Sword at Sunset (10 page)

‘Sa! I will remember that for a future need; if I wish to lie and be believed, always to make the lie great enough. Does the tale seem so very wild, then? They say that nowadays, with the
Ostrogoths pressing against the frontiers, the Emperor will give his sword to any good fighting man of any nation that comes his way. And it will be good to see Constantinople, and a splendor that
does not lie in ruins; good to have a sword, and a cause to use it in.’ For one moment his manhood and his mocking reserves fell away from him, and I saw through the smoke a boy looking at me
with hopeful eyes.

‘It is only the length of the road that makes it seem strange. I have heard that now the old posting services are dead, for a traveler without great store of gold it takes the best part of
two years.’

‘So – but I am well on my way already, and as to the gold, my harp and the odd task such as I had today will see that I do not starve.’ Bedwyr reached for another olive and sat
tossing it idly from hand to hand, and the boy was a man again, and the subject closed. ‘Doubtless I should travel swifter with a Lucitanian colt between my knees. But I should see less of
the road on the way, and since I shall travel it but once, I’d as lief see more of it than a cloud of my own dust.’

‘Are they so swift then, this Lucitanian breed?’

He looked at me, still tossing the olive from hand to hand. ‘The mares are served by the west wind, so I have heard, and the foals are as swift as their sire, but live only three years.
You should strike a bargain with the west wind, my lord – it might come cheaper in the long run than buying Septimanian stallions.’

‘I can well believe in this Powys-born grandmother of yours, for you have a true Cymric tongue in your head ... But as for me, I need size and strength in my war-horses – the striking
power of Camulus’s thunderbolts, not the speed of the west wind.’

‘War-horses?’ he said.

‘Did you think I wished to breed them for the Hippodrome? Our need is for war-horses, in Britain. Here it has been the Goths, but with us it is still the Saxons, and compared to the Saxon,
the Goth is the very flower of gentleness. Gaul has not known the tearing of the Sea Wolf’s fangs, and for the most part Gaul has had the sense to lie quietly in the dust while the conquerors
ride over. But in Britain we choose another way, and our need is for war-horses.’

He sat back on his heels, and looked at me with level eyes. ‘Who are you, my lord, that speak of Britain as a chieftain speaks of his war band?’

‘I was named Artorius on my ninth day, but most men call me Artos the Bear,’ I said, thinking that the name would mean nothing to him.

‘So. We have heard that name – a little – even in Armorica where the Sea Wolves do not run,’ he said; and then, ‘Truly my lord should take the Dark One, for they
are worthy of each other.’

And suddenly we were all laughing, whirled up into choking mirth by his persistence; and Bedwyr laughed with us, over the rim of the wine jar that he had caught up; but it seemed to me that the
laughter only brushed his surface as a puff of wind brushes the surface of a dark pool.

That night when we lay down to sleep with our feet to the fire, I could have laughed at my idiot fancy of the night before, for the day was passed and nothing, apart from the newly purchased
horses in the picket lines, had come of it, after all. Yet I thought about Bedwyr in the time that followed, almost as much as I did about the black horse, and next day constantly found myself
looking out for them in the sweating and trampling and the dust clouds of the horse yards. The horse I glimpsed twice, though I did not go near him again, and guessed that other men besides myself
must have seen the killer in his eyes, that he hung so long in the market. Bedwyr I did not see at all in the horse yards; but at evening I passed him among the crowd about one of the cheap wine
booths. He was drunk, to judge by the flush along his cheekbones and the hectic brightness of his eyes; he had a little dark red rose stuck behind one ear, and flourished a wine jug at me as I
passed, shouting something about damping the dust on the road to Constantinople.

On the evening of the fourth day, suddenly weary of Narbo Martius and its uproar that was so much more blurred and raucous than the uproar of a war camp, I did not at once return to the city
when the selling grounds began to empty, but let the rest of the band go on without me, and myself strolled down through the ill-kept olive gardens that rimmed the open ground, and sat on the stone
curb of a well, looking out over the pale levels toward the sea which was turning to pearl-shell colors as the sun westered. It was good to be alone for a while, and have quiet enough for my
bruised ears to hear the faint hushing of the little wind that rose each evening, in the olive trees behind me, and the dark drip of water from the well, and the soft clonk of goat bells, and to
watch, far off, the fishermen drawing in their nets. This would be our last night in Narbo Martius, and I knew that when I got back to the evening fire, every man of the Company would be there. On
other nights, many of them had hurried through their supper and gone about their own pleasures; the laughter and rough horseplay in the wineshops, and the women of the city kind and not expensive.
But I could not risk thick heads and maybe a hunt through Narbo Martius for some fool still dead drunk in a harlot’s bed, when the time came to break camp in the morning. So I had given the
order and made sure that it was understood; but I knew that I must not bide long in my quiet place below the olive gardens, taking for myself the freedom for my own pleasure that I had denied to
Fulvius and the Minnow and the rest. I think that few of them would have grudged it to me if I had, but it was not in the bargain.

Just until the shadow of the low-hanging olive branches reached that crack in the stones of the well curb, I told myself. It had the breadth of a hand to travel yet ...

That time I heard no step coming through the long grass under the olive trees, but a shadow, fantastically long in the westering light, fell across the wellhead, and when I looked up, Bedwyr was
standing within a spear’s length of me, his figure blotted darkly against the sunset. ‘How does the horse buying go?’ he asked, without any other greeting.

‘Well enough,’ I said. ‘I have chosen all my stallions, all but one of my brood mares. Now we have all things ready for striking camp, and tomorrow I shall take the first
reasonable beast that I can strike a bargain for, and with good fortune we should be on the road north by noon.’

He came and sat himself on the ground at my feet, leaning his head back against the warm stones of the well curb. ‘There are yet three days of the fair to run. Why then so great a hurry,
my Lord Artos?’

‘It is a long road north, and at the end of it a sea crossing. Even with good weather we must needs rest the horses at least one day in four. And at the best, we shall reach the coast with
a month to spare before the autumn storms.’

He nodded. ‘You will have transports of some kind?’

‘If Cador of Dumnonia has been successful – two trading vessels with the decks torn out for getting the horses into the holds.’

‘And how many horses do you reckon to get across at each trip?’

‘Two to each tub. To try for more would be to strike hands with disaster.’

‘So. I see wisdom of not lingering among the wine booths of Narbo Martius.’

‘That relieves my mind,’ I said gravely, and he laughed, then shifted abruptly to look up at me.

‘The Black One is still for sale.’

‘I have all my stallions.’

‘Sell one again. Or another stallion instead of the last mare?’

‘Certainly you do not lack for cool affrontery.’

‘You want him, don’t you?’

I hesitated, then admitted it fully to myself for the first time. ‘Yes, I want him, but not enough to pay for him as I am very sure I should have to do, with the life of a man or another
horse.’

He was silent a moment, and then he said in a curiously level tone, ‘Then I ask another thing. Take me, my Lord the Bear.’

‘What as?’ I asked, without surprise, for it was as though I had known what was coming.

‘As a harper or a horse holder or a fighting man – I have my dagger, and you can give me a sword. Or’ – his strange lopsided face flashed into a grin, his one reckless
eyebrow flying like a banner – ‘or as a laughingstock when you feel the need for laughter.’

But though I had known, in a way, what was coming, I was not sure of my reply. Usually I can judge a man well enough at first meeting, but this one I knew that I could not judge. He was dark
water that I could not look into. His reserves were as deep in their way as Aquila’s but whereas Aquila, whose past was bitter, had grown them through the years as the hard protective skin
grows over an old wound, this man’s were a part of himself, born into the world with him as a man’s shadow.

‘What of Constantinople and the Emperor’s bodyguard?’ I said, a little, I think, to gain time.

‘What of them?’

‘And the splendor that does not lie in ruins, and the bright adventure and the service to take?’

‘Could you not give me a service to take? Oh, make no mistake, my Lord Artos, it was the other I wanted. That was why I got drunk yesterday; it was no use though. I am your man if you will
take me.’

‘We have need of every sword hand,’ I said at last, ‘and it is a good thing to laugh sometimes – and to have the heart sung out of the breast. But ... ’

‘But?’ he said.

‘But I do not take a hawk without having made trial of him. Nor do I take an untried man into the circle of the Companions.’

He was silent for a good while, after that. The sun was behind the mountains now, and the evening sounds of the olive grove were waking, the creatures that they call cicadas creaking in the
branches, and the voices of the fisherfolk coming up faintly on the wind. Once he made a small swift movement, and I thought he was going to get up and walk away, but he stilled again. ‘You
choose more delicately than they say the Eastern Emperor does,’ he said at last.

‘Maybe I have more need.’ I leaned down and touched his shoulder, scarcely meaning to. ‘When you are captain of the Emperor’s bodyguard, you’ll look back on this
evening and thank whatever god you pray to, that the thing turned out as it did.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘When that day comes, I shall thank – whatever god I pray to, that it was not given to me to throw all that away, and go crawling back over those
five hundred miles or so that I was already on my way, to die at last in a northern mist with the Sea Wolf’s fangs in my throat.’

I said nothing, for it seemed to me that there was no other word to say. And then he turned to me again, his eyes full of a cool dancing light that was nearer to battle than to laughter.
‘If I get the Black One back to Britain for you, without its causing the death of himself or any other horse or any man, will that seem trial enough? Will you take me then, and give me my
sword in recompense?’

I was more surprised at that than I had been at his first asking to join us, and for a moment the surprise struck me silent. Then I said, ‘And what if you fail?’

‘If I have not died in the failing, I will give you my life to add to that of the man or the other horse. Is not that a fair bargain, my Lord the Bear?’

Before I knew that my mind was made up, I heard my own voice saying, ‘We will go now and look into the Black One’s mouth and feel him over, for I have not even touched him as yet.
And if the horse be all that he seems, then it is a fair bargain, Bedwyr.’

And I remember that we spat in our hands and struck palms like men sealing a bargain in the marketplace.

On a wild night of late September, with the first of the autumn gales beating about the thatch, we supped again in Cador’s mead hall, I with the great gaunt joyful head of Cabal on my
knee; behind us the long road and the choking summer dust cloud rolling up through Gaul, behind us the urgent struggle to get the last of the horses across before the weather broke. And the
torchlight and the heather beer seemed the more golden for the triumphant knowledge of fine big-boned Septimania stallions and the brood mares picketed within the ring fence of the Dun.

Bedwyr, with dark smudges beneath his eyes – for the last crossing, with the Black One on board, had been no easy one, and he had not slept, even in his accustomed place at the great
brute’s side, for two nights before it – had come from his fairly won place among the Companions and sat on the harper’s stool beside the hearth and sang for us, or maybe for
himself, the triumph song of Arwas the Winged after he slew the Red Boar.

chapter six

T
HEY BROKE AT NOON, AND ALL THE REST OF THAT DAY AND
most of the next we had driven them, among the willow-fringed islands and the reedbeds and the
wildfowl meres; we had fired their winter camp (they should be well used to the stench of homesteads going up in flames). We had cut off the stragglers and burned their narrow dark war boats in the
mouth of the Glein. Now, at evening on the second day, we came up from the river marshes toward the monastery on its island of higher ground, where we had left the baggage beasts.

We were a full band, three hundred cavalry, four hundred counting grooms, drivers, armorers, et cetera – or we had been, two days ago. We were somewhat less this evening, but in a few
weeks we should be up to strength again; we always were. There were no captives with us. I have never taken captives, save once or twice when I had need of a hostage.

Cabal trotted as usual at my horse’s off forefoot. Bedwyr rode on my sword side, and on the other, Cei who had blown in like a blustering west wind to join us when first we made our
headquarters at Lindum, just two years ago. A big, red-gold man with hot-tempered blue eyes, and a liking for cheap glass jewelry that would have become either a Saxon or a whore. Those two had
proved themselves in the past summers when, sometimes alone, sometimes with the half-trained warriors of Guidarius, the local ruler, we had attacked the settlements of Octa Hengestson, and driven
back his inland thrusts again and again. And the time was to come when I counted Bedwyr the first and Cei the second of my lieutenants.