Sword at Sunset (75 page)

And as swiftly as he had come, he sprang down and was gone into the thickest storm of the fighting, where our ranks were desperately striving to rally under the hammer blow of Medraut’s
last charge. One more such charge as that ... and we should scarce be rallied from this one before the newcomers were upon us also ...

I wrenched Gray Falcon half around on his haunches, and thrust in beside Cei who was standing in his stirrups to steady his men, his eyes blue fires in a face smeared with blood and filth, and
shouted to him, ‘Constantine can’t be far off now, but it seems that Cynglass and Vortiporus will be here first.’

‘How near?’ he roared back, as I had done. (‘Ya-ai ya ya ya! Stand firm, you rabble!’)

‘Something well under a score of bowshots. Take over, Cei. I’m going to try and draw Medraut off for a while.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Artos, you can’t!’

‘If I can’t, then there’ll be nothing but the bits for Constantine to pick up when he
does
get through. It’s your battle now.’

He looked around at me, grinning like a dog in the gray jut of his beard, then flung the half shield away from him, and sent his horse plunging forward, and the fight closed over between him and
me.

I drove back somehow through the turmoil to my own squadron, flinging off my cloak of the betraying purple and bundling it under my shield, shouted to them to throw away the yellow corn
marigolds and follow me, and a few moments later, with my trumpeter beside me and young Drusus, with my personal standard dragged from its lance pole and bundled under one arm, was leading them out
of the boil of battle.

‘Is it some game that we play?’ Flavian cried, leaning from his saddle toward me.

‘A game of marsh lights and played with Medraut. The curs of the Cymri are overnear, and Cei and Marius can do without his attentions as well.’

‘This is a game that my father would have enjoyed,’ he said, and choked on the last word and pitched from the saddle with a flung spear between his shoulders.

We swung wide, with a small ragged pursuit on our heels, and into cover of the alder woods that fringed the rising ground, then turned and charged them. They scattered back, and we did not wait
to ride down the survivors, but turned about once more and headed at full gallop into the soft rolling country that lifted above the marsh to the north. Bedwyr had taken Flavian’s place, and
rode stirrup to stirrup with me as we had ridden in the early days, as we struggled upward in desperate haste toward the hill track from Aquae Sulis. Just before we lost the full cover of the woods
I called a few moments’ halt. ‘Now, Drusus, get the standard back on its spear shaft, and you Alun Dryfed, and you Gallgoid, your cloak is a good bright one. Tear it in half and it
shall serve us for two—’ I flung on my own cloak of the unmistakable purple at the same time, and when we rode on again, widely spaced now to allow for the phantom cavalry among us, we
carried on long hazel branch or spearpoint what seemed to be the pennons of a dozen squadrons. We came out on to the bush-scattered ferny hillside, and turning Gray Falcon aside a short distance
down the wood-shore, I could see the whole battle spread before me, and the pied flicker of the traitor standards already on the fringe of it. The Little Dark Warrior had spoken truth. I could see
also, but still a long way off, the faint dust cloud of marching men on the great causeway road from Lindinis.

‘They’ve a long way to go! My God; they’ve a long way to go!’

I turned back to the rest again. ‘All’s well, raise the standard again. Now your turn, Aidan. Sound me a fanfare.’ And touching heel to Gray Falcon’s flank, I rode
forward with Drusus close behind me, choosing my line so as to give an uninterrupted view to the enemy, and pausing to let the gleam of the horse’s coat and the red and gold flame of the
standard show up against the deep summer colors of the hillside. Beyond me, the bushes and tall form of the trackside would break and blur the numbers and movement of the rest of the squadron,
leaving only the pennons clear – those pennons of a dozen squadrons: Artos and his heavy cavalry reserves sweeping around through the higher ground to take them on the flank! Even from that
distance I could hear the roar as we were sighted, and looking back before I rejoined the head of the squadron and swung them northward again following the track into a shallow fold of the hills,
saw a mass of cavalry already shaking free from the main mass of the Saxon war host, and swinging toward the higher ground.

A short while later we let ourselves be glimpsed again on the crest of another soft billow of moor, then rode like the hammers of hell for the place where the track forded a stream coming down
from the higher hills, and beyond it became a stony scramble half lost among the heather of a narrow combe. We gained it ahead of Medraut and his horsemen, splashed through, and wheeled about on
the farther side.

‘We are not like to find a better place to hold them,’ I said.

And Bedwyr nodded, cleaning his sword blade on his horse’s mane that was almost as red, that it might be bright for further use. ‘I never saw a place more to my mind,’ he said,
‘nor a Company,’ and met my eye, and I thought how he had said last night, ‘I have always been one to choose with care the company I die in.’

Far off and dulled by the swell of the land, I could hear the rumor of battle like the rumor of a storm rushing through distant forest country, and already the nearing beat of hooves drumming up
toward us. I looked around me once, I remember, seeing the pocket of level in the quiet lap of the moors, the stream silvering over the ford, the furze coming into its second flowering,
bean-scented in the sun and wet. There were linnets in the furze, I heard their song; and the great cloud shadows sailed up from the south as they had done on the morning of Badon fight. A good
place for a last stand, with the combe narrowing behind us, and the river ford before.

I remembered, across more than half a lifetime, Irach leaping upon the enemy spears, and for an instant felt again the oneness of all things, that is man’s comfort under his knowledge of
being alone. Yes, a good place for a final stand. By the time the last of us fell, Constantine should surely have come up ...

I glanced behind me and on either side at the score of men ranged there with me, and saw it in their faces, that they knew their purpose here as well as I did. I wanted to say something to them
now, something to toughen the fiber and kindle the heart, but that is for an army, and this was a knot of friends, and instead I said: ‘My most dear, we have fought many fights together, and
this is the last of them and it must be the best. If it is given to men to remember in the life we go to, remember that I loved you, and do not forget that you loved me.’

They looked back at me kindly, as friend looks at friend. Only one of them spoke and that was Drusus my standard-bearer, the youngest of them all. He said: ‘We have good memories, Artos
the Bear.’

And then in a new burst of cloud shadows sweeping up from the marshes, Medraut’s cavalry burst out of the valley before us. They reined in on the farther bank, and for a long trampling
pause, each looked to the other across the running water. There were faces that I knew among the horsemen on the farther bank; in the midst and forefront of them, Medraut sitting his tall roan with
his naked sword across its neck and on his arm the great dragon arm ring of a Prince of Britain, that was brother to the one I wore on my own. The stream was little more than a couple of spear
lengths wide, and we could have spoken to each other as one speaks to the man across the hearth. We looked eye into eye and I saw his nostrils widen and tremble. Then he cried out and heeled his
horse into the water, and instantly the foremost of his riders plunged after him.

And we, on the near bank, braced ourselves and spurred forward to meet the coming shock.

We fought hock-deep across the ford, up to the girths on either side, and the water sheeted up, boiling to a yeasty turmoil, white and then stained with rusty streaks that spread down the run of
the stream. Men were in the water, and a horse screamed and went down, rolling belly up into shallows like a great wineskin. Again and again they hurled against us, yelling, and again and again we
flung them back. More horses were down now, and men fought on foot, knee-deep, thigh-deep, in the boiling shallows, and so far, not one of the traitors had reached the western bank. Small
difference if they had; but men fighting as we were must have something to hold, some rampart which is of the spirit as much as of pass or narrows or running water; and for us it was the ford and
the line of that lowland stream ... Bedwyr was beside me, the rest of the surviving Companions close-knit on either hand, and if we never fought in all our lives before, God of gods! we fought then!
And in the midst of all, Medraut and I came together, naturally and inevitably, as to a meeting long appointed.

Spears had no part in this kind of fighting, it was work for swords, whether on horseback or on foot, and we strove together almost knee to knee, while the water boiled and the spray flew like
the spume of breaking waves. The horses slipped and scrambled among the stones of the ford, neighing in fury, and both of us had flung aside the bullhide bucklers which hampered the bridle arm in
maneuvering. Medraut was fighting on the defensive, waiting to pounce. His face was set in a small, bright, curiously rigid smile, and I watched his eyes as one watches the eyes of a wild animal,
waiting for it to spring.

But in the end it was I who broke through his guard first with a blow that should have landed between neck and shoulder, but in the same instant his roan stumbled, and the stroke caught him on
the comb of his war cap and swept him from the saddle.

He went down with a shuddering splash in his heavy mail sark that sent the water sheeting upward, and was on his feet again, still gripping his sword, while the roan plunged snorting away. He
leapt in under my guard with shortened blade, and stabbed upward. The point went under the skirts of my war shirt and entered at the groin, and I felt the white shrieking anguish pierce through me,
up and up until it seemed to reach my heart; I felt death enter with it, and was aware of the dark blood gouting over Gray Falcon’s shoulder, and Medraut’s face with the small bright
smile still frozen upon it. The sky was darkening, but I knew quite clearly that I had time and strength for one more blow, and I wrenched the horse trampling around upon him, and thrust at the
throat, bare above his war sark, as he flung back his head to hold me still in sight. The same blow that I had struck at Cerdic, all those years ago. But this time it did not go amiss. The blood
burst out with the blade, it spurted in little bright jets through his fingers when he dropped his sword to clutch with both hands at his throat, and in the moment before he fell, I saw his eyes
widen in a kind of wonder. That was the moment when he understood that the doom between us demanded for its fulfillment, not that he should kill me or I him, but that each should be the death of
the other.

He opened his mouth gasping for air and blood came out of that too, and with it his last breath in a kind of thin bubbling retch.

As he fell, the whole world swam in one vast darkening circle, and I pitched from the saddle on top of him. I remember hitting the water, and the circle turned black.

I tried to cling to the darkness, but the pain was too bright, too fiery, and tore it from my grasp. And I was lying in this place, in this small cell where I lie now, and the cell was full of
tall shadows on the lamplit walls. The hooded shadows of monks, the barbed shadows of gray men in war harness, like the ghosts of some long-forgotten battle. But at first the shadows seemed more
real than the men, for I had not thought to wake into the world of living men again. I heard a low mutter that might have been prayer or only the beating of a moth’s wings about the light. I
heard someone groaning, too, and felt the slow-drawn rasp of it in my own throat, but did not think at first to connect the two. A shadow, darker than the rest against the lamp, was kneeling beside
me; it stirred and bent forward, and I saw that it was not a shadow at all, but Bedwyr. But whether all that was of the first time, or whether other times came into it, I do not know; indeed all
time has seemed confused these last few days, so that there is no saying, ‘This thing happened after that,’ for all things seem present together, and most things far away, farther,
farther away than the night that Ambrosius gave me my wooden foil ... I said, ‘Where is this place?’

Or at least the question came to my mind, and I must have spoken it, for an old ancient Brother, whose tonsured head had a silver nimbus like a rain cloud with the sun behind it, said,
‘Most often men call it “The Island of Apples.”’

‘I have been here before?’ For the name chimed in my head, but I could not remember.

And he said, ‘You have been here before, my Lord Artos. I took your horse, and led you up to the hall, to Ambrosius at supper,’ and I thought that he wept, and wondered why.

I fumbled out a hand to the dark shadow between me and the lamp, which was Bedwyr, and he caught it in his own, the sound one, and drew it to his knee and held it there, and something of life
seemed to flow from his hand into mine, so that the leaden chill lifted from my heart and brain, and I was able to think and remember again. I said, ‘Did we gain time enough? Did Constantine
get through in time?’

And Bedwyr said, bending closer, ‘Constantine got through. The victory is yours, Artos, a narrow victory, but it is yours.’

A great wave of relief rose in me, with the next wave of pain, but the pain outstripped the relief so that for a while I could neither see nor think nor even feel save with the feeling of the
flesh. Thank God it no longer comes like that – and when at last it ebbed again, the relief that I had known ebbed with it and grew small and thin. ‘
How
narrow?’

‘As when two hounds fight until their flanks are laid open and their throats in ribbons, and one breaks off and runs howling; and yet for both hounds alike, there is no more that they can
do for a while and a while save crawl into a dark place and lick their wounds.’ He began to tell me how Connory of Deva had come in together with the Lords of Strathclyde, and were hounding
the surviving Saxons and their allies through the reed country and back toward their southern settlements, while Marius was mustering the remains of the war host to regarrison Venta. I did not ask
as to Cei and Flavian; I knew. But I asked after a while, ‘How many of the Company lived?’