Sword at Sunset

  Yet it was on the third day that, as I pushed my way through the crowd at the far end of the sale ground, with Flavian beside me, I found the best horse that I had seen yet. I suppose he had been brought in late, when the best of the others were gone. He was a full black, black as a rook’s wing. There are more bad horses among the black than any other color, but a good black is own brother to Bucephalus. This was a good black, standing a clear sixteen hands at the shoulder, with a good broad head and high crest, power in every line of him, and fire in his heart and loins to beget some of his own kind. But as I stopped to examine him more closely, I saw his eyes. I would have turned away, but the man in charge of him, a bowlegged individual with small twinkling eyes and a lipless gash for a mouth, stayed me with a touch on my arm. ‘You’ll not see a better horse than this in Narbo Martius this year, my lord.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I should think most likely not.’

  ‘My lord would like to look him over?’

  I shook my head. ‘That would be a waste of your time and mine.’

  ‘Waste?’ He sounded as though I had used a forbidden word, almost awed at my iniquity; and then, his voice turning soft as fur, ‘Did ever my lord see such shoulders? And he just five years old ... One was telling me that my lord sought the best stallion in Septimania – I suppose he was mistaken.’

  ‘No,’ I said, beginning again to turn away. ‘He was not mistaken. A good sale to you, friend – but not with me for the purchaser.’

  ‘Na then, what does my lord find amiss with him?’

  ‘His temper.’

  ‘Temper? The temper of a sucking dove, Most Noble.’

  ‘Not with those eyes,’ I said.

  ‘At least let you see his paces.’ We were on the edge of the open ground where the horses were shown off, and the crowd was packed dense behind me, but I could have pushed my way through easily enough. I do not know why I hesitated; not, I think, for the stallion’s sake, magnificent as he was, certainly not for the man’s persuading tone. The finger of Fate was on me, I suppose; for the enrichment and the bitter loss that came of that moment’s hesitating have been with me all my afterdays.

  The horse dealer had summoned someone from the crowd with a jerk of the head; and a man stepped forward in answer. I had seen him before, distantly, among the men who showed off the horses for prospective buyers. I recognized him by the lock of fair hair that sprang from his temple, mingling oddly with the darkness of the rest of his head; but until now I had noticed nothing else about him. Yet there was enough to notice, when one came to look. He was a very young man, maybe midway between myself and Flavian for age, but lean and sinuous already as a wolfhound at the end of a hard season’s hunting; naked save for a kilt of lambskin strapped about his narrow waist, the wool showing at the edges, and something that looked surprisingly like a harp bag was slung from a strap across his bare shoulder. But in the brief moment while he stood looking to the horse dealer for his word, the thing that I chiefly noticed was his face, for it seemed to have been put together somewhat casually from the opposite halves of two completely different faces, so that one side of his mouth was higher than the other, and his dark eyes looked out from under one gravely level brow and one that flared with the reckless jauntiness of a mongrel’s flying ear. It was an ugly-beautiful face and it warmed the heart to look at it.

  ‘Hai! Bedwyr, the chieftain would see the Black One’s paces, that he may judge of his mettle,’ said the dealer, and I did not contradict him because, of all foolish reasons, I wanted to see how this young man with the surprising Celtic name handled such a horse.

  The horse was of course already bitted and bridled, but not saddled. The boy swept me a swift low bow, and turning, set his hands on the great brute’s shoulders, and next instant was astride the glossy back, and catching the reins out of the dealer’s hands as the great brute began to dance and snort and sidle, swung him out onto the open trampled turf. Watching him as he put the Black One through his paces, I found myself judging the rider’s mettle as well as the horse’s, noting how lightly he handled the savage ‘wolf’ bit, while never for one instant losing the control; and the way the Black One himself, who I was very sure would have been a plunging fury with almost any other man on his back, not only answered to his authority but seemed to enter into the thing with him as they wheeled and circled and changed paces, and came sweeping in a cloud of dust around the full circle of the open space; so that when at last they came to a trampling halt before me, I could have sworn that the horse, as well as the man, was laughing ...

  ‘See, my lord, and he is not even sweating,’ said the dealer’s voice in my ear; but I had to think of the long road home; above all, of the sea crossing. I longed to take this superb black thunderstorm, but if I did, he would almost certainly cost us a man’s life, or another horse’s, maybe more, to get him home.

  ‘He is a good horse – with the right rider,’ I said, aware of the man Bedwyr looking down at me under that flaring eyebrow, with a curious intensity widening his eyes, ‘but he is not good for my purpose.’ And I turned on my heel and pushed my way into the crowd again, followed by Flavian in a cloud of mute protest, for he was still young enough to be sure that if one only wanted it badly enough, one could hook Orion out of the sky on the end of a cockle pin.

  He looked back once, and sighed. ‘It’s a pity,’ he said.

  I glanced down at him, and because he looked so young and forlorn, found myself calling him by the name that had been his when he stood nose high to an otter hound. ‘It’s a pity, Minnow.’ And felt that the pity of it included the man as well as the stallion.

  But it was to be only a few hours later that I saw the man with the pale forelock again.

  Every evening after the first, we had had our own small fire in the corner of the corral, for dried dung cakes cost little, and a sack of them went a surprisingly long way. And that evening we were gathered around it as usual, eating the evening meal, when a step came past the horse lines and a shadow loomed out of the crowded shifting dark, and took substance in the smoky light of the fire. The small licking flames seemed to leap up at his coming, and the pale lock of hair gave him the look of having a white swan’s feather caught at his temple; and I saw that he held in his hands a small thickset harp of black bog oak, on the strings of which the firelight played as on running water.

  He came in the usual way of wandering harpers, who sit themselves uninvited at any man’s fire, sure of a welcome and a hearing and a meal for the song they sing; and making me the same swift bow that he had made in the horse ring, he folded onto his narrow haunches between Flavian and Bericus, settling his harp onto his knee and into the hollow of his shoulder before most of us were aware of him at all. We had been talking of the horses, cavalry talk, sweet and nutty on the tongue, but at his coming a gradual silence fell, and face after face was turned expectantly to the newcomer; horse talk one could have at any time, not so a harper. But having gained our whole attention, Bedwyr seemed in no hurry to begin his song, and remained for a few moments fondling the well-worn instrument, so that watching him I was reminded suddenly of a man making his falcon ready for flight. Then with no beginning, no awakening chord, it was as though he flung the bird free. But it was no falcon, and though it leapt upward in bursts and upward rushes as a lark leaps toward the sun, it was no lark either, but a bird of fire ...

  Old Traherne was no mean harper, but I knew, even while my own heart leapt out on the winged and rushing notes, that this was harping such as I had not heard in Ambrosius’s hall.

  Presently it sank and grew little, infinitely little, and sad. I watched a stalk of dry shepherd’s purse among the dung cakes catch light and glow for an instant into beauty stranger than ever it had had in life, before it crumbled into a pinch of blackened fibers. And the harp music seemed one with it, lamenting the loss of all beauty, that might fall in a single grass seed ... Now it was swelling again, rising to the heights of Oran Môr, the Great Music, and the lament was fo
r lost causes and lost worlds and the death of men and gods; and as it grew, it began to change. Until now it had been sound without the limit of form, but now it was taking on a fugitive pattern, or rather the pattern was growing through the storm-rush of the music, and it was a pattern that I knew. The harper flung up his head and began to sing, his voice strong and true, with an odd brooding quality in it that matched the song. I had expected a song of the Goths and the South, forgetting his unlikely name. Instead, I found that I was listening to a song of my own people, and in the British tongue; an old nameless lament that our women sing at seed time to help the wheat to spring; for a dead hero, a dead savior, a dead god, for brightness laid in the dark and the dust and the long years rolling over. Why it should help the corn in its springing, we have forgotten with our minds, though our bones still remember; but in its way it is a song of death and rebirth. I had known it all my life, as well as I had known Ygerna’s small song of the birds on the apple spray; and as I had waited when I was a child for the wheat to spring again, for the rekindled hope of the ending, so I waited now for the promise of the hero’s return. ‘Out of the mists, back from the land of youth,’ sang the harper, as though to himself. ‘Strong with the sound of trumpets under the apple boughs ... ’ I had heard that song so often ended on a crash of triumph as though the lost hero were already returned to his people; this time it ended on one clear note of distant hope that was like one star in a wild sky.

  The harp song was silent, and the harper’s hand fell from the leaping strings to lie at rest on his knee. For a long moment we were all silent about the fire, and the sounds of the camp washed in upon us without breaking the stillness of our own circle. Then Owain leaned forward to remake the sinking fire, building the brown dung cakes upon each other with the grave and thoughtful deliberation that was very much a part of him, and the spell was broken, so that I was aware of the dark faces of the mule drivers gathered on the fringe of the firelight, and the angry squealing of a mule somewhere beyond; and close beside me the old merchant, standing with his hands in his beard, and the faint aromatic smell that came from his robes as he rocked gently to and fro, his head cocked as though still to listen; and the murmur that came from him too, ‘Sa sa – 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 ... ’ which was strange, for he understood no word of the British tongue.

  I saw the harper looking at me through the blue smoke drift of the dung fire. But it was Fulvius who spoke first. ‘I should scarce have thought to hear that song in Septimania, unless it was one of our own pack that gave tongue to it.’

  Bedwyr the Harper smiled, his crooked mouth touched with mockery. ‘I am from the settlement that the Emperor Maximus made with his Sixth Legion veterans in Armorica and my father’s mother was from Powys. Does that answer your question?’ His speaking voice was deep, a singer’s voice, and touched with mockery also.

  Fulvius nodded, and passed him the wine jar. Flavian set the basket of cold meat and olives before him, and he accepted both without comment, returning the harp gently to the embroidered doeskin bag like a man rehooding his falcon. The mule drivers, seeing that there would be no more singing, at least for a while, had drifted away.

  I said, ‘It explains how you came to have the songs of Britain in your harp bag, but scarcely why you should choose one of them for us. Do we wear Britannicus branded on our foreheads?’

  ‘All Narbo Martius knows that the chieftains are from Britain to buy stallions and brood mares,’ he said, eating bread and olives in alternate bites. And then he said the thing that I knew he had come to say. ‘Why did you refuse the Black One? He would sire fine sons.’

  ‘Does all Narbo Martius know that the stallions are for siring?’

  ‘Is it not clear to see? Every horse that my lord has chosen, the points that he has looked for are those that make for strong breeding, in the stallions as well as the mares. My lord has been buying, not these horses but their sons ... Why turn from the Black One?’

  ‘We are from Britain, as you have said yourself. That means a long road north and a sea crossing. If I mistake not, the horse is a killer.’

  ‘Your true killer slays for pleasure like a wildcat,’ Bedwyr said. ‘This one’s heart is angry, that is a different thing. He is what he is because he was mishandled in his colt days.’

  ‘You know him, then?’

  ‘I never saw him until today. But brother may know brother ... ’

  That was the only time, I think, in twenty years, that I ever heard him speak, however indirectly, of his own colt days, and I would sooner, I think, have asked Aquila how it felt to wear a Saxon thrall ring, than have probed into what he did not choose to tell me.

  ‘I think maybe you are right. Certainly he handled well enough for you,’ I said, and scarcely noticed at the time, though I remembered it after, how he looked up at that as though a new thought had opened in him, and then returned to the meat in his hand. ‘But nevertheless, he must find another master than me.’

  But I wished that it need not be so. The Black One had taken my fancy more than almost any other of the horses that I had seen in Narbo Martius.

  The wine jar came my way, and I drank and passed it on to Bericus beside me, and returned to an earlier thing. ‘And now – since you know so clearly what it is that we do in Narbo Martius, do you make fair return, and tell us what brings you here, so far from your own hunting runs.’

  On the face of it, it was a foolish question to ask of a strolling harper, but there was something about this man that set him apart from the ordinary wandering minstrel drifting from lord’s hall to fairground; a purpose about him that was at odds with any kind of drifting; and I thought it unlikely that a professional harper would have turned his hand to the kind of work that he had been doing that morning.

  And suddenly his eyes, meeting mine through the acid smoke, flashed into a mocking awareness of what I was thinking. ‘I am on my way to Constantinople, in hope of joining the Emperor’s bodyguard,’ he said, and watched me to see what I would make of it.

  ‘I think you hope that I will not believe you,’ I said, ‘but oddly enough, I do.’ I was leaning forward as he was, arms across knees, and we spoke to each other through the dung smoke as though the others around the fire did not exist.

  ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘Because for one thing, if for some reason you were lying, you would choose a less wild tale to tell.’

  ‘Sa! I will remember that for a future need; if I wish to lie and be believed, always to make the lie great enough. Does the tale seem so very wild, then? They say that nowadays, with the Ostrogoths pressing against the frontiers, the Emperor will give his sword to any good fighting man of any nation that comes his way. And it will be good to see Constantinople, and a splendor that does not lie in ruins; good to have a sword, and a cause to use it in.’ For one moment his manhood and his mocking reserves fell away from him, and I saw through the smoke a boy looking at me with hopeful eyes.

  ‘It is only the length of the road that makes it seem strange. I have heard that now the old posting services are dead, for a traveler without great store of gold it takes the best part of two years.’

  ‘So – but I am well on my way already, and as to the gold, my harp and the odd task such as I had today will see that I do not starve.’ Bedwyr reached for another olive and sat tossing it idly from hand to hand, and the boy was a man again, and the subject closed. ‘Doubtless I should travel swifter with a Lucitanian colt between my knees. But I should see less of the road on the way, and since I shall travel it but once, I’d as lief see more of it than a cloud of my own dust.’

  ‘Are they so swift then, this Lucitanian breed?’

  He looked at me, still tossing the olive from hand to hand. ‘The mares are served by the west wind, so I have heard, and the foals are as swift as their sire, but live only three years. You should strike a bargain with the west wind, my lord – it might
come cheaper in the long run than buying Septimanian stallions.’

  ‘I can well believe in this Powys-born grandmother of yours, for you have a true Cymric tongue in your head ... But as for me, I need size and strength in my war-horses – the striking power of Camulus’s thunderbolts, not the speed of the west wind.’

  ‘War-horses?’ he said.

  ‘Did you think I wished to breed them for the Hippodrome? Our need is for war-horses, in Britain. Here it has been the Goths, but with us it is still the Saxons, and compared to the Saxon, the Goth is the very flower of gentleness. Gaul has not known the tearing of the Sea Wolf’s fangs, and for the most part Gaul has had the sense to lie quietly in the dust while the conquerors ride over. But in Britain we choose another way, and our need is for war-horses.’

  He sat back on his heels, and looked at me with level eyes. ‘Who are you, my lord, that speak of Britain as a chieftain speaks of his war band?’

  ‘I was named Artorius on my ninth day, but most men call me Artos the Bear,’ I said, thinking that the name would mean nothing to him.

  ‘So. We have heard that name – a little – even in Armorica where the Sea Wolves do not run,’ he said; and then, ‘Truly my lord should take the Dark One, for they are worthy of each other.’

  And suddenly we were all laughing, whirled up into choking mirth by his persistence; and Bedwyr laughed with us, over the rim of the wine jar that he had caught up; but it seemed to me that the laughter only brushed his surface as a puff of wind brushes the surface of a dark pool.

  That night when we lay down to sleep with our feet to the fire, I could have laughed at my idiot fancy of the night before, for the day was passed and nothing, apart from the newly purchased horses in the picket lines, had come of it, after all. Yet I thought about Bedwyr in the time that followed, almost as much as I did about the black horse, and next day constantly found myself looking out for them in the sweating and trampling and the dust clouds of the horse yards. The horse I glimpsed twice, though I did not go near him again, and guessed that other men besides myself must have seen the killer in his eyes, that he hung so long in the market. Bedwyr I did not see at all in the horse yards; but at evening I passed him among the crowd about one of the cheap wine booths. He was drunk, to judge by the flush along his cheekbones and the hectic brightness of his eyes; he had a little dark red rose stuck behind one ear, and flourished a wine jug at me as I passed, shouting something about damping the dust on the road to Constantinople.