Sword at Sunset (73 page)

In the lag end of the night the long-awaited messenger got through to us from Constantine. ‘From Constantine?’ I said when he was brought to me. ‘What of Cador, the
King?’

‘My Lord the King grows old before his time. He is sick and cannot ride,’ the man said, standing before me in the cold flare of torches in the windy dawn. ‘Therefore he sends
his son to lead the war bands.’

‘How soon can they join us?’

‘Here?’ he said, doubtfully.

‘No, we march westward in an hour; we shall be within a few miles of the enemy when we camp again.’

‘So, then maybe not long past noon tomorrow. They make forced marching.’

‘By noon tomorrow the work may be for the wolves and ravens rather than for the men of Dumnonia,’ I said. ‘They must force the march still farther. How large is the
force?’

‘The household warriors, and such of the war host as we could gather quickly. It is harvesttime.’

Harvesttime, harvesttime!

I said, ‘Go now and get something in your belly, then get back to Constantine and tell him the need that we have of his coming swiftly.’

Within the hour, we marched; pushing westward over the great summer-pale combers of the Downs, following the Legion’s road at first, then by the alder green ridgeway into the low-lying
country below the Mendips. And that night we camped on a patch of rising ground in a soft country of deep woods and ferny hillsides, with the downs of our day’s march rising cloud-dappled,
chalk-scarred, behind us, and far ahead, the gleam of water and the curious lightening of the sky that told of marsh country. Far ahead also, unglimpsed, unhinted at in the summer quiet land sweep,
were the enemy war host; the enemy war host led against me by my son and the man whom I would have had most joyfully for my son if Fate had woven the pattern that way. They were encamped some five
miles off, reported the little dark scouts who brought in word of them, and I would have pushed on then and forced the battle, for there were still some hours of daylight left, and in that way we
would have had the advantage of surprise with us; but half my men were blind weary, and to go into battle next day with men strengthened by a few hours’ sleep, would, I judged, be a thing to
outweigh the loss of surprise. So we made camp, and mounted a strong watch, with a screen of outpost pickets beyond. And while the main camp was being pitched, I rode the rounds of the outposts
with Cei, from one to another of the knots of men lying up wherever there was cover and command of the country westward, in small ferny hillside hollows, or the fringes of an alder thicket, among
the last pink smoke of the summer willow herb, while the horses grazed nearby. In one such outpost as we rode nearer, they were singing softly, with their mouths full of bannock; an unlikely war
song, but I have noticed that men only sing of fighting in time of peace.

Singing very softly with a swing that was at once grim and merry, their eyes on the track where it passed below them. They rolled over and scrambled to their feet at my coming, and the youngling
in charge of them came and stood at my stirrup, looking up, eager for my approval because this was his first command of men. ‘All well?’ I said, in the usual form.

‘All well, Caesar,’ he returned, and then, forgetting his dignity, grinned, and flashed me the ‘Thumbs Up’ that men used to use in the arena, but only boys use now. I
stuck my own thumb skyward, laughing, as I turned my horse away.

I saw his head on a Saxon spear before the same time next evening. It was still recognizable by the big crescent-shaped mole on one cheek.

It was sunset when, the round completed, we turned back toward the camp. But I remember that as though by common consent, with no word spoken between us, we wheeled the horses on a low billow of
rising land, and looked westward once more, and having looked, could neither of us look away. I have seen wild sunsets in my time, but seldom, surely never, a sky quite like that one. It was as
though beyond the dark, gold-fringed cloud bars of the west, the world itself were burning, and the torn-off rags of the burning, spreading into great wings as they went, were drifting all across
the sky so that even when one looked upward to the zenith, still the sky was full of the rush of vast wings of flame. Far off toward the Island of Apples, the winding waters of the reed country
caught fire from the burning west, and earth and sky alike blazed into an oriflamme. It was a sunset full of the sound of trumpets and the flying of banners, a sunset that made one feel naked under
the eye of God ...

‘If tomorrow we go down into the Dark,’ Cei said at last, with awe in his deep grumble of a voice as the radiance began to fade, ‘at least we have seen the sunset.’

But for the moment I was looking at something else, at red petals of fire brightening far out in the dusking marshes. The campfires of the Saxon war host.

In a while we turned the horses and rode on into camp, to find Marius and Tyrnon there with their hastily gathered reinforcements who had marched in just ahead of us. God’s face was not
turned from us in all things, it seemed.

When all things were in train, we ate well that night, knowing that there would be little time for food in the morning, and as soon as the meal was done with, men began to roll themselves in
their cloaks and lie down with their feet to the fires.

I withdrew to my own quarters, to the hut of hurdle roofed with the striped awning of a captured war boat, gay as a horse-fair wine booth save that in place of the vine garland my battered
personal standard hung before it for a sign. I pulled off iron cap and sword belt and flung down, still in my war shirt, on a pile of bracken with my saddle for a pillow. A saddle makes a good
enough pillow, but a hound’s flank makes a better ...

At most times I have been able to sleep on the eve of battle, if I had an hour or so to lie down, but that night I could not, for the thoughts and pictures that whirled through my head almost as
though I had the fever.

I lay for a long time staring at the small bright flame-bud of the tallow glim in its lantern, and the flame had no more heart nor comfort to it than the Solas Sidh, and the long upward shadows
that it threw all up the wattle walls were the shadows of the future pressing in upon me, crowding me with mouthless questions to which, God knows, I had no answer; shadows that came trailing the
past behind them also, so that I caught again the acrid smell of the dung fires at Narbo Martius, and the thunder of my horse’s hooves in Nant Ffrancon and heard again, across the years, my
own voice and Ambrosius’s: ‘Then why don’t we yield now, and make an end ... ? They say it is easier to drown if you don’t struggle.’ ‘For an idea, for an ideal,
for a dream.’ ‘A dream may be the best thing to die for.’ But I had no dream left ... ‘When the dream fails, that is when the people die.’ But Ambrosius had not said
that – Bedwyr had said it – something of the kind – in the sunlight of the Queen’s Courtyard, with the pigeons crooning on the store-wing roof.

So that I longed with a small whimpering longing to set my finger one time more on the rose mole on Guenhumara’s breast, but could not remember whether it was on her left breast or her
right ...

Gradually past and future began to mingle; tomorrow’s battle and Ambrosius’s last hunting becoming one, as the light of the candle spread and blurred into the shadows, and the sounds
of the nighttime camp that had been sharp-edged and assertive grew blurred also, by little and little, until they were no more than the wash of the tide behind the sand dunes that faced toward
Môn ...

I heard a voice outside, a challenge and a sharp exclamation beyond the nearest watch fire, and shook myself clear of the little dark lapping waves of sleep, thinking that maybe another scout
had come in. Then somebody put aside the loose fold of the awning at the bothy entrance, and I turned on my elbow, and saw a man standing there caught between the lights of the watch fire and the
tallow glim. A lean old man in a war shirt of glimmering mail. His proud mane of iron-colored hair, bound about the hollow temples with a strip of crimson leather, showed one lock as white as the
grinning mask stripe of a badger. And he stood looking at me strangely under one level brow and one that flew wild.

‘Bedwyr,’ I said. ‘Bedwyr?’ and sat up slowly, and drew my legs under me and got slowly to my feet, and we stood confronting each other for a long time.

‘Is it yourself, then, or your ghost?’ I said at last, for caught between the two lights, he might have been a ghost indeed, called up to me by my need, by my own nearness to the
crossing over.

He moved then, one step forward, and let the striped fold of the awning fall behind him, and I saw that he was living flesh and blood. ‘No ghost,’ he said. ‘I have disobeyed
your orders, and come back, Artos.’

I could have cried out to him, as Jonathan to David, by the forbidden love names that are not used between men; I could have flung my arms about his shoulders. Instead, I stood where I had
risen, and said, ‘Why did you not join me on the road south?’

‘The news did not reach me until you were many miles on your way, and from Coed Gwyn the swiftest way is by the coast road so that one does not fall into traitor hands on the way, and so
that one can get a fisher boat across the Sabrina. Can you spare me a mount? A river currach is no horse transport.’

‘A mount maybe, though we are somewhat short of horses,’ I said. ‘Your old command is Flavian’s now.’ Almost I might have been speaking to a stranger.

‘I did not come seeking my old command. A fighting place among the Companions, no more.’

The aching silence fell between us again. The loose end of the awning flapped in the light wind like a bird with a broken wing, and the candle flame leapt and fluttered, casting strange shadows
on the rough hurdles that formed the walls.

‘You will have no illusions as to the likely outcome of tomorrow’s fight?’ I said (but already it was today’s).

‘Not many.’ There was a twist of the old reckless laughter on his lips.

‘And so you came back.’

‘I have always been one to choose with some care the company that I die in.’

Age had made him uglier than ever; the lines of his face that had been fantastic in his young manhood tipped over into the grotesque. It was a face made for a bitter jest by some God with a
crooked sense of humor, and Christos! My heart whimpered for joy at the sight of it.

‘Take me back into your service, Artos.’

‘What of Guenhumara?’

He said steadily, ‘I left her at the gate of the little nunnery in Caredegion, out on the headland. You know it? They keep the holy fire burning always for Saint Bride. She will be happier
there, I think, than at Eburacum, even if I could have spared the time to take her there.’

And I remembered the House of Holy Ladies in the Street of the Clothworkers, and Guenhumara shuddering in the curve of my bridle arm as she looked back toward it, as though a wild goose had
flown over her grave. ‘She hated cages. She was afraid of them,’ was all I could find to say.

‘She went in through the door of the wall, of her own free wish,’ he said dully.

‘Were you not happy together, all those years?’

‘Not very.’

‘But – Bedwyr, you loved her, and she you?’

He said simply, ‘Oh yes, we loved each other, but you were always between us.’

It was a small bothy, one step brought us to meet in the midst of it; my arms were around him, and his around me, the strong right arm and the maimed left that felt sapless and brittle as a bit
of dead stick, and we held fast together, and wept somewhat, each into the hollow of the other’s shoulder. Maybe it is easier to weep when one grows old, than it was in the flower of life.
The strength ebbs, or the wisdom grows ... It no longer tears at the soul; there is even something of catharsis, of healing, in it ...

In the dark hour before dawn, I was roused to the news, brought in by one of the scouts, that the enemy were showing the first sign of stirring, and with him another rider from Constantine. The
men of Dumnonia were pressing on to the limit of their endurance, but the marsh country had forced them around by the long way and they could not be with us much more than an hour before noon. I
got up and swallowed a few mouthfuls of bannock and beer, while I armed and made ready. Bedwyr, having no duties of command to hold him now, came and served me as armor-bearer – he was
skillful enough with that arm, though he lacked much strength in it – and afterward I did the same for him, so that in the end we armed each other like brothers.

I took especial pains that morning, combing out my hair and beard, and settling the folds of my old weather-worn cloak with care, arranging and rearranging the plume of yellow corn marigold in
its shoulder brooch – those of the Brotherhood who yet remained still rode into battle with some such grace note about them. I knew, I had accepted, that Fate had finished the pattern, that
the doom was accomplished, and I was to come by my death that day (but I thought that it would be swift and seemly, as the thing should be, as it had been for Ambrosius; not this untidy lingering
by the way!). And I could only hope that my death might serve also as ransom for the people. I knew, too, as surely as I knew the other thing, that the pattern demanded that I should take Medraut
with me, and prayed that, so, the old sin might be wiped out and the final defeat of Britain not demanded. At the least, with Medraut gone, Britain might be saved the fatal split within herself
that must let the darkness in. And hurriedly, for already I could hear through the wattle walls the sound of the squadrons mustering, I made ready as though I rode to take a bride or a triumph, for
it was as though something in me, older than my own life, the thing that I had felt at my crowning, knew that there was a certain fitness of things, an outward and visible sign of willingness, to
be made in the sight of the gods ... I remembered all at once how carefully Ambrosius had made his young armor-bearer trim his hair for him on the morning of his last hunting.