdrew to my own quarters, to the hut of hurdle roofed with the striped awning of a captured war boat, gay as a horse-fair wine booth save that in place of the vine garland my battered personal standard hung before it for a sign. I pulled off iron cap and sword belt and flung down, still in my war shirt, on a pile of bracken with my saddle for a pillow. A saddle makes a good enough pillow, but a hound’s flank makes a better ...

  At most times I have been able to sleep on the eve of battle, if I had an hour or so to lie down, but that night I could not, for the thoughts and pictures that whirled through my head almost as though I had the fever.

  I lay for a long time staring at the small bright flame-bud of the tallow glim in its lantern, and the flame had no more heart nor comfort to it than the Solas Sidh, and the long upward shadows that it threw all up the wattle walls were the shadows of the future pressing in upon me, crowding me with mouthless questions to which, God knows, I had no answer; shadows that came trailing the past behind them also, so that I caught again the acrid smell of the dung fires at Narbo Martius, and the thunder of my horse’s hooves in Nant Ffrancon and heard again, across the years, my own voice and Ambrosius’s: ‘Then why don’t we yield now, and make an end ... ? They say it is easier to drown if you don’t struggle.’ ‘For an idea, for an ideal, for a dream.’ ‘A dream may be the best thing to die for.’ But I had no dream left ... ‘When the dream fails, that is when the people die.’ But Ambrosius had not said that – Bedwyr had said it – something of the kind – in the sunlight of the Queen’s Courtyard, with the pigeons crooning on the store-wing roof.

  So that I longed with a small whimpering longing to set my finger one time more on the rose mole on Guenhumara’s breast, but could not remember whether it was on her left breast or her right ...

  Gradually past and future began to mingle; tomorrow’s battle and Ambrosius’s last hunting becoming one, as the light of the candle spread and blurred into the shadows, and the sounds of the nighttime camp that had been sharp-edged and assertive grew blurred also, by little and little, until they were no more than the wash of the tide behind the sand dunes that faced toward Môn ...

  I heard a voice outside, a challenge and a sharp exclamation beyond the nearest watch fire, and shook myself clear of the little dark lapping waves of sleep, thinking that maybe another scout had come in. Then somebody put aside the loose fold of the awning at the bothy entrance, and I turned on my elbow, and saw a man standing there caught between the lights of the watch fire and the tallow glim. A lean old man in a war shirt of glimmering mail. His proud mane of iron-colored hair, bound about the hollow temples with a strip of crimson leather, showed one lock as white as the grinning mask stripe of a badger. And he stood looking at me strangely under one level brow and one that flew wild.

  ‘Bedwyr,’ I said. ‘Bedwyr?’ and sat up slowly, and drew my legs under me and got slowly to my feet, and we stood confronting each other for a long time.

  ‘Is it yourself, then, or your ghost?’ I said at last, for caught between the two lights, he might have been a ghost indeed, called up to me by my need, by my own nearness to the crossing over.

  He moved then, one step forward, and let the striped fold of the awning fall behind him, and I saw that he was living flesh and blood. ‘No ghost,’ he said. ‘I have disobeyed your orders, and come back, Artos.’

  I could have cried out to him, as Jonathan to David, by the forbidden love names that are not used between men; I could have flung my arms about his shoulders. Instead, I stood where I had risen, and said, ‘Why did you not join me on the road south?’

  ‘The news did not reach me until you were many miles on your way, and from Coed Gwyn the swiftest way is by the coast road so that one does not fall into traitor hands on the way, and so that one can get a fisher boat across the Sabrina. Can you spare me a mount? A river currach is no horse transport.’

  ‘A mount maybe, though we are somewhat short of horses,’ I said. ‘Your old command is Flavian’s now.’ Almost I might have been speaking to a stranger.

  ‘I did not come seeking my old command. A fighting place among the Companions, no more.’

  The aching silence fell between us again. The loose end of the awning flapped in the light wind like a bird with a broken wing, and the candle flame leapt and fluttered, casting strange shadows on the rough hurdles that formed the walls.

  ‘You will have no illusions as to the likely outcome of tomorrow’s fight?’ I said (but already it was today’s).

  ‘Not many.’ There was a twist of the old reckless laughter on his lips.

  ‘And so you came back.’

  ‘I have always been one to choose with some care the company that I die in.’

  Age had made him uglier than ever; the lines of his face that had been fantastic in his young manhood tipped over into the grotesque. It was a face made for a bitter jest by some God with a crooked sense of humor, and Christos! My heart whimpered for joy at the sight of it.

  ‘Take me back into your service, Artos.’

  ‘What of Guenhumara?’

  He said steadily, ‘I left her at the gate of the little nunnery in Caredegion, out on the headland. You know it? They keep the holy fire burning always for Saint Bride. She will be happier there, I think, than at Eburacum, even if I could have spared the time to take her there.’

  And I remembered the House of Holy Ladies in the Street of the Clothworkers, and Guenhumara shuddering in the curve of my bridle arm as she looked back toward it, as though a wild goose had flown over her grave. ‘She hated cages. She was afraid of them,’ was all I could find to say.

  ‘She went in through the door of the wall, of her own free wish,’ he said dully.

  ‘Were you not happy together, all those years?’

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘But – Bedwyr, you loved her, and she you?’

  He said simply, ‘Oh yes, we loved each other, but you were always between us.’

  It was a small bothy, one step brought us to meet in the midst of it; my arms were around him, and his around me, the strong right arm and the maimed left that felt sapless and brittle as a bit of dead stick, and we held fast together, and wept somewhat, each into the hollow of the other’s shoulder. Maybe it is easier to weep when one grows old, than it was in the flower of life. The strength ebbs, or the wisdom grows ... It no longer tears at the soul; there is even something of catharsis, of healing, in it ...

  In the dark hour before dawn, I was roused to the news, brought in by one of the scouts, that the enemy were showing the first sign of stirring, and with him another rider from Constantine. The men of Dumnonia were pressing on to the limit of their endurance, but the marsh country had forced them around by the long way and they could not be with us much more than an hour before noon. I got up and swallowed a few mouthfuls of bannock and beer, while I armed and made ready. Bedwyr, having no duties of command to hold him now, came and served me as armor-bearer – he was skillful enough with that arm, though he lacked much strength in it – and afterward I did the same for him, so that in the end we armed each other like brothers.

  I took especial pains that morning, combing out my hair and beard, and settling the folds of my old we
ather-worn cloak with care, arranging and rearranging the plume of yellow corn marigold in its shoulder brooch – those of the Brotherhood who yet remained still rode into battle with some such grace note about them. I knew, I had accepted, that Fate had finished the pattern, that the doom was accomplished, and I was to come by my death that day (but I thought that it would be swift and seemly, as the thing should be, as it had been for Ambrosius; not this untidy lingering by the way!). And I could only hope that my death might serve also as ransom for the people. I knew, too, as surely as I knew the other thing, that the pattern demanded that I should take Medraut with me, and prayed that, so, the old sin might be wiped out and the final defeat of Britain not demanded. At the least, with Medraut gone, Britain might be saved the fatal split within herself that must let the darkness in. And hurriedly, for already I could hear through the wattle walls the sound of the squadrons mustering, I made ready as though I rode to take a bride or a triumph, for it was as though something in me, older than my own life, the thing that I had felt at my crowning, knew that there was a certain fitness of things, an outward and visible sign of willingness, to be made in the sight of the gods ... I remembered all at once how carefully Ambrosius had made his young armor-bearer trim his hair for him on the morning of his last hunting.

  chapter thirty-seven

  The Corn King

  THE STORMY PROMISE OF LAST NIGHT’S SUNSET HAD BEEN fulfilled in a day of soft blustering wind and squalls of rain, and the standards and the squadron pennons flew as though already carried at the charge. Beyond the huts and the cooking fires the whole war host was already mustered, horse and foot, archers and spearmen. The wild riders of my own mountains, sitting their small shaggy steeds as though they and the horses were one; the men of Glevum under the black hound banner of their prince; the men of the high chalk downs, with something of the formidable steadiness of the Legions about them still. If only, among them, I could have caught the saffron gleam of Cador’s standard, but the men of the West must be still many miles away. I wondered how near were Cynglass and Vortiporus ... My own Companions were drawn up before the rest, yellow-touched with the corn marigolds that each man wore in his helmet comb or shoulder buckle, waiting with Flavian at their head, for me to join them. My grand old Signus had died three years ago, and the big silver stallion Gray Falcon, who had taken his place as chief among my war steeds, was being walked up and down close by. He whinnied at sight of me, and the men shouted my name in greeting, so that it sounded like the sudden crash of waves on a sandy shore.

  I flung up an arm to them in reply, and mounting, wheeled Gray Falcon in among them, with Bedwyr at my side on a tall raking sorrel drawn from the reserves, and suddenly knew the Brotherhood complete again. Pharic and his Caledonians, whose tribe had first loyalty with them, the traitors who had followed Medraut over to the Saxon camp, they were cut away; the familiar faces that were lacking and long since rotted into skulls were another matter, for it was not death could break the Brotherhood; what was left was the hard core, the men who, new-joined last year or with forty years of service behind them, chose to tuck the corn marigold in their war caps and ride into this last battle with me. These were the Companions of the Bear. And I have never loved them quite as I loved them at that moment.

  I should speak to them now; almost always before battle I had made them some kind of fighting speech, but there had been so many battles, so many fighting speeches, that there seemed nothing left to say, and looking at their grim faces, I knew it was no time for false heartening. So I cried out to them only, ‘Brothers, you know the odds against us today; therefore let us fight so that whether we win or whether we die, the harpers shall sing of us for a thousand years!’

  I flashed up my hand to Cei in command of the main cavalry, and old Marius who led the foot, and the great aurochs horn sang harshly merry and was echoed across the camp, the notes that ordered the march tossed to and fro on the squally wind that ruffled up and silvered the hazel leaves. And the first band of horse moved off, raising their spears to me in salute as they passed.

  Hail Caesar! Those about to die ...

  We rode in the usual formation for hostile country, for we could not be sure how near the enemy scouts and advance parties might be: foreguards flung out ahead, and knots of light horse screening the flanks of the main body, and I remember that Bedwyr, riding beside me, had his harp slung on his shoulder, as he had used to ride into battles, and presently, though he did not unsling it, he began to sing, so softly that it scarcely broke through the beat of his horse’s hooves, but I caught the breath of it and it was the first song that ever I had heard from him, the lament for the Corn King that helps the crops to grow, the promise of his return – out of the mists, back from the land of youth, strong with the sound of trumpets under the apple boughs ... and I remembered the big stars and the smell of dung fires and the mule drivers listening on the outfringe of the firelight ... He must have heard himself at the same instant as I did, for we glanced aside at each other, and he laughed and flung up his head and broke baying into a cattle-reeving song of the Berwyn Hills.

  Presently three of our scouts came riding back over the skyline of the low ridge as though the red-eared hounds of Anwn were after them. The foremost reined up in a smother of dust almost under Gray Falcon’s nose so that the big horse snorted and danced in his tracks. ‘Caesar, the advance guard is tangled with the Saxon outposts! They’re falling back—’

  I sent the three of them out again, and rising in my stirrups shouted to the Companions to come on. The trumpeter beside me raised the great aurochs horn to his lips and sent the echoes flying out over the marshes, and we broke forward at an increased speed, the whole war host changing pattern and deploying for action at full march, so that we became, as it were, two advancing battle lines one behind the other, each with its own spear center and cavalry wings, and the small free bodies of light horse that flanked and partly joined the two together.

  Just below the crest of the shallow ridge I checked them, and with Bedwyr and two of my captains rode forward through the furze to get a view of the Saxon position. It was a spur of the same ridge from which, farther back into the hills, I had seen the Saxon watch fires brightening under last night’s sunset.

  On the very fringe of the marshes, where soft ground and winding waterways must limit the use of cavalry, the enemy battle line was drawn up not much more than a mile distant. Medraut, with the war training that I had given him – and the inborn skill that I had given him too – had chosen his ground well. In the clear between the soft showers of blowing mizzle, the Barbarian battle line was sharp-edged and pricked with detail; I could make out in their center the horsetail standard of Cerdic, where the Saxon leader held his heavy shield warriors, his hearth companions, white as a gleam of bog grass against the blurred greens and grays of marsh and reedbed; more white, that was the lime-washed Scottish bucklers; the dull glint of shield boss and spear blade and war cap splintering into sudden light where a gleam of wet sunshine fled across the marshes and the northward swell of the hills. No sign as yet of the pied and checkered standards of the traitors Cynglass and Vortiporus. God be thanked for that at least. Above all I saw the blood-red gleam on the right flank where the main part of the enemy cavalry was posted. (Cavalry wings on a Saxon war line!) Medraut was flying the Red Dragon of Britain for his battle standard, and my gorge rose at the sight.

  Between the Saxon host and the ridge from which we looked toward it, our advance cavalry was falling back, scattered and pursued by a flying mob of light horsemen and running spears, and even as I looked, another band of riders appeared from behind some thick hawthorn scrub, and came curving across like a skein of wild geese in flight, to cut off our men from all hope of retreat.

  I had hoped to draw the enemy up from their chosen position onto ground that would allow us better use of our advantage in cavalry, but to delay for that now would mean the sacrifice of the whole of our advance force. Again I spoke to the trumpeter, and again
the notes of the war horn sang thin over the western countryside. The tramp of feet and the smother of hooves came sweeping up behind me, and I swung Gray Falcon into place at the head of the Companions as we spilled like a wave over the comb of the ridge, and on down to join with the advance guard. The enemy broke off as they saw us nearing, and scattered back to their own battle line, and we swept on and down, the advance troops wheeling about once more to join with us. It is seldom good to take foot any distance at the full charge, lest they lose formation and breath together; but there were bowmen among the ranks of the great Saxon battle line, and I must get them across the open ground as swiftly as might be. The first flight of arrows thrummed out at us as we came within range, and men pitched in their stride and went down; then our own horse archers opened up in reply, and in the enemy ranks, also, gaps darkened for an instant, until each was closed up by the springing in of the man behind. Forward and away at the canter and the long loping run, the standards lifting and flying on the air of our going, the war horns yelping, and under the horns I raised the war cry: ‘Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!’

  The enemy also had broken forward, to the booming of their own bulls’ horns and the long-drawn shuddering German war howl, having learned the unwisdom, I suppose, of receiving a cavalry charge while at the halt. And so we swept together, yelling at the speed of both armies.

  Far on either side of us spread the Barbarian wings, and I glanced back once as we rode, to make sure that the second line on which our hope depended was keeping station, and saw the solid wave of men and horses sweeping after us, under the standards of Powys and Glevum. So far, so good; but in this country where there could be little free maneuvering for cavalry, to engage solidly all along the line would be to ask to be engulfed, and I began to swing the whole war host slantwise so as to bring the Companions and the flower of the spear ranks against, as I judged, the weakest span of the enemy battle line, that held by the Scottish warriors. The spears were flung, a dark whistling shower, and we charged home with drawn swords. War front and war front rolled together with crash of meeting shields that filled the marsh skies with wheeling and calling clouds of birds, and instantly there rose the clash and grind of weapons, the full-throated roar of war cry against war cry, the screams of horses, all blended into the great formless smother of sound that is the voice of all battles.