Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff Page B

of the fat-lamps hanging from the rafters, and the Brothers were already gathering to the evening meal of bread and kale broth, for it was a fast day, and
Ambrosius and his handful of Companions sat with the Abbot at the head of the rough plank table. I had been dreading the meeting, fearing, I think, not so much what he might see in my face as what
I might see in his; fearing in some confused and nightmare way that because I had seen the likeness to him in Ygerna, I must see the likeness to Ygerna in him. Indeed if it were not for shame, I
would not have taken this road at all, but held westward by the lower way and so shirked the meeting ...
    I did not look at him fully as I walked up the timber hall, and knelt with bowed head before him, according to the custom. He made the gesture to me to rise, and I got slowly to my feet, and
looked at last into his face.
    Ygerna was not there. There was a surface likeness of form and color, the dark skin and the slender bones beneath it, and the way the brows were set. It was that that had tugged at my memory
with its unavailing warning. But the man whose face flashed open to smile at me out of the strange rain-gray eyes was Ambrosius as he had always been. The breath broke in my throat with relief and
I bent forward to receive his kinsman’s embrace.
    When the simple meal was over, we left the Brothers to their souls and our own men to playing knucklebones about the fire, and went out, the two of us, with Cabal stalking as usual at my heel,
to sit on the low turf wall that held the orchard from the marsh; and talked together as we had had no chance to since the night that Ambrosius gave me my sword.
    The moon was up and the mist rising over the marshes and the withy beds like the rising tide of a ghost sea; the higher ground stood clear of it, islands above high-water mark, rising to the
steep thrust of the hill crowned with its sacred thorns; but at the lower levels of the orchard a lantern tossing its way along the horse lines had a faint golden smoke about it. The first pale
petals were drifting from the apple trees, with no wind to flurry them abroad. Behind us we heard the quiet voices of the camp and the holy place. The marsh was silent until somewhere far out in
the mist a bittern boomed, and was silent again. It was a very peaceful place. It still is.
    After a while, carefully keeping to the obvious, Ambrosius said, ‘So we meet on your road to Septimania.’
    I nodded. ‘Yes.’
    ‘You still feel that you must needs go yourself on this journey? You do not feel that the sorer need of you is here?’
    I was dandling my sword between my knees, looking out into the mist that crept nearer across the marsh. ‘God knows I have thought the thing over through enough of nights. God knows how
bitterly I grudge a whole summer’s campaigning; but I cannot trust another man to pick my war-horses for me; too much depends on them.’
    ‘Not even Aquila?’
    ‘Aquila?’ I said reflectively. ‘Yes, I’d trust old Aquila; but I cannot find it in my mind to think that you would lend me Aquila.’
    ‘No,’ Ambrosius said. ‘I would not – I could not lend you Aquila; not both of you in one year.’ He turned toward me abruptly. ‘What of your men, Bear Cub,
while you’re away?’
    ‘I lend them back to you. Hunt my pack for me, Ambrosius, till I come again.’
    For a while we talked over the mares I had chosen for my breeding herd, and the plans that I had made with Hunno, and the money I had raised off my own estates; of the defenses that Ambrosius
had been riding here in the West, and a score of other things, until at last we fell silent again, a long silence while the mist and the moon rose together, until presently Ambrosius said,
‘It was good, to get back to the mountains?’
    ‘It was good, yes.’ But I suppose something in my voice rang false, for he turned his head and sat looking at me fixedly. And in the stillness, somewhere among the reedbeds the