Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
But seeing him standing there, the lamp turning his mane of hair to tarnished silver and filling his eyes, always so pale in the darkness of his face, with a rain-gray light, and burnishing the
gold fillet about his skeleton temples; seeing the faint half-triumphant smile on his mouth that was unlike any smile that I had ever seen there, and the great cup burning in his hand, and the
shine upon him that was not the lamplight alone, it seemed to me that I was not looking at the Ambrosius I knew, but at the King decked for sacrifice, and my heart shook within me.
Then we heard young Gaheris pounding up the stair to demand whether we had seen the marvel, and he was only Ambrosius again, standing in the candlelight with an empty wine cup in his hand.
chapter twenty-seven
N
EXT MORNING WHEN THE HORSES WERE BROUGHT AROUND,
Ambrosius mounted Pollux almost as lightly as the rest of us (he had had to be almost lifted into the
saddle when we set out from Venta, two days before) and sat there in his greasy weather-stained old hunting leathers, discussing the day’s prospects with Kian his chief huntsman. An
extraordinary return of strength had come to him from somewhere, and even his face seemed less skull-like than it had done for a month past, so that all last night might have been no more than a
dream.
Yet his renewed strength seemed not quite to belong to the world of men, and something of last night’s shining was still upon him, after all, and the huntsmen and farm folk looked somewhat
askance at their lord, and seemed more shy of going near him than ever they had been before – for he was never one to wear the Purple among his own folk, and I have heard him arguing with an
armorer about the placing of a rivet, or with some old falconer as to the handling of an eyas, and getting the worst of it in the way of any man who argues with an expert on his own ground.
The world was gray with hoarfrost, under a skim-milk sky still barred with the last silver and saffron of the dawn, but the frost had not been a hard one and would not spoil scent; and the
horses danced after their day’s rest, even old Pollux, and the hounds strained forward in eagerness against their leashes as we rode out from the farm courtyard and skirted the brown of the
winter wheat field beyond, scaring up the little crested lapwings as we went, and headed for the dark shoreline of the woods beyond.
The sun came up, and the frost melted around us as we rode, giving place to a thin white mist lying close to the ground in the hollows. The horses waded through it as through shallow seas of
gossamer as we dropped into the valley, and small bright drops trembled in the light, hanging from every dried hemlock head and half-silken, half-sodden feather of last year’s willow herb.
And I remember that over the open fallow the larks were singing. In a sheltered hollow of the woodshore, the first hazel catkins were hanging out, and as we brushed through, shaking the whippy
sprays, the air was suddenly stained with a sun-mist of yellow pollen for yards around. And I wondered how it all seemed to Ambrosius: whether he had yet freed himself utterly from the dearness and
strangeness and piercing beauty of the world, from the lark song and the smell of melting frost on the cold moss under the trees, and the thrust of a horse’s flanks beneath him, and the faces
of his friends. His own face betrayed nothing, but I thought that he looked about him from time to time, as though he wished to see very clearly the winter woods dappled like a curlew’s
breast, the prick of a hound’s ears, the crimson thread tips of a woman-bud on a hazel spray, the flying shadow of a bird across the turf, to draw them in and make them part of himself, part
of his own soul, so that he might carry them with him where he was going.
The hounds picked up the scent of the stag beside the pool where he had come down to drink at dawn, and the instant they were slipped from the leash they were off and away, filling the winter
morning with their music under the high thin sounding of the hunting horn. So, following the hounds, and with the hunters running hound-swift alongside, we swung westward and up onto high ground.
Ambrosius rode that day like a sound man. I have wondered since, if Ben Simeon had given him some such draught as they say the Jutes give to their berserkers, but I do not think so, I think it was
something that, at God knows what cost, he himself had summoned up, the last valiant flare of a dying torch before it gutters out. He had drawn a little ahead of Aquila and me, and we glanced at
each other and marveled; and young Gaheris had a look of puzzled hope as though he half believed his lord’s sickness was passing.
We hunted long and hard, and it must have been close on noon when, toiling up a slope of bare winter-tawny turf, we sighted our quarry on the skyline. A magnificent twelve-point stag, a royal
hart, in the instant before he bounded forward over the ridge. Old Aquila sounded the View, and the hounds who, for some time past, had been running almost in silence, businesslike, muzzles to
ground, broke out into fierce music and sprang forward with a burst of eagerness.
When we crested the ridge, the stag was nowhere in sight, but a few moments later he came into view again, flying like the wind above his own shadow along the opposite hillside. The hounds were
hunting by sight now, and swung right-handed, streaming out on a line that would carry them straight across the valley to cut him off; but he saw us in time, and doubling in his tracks was away
down-valley toward the refuge of the woods that crept up from the low river country, and for a while we lost him among the hazel scrub and thickets of thorn and wayfaring trees that were the outer
fringes of the forest; and the music of the hounds turned thin and querulous. ‘He has taken to the water,’ said the chief hunter, and we swung away down the riverside, splashing our way
across by a shallow stickle, the hounds swimming for it, and pushed on down again, along the farther bank. Sure enough, a mile or maybe more downstream, at a place where the bank had been pulled
away, exposing torn earth and a tangle of willow roots, the hounds picked up the scent again. Hunters and hunted swung back toward open country, for the quarry could not strike into the denseness
of the damp-oak forest with its low growth of branches to entangle his antlers, any more than we could force a way through on horseback. And when next we had him in full view the great stag, though
running swiftly as ever, was clearly laboring. ‘I think we have him!’ I cried, and the big brindled hounds swept on, baying and belling. Our horses were tiring, but we urged them on to
one last burst of speed. Ahead of us, the stag was slowing visibly, struggling on with his proud diadem of antlers lowered now; once he all but stumbled to his knees, then regathered himself and
fled on in one last desperate flare of swiftness, with the hounds almost upon him.
Over a last hill shoulder and down into the valley beyond, stumbling and struggling through the sodden wreck of the past year’s bracken, with the brindled hounds running low and baying on
his heels, and behind, crouched on our horses’ necks, we four, and Ambrosius’s hunters racing and leaping at our stirrups. In a narrow side combe, scarcely more than a stream channel
down the slope of the hill, among flint boulders and the tangled roots and spiny maze of ancient thorn trees, the stag turned at bay; his head up, the great antlers like tree branches themselves; a
king again, and no mere hunted fugitive, though his eyes were wild and his flanks sobbed in and out, and his nostrils seemed full of blood. And as we reined in below the great beast, there was a
majesty about him that gave us all pause; not a hunted beast but a king brought to his death. Ambrosius flung up his hand, I remember, and it was as though brother greeted brother.
The brindled hounds checked an instant, then sprang in, yelling; the hunters making a wide bow on either side and siccing them on with jibes and encouragement in the dark tongue in which hunters
talk to the hound pack. The rest of us dismounted, for it was impossible to take horses up into that steep tangle. But Ambrosius, who yesterday had been a dying man, had flung himself from the
saddle, with the familiar hunting shout ‘I claim kill!’ and was away ahead of us, scrambling among the tree roots and under the low thorn branches, and I caught the wintry light flash
on the blade of the hunting knife in his hand.
He was among the hounds now, and I saw that he meant to make the kill himself. I had seen him do that before, in the Western hills when I was yet the height of another hound. It is accounted the
crowning feat of a hunter, also the most hideously dangerous, work for a young man in the flower of his strength and speed; but to put oneself forward to aid in the kill after another man has cried
his claim is one of the unforgivable things, and I knew also, as surely as ever I had known anything in this world, that Ambrosius had cried it for a warning to us to hold back from more than his
kill. Only Gaheris, not knowing the truth, ran at lung-bursting speed to reach him against all the law of the hunting trail. But the boy caught his foot in a thorn root and fell headlong, driving
the wind from his body, and by the time he had struggled still crowing to his feet again, and Aquila and I, with our own knives drawn, had come pounding more slowly up behind, the thing was
finished.
Ambrosius had run in among the hounds that were yelling all about the stag as it confronted them with lowered head. Even as he did so, one of the dogs, impaled on a deadly tine, was flung aside
with its belly split open like a rotten fig. I heard the dying howl of the dog, and in the same instant a strange cry of triumph from the High King. I saw him spring to meet the great animal,
scarcely attempting to avoid the deadly antlers, seeming rather to court them as naturally as a man goes to his woman’s arms after a long parting. The upward thrust of the strong branched and
weaponed head and the flash of the hunting knife came in the same bright splinter of time, and as though in a dream or at a great distance, I saw the crumpled body of a man who did not seem in that
moment to be Ambrosius flung up as the dog had been, and slither writhing across the stag’s shoulders, and crash down untidily, all arms and legs, among the thorn roots and the boulders. Then
the Red Lord of the Forest swayed and staggered a step forward and plunged down upon him.
The hunters were shouting, running from all directions. And we – we were running too, now that it was too late, bounding upward with bursting hearts. He can have been only two or three
spears’ lengths ahead of us, but it seemed a mile before we reached him. Then I was kneeling beside the tangle of beast and man, hauling the still faintly kicking stag off Ambrosius’s
body, while Aquila and the boy drew him clear, and the hunters whipped off the hounds. Ambrosius’s knife was still in the great brute’s throat, and when I drew it out the blood burst
out after it in a red wave. There was blood everywhere, soaking into the thorn roots, curling in rusty tendrils downstream with the flow of the little hill torrent. I dispatched the deer, and
turned back to Ambrosius. And all the while the words of the old saw were chanting themselves maddeningly over and over in my head. ‘After the boar, the leech; after the hart, the
bier.’
Ambrosius was quite dead, horribly dead, the whole lower forepart of his body smashed to red rags, one great gash where the tine had entered at the groin and burst out again below the
breastbone, gaping raggedly over blood and torn gut and wet soft things that I could not look at. I was not Ben Simeon who had been to Alexandria. But his face was not touched. It wore a look of
faint surprise (so many dead faces that I have seen have looked surprised; it must be that death is not like anything that we have imagined it to be), and under the surprise, a look harder to
define, something of triumph, but not personal triumph, the look, perhaps, of a man who has fulfilled his fate, and gone gladly to the fulfillment.
Above the battered and mutilated body, Aquila and I looked at each other, and then bowed our heads. I don’t think any of us spoke – any of the three of us, that is; the hunters were
murmuring among themselves, white-faced, as they got the dogs leashed, and turned again and again to stare in our direction. I looked at the ashen face and quivering mouth of Ambrosius’s
young armor-bearer, and knew that the boy must instantly be got away and given something to do. Besides, he was the obvious choice, for he was the lightest rider of us all. ‘Take the least
tired of the horses, and ride back to the farm. Tell them the High King is dead, and bring back a hurdle – no, stay – three of the hunters had best take the other horses and go with
you. You’ll be quicker so than by rounding up three of the farm people.’
When they were gone Aquila and I straightened the King’s body somewhat, that it might not lie tumbled and unseemly when it began to stiffen. Then I stripped off hunting leathers and
under-tunic, and tore the tunic into strips and bound them about his loins and waist, that none of the red wet ruin of things might fall out when we came to move him. Aquila held him for me the
while; and when it was done, I picked him up and carried him down to the foot of the narrow combe, clear of the thorn scrub where they would be able to get the hurdle, clear of the blood and mess.
The remaining hunters with their hounds had gathered at a little distance, and we forgot that they were there. I do not think that in all that time either of us spoke one word. Only I remember
Aquila’s harsh painful breathing, for with the running and the struggle he must have all but torn the breast wound asunder.
In a while the party from the farm came back with the hurdle, and stood gazing down at the dead King, almost as silent as ourselves. Then we lifted his wasted body – he was nothing but
yellow skin over the light bones – and laid him on the hurdle, and set off back to the farm. Somebody had gralloched the deer, and they flung its carcass across the back of a pony and brought
it after us.
It was not so very far, traveling straight across the country, for the stag had looped and doubled many times in his flight, and the dusk had scarcely deepened into the dark when we stumbled
into the courtyard, where the flare of torches beat harshly on our eyes and the farm folk came crowding around, and the sound of women’s wailing was in the air.