Sword at Sunset (35 page)

We had a good day’s hawking, but the thing that remains clearest of it in my mind came when Pharic had seemingly wearied of the sport; and lagging behind with him, while the rest moved on
to try some pool farther up the glen, we came walking the horses up a long slope where the midges rose in clouds from the bracken as we brushed by, and over the crest of the ridge reined in and sat
looking down into a widely shallow valley running to the marshes and the sea. Directly below us a small leaf-shaped tarn lay as in the hollow of a big quiet hand; and listening, I thought that I
could catch the whistling call of sandpipers that always haunt such places. And between us and the pebbly shore lay all that time had left of an ancient steading, the ground dimpled with hollows
and bush-grown mounds that must once have been bothies and byres and store pits, and showing here and there curved outbreaks of stones that had faced a turf wall, so that I was reminded of a
village of the Little Dark People. But in the midst of the place, on ground a little higher than the rest, the stone drum of the old strong point, the chieftain’s tower still stood to almost
twice the height of a man, and had a roof of ragged thatch.

‘What happened to it?’ I asked, after we had sat looking down in silence for a few moments.

‘No fire nor sword; not the Scots this time. The place was too prone to flooding in the winter, and some forefather of mine with a misliking for wet feet abandoned the place to build the
present Dun on higher ground.’

I had something of the story from this one and that. ‘It seems not quite abandoned, even now. So far as one may see from here, that thatch is sound enough, and someone has been cutting
bracken fodder over yonder on the far side of the valley, not more than a week or ten days since, to judge by the clean yellow gleam of it.’

‘The herdsmen use it at the spring and autumn herding, and sometimes in the summer, on passage from one grazing ground to another. They keep a roof on the tower for shelter, and fodder for
the beasts and maybe a creel or two of rye meal for themselves stowed above the house beam. It’s a humble end, isn’t it, for a stronghold that’s known the clash of weapons and the
music of the chieftain’s harper – but there’s times, even now, when the place comes into its own again for a while and a while.’

‘And what times would those be?’

‘When there is a marrying in the chieftain’s line. Always it has been our custom that when the sons of the chieftain’s house bring home their brides, they must pass the first
night in the old Dun. That is for courtesy to the chieftains of the older time – to bring the incoming women to their hearth.’

I glanced around at him. ‘The daughters, too?’

‘The daughters, maybe, though for them it is not greeting but farewell. When a woman marries she goes to her husband’s hearth.’ He turned his head deliberately, and looked at
me under black brows as level as his hawk’s wings when she rested on the upper air. ‘It is not forbidden to the daughters, too.’

We looked at each other, the horses shifting under us eager to be moving on, and the little breeze that could not reach down into the midge-infested glen behind us stirred the hair on our heads
and brushed through the tawny late summer grass. ‘Guenhumara has told you, then,’ I said at last.

‘Something – it is a matter that concerns me, after all, since if she brings you a war band for her dowry, it must be I who lead it.’

‘You especially?’

‘It is for one of the chieftain’s sons to lead such a band. Laethrig is my father’s first son, and Sulian is already knotted in a girl’s long hair, while I – I am
free, and have an itch to the soles of my feet that I shall not find easement for, here in my father’s hall.’

I looked at him in the clear upland light, the set of his head that matched that of the hawk on his fist, the hot red-brown eyes under the black brows; and I thought that he might be well right
in that, and thought also that it would be good to have this frowning youngster among my captains.

‘I can maybe find the means for easing the soles to your feet,’ I said. ‘And if there is a like itching in the palm of your sword hand, I can find you a fine way to appease
that also.’

‘Then while my sister is your woman, I am your man. But I forget—’ He flung up his head and laughed. He had a hard short laugh that when he grew older would be a bark like a
dog-fox’s. ‘You may not speak of such matters until the Lammas torches are lit!’

‘It is none so simple a thing, to be faced with the offer of a wife, all unwarned, in a hall full of strangers,’ I said, ‘and with more matters than a bride-wreath hanging on
the Yea or Nay.’

‘Sa sa, I can well believe it, and a man might snatch at any means to gain him breathing space. Only when the breathing space is past, and he has made his choice, and struck his bargain,
let him abide by it, remembering that hall full of strangers, who are not strangers to the woman, but her own people, and remember that among them she has three brothers, and among those three
brothers, one in particular.’

I had liked the boy before, and I liked him the better for that clumsy threat. ‘I will remember,’ I said. And I suppose I must have shown my liking in some way, for suddenly his dark
bony face lit up as though in answer, and the moment of stress was gone like a plume of thistle seed on the small soft wind.

‘And speaking of the Lammas torches,’ I said, ‘the shadows are growing long – time, maybe, that we were away back to the Dun.’

He shook his head, looking back the way that we had come. ‘Ach, no need for a while yet. It is good out here; a good time of the evening, and we are none so far, across country. We can
meet up with the others at the glen head, and send two or three of the young ones back with the hawks and the dogs; no need for the rest of us to be making for the Dun at all. We can ride straight
over to the gathering place, and leave the horses in the little wood close by.’

So it was that dusk had deepened into the dark, and a blurred moon was rising over the high moors, when we dismounted and tethered the horses in the hazel thicket below the gathering place, and
set our faces to the steep heathery slope beyond. The little soft wind of the day had quite died away, and the sky was overspread with the faintest rippled sheet of thunder haze, and even as we
climbed, there was a flicker of summer lightning along the hills. The circle of the Nine Sisters stood above us on its shoulder of the moors, darkly outlined against the snail-shine of the moon,
and about its feet the dark multitude was already gathering. We could hear the awed hushed murmur of tongues, the faint brush of feet in the grass ... As we stepped out from the heather onto the
smooth turf of the dancing floor I saw that every face was turned inward to the circle of standing stones, and looking the same way, I saw – or thought I saw – that despite the luminous
clearness of the night, a faint mist clung there still; no, not so much a mist as an obscurity that one could neither see nor see through. So must the magic mists have been, that the priests of the
older world could raise for the cloaking of an army.

Pharic had disappeared, with his own lads about him, and young Amlodd, still panting with the speed that he had made from the Dun after his errand with the hawks, came dodging through the
multitude to join the little knot of Companions. But he, too, kept his face turned all the while to the Nine Sisters. The tension of thunder was on us all, but another tension also, that rose and
rose as the moments passed, until it reached almost to the limit of physical endurance; as certain prolonged notes of a horn will do. I heard Flavian gasp beside me. I was sweating in the palms of
my hands, and it began to seem to me that at any moment now the whole night must crack wide open under pressure of this intensity of waiting.

The faint whisper of scuffing feet and low-pitched voices had fallen away into complete stillness, and out of the stillness came the Beginning. Not any note of horns, but the sudden overwhelming
stench of animal potency, as though some great rutting beast were nearby.

A low thrilling murmur, a kind of moan, rose from the crowd, and as one man they surged inward almost to the outer surface of the standing stones, as though drawn by the thing within them, the
thing that drew me with the rest, as it had drawn me when I was a boy among my own hills, but so long ago that I had forgotten ... The mist seemed to have gathered more thickly within the stone
circle, and out of the midst of it, tangible as the musky stink of rut, was flowing a vast Power. Somewhere a pipe called silverly, small and remote as a bird over the moon-washed moors, more
compelling than the war horns of an army. And as though at the command of the pipe, the mist began to lift. Somewhere at the heart of it came a blurred blink of bluish light, that strengthened into
a small clear jet of flame springing from between a huge sweep of shadowy antlers.

On a throne of piled turf in the exact center of the Nine Dancers, his arms folded on his breast, sat a tall man, naked and shining, with the head of a royal stag.

At sight of him the people set up a great throbbing cry that rose and rose and seemed to beat vast wings about the hill shoulder; and then in one great surge of movement like a breaking wave,
they flung themselves to the ground.

And I, I was on my knees with the rest, the old men and women, the warriors and the children, the maidens with the magic vervain and the white convolvulus braided in their hair; my face hidden
in my hands, and the feel of young Amlodd’s shoulder shaking against mine.

When I looked up, the Horned One had risen and was standing with arms upstretched, showing himself to his people. The flame between the glorious crowning sweep of antlers bathed his breast and
shoulders in a radiance that was like the cold blue fire that drips from the oar blades in northern seas; his flanks and thighs seemed insubstantial as woodsmoke, and the shadows engulfed his feet.
And slowly, as though drawn upward by his raised arms, the crowd rose to their feet, and again the wild greeting cry was beating about the hill shoulder; and this time it did not die away, but
changed by little and little into a rhythmic chanting, into the ancient intercession for the harvest and the mating time that one hears with the loins and belly rather than the head.

It was not quite as we sang it among my own hills, but though word and cadence may vary a little, the core of the mystery remains the same. The ritual slaying of the God, the dark gleam of the
sacrificial knife, and the wailing of the women, and the rebirth coming after ... I remembered Bedwyr with his harp beside the horse-dung fire at Narbo Martius when the world was young, and the
merchant in his blanket robes swaying to and fro. ‘So the women used to sing when I was a boy – singing the lament for Adonis, when the crimson anemones are springing from the
rocks ... ’ And I remembered the bracken-thatched church in the cool light of that morning and Guenhumara kneeling at the Lord’s Table; and I saw the oneness of all things.

And then the ritual was over, and the reborn Lord had seated himself once more on his throne of turfs; and I thought that there had been other beast-headed figures among the standing stones, but
could not be sure for the mist that seemed to hang there still. And people were catching up unlit torches from the fringe of the dancing floor, and crowding forward to kindle them from the blue
flame burning on the very forehead of the God.

The light flared brighter moment by moment, a wheel of ragged fire-tongues circling the Nine Sisters. The fierce coppery light beat farther and farther up the weathered flanks of the standing
stones, driving back the moonlight; and among the tawny smoke, now glimpsed, now lost, were surely uptossed heads, horned and winged, hound-snouted and prick-eared ... And in the very heart and
center of the faming circle, the stag-headed figure sat immovable, the red patterns of ritual death and ritual birth still on his breast and thighs, and the old dry scars of war and hunting such as
men carry who are not gods. I had lost my sense of oneness, and I could have wept for it like a child who falls asleep at the warm hearth and wakes to find itself in the alien dark beyond a closed
door; only I knew that it had been there ...

Something of the godhead was fading from him, as the blue light dimmed before the red flare of the torches, so that one became aware once more of the man’s head within the mask. And yet he
lost nothing by returning humanity. The god was incarnate. None the less the Life of the People because we knew that he was also Maglaunus the chieftain, none the less terrible and apart.

All at once the crowd fell back a little, and there was empty torchlit space between me and the still figure on the high turf throne. The antlered head was turned toward me, and I felt the eyes
behind the mask reaching out to mine across the emptiness; felt at the same time, as though it were in myself, the appalling weariness of the man, the first lonely and terrible awareness of
returning self.

‘My Lord Artos, Count of Britain.’

Maglaunus’s voice was scarcely recognizable, hollow under the mask. He made a small summoning gesture with one hand and was still again. And I knew that the moment had come. I walked
forward across the trampled turf and stood before him. He tipped his head far back to look at me, and for an instant I caught the flicker of reflected torchlight behind the eye slits under the
stag’s muzzle. ‘I am here,’ I said.

‘The Lammas torches are lit,’ he said. And that was all.

chapter seventeen

A
N OLD WARRIOR WITH A HEADDRESS MADE FROM THE
feathers of a golden eagle – it is in my mind that he was one of the chieftain’s many uncles
– came forward to stand beside the turf throne and speak with me as to my taking Guenhumara, as to the bonds of friendship, and the dowry that she would bring me. For it was not for the
Horned One to speak of these things, though it would have been well enough for Maglaunus the chieftain at other times. I heard the old man talking, and the mention of a hundred armed and mounted
men with the chieftain’s second son to head them; I heard my own voice making the replies that courtesy demanded. I saw the little blue veins that writhed about the old man’s forehead,
and the torchlight shining through the silvery down at the base of the eagle’s feathers. But all the while my awareness was going out beyond the old man, beyond even the Stag-Headed One on
the throne, to the place where the torches had moved apart, leaving a gap of smoky darkness; and in the darkness something stirred and was still, giving no more to the torchlight than a blink of
gold.