Free Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff

are more like to die of seasickness than drowning.’
    That night we sat late after the evening meal, discussing the problem of horse transport. Cador had promised to find me two suitable vessels and have them ready on the far side of the Narrow Sea
by the middle of August, which, with luck, would leave us six weeks or so before the autumn gales, for the five or six trips that would be needed to get all the horses across. But the problem was
how they should be adapted in such a way that they could be returned to their normal use again afterward. The Roman horse transports had been built with entry parts below the waterline, through
which the horses were loaded while the vessels were high and dry, and which were closed and caulked afterward. But what shipmaster would allow his ship to have great wounds cut in her underwater
body? And we could not afford to buy ships, nor build them, even if there had been the time to do so. In the end it was decided that part of the decking must be torn up, and the horses drugged and
slung into the holds by means of slings and pulleys, the deck planks being replaced after them. It was a desperate measure, and I think we all prayed to God that it would not result in the deaths
of either men or horses; horses almost more than men, for they would be harder to replace. But there was no alternative that any of us could see.
    The next day, leaving Cabal chained in an empty byre and howling his furious despair behind us, we rode down to the coast. (It was the only time in his life that he was parted from me, and I
felt much like a murderer.) And on the morning tide of the day after that, we sailed for Burdigala, packed close into the space left by the stinking bullhides, in a vessel that, as Fulvius had
said, was almost round, and wallowed like a sow in litter, into the troughs of the seas, so that one wondered at each weltering plunge whether she could ever shake clear again in time for the next
crest. We were very wretched, and presently we lost count of time, so that we had little idea of how many days we had been at sea when at last, having neither foundered nor fallen in with Sea
Wolves, we ran into the mouth of a broad Gaulish river. When we came ashore I was surprised to find, never having been to sea before, that the wooden jetty heaved up and down beneath my feet with
the long slow swing of the Atlantic swell.
    At Burdigala we found a party of merchants gathering for the next stage of the journey, for it seemed that to the horse fairs of Narbo Martius, the merchant kind gathered from all over Gaul and
even from the nearer fringes of Hispana beyond the mountains that men call the Pyrenaei; not only horse traders, but those who came to trade among the horse traders, in anything from sweetmeats to
swords and painted pottery to ivory Astartes and cheap horoscopes. We joined ourselves to this party, and while we waited for the latecomers, set about buying the nags that we should need for the
next stage. We picked small sturdy brutes, with no looks or graces to add to their price, yet such as we might be able to sell again at Narbo Martius without too much trouble. I had thought that
the strange tongue might make bargaining difficult, but everyone spoke Latin of a barbarous kind – at least it sounded barbarous in our ears, but maybe ours sounded as barbarous in theirs
– and with the aid of a certain amount of counting on our fingers and shouting, we managed well enough. They are a goodly people to look upon, the Goths; tall men, some as tall as I am, and I
have met few men of my own height in Britain; fiercely proud, fair-haired but with more of yellow and less of red than our own mountain people have. Strange to think that these loyal vassals of the
Eastern Empire were the great-grandsons of the men who, seventy years ago, had sacked Rome and left it a smoking ruin. If they had not done so, perhaps the last Legions would not have been
withdrawn from Britain ... But there is