Sword at Sunset
Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
SWORD AT SUNSET
First published in Great Britain in 1963 by Hodder & Stoughton,
an imprint of Hachette Livre.
This edition published in hardback in Great Britain in 2012
by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Rosemary Sutcliff, 1963
The moral right of Rosemary Sutcliff to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 0 85789 243 0
E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 244 7
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33. ‘It Was Warm Between Thy Breasts, Lalage’
Just as the saga of Charlemagne and his paladins is the Matter of France, so for fourteen hundred years or so, the Arthurian Legend has been the Matter of Britain. A tradition
at first, then a hero-tale gathering to itself fresh detail and fresh glories and the rainbow colors of romance as it went along, until with Sir Thomas Malory it came to its fullest flowering.
But of late years historians and anthropologists have come more and more to the belief that the Matter of Britain is indeed ‘matter and not moonshine.’ That behind all the numinous
mist of pagan, early Christian and medieval splendors that have gathered about it, there stands the solitary figure of one great man. No knight in shining armor, no Round Table, no many-towered
Camelot; but a Romano-British war leader, to whom, when the Barbarian darkness came flooding in, the last guttering lights of civilization seemed worth fighting for.
Sword at Sunset
is an attempt to re-create from fragments of known facts, from likelihoods and deductions and guesswork pure and simple, the kind of man this war leader may have been, and
the story of his long struggle.
Certain features I have retained from the traditional Arthurian fabric, because they have the atmosphere of truth. I have kept the original framework, or rather two interwrought frameworks: the
Sin which carries with it its own retribution; the Brotherhood broken by the love between the leader’s woman and his closest friend. These have the inevitability and pitiless purity of
outline that one finds in classical tragedy, and that belong to the ancient and innermost places of man. I have kept the theme, which seems to me to be implicit in the story, of the Sacred King,
the Leader whose divine right, ultimately, is to die for the life of the people.
Bedwyr, Cei and Gwalchmai are the earliest of all Arthur’s companions to be noted by name, and so I have retained them, giving the friend-and-lover’s part to Bedwyr, who is there
both at the beginning and at the end, instead of to Lancelot, who is a later French importation. Arthur’s hound and his white horse I have kept also, both for their ritual significance and
because the Arthur – or rather Artos – I found myself coming to know so well, was the kind of man who would have set great store by his dogs and his horses. When the Roman fort of
Trimontium was excavated, the bones of a ‘perfectly formed dwarf girl’ were found lying in a pit under those of nine horses. An unexplained find, to which, in Artos’s capture of
the fortress and in the incident of ‘The People of the Hills,’ I have attempted an explanation. So it goes on ... Almost every part of the story, even to the unlikely linkup between
Medraut and that mysterious Saxon with a British name, Cerdic the half-legendary founder of Wessex, has some kind of basis outside the author’s imagination.
Having, as it were, stated my case, I should like to express my most warmly grateful thanks to the people who have, in one way or another, contributed to the writing of
Sword at Sunset
– among them the Oxford University Press, for allowing me to use certain characters which have already appeared in
The Lantern-Bearer
. Among them also the authors of many books from
Gildas in the sixth century to Geoffrey Ashe in 1960; the oddly assorted experts who returned detailed and patient answers to my letters of inquiry about horse breeding; the Canadian friend who
sent me the poem ‘Hic Jacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus’ and the Intelligence Corps Sergeant and his young woman who found its origin for me after both I and the aforesaid
Canadian friend had dismally failed to do so; the Major of the 1st East Anglian Regiment, who sacrificed three sunny afternoons of his leave from Staff College to help me plan Artos’s
campaign in Scotland, and to work out for me in three colors on a staff map the crowning victory of Badon.
Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus
Arthur is gone ... Tristram in Careol
Sleeps, with a broken sword – And
Yseult sleeps Beside him, where the westering waters roll
Over drowned Lyonesse to the outer deeps.
Lancelot is fallen ... The ardent helms that shone
So knightly and the splintered lances rust
In the anonymous mould of Avalon:
Gawain and Gareth and Galahad – all are dust!
Where do the vanes and towers of Camelot
And tall Tintagel crumble? Where do those tragic
Lovers and their bright-eyed ladies rot?
We cannot tell – for lost is Merlin’s magic.
And Guinevere – call her not back again
Lest she betray the loveliness Time lent
A name that blends the rapture and the pain
Linked in the lonely nightingale’s lament,
Nor pry too deeply, lest you should discover
The bower of Astolat a smoky hut
Of mud and wattle – find the knightliest lover
A braggart, and his Lily Maid a slut;
And all that coloured tale a tapestry
Woven by poets. As the spider’s skeins
Are spun of its own substance, so have they
Embroidered empty legend – What remains?
This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak
That age had sapped and cankered at the root,
Resistant, from her topmost bough there broke
The miracle of one unwithering shoot
Which was the spirit of Britain – that certain men
Uncouth, untutored, of our island brood
Loved freedom better than their lives; and when
The tempest crashed around them, rose and stood
And charged into the storm’s black heart, with sword
Lifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmed
With a strange majesty that the heathen horde
Remembered after all were overwhelmed;
And made of them a legend, to their chief,
Arthur, Ambrosius – no man knows his name –
Granting a gallantry beyond belief,
And to his knights imperishable fame.
They were so few ... We know not in what manner
Or where or when they fell – whether they went
Riding into the dark under Christ’s banner
Or died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent.
But this we know: That, when the Saxon rout
Swept over them, the sun no longer shone
On Britain, and the last lights flickered out;
And men in darkness murmured: Arthur is gone ...
F
RANCIS
B
RETT
Y
OUNG
SWORD AT SUNSET
chapter one
N
OW THAT THE MOON IS NEAR TO FULL, THE BRANCH OF
an apple tree casts its nighttime shadow in through the high window across the wall beside my bed. This
place is full of apple trees, and half of them are no more than crabs in the daylight; but the shadow on my wall, that blurs and shivers when the night wind passes and then grows clear again, is
the shadow of that Branch the harpers sing of, the chiming of whose nine silver apples can make clear the way into the Land of the Living.
When the moon rises higher, the shadow is lost. The white radiance trickles down the wall and makes pools on the coverlet, and then at last it reaches my sword lying beside me – they laid
it there because they said I was restless when it was not ready to my hand – and a spurt, a pinpoint, of blazing violet light wakes far, far down in the dark heart of Maximus’s great
amethyst set into the pommel. Then the moonlight passes, and the narrow cell is cobweb gray, and the star in the heart of the amethyst sleeps again; sleeps ... I reach out in the grayness and touch
the familiar grip that has grown warm to my hand in so many fights; and the feeling of life is in it, and the feeling of death ...
I cannot sleep, these nights, for the fire of the wound in my groin and belly. The Brothers would give me a draught stronger than the fire, if I let them; but I have no wish for the sleep of
poppy juice and mandrake that leaves a dark taste in the mind afterward. I am content to wait for another sleep. And meanwhile there is so much to think of, so much to remember ...
Remember – remember across forty years, the first time that ever I held that blink of violet light in my hand, answering not to the cold whiteness of the moon, but to the soft yellow
radiance of the candles in Ambrosius’s study, on the night that he gave me my sword and my freedom.
I was sitting on the foot of my sleeping couch, busy with the twice-daily pumice stone. On campaign I generally grew my beard and clipped it short, but in winter quarters I always tried to keep
a smooth chin in the Roman manner. Sometimes that meant the butchery of goose grease and razor, and left me scraped and raw and thanking many gods that at least I was not, like Ambrosius or old
Aquila my friend and mentor in all that had to do with cavalry, a black-bearded man. But there was still pumice stone to be got when one was lucky, for it took more than the Franks and the Sea
Wolves to quite close the trade routes and pen the merchant kind within their own frontiers. One of the merchant kind had come into Venta Belgarum only a few days since, with pumice stone and dried
raisins and a few amphorae of thin Burdigala wine slung in pairs on the backs of his pack ponies; and I had managed to buy an amphora, and a piece of pumice almost the size of my fist, enough to
last me through the winter and maybe next winter also.