Sword at Sunset (8 page)

That was the first time I ever saw Constantine Map Cador face to face. The last was only a few days ago – I am not sure how many, it is hard to keep count of time – when I named him
as my successor before the whole war host. That was on the eve of the battle. The Lord God knows how he will bear the leadership, but he is the last of the line of Maximus, and at least he is a
warrior. The choice had to fall on him ...

‘You had best take that down to Urian my swordsmith,’ Cador said. ‘Blades are the business of his heart, but he can make shift to bed a jewel as surely as any goldsmith of
Venta Belgarum.’

And so I went down to the lower Dun, following the directions that he gave me, and found Urian the Smith to reset the great seal for me.

I was still standing propped in the forge doorway, watching the little bullock-shouldered smith – for I would not let the seal out of my sight until it was once more securely in its place
– when a step sounded behind me, and I turned to find Fulvius, who had gone down to the coast with a couple of Cador’s men to see about our passages, coming from the direction of the
stables.

‘Well?’ I said. ‘What fortune?’

He grinned, the grin that even when we were boys had always made me think of the little jaunty rough-haired dogs that one puts down rat holes, and wiped the dust and sweat of his ride into
streaks across his forehead with the back of one hand. ‘Well enough. I found a ship sailing for Burdigala in two days’ time, and contrived to strike a bargain with the master.
She’ll be coming back with a cargo of wine, but she’s going out in ballast with only a few raw bullhides for cargo, and he was glad enough to hear of some passengers to make the trip
more profitable.’

‘How much?’ I demanded.

‘An arm ring to every four heads – that’s if we don’t mind the likelihood of drowning.’

‘All things must have a first time,’ I said. ‘Does she leak like a sieve?’

‘She looks sound enough, but nigh as wide as she’s long. Na, I’d say on second thoughts we are more like to die of seasickness than drowning.’

That night we sat late after the evening meal, discussing the problem of horse transport. Cador had promised to find me two suitable vessels and have them ready on the far side of the Narrow Sea
by the middle of August, which, with luck, would leave us six weeks or so before the autumn gales, for the five or six trips that would be needed to get all the horses across. But the problem was
how they should be adapted in such a way that they could be returned to their normal use again afterward. The Roman horse transports had been built with entry parts below the waterline, through
which the horses were loaded while the vessels were high and dry, and which were closed and caulked afterward. But what shipmaster would allow his ship to have great wounds cut in her underwater
body? And we could not afford to buy ships, nor build them, even if there had been the time to do so. In the end it was decided that part of the decking must be torn up, and the horses drugged and
slung into the holds by means of slings and pulleys, the deck planks being replaced after them. It was a desperate measure, and I think we all prayed to God that it would not result in the deaths
of either men or horses; horses almost more than men, for they would be harder to replace. But there was no alternative that any of us could see.

The next day, leaving Cabal chained in an empty byre and howling his furious despair behind us, we rode down to the coast. (It was the only time in his life that he was parted from me, and I
felt much like a murderer.) And on the morning tide of the day after that, we sailed for Burdigala, packed close into the space left by the stinking bullhides, in a vessel that, as Fulvius had
said, was almost round, and wallowed like a sow in litter, into the troughs of the seas, so that one wondered at each weltering plunge whether she could ever shake clear again in time for the next
crest. We were very wretched, and presently we lost count of time, so that we had little idea of how many days we had been at sea when at last, having neither foundered nor fallen in with Sea
Wolves, we ran into the mouth of a broad Gaulish river. When we came ashore I was surprised to find, never having been to sea before, that the wooden jetty heaved up and down beneath my feet with
the long slow swing of the Atlantic swell.

At Burdigala we found a party of merchants gathering for the next stage of the journey, for it seemed that to the horse fairs of Narbo Martius, the merchant kind gathered from all over Gaul and
even from the nearer fringes of Hispana beyond the mountains that men call the Pyrenaei; not only horse traders, but those who came to trade among the horse traders, in anything from sweetmeats to
swords and painted pottery to ivory Astartes and cheap horoscopes. We joined ourselves to this party, and while we waited for the latecomers, set about buying the nags that we should need for the
next stage. We picked small sturdy brutes, with no looks or graces to add to their price, yet such as we might be able to sell again at Narbo Martius without too much trouble. I had thought that
the strange tongue might make bargaining difficult, but everyone spoke Latin of a barbarous kind – at least it sounded barbarous in our ears, but maybe ours sounded as barbarous in theirs
– and with the aid of a certain amount of counting on our fingers and shouting, we managed well enough. They are a goodly people to look upon, the Goths; tall men, some as tall as I am, and I
have met few men of my own height in Britain; fiercely proud, fair-haired but with more of yellow and less of red than our own mountain people have. Strange to think that these loyal vassals of the
Eastern Empire were the great-grandsons of the men who, seventy years ago, had sacked Rome and left it a smoking ruin. If they had not done so, perhaps the last Legions would not have been
withdrawn from Britain ... But there is no profit in such speculating.

The last comers joined the band, and we set out for Tolosa.

All the wide valley of the Garumna seemed, as we made our way eastward along what remained of the old road, to be wine country. I had seen a few vineyards, mostly falling into neglect, clinging
to a terraced hillside here and there throughout southern Britain, but never great stretches of vine country such as this. A smaller, darker people than the Goths were at work tying the vines along
the roadside, and from time to time we could see the great river that cast its gray sinuous curves across and across the countryside – but myself I have always loved best a mountain
stream.

On the fifth evening, our numbers swollen by other, smaller bands that had joined us on the road, we came in sight of Tolosa where the distant mountains began to thrust up into the sky. We spent
a day there to rest the horses and mules before the roughest part of the journey and get in supplies for ourselves. Everything for four camps among the mountains, said the fortune-teller, who had
taken that road many times before, and liked to bestow advice. And next morning, our numbers increased still further by the men who had joined us in the town, we rode out again with our faces to
the hills.

As the road lifted, and the vast vale of the Garumna fell behind us, the tall crests of the Pyrenaei, deeply blue as thunderclouds, marched in a vast rampart across the southern sky. But by the
second day I saw that we should not touch the mountains; they rose on either hand, maybe twenty miles away, and between them lay a lesser hill country through which the broad paved road ran,
terraced sometimes, or causewayed across a ravine, toward Narbo Martius and the coast. We jogged on at the same slow pace, pausing in what shade we could find during the heat of the day, passing
the nights huddled about our fires, for even in summer it could be chill at night, while the beasts stamped in their picket lines at the distant smell of wolf, and the guard sat huddled in their
cloaks and longed for morning. We – the Companions and I – slept sword in hand, with the precious riding pads for pillows. We did not distrust our fellow travelers; in such bands it is
a law that no man robs his brother, for the sufficient reason that in robber country where there are broken men among the hills, any breach in the traveling band may let in the enemy, and therefore
any man caught in such an act is driven from the band to make his own way, which, lacking the protection of their numbers, is likely to be a short one. None the less, there was always the risk of a
night attack by the hill robbers themselves, and we were running no risks.

But on the fifth day, without having met any worse trouble than somebody’s mule being overbalanced by its load and slithering into a ravine, we reined aside from the road into the shade of
a long skein of pine trees where a brown hill stream ran quietly over a paved ford, to make our last noontide halt. And sitting in the shade after we had sparingly watered the horses, and washed
the worst of the white dust out of our own eyes and mouths, I looked down over the gently dropping countryside to Narbo Martius and the sea.

This was a different world from the vine country around Tolosa; the hillside covered with a dense mat of aromatic things – thyme and broom and stone bramble were the only ones I knew
– and the quivering air was full of the hot rising scent of them and the darker scent of the pines. The land turned pale and sunburned below us, growing more and more bleached and barren as
it went seaward, and the sea was a darker blue than any that I have looked down on from the headlands of Dumnonia, though I have known that the color of a kingfisher’s mantle. A little wind
shivered up through the woods that followed the valleys, so that the thin scatter of gray-green trees turned to silver – wild olives, somebody said they were, later – and here and there
the pale discs of the threshing floors caught the heat-drained sunlight and shone like silver coins. Strange to be in a land where one could be so sure of the weather that one threshed in the
open.

But of all the scene before me, the thing that claimed and held my gaze was the pale checkered smudge of a town on the far-distant coast. Narbo Martius; and somewhere among its horse guards and
in fields, the stallions and brood mares that I had come to buy; the horses of my dream.

chapter five

A
T SUNSET, WITH THE DUST HAZE THAT ROSE FROM THE
hooves of the pack beasts turned to red-gold clouds in the westering rays, we clattered under the gate
arch into Narbo Martius, and found the place thrumming like a bee swarm with the crowds pouring in to the horse fair. It must have been a fine place once, one could see that even now; the walls of
the forum and basilica still stood up proudly above the huddle of reed thatch and timber, with the sunset warm on peeling plaster and old honey-colored stone; and above the heads of the crowds the
air was full of the darting of swallows who had their mud nests under the eaves of every hut and along every ledge and acanthus-carved cranny of the half-ruined colonnades. The smell of the evening
cooking fires was the arid reek of burning horse dung, such as the herdsmen burn in the valleys of Arfon.

The two or three inns which the place still possessed were already full and spilling over with merchants and their beasts, but the open spaces within the city walls had been roughly fenced off
with hurdles and rope and dead thornbushes, to serve as camps for the lesser folk and latecomers, and when the trading band broke up, we found a place in one of these, where a couple of score of
mules and their drivers were already encamped among their newly unloaded bales, and an ancient merchant sat under a striped canopy, scratching himself contentedly beneath his earth-colored blanket
robes, while his servants made camp about him. There was of course no service of any kind, no one in charge of anything, save for an immensely fat man with green glass earrings in his hairy ears,
who lolled under the awning of a wine booth – it was good wine, though; we tried it later – nor was there any food for the men, though we found that fodder for the beasts could be got
close by. So while Fulvius and Owain, who were our best foragers, went off to buy cooked food, the rest of us watered and tended the horses and made camp as best we could in the corner of the
corral not already occupied with kicking and snarling mules.

When the other two returned, we supped off loaves with little aromatic seeds sprinkled over the crust and cold boiled meat with garlic and green olives whose strange taste I was by this time
getting used to; and washed it down with a couple of jars of drink from the wine booth. Then we lay down to sleep save for Bericus and Alun Dryfed, who took the first watch.

For a long while I lay awake also, listening to the nighttime stirrings and tramplings of the camp and the city, and looking up at the familiar stars that had guided and companioned me so often
on the hunting trail, every fiber of me quivering with a strange expectancy that concerned something more than the horses that I should buy tomorrow. It had been growing in me all evening, that
mood of intense waiting, the certainty that something, someone, was waiting for me in Narbo Martius – or that I was waiting for them. So might a man feel, waiting for the woman he loved. I
even wondered if it might be death. But I fell asleep at last, and slept quietly and lightly, as a man sleeps on the hunting trail.

The midsummer horse fair, held on the level ground above the shore, lasted for seven days, and so I should be able to make my choice with care and maybe time for second thoughts, but by evening
on the second day I had bought well over half the horses I wanted, by dint of much vehement bargaining – duns for the most part, and dark brown, so dark as to be almost black, with a white
flame or star on the forehead – and it was beginning to be harder to find what I sought, or maybe I was becoming harder to please as I grew more used to the big powerful animals that filled
the selling grounds.

Yet it was on the third day that, as I pushed my way through the crowd at the far end of the sale ground, with Flavian beside me, I found the best horse that I had seen yet. I suppose he had
been brought in late, when the best of the others were gone. He was a full black, black as a rook’s wing. There are more bad horses among the black than any other color, but a good black is
own brother to Bucephalus. This was a good black, standing a clear sixteen hands at the shoulder, with a good broad head and high crest, power in every line of him, and fire in his heart and loins
to beget some of his own kind. But as I stopped to examine him more closely, I saw his eyes. I would have turned away, but the man in charge of him, a bowlegged individual with small twinkling eyes
and a lipless gash for a mouth, stayed me with a touch on my arm. ‘You’ll not see a better horse than this in Narbo Martius this year, my lord.’