Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff Page B

flight. Then with no beginning, no awakening chord, it was as though he flung the bird free.
But it was no falcon, and though it leapt upward in bursts and upward rushes as a lark leaps toward the sun, it was no lark either, but a bird of fire ...
    Old Traherne was no mean harper, but I knew, even while my own heart leapt out on the winged and rushing notes, that this was harping such as I had not heard in Ambrosius’s hall.
    Presently it sank and grew little, infinitely little, and sad. I watched a stalk of dry shepherd’s purse among the dung cakes catch light and glow for an instant into beauty stranger than
ever it had had in life, before it crumbled into a pinch of blackened fibers. And the harp music seemed one with it, lamenting the loss of all beauty, that might fall in a single grass seed ... Now
it was swelling again, rising to the heights of Oran Môr, the Great Music, and the lament was for lost causes and lost worlds and the death of men and gods; and as it grew, it began to
change. Until now it had been sound without the limit of form, but now it was taking on a fugitive pattern, or rather the pattern was growing through the storm-rush of the music, and it was a
pattern that I knew. The harper flung up his head and began to sing, his voice strong and true, with an odd brooding quality in it that matched the song. I had expected a song of the Goths and the
South, forgetting his unlikely name. Instead, I found that I was listening to a song of my own people, and in the British tongue; an old nameless lament that our women sing at seed time to help the
wheat to spring; for a dead hero, a dead savior, a dead god, for brightness laid in the dark and the dust and the long years rolling over. Why it should help the corn in its springing, we have
forgotten with our minds, though our bones still remember; but in its way it is a song of death and rebirth. I had known it all my life, as well as I had known Ygerna’s small song of the
birds on the apple spray; and as I had waited when I was a child for the wheat to spring again, for the rekindled hope of the ending, so I waited now for the promise of the hero’s return.
‘Out of the mists, back from the land of youth,’
sang the harper, as though to himself.
‘Strong with the sound of trumpets under the apple boughs
...
’
I
had heard that song so often ended on a crash of triumph as though the lost hero were already returned to his people; this time it ended on one clear note of distant hope that was like one star in
a wild sky.
    The harp song was silent, and the harper’s hand fell from the leaping strings to lie at rest on his knee. For a long moment we were all silent about the fire, and the sounds of the camp
washed in upon us without breaking the stillness of our own circle. Then Owain leaned forward to remake the sinking fire, building the brown dung cakes upon each other with the grave and thoughtful
deliberation that was very much a part of him, and the spell was broken, so that I was aware of the dark faces of the mule drivers gathered on the fringe of the firelight, and the angry squealing
of a mule somewhere beyond; and close beside me the old merchant, standing with his hands in his beard, and the faint aromatic smell that came from his robes as he rocked gently to and fro, his
head cocked as though still to listen; and the murmur that came from him too, ‘Sa sa – so the women used to sing when I was a boy – singing the lament for Adonis, when the crimson
anemones are springing from the rocks ... ’ which was strange, for he understood no word of the British tongue.
    I saw the harper looking at me through the blue smoke drift of the dung fire. But it was Fulvius who spoke first. ‘I should scarce have thought to hear that song in Septimania, unless it
was one of our own pack that gave tongue to it.’
    Bedwyr the Harper smiled, his crooked mouth touched with mockery. ‘I am from the settlement that the Emperor Maximus made with