Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff

for the most part, and dark brown, so dark as to be almost black, with a white
flame or star on the forehead – and it was beginning to be harder to find what I sought, or maybe I was becoming harder to please as I grew more used to the big powerful animals that filled
the selling grounds.
    Yet it was on the third day that, as I pushed my way through the crowd at the far end of the sale ground, with Flavian beside me, I found the best horse that I had seen yet. I suppose he had
been brought in late, when the best of the others were gone. He was a full black, black as a rook’s wing. There are more bad horses among the black than any other color, but a good black is
own brother to Bucephalus. This was a good black, standing a clear sixteen hands at the shoulder, with a good broad head and high crest, power in every line of him, and fire in his heart and loins
to beget some of his own kind. But as I stopped to examine him more closely, I saw his eyes. I would have turned away, but the man in charge of him, a bowlegged individual with small twinkling eyes
and a lipless gash for a mouth, stayed me with a touch on my arm. ‘You’ll not see a better horse than this in Narbo Martius this year, my lord.’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘I should think most likely not.’
    ‘My lord would like to look him over?’
    I shook my head. ‘That would be a waste of your time and mine.’
    ‘Waste?’ He sounded as though I had used a forbidden word, almost awed at my iniquity; and then, his voice turning soft as fur, ‘Did ever my lord see such shoulders? And he
just five years old ... One was telling me that my lord sought the best stallion in Septimania – I suppose he was mistaken.’
    ‘No,’ I said, beginning again to turn away. ‘He was not mistaken. A good sale to you, friend – but not with me for the purchaser.’
    ‘Na then, what does my lord find amiss with him?’
    ‘His temper.’
    ‘Temper? The temper of a sucking dove, Most Noble.’
    ‘Not with those eyes,’ I said.
    ‘At least let you see his paces.’ We were on the edge of the open ground where the horses were shown off, and the crowd was packed dense behind me, but I could have pushed my way
through easily enough. I do not know why I hesitated; not, I think, for the stallion’s sake, magnificent as he was, certainly not for the man’s persuading tone. The finger of Fate was
on me, I suppose; for the enrichment and the bitter loss that came of that moment’s hesitating have been with me all my afterdays.
    The horse dealer had summoned someone from the crowd with a jerk of the head; and a man stepped forward in answer. I had seen him before, distantly, among the men who showed off the horses for
prospective buyers. I recognized him by the lock of fair hair that sprang from his temple, mingling oddly with the darkness of the rest of his head; but until now I had noticed nothing else about
him. Yet there was enough to notice, when one came to look. He was a very young man, maybe midway between myself and Flavian for age, but lean and sinuous already as a wolfhound at the end of a
hard season’s hunting; naked save for a kilt of lambskin strapped about his narrow waist, the wool showing at the edges, and something that looked surprisingly like a harp bag was slung from
a strap across his bare shoulder. But in the brief moment while he stood looking to the horse dealer for his word, the thing that I chiefly noticed was his face, for it seemed to have been put
together somewhat casually from the opposite halves of two completely different faces, so that one side of his mouth was higher than the other, and his dark eyes looked out from under one gravely
level brow and one that flared with the reckless jauntiness of a mongrel’s flying ear. It was an ugly-beautiful face and it warmed the heart to look at it.
    ‘Hai! Bedwyr, the chieftain would see the Black One’s paces, that he may judge of his mettle,’ said the dealer, and I did not contradict