Sword at Sunset (7 page)

All the multitude of nameless preparations to be made for a long journey were made at last and with nineteen of the Company, I set out from Venta. So many would eat badly into our gold, but I
did not see how we were to do with less, especially if we were to get the stallions overland to Armorica and so avoid the long sea voyage. The gold we carried sewn into the wadding of the thick
riding pads, and wore above our elbows only an arm ring each for immediate use.

Three days later we rode into this place, this place among the reedbeds and the western marshes, which the Celts among us call the Island of Apples; and found Ambrosius’s big black
stallion Hesperus tethered with a few other horses among the trees of the monks’ orchard – for there were holy men here then, even as there are now, and as they claim there had been
almost since the time of Christ. We tethered our horses with Ambrosius’s, under the apple trees where the grass grew sweet and tall for grazing, and followed the young brown-clad Brother who
had taken us in charge, up to the long hall beside the wattle church, which formed as it were the center of the cluster of small thatched cells, like the queen cell in a humblebee’s nest. The
place was thick with the smoky light of the fat-lamps hanging from the rafters, and the Brothers were already gathering to the evening meal of bread and kale broth, for it was a fast day, and
Ambrosius and his handful of Companions sat with the Abbot at the head of the rough plank table. I had been dreading the meeting, fearing, I think, not so much what he might see in my face as what
I might see in his; fearing in some confused and nightmare way that because I had seen the likeness to him in Ygerna, I must see the likeness to Ygerna in him. Indeed if it were not for shame, I
would not have taken this road at all, but held westward by the lower way and so shirked the meeting ...

I did not look at him fully as I walked up the timber hall, and knelt with bowed head before him, according to the custom. He made the gesture to me to rise, and I got slowly to my feet, and
looked at last into his face.

Ygerna was not there. There was a surface likeness of form and color, the dark skin and the slender bones beneath it, and the way the brows were set. It was that that had tugged at my memory
with its unavailing warning. But the man whose face flashed open to smile at me out of the strange rain-gray eyes was Ambrosius as he had always been. The breath broke in my throat with relief and
I bent forward to receive his kinsman’s embrace.

When the simple meal was over, we left the Brothers to their souls and our own men to playing knucklebones about the fire, and went out, the two of us, with Cabal stalking as usual at my heel,
to sit on the low turf wall that held the orchard from the marsh; and talked together as we had had no chance to since the night that Ambrosius gave me my sword.

The moon was up and the mist rising over the marshes and the withy beds like the rising tide of a ghost sea; the higher ground stood clear of it, islands above high-water mark, rising to the
steep thrust of the hill crowned with its sacred thorns; but at the lower levels of the orchard a lantern tossing its way along the horse lines had a faint golden smoke about it. The first pale
petals were drifting from the apple trees, with no wind to flurry them abroad. Behind us we heard the quiet voices of the camp and the holy place. The marsh was silent until somewhere far out in
the mist a bittern boomed, and was silent again. It was a very peaceful place. It still is.

After a while, carefully keeping to the obvious, Ambrosius said, ‘So we meet on your road to Septimania.’

I nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘You still feel that you must needs go yourself on this journey? You do not feel that the sorer need of you is here?’

I was dandling my sword between my knees, looking out into the mist that crept nearer across the marsh. ‘God knows I have thought the thing over through enough of nights. God knows how
bitterly I grudge a whole summer’s campaigning; but I cannot trust another man to pick my war-horses for me; too much depends on them.’

‘Not even Aquila?’

‘Aquila?’ I said reflectively. ‘Yes, I’d trust old Aquila; but I cannot find it in my mind to think that you would lend me Aquila.’

‘No,’ Ambrosius said. ‘I would not – I could not lend you Aquila; not both of you in one year.’ He turned toward me abruptly. ‘What of your men, Bear Cub,
while you’re away?’

‘I lend them back to you. Hunt my pack for me, Ambrosius, till I come again.’

For a while we talked over the mares I had chosen for my breeding herd, and the plans that I had made with Hunno, and the money I had raised off my own estates; of the defenses that Ambrosius
had been riding here in the West, and a score of other things, until at last we fell silent again, a long silence while the mist and the moon rose together, until presently Ambrosius said,
‘It was good, to get back to the mountains?’

‘It was good, yes.’ But I suppose something in my voice rang false, for he turned his head and sat looking at me fixedly. And in the stillness, somewhere among the reedbeds the
bittern boomed again, and again was silent.

‘But something I think was not so good. What was it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

I felt my hands tighten on my sword hilt until the pommel with its great square-edged amethyst cut into my palm, and forced a laugh. ‘More times than once, you have told me that I show all
things too clearly in my face. But this time you ride your own fancy. There is nothing there to show.’

‘Nothing?’ he said again.

And I turned deliberately to face him in the full white moonlight. ‘Do I seem changed in some way?’

‘No,’ he said slowly, consideringly. ‘More as though you found us – our world – changed; or were afraid to find it so. When you came into the holy men’s hall
this evening, you held yourself as long as might be, from looking into my face. And when you looked at last, it was as though you feared to see the face of a stranger – even an enemy. It
is—’ His voice dropped even lower, and all the while he had been speaking scarcely above his breath. ‘You make me think of a man such as the harpers sing of, who has passed a
night in the Hollow Hills.’

I was silent a long time, and I think I nearly told him all the story. But in the end I could not; I could not though my soul had depended upon it. I said, ‘Maybe I have passed my night in
the Hollow Hills.’

And even as I spoke, up beyond the apple trees the bell of the wattle church began to ring, calling the Brothers to evening prayer; a bronze sound, a brown sound in the moonlight, falling among
the apple trees. Ambrosius went on looking at me for a moment, but I knew that he would press the thing no further; and I remained for the same moment, playing with the hilt of the great sword
across my knees, and letting the quiet of the moment soak into me before I must rouse myself to go forward again. ‘If I were indeed newcome from the Hollow Hills, at least this must be the
place of all others, with the bell calling my soul back to the Christian’s God ... It is a good place – peace rises in it as the mist over the reedbeds. It would be a good place to come
back to in the end.’

‘In the end?’

‘When the last battle is fought and the last song sung, and the sword sheathed for the last time,’ I said. ‘Maybe one day when I am past fighting the Saxon kind, I shall give
my sword to whoever comes after me, and come back here as an old dog creeps home to die. Shave my forehead and bare my feet, and strive to make my soul in whatever time is left to me.’

‘That is the oldest dream in the world,’ Ambrosius said, getting to his feet. ‘To lay down the sword and the Purple and take up the begging bowl. I don’t see you with
bare feet and a shaven forehead, Artos my friend.’

But even as he spoke, it seemed to me that the great purple amethyst in my sword pommel tilted a fraction under my finger, as though it were not quite secure in its bed. I bent quickly to
examine it and Ambrosius checked in the act of turning away. ‘Something amiss?’

‘I thought Maximus’s seal felt loose in its setting. Seems secure enough now, though; probably I imagined it ... I’ll get the next goldsmith I can find, to take a look at it, all
the same.’

But the bell was ringing louder, and the sound of singing stole down through the apple trees, and if we were to pay the Brothers the small courtesy of joining them at prayer, we must move. I got
up, stirring the unwilling Cabal with my foot. ‘Up, lazy one!’ and with the hound’s cold muzzle thrusting into my hand, walked with Ambrosius up through the orchard. I thought no
more about the loosened amethyst, until a later day reminded me ...

Well before spring had given place to summer, I and my small band were in Dumnonia, and lodged with Cador the Prince, while we waited for a ship. I had thought to find him in the old frontier
town of Isca Dumnoniorum, or at his summer capital on the Tamara River; but it seemed that Cador had as little liking for cities as have the Saxons, and so those few waiting days were spent up on
the skirts of the high moors where he had his Dun with his warriors and his women and his wealth of cattle gathered about him, like any wild Hibernian chieftain.

On the last evening, we came back from hunting with a couple of the proud red deer that roam those hills slung across the backs of the ponies. It had been a good day’s hunting, and for a
while, just for a while, I seemed to have outdistanced certain pursuing hounds of my own. We came up to the Dun, with our shadows running far ahead of us through the brown of last year’s
heather and the fragile green of the spring-sown barley; and the pleasant tiredness that comes of a day’s hunting was in all our limbs. Cabal ran at my horse’s forefoot apart from the
rest of the pack. He was the greatest of them all though Cador had fine hounds, too. We clattered through the broad gateway of the Dun, and among the byres and stables of the forecourt, where the
tall weapon stone stood for the warriors to sharpen their blades in time of battle, we handed over the ponies and the kill to the men who came for them, and went on together, toward the inner
court.

A knot of women sat before the doorway of the long timber hall, in the thin shade of the ancient half-sacred whitethorn tree that grew there. ‘Sa sa! The fine weather has brought the women
out like midges in the sunlight,’ Cador said, as we came in sight of them. The sight was a good one to see. The dappling sunspots quivered on the blue and russet and saffron of their tunics,
as the small lazy breeze stirred the whitethorn branches and brought down the first thin drifts of fading petals; and they were talking softly, like a huddle of colored birds, some of them
spinning, one girl combing out wet hair to dry in the sun; while Esylt, Cador’s wife, sat in their midst, restringing a broken necklace of amber beads, with something small and mewing like a
kitten in the soft folds of a fallow doeskin at her feet.

I knew that Cador had a son, born since Ambrosius’s crowning, and named Constantine for my grandsire, but I had not seen him before, though I had heard him yelling like a hungry lamb in
the women’s quarters. Cador had been ashamed to show any interest in the thing before other men, but now that he could do so without seeming eager, I think he was pleased to show it off to
the stranger within his gates. At all events, his step quickened as we came into the inner court.

Esylt looked up with a melon-shaped bead of amber between her fingers, her eyes narrowed against the watering sunlight. ‘You are come home early, my lord. Was the hunting not
good?’

‘Good enough to show the Bear that there are other hunting runs than those of his own mountains,’ Cador said. ‘We killed twice.’ He bent down, his hands on his knees, to
peer at the small squirming thing in the doeskin, then glanced aside at his woman with a snapping flash of white teeth. ‘Why then, should I not come home early from my hunting? Is it that I
might find something or some
one
that I am not meant to find?’

‘There are three men hidden in the folds of my skirt, and the fourth lies there,’ said Esylt, pointing to the child with the hand in which she held the thread. ‘If you would
know
his
father, you have but to look at him.’

It sounded like a quarrel, but it was a game, the kind of half-fierce, half-laughing game that boys and hounds play together in mimic war. Also it was born of the fact that Cador knew that there
was no one that he was not meant to find, and so could afford the jest. I had never seen a man and a woman make that kind of play together, and it seemed to me good.

‘So, but I cannot see it all; it might be a small pink pig. What is it bundled up like that for?’

‘Because the sun is westering and the wind grows cold,’ Esylt said, suddenly laughing. ‘He is much the same as he was this morning. But see, if you would have it so,’ and
she turned back the folds of deerskin, so that the man-child lay naked in its nest, save for the bead of coral that every babe wears around its neck to keep off the Evil Eye. ‘There is your
pink pig.’

Cador grinned at it. ‘Small and useless,’ he said, studying to keep the pride from his voice. ‘When he comes of an age to bear his shield,
that
is the time when it may
be worth while to have a son.’

And for me, at his words, there was suddenly a shadow over the sky, and the hounds were on my track again.

Cabal, who should have been a bitch for his interest in all young things, thrust forward his muzzle to snuff at the babe, and I stooped quickly to catch his collar and pull him back. He would
not have dreamed of harming the thing, but it was in my mind that the mother might be frightened. And as I stooped, Maximus’s seal in my sword hilt sprang from its faulty setting, and fell
into the nest of deerskin beside the babe and rolled against his far neck, to lie there an instant holding the fires of the sunset in a small fierce flame of imperial purple.

Esylt stooped and caught it up next instant and gave it back to me, and everybody spoke at once, the women exclaiming over the lucky chance that it had not fallen somewhere among the heather,
Cador peering into the empty socket of my pommel; while my men and his crowded around to see. And I laughed, and made a jest of the thing, and tossed the gem in the hollow of my hand. It was all
over in the time that it takes a gust of wind to sweep up over the shoulder of Yr Widdfa and die into the grass. But an old woman under the May tree whispered something to her neighbor, and they
looked from the child to me and back again, as I turned to follow Cador into the hall. And I caught the gist that was not meant for my ear. ‘It is a sign! A sign! Constantine is an
emperor’s name ... ’