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

was me. My mouth felt stiff and dry, so that I could scarcely form the words that were in my throat. ‘Why – what made you do it?’
    She sat playing with the dragon arm ring between her hands, turning and turning it, just as Ambrosius had done, that night in Venta. ‘There could be two good reasons. One is love, and the
other, hate.’
    ‘I never harmed you.’
    ‘No? For the wrong, then, that Utha, Prince of Britain, did to my mother before you were born. Your mother died at your coming – oh, I know – and because you were a son,
bastard or no, your father took and reared you at his hearth, and so you see the thing with your father’s eyes. But I was only a daughter; I was not taken from my mother, and she lived long
enough to teach me to hate, where once she had loved.’
    I wanted to look away, not to stare into her face any more, but I could not turn my eyes from her. She had given me her body in a kind of faming and devouring ecstasy, last night; and it was an
ecstasy of hate, as potent as ever that of love could have been. I smelled hate all about me, tangible as the smell of fear in a confined space. And then, as though at last the veil were torn
aside, I saw what was behind her eyes. I saw a woman and a child, a woman and a girl, beside the peat fire in this place, the one teaching and the other absorbing that caressing, soul-destroying
lesson of hate. All at once I saw that what I had taken for the ruins of beauty in Ygerna’s face was the promise of beauty that had been cankered before ever it could come to flowering, and
for one instant pity mingled with the horror that was rising like vomit in my throat. But the two figures in the peat smoke were changing, the girl becoming the mother, and in her place a boy, with
his face, his whole soul, turned to hers, drinking in the same lesson. Dear God! What had I let loose? What had my father let loose before me, into the world?
    ‘If it is a boy,’ said Ygerna, and her gaze went beyond me, as though she too were seeing past and future, ‘I shall call him – Medraut. I had a little white rat with
rose-red eyes called Medraut, when I was a child. And when he is a man, I will send him to you. May you have much joy of your son when that day comes, my lord.’
    Without knowing it, my hand had been fumbling with the hilt of my sword which had lain beside me – strange that she had not disarmed me while I slept. My fingers tightened on it, and it
was half out of the wolfskin sheath. A little hammer was beating in my head. ‘I should like – very much – to kill you!’ I whispered.
    She swept up from the floor, dragging back the torn breast of her gown. ‘Why do you not then? See, here is the place. I will not cry out. You can be well away from the steading before my
servants find what is left.’ All at once there was a wailing note in her voice. ‘It might be the best way for both of us. Now – kill me now!’
    But my hand dropped away from the sword hilt. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’
    ‘Why not?’
    I groaned. ‘Because I am a fool.’ I blundered past her, thrusting her aside so that she stumbled to her knees, and sprang for the door as though all the fends of darkness were behind
me. Cabal, who had roused and come to crouch against my legs, snarling and shaking his head in a way that I remembered afterward, leapt past me into the milky daylight. The steading was already
astir. I heard the milch cows lowing, and the thorn-bush had been pulled aside from the gate gap. I plunged out through it, and behind me heard the woman laughing, a wild, wailing laughter that
followed me long after I had ceased to hear it with the hearing of my body.
    The mist was thinning fast, growing ragged and fitful, sometimes smoking around me as thick as ever, at others lifting to show half a hillside of sodden bilberry and last year’s heather.
At the foot of the valley my feet found a track that crossed the stream and headed in the direction I needed, and I