Sword at Sunset (11 page)

Bedwyr had unslung his harp from its accustomed place behind his shoulder, and was plucking the strings in triumphant ripples of notes that broke in waves of brightness, managing his horse with
his knees the while. He often played and sang us home from battle. ‘After the sword, the harp,’ as the saying runs – and always it seemed to help our weariness and our wounds.
When the tune was recognizable, Cei lifted up his voice in a deep grumbling buzz that was his nearest approach to singing, and here and there behind us a man took up a snatch of the familiar tune;
but for the most part we were too spent to join in.

The sun was sinking as we pulled up out of the rustling reedbeds, and the vast arch of the sky was alight with a sunset that seemed to catch its mood from Bedwyr’s harping and break in
waves and ripples of flame. Never, even among my own mountains, have I known such sunsets as those of the eastern marshes, winged and shining skies busy as market crowds or streaming like the
banners of an army. The standing water among the reedbeds caught fire from the sky, and overhead the wavering lines of wild duck were flighting.

On the lower levels only just clear of the marsh, the monastery’s horses were grazing. It was horse country, though most of the beasts, sturdy though they were, were too small for our
needs; too small, that is, if we had had any choice in the matter. But it would be seven or eight years yet before we could hope to draw much from the Deva training runs. We had lost upward of a
score of horses in the past two days, and they would be harder to replace than the men.

The countryman in charge of the herd (the horse herding and breaking was the only work of the community not done by the Brothers themselves) took one look at us from the hummock of land that was
his lookout post, and tossing up his spear ran back toward the monastery building. We heard him shouting, ‘They are coming! They are back! Holy Brothers, it is the Count of Britain!’
And a few moments later the bell of the little church began to throb out its round bronze notes in greeting and rejoicing. ‘Truly, we are to have a hero’s welcome!’ said Bedwyr;
and he let his hand fall from the harp strings, so that the weary smother of hoof-beats behind us grew suddenly louder.

The fire was fading from the sky as we reached the gateway in the thorn hedge; the huddle of reed-thatched sleeping cabins and farm buildings about the church and wattle dining hall were dark
against the fading brightness of the west, and the few wind-stunted apple trees of the monks’ orchard were pale and insubstantial clouds of blossom; and suddenly I thought of that other
community over toward the sunset in the Island of Apples. The Brothers and the poor folk who had taken refuge with them had come crowding down to their gateway, save for whichever Brother it was
who was still ringing the bell. Their hands reached out to us, their anxious faces were full of questioning; they called down blessings on us as we clattered through. They had brought a lantern
with them, and by its light I saw the haggard face of a woman with a babe asleep at her shoulder, and that Brother Vericus the ancient Prior was crying.

In the clear space between the ring hedge and the huddled buildings, I dropped from the saddle and pulled off my war cap. The others were dismounting all about me, clattering to a weary
standstill, more than one of them swaying with the weakness of a wound. The sharp yellow gleam of the lantern was in my eyes, and people pressing about me, catching at my hands, or my knees, and I
was aware of the tall spare figure of the Abbot moving toward me; aware that I was expected to kneel down for his blessing as I had done when we rode out. I wanted to get the wounded under cover,
but I knelt down. Cabal lay beside me with a grunt.

‘How went the day, my son?’ He had a beautiful voice, like the bronze notes of the bell still floating out above us.

‘We burned their winter camp,’ I said. ‘There is one Saxon settlement the fewer to foul the grass, and this place may rest secure from the Barbarians, at least until the next
thrust.’

His hands were light as skeleton leaves on my head. ‘May the Grace of God be upon you. And may your shield, under His, be over all Britain, as it has been over us this day; and may you
find His peace when the fighting is over.’

But it was not the Grace of God that I wanted at that moment, it was salves and bandage linen and food for my men. I got to my feet again, slowly, for I was so tired that I could scarcely bear
my own weight up from the ground. ‘Holy Father, I thank you for your blessing. I have wounded men with me – where may I send them for tending?’

‘Wounded men, alas, we had expected,’ he said. ‘All is ready for you in the hall; Brother Lucius, our Infirmarer, will go with you.’

The drivers whom we had left behind with the baggage train were already busy with the horses, and some of the village men among them. I saw Arian lead off with my bronze and bullhide buckler
clanking softly at the saddletree, then turned to the business of getting the wounded together. Gault, one of my best youngsters, had a long spear wound in the thigh, and slid half fainting into
the arms of his friend Levin, who had ridden close beside him all the way; but the rest of us were able to walk, and we went up to the hall together. I had a gash in my sword arm – most of
our scathes, as usual with horse soldiers, were in the sword arm, or in the thigh below the guard of the thick leather kilt – and it was still oozing red.

In the hall they had hung extra lanterns from the rafters to see by, and pushed back the trestle table to make a clear space. There were small bundles of gear and possessions stacked within the
doorway, easily to be caught up for a hurried flight. With the Sea Wolves so near, the Brothers and their refuging village folk had been prepared for flight when we came, and they had left all
things ready in case the worst should happen after all.

Those of us whose hurts were slight stood back against the wall while the more sorely scathed were tended. After the chill of the spring evening it was very warm in the hall, for they had lit a
fire, to boil water and heat the searing iron. The smoke hung among the rafters and made drifting yellow wreaths around the lanterns; it grew hot, and there began to be a thick smell of salves and
the sweating bodies of men in pain, and once or twice, when the searing iron came into use, the sickening reek of scorched flesh. The first time the iron was used, it was on Gault, and the boy
cried out, short and sharp as the scream of a hawk. Afterward he wept, but I think he wept because he had cried out, not for the pain.

Brother Lucian, working with the sleeves of his habit rolled to the shoulder, and the shaven forepart of his head shining sweat-beaded in the lantern light, had two or three helpers, amongst
them a young novice, whom I had noticed before. A yellow-haired overplump lad with a good straight pair of eyes, and a way of slightly dragging his left foot. Watching him now, somewhat anxiously
at first, for he was so young that I doubted his skill, I saw that he knew what he was doing, and that he cared deeply for the doing of it. Once he glanced up and saw me watching him, but his eyes
returned instantly to the work of his hands, without, I think, even being fully aware of mine. I liked the singleness of purpose in him.

When it came to my turn, it so happened that the Infirmarer was still busy upon someone else, and the novice turned to me as I came forward to the table under the lanterns. I was just going to
pull off the clotted rag, but he stayed me, with the authority of a man who is about his own trade.

‘No, let me. You will set it bleeding again.’ He took up a knife and cut through the rag, eased away the stiffened folds and looked at the gash.

‘It is not much,’ I said.

‘Clench your fist,’ he ordered, and when I had done so, he nodded. ‘It is not much. You are fortunate. A nail’s breadth farther that way, and it might have severed the
thing that bids the thumb answer to your will.’ He bathed the gash and salved it, drawing the edges together, and lashed it. His hands were less plump than the rest of him, very sure of their
work, strong and gentle at the same time, with a gentleness that had nothing soft in it but could be swiftly ruthless if the need arose. Also they were the hands of a fighter. And I thought for the
first time that it was a pity that the healing art should lie altogether with the Church; better the old way when the healer had been part of the world, when army surgeons had marched with the
Legions. Somehow I could not see these hands as belonging to one shut away into sanctuary, their healing shackled always to the dictates of one religion.

He fastened off the bandage and I thanked him and turned away, and in a little we went out, those of us who were still on our feet, to join the rest of the Companions, who had unhelmed and
loosened off their war gear, and were kneeling about the candlelit doorway of the wattle church – there would have been room for less than half of us within – for it was the hour of
evening prayer. The Abbot spoke the Thanksgiving prayers. His stately words meant little to me, but I remember that there was a late blackbird singing in the orchard, and the wind came siffling up
from the marshes, and I had my own Thanksgiving prayer within me, because there was one less settlement of the Sea Wolves in Britain. Afterward they brought out and held up before us their chief
treasure; some bones from Saint Alban’s foot, I think it was. The light from the open doorway woke colored fires in the goldwork and enamel of the reliquary, as the Abbot raised it between
his hands; and I heard the soft awed gasp of the village folk, who lived, as it were, in the shadow of its sanctity.

Then mercifully there was food at last. We made camp in the orchard, and ate there, for, like the church, the hall would not have held half of us, let alone the huddled refugees of the
countryside. The brown-clad Brothers served and ate with us; and the Abbot served me with his own hands.

We had a fire, well clear of the apple trees, and by the flicker of it I saw the young novice watching me, more than once. And late that evening, as I crossed the monastery garth toward the
bothy where our sorest wounded had been housed, I met him coming from there, swinging a lantern in his hand and walking with that faint drag of the left foot that I had noticed before. ‘How
is it with Gault and the others?’ I asked as we came together, and jerked my chin in the direction of the bothy.

‘I think that if they do not take the wound fever, they will do well enough. How is it with that arm, my Lord Artos?’

‘Well enough, also. You’re a good surgeon.’

‘It is my hope that I shall be, one day.’

I would have gone on, but he lingered as though there was something he wanted urgently to say; and I found myself lingering also. Besides, he had been catching at my interest all evening.
‘Is that why you entered the religious life?’ I asked after a moment.

‘There is nowhere that one can learn or follow the healer’s craft outside the Church, in these days,’ he said; and then, speaking as though the words stuck a little in his
throat, ‘That is a good enough reason for my choice of life, but lest it should fail me, I’ve another.’ He thrust forward his bare left foot from the thick folds of his habit, and
glancing down at the sudden movement, I saw that it was turned inward, wasted and drawn up like the cramped claw of a bird, and the reason for his slight lameness became clear. ‘I am a
younger son. I possess nothing of my own save a certain skill with wound salves and black draughts; I had the normal weapon training that all boys have, but as my father was at pains to make clear
to me, I’d not be likely to find a lord overeager to take a fighting man as slow-footed as I am into his hall.’

‘I wonder if he was right,’ I said.

‘My Lord Artos is kind. I have wondered the same thing – now and then. But I expect he was.’

‘I am willing to believe, at all events, that you will make a better surgeon than you would have made a soldier,’ I said. ‘Why do you make this defense, as though I had accused
you of something?’

His eyes were bright and wretched in the lantern light, and he laughed a little drearily. ‘I don’t know ... I suppose because it is a time for taking the sword, and I would not have
you think—’ He caught at the words as though to have them unspoken again. ‘No, that is presumption; it sounds as though I were fool enough to think that you – that
you—’

‘Might waste my time thinking of you at all,’ I said, rescuing him from the stammer. ‘My way is the sword and yours is prayer, and both are good. It should not matter to you
what I think of you.’

‘It will always matter to men, what you think of them,’ he said; and then on a lighter note, ‘Nevertheless, it is good to follow the healer’s craft.’

‘It is a craft not without its uses when men take to the sword, Brother ... What name do they call you by?’

‘Gwalchmai.’

Gwalchmai, the Hawk of May; it was a piteously ill-fitting name, for he was built more like a partridge than a hawk.

He hitched up the lantern and began to swing it. ‘It’s comic really, isn’t it? My Lord Artos, they have made the guest place ready for you – but they will have told you
that.’

‘They told me. But I had liefer sleep with my men in the orchard. God’s night to you, Brother Gwalchmai.’ And we went our separate ways, I to see for myself how Gault and the
other three were doing, and he, swinging his lantern in blurred gouts of light before him, on across the garth to the place where the novices slept.

Presently I went back to my Companions, and slept a good sleep under the apple trees, wrapped in my cloak and with my head on Cabal’s flank for a pillow. There is no pillow in the world so
good as a hound’s flank.

Next morning ‘the bloom began to wear off the bilberries,’ as they say; and it was Brother Lucian the Infirmarer, in all innocence of heart, who first showed me that it was so. I had
been down to the low pastures to look at the monastery’s horses – particularly those who were part broken ready for the autumn markets. There were four or five of them big-boned enough
to be of some use to us, which might serve to fill up our losses; and I was considering in my mind the price to offer for them. I might be able to get the price out of Guidarius – after all,
we were fighting his battles – or failing that, there was something in the war kist, for a few of us had lands of our own; we had sold off the poorer yearlings from the breeding runs, and the
Saxon weapons and goldsmiths’ work that we took from time to time fetched a good price. It mostly went on horses, but not when I could get them in any other way, for I had always to keep
something in reserve against the days when gold might be the only way there was.