Sword at Sunset

  She had been speaking quite close behind me, but when I turned, meaning to ask her some other question, she was not there. Only, a few moments later, something flickered below me on the hillside, that might have been some wild thing passing among the hazel bushes.

  I got up, and turned to the postern gateway of the fort, which I could see above me, and began to climb.

  An elder sapling had rooted itself in the cracked doorsill of a ruined guardroom. I had noticed it last night, as one notices small unmattering things; and as I came up toward the gate I knew one moment of icy foreboding that I should find nothing there but an age-eaten stump, and the familiar sounds of the camp made by men whose faces I did not know.

  But the sapling was just as it had been last night, and suddenly the men of the watch were all about me, and there were shouts, and someone came running, running like a boy between the ruined barrack rows, and I saw that it was Bedwyr, with the Minnow and young Amlodd behind him. The last chill of the fear that had been like a thin wind between my shoulder blades fell away, so that the warmth of the sun broke through, and in the same instant weariness descended on me so that I could barely stumble forward to meet them.

  ‘Is it well? Is it well with you?’ they asked.

  ‘All is well,’ I told them. ‘I think that all is very well. I have what I went for.’

  ‘Come and eat,’ they said.

  But I shook my head, laughing muzzily. ‘All I want is a place to sleep – a corner to crawl into where no one will fall over my legs.’

  chapter fourteen

  Cit Coit Caledon

  THERE MIGHT HAVE BEEN TWO MONTHS MORE OF POSSIBLE campaigning weather, but after taking council with Cei and Bedwyr and the rest of the chiefs and captains, I determined against dissipating our forces at the summer’s end in an attempt to round up the broken and scattered war host of Huil. Better to concentrate on making a strong winter quarters here in Trimontium and set about turning Castra Cunetium into a strong outpost while there was time for the garrison sent out there to dig themselves in before the winter closed down on them, and get the patrols going steadily to and fro along the road between.

  The first thing must be to speak with the Little Dark People again, and make sure that Daglaef the Merchant had made no mistake as to the position of the old fort; make sure also whether it was open to our coming, or in enemy hands and to be fought for as we had fought for Trimontium.

  So on the third morning after my return from the Hollow Hills, I bade Flavian hang a straw garland on the broken branch of the big alder tree when he took the squadron down to water the horses. The girl Itha had been right; there was one perfect watering place where the stream that we came afterward to call the Horse Burn paused in its headlong run, and broadened into an alder-fringed pool before it fanned over the piled-up wash of centuries that had formed the ford, and then plunged down its last steep stretch to join the great river. And above the pool one ancient alder tree stood out from its lesser and younger kind as a chieftain from among his sword brothers.

  He came when he brought the horses back, to report the thing done, and that evening Druim Dhu, the warrior who had shown me his arrow, walked in through the narrow northern gate, saying to the men on guard there, ‘The Sun Lord sent for me, and I am come.’

  They brought him to me beside one of the evening fires on the old parade ground – we had not got as far as any fixed quarters yet, we were merely camping in the ruins of Trimontium as we had camped on open moor – and he squatted onto his heels in the firelight with the dignity of a wild animal, seemingly oblivious of the staring crowd about him; and with no word of greeting, fixed his eyes on my face and waited for me to tell him what I wanted.

  When I had done so, he said, ‘As to this place you speak of, it is two days’ trail along the Great Road toward the setting sun. I know, for I have followed the trail myself at the herding; and the walls are yet strong. Whether it is empty or man-held, I do not know, but give me a day, two days at most, to send the word and receive it back again, and I will come and tell you. Oh my lord, is there no more?’

  ‘No more if the place be empty. If it be held, then bring me the number of the men who hold it, and their strength in weapons and stored food. Can that be done?’

  ‘It can be done.’ He drew his legs under him to rise.

  ‘Eat before you go,’ I said.

  ‘I eat only by my own hearth.’

  But I knew that the trust must work both ways. ‘Eat! I drank by yours!’

  He looked at me a long doubtful moment, then sank back beside the fire and held out his hand for the hot barley bannock that someone passed him; and ate, without taking his eyes from my face. When he had eaten, he got up, speaking no word of leave-taking as he had spoken none of greeting, but with a curious deep gesture of hand to forehead, melted out of the firelight into the dusk.

  The next day there was no sign of him, but on the morning after that, when the horses were brought up from watering, Flavian came and sought me out. ‘Sir, Druim Dhu has come in again.’ He said, ‘I don’t see how he does it, but it gives me the prickles! We started to get the squadron back from the water, and there he was in our midst!’

  I glanced past Flavian, expecting to see the little dark figure behind him, but he shook his head. ‘He would not come up to the fort. He just said, “Tell the Sun Lord that there is nought for him to drive out of the strong place we spoke of, save the hill foxes and maybe an owl or two” – and then he was gone. Maybe he turned into an alder tree.’ He laughed a little as he said it, but the laughter was not altogether easy.

  ‘The ability to turn into an alder tree is no bad thing for a scout.’

  ‘I suppose not. It is unchancy all the same, the way he comes and goes.’ Flavian hitched impatiently at his shoulders, and looked at me with sudden gravity. ‘Artos, sir, are we to trust him? – Them – about Castra Cunetium, I mean? They have the name for being treacherous little beasts.’

  ‘Nevertheless, we are going to trust them. We shall send the usual scouting party ahead lest the state of things has changed since the message was sent. But that is all. It is in my heart that Druim Dhu and his kind will not prove treacherous to us unless we earn their treachery.’

  And so a few days later, with their share of the stores, weapons and raw materials of war loaded onto their share of the baggage beasts, Bedwyr with his own squadron of fifty cavalry, a war band of spearmen, and a few slingers and light horse for scouting, took the road westward up the river gorge, to garrison Castra Cunetium.

  ‘We shall miss his harp in the winter evenings,’ said Cei, leaning beside me on the red sandstone of the west rampart to watch the little force grow smaller and smaller in the distance, until it was lost in the tawny dust cloud of the summer’s end.

  But that autumn we had little leisure in Trimontium for missing anybody or anything. We cleared the bushes and scrub for two bowshots around the walls, save for a clump of hazel shading the spring that had been as it were a gift to us from the Dark People. We set about clearing and restoring one of the two wells, which looked as though it might bear water again. We made the old latrines usable after a fashion, and patched up the rampart walls as best we could; we contrived, with bracken thatched onto hurdles, to reroof several barrack rows, some to serve their old purpose, some for outhouses, storerooms and stables. We got in peat and firewood, and bracken for fodder and bedding. Most of that work fell to the foot soldiers of our auxiliaries, who grumbled incessantly, as the warrior kind generally do when they are not fighting; for there was other work in plenty for the Companions and the light horsemen. Before September was out, we were regularly patrolling the lateral road, and from the first, I used small cavalry knots for foraging among the British villages and at the same time gaining some kind of control over the countryside. The clans of central and southwestern Valentia had not been drawn into the general flare-up; they were still, for the most part, friendly, and they had assuredly no longing for the Picts and the Sea Wolv
es trampling through their hunting runs leaving the inevitable wake of red ruin behind them. But on the other hand, many of the petty chieftains did not see why they should submit to a war host not of their own tribe in Trimontium, let alone help to feed them with the winter coming when they would have little enough for themselves. Sometimes it came to the direct threat. ‘Three bullocks or we fire the thatch,’ especially if Cei led the foraging party, for he could use threats with a kind of grim good humor that left few scars behind. But there was always the risk that if we pressed them too hard, the chieftains would bethink them that another way of saving their fields and cattle from the Barbarians was to make common cause with them; and so threats were not things to be used too often. And in the main we found that the coming of heavily armed cavalry, a thing that the tribes had never seen before, was at once threat and reassurance enough. For the same reason, I refused to allow any cattle raiding. Instead, we hunted. There was game enough for all in the scrubby woods around Eildon, tribesmen and war host and little dark hunters alike; especially as the wilder and younger of the war host chose to turn their hunting spears chiefly against boar or wolf, and so the better food game was left for the rest.

  Late in the autumn our promised supplies came up from Corstopitum, and among the grainskins and tallow jars were the sheaves of arrows, the saddle leather and blocks of salt which I had bullied out of Eburacum’s bishop. (May God be good to his tired old soul, he was a bonny fighter against paying his just dues, but he kept his word once it was given.) And after that most of what we killed was salted down and stored for the winter.

  Winter came early that year, in a flurry of sleet that turned to snow and thawed and came again, and this time did not thaw, but lay week after week among the hills, adding to the stresses and hazards of both hunting and foraging; and for long spells at a time there was no grazing for the horses, so that they must be kept stabled and forage-fed; and in the long winter nights when the icy winds yowled through Trimontium and we heard the whistle of the wild geese overhead, we missed Bedwyr’s harp, even as Cei said that we should.

  In all those months we heard and saw nothing, either of the Barbarians or the Little Dark People.

  But spring came suddenly and early as winter had done. There was a red flush among the alders when we went to water the horses, and the hills were loud with the crying and calling of lapwing, though the snow still lay thick on the northern slopes and the wind cut like a fleshing knife. And one evening when I brought my own squadron in from exercise – we were hard at it already getting the horses back into condition again – a shadow shook itself clear of the guardhouse door, and Druim Dhu with his little war bow in his hand was standing at my stirrup. He looked older, his eyes sunken back into his head. But then so did we all, it was the famine look, the wolf look that comes to most men at the winter’s end when the food runs low.

  ‘My Lord Artos.’ He touched my foot in the stirrup by way of greeting.

  I reined aside, gesturing to the others to go on, and dismounted. ‘Greetings, Druim Dhu, do you bring me news?’

  ‘The Cran Tara has gone forth,’ he said.

  ‘So.’

  ‘To the settlements of the Sea Wolves along the land edge yonder.’ Druim jerked his head eastward. ‘Toward the Snow’ – he meant the north – ‘and toward the sunset to summon the tribes and the Painted People. They were scattered back to their own places, to Manann, those who could get so far, last summer’s end; and the White Shields from across the Sunset Sea wintered with them. Now the Cran Tara has gone forth, and they will be hosting again.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Into the Great Forest yonder between the two rivers, Cit Coit Caledon that we call Melanudragil in the dark tongue.’

  From that time forward, as the spring drew on, one or another of the Little Dark People appeared from time to time. Not always Druim nor even one of his brothers, but others whom I had never seen before. Once it was a little old man tough and twisted as a heather root, who materialized under the very hooves of the patrol as it came in. Once it was even a woman. It seemed that among the People of the Hills also, some kind of Cran Tara had gone out.

  Each brought some word of the enemy’s hosting, of the numbers growing in Caledon even before the snow was gone from the northern corries of Eildon; of Pictish and Scottish war bands seeping in by secret ways; of the long black war boats of the Sea Wolves prowling in up the Bodotria Estuary with reinforcements for their brothers of the settlements. And for the time being there was little we could do but hold all things in readiness, and wait until the red-hot moment came. I knew that to try to deal with the inflowing war bands piecemeal would be to fritter away our own strength almost certainly to no purpose. It was no formless skirmishing of war bands all across Valentia that we needed, but one smashing victory at the heart of things, Huil Son of Caw slain and his war host broken and scattered; after that the rest, however slow, would follow.

  So I turned a deaf ear to the urging of the hotheads, and remained, as Cei told me to my face, ‘like an old eagle molting on his perch,’ in my half-ruined fort, while slowly the Barbarians gathered like thunder drawing in from the skyline.

  Presently Bedwyr came in, leaving Owain in command at Castra Cunetium, and we held a council of war around the fire that burned in the entrance to the part-roofed Sacculum where I had made my own quarters. By that time it was clear from their movements, reported by the Little Dark People, that the enemy intended to cut the lateral road, and that once done, we should cease to be a system for quenching and holding down Lowland Caledonia, and become merely two isolated strongholds, each with its own perilously long and fragile communication line behind it, and no sure means of linking shields with each other.

  ‘Added to which,’ said Bedwyr, thrumming softly at the harp on his knee, ‘that if Druim and his kind speak truth, we are like to be out -numbered by upward of three to one when Huil has the last of his war host gathered, and you have a most noble prospect.’

  ‘Cei has been urging me to deal with the inflow piecemeal,’ I said.

  ‘And you are not of his mind?’

  ‘I am of the mind to wait for the right time, and break the thing with one blow – or am I growing old, Bedwyr?’

  ‘No,’ said Bedwyr. ‘That is Cei. It is always the old who are fiercest and most impatient.’ And he made music on his harp that was like a snapping of the fingers, and grinned across the fire at Cei, who grew purple behind his russet bush of beard.

  ‘Why you – you lop-eared nightingale—’ I caught his eye and he subsided into mutterings like an old hound when it is put out.

  ‘Peace, children, and listen to me. I have let battle be forced upon me because I have very little choice in the matter, but also because I believe that by doing so we may well gain our own choice of fighting ground.’

  ‘How then?’ Cei put aside his anger for more important matters.

  ‘By waiting until the last possible moment, to allow the enemy down into the most southerly tongue of Caledon; by not taking our own battle stand until they are within a few miles of the road itself. The forest is more open there, and on the watershed we shall have the river marshes below on either side to narrow the pass for us.’

  ‘For them also,’ Cei said.

  ‘Aye, but at the least it will even the length of the battle lines and keep them from spreading out to engulf us, as they could well do with their greater numbers; and I think that we can take care of their flanks in advance. Therein lies one of the few advantages of a defensive action.’ I took a bit of charred stick from the fire and began to draw the pattern of fighting as I proposed it. I was not a stranger to Cit Coit Caledon, for I had hunted there, and ridden with the patrol more than once; it is no bad thing for a war leader to gain some knowledge of the lay of his campaign country.

  And so on a March morning, drawn up in a somewhat unorthodox battle formation across the highest part of the watershed, we waited for the Barbarians.

  The red-hot momen
t that we had waited for had come at last, signaled to us by the Dark People in smoke smother across the hills; and within an hour, all of us, save for a small and most evilly tempered garrison left behind in Trimontium, had been on the march. It had been almost noon when the signal came through, and it was far into the night when we reached the agreed war camp and found Owain with his slim column from Castra Cunetium there just ahead of us. Found there also Druim Dhu, standing by one of the newly kindled campfires. But I had scarcely recognized him at first, through the war patterns of clay and red ochre daubed on his face and slight naked body. Only when he came and touched my foot in the stirrup in the moment before I dismounted, I had known him for sure by the familiar gesture. His hair was bound back with thongs, and the quiver of small deadly arrows hung well-stocked from his shoulder.

  ‘The Wolves have made camp on the shoulder of Wildcat Ridge by the Mark Stones,’ he said. (To the People of the Hills, the Saxons were the Sea Wolves and the rest the Painted People; and the Tribes and the Scots raiders, when banded together, they often spoke of simply as ‘The Wolves.’)

  ‘How far is that?’

  But distance meant little to Druim and his kind; they reckoned by the time that it took to make the journey. ‘If they start at first light, they will be well into the high ground whence the two rivers spring when the shadows lie so—’ He stooped, and setting the foot of his bow to the ground, drew a line where its shadow would fall about three hours before noon.

  ‘So. How many do they muster now?’

  ‘Between two and three times the number that follow you, my Lord Artos. But there are brothers of mine – a few – not so far from here, who have scouted for you all this time and will serve none so ill as warriors.’

  And indeed a score or more of the Little Dark Warriors did come to our fire in the night, and disappeared again by morning. Whether they were the full tally, I did not ask. I had long since learned that where the Dark People were concerned, one did not ask; to try to use them as normal troops would have been like trying to forge a spear blade from the substance of a hill mist. One simply accepted what they gave.