Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  The line of white shields wavered, and clouds of lime dust rode into the air, choking and blinding friend and foe alike, and in the midst of the sharp white haze we were hacking and trampling our way forward. Almost it seemed, in one short triumphant burst of time, that we should break through to take them in the rear before our own weaker left wing, which I had held back somewhat by the slantwise charge, became fully engaged. That was when Medraut’s cavalry took us on the flank. The charge was brilliantly timed and handled and, save for the unmounted spearmen I had set amongst us, we must have been crushed in by it. As it was, our outer ranks were forced back, and the thing that I had dreaded and prepared for began to happen: the enemy’s longer flank was curling around our own to engulf us. Behind me I heard the trumpets sounding, and knew that our second-line warriors were wheeling about to make their stand back to back with us, while the farthest right of my own wing, withdrawing under the crash of Medraut’s charge, were linking shields with them.

  Now we were a long narrow island, thrust and driven at from all sides, but an island that stood like rock, while again and again the dark waves of destruction came roaring in on us, and again and again we flung them back. I had pulled back the Companions into the slim space between the two fighting lines, to re-form them, and that I might have freedom of movement to come at any part of the war host. And I remember Flavian grinning at me from under the standard. He had lost his helmet and his forehead was streaked with blood, and he shouted to me above the furnace roar of battle: ‘A hot day, and somewhat dusty!’ I saw Cei with every cheap glass ornament he possessed bright upon him, standing like a giant in his stirrups in the midst of a battle all his own. I saw men going down, and others stepping forward to fill their places, and knew that soon the lines would grow perilously thin; soon the island, the British shield-burg, must begin to shrink. Constantine and his war bands could not be far off now – and nor could the traitor Cymri ...

  In the spot where the Barbarian host had come together, encircling us, it seemed to me suddenly, more by a kind of hunter’s instinct than by anything I could see, that the joining place was weak. I sent the order to Tyrnon and saw him unleash the flower of the war host’s cavalry. They rolled forward, not fast, but remorseless as a wave, the spearmen parting to let them through ... And suddenly the pressure against us on that side began to slacken. I heard the triumphant yell as it was torn apart and flung off, and the whole battle mass that had been knotted fast seemed to shake free of the bonds that had held it and grow fluid again. With the incredible swiftness with which the entire nature of a battle can change, the whole field had opened up and was now on the move. The fighting lines were swaying to and fro over ground that had been fought over all morning and was cumbered with dead men and dead horses, slippery with blood, stinking. Our hands and war gear were stained red, and here and there a man with his shield torn away would lift a battered corpse in front of him to receive the enemy spears. In the midst of the swifter swirl of cavalry and light troops, Marius with the heavy spearmen had made for the white horse standard, and was locked with Cerdic’s troops like a pair of tusk-locked boars, while again Medraut’s flying squadrons were sweeping down upon us.

  The Saxons had unleashed their berserkers some time before, and when a shadow slid up from the undergrowth of battle almost under Gray Falcon’s breast and turned about with knife in hand, my heart jumped cold and I had already flung myself sideways in the saddle in desperate essay to cut the creature down when I saw that it was no drug-maddened Barbarian, but one of the Little Dark People, and turned the sword point just in time. He cried out something to me, but in the tumult I could not hear and shouted to him in return, ‘Up! Come up here, then!’

  And he set one foot over mine in the stirrup, and next instant was clinging to my saddlebow for support, his narrow face streaked with the clay and ochre war patterns on a level with my own, the three buzzards’ feathers thrust into his knotted-up hair bowed and shivering sideways in the squally wind. ‘My Lord the Bear, the men from the North are near, those that come to join with the Wolves.’

  ‘How near?’

  He held up a spread hand. ‘As many bowshots as there are fingers on my hands and toes on my feet, maybe less – they come swiftly, swiftly, like a wolf pack on the trail.’

  And as swiftly as he had come, he sprang down and was gone into the thickest storm of the fighting, where our ranks were desperately striving to rally under the hammer blow of Medraut’s last charge. One more such charge as that ... and we should scarce be rallied from this one before the newcomers were upon us also ...

  I wrenched Gray Falcon half around on his haunches, and thrust in beside Cei who was standing in his stirrups to steady his men, his eyes blue fires in a face smeared with blood and filth, and shouted to him, ‘Constantine can’t be far off now, but it seems that Cynglass and Vortiporus will be here first.’

  ‘How near?’ he roared back, as I had done. (‘Ya-ai ya ya ya! Stand firm, you rabble!’)

  ‘Something well under a score of bowshots. Take over, Cei. I’m going to try and draw Medraut off for a while.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Artos, you can’t!’

  ‘If I can’t, then there’ll be nothing but the bits for Constantine to pick up when he does get through. It’s your battle now.’

  He looked around at me, grinning like a dog in the gray jut of his beard, then flung the half shield away from him, and sent his horse plunging forward, and the fight closed over between him and me.

  I drove back somehow through the turmoil to my own squadron, flinging off my cloak of the betraying purple and bundling it under my shield, shouted to them to throw away the yellow corn marigolds and follow me, and a few moments later, with my trumpeter beside me and young Drusus, with my personal standard dragged from its lance pole and bundled under one arm, was leading them out of the boil of battle.

  ‘Is it some game that we play?’ Flavian cried, leaning from his saddle toward me.

  ‘A game of marsh lights and played with Medraut. The curs of the Cymri are overnear, and Cei and Marius can do without his attentions as well.’

  ‘This is a game that my father would have enjoyed,’ he said, and choked on the last word and pitched from the saddle with a flung spear between his shoulders.

  We swung wide, with a small ragged pursuit on our heels, and into cover of the alder woods that fringed the rising ground, then turned and charged them. They scattered back, and we did not wait to ride down the survivors, but turned about once more and headed at full gallop into the soft rolling country that lifted above the marsh to the north. Bedwyr had taken Flavian’s place, and rode stirrup to stirrup with me as we had ridden in the early days, as we struggled upward in desperate haste toward the hill track from Aquae Sulis. Just before we lost the full cover of the woods I called a few moments’ halt. ‘Now, Drusus, get the standard back on its spear shaft, and you Alun Dryfed, and you Gallgoid, your cloak is a good bright one. Tear it in half and it shall serve us for two—’ I flung on my own cloak of the unmistakable purple at the same time, and when we rode on again, widely spaced now to allow for the phantom cavalry among us, we carried on long hazel branch or spearpoint what seemed to be the pennons of a dozen squadrons. We came out on to the bush-scattered ferny hillside, and turning Gray Falcon aside a short distance down the wood-shore, I could see the whole battle spread before me, and the pied flicker of the traitor standards already on the fringe of it. The Little Dark Warrior had spoken truth. I could see also, but still a long way off, the faint dust cloud of marching men on the great causeway road from Lindinis.

  ‘They’ve a long way to go! My God; they’ve a long way to go!’

  I turned back to the rest again. ‘All’s well, raise the standard again. Now your turn, Aidan. Sound me a fanfare.’ And touching heel to Gray Falcon’s flank, I rode forward with Drusus close behind me, choosing my line so as to give an uninterrupted view to the enemy, and pausing to let the gleam of the horse’s coat and the red and gold fla
me of the standard show up against the deep summer colors of the hillside. Beyond me, the bushes and tall form of the trackside would break and blur the numbers and movement of the rest of the squadron, leaving only the pennons clear – those pennons of a dozen squadrons: Artos and his heavy cavalry reserves sweeping around through the higher ground to take them on the flank! Even from that distance I could hear the roar as we were sighted, and looking back before I rejoined the head of the squadron and swung them northward again following the track into a shallow fold of the hills, saw a mass of cavalry already shaking free from the main mass of the Saxon war host, and swinging toward the higher ground.

  A short while later we let ourselves be glimpsed again on the crest of another soft billow of moor, then rode like the hammers of hell for the place where the track forded a stream coming down from the higher hills, and beyond it became a stony scramble half lost among the heather of a narrow combe. We gained it ahead of Medraut and his horsemen, splashed through, and wheeled about on the farther side.

  ‘We are not like to find a better place to hold them,’ I said.

  And Bedwyr nodded, cleaning his sword blade on his horse’s mane that was almost as red, that it might be bright for further use. ‘I never saw a place more to my mind,’ he said, ‘nor a Company,’ and met my eye, and I thought how he had said last night, ‘I have always been one to choose with care the company I die in.’

  Far off and dulled by the swell of the land, I could hear the rumor of battle like the rumor of a storm rushing through distant forest country, and already the nearing beat of hooves drumming up toward us. I looked around me once, I remember, seeing the pocket of level in the quiet lap of the moors, the stream silvering over the ford, the furze coming into its second flowering, bean-scented in the sun and wet. There were linnets in the furze, I heard their song; and the great cloud shadows sailed up from the south as they had done on the morning of Badon fight. A good place for a last stand, with the combe narrowing behind us, and the river ford before.

  I remembered, across more than half a lifetime, Irach leaping upon the enemy spears, and for an instant felt again the oneness of all things, that is man’s comfort under his knowledge of being alone. Yes, a good place for a final stand. By the time the last of us fell, Constantine should surely have come up ...

  I glanced behind me and on either side at the score of men ranged there with me, and saw it in their faces, that they knew their purpose here as well as I did. I wanted to say something to them now, something to toughen the fiber and kindle the heart, but that is for an army, and this was a knot of friends, and instead I said: ‘My most dear, we have fought many fights together, and this is the last of them and it must be the best. If it is given to men to remember in the life we go to, remember that I loved you, and do not forget that you loved me.’

  They looked back at me kindly, as friend looks at friend. Only one of them spoke and that was Drusus my standard-bearer, the youngest of them all. He said: ‘We have good memories, Artos the Bear.’

  And then in a new burst of cloud shadows sweeping up from the marshes, Medraut’s cavalry burst out of the valley before us. They reined in on the farther bank, and for a long trampling pause, each looked to the other across the running water. There were faces that I knew among the horsemen on the farther bank; in the midst and forefront of them, Medraut sitting his tall roan with his naked sword across its neck and on his arm the great dragon arm ring of a Prince of Britain, that was brother to the one I wore on my own. The stream was little more than a couple of spear lengths wide, and we could have spoken to each other as one speaks to the man across the hearth. We looked eye into eye and I saw his nostrils widen and tremble. Then he cried out and heeled his horse into the water, and instantly the foremost of his riders plunged after him.

  And we, on the near bank, braced ourselves and spurred forward to meet the coming shock.

  We fought hock-deep across the ford, up to the girths on either side, and the water sheeted up, boiling to a yeasty turmoil, white and then stained with rusty streaks that spread down the run of the stream. Men were in the water, and a horse screamed and went down, rolling belly up into shallows like a great wineskin. Again and again they hurled against us, yelling, and again and again we flung them back. More horses were down now, and men fought on foot, knee-deep, thigh-deep, in the boiling shallows, and so far, not one of the traitors had reached the western bank. Small difference if they had; but men fighting as we were must have something to hold, some rampart which is of the spirit as much as of pass or narrows or running water; and for us it was the ford and the line of that lowland stream ... Bedwyr was beside me, the rest of the surviving Companions close-knit on either hand, and if we never fought in all our lives before, God of gods! we fought then! And in the midst of all, Medraut and I came together, naturally and inevitably, as to a meeting long appointed.

  Spears had no part in this kind of fighting, it was work for swords, whether on horseback or on foot, and we strove together almost knee to knee, while the water boiled and the spray flew like the spume of breaking waves. The horses slipped and scrambled among the stones of the ford, neighing in fury, and both of us had flung aside the bullhide bucklers which hampered the bridle arm in maneuvering. Medraut was fighting on the defensive, waiting to pounce. His face was set in a small, bright, curiously rigid smile, and I watched his eyes as one watches the eyes of a wild animal, waiting for it to spring.

  But in the end it was I who broke through his guard first with a blow that should have landed between neck and shoulder, but in the same instant his roan stumbled, and the stroke caught him on the comb of his war cap and swept him from the saddle.

  He went down with a shuddering splash in his heavy mail sark that sent the water sheeting upward, and was on his feet again, still gripping his sword, while the roan plunged snorting away. He leapt in under my guard with shortened blade, and stabbed upward. The point went under the skirts of my war shirt and entered at the groin, and I felt the white shrieking anguish pierce through me, up and up until it seemed to reach my heart; I felt death enter with it, and was aware of the dark blood gouting over Gray Falcon’s shoulder, and Medraut’s face with the small bright smile still frozen upon it. The sky was darkening, but I knew quite clearly that I had time and strength for one more blow, and I wrenched the horse trampling around upon him, and thrust at the throat, bare above his war sark, as he flung back his head to hold me still in sight. The same blow that I had struck at Cerdic, all those years ago. But this time it did not go amiss. The blood burst out with the blade, it spurted in little bright jets through his fingers when he dropped his sword to clutch with both hands at his throat, and in the moment before he fell, I saw his eyes widen in a kind of wonder. That was the moment when he understood that the doom between us demanded for its fulfillment, not that he should kill me or I him, but that each should be the death of the other.

  He opened his mouth gasping for air and blood came out of that too, and with it his last breath in a kind of thin bubbling retch.

  As he fell, the whole world swam in one vast darkening circle, and I pitched from the saddle on top of him. I remember hitting the water, and the circle turned black.

  I tried to cling to the darkness, but the pain was too bright, too fiery, and tore it from my grasp. And I was lying in this place, in this small cell where I lie now, and the cell was full of tall shadows on the lamplit walls. The hooded shadows of monks, the barbed shadows of gray men in war harness, like the ghosts of some long-forgotten battle. But at first the shadows seemed more real than the men, for I had not thought to wake into the world of living men again. I heard a low mutter that might have been prayer or only the beating of a moth’s wings about the light. I heard someone groaning, too, and felt the slow-drawn rasp of it in my own throat, but did not think at first to connect the two. A shadow, darker than the rest against the lamp, was kneeling beside me; it stirred and bent forward, and I saw that it was not a shadow at all, but Bedwyr. But whether all
that was of the first time, or whether other times came into it, I do not know; indeed all time has seemed confused these last few days, so that there is no saying, ‘This thing happened after that,’ for all things seem present together, and most things far away, farther, farther away than the night that Ambrosius gave me my wooden foil ... I said, ‘Where is this place?’

  Or at least the question came to my mind, and I must have spoken it, for an old ancient Brother, whose tonsured head had a silver nimbus like a rain cloud with the sun behind it, said, ‘Most often men call it “The Island of Apples.”’

  ‘I have been here before?’ For the name chimed in my head, but I could not remember.

  And he said, ‘You have been here before, my Lord Artos. I took your horse, and led you up to the hall, to Ambrosius at supper,’ and I thought that he wept, and wondered why.

  I fumbled out a hand to the dark shadow between me and the lamp, which was Bedwyr, and he caught it in his own, the sound one, and drew it to his knee and held it there, and something of life seemed to flow from his hand into mine, so that the leaden chill lifted from my heart and brain, and I was able to think and remember again. I said, ‘Did we gain time enough? Did Constantine get through in time?’

  And Bedwyr said, bending closer, ‘Constantine got through. The victory is yours, Artos, a narrow victory, but it is yours.’