Sword at Sunset (3 page)

‘Why so?’

‘Our native horse breeds have dwindled in size since the Legions ceased to import mounts for their cavalry.’

‘They acquitted themselves none so ill at Guoloph last autumn – you of all men should know that,’ Ambrosius said, and began to hum very softly, part of the triumph song that
old Traherne our harper had made for me on the night after that battle.
‘Then came Artorius, Artos the Bear, thundering with his squadrons from the hill; then the world shook and the sods
flew like startled swallows from beneath his horses’ hooves
...
like leaves before a wind, like waves before a galley’s prow the war hosts of Hengest curled back and
scattered
...
’

‘It is in my mind that Traherne had been drinking to our victory and the Gods of the Harp spoke to him in a blaze of heather beer,’ I said. ‘But as for the horses: they are
fine little brutes, our native hill breeds; swift and valiant, and surefooted as mountain sheep – and not much larger. Save for Arian there’s scarce a horse in all our runs that is up
to my weight with even the lightest armor.’

‘Armor?’ he said quickly. We had always ridden light, in leather tunics much like the old Auxiliary uniform, with our horses undefended.

‘Yes, armor. Chain-mail shirts for the men – they would have to come as and when we could take them in battle, there are no British armorers that have that particular skill. Boiled
leather would serve for the horses’ breast guards and cheekpieces. It was so that the Goths broke our Legions at Adrianople close on two hundred years ago; but the Legions never fully learned
the lesson.’

‘A student of world history.’

I laughed. ‘Was I not schooled by your old Vipsanius, whose mind was generally a few hundred years and a few thousand miles away? But he talked sense now and then. It is the weight that
does it, the difference between a bare fist and one wearing the cestus.’

‘Only you need the bigger horses.’

‘Only I need the bigger horses,’ I agreed.

‘What is the answer?’

‘The only answer that I can think of is to buy a couple of stallions – the Goths of Septimania breed such horses – of the big forest strain, sixteen or seventeen hands high,
and a few mares, and breed from them and the best of our native mares.’

‘And as to price? You’ll not get such beasts for the price of a pack pony.’

‘They cost, on the average as I gather, the stallions each as much as six oxen; the mares rather more. I can raise perhaps the price of two stallions and seven or eight mares from my own
lands that you passed on to me from my father – without selling off the land, that is: I’ll not betray my own folk by selling them like cattle to a new lord.’

Ambrosius was staring into the red heart of the brazier, his black brows drawn together in thought. Then he said, ‘Too long. It will take too long. With twice as many you might have enough
of your big brutes grown and broken to mount at least your best men in three or four years; within ten you might well be able to mount your whole force.’

‘I know,’ I said, and we looked at each other through the faint smoke drift and the tawny upward glow of the brazier that threw into relief the old brand of Mithras between
Ambrosius’s brows that scarcely showed by daylight.

‘You spoke of yourself a while since, as of a son going out into the world,’ he said at last. ‘So be it, you are all the son I ever had or ever shall have, and the Lord of
Light forbid that I should send you out with an empty hand. We are none of us rich in these days, and one cannot build a fortress for nothing, or you should have more. I will give you the price of
another ten beasts.’ And then before I could thank him, he rose with the controlled swiftness that was part of him, and turned away, saying, ‘More light, Bear Cub, the candles are at
your elbow.’

And while I lit a twig at the brazier and kindled the thick honey-wax candles on the writing table, he crossed to the big chest against the far wall, and stooped and flung back the lid. The
candle flames sank, and then sprang up into the shape of laurel leaves, gold fringed with the perfect blue of the sky’s zenith at the heart, and the room that had been lost in shadows sprang
to life, the bull’s-head frescoes on the walls, the scroll ends of Ambrosius’s treasured library making a dim black-and-gold lozenge pattern in their shelves; and the storm and darkness
of the night seemed to crouch back a little.

Ambrosius had taken something long and narrow from the chest and was turning back the folds of oiled linen that had been bound about it. ‘A while since also,’ he said, ‘you
spoke of my giving you your wooden foil. Let this serve instead – Give me your own in exchange for it.’ And he turned and put into my hands a sword. It was a long cavalry spatha exactly
like the one that I had carried since I became a man; and not knowing quite what to do, I drew it from its black wolfskin sheath, and let the light run like water on the blade. It was a fine
weapon, perfectly balanced so that as I cut the air with it, it came up again into my hand almost of its own accord; but so did my own blade. Then I made a discovery. ‘Ambrosius, it is your
sword!’

I suppose he saw my bewilderment, for sitting down again in his chair by the fire, he half smiled. ‘Yes, it is my sword. But not all my sword. Look at the pommel.’

The hilt was of bronze finely inlaid with silver along the shoulders, the grip bound with silver wires, and as I reversed it, holding it point down, I saw that set into the pommel was a great
square amethyst. It was so dark in color as to be almost of the imperial purple, and as I moved it, suddenly the light of the candles gathered in it, and far down through the lucid depth, a spark
of violet radiance blazed for an instant like a small fierce jet of flame. And above it, clear on the pale surface sheen of the gem, I saw an imperial eagle, intaglio cut, grasping in its claws a
double M; and spelled out around the edge, turning the sword to catch the light on the letters, the single word
IMPERATOR
.

‘Do you remember that?’ Ambrosius asked.

‘Yes, you showed it to me once; it is Maximus’s seal.’ It had been kept always at Dynas Pharaon in the home hall of the Laborer, and so had escaped the rising that swept so
much away. ‘But it was not in any sword then.’

‘No, I had it set for you, and the sword seemed the most fit setting.’

I remember that I stood for a long time looking at the great seal, waking and losing the star in the heart of the amethyst, oddly moved by the link across the years with my great-grandsire, the
proud Spanish general who had married a princess of Arfon and so founded our line before his own legionaries had proclaimed him Emperor and he had marched out to his Gaulish campaigns and his death
at Aquileia. After his execution, one of his officers had got his seal back to Arfon, to the princess his wife; and now it seemed to me that I was holding the whole history of our line in the dark
depth of the gem that was so nearly the color of an emperor’s mantle. A stormy and a bitter history, but a proud one; of Maximus himself; of Constantine, the son he had left, sweeping down
from the Arfon glens, out of the very snows of Yr Widdfa, to drive back the Saxon hordes, dying at last of a murderer’s javelin in the throat, here at Venta in his own hall. Ambrosius had
told me that story often enough; he had been only nine years old, and Utha two years older, for they were the sons of their father’s old age; but he had told me once that he still dreamed of
the firebrands and the shouting, and being carried off across somebody’s saddlebow with a cloak flung over his head. It had been days before he knew that he and Utha, snatched away by a
faithful few of their father’s household warriors, were all that was left of the Royal House of Britain; months before he knew that Vortigern of Powys, Vortigern the Red Fox, their
marriage-kinsman, had usurped the chief power in the land. Vortigern’s story was in the seal, too; Vortigern the dreamer of magnificent twilight dreams, to whom all that had to do however
distantly with Rome was a worse thing than the menace of the Saxon hordes; who had brought in Saxon war bands to hold down the Picts for him, and found too late that he had called the Wolves in
over his threshold. And there in the seal, too, was I, who now held it ... My mother died when I was born, and either because he felt himself guilty of her death, or because I was, after all, a son,
Utha took me into his household and put me to nurse with the wife of his chief hunter; and after Utha’s death on a boar’s tusk, Ambrosius took me in his stead. I was four summers old
then, and thrust among the hounds for the place next to his knee, and when I got it, was content. I was, as he had said, the only son he ever knew, and assuredly he was all the father I had ever
needed. Through the years of waiting and making ready that were the years of my own growing up, through the years of long-drawn warfare that followed, quickening at last to our autumn’s
victory, I had ridden with Ambrosius since I was fifteen and first judged man enough to carry my sword. Therefore it had not been easy to tell him tonight that henceforth I must ride alone. But I
think that he had known it already.

Again the star blazed up in the royal depth of the amethyst, and I thought of another thing, and looked up. ‘Ambrosius – you cannot give me this. The sword, yes, I take that gladly
in exchange for mine; but the seal is another matter. It is of the Royal House, even as you say.’

‘Well? And are you not of the Royal House? Not your father’s son?’

‘My mother’s also,’ I said.

‘Who, then, should I give it to?’

‘You have not so many gray hairs that you need take much thought of that as yet. When the time comes – Cador of Dumnonia, I suppose.’ I saw in my mind’s eye the dark
reckless face of the Prince of the Dumnonia, close to Ambrosius’s at the coronation feast. Thin and fiery like the fierce spirit that our people make from grain. A warrior, yes; but a High
King ... ?

‘He has less of the royal blood in him than you, and that on the mother’s side.’

‘He is not a bastard,’ I said. And the word sounded harshly in my own ears.

There was another silence; Cabal whimpered in his sleep, chasing dream hares, and the sleet spattered more sharply at the window. Then Ambrosius said, ‘Bear Cub, has that left a
scar?’

‘No, for you took care that it should not. But because of it, you must not give me this seal of the Royal House.’

He took up again the heavy gold bracelet that he had laid aside when he rose to fetch the sword. ‘You mistake. I could not give you this that can be worn by right only by the princes of
the House. The other was Maximus’s private seal and nothing more. In its way it is more potent than the arm ring, but it is mine to give – to my houndboy if I choose, and I choose that
it should follow, shall we say, the dexter line of the royal blood ... I have known for a long while that a night such as this must come, and I have known as long, that when it came you must take my
sword with you, Bear Cub, because I love you; and Maximus’s seal because you are its true lord.’

‘The light burns like a star in the heart of it,’ I said. ‘Maybe I can make it shine a small way further, into the dark ... I think we’re both a little drunk,
Ambrosius.’

But I do not think that we had touched the wine.

chapter two

M
ORE THAN TWO MONTHS LATER
I
WAS SQUATTING BESIDE
another fire – of crackling furze and heather roots that blazed on the
open turf before a herdsman’s bothy. It seemed to me bright as only a hill fire could be, just as the clear luminous darkness that pressed behind it could only be the darkness of the
hills.

Behind me in Venta I had gathered my hundred men, and now, with a handful of those who were closest to me, I had come up into the Arfon herding grounds to see for myself what Ambrosius’s
promised drafts might be likely to yield in the next few years, and choose out the best brood mares for my great stallions from among my own horse kind.

Spring had come to the valleys of Arfon though the white mane of winter snows still lay far down the north side of Yr Widdfa; and the night was full of the voices of running water, and from the
heather slopes behind the bothies, the curlews were calling as they would call almost all night long. But under the voices of the high hills, my ears seemed still to throb with the soft thunder of
unshod hooves. All day they had been rounding up the horse herds, bringing them in to this deep valley of Nant Ffrancon that in time of danger could give sheltered grazing to all the horses and
cattle of Arfon. The made horses had been brought up in small bands, sometimes even singly, to show their paces; and I had stood here in the loop of the stream where the herdsmen had their bothies
and their branding pens, to see them brought in; and afterward the leggy two-year-olds whose breaking had been begun that winter, the wild-eyed colts with matted manes and tails, and burrs in their
woolly winter coats; awkward and scary, the short hill turf flying in sods from under their stampeding hooves; the mares brought up more quietly, nervous and willful, with bellies beginning to drop
as foaling time drew near; the herdsmen on their little swift beasts handling them as a dog handles sheep. It had been a good sound, a good sight. All my life the sight of a made stallion or a mare
with her foal running at heel has been to me a thing to shake the heart with delight.

Now the sweating business of the day was over and, herdsmen and Companions, we had gathered together around the blaze, huddling our cloaks about us against the cold that prowled with the
darkness at our backs even while our faces scorched. We had eaten broiled mountain mutton and great hunks of rye bread and mare’s-milk cheese and wild honey; our bellies were full and our
work done, and as we sat talking, most of us, I think, still about the horses, content folded us around like a homespun blanket.

But for me, the blanket was somewhat threadbare, and a little cold wind blew through. It was good, unbelievably good, to be in the mountains again; but I had come to them as a man comes to the
house he has longed for – and found that among my own hills and my own people, something in me had become a stranger.