Sword at Sunset (5 page)

But even as the thought brushed across my mind, I knew suddenly that I was being watched – watched, that is, by someone other than the man and the boy. I turned quickly, and saw a woman
standing in the houseplace doorway. A tall woman clad in a tunic of rough saffron wool worked about the neck and sleeves with crimson, which gave her the look of a flame. A heavy mass of dark hair
was loosely knotted about her head, and her eyes looked coolly back into mine out of a face which bore what I took at that first sight to be the burned-out remains of great beauty. Yet she could
not, I thought, be more than a few years older than myself, twenty-seven or -eight, maybe. She stood with one hand on the leather door apron which still quivered where it had just fallen back into
place behind her; yet there was a stillness about her, as though she had been standing there a very long time, maybe a lifetime or so – waiting.

This, clearly, was the woman of whom I must ask my night’s shelter. But she spoke first, low-voiced and with less courtesy than her herdboy. ‘Who are you, and what do you come
seeking here?’

‘For the one, men call me Artos the Bear,’ I said. ‘For the other, a night’s shelter if you will give it to me. I am from Nant Ffrancon over the mountains, and the mist
came upon me unawares.’

I had the odd impression, as I spoke, that something had flashed open behind her eyes; but before I could tell what lay beyond, it was as though she veiled them again, deliberately, so that I
should not look in. She stood as still as before, save that her gaze moved over me, from my head to my rawhide shoes. Then she smiled, and drew aside the door apron. ‘So – we have heard
that Artos the Bear was running among the horse herds of Nant Ffrancon. It grows cold since the mist came down; let you come in to the hearth fire, and be welcome.’

‘Good fortune on the house, and on the woman of the house.’ I had to duck low to pass in through the doorway, but once inside, with the thick peat reek stinging in my throat and
eyes, the house-place was roomy enough to be half lost in shadows beyond the reach of the firelight.

‘Wait,’ the woman said, moving past me. ‘I will make more light.’ She disappeared into the farther gloom, and I heard her moving there, softly, as though on furred paws.
Then she was back, and stooping to kindle a dry twig at the central hearth. The twig blossomed into flame at the tip, and from the flame-flower she kindled the waxen candle she had brought with her
from the shadows. The young candle flame sank and turned blue as she shielded it with her hollowed hand, then sprang erect, and the shadows crowded back under the deep thatch as she reached up and
set it on the edge of the half loft in the crown of the roof.

I saw a spacious living hut, the usual standing loom beside the door with a piece of striped cloth on it, piled sheepskins on the bed place against the farther wall, a carved and roughly painted
chest. The woman drew forward a stool spread with a dappled deerskin to the flagged space beside the hearth. ‘Let my lord be seated; there will be food by and by.’

I murmured something by way of thanks, and sat down, Cabal watchful at my feet; and sitting there with my elbows comfortably on my knees, I fell to watching her as, seemingly brushing off all
consciousness of me, she returned to the cooking of the evening meal. Watching her so, as she knelt in the fire glow, turning from the herb-scented stew in its copper cauldron to the barley cakes
browning on the hearthstone, I was puzzled. Her tunic was of rough homespun, scarcely finer, though certainly brighter in color, than that which any peasant woman might have worn, and the hands
with which she turned the barley cakes were rough-skinned, the hands of a peasant woman in texture though not in shape; and yet I could not see her as woman to the man outside. Also, the more I
looked at her face in the firelight, the more my mind was teased with a half-memory like a fugitive scent that always eluded me, just as I thought I had it. Yet I was sure that I had never seen her
before. I should never have forgotten that ruined beauty once I had seen it. Maybe she was like someone? But if so, who? I had an uneasy feeling that in some way it mattered deeply that I should
remember, that a great deal depended on it ... But the more I tried to lay hold of it, the further the nagging memory slipped away.

At last I turned from it to the puzzle that could be more easily solved. ‘The man I saw outside ... ’ I began, and left the end of the sentence trailing, for I was feeling my way.

She looked up at me, her eyes bright and faintly mocking, as though she knew what was in my mind. ‘Is my servant. So is the boy, and so is Uncle Bronz, whom you will see in a while. I am
the only woman here, and so I cook for my servants – and for my guest.’

‘And for the lord of the steading?’

‘There is no lord of the steading.’ She sat back on her heels and stared into my face; the hot barley cake must have scorched her fingers, but she seemed not to feel it, as though
her whole awareness were in her eyes. ‘We are such barbarians, here in the mountains where Rome’s feet seldom trampled, that a woman may possess both herself and her own property, if
she be strong enough to hold them.’

She spoke as one half scornfully explaining the ways of her country to strangers, and I felt the blood rise in my forehead at her tone. ‘I have not forgotten the customs of my own
people.’

‘Your own people?’ She replaced the barley cake on the hearthstone, laughing a little. ‘Have you not? You have been long enough in the lowlands. They say that at 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.’

I laughed also, pulling at Cabal’s twitching ears. This woman was not like any that I had known before. ‘Do not hold the straightness of the Venta streets against me. Do not deny me
a place in my mother’s world because I have a place in my father’s.’

chapter three

P
RESENTLY THE THREE MEN AND THE WALLEYED BITCH CAME
to their supper, shouldering in like oxen out of the wet, with a silver bloom of mist drops hanging
in their hair and the homespun and wolfskin of their garments, and took their places about the fire, squatting on their haunches in the spread fern. I had the only stool in the place, and they
looked at me sidelong and upward, knowing me for who I was, and more silent even than I judged was usual with them because I was there.

The woman gathered the hot barley cakes into a basket, and unhooked the bronze stewpot and set it beside the hearth, and fetched hard white cow’s-milk cheese and a jar of thin heather
beer. Then she poured her own share of the stew into a bowl, took a barley cake, and withdrew to the women’s side of the hearth, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves on the
men’s side.

It was the most silent meal that I have ever eaten. The men were tired, and wary in my presence like animals with a stranger’s smell among them; and on the far side of the fire, the woman
kept her own dark counsels, though more than once when I glanced toward her, I knew that the instant before she had been watching me.

When we had thrown the bones to the dogs, and wiped the last drops of soup from the bottom of the crock with lumps of barley bannock, when the last lump of cheese was eaten and the beer jar
drained, the farm men rose, and shouldered out once more into the night, bound, I supposed, for their own sleeping places somewhere among the byres. Thinking that maybe I should go too, I drew one
leg under me to rise. But the woman had risen already, and was looking at me through the peat smoke. It seemed as though her eyes were waiting for mine; and when I met them, she shook her head,
smiling a little. ‘Those are my servants, and when they have eaten they go to their own places; but you are my guest; therefore stay a while. See, I will bring you better drink than you had
at supper.’

And as I watched her, she seemed to melt rather than draw back into the shadows under the half loft. She was an extraordinarily silent creature in all her movements, silken-footed as a mountain
cat; and I guessed that she could be as fierce as one also. In a while she returned, bearing between her hands a great cup of polished birchwood darkened almost to black by age and use, and
ornamented around the rim with beaten silver; and I rose as she came toward me, and bent my head to drink from the cup as she raised it, my hand resting lightly over hers in the gesture which
custom demanded. It was more heather beer, but stronger and sweeter than that which I had drunk at supper; and there was an aromatic tang under the sweetness that I did not recognize. Maybe it was
no more than the flavor of the wild garlic in the cheese lingering still in my mouth. Over the tilting rim of the cup I saw her looking at me with an odd intensity, but as I caught her gaze, I had
once again that impression that she had drawn a veil behind her eyes so that I could not look in ...

I drained the cup, and released it again into her hands. ‘I thank you. The drink was good,’ I said, my voice sounding strangely thickened in my own ears, and sat down once more on
the skin-spread stool, stretching my legs to the fire.

The woman stood looking down at me; I felt her looking; and then she laughed, and tossed to Cabal some dark sweetmeat that she had been holding in the hollow of her hand. ‘There, for a dog
that is better than heather beer,’ and as Cabal (greed was his failing always) snapped it up, she sank to her knees beside me and letting the empty cup roll unheeded into the folds of her
skirt, began to mend the fire. She settled on more peat, and heather snarls and birch bark to make a blaze, and as the dry stuff caught and the flames licked out along the strands of it, the light
strengthened and leapt up and reached to finger the very houseplace walls. A strange mood of awareness was coming over me, so that it was as though I had one less skin than usual. I was aware as
though they had been part of my own body, my own soul, of the houseplace brimming with light as the great cup had brimmed with heather beer, and with the same wild sweet half-forgotten,
half-remembered tang of magic; I was aware of the dark thatch like sheltering wings, and beyond the golden circle the night and the mountains and the salt mist crowding in: the very texture of the
pale night moth’s fur as it fluttered about the candle flame, and the last year’s sweetness of the sprig of dry bell heather in the fern by my foot.

There was another scent, too, that I had not noticed before, a sharp aromatic sweetness lacing the mingled homespun smells of thatch and cooking, wet wolfskins and peat smoke. It came, I
realized, from the woman’s hair. I had not seen her take the pins from it, but it fell now all about her, a dark silken fall like the slide of water under the hawthorn trees, and she was
playing with it idly, flinging it this way and that, combing it with her fingers, so that the disturbing sweetness came and went like breath, whispering to me in the firelight ...

‘Tell me where I may find a place to sleep among your byres, and I will be going now,’ I said, more loudly than was needful.

She looked up at me, holding aside the dark masses of her hair and smiling in the shadow of it. ‘Ah, not yet. You have been so long in coming.’

‘So long in coming?’ Something in me that stood aside from the rest knew even then that it was a strange thing for her to say; but the firelight and mist and the scent of her hair
were in my head, and all things a little unreal, brushed with a dark moth-wing bloom of enchantment.

‘I knew that you would come, one day.’

I frowned, and shook my head in a last attempt to clear it. ‘Are you a witch, then, to know the thing that has not yet come to happen?’ And even as I spoke, another thought sprang to
my mind. ‘A witch, or—’

Again she seemed to read my thinking; and she laughed up into my face. ‘A witch, or—? Are you afraid to wake in the morning on the bare mountainside, and find three lifetimes gone
by? Ah, but whatever happens tomorrow, surely tonight is sweet?’ With the speed and liquid grace of a cat, she slip-turned from her kneeling position, and next instant was lying across my
thighs, her strange ravaged face turned up to mine and her dark hair flowing over us both. ‘Are you afraid to hear the music of the Silver Branch? Are you afraid to hear the singing of
Rhiannon’s birds that makes men forget?’

I had not noticed the color of her eyes before. They were deeply blue, and veined like the petals of the blue cranesbill flower, the lids faintly stained with purple like the beginning of
corruption. ‘I think that you would not need the birds of Rhiannon to make men forget,’ I said thickly, and bent toward her. She gave a low shuddering cry and reared up to meet me; she
tore the bronze pin from the neck of her tunic so that it fell loose, and caught my hand and herself guided it down into the warm dark under the saffron cloth, to find the heavy softness of one
breast.

The skin of her hands was hard, and her throat brown where it rose above her tunic, but the skin of her breast was silken, full and unblemished; and I could feel the whiteness of it. I dug in my
fingers, and the delight under my hand set up a shivering echo like a small flame in my loins. I was not like Ambrosius; I had had my first girl when I was sixteen, and others since; not more
perhaps, or less, than most of my kind. I do not think I ever harmed any of them, and for me, the taking had been sweet while it lasted and not much mattered afterward. But the thing in me that
stood aside knew that this would be different, promising fiercer joys than ever I had known before, and that afterward, for all the rest of my life, the scars would last.

I struggled to resist – drugged, enchanted, whatever I was, I strove to fight her; and I am not weak-willed. She must have felt the struggle in me. Her arms were around my neck, and she
laughed, softly and crooningly. ‘Na na, there is no need that you should be afraid. I will tell you my name in exchange for yours; if I were one of
Them
, I could not do that, for it
would give you power over me.’