Sword at Sunset

Sword at Sunset Rosemary Sutcliff

JUST as the saga of Charlemagne and his paladins is the Matter of France, so for fourteen hundred years or so, the Arthurian Legend has been the Matter of Britain. A tradition at first, then a hero-tale gathering to itself fresh detail and fresh glories and the rainbow colors of romance as it went along, until with Sir Thomas Malory it came to its fullest flowering.

  But of late years historians and anthropologists have come more and more to the belief that the Matter of Britain is indeed “matter and not moonshine.” That behind all the numinous mist of pagan, early Christian and medieval splendors that have gathered about it, there stands the solitary figure of one great man. No knight in shining armor, no Round Table, no many-towered Camelot; but a Romano-British war leader, to whom, when the Barbarian darkness came flooding in, the last guttering lights of civilization seemed worth fighting for.

  Sword at Sunset is an attempt to re-create from fragments of known facts, from likelihoods and deductions and guesswork pure and simple, the kind of man this war leader may have been, and the story of his long struggle.

  Rosemary Sutcliff

  Sword

  at

  Sunset

  COWARD-McCANN, Inc. New York

  Copyright © 1963 by Rosemary Sutcliff

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  HIC JACET ARTHURUS REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS is from Francis Brett Young’s The Island, published by William Heinemann Ltd.

  Reprinted by permission.

  HIC JACET ARTHURUS

  REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS

  Arthur is gone . . . Tristram in Careol
  Sleeps, with a broken sword — And Yseult sleeps
  Beside him, where the westering waters roll
  Over drowned Lyonesse to the outer deeps.

Lancelot is fallen . . . The ardent helms that shone
  So knightly and the splintered lances rust
  In the anonymous mould of Avalon:
  Gawain and Gareth and Galahad — all are dust!

Where do the vanes and towers of Camelot
  And tall Tintagel crumble? Where do those tragic
  Lovers and their bright-eyed ladies rot?
  We cannot tell — for lost is Merlin’s magic.

 And Guinevere — call her not back again
  Lest she betray the loveliness Time lent
  A name that blends the rapture and the pain
  Linked in the lonely nightingale’s lament,

 Nor pry too deeply, lest you should discover
  The bower of Astolat a smoky hut
  Of mud and wattle — find the knightliest lover
  A braggart, and his Lily Maid a slut;

And all that coloured tale a tapestry
  Woven by poets. As the spider’s skeins
  Are spun of its own substance, so have they
  Embroidered empty legend — What remains?

 This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak
  That age had sapped and cankered at the root,
  Resistant, from her topmost bough there broke
  The miracle of one unwithering shoot

 Which was the spirit of Britain — that certain men
  Uncouth, untutored, of our island brood
  Loved freedom better than their lives; and when
  The tempest crashed around them, rose and stood

 And charged into the storm’s black heart, with sword
  Lifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmed
  With a strange majesty that the heathen horde
  Remembered after all were overwhelmed;

 And made of them a legend, to their chief,
  Arthur, Ambrosius — no man knows his name —
  Granting a gallantry beyond belief,
  And to his knights imperishable fame.

They were so few . . . We know not in what manner
  Or where or when they fell — whether they went
  Riding into the dark under Christ’s banner
  Or died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent.

But this we know: That, when the Saxon rout
  Swept over them, the sun no longer shone
  On Britain, and the last lights flickered out;
  And men in darkness murmured: Arthur is gone . . .

  FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  JUST as the saga of Charlemagne and his paladins is the Matter of France, so for fourteen hundred years or so, the Arthurian Legend has been the Matter of Britain. A tradition at first, then a hero-tale gathering to itself fresh detail and fresh glories and the rainbow colors of romance as it went along, until with Sir Thomas Malory it came to its fullest flowering.

  But of late years historians and anthropologists have come more and more to the belief that the Matter of Britain is indeed “matter and not moonshine.” That behind all the numinous mist of pagan, early Christian and medieval splendors that have gathered about it, there stands the solitary figure of one great man. No knight in shining armor, no Round Table, no many-towered Camelot; but a Romano-British war leader, to whom, when the Barbarian darkness came flooding in, the last guttering lights of civilization seemed worth fighting for.

  Sword at Sunset is an attempt to re-create from fragments of known facts, from likelihoods and deductions and guesswork pure and simple, the kind of man this war leader may have been, and the story of his long struggle.

  Certain features I have retained from the traditional Arthurian fabric, because they have the atmosphere of truth. I have kept the original framework, or rather two interwrought frameworks: the Sin which carries with it its own retribution; the Brotherhood broken by the love between the leader’s woman and his closest friend. These have the inevitability and pitiless purity of outline that one finds in classical tragedy, and that belong to the ancient and innermost places of man. I have kept the theme, which seems to me to be implicit in the story, of the Sacred King, the Leader whose divine right, ultimately, is to die for the life of the people.

  Bedwyr, Cei and Gwalchmai are the earliest of all Arthur’s companions to be noted by name, and so I have retained them, giving the friend-and-lover’s part to Bedwyr, who is there both at the beginning and at the end, instead of to Lancelot, who is a later French importation. Arthur’s hound and his white horse I have kept also, both for their ritual significance and because the Arthur — or rather Artos — I found myself coming to know so well, was the kind of man who would have set great store by his dogs and his horses. When the Roman fort of Trimontium was excavated, the bones of a “perfectly formed dwarf girl” were found lying in a pit under those of nine horses. An unexplained find, to which, in Artos’s capture of the fortress and in the incident of “The People of the Hills,” I have attempted an explanation. So it goes on . . . Almost every part of the story, even to the unlikely linkup between Medraut and that mysterious Saxon with a British name, Cerdic the half-legendary founder of Wessex, has some kind of basis outside the author’s imagination.

  Having, as it were, stated my case, I should like to express my most warmly grateful thanks to the people who have, in one way or another, contributed to the writing of Sword at Sunset — among them the Oxford University Press, for allowing me to use certain characters which have already appeared in The Lantern-Bearer. Among them also the authors of many books from Gildas in the sixth century to Geoffrey Ashe in 1960; the oddly assorted experts who returned detailed and patient answers to my letters of inquiry about horse breeding; the Canadian friend who sent me the poem Hic Jacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus and the Intelligence Corps Sergeant and his young woman who found its origin for me after both I and the aforesaid Canadian friend had dismally failed to do so; the Major of the 1st East Anglian Regiment, who sacrificed three sunny afternoons of his leave from Staff College to help me plan Artos’s campaign in Scotland, and to work out for me in three colors on a staff map the crowning victory of Badon.