Making Connections in Sword at Sunset

Instructions: The following passages from this week's readings resonate throughout the rest of the novel, creating a rich network of images and themes. Identify each episode and draw thematic connections.

1. Because whatever he is, it is my fault, mine and my father’s who unleashed the evil. (342)

It was Eburacum all over again. I seemed fated always to find myself with the body of a woman to dispose of when the fighting was done. But this was no golden witch in a crimson gown. (159) She seemed in some way to be my charge. (162)

However unknowingly, I had sinned the Ancient Sin, the Great Sin from which there is no escaping. I had sown a seed, and I knew that the tree which sprang from it would bear the death apple. (33)

"As Abbess of this house of Holy Sisters, it is my duty to tell you that you are a most sinful man, a despoiler of Christ's garden second only to the Saxon kind . . . but as a mere woman, and one perhaps not overblest with meekness, it is in my heart to spoil all by telling you that if I were a man and fighting to hold back the Barbarian flood and the darkness from the land, I believe that I should feel and act much as you have done, and deserve damnation also, in the day of Judgment." (264)

Now 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 . . . (1)

2. "It was like being in a cage. I could not breathe or stretch my wings--and no fresh wind ever blew through the bars." (271)

All her bones stood out in the sinking lantern light, and the tendons in her neck stood out like cords, and her lips were chapped and flaked and bleeding, and my heart flew out to her like a bird out of the cage of my breast. (288)

Her voice had a low vibrant quality like the musical throb of a swan's wings in flight. (289)

"Let me stay a while longer," she said suddenly, "until the ducklings are safely hatched." (261)

3. "I am putting Britain—all that was our heritage, all that we of the war host have spent our lives for, all that we still mean when we speak of Rome—into the hands of a man who I am not at all sure is strong enough to hold them; and if, when I am dead, it appears that my doubts were well founded, it will not be I who suffer, but Britain. Britain and the whole western world that will see the last lights go out." (355)

The hilt was of bronze finely inlaid with silver along the shoulders, the grip bound with silver wires, and as I reversed it, holding it point down, I saw that set into the pommel was a great square amethyst. It was so dark in color as to be almost of the imperial purple, and as I moved it, suddenly the light of the candles gathered in it, and far down through the lucid depth, a spark of violet radiance blazed for an instant like a small fierce jet of flame. And above it, clear on the pale surface sheen of the gem, I saw an imperial eagle, intaglio cut, grasping in its claws a double M; and spelled out around the edge, turning the sword to catch the light on the letters, the single work Imperator. (11)

“The light burns like a star in the heart of it,” I said. “Maybe I can make it shine a small way further, into the dark.” (13)

They made the fire at last, . . . the sudden miracle of living flame. A great cry of joyful relief burst from the watching crowd--odd how one always has that fear: "This year the fire will not come and life will be over." To me it was this year--this year the dark will close over our heads, this is the black wilderness and the end of all things, and the white flower will not bloom again. . . . the small licking tongue of flame, so easily to be quenched, was a promise, not of victory maybe, but of something not lost, shining on in the darkness. And I shouted with the rest. (197)

4. "So this is a Roman fort--a dun of the Red Crests?"

"Is it not at all as you expected?"

"I do not know. Yes, I suppose so. They say that the Romans like to have their lives boxed into squares and fenced with straight lines. . . . One was telling me, a while since, that in Roman cities the houseplaces have high square rooms to them, and that they are built all along ways so straight that they might have been ruled with a spear shaft. Would that be true?" (252)

"They say that at Venta there are streets of houses all in straight rows, and in the houses are tall rooms with painted walls, and ambrosius the high King wears a cloak of the imperial purple."

"Do not hold the straightness of the Venta streets against me. Do not deny me a place in my mother's world because I have a place in my father's." (24)

5. But looking down at it as I stood leaning on my sword, I saw it for the face of the King Sacrifice; older than either Christos or Mithras, reaching back and forward into all time until the two met and the circle was complete. Always the god, the king, the hero, who must die for the people when the call comes. . . . I remembered suddenly across the years, Irach flinging himself forward upon the Saxon spears at Eburacum. And for the second time in my life I glimpsed the oneness of all things. . . .(369)

Anyway, what was the death of two men, now, when we were all for the Dark Road close after them? And yet I knew that whoever they were, those two, their deaths would lie heavy on my heart when my own time came--unless--I prayed to Mithras and the Horned One and the White Christos that I might draw one of those two straws. I even began to wonder if there was any means by which I could tamper with the draw. But the choice belonged to Fate, not to me. (284)

"When a man dies to bring you a call for help, why then that's a better argument than any that you're like to be able to put up against him." (292)

Always there must be one to wear the Horns; one to give life and fruitfulness out of his own substance, the King and the Sacrifice in one, to die for the life of the people if need be, as the Christos died. (219)

"Brothers, I drink to tomorrow's hunting. Good hunting and a clean kill." (361)

. . . the stag turned at bay; his head up, the great antlers like tree branches themselves; a king again, and no mere hunted fugitive . . . there was a majesty about him that gave us all pause; not a hunted beast but a king brought to his death. Ambrosius flung up his hand, I remember, and it was as though brother greeted brother. (365)

It was not quite as we sang it among our own hills, but though word and cadence may vary a little, the core of the mystery remains the same. The ritual slaying of the god, the dark gleam of the sacrificial knife, and the wailing of the women, and the rebirth coming after. . . . I remembered Bedwyr with his harp beside the horse-dung fire at Narbo Martius when the world was young, and the merchant in his blanket robes swaying to and fro. "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. . . ." And I remembered the bracken-thatched church in the cool light of that morning and Guenhumara kneeling at the Lord's Table; and I saw the oneness of all things. (226)

6. One great gash where the tine had entered at the groin and burst out again below the breastbone . . . (366)

I cannot sleep, these nights, for the fire of the wound in my groin and belly. (1)

The following passages connect back to Geoffrey of Monmouth:

“The others have seen it now,” Aquila said. “They could scarcely make more starling chatter if it were a golden dragon in the sky.

“There will be many pointing to the north and bidding each other to look tonight.” Ambrosius said musingly. “And later, all Britain will tell each other that there were strange lights in the sky on the night before Ambrosius Aurelianus died; and later still, it will become Aquila’s dragon, or a sword of light with the seven stars of Orion set for jewels in the hilt.” (359)

Ambrosius rode that day like a sound man. I have wondered since if Ben Simeon had given him some such draught as they say the Jutes give to their berserkers, but I do not think so, I think it was something that, at God knows what cost, he himself had summoned up, the last valiant flare of a dying torch before it gutters out. (363)