Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff

Author:Rosemary Sutcliff [Sutcliff, Rosemary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857892447
Publisher: Atlantic Books

chapter nineteen

The House of Holy Ladies

FLAVIAN RETURNED TO US EARLY IN THE SPRING, BEFORE even the first supply carts of the year got through. I was out on old Arian, beginning the long business of getting him back into condition after the winter, and we came together with a suddenness that set the horses trampling, at the bend where the Cunetium road ran out from the shadows of the river gorge. ‘Artos!’ he shouted, and I, ‘Minnow!’ and laughing and exclaiming and cursing the horses, we leaned together from the saddle to strike hands, while Cabal sprang around us with his tail lashing.

‘How is it with Teleri and the bairn?’ I asked, when we had quieted the beasts and turned them back toward the gates of Trimontium.

‘It is very well with both of them; he is a fine cub and uses his fists like a warrior already.’ He spoke with the lingering tone and inward-turning smile of a man looking back on past contentment so strong that the flavor of it lingers with him still. And then in a changed note, ‘She came then?’

‘Guenhumara? She came. But what tells you so?’

‘You have a new cloak.’

I glanced down at the dark thick plaid I had flung about me against the March wind that cut like a fleshing knife. Guenhumara had not been two days in Trimontium before she asked for a loom, and when two of our craftsmen made it for her, the first thing that she wove on it had been a cloak for me. ‘I have a new cloak,’ I agreed, ‘but must it be of Guenhumara’s weaving?’

‘They always weave a cloak for their lord, to keep him warm,’ said Flavian, with the air of one grown suddenly wise in the ways of women. ‘Mine wove this for me,’ and he shook out and resettled the folds of a fine dark blue cloak bordered with black and flame red.

‘It is a bonny cloak,’ I said, ‘and a bonny target for Saxon arrows you’ll make wearing it. Now I have but to squat still enough in this dim plaid of mine, and the Dark People themselves will take me for a hole in the hillside.’

‘Ah, you are jealous, my Lord the Bear!’ And so I was, but not of his cloak with the black and scarlet border.

We rode on, exchanging the news of the camp for news of the world outside, until we came down to the ford, and splashed through; and as we set the horses to the steep rough-paved slope on the far side, Flavian said suddenly, ‘Fool that I am. I should have told you at first. Hunno bade me remind you that he will be sending your Signus up with the horse drafts, this spring.’

I had almost forgotten that the white foal would be three years old now. In war and in the wilderness one easily loses count of time. I twisted in the saddle to look at my companion. ‘You have seen him? He has fulfilled his promise?’

‘I believe you will think so.

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