Sword at Sunset (39 page)

He swung around on me, his eyes wide and blazing. ‘No
blame?
’

‘None whatever,’ I said, pretending to misunderstand him. ‘And you have given your report well and clearly.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ he said bitterly. ‘Is there anything more?’

‘First, have you anything to say to me?’

‘Yes. I wish to ask for leave to go away from here.’

‘And fall on your sword?’

‘What is it to my Lord Artos what I do, when once I am no more of the Brotherhood?’

‘Only this – that we are short of men as it is, and I cannot spare another for no good cause.’

‘No good cause?’

‘None,’ I said. I got up and walked across to him. ‘Listen to me, Levin. For more than ten years I have counted you and Gault among the best and bravest of my Companions. That
is because each of you has striven always to outdo the other in valor and endurance, not from any rivalry, but that each of you might be worthy of his friend. So it has been since you were boys;
and are you going to be a shame to Gault, to break the old covenant between you, now in the first hour that he is dead?’

He stared back at me with dilated eyes. ‘Maybe I’m not as strong as Gault. I can’t go on – I can’t.’

I took him by the shoulders and shook him a little. ‘That is a weakling’s cry. There’s water in that jar in the corner; wash your face, and go down and take over command of the
squadron. Choose whichever of your lads you judge most suitable for your second; that is your affair, so don’t come troubling me with it.’

‘You – you’re giving me command of the squadron?’

‘Assuredly. You have been Gault’s second for five years, and you have it in you to make a good leader.’

‘I cannot do it,’ he said pitifully. ‘Artos, have some mercy on me – I can’t. It is all true as you say, but I
can’t go on!
’

But already, though he was not yet aware of it himself, I could feel him strengthening under my hands, bracing himself to take up the intolerable burden.

‘Oh yes you can. One can always go on. And as to mercy, I keep that for when and where it is needed. If Gault could break off the arrow shaft so that his men should not know and lose
heart, and get the rags of you out of ambush and back to camp, with a mortal wound in him, then you can wash your face so that the rest won’t mistake you for a woman, and go and take over his
squadron and keep it what he made it, one of the best squadrons of the Company.’ I gripped and gripped at his shoulders, driving in my fingers until I felt the bone. ‘If you cannot
– then you were never as he thought you were, after all.’

He stood unmoving for a long moment, though I had dropped my hands. Then his head went up very slowly, and I saw him swallow thick in his throat; and he turned and crossed to the jar of water in
the corner.

Through the rest of that summer I watched him anxiously. But there was little need. He proved, as I had believed he would, to be as fine a leader as Gault had been; and under his handling, the
battered remnant gathered itself up and began to be a squadron again. He was careful of his men, but utterly careless of himself – so reckless that, though there was no more talk of falling
on his sword, it was clear he hoped for death. And as so often happens when a man is in that state, death passed him by as if he had a charmed life.

We campaigned late into October that year. At most times in the North, one cannot hold to the war trail much beyond the end of September, but it was a soft autumn, and the last yellow leaves
were still clinging to the birches when at last we rode into Trimontium to make our winter quarters again.

There were only a few days left, and many things to be seen to in them, before I must ride for Castra Cunetium to meet Guenhumara. But in the time that I had, I did what I could to make ready
for her. I furbished up the much larger chamber next to the narrow one in the half-ruined officers’ block where I had slept since we first came to Trimontium. The commandant’s dining
room, I think it must have been, to judge by the crudely painted trophies and goats’ masks that still showed here and there like shadows on the shreds of plaster that still clung to one wall.
I bought a thick striped native blanket and a rug of soft beaver skins from Druim Dhu and his brothers, who bought and sold all things in common, to cover the piled fern of the bed place. I pegged
up a fine embroidered hanging of some saint or other, all glimmering blues and russets, kingfisher colors, to cover the crumbling red sandstone of the most ruinous wall and give some richness to
the chamber. It was part of the loot that we had taken from the Sea Wolves that summer, and they, I suppose, had reaved it from some rich religious house in the gentler Lowlands. Well, the Church
could count it as part of the debt they owed me, there was a certain satisfaction in the thought.

All the while I was aware of my men watching me, with a kind of suspended judgment that might turn into anything ... The awareness did nothing to ease the waiting days. I half longed for her
coming, as those days went by, half dreaded it, sometimes wondered whether she would come at all.

She came, and we swept her into Castra Cunetium by torchlight. It was a wild night, the feast of Samhain, and I remember how the torches flared in the wind, sending their tawny smoke billowing
all across the forecourt, their light beating like bright wings in the darkness upon the faces of the men who thronged around us, and clatter and jink and hoof drum of the cavalry swept in after us
through the gates. Guenhumara rode between her brother Pharic and myself, with her cloak flying loose from its shoulder clasp. I had not known her in the first moments of our meeting, almost a
day’s march farther westward, for with her tall slight body clad in plaid breeks for the long ride, and her hair gathered up under a soft woolen cap, she looked for all the world like a
fine-boned stripling. And indeed I think that few among the crowding garrison realized who she was, for I saw them craning behind her for the commander’s woman. That was until we clattered to
a halt, and I dismounted and turned to help her down; for I remember, then the roar went up.

I had not touched her until then, for we had not dismounted at our meeting. There were still grumblings of trouble in the hills, and we had ridden hard to reach Cunetium before full dark, and in
the instant before she kicked free from the stirrup and slid into my arms, I knew a wild expectancy; but as it had been before, among the Nine Sisters, I felt as I caught and set her down that
there was nothing there, that I might have been holding one of the cool gray standing stones; and this time there was no time for the fire and the life to kindle, for she turned from me at once,
swaying with exhaustion as she was, to face the new life about her, with all her defenses like a drawn sword in her hand.

Pharic and the rest were swinging down from their horses, and Bedwyr, who was once again in command of the outpost garrison, had come out from among his squadron to bid her welcome.

I said, ‘Guenhumara, here is Bedwyr, my sword brother and lieutenant.’

I had wondered how it would be between Bedwyr and Guenhumara when they came together, and I was left still wondering.

I remember him making the bent knee to her that a man makes to a queen; I remember his ugly, crooked face smiling down at her, faintly mocking, his reckless eyebrow flaring like the windblown
flames of the torches, saying with the drawling tenderness in his voice that I had never heard him use on a woman before, ‘I never thought to see a flower springing in the hard ground of this
old fort – and it not even summer.’

‘A hand for the harp as well as the sword.’ Guenhumara’s gaze touched on the embroidered lip of the harp bag that cocked above his shoulder. ‘Was that grace note plucked
from the last song you made?’

‘Na na – but I may find it fit in well enough when I come to make the next. There is something tells me that you set little store by the minstrel kind.’

‘I have known only the one harper in my father’s hall,’ she said gently. ‘He can outplay any of his kind along the west coast, when it comes to Oran Môr, the Great
Music; but I have heard over-many light lilts to the Lady Guenhumara’s shining hair – especially when he would have another arm ring or a new bull calf for his herd.’

‘Be assured, at least, that I have no use for an arm ring, nor for a bull calf,’ Bedwyr said, with the smile flickering around his lips. ‘And alas! I have not yet seen the Lady
Guenhumara’s shining hair!’

Standing by, it seemed to me that I was watching two swordsmen playing for the feel of each other’s blades, but whether the foils were blunted or sharp, I could not yet be sure. I have
thought since, that they were not sure themselves. I made the late rounds with Bedwyr that night, neither of us speaking any word of Guenhumara, and after he had gone back to the mess hall and the
evening firelight, I lingered behind, leaning my elbows on the crumbling stone breastwork that still faced the old turf ramparts, and staring out into the blustery darkness of the hills. I meant to
follow him at any moment, but I was still there when something moved below and behind me, and as I swung around, Guenhumara herself came up the rampart stair. She was close-muffled in the heavy
folds of her riding cloak, but the light of a distant pine-knot torch behind her made a bright copper-dust nimbus through her unbound hair, and I knew by that, and by her way of moving, I suppose,
that she had changed back into women’s gear.

‘Guenhumara! You should be in your bed.’

She reached out her hand to Cabal, who had risen from his place beside my feet to welcome her better than I had done. ‘I am too restless for my bed. Everything is so strange; I felt caged
in that little room with its face turned nowhere save into a courtyard, and all the wind and the darkness outside.’ She came beside me, and set both hands on the cold age-eaten coping.
‘So this is a Roman fort – a Dun of the Red Crests?’

‘Is it not at all as you expected?’

‘I do not know. Yes, I suppose so. They say that the Romans like to have their lives boxed into squares and fenced with straight lines ... One was telling me, a while since, that in Roman
cities the houseplaces have high square rooms to them, and that they are built all along ways so straight that they might have been ruled with a spear shaft. Would that be true?’

Memory twinged at me, and out of the dark and under the wind it seemed for a moment that another woman’s voice was in my ears, a low voice, and mocking. ‘They say that in Venta there
are streets of houses all in straight rows, and in the houses are tall rooms with painted walls; and Ambrosius the High King wears a cloak of the imperial purple.’ And I wanted to catch
Guenhumara into my arms and hold her fast against all threat to take her from me, defying Ygerna, defying God Himself if need be. But I knew with a sick helplessness that I could not so much as
touch her until she gave me leave.

‘It is true. The better houses, and the main streets, anyway,’ I said, and hoped that my voice was steady. ‘There are small crooked ways behind the straight ones, and they
creep out farther in these days, as the grass creeps farther between the wheel ruts in the streets.’

‘The grass is not Roman,’ Guenhumara said with a small tired whimper of laughter. ‘It flows in curves when the wind blows over.’

‘You will grow used to it all in time.’

‘I will grow used to it in time,’ she agreed, ‘but tonight it is all so strange – so many strange faces in the torchlight. Do you know, save for your trout-freckled
armor-bearer, I have not seen in this Red Crest’s eyrie, one of those who were with you in my father’s hall.’

‘They will be most of them at Trimontium,’ I said. ‘Flavian rode this far with me, and then on south, to winter with his wife and bairn.’

She looked around quickly. ‘Was that his price?’

‘His price?’ I did not fully grasp her meaning for a moment, and could only repeat the words, stupidly. ‘His price?’

And I think she must have seen how it was, for suddenly she was trying to catch her words back. ‘Na na, that was a wicked thing to say – stupid, which is worse; I shall be less
stupid when I am not so tired. You told me before, that it might be you could let him go this winter, and it might be not, and I am glad that you could let him go.’ She moved a little nearer
to me as she spoke, as though to make up for some hurt or failure, and I knew that I had the beginning of the leave that I had waited for, and put my arm around her as we propped side by side
against the rampart wall.

‘What of the one with the barley-colored hair – Gault, his name was,’ she asked in a little.

‘Why Gault in particular?’

‘I don’t know. I thought of him at that moment – just a thought that passed by.’

‘Maybe it was himself that passed, coming in to the fire,’ I said, thinking of the empty places kept beside the mess hall hearth, and the food and drink set ready for men who came no
more in the body to the evening meal among their comrades. But it would be at Trimontium that Gault’s place was kept for him, beside Levin, this Samhain night.

I felt Guenhumara startle and stir in the curve of my arm. ‘Dead?’

‘Almost two months ago.’

‘Was there a woman left lonely for him – or a bairn?’

‘No, Guenhumara.’ I put both arms around her then, and pulled her close, as though trying to shield her from something, I am not sure what. She was too weary to quicken, spent as a
bird that one finds sometimes fallen on the shore after a long storm-driven journey over the sea. But she leaned against me as though there was some kind of shelter in that. And standing there in
the wind and the sharp spitting darkness, I had a sudden sense of light and strength and quietness, and it seemed to me that Ygerna’s power could not last forever; that it might even be
fought off and broken, and in the end I might be free, and Guenhumara with me.

‘May the fire be warm for him,’ Guenhumara said softly, against the breast folds of my cloak, ‘or may the birds of Rhiannon sing for him, if it hurts less, to forget.’
(‘Forget ... Forget ... Are you afraid to hear the singing of Rhiannon’s birds, that makes men forget?’)