Read Online Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff - Free Book Online Page A

little liking for cities as have the Saxons, and so those few waiting days were spent up on
the skirts of the high moors where he had his Dun with his warriors and his women and his wealth of cattle gathered about him, like any wild Hibernian chieftain.
    On the last evening, we came back from hunting with a couple of the proud red deer that roam those hills slung across the backs of the ponies. It had been a good day’s hunting, and for a
while, just for a while, I seemed to have outdistanced certain pursuing hounds of my own. We came up to the Dun, with our shadows running far ahead of us through the brown of last year’s
heather and the fragile green of the spring-sown barley; and the pleasant tiredness that comes of a day’s hunting was in all our limbs. Cabal ran at my horse’s forefoot apart from the
rest of the pack. He was the greatest of them all though Cador had fine hounds, too. We clattered through the broad gateway of the Dun, and among the byres and stables of the forecourt, where the
tall weapon stone stood for the warriors to sharpen their blades in time of battle, we handed over the ponies and the kill to the men who came for them, and went on together, toward the inner
court.
    A knot of women sat before the doorway of the long timber hall, in the thin shade of the ancient half-sacred whitethorn tree that grew there. ‘Sa sa! The fine weather has brought the women
out like midges in the sunlight,’ Cador said, as we came in sight of them. The sight was a good one to see. The dappling sunspots quivered on the blue and russet and saffron of their tunics,
as the small lazy breeze stirred the whitethorn branches and brought down the first thin drifts of fading petals; and they were talking softly, like a huddle of colored birds, some of them
spinning, one girl combing out wet hair to dry in the sun; while Esylt, Cador’s wife, sat in their midst, restringing a broken necklace of amber beads, with something small and mewing like a
kitten in the soft folds of a fallow doeskin at her feet.
    I knew that Cador had a son, born since Ambrosius’s crowning, and named Constantine for my grandsire, but I had not seen him before, though I had heard him yelling like a hungry lamb in
the women’s quarters. Cador had been ashamed to show any interest in the thing before other men, but now that he could do so without seeming eager, I think he was pleased to show it off to
the stranger within his gates. At all events, his step quickened as we came into the inner court.
    Esylt looked up with a melon-shaped bead of amber between her fingers, her eyes narrowed against the watering sunlight. ‘You are come home early, my lord. Was the hunting not
good?’
    ‘Good enough to show the Bear that there are other hunting runs than those of his own mountains,’ Cador said. ‘We killed twice.’ He bent down, his hands on his knees, to
peer at the small squirming thing in the doeskin, then glanced aside at his woman with a snapping flash of white teeth. ‘Why then, should I not come home early from my hunting? Is it that I
might find something or some
one
that I am not meant to find?’
    ‘There are three men hidden in the folds of my skirt, and the fourth lies there,’ said Esylt, pointing to the child with the hand in which she held the thread. ‘If you would
know
his
father, you have but to look at him.’
    It sounded like a quarrel, but it was a game, the kind of half-fierce, half-laughing game that boys and hounds play together in mimic war. Also it was born of the fact that Cador knew that there
was no one that he was not meant to find, and so could afford the jest. I had never seen a man and a woman make that kind of play together, and it seemed to me good.
    ‘So, but I cannot see it all; it might be a small pink pig. What is it bundled up like that for?’
    ‘Because the sun is westering and the wind grows cold,’ Esylt said, suddenly laughing. ‘He is much the same as he was this morning. But