King. Arthur - Sword at Sunset

The Road to Avalon

Joan Wolf

Foreword by Mary Jo Putney

[Wolf is] a master storyteller and with this fresh look at the legend of King Arthur, [she] reaffirms her preeminence in those ranks.... Portraying characters with crisp and memorable originality, Wolf capturesand enrichesthe tragic sweep of romance and idealism inherent in the Arthurian tale. Imaginative and moving... historical fiction at its finest.

Publishers Weekly

978-1-55652-658-9

Deeply absorbing and satisfying.

Rosemary Sutcliff

The Eagle and the Raven

Pauline Gedge

Foreword by Donna Gillespie

[Gedge] gives us the daily life and landscapes of Celtic Britain with an almost psychic immediacy.

Toronto Star

A novel of majestic sweep, splendid assurance and controlled imaginative power.

Publishers Weekly

A big, other-worldly and beautiful novel. Gedge... has brought another age pulsating to life.

San Francisco Chronicle

978-1-55652-708-1

N OW that the moon is near to full, the branch of an apple tree casts its nighttime shadow in through the high window across the wall beside my bed. This place is full of apple trees, and half of them are no more than crabs in the daylight; but the shadow on my wall, that blurs and shivers when the night wind passes and then grows clear again, is the shadow of that Branch the harpers sing of, the chiming of whose nine silver apples can make clear the way into the Land of the Living.

When the moon rises higher, the shadow is lost. The white radiance trickles down the wall and makes pools on the coverlet, and then at last it reaches my sword lying beside methey laid it there because they said I was restless when it was not ready to my handand a spurt, a pinpoint, of blazing violet light wakes far, far down in the dark heart of Maximuss great amethyst set into the pommel. Then the moonlight passes, and the narrow cell is cobweb gray, and the star in the heart of the amethyst sleeps again; sleeps... I reach out in the grayness and touch the familiar grip that has grown warm to my hand in so many fights; and the feeling of life is in it, and the feeling of death....

I cannot sleep, these nights, for the fire of the wound in my groin and belly. The Brothers would give me a draught stronger than the fire, if I let them; but I have no wish for the sleep of poppy juice and mandrake that leaves a dark taste in the mind afterward. I am content to wait for another sleep. And meanwhile there is so much to think of, so much to remember....

Rememberremember across forty years, the first time that ever I held that blink of violet light in my hand, answering not to thecold whiteness of the moon, but to the soft yellow radiance of the candles in Ambrosiuss study, on the night that he gave me my sword and my freedom.

I was sitting on the foot of my sleeping couch, busy with the twice-daily pumice stone. On campaign I generally grew my beard and clipped it short, but in winter quarters I always tried to keep a smooth chin in the Roman manner. Sometimes that meant the butchery of goose grease and razor, and left me scraped and raw and thanking many gods that at least I was not, like Ambrosius or old Aquila my friend and mentor in all that had to do with cavalry, a black-bearded man. But there was still pumice stone to be got when one was lucky, for it took more than the Franks and the Sea Wolves to quite close the trade routes and pen the merchant kind within their own frontiers. One of the merchant kind had come into Venta Belgarum only a few days since, with pumice stone and dried raisins and a few amphorae of thin Burdigala wine slung in pairs on the backs of his pack ponies; and I had managed to buy an amphora, and a piece of pumice almost the size of my fist, enough to last me through the winter and maybe next winter also.

When the bargaining was over, we had drunk a cup of the wine together and talked, or rather he had talked while I listened. I have always found pleasure in hearing men tell of their travels. Sometimes the talk of travelers is for listening to by firelight, and best savored with much salt; but this mans talk was of a daylight kind and needed little salt, if any. He talked of the joys of a certain house in the street of sandalmakers at Rimini, of the horrors of seasickness and the flavor of milk-fed snails, of passing encounters and mishaps of the road that brimmed with laughter as a cup with wine, of the scent and color of the roses of Paestum that used to serve the Roman flower markets (he was something of a poet in his way). He told of the distances from such a place to such another place, and the best inns still to be found on the road. He talkedand for me this had more interest than all the restof the Goths of Southern Gaul and the big dark-colored horses that they bred, and the great summer horse fair at Narbo Martius. I had heard before of the horses of Septimania, but never from one who had seen them with his own eyes and had the chance to make his own judgment of their mettle. So I asked many questions, and laid by his answers,together with certain other things that had long been in my heart, to think over, afterward.

I had thought of those things a good deal, in the past few days, and now it came upon me as I sat there rubbing my chin with the pumice stone and already half stripped for sleep, that the time had come to be done with the thinking.

Why that night I do not know; it was not a good time to choose; Ambrosius had been in council all day, it was late, and he might even have gone to his bed by now, but I knew suddenly that I must go to him that night. I leaned sideways to peer into the burnished curve of my war cap hanging at the head of the couch, which was the only mirror I had, feeling my cheeks and chin for any stubble still to be rubbed away, and my face looked back at me, distorted by the curve of the metal, but clear enough in the light of the dribbling candles, big-boned as a Jutes, and brown-skinned under hair the color of a hayfield when it pales at harvesttime. I suppose that I must have had all that from my mother, for assuredly there was nothing there of dark narrow-boned Ambrosius; nor, consequently, of Utha his brother and my father, who men had told me was like him. Nobody had ever told me what my mother was like; maybe no one had noticed, save for Utha who had begotten me on her under a hawthorn bush, in sheer lightness of heart after a good days hunting. Maybe even he had not noticed much.

The pumice stone had done its work, and I set it aside, and getting to my feet, caught up the heavy cloak that lay across the couch and flung it around me over my light undertunic. I called to my armor-bearer whom I could still hear moving in the next room, that I should want him no more that night, and went out into the colonnade with my favorite hound Cabal padding at heel The old Governors Palace had sunk into quiet, much as a war camp does about midnight when even the horses cease to fidget in their picket lines. Only here and there the china saffron square of a window showed where someone was still wakeful on watch. The few colonnade lanterns that had not yet been put out swung to and fro in the thin cold wind, sending bursts of light and shadow along the pavements. The snow had driven in over the dwarf wall of the colonnade, but it would not lie long; already the damp chill of thaw was in the air. The cold licked about my bare shins and smarted on my newly pumiced chin; but faint warmth met me onthe threshold of Ambrosiuss quarters, as the guards lowered their spears to let me pass into the anteroom. In the inner chamber there was applewood burning above the charcoal in the brazier, and the aromatic sweetness of it filled the room. Ambrosius the High King sat in his big cross-legged chair beside the brazier, and Kuno his armor-bearer stood in the far shadows by the door that opened into his sleeping cell beyond. And as I halted an instant on the threshold, it was as though I saw my kinsman with the clear-seeing eye of a stranger: a dark fine-boned man with a still and very purposeful face; a man who, in any multitude, would wear solitude almost as tangibly as he wore the purple mantle flung about his shoulders. I had been aware always of that solitude in him, but never so sharply as in that moment, and I was thankful that I should never be High King. Not for me that unbearable peak above the snow line. Yet now I think that it had little to do with the High Kingship but was in the man himself, for I had known it in him always, and he had been crowned only three days.