Sword at Sunset (71 page)

Also, we have never, in all these years, been free to turn the whole war host their way; there has been Eburacum and the Lindum coastline in need of our aid, and the Scots from the West every
summer, and not even a whole heart within ourselves, for among the princes of the Cymri, who have always fought like dogs whenever the High King’s hand was off them, the word was running to
and fro like a little furtive wind through the grass, that Artos the Bear was one who had forgotten his own people to carry a Roman sword. Maybe someone set that word running; I do not know. I know
that three years since, I had to deal with the princedoms of Vortiporus and Cynglass as one deals with enemy territory ...

This summer the Scots made a sudden attack on Môn and the coast of all the northern Cymri (last summer the harvest failed and last winter was a lean one; that always sets the young men
wandering) and I went up with two hundred of the Companions, leaving Cei in command at Venta, to the aid of Maelgwn and the coastwise princes who were for the most part still loyal. The Scots are
brave men though their fires flare too windily over too little of red heart; and it was the beginning of harvesttime before the flurry of small buffeting wide-spaced attacks were dealt with to the
last one.

We made our base camp, our central stronghold all summer, in the old Roman fort of Segontium that clung to the foot of the mountains commanding the Straits of Môn, until with the shores
quiet again, it was time to be turning the horses’ heads south once more. It was a soft evening, that last one I spent – the last that I shall ever spend – among my own hills, the
sun westering into a smoky haze beyond the low hills of Môn, and every comber of the western sea shot through with translucent gold as it came in to crash and cream below the fortress walls.
Arfon tore at my heart that evening, all the shadowed glens of Arfon and swift white falls of mountain water, and the high tops that were tawny now in late summer as a hound’s coat, and the
moss-fragrant woods below Dynas Pharaon where I shall not walk again. I would have put off the parting for a few days longer, lingering, finding some excuse, but I knew we should have slow
traveling on the way south, for I intended to swing wide of the direct road, in order to pass through as many of the Cymric and border princedoms as might be, and sup in hall with as many of their
lords. I thought it might serve some good purpose, that they should see the High King at their own hearths. God help me, I was still fool enough to cling to that old hopeless dream of a Britain
strongly enough bonded to stand with shields still linked, when I was no longer there.

Fool! Fool! Fool!

With a short while to waste before supper, I had gone up with Maelgwn into the old watchtower at the southeast angle of the fort, to look at the falcons we had housed there – Maelgwn was a
falconer to his fingertips, like Pharic, and where he went his hawks went too. I can see the small round chamber now – lit partly by the coppery sunset light through the archer’s
window, partly by the flare of the newly kindled torch in its sconce by the winding stair-head. The hawks and falcons hooded and unhooded on their perches, with the startling black and white
slashes of their mutes patterning the wall behind them. I can smell the smoke curling up the stair from the driftwood and sea-wrack fire that the falconers had lit in the chamber below, and hear
the harsh cries and wing clappings of feeding time. Maelgwn had pulled on an ancient hawking glove, and was feeding the birds himself, taking from his falconer the gobbets of meat, and holding each
in turn to the bird that snatched it from him. The last, and clearly his favorite, was a young golden eagle, whom he took up to feed on the fist. ‘This one I took myself from the eyrie in
May; a small thing of down and quills, but a demon even then – eh, my Lucifer?’ He held a bloody partridge to the bird, who took it with a lightning strike of the talons, and began to
break it up with the delicacy of its kind; and then, the food being gone, rattled his feathers and sat with distended crop, brooding on his lord’s fist, like a chained Caesar and outglaring
the world in general with a mad topaz eye. They were two of a kind, I thought, watching the man standing where he had moved into the window with the great bird on his fist; both predators, both
knowing no law but their own, both magnificent in their way, and I wondered again if they were true, those tales of his first wife’s death being no natural one. It was certainly true that he
had killed the boy for the sake of Gwen Alarch’s pretty hair and little soft breasts. Well, he would hold Arfon with a strong hand after me, he might ride the princedom with a wolf bit
himself, but assuredly no other would encroach on its borders. I wished that I could be as sure of Constantine’s strength.

Suddenly Maelgwn’s likeness to the eagle sharpened, as his eyes widened, focusing on something a long way off, and his finger checked in the light repeated movement of drawing again and
again down the burnished neck feathers.

He said nothing, but I got up from the box on which I had been sitting and crossed to the window.

Far up the track that had once been the military road from Moridunum and the South a small puff of dust caught the last of the sunlight and turned to a golden smudge with a seed of darkness at
its heart. It was scarcely larger than a plume of thistle silk, and yet I knew – or maybe it only seemed afterward as though I knew – that it was the doom I had waited for almost forty
years, that the rider hammering down the old road through the mountains, with his dust cloud rolling behind him, was the Dark Rider, for me.

‘Someone has an urgent tale to tell, that he carries it at that speed,’ Maelgwn said.

I nodded, but I do not think I spoke; watching that small ominous plume of dust spin nearer at breakneck speed, dropping out of the sunlight that still clung to the skirts of the hills, into the
shadows that were already creeping in across the coast. And a few moments later I heard, faintly, faintly as the blood in my own ears, above the soft voice of the sea, the beat of horse’s
hooves. In a little, I could see the horseman, bent low over his horse’s neck, and the drum of hooves rose pounding and urgent; it was almost dusk now, below the fortress walls, and men and
torches were gathering to the gate. I pushed off with my hands from the high cold window ledge; time to go down ... ‘It will be for me,’ I said, and turned and clattered down the winding
stair, my own shadow wheeling darkly ahead of me on the torchlit wall. Maelgwn followed me, still carrying the golden eagle, and at the foot of the stairway Flavian joined us, hurrying from the
stables.

The gates were open when we reached the clear space before them, and in the midst of a small startled crowd a man was dropping from the back of a foundered horse. The poor brute was black with
sweat and crusted with the summer dust, his flanks heaved distressfully, and the foam dripping from his muzzle as he stood with drooping head was rank and bloody; and the rider, staggering where he
stood, was in little better case, white from head to foot with the dust that had made raw red rims around his bleared eyes, save where the trickling sweat had cut channels in it down his haggard
forehead and cheeks. Indeed it was small wonder that in the first moment of seeing him neither Flavian nor I recognized his son.

Then Flavian uttered a startled exclamation, and it was as though a film dropped from my eyes. ‘Minnow! What word do you bring me?’

He looked up at sound of my voice, and came and stumbled onto his knees at my feet, his head and shoulders hanging. ‘An ill word.’ The dust was in his throat too, and his voice a
mere croak. ‘An ill word, my Lord Artos. Do not make me speak it; it is all here in this letter— ’

I took the roll which he pulled from the breast of his tunic and handed up to me, broke Cei’s familiar seal and snapped the crimson thread, and opened it out. Someone was holding a torch
for me, and the flames of it, teased by the light sea wind that was rising with sunset, fluttered over the crabbed writing. Yet I had none of my usual difficulty in reading anything from
Cei’s hand; it was as though it read itself, every word striking up at me from the ill-cured parchment with a small cold separate shock. I read on, neither slow nor quick, and when the last
word was reached, looked up, with a head that felt cold and clear and oddly separate from my body. I saw the faces of my own Companions and those who followed Maelgwn turned toward me in the
torchlight, stilled in waiting and unspoken question.

‘This is from Cei,’ I said. ‘He sends me word that Cerdic of the West Seax has been strengthened by a great war fleet from the Ligis Estuary – a lean summer and a hard
winter we had last year, you’ll remember – and that Medraut my son has raised the standard of revolt against me. He has left the war host, taking a goodly following of our young
warriors with him, and joined himself to Cerdic at Vindocladia. They have sent out the Cran Tara for the Scots and the Painted People in Gaul to join them.’

The silence closed in over my voice, and went on and on, the sound of the sea echoed hollow in it, and a crying of gulls like lost souls.

Nobody spoke; they were waiting for me to speak again; only somebody swallowed thickly, and I saw Flavian’s hand clench on his sword belt until the knuckles shone waxy white as mutton
bone. In the end it was not I, but Maelgwn’s great golden eagle that broke the silence when it had begun to seem unbreakable so that it must endure forever. Disturbed by what he felt around
him, and swift as all his kind to catch the mood of men, he began to bate wildly from the fist, leaping against his jesses while his jarring screams tore the silence across and across and his vast
beating wingspread seeming to shut out the sky. Maelgwn fought to quieten and control him, cursing softly, while the great wings thrashed about his head, and now that the silence was broken,
men’s voices splurged up, and incredulous and impotently raging.

When at last the great bird was quieted, and the men, answering to my upflung fist, had grown silent again, I heard my own voice against the wash of the tide. ‘It will be moonrise in about
three hours. In three hours we ride south, my brothers.’ And the words seemed to be an echo of something said before.

(‘For God’s sake come!’ Cei had written. ‘Gathering all men possible by the way. We need every man, but above all, for God’s sake come yourself with all speed, for
if ever we needed you to lead us, we need you now!’)

Within the half of an hour, Companions and tribesmen were snatching a meal in the crumbling mess hall. Around the upper fire a little apart from the rest, I had gathered to me Maelgwn himself
with a couple of chieftains who had not yet dispersed to their own places after the summer’s fighting, Owain and Flavian and the Minnow still in all his dust; and while we ate we held a
hurried council of war. From outside came the sounds of the aroused camp, men’s voices, and the trampling and neighing of horses as they were brought in, the clang of weapons fetched out from
the armory and flung down in heaps.

‘If Medraut has but now sent out the Cran Tara, it must be some while before the Scots or the Picts can gather to him in strength,’ I said. ‘If the Fates are not against us we
may well be able to take him and Cerdic before their friends can reach them.’

The Minnow, who had been staring with red-rimmed eyes into the fire, looked up and shook his head, which with the dust of his wild ride was grayer than his father’s. ‘If Noni
Heron’s Feather and his sons speak truth, the Cran Tara must have gone out in the spring, for a war hosting at harvesttime. With a northwest wind to speed the currachs, the Scots and the
Painted People will not be late to the feast.’

And it seemed to me that my heart settled, cold and heavy as flint, under my breastbone. For the wind which had risen at sunset and was siffling through the sand-dune grasses and across the
ramparts of the fort blew from the northwest ...

Flavian beat his open hand on his knee. ‘Harvesttime! And three quarters of the war host at home in their own villages, getting in the barley!’

‘So the call must have gone out at least two months before he left Venta,’ I said, but I was speaking more to myself than to the other men about the fire. ‘While he still
supped in hall with the rest of us. It is true that one cannot see into his eyes ... ’

‘He has the forethought and the gift for seeing and acting swiftly on the chances of a situation that becomes a High King, if nothing else,’ Maelgwn said, in his throat, not without
admiration.

A High King. Yes, the High Kingship was the quarry that Medraut hunted. The Purple would mean nothing to him, it belonged to another world than his. There would not be another Emperor of the
West; all that would be over with my going. If he was victorious there would be a High King, and half a length behind him, as it were, a Saxon holding the greatest power in Britain; just as once it
had been with Vortigern and the Sea Wolf Hengest. And then when the time came, as it must, for a trial of strength between them, there would be only the Saxon, and Britain would be torn between the
tree and the stallion, and the end would be darkness, after all.

I must have groaned aloud, for there was a small swift movement among the men around the fire, and suddenly they were all looking at me as though I had drawn their attention by some sound. I
laughed, to cover the thing, whatever it had been, and tossed the last of my barley crust to the nearest hound, and looked around at them, gathering them in. ‘It is in my mind that with
Cerdic and Medraut striking up from Vindocladia, the obvious place for a landing of the Scots, and presumably the Painted People with them, is well up the Sabrina Sea – somewhere in the marsh
and reed country northwest of Lindinis – away beyond the Apple Island, maybe – low shores and small wandering waterways to run the war boats inland and ground them, and having landed,
they will cut through to join hands with the Saxons as soon as may be.’

‘The old game of cutting the kingdom in two,’ Owain said.

‘Partly, partly also, of course, to combine into their full strength before we can come to grips with them. It seems that they are all too likely to succeed in that, yet even now, if we
ride like the hammers of hell, there is still a chance that we may meet one half of the enemy host in time to deal with it before it is joined by the other.’