Sword at Sunset (43 page)

A dozen startled faces looked back at me in the red upward glow of the brazier. Cei was the first to speak, playing in the way he had with the blue glass bracelets on his wrist. ‘I thought
you would as lief part with your sword arm as with the horses.’

‘Almost as lief,’ I said.

Bedwyr, squatting on the pile of wolfskins that sometimes served me as a bed, his harp as usual on his knee, leaned forward into the light that turned his face into a copper mask. ‘Then
why this sudden desire for amputation?’

‘Because Earth Mother has told the Old Woman in Druim’s house that this will be a winter like a white beast that strives to tear men’s hearts out. There will be no grazing-out
in the mild spells, and the Wolf-People will hunt to the fortress gates. So says Earth Mother.’

Pharic’s black brows drew together. ‘And think you that Druim’s word and the word of the Old Woman and Earth Mother are to be trusted so much?’ He broke into a somewhat
scornful grin. ‘Oh, I doubt not that they are speaking the truth as they believe it. So is old Blanid when she babbles of autumn berries. They believe so much, the Little Dark People, but
need
we
believe also?’

‘I – think so, yes. I propose to act on it as though I did, at all events; and if I am wrong, I give you leave to point the finger of laughter at me for all time.’

Within a week the horses had all gone south, save for three or four of the hardy hill ponies that we kept against possible need of a messenger. Most of our light riders were of course needed to
take them, one half directly south to the Corstopitum depot and on to Eburacum, and the other by Castra Cunetium and down to Deva. And with each, I sent half a squadron of the Companions –
Flavian, as it chanced, in command. I gave orders, since there seemed little help for it, that the men were to winter with the horses, and bring them up again in the spring.

We had brought up the last of the winter supplies with us from Corstopitum, and with good stocks of meal and salted carcasses in the long store barn, we settled down to make all secure and
galley-shape for the winter that Druim Dhu had promised us. We mended again the cracks in the barrack-row walls, where the autumn rains had washed out the mud of our previous repairs (we were
almost as great workers with mud, by that time, as the swallows who built every spring under the eaves of the Praetorium), we got in extra peat and firewood, melted down every scrap of fat for
candles, and piled up great ricks of russet bracken for bedding and the ponies’ fodder. This being our fifth winter in the Three Hills, we must push farther afield in our foraging and
woodcutting, and without the aid of the wiry little pack beasts that in past winters we had relied on to carry the loads. But with no horses to tend and exercise, we had more time than usual on our
hands even so; and we hunted hard, that autumn, eating fresh meat while we could.

I had thought, naturally, to see no more of the horses or the men who had gone with them, until spring, but in half a month the Eburacum part of the squadron under Corfil, who had stepped into
Fercos’s place as Flavian’s second, plodded in on foot, having done the march, so they reported without undue humility, in the exact nine days laid down for the Legions in the days of
good roads. And two days after Samhain, as though his arrival was the signal for the white beast to begin his prowling, Flavian himself, with his half squadron behind him, staggered in through the
Praetorium Gate in a blinding snowstorm.

‘I didn’t think we were going to make it,’ he said, when he came to me in my quarters.

I cursed him where he stood. ‘You bleeding fool! Didn’t I give the whole lot of you orders to stay south until the spring – and you with a wife and son in Deva!’

He blinked at me in the light of the lantern, the snow on his shoulders melting into dark wetness at the edges, and grinned, weary but unashamed. ‘It is a different matter for the
auxiliaries.
We
are the Brotherhood, and we have always been an unruly lot. We didn’t like the order, so we took a vote on it and decided to mutiny.’

Earth Mother had spoken truth. By mid-November we were sunk so deep in winter that we might have been in a world that had never known spring. At first the snow was not deep, save in the hollows
and the northward-facing glens, for the first fall had melted, and the stuff that followed it was wet, sleet and half-frozen rain that drove and drenched across the fort before bitter gales from
the northeast. Eildon must have sheltered us a little, but I think not much, and the wind howled day after day down through the hazel woods to fling itself like a living enemy upon the old red
sandstone fort above the river. The woods boomed and roared like a great sea beating upon a wild coast; and indeed for days at a time, for all that we could see of Eildon and the hills beyond, we
might have been perched on some headland high above a raging sea. And then after a month, the wild gales fell still, and out of the stillness came snow, and an ever-increasing cold that made the
sword hilt sear the hand, and narrowed the spring under the hazel bushes that had been the gift of the Little Dark People to the merest dribbling thread of water, under a curtain of black ice. And
in the long nights the strange, colored fires that Pharic’s people called the ‘Crown of the North’ and Druim’s ‘The Dancers’ played more brightly than ever I had
seen them, across the northern sky.

But under the covering of snow, our log and brushwood piles were broad and long, and the peat stacks rose beside the living place doors, the stores were gathered in, and we had even a cartload
of sour wine to help out the local heather beer at the times when men need to make merry. And with no need to trouble for the horses’ fodder (but God of gods, how we missed the stamping in
the picket lines, and how the loneliness, the sense of being utterly cut off from the world, increased upon us with the horses gone!) we felt that we could outlast the winter well enough.

That was until Midwinter’s night.

For all of us that night had some meaning. For those of us who were Christians, it had become the custom in our fathers’ fathers’ time to celebrate the birth of the Christos on that
night, when the old year goes down into the dark, and out of the dark all things are born anew. To those who followed the Old Faith, it was the night of the Midwinter Fires, when one made all the
light and heat one could, to help the sun grow strong again and drive out the darkness and the cold. For the few among us who bore the small telltale brand of Mithras between the brows, it was,
just as to the Christians, the Saviour’s birth night. To most of us it was, I suppose, in some sort a mingling of all these things, and to all of us, when the worship was over, it was a night
for as much merrymaking as could be crammed into it, and as much heather beer. In an open winter when the hunting was good, we were able to get fresh meat for the Midwinter feast; but this year
there had been no hunting for upward of a month, and we should have no release from the tyranny of boiled salt beef and mutton. But there was always the beer. Each year I released three days’
supply of beer to make up for the shortage in other directions. That meant the portion of the garrison who had weaker heads than the rest, or who got more than their fair share, were drunk by
midnight, and greeted the next day with aching head and bloodshot eyes and tempers. What would have happened if the fort had ever been attacked at that time, I sweat to think; but I knew the limits
of my power with the wild auxiliaries; they were not the Company, and it did not extend to keeping them sober on Midwinter night. Besides, men do not remain at their best, especially cut off in the
wilds, if they may not make merry to the full, now and then.

But I, I dreaded Midwinter, and was always devoutly thankful when it was over for another year and the fort not burned down about our ears.

This particular Christ’s Mass night was no worse than its forerunners had been, until one of the mule drivers having (so his mates said afterward) drunk himself into a state of deep
suspicion of the world, got the idea that he was somehow being cheated of his fair share, and stealing a half-full beerskin, departed to make merry by himself in a corner of the derelict mill shed
which backed onto the main store barn. What happened after that, no one can ever know. In all likelihood he kicked over the lantern he had brought with him and it opened as it fell, the guttering
flame caught the dry-bracken fodder stored there, and the wind blowing through the holes in the roof did the rest.

The first that anyone knew of the danger was when one of the guard (we always kept a small and comparatively sober guard, even on Midwinter’s night) saw smoke curling up through the rents
in the mill shed roof.

I was with the main uproar in the mess hall when the man came running with his news, and the Companions and most of the auxiliaries gathered there with me; but the baggage train folk had
quarters of their own beyond the old parade ground, and there would be small knots making merry all over the camp, many of them half drunk by this time. I got hold of Prosper, who was still smiling
somewhat owlishly into the fire while the other men stumbled cursing to their feet all about him, and shook him into awareness. ‘Get out of here and sound me the alarm, and keep on sounding
it!’ I told him, and casting a hurried glance around me, saw that most of the Companions, at least, still looked reasonably serviceable.

‘They’ll think it’s an attack,’ someone objected.

‘What in Hell’s name does that matter, if it gets their heads out of the beer jar?’ I was already running for the door, Cabal leaping ahead of me in wild excitement. I ran as
though for my life across the empty parade ground and down toward the lower camp, most of the Brotherhood pelting at my heels, and behind us, clear and true and rock-steady – it is wonderful
what habit will do – I heard the notes of the great aurochs horn sounding the alarm.

By the time we reached the clear space before the mill shed and workshop, there was a crowd that thickened every moment, as men tumbled out from their merrymaking in answer to the urgent summons
of the horn and, as word leapt from man to man like heath fire itself, headed down toward the disaster. There could be no doubt now as to where the fire was; flame had followed the smoke; it was
already bursting through the rough thatch in a score of places, leaping up into the night, and the flickering glare of it brightened over the gaping faces of the crowd. The wind that had been
rising all day was blowing hard from the northeast by that time, driving dark rags of cloud across the frost-fierce stars; driving also the licking flames along the thatch toward the store
barn.

They got the door open just as I arrived, and the red furnace burst of flame that leapt up behind it on the instant drove them back as though from a charge of horsemen. I forced my way through
them, yelling, ‘Leave that, you fools! The flames are spreading to the barn roof. Get the stores out!’ Pharic and I and a couple more of us, heads down behind our arms, managed to get
the door shut again, while Bedwyr was already busy organizing a bucket chain from the well, with any and everything capable of holding water – we had enough men to fight a score of fires,
scarce enough water to quench a candle. But there was the snow; it did not serve so well as water, but it was better than nothing. We blanketed the flames with it as best we could, while men
swarming onto the roof strove to tear away the thatch and rafters in the path of the fire. The ponies in their nearby shed were shrieking in terror as the smoke reached them, but they were in no
danger as yet. Others of us, the women among them, were working desperately to get out the stores. They might have saved the whole, but the door, which we had made ourselves to close the gap where
the old one had rotted away, was of green wood because we had no seasoned timber, and prone to jam. It jammed now; perhaps the heat had something to do with it; and by the time it had been broken
in, while several of the lads getting onto the roof and tearing up the smoldering thatch, dropped through into what might like enough have been their deathtrap, the fire was there ahead of
them.

Our store of mutton tallow added to the blaze, making the whole store shed a torch. Rags of blazing thatch had begun to tear off and whirl away downwind like birds of fire, and I sent men
running to watch against other outbreaks. The flames leapt higher, bending over at the crest, and the flickering light beat upon our scorching eyeballs, the thick smoke cloud choked us, and the
fire seemed to be in our very lungs. In the end we got less than half the stores out, before the roof came down with a rending crash and a roar of flame, engulfing two men.

The fire was beginning to sink, the darkness creeping back over the fort, and we had kept the flames from spreading to any other building. But that was the best that could be said. I remember,
as one remembers a dark dream, men bringing lanterns, now that the fire was low, to light the work of salvage, and myself standing in the trampled slush that was already freezing over again,
surrounded by scorched men and half-charred carcasses of meat, and grain baskets with the coarse meal seeping out through the blackened slits in their sides. I was rank with sweat, and the sweat
was turning icy on me in the bitter wind, and the palms of my hands seemed fayed and full of pulsing fire. Guenhumara was there too, with a great smear of black across her forehead. I suppose I
must have asked her what she did there – I always made her go with Blanid to her own quarters, and bolt the door, when the drinking started – for she said breathlessly, ‘Carrying
water. Was I to stay in my rooms, with the horn sounding the alarm, and men crying fire through the camp?’ And then, ‘Artos, your eyebrows are singed off,’ and then in quick
concern as Cabal crouched panting against my legs, and I made to fondle his poor scorched head, ‘Oh my dear, your hands! Your poor hands! Come up with me and let me salve them.’

But I had other things to do just then. There would be time presently for Guenhumara’s salves, there was none now.