Sword at Sunset (37 page)

‘I left you the fire to undress by,’ she said, ‘but I think the moon would have been light enough.’ And then, as I kicked off my shoes, and freeing my sword belt began to
strip, ‘How many scars you carry! You are fang-gashed like an old mastiff that has spent its life fighting wolves.’

And I think that she must have been seeing me for the first time in the way that I had first seen her four days ago, for she must have seen most of the scars often enough when she tended me in
my sickness, and never spoken of them before.

Standing by the hearth, I looked down at the new crimson scar on my shoulder, and the white seams of old ones on my thighs and sword forearm. ‘I suppose that is what I am.’

‘Why do they come again and again so close about the same places?’

‘You can always tell a heavy cavalry man by the position of his scars. They come on the thighs below the edge of one’s war shirt – I have heard of thigh guards, but they hamper
one in mounting – on the thighs and on the sword arm.’

‘Why not a long sleeve?’ she asked, practically. It was an odd conversation for a wedding night.

‘Because it would hamper the sword swing; also because the Saxon armorers do not make their sarks that way.’

I stood by the fire, stretching, then stooped to set on the turfs that I had laid by for smooring it. As I did so, she said in the same tone of quietly detached interest, ‘You’re
beautiful. How many women have told you so?’

I thrust the fire together and set on the sods, and the firelight died, leaving only the fading moonlight to bar the darkness. ‘A few,’ I said, ‘but very long ago.’

‘How long? How old are you, my Lord Artos?’

‘Thirty-five. That is another reason why you should not have married me.’

‘And I am twenty – almost one and twenty. We are old, you and I.’

I had not thought of her as being of any special age, but I had realized, without much thought, that she was long past the age at which most women go to a husband’s hearth; and I wondered
for the first time why it was that she had not done so. As though she caught the question in my mind, as though, also, she had lowered her own defenses a little further, with the quenching of the
too-probing firelight, she said, ‘When I was fifteen, I was betrothed to a chieftain’s son from farther south. It was arranged in the usual way, but I loved him, none the less – I
thought
I loved him. I am not sure now; I was only fifteen. He was killed hunting, before the time came for him to take me, and I thought that the sun and moon had fallen from the skies. His
memory came between me and all things, between me and all men, and when my father would have betrothed me again, I begged and prayed – I swore that I would kill myself; and in the end –
I was beside myself, and I think he feared that I had it in me to carry out my threat – he yielded partway, and promised that at least I should have five summers’ respite.’

‘And this is the sixth summer,’ I said.

‘This is the sixth summer. But— ’ I heard a small bitter laugh of self-mockery. ‘Scarcely two summers were gone by before I knew that I had been a fool. I tried to hold
his memory, but it turned thin like woodsmoke and melted through my fingers, and I had nothing left.’

‘Why did you not tell your father?’

‘I was too proud. If you were a girl of seventeen who had shrieked down the roof of her father’s hall, vowing to die for her dead love if she were forced into another man’s
bed, could you have gone to your father and said, “Oh my father, I made a mistake, a simple mistake; anyone might make it. It was not love; I have forgotten what his face looked like, and the
sound of his voice, and now I am ready for a living husband, after all.”’

I took up my sword and carried it across to the bed place and laid it to hand. Then I lay down beside Guenhumara. The moon-moth fluttered across my face, but there was no other movement in the
dark beside me.

Her body was good to the touch, to explore; the skin smooth and silky despite its brownness, and I could feel the strong light bones under it; the light cage of her ribs, the long slim flanks.
She was too thin for most men’s taste, but suddenly I loved the feel of her bones. I had seen, while she lay there in the firelight, that there was a rose mole on her left breast, and I
searched for it by touch and pressed my finger onto it. It was soft and curiously alive, like the bud of a flower, like another smaller nipple, infinitely small and soft, and the feel of it sent a
shimmer of delight through my body and into my loins. I flung my arms around her and strained her against me. She lay completely passive, neither giving nor withholding, as the furrow lies passive
for the seed at sowing time ... And in that instant came like a black frost the memory, the very flavor, of the last time that I had lain with a woman, a mating half battle, half ecstasy, like mating
with a wildcat. The cold miasma of hate seemed all about me, suffocating, chilling me to the soul, sapping all my powers. I clutched Guenhumara closer – no, rather I clung to her as one
drowning – struggling to drive out the horror of my spirit, struggling to drive out the chill with her warmth, the death with her life. Her body was no longer passive under mine, and I must
have hurt her, for she cried out, and I knew in that moment that she was a virgin; but even so, I hurt her more than is the nature of things, and I had no mercy. I was fighting desperately against
some barrier, some denial that was not of her making ... It was, save for one other, the bitterest fight that ever I have known.

In the end I managed the man’s part none so ill, but it was empty and joyless, the mere husk of what had once been a living thing; and I knew that for Guenhumara also, there had been no
joy to transmute the pain. I remembered my first girl, taken laughing in the warm lee of a bean stack, clumsily but with delight. That had been whole and sweet, but this was a maimed thing. And I
knew to the full then what Ygerna had done to me; that in some way she had robbed me of the spearpoint of my manhood.

I released Guenhumara, and rolled away from her. I think I groaned. I know that I was sweating and shaking from head to foot like a man after a mortal struggle; and I buried my head in my arms,
waiting for her to turn away from me in disgust or bitter mockery.

Instead, she said calmly, but as though something in her throat was tight, ‘It should not be like that, should it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It should not be like that.’ I drove my face harder onto my arms and little clouds of colored light whirled through the darkness before my eyes. I heard my
own voice, muffled in my arms. ‘A few days since, I was watching one of your dunghill cocks. He was tethered with his hens about him, but the one he wanted was beyond his reach, and every
time he leapt on her his tether brought him up short at the last moment, and tumbled him in the dung, until his feathers were all mired and draggled. God have mercy on me, I thought at first that
it was funny.’

There was a long silence; and then Guenhumara said, ‘Has it always been so?’

‘If it had, do you think that I’d have taken you with a whole war host for your dowry? I haven’t been with a woman for ten years. I did not know.’

Another silence; the flutter of the flames had died away and outside I heard the soft whisper of falling rain; the scent of it on the warm earth breathed in at the open doorway. And beyond
again, I heard the silence of the forsaken Dun.

Then Guenhumara said, ‘What happened? Let you tell me the once, and be done with the telling.’

And lying there with my head still buried in my arms, I told her the whole foul story that I had not told in ten years, even to Bedwyr who was nearer to me than my own heart. It was her right to
know.

When the thing was told to the last word, I waited for her horror and her drawing away. She did not speak for so long, in the end I lifted my head from my arms and turned again to look at her in
the dark. And as I did so, a strange thing happened, for she turned a little toward me, and felt for my face and took it between her hands, and kissed me like the mother I never had. ‘God
help us both, my dear,’ she said.

chapter eighteen

W
ORD OF WHAT HAD HAPPENED WAS IN
C
ASTRA
C
UNETIUM
and the Place of Three Hills ahead of me. Maybe the
word had run through the tribes, maybe it had been carried by the Little Dark People, who know everything. I saw it in men’s eyes that met mine a little too long or not quite long enough, as
I rode in, but only two of my Companions spoke of the thing without waiting for me to speak first.

Gwalchmai came limping into my quarters while I was still washing off the dust and sweat of the summer tracks. He had ridden in only a few hours ahead of me, on some business of supplies, and
began by giving me a report of how things were going with Bedwyr among the Saxon settlements, so that at first I thought that was all he had come for. Indeed he had actually got up to go, when he
turned back to me, clearly hesitating over something more that he wished to say. He was a man who seldom found it easy to speak of the things that mattered to him. ‘The whole fort is
throbbing with the word that you have taken a wife from the Damnonii,’ he managed at last, ‘and that she comes here to join you when we settle into winter quarters. Artos, is it
true?’

‘It is true that I have taken a wife, yes,’ I said.

‘And that she comes here?’

‘Yes, also a hundred of her father’s best horsemen, captained by her brother.’

‘The hundred will be welcome, at all events.’

‘But not the
one
?’

He hesitated. ‘We are not used to the thought of the
one
and the thought is strange to us. You must give us a little time.’ He changed the subject. ‘Artos, they did not
send up any bandage linen or salves with the last supplies. We have had a good few wounded, as I told you, and we cannot go on tearing up our cloaks forever. I cannot go myself, I must get back to
Bedwyr tomorrow, but give me leave to send Conon down to raise hell at Carbridge and get some more sent up.’

But Cei was less forbearing, later that night, before we started out to make the late rounds together. ‘In God’s name, if you wanted the girl why didn’t you take her –
and leave her with a pretty necklace, and no harm done?’

‘Maglaunus her father would perhaps not have given me a hundred well-mounted men for tumbling his daughter under a broom bush.’

‘Aye, there’s no denying that it is a dowry worth the having,’ Cei admitted; and then in a deep grumble between disgust and speculation: ‘But a woman prinking in her
mirror. I suppose she’ll bring a swarm of giggling girls to serve her?’

‘One woman. I told Guenhumara she might bring one henchwoman: she chose her old nurse – no teeth, Cei, one foot already in the grave and the other on a lump of tallow.’

‘An asset indeed!’ Cei’s speculation was swallowed up in disgust.

‘Agreed, my old ram, and a foul nuisance here in the fort, but by the God’s grace, the other foot will slip one day,’ I said savagely. I was angry and sickened with all the
things under the sun, myself most of all.

‘Love does not seem to have sweetened your temper, Artos mine.’

I was pulling on my rawhide boots, and I did not look up. ‘Who spoke any word of love?’

‘Na, it was a hundred horsemen, wasn’t it? But great God! Man, you can’t have her here, just her and the hag in a fort full of men.’

‘There are the gay girls of the baggage train,’ I said, and stood up and reached for my sword which lay on the cot beside me.

‘If she’s a good woman, she’d sooner die than touch little fingers with one of the sisterhood.’

‘Cei, do you know much about good women?’

He laughed unwillingly, and shrugged, but looked up from the lamp flame with trouble in his fierce blue eyes. ‘You must have the thing your own stubborn way. But Christos! I foresee storm
water ahead!’ Then he shook himself as though shaking off the trouble like an old cloak, and laughed again, and flung his heavy arm around my shoulders as we went out from the lamplit room
into the darkness of the hills. ‘Like enough I shall try seducing her myself, in the pursuit of further knowledge.’

‘Thanks for the warning,’ I said, tranquilly enough, and tried to ignore the black pain of jealousy that stabbed through me. In that moment I first understood that I loved
Guenhumara.

In the next I fell headlong over a pig – we kept a good deal of livestock by that time – who rose in squealing affront and lumbered off into the night, leaving me to rub a bruised
elbow and curse the Fates who must need strip a man even of his dignity, making a clown of him even while they turn the knife in the wound that they have made.

Everything in Trimontium was in good shape, for despite his hot temper and his wenching, Cei was as reliable as a rock, and so next morning when Gwalchmai headed eastward again, with the reliefs
who were going up to free some of the other men for rest, I rode with them. And a few evenings later, I stood with Bedwyr in the lee of a clump of wind-shaped elder scrub that marked the lower end
of our picket lines. There was a smell of smoke about him, not the fresh tang of campfires, but the acrid and faintly greasy reek that comes of burning out the places where men live. Bedwyr had
been busy since I saw him last.

He was saying, ‘It is in my mind that the world would be a simpler place if the God that Gwalchmai believes in had never taken a rib from Adam’s side and made a woman for
him.’

‘You would miss her sorely, when you came to tune your harp.’

‘There are other matters for a harp song, besides women. Hunting and war, and heather beer – and the brotherhood of men.’

‘It is not many days since I found that I must ask the Minnow not to desert me,’ I said. ‘I did not think that I should have to ask it of you, Bedwyr.’

He stood looking out over the camp, where the smoke of the cooking fires trailed sideways into the dusk, and a faint mist was creeping in over the moors from the sea. ‘If I were to desert
you, I think that it would be for something more than a woman.’