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

words out.
    ‘But you must; it is too late now ... I am called Ygerna,’ and she began to sing, very softly, almost under her breath. It might have been a spell – maybe it was, in its way
– but it only sounded like a singing rhyme that I had known all my life; a small caressing song that the women sing to their children, playing with their toes at sleeping time. Her voice was
sweet and soft as wild honey; a dark voice:
    Three birds perched on an apple spray,
    And the blossom was not more white than they.
    And they sang to the souls who passed that way.
    A King in a cloak of white and red
    And a Queen with goldwork round her head
    And a woman with loaves of barley bread ...
    The song and the voice were calling to me, calling to the part of me that had its roots in my mother’s world, offering the perfect and complete homecoming that I had failed to find. The
Dark Side, I had called it, the women’s side, the side nearest to the heart. It was calling to me now, arms wide and welcoming, through the woman lying across my knee, finally claiming me, so
that the things I had cared about before the mist came down were forgotten; so that I rose when she did and stumbled after her to the piled sheepskins against the wall.
    When I awoke, I was lying still fully clothed on the bed place, and the leather apron had been freed from its pegs and drawn back from the doorway; and in the gray light of dawn that watered the
shadows, I saw the woman sitting beside me, once again with her stillness upon her, as though she had been waiting maybe a lifetime or so for me to waken.
    I smiled at her, not desiring her any more, but satisfied, and remembering the fierce joy of her body answering mine in the darkness. She looked back at me with no answering smile, her eyes no
longer blue but merely dark in the leaden light, the discolored lids more deeply stained than ever. I came to my elbow, aware, without full looking, of Cabal lying still asleep beside the hearth,
the fire burned out to frilled white ash, and the cup with its silver rim lying where it had fallen among the fern. And in the woman, too, it seemed that the fires were burned out and cold, deadly
and dreadfully cold. A chill fell on me as I looked at her, and the thought came back to me of waking on a bare mountainside ...
    ‘I have waited a long time for you to wake,’ she said without moving.
    I glanced at the light that was still colorless as moonstone beyond the doorway. ‘It is still early.’
    ‘Maybe I did not sleep as sound as you.’ And then, ‘If I bear you a son, what would you have me call him?’
    I stared at her, and she smiled now, a small bitter twisting of the lips. ‘Did you not think of that? You who were chance-begotten under a hawthorn bush?’
    ‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘No, I did not think. Tell me what you would have me do. Anything that I can give you—’
    ‘I do not ask for payment; none save that I may show you this.’ She had been holding something hidden between her two hands; and now she opened them and held out what they contained.
And I saw that it was a massive arm ring of red gold, twisted and coiled into the likeness of the Red Dragon of Britain. I had seen the mate of it on Ambrosius’s arm every day of my life.
‘On a morning such as this one, Utha, your father and mine, gave this ring to my mother before he rode on his way.’
    It was a long moment before I understood the full meaning of her words. And then I felt sick. I drew my legs under me and got up, pressing back from her, while she sat watching me under her dark
cloak of hair. ‘I do not believe you,’ I managed at last. But I knew that I did believe her; the look in her face told me that if she had never told the truth in her whole life, she was
telling it now; and I knew at last, now that it was too late, that the likeness that had so puzzled me was to Ambrosius. And she had known; all the while she had known. I heard someone groan and
scarcely knew that it