Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff Read Free Book Online

mist crowding in: the very texture of the
pale night moth’s fur as it fluttered about the candle flame, and the last year’s sweetness of the sprig of dry bell heather in the fern by my foot.
    There was another scent, too, that I had not noticed before, a sharp aromatic sweetness lacing the mingled homespun smells of thatch and cooking, wet wolfskins and peat smoke. It came, I
realized, from the woman’s hair. I had not seen her take the pins from it, but it fell now all about her, a dark silken fall like the slide of water under the hawthorn trees, and she was
playing with it idly, flinging it this way and that, combing it with her fingers, so that the disturbing sweetness came and went like breath, whispering to me in the firelight ...
    ‘Tell me where I may find a place to sleep among your byres, and I will be going now,’ I said, more loudly than was needful.
    She looked up at me, holding aside the dark masses of her hair and smiling in the shadow of it. ‘Ah, not yet. You have been so long in coming.’
    ‘So long in coming?’ Something in me that stood aside from the rest knew even then that it was a strange thing for her to say; but the firelight and mist and the scent of her hair
were in my head, and all things a little unreal, brushed with a dark moth-wing bloom of enchantment.
    ‘I knew that you would come, one day.’
    I frowned, and shook my head in a last attempt to clear it. ‘Are you a witch, then, to know the thing that has not yet come to happen?’ And even as I spoke, another thought sprang to
my mind. ‘A witch, or—’
    Again she seemed to read my thinking; and she laughed up into my face. ‘A witch, or—? Are you afraid to wake in the morning on the bare mountainside, and find three lifetimes gone
by? Ah, but whatever happens tomorrow, surely tonight is sweet?’ With the speed and liquid grace of a cat, she slip-turned from her kneeling position, and next instant was lying across my
thighs, her strange ravaged face turned up to mine and her dark hair flowing over us both. ‘Are you afraid to hear the music of the Silver Branch? Are you afraid to hear the singing of
Rhiannon’s birds that makes men forget?’
    I had not noticed the color of her eyes before. They were deeply blue, and veined like the petals of the blue cranesbill flower, the lids faintly stained with purple like the beginning of
corruption. ‘I think that you would not need the birds of Rhiannon to make men forget,’ I said thickly, and bent toward her. She gave a low shuddering cry and reared up to meet me; she
tore the bronze pin from the neck of her tunic so that it fell loose, and caught my hand and herself guided it down into the warm dark under the saffron cloth, to find the heavy softness of one
breast.
    The skin of her hands was hard, and her throat brown where it rose above her tunic, but the skin of her breast was silken, full and unblemished; and I could feel the whiteness of it. I dug in my
fingers, and the delight under my hand set up a shivering echo like a small flame in my loins. I was not like Ambrosius; I had had my first girl when I was sixteen, and others since; not more
perhaps, or less, than most of my kind. I do not think I ever harmed any of them, and for me, the taking had been sweet while it lasted and not much mattered afterward. But the thing in me that
stood aside knew that this would be different, promising fiercer joys than ever I had known before, and that afterward, for all the rest of my life, the scars would last.
    I struggled to resist – drugged, enchanted, whatever I was, I strove to fight her; and I am not weak-willed. She must have felt the struggle in me. Her arms were around my neck, and she
laughed, softly and crooningly. ‘Na na, there is no need that you should be afraid. I will tell you my name in exchange for yours; if I were one of
Them
, I could not do that, for it
would give you power over me.’
    ‘I do not think I want to know it.’ I dragged the