Sword at Sunset (16 page)

We met old Hunno on a small rough-coated pony, with a stripling whom I did not know riding another behind him, jogging up from the marsh end of the valley. Clearly he had been making his daily
round of the boundaries. He looked exactly as he had done when I saw him last, exactly as he had done since I first remembered him; the wide lipless mouth, the little bright eyes peering out from
the shadow of the enormous sheepskin hat he always wore – I could swear it was the same hat, too. ‘Heard you was back in Deva.’ He greeted me as though we had last met maybe a
week ago. And then, faintly accusing, ‘I been expecting you any time these last three days.’

‘I could not come before,’ I said. ‘Too much else to see to. How does it go, Hunno old wolf?’

He gestured with a hand like a knotted furze root. ‘How does it look?’

But I had no need to follow his pointing finger. I had been looking, all the way down from the head of the valley, joying in the sight of young horses grazing by the stream, war-horses in the
making, as a miser joys in the gleam of gold trickling through his fingers. ‘It looks well enough from here,’ I said. We had never dealt in superlatives together, but we smiled, eye
into eye.

‘Come and take a look at closer quarters.’ He jerked his chin toward the water, and we rode on together. Amlodd my young armor-bearer, who was a friendly soul, had dropped behind to
join the unknown stripling, and Hunno and Flavian, Cei and I rode ahead in a bunch. Many stallions had sprung from those five Septimanian sires, three-, four-, and even a few five-year-olds; and
one look at the big-boned youngsters who scattered at our coming and then turned back in curiosity was enough to tell me that the plan was working out. Not all of them were as tall or as heavy in
build as their sires, but all stood at least two hands higher than our native breed.

‘All broken?’ I asked.

‘All rough-broken. A few of the three-year-olds are not finished yet. It’s none too easy to get enough men for the task, not what I’d call skilled men, not in these fat
Lowlands.’ Hunno spat with great accuracy into the silky head of a seeding marsh thistle, in token of his opinion of the Lowland horsemen.

‘You’ll have enough breakers
this
year, at all events.’

By the time that we had seen all we wished to see in the training runs, and Hunno had signaled finish to the lads whom he had called up to put the best of the young stallions through their
paces, the autumn day was drawing on. And as we went up over the brow of the ridge heading for the one breeding run that we had in the Lowlands, Hunno said, ‘Best come up to the corral, and
we’ll drive the rest for you. If you try riding the whole valley, ’twill be dusk before we’re half done, and you’ll likely miss the best of the colts.’

I nodded; we were in Hunno’s hands, and this was his kingdom, and on the crest of the ridge, among the wind-shaped thorns that grew there, reined in and sat looking down the gentle slope
seaward, toward the breeding run maybe half a bowshot away. The valley before us was better sheltered than the one we had left, with thick low oak woods on the seaward side, a good place for its
purpose; and at the upper end of it, among his quietly grazing mares and their foals, I could see the dark masterful shape of the stallion. The long sweep of the valley was only lightly enclosed,
for there were few wolves in those parts, and if any of the little native stallions who ran free on the marshes should attempt to break into the mares, the lord of the herd would deal with him;
while, with a stallion contented among his own thirty or forty mares, there was far less risk of a breakout than among the unmated youngsters in the training runs.

I wheeled Arian and we set off again for the stone-walled corral at the head of the valley, passing as we went the furze-roofed shelters for the mares at foaling time, and coming to the corral
gate we tethered the mounts to a thornbush and Cei and Flavian and I settled down to wait, while Amlodd went off with the other two to help drive the horses.

The black stallion had been watching us ever since we came down to the edge of his domain, not uneasy, but wary on behalf of his mares; he snorted and tossed his head, his mane flying up in a
dark cloud, and came up at the trot, in a wide unhurried circle to come between us and them.

‘The Black One takes good care of his own,’ Flavian said.

Old Hunno called out to him softly and unintelligibly as he trotted by on his shaggy pony, and the great horse ruckled down his nose in greeting. Bedwyr had been right about that one.

Hunno and his little troop trotted on, dwindling small into the distance, casting about the lower end of the valley, half out of sight among the furze and thorn scrub that dipped toward the
marshes. And presently we saw the whole valley moving toward us. We heard the shouting of the drivers, and a few moments later the soft smother of unshod horses on the grass. They came up at a
trot, long-drawn-out like a great skein of flighting duck, the herdsmen on their little rough ponies shepherding them on the flanks; and for a moment I was snatched back to a spring day in Nant
Ffrancon, eight years ago. They were being herded in through the opening with shouts and cries, the wild-eyed mares with their colts still running at heel, the yearlings and the rough-coated
two-year-olds who would be for that winter’s breaking; awkward, scary, curious as to the meaning of this thing. And among them still, a little gray in the muzzle now but still mighty, on
guard over his own, the Black One. I saw Amlodd riding with the herdsmen, flushed under his freckles and bright-eyed as a girl in love; and after the hurdles had been set up at the wide entrance,
he dropped from his horse’s back and came to me with the bridle looped over his arm, laughing and breathless. ‘Oh my Lord Artos – sir – I should have made a good herdsman if
I were not your armor-bearer!’

‘By the time that you are captain of the third squadron,’ said Flavian, naming his own rank and speaking from experience, ‘you’ll have served often enough as both, I
promise you.’ And he tossed the knot of bright hawthorn berries that he had been playing with, into the hand that the boy flung out to catch it, and turned to the trampling mass of
horses.

I went first to the Black One, who in the way of his kind had drawn out from the rest to stand a little to one side, where he could have all things under his eye. He stood with his head alertly
up to watch our coming, swishing his tail behind him, but no more uneasy than he had been at first, because of the familiar figure in the old sheepskin hat who walked with me.

‘If you had been Bedwyr the Harper,’ Old Hunno said, ‘he would have come to you.’

‘I wonder – does a horse remember so well from year’s end to year’s end?’

‘He doesn’t forget the man that won and mastered him,’ Hunno grunted. ‘No more than a woman forgets the man that had her virginity – it’s the same thing in a
way.’

I gave him a lick of salt, which he took with aloof deliberation, accepting with it the fact that I was not an enemy; and having made that clear to him, I turned in with Flavian and Cei to see
my fill of the mares and their young. We moved in and out among them, pausing to look at this one and that, examining, judging, feeling latent strength and responsiveness in slim haunches and
supple neck, while Hunno forced up a head with back-laid ears or slapped aside a woolly rump to make way for us in the press. And afterward, those that seemed to me the finest were brought out to
us separately, mare and foal, yearling and two-year-old, colt and filly. In all of them the same thing was apparent, the increase of height, the added weight of bone.

‘God is good,’ said Cei, who was a religious man after his own fashion.

Finally I beckoned Hunno over again. ‘The chestnut mare over there, with the white foal – bring them out to me.’

I had been noticing that mare and foal ever since they were driven up to the corral, or rather, I had been noticing the foal, but had kept him until the last, childishly enough, lest the rest of
the day, coming after, should seem a lesser thing.

Hunno cut them out from the herd and brought them to me, and I had a feeling, seeing his grin, that he also had been saving this foal for the last, hoping that I would not call for him before. I
set about gaining the dam’s confidence first, fondling her neck and making small love talk into her twitching ear (for with the mother’s confidence the foal’s would come the more
easily), before I turned my attention to the young one. He was a rawboned stallion foal, much younger than most of his kind; indeed, I judged him to have been born at summer’s end or early
autumn, as sometimes happens when a mare comes late into season or remains horsey after her proper time. He was not white as yet, but gray as a signet, yet any who had encountered such a foal
before could see that by the third year he would be white as a swan. An uncommon color nowadays; but they used to say that there was Libyan blood in most of the Roman cavalry mounts, and there were
many white horses of that breed, and he must have been a throwback in color through his mother to some cavalry horse of the Eagles. One could sense the promise in him already, as he stood beside
his mother, uncertain of himself, torn between his desire for the reassurance of the milk that he had almost outgrown, and his curiosity as to these men he had never seen before. The fire of his
mother’s race was in him, and the power and steadiness of his sire’s. He was only a very little afraid of me, especially when he saw that his mother was content to let my hand rest on
her neck. Among my own hills, the foals that run wild on the mountain grasslands and are rounded up only twice a year come wild as hawks to the breaker’s hand; but those that are born of
tamed mothers in the home runs, we are accustomed to handle from the day of their birth, and these ‘gentled’ foals are always the more easily broken when the time comes. So the smoky
foal was used to men’s hands on him. He was a little shy of me, because my hand was a stranger’s, but my palm to lick – there must have been the taste of salt on it still –
soon won him over, and he allowed me to gentle the harsh furry tuft where his crest would be, and draw a finger down his nose to the soft muzzle, caressing him, feeling the promise of him, the
small half-shy response under my hand. I knew all at once and with complete certainty that here was my war-horse of a future day when staunch old Arian should come to honorable retirement. I always
rode a white horse in battle; it is not that I find them better than horses of another color, but that a white horse marks out the leader clearly for his men to follow; it also marks him clearly
for the enemy, but that is a thing that there is no help for. Besides, it is not to the Saxons alone that the White Horse is sacred, else why should men, before even the Legions came, have cut a
white Dragon Horse half a hillside high in the chalk above the vale that runs to the very heart of the land? It is fitting that a white horse and no other color should lead the war hosts of Britain
into battle ...

Autumn-foaled and autumn-found – I knew the name that was his as by right; I should call him Signus, for the four stars of Signus the Swan, that comes winging up into the southern sky just
at the time of the autumn gales.

I gave it to him now, as a kind of covenant between us. ‘Signus – Signus, I call you. Remember that, small one, against the day that we go into battle together.’

And the foal ducked his head and then tossed it up again. It was no more than my hand on his muzzle, but it looked like agreement. We all laughed, I remember; and the foal, suddenly turning shy,
backed a little, and wheeling about on long splayed legs, turned himself to the comfort and reassurance of his mother’s milk.

Later, sitting on our hams about the crackling furze fire in the herdsmen’s bothy, Old Hunno brought out a jar of fermented mare’s milk (it is wonderful what unlikely things can be
used to make fire-drink) and the peeled willow wands on which he kept the tallies, both of his own and those which Amgerit his son sent down to him every year from the Arfon breeding runs, that the
whole record might be kept as one. There, marked by variously shaped notches on the white wands, was the record of every foal born in the last seven years. Round about ninety to a hundred foals a
year, save for the third year, when there had been less than half that number. ‘That was a bad black year,’ Hunno said, ‘a wet spring, a drowned spring, both here and in the
hills. And there was more than a score of foals dropped dead, besides them that sickened later; and we lost heavily among the mares too. But this year – Ah now, this year has been a good one;
see—’ The old brown finger with its ridged and back-curved nail moved up the newest and whitest of the willow wands, touching mark after mark. ‘A hundred and
thirty-two-three-four-five – a hundred and thirty-six, seventy-three of them colts; and we have lost no more than nine. The number of births goes up, look you, because we have added certain
of the young mares to the breeding herd.’

Besides the occasional losses, there had of course been some horses that did not come up to the needful standard, besides mares who were stallion-shy or consistently bad breeders, and Hunno had
sold off these poorer beasts as I had bidden him, to pay for fodder or occasionally for other horses; but save for these sales, we had kept faithfully to the original plan, however sore our need,
of not drawing on the herd until it had had time to become well established. But now the time had come when we might safely begin to do so and we looked at each other about the furze fire with
brightening eyes. ‘We have done well to wait so long,’ I said, ‘and now, thanks to your good stewardship, Hunno old wolf, we can begin to draw on the herd.’

He nodded. ‘What have you in mind?’

‘All the half-bred stallions of four and five years old – the Septimanians are enough to serve as many mares as we possess – possibly some of the three-year-olds, too, come the
spring, when they are fully broken. That should give us something over two hundred and fifty.’

‘What of the surplus mares?’

‘Not for us,’ I said. ‘Too precious to be risked in war save in the last ditch. Let them go back to free range in the hills; they may do something to improve the stock, and we
can call them in again in another year should we need them.’