Sword at Sunset (59 page)

Against them we could muster not much over five. But we had the cavalry.

Below me in the camp where the light of the fires was biting more sharply as the last of the daylight died, arrows and fresh bowstrings were being given out, while men with torches moved along
the picket lines, checking foot shackles, and from the field forges came the ring of hammer on anvil where the smiths and armorers were at work on last-minute repairs. And from the cooking fires
the smell of the evening stew began to mingle on the air with the tang of woodsmoke and horse droppings.

I had called the Council of War to sup with me, for when there is not much time to spare, it serves ill to waste it by eating and conferring separately when both may be done together, and so in
a little, Aquila the firstcomer tramped into the light of the council fire that burned almost at the foot of the bush-grown barrow, flinging back the heavy blood-red folds of his cloak, and half
turning to speak to Bedwyr, who stepped out of the shadows behind him, into the fire flicker that touched as though with exploring fingers the pale feather of hair at his temple. And I went down to
them, with old Cabal stalking at my heels.

Perdius was the next to join us, and little grim Marius who commanded the foot of the main war host. The Lords of Strathclyde and the North, and the princes of the Cymri, for I too had sent out
my own Cran Tara that spring; and Cador of Dumnonia, grayer than when we hunted together in the spring before I sailed for Gaul, thicker in the shoulder and inclined to a paunch; and when the
stewpot and baskets of barley cakes had already been set beside the fire, Cei arrived, clashing with cheap glass jewelry, from our sister fort across the road valley, where he held command of
tomorrow’s left cavalry wing.

So we ate, and while we ate, worked out with bits of stick and ale cups and daggers, the pattern – so far as one can ever make such a pattern in advance – of tomorrow’s
fighting.

When the food was eaten and the War Council ended, and the captains and leaders gone their own ways, I went to put on my war shirt. The day had been hot, and in summer no man wears link mail
more than need be; and there would be little leisure for arming in the morning. Old Aquila walked with me, for the bodyguard was camped beyond the garrison huts, and so his way was mine. Before the
mud bothy where my personal standard drooped on its spear shaft by the doorway, we checked, and lingered looking out over the great curve of the Downs silvered now by the moon, and by very contrast
with the quiet of the summer night beyond the ramparts, the awareness of tomorrow’s battle was strong on us.

‘We have waited a long time for this,’ Aquila said.

‘Ever since we drew breath after Guoloph, I suppose. Twenty years. And yet it seemed at the time, just for that one time, that we had fought the greatest fight that ever there would be
between us and the Saxon kind. And afterward—’

I hesitated, and he said quietly, ‘A new Heaven and a new Earth?’

Cabal nosed at my hand, then began the old familiar pretense at savaging my wrist in his great jaws, until I took it away and began to gentle his ears as he wished.

‘Something of the kind. Most of us were young, then, and drunk with victory. Now there comes a greater fight, and we grow old and sober.’

‘So – and afterward?’

‘If God gives us again the victory – the old Heaven and the old Earth patched up to seem a little more secure. A few gained years in which men may sow their fields in reasonable hope
of reaping the harvest.’

Aquila’s harsh hawk face was remote in the moonlight, as he looked far off between the dark bothies toward the rim of the Downs, every line of it deep cut as a sword gash; and under the
frowning black brows, I had a feeling that it was not the shape of the rounded slopes against the sky that he was seeing, but something further and beyond. ‘Even that might be worth whatever
price was asked for it.’

Abruptly he turned to me. ‘Bear Cub, will you do something for me?’

‘I expect so,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

He pulled the flawed emerald from his signet finger.

‘Take this in charge, and if I die tomorrow and Flavian lives, give it to him to wear after me.’

‘And if you do
not
die tomorrow?’ I said quickly, as though by that I could turn the thing aside.

‘Then give it back to me at sunset.’

‘And how if I am no more weapon-proof than you?’

‘The mark is not on your forehead yet,’ Aquila said, and put the ring into my hand.

I stowed it in the little pouch of leather hanging around my neck inside my tunic, in which I kept sundry other matters of my own. ‘Until sunset, then. Maybe we shall meet in the thick of
things, tomorrow.’

‘Maybe,’ he said, and touched my shoulder, and went on his way toward the guards’ part of the camp.

When he was gone, I turned into the bothy behind me, where a lantern hung from the center pole and my war shirt from its wooden cross against the wall. I did not call Riada, for the mail was
laced at the side, and could be put on easily enough, not like the kind one pulls on over the head, and which is all but impossible to get into without help. I took it down and heaved into it, and
was busy with the lacing when a step sounded outside, and Bedwyr ducked in through the low door hole.

He sat himself down on the packsaddle which as usual served the purpose of a chair, and watched me as I drew the broad thongs through the eyelet holes. ‘Artos, what do we take for our
badge tomorrow?’

We still kept up our old custom of riding into action with a sprig of some flowering thing tucked into helmet comb or shoulder buckle – brown feathered rushes in the East Coast years, or
sometimes yellow loosestrife or the little white many-thorned roses of the sand dunes; heather in the Caledonian years (‘Taking Heather’ had come to be the term men used in those years
for joining the Companions). It was a privilege jealously guarded from the rest of the war host, a flourish, a grace note that was ours alone. But there was neither feathered rush nor royal heather
on Badon Hill. Wild cranesbill along the foot of the chalk ramparts, but the blue flowers would be limp and dead before the first charge.

The grass for my bed had been cut from the northwest face of the hill, where it grew long and thick in tawny waves, for the fall of the land was too steep for the horses that had trampled it
flat elsewhere. A few stalks of it were spilling out from under the old half-bald otter skin that Riada had spread for me to lie on, wisps and feathery shreds of seeding grasses and among them the
withered head of a moon daisy. I stooped and picked it up, thinking suddenly how the steep drop of the hillside there was freckled white with the swaying flower heads.

Nowadays we number the moon daisy among the flowers of God’s Mother; the gold for her love and compassion, the white for her purity, and the raying petals for the glory that shines about
her. But underneath in the warm dark places we have not forgotten that the flower of the moon belonged to the Lady, the White Goddess, before ever men gave it to the Maiden Mary. The Church,
claiming as she does that the Old Ones have no place left in the people’s hearts, must forget that, or pretend to forget, and I knew that if I and my Companions were to ride into the coming
battle with the flower of God’s Mother for our badge, it must help to strike the weapon against me from the Church’s hand, while still, for those of us who still held to the Old Faith,
the old meaning would be there. Also it would show up well in the dust and turmoil of the fight. I looked down at Bedwyr as a man sharing an unspoken jest with his brother, and tossed him the limp
wisp of flower head. ‘This would make a fine panache, and there’s plenty on the west side of the hill; easily picked out in battle and surely most suited of all flowers to a Christian
war lord and his Companions.’

And I saw by the quirk of that most devilish eyebrow, that he took my point. ‘Give it fifty years, and the harpers who sing tomorrow’s battle after us will tell how Artos the Bear
rode into Badon Fight with a picture of the Virgin on his shoulder.’

I was finished with the lacing of my war shirt and began to fasten the shoulder buckle. ‘If there are any harpers of our own people still singing in fifty years’ time.’

Bedwyr was playing with the withered moon daisy, twisting the limp stem between his fingers. He tipped back his head to look at me through half-shut eyes, still fiddling.

‘Not so did you speak to the war host a while since.’

‘I have the oddest fancy to win this battle,’ I said, testing the buckle, ‘and choose my words to the war host accordingly.’

‘Sa! That was a magnificent harangue you gave us.’

‘Was it?’ I had no clear idea now of what I had said. The usual kind of thing, I suppose. It had not seemed so usual at the time.

It had been just at sunset, and my shadow had streamed away from me forward over the hilltop with a vast fiery arrowhead of sunlight between the straddled legs, and I remembered the coppery
glare of the sunset on the faces of the war host turned up to mine, answering to me so that I could play on them as Bedwyr played on his harp. And that and the length of my shadow had filled me
with a drunken sense of being a giant.

‘You should always speak to your war host before battle, at sunset with the fires behind you,’ Bedwyr said. ‘That is for any leader. It would make even a small man look like a
tall one, and a man of your height becomes a hero-giant out of our oldest songs; a fit rider, half a hillside high, for the Sun Horse of the White Horse Vale, with the seven stars of Orion for the
jewels in his sword hilt.’

(‘A sword of light with the seven stars of Orion for the jewels in its hilt.’) I seemed to catch again the echo of Ambrosius’s voice on the night before he died. But Bedwyr had
not been there, only Aquila and I.

‘I will remember another time,’ I said, and reached for my sword.

We made the late night round of the pickets and guard posts together, as we had made them on so many nights before. There is always something strange, something not quite canny, in making the
rounds of a camp at night; the increasing stillness that comes at last to be broken only by the fretful stamp of a horse from the picket lines, or a standard stirring in the night wind, the spear
gleaming out of nowhere across one’s path in the moonlight, to vanish as one speaks the password. It is a little like moving through a world of ghosts or, alternatively, like being a ghost
oneself. One’s own footsteps seem unnaturally loud, and any incident, the face of another waking man glimpsed in the red glow of a dying campfire, seems fraught with meaning and significance
that it would not bear in the daytime.

So it was with Medraut’s face, that night, suddenly seen in the flare of a picket-line torch. By day, to pass Medraut coming up from the horse lines was the merest commonplace of life,
save for the vague sense of a shadow passing between me and the sun which any sight of him always woke in me; but at night, that night, in the dark solitude of waking men in a camp full of others
‘sleeping on their spears,’ the brief unmattering moment stands in my mind even now as vivid as a duel.

Yet he only moved aside to give me right of way among the harness piles, spoke something of having thought at exercise that the big gray might be going lame, and melted on into the dimness of
the moon.

Bedwyr glanced after him, and said, ‘The odd thing is that in some ways he is very much your son.’

‘Meaning that in the same circumstances, I also should be down at the picket lines playing leech to a horse that I thought might be going lame? It is not really the horse that he cares
about, you know.’

‘No,’ Bedwyr said, ‘he cares no more for his horses than he does for his men. But tomorrow will be his first action in command of a squadron and he cannot bear that anything
should go amiss under his leadership, be less than perfect as he sees perfect ... I was thinking rather of a certain capacity for taking pains, together with a conviction that if a thing must be
done, it is needful to do it oneself.’ We walked on for a few paces between the horse rows, and then he added thoughtfully, ‘Yet if he has that conviction, assuredly it is the only one
he has. In all these fighting years, he has never learned to care for anything beyond the fighting; for him it is enough to strike, without heed as to the thing he strikes for. He likes to kill
– the actual skillful process of letting out life – that is a thing that I have met only a few times among fighting men.’

‘He is one of the destroyers,’ I said. ‘Most of us have something of destruction in us, I suppose, but mercifully not many are destroyers through and through. Dear God! That I
should speak so! It was I who made him what he is!’

‘How?’

‘His mother ate him as a she-spider eats her mate, but it was I who gave him to her destroying love.’

Neither of us spoke again until we were clear of the horse lines and into the moon-whitened space that lay between them and the wagon park; and there Bedwyr checked as though to tighten a
slipping sword buckle. He said at half breath, and with an extraordinary gentleness, ‘Say the word, Artos, and he shall find an honorable death in tomorrow’s fighting.’

The long silence that followed was ripped asunder at last by the sudden murderous scream of Pharic’s hawk, which he had with him in his bothy.

I stared at Bedwyr in the moonlight, sickened, and then angry, and then neither. ‘You would take that stain on your hands for my sake?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and then, ‘But you must speak the word.’

I shook my head. ‘I can’t cut this particular knot with a sword; not even yours. You made no such offer the first time, the last time that we spoke so of Medraut.’

‘I had not had him in my squadron, then ... ’ Bedwyr said.

I did not ask his meaning. Probably he could not have told me, if I had. Medraut committed none of the evils that can be put into words; it was not in what he did, but in what he was; no man may
hold the hill mist between his thumb and forefinger nor catch the hovering marsh light in a grain jar.