The Last Light of the Sun (11 page)

The axe blow that killed Dai had fallen from behind and above, from horseback. Alun saw that by the light of the torches moving through the yard now. His blood and
soul did not quicken. He held a maimed body, terribly loved. The soul was … elsewhere. He ought to pray now, Alun thought, offer the known, proper words. He couldn’t even remember them. He felt old, weighted by grief, the need to weep.

But not yet. It was not over yet. He heard shouting still. There was an armed Erling in the yard some distance away, his back to the door of one of the outbuildings, holding a sword to a nearly naked figure in a half-ring made by the Arberthi warband and Alun’s own companions.

Still on his knees, his brother’s head in his lap now, blood soaking into his leggings and tunic, Alun saw that the captive figure was Brynn ap Hywll, being held—in the most savage irony he could imagine—exactly as his daughter had been, moments before.

The clerics taught in chapel (and text, for those who could read) that Jad of the Sun did battle in the night under the world for his children, that he was not cruel or capricious as the gods of the pagans were, making sport of mortal men.

You would not have known it tonight.

Riderless horses moving in the yard among the dead; servants running after them, taking their reins. Wounded men crying. The flames seemed to have been put out except for one shed, burning down at the other end of the farmyard, nothing near it to be claimed by fire.

There had been more than fifty fighting men sleeping here tonight, with weapons and armour. The northmen could not have known or expected that, not in a farmhouse. Bad luck for them.

The Erlings had fled or were taken, or were dead. Except one of them held Brynn now, with nowhere to go. Alun wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, but he was about to do something.

You go. I don’t think I am equal to this.
Not the voice, the brother, he’d known all his life. And for a very last word, a command, torn from him:
Go!

Sending Alun away, at the end. And how could that be their last shared moment in the god’s world? In a life Alun had lived with his brother from the time he was born?

He set Dai’s head gently down and rose from the mud and started over towards that torchlit half-circle of men. Someone was speaking; he was too far away yet to hear. He saw that Siawn and Gryffeth and the others had come out now, the big, red-bearded Erling gripped between two of them. He looked over at his cousin, and then away: Gryffeth had seen him kneeling beside Dai, so he knew. He was using his sword for support, point down in the earth, looked as if he wanted to sink into the dark, trampled grass. They had grown up together, the three of them, from childhood. Not so long ago.

Rhiannon mer Brynn was in the yard as well now, beside her mother, who was standing straight as a Rhodian marble column, not far from the arc of men, gazing at her captive husband through the smoke and flames.

HE SAW OWYN’S YOUNGER SON
—Owyn’s
only
son now, a sorrow under Jad—moving too quickly towards the other men, sword in hand, and he understood what was working in him. It could be like a poison, grief. Ceinion went forward swiftly, at an angle, to intercept him. A necessary life was still in the balance. It was too dark to read faces, but you could sometimes tell a man’s intention from the way he moved. There was death around them in the farmyard, and death in the way the young Cadyri prince was going forward.

Ceinion spoke, almost running, calling his name. Alun kept going. Ceinion had to catch him, lay a hand on the young man’s arm—and received a look that chilled him, for his pains.

“Remember who you are!” the cleric snapped, deliberately cold. “And what is happening here.”

“I know what happened here,” said the boy—he was still something of that, though his father’s heir as of tonight. And there were ripples that might flow from that, for all of them. Princes mattered, under Jad.

“It is still happening. Wait, and pray. That man with the sword is the Volgan’s grandson.”

“I thought as much,” said Alun ab Owyn, a bleakness in his voice that was a sorrow of its own to the cleric hearing it. “We learned he was leading them, inside.” He drew a breath. “I need to kill him, my lord.”

There were things you were supposed to say to that, in the teachings, and he knew what they were, he had even written some of them. What Ceinion of Llywerth, high cleric of the Cyngael, anchor and emblem of his people’s faith in Jad, murmured amid the orange flickering of torches and the black smoke was: “Not yet, my dear. You can’t kill him yet. Soon, I hope.”

Alun looked at him, and after a stiff moment nodded his head, once. They went forward together into that half-circle of men and were in time to see what happened there.

The taken-away sword had struck the tumbled raider first, but a second Erling’s axe from behind and above had killed the Cyngael sooner.

She crouches by the fence until those first two bodies are left alone again—the one who knelt beside one of them standing and walking away—and then, not allowing
any time for fear to take hold of her, she goes straight in, at speed, and claims a soul for the queen.

A moonless night.
Only
on a moonless night.

Once it was otherwise and easier, but once, also, they were able to fly. She lays hands on the body, and speaks the words they are all taught, says them for the first time, and—
yes, there!
—she sees his soul rise from blood and earth to her summoning.

It hovers, turning, drifting, in a stray breath of wind. She exults fiercely, aroused, her hair changing colour, again and then again, body tingling with excitement, even amid the fear of shod hooves and the presence of iron, which is weakening and can kill her.

She watches the soul she’s claimed for the Ride float above the sprawled, slain mortal body and she sees it turn to go, uncertain, insubstantial, not entirely
present yet
in her world, though that will come, it will come. She didn’t expect to feel so much desire. This isn’t hers, though, this is for the queen.

He turns completely around in the air, moves upwards, then comes slowly back down, touches ground, already gathering form again. He looks towards her, sees, doesn’t see—not quite yet—and then to the south he turns and begins to go, pulled towards the wood … as if to a half-remembered home.

He will reach them in the forest soon, taking surer, stronger form as he goes, a shape in
their
world now, and the queen will see him when he arrives, and will love him, as a precious gift, shining by water and wood and in the mound. And she herself, when she rejoins the others, will be touched by the glory of doing this as silver moonlight touches and lights pools in the night.

No moons tonight. A gift she has been given, this mortal death in the dark, and so beautiful.

She looks around, sees no one near, goes out then from that farmyard, from iron and mortals, living and dead, springing over the fence, up the slope, stronger as she leaves blades and armour behind. She pauses at the crest of the ridge to look back down. She always looks when near to them. Drawn to this other, mortal half of the world. It happens among the Ride, she isn’t the only one. There are stories told.

The auras below are brighter than torches for her: anger, grief, fear. She finds all of these, takes them in, tries to distill them and comprehend. She looks down from the same beech tree as before, fingers upon it, as before. Two very big men in the midst of a ring; one holding iron to the other, who came bursting out of the small structure, roaring for a weapon. It frightened her, the red heat in that voice. But he was seen by the raider before his own men could reach him, and pinned by a sword to the wall. Not killed. She was not sure why, at first, but now she sees. Or thinks she does: other men arrive, freeze like carvings, then more come, gather, and are there now, like stone, torchlight around two men.

One of the two is afraid, but not the one she would have thought. She doesn’t understand mortals well at all. Another world, they live in.

It is quiet now, the battle over except for this, and one other thing they will not know, down below. She listens. Has always liked to listen, and watch. Trying to understand.

“Understand me,” the Erling said again, in his own tongue. “I kill him if anyone moves!”

“Then do it!” snapped Brynn ap Hywll. He was barefoot in the grass, only a grey undertunic covering his belly and heavy thighs. Another man would have looked ridiculous, Ceinion thought. Not Brynn, even with a
sword to him and the Erling’s left hand bunching his tunic tightly from behind.

“I want a horse and an oath to your god that I will be allowed passage to our ships. Swear it or he dies!” The voice was high, almost shrill.

“One horse? Pah! A dozen men you led are standing here! You stain the earth with your breathing.” Brynn was quivering with rage.

“Twelve horses! I want twelve horses! Or he dies!”

Brynn roared again. “No one swear that oath! No one
dare!”

“I
will kill
him!” the Erling screamed. His hands were shaking, Ceinion saw. “I am the grandson of Siggur Volganson!”

“Then do it!”
Brynn howled back. “You castrate coward! Do it!”

“No!” said Ceinion. He stepped forward into the ring of light. “No! My friend, be silent, in Jad’s name. You do not have permission to leave us!”

“Ceinion! Don’t swear that oath! Do not!”

“I
will
swear it. You are needed.”

“He won’t do it. He’s a coward. Kill me and die with me, Erling! Go to your gods. Your grandfather would have gutted me like a fish by now! He’d have ripped me open.” There was a white-hot, spitting fury in his voice, near to madness.

“You killed him!” the Erling snarled.

“I did!
I did!
I chopped off his arms and cut his chest open and ate his bloody heart and laughed! So carve me now and let them do the same to you!”

Ceinion closed his eyes. Opened them. “This must not be. Erling, hear me! I am high cleric of the Cyngael.
Hear me!
I swear by holiest Jad of the Sun—”

“No!” roared Brynn. “Ceinion, I forbid—”

“—that no harm will come to you when you release—”

“No!”

“—this man, and that you will be allowed—”

The small door to the outbuilding—it was the brewhouse—banged open, right behind the two men. The Erling startled like a nervous horse, looked frantically back over his shoulder, swore.

Died. Brynn ap Hywll, in the moment his captor half turned, hammered an elbow viciously backwards and up into the other man’s unprotected face beneath the nosepiece, smashing his mouth open. He twisted hard away from the sword thrust that followed. It raked blood from his side, no more than that. He stepped back quickly, turned …

“Here!”

Ceinion saw a sword arcing through the torchlight. Something beautiful in that flight, something terrible. Alun ab Owyn’s blade was caught by Brynn at the hilt. Ceinion saw his old friend smile then, a grey wolf in winter, at the Cadyri prince who had thrown it.
I ate his heart.

He hadn’t. Might have done, though, the way he’d been that day. Ceinion remembered that fight—against this one’s grandfather. A meeting of giants, crashing together on a blood-slick morning battlefield by the sea. In battle this fury happened to Brynn, the way it did to the Erlings of Ingavin’s bear cult: a madness of war, claiming a soul.
If you became what you fought, what were you?
'Not the night for that thought. Not here, good men dead in the dark farmyard.

“He swore an oath!” the Erling bubbled, spitting teeth. Blood in the broken mouth.

“Jad curse you,” said Brynn. “My people died here. And my guests. Rot your ugly soul!” He moved, barefoot, half-naked. The Cadyri blade in his hand flicked right. The Erling moved to block it. The younger man wore armour, was big, rangy, in his prime.

Had been. The annihilating backhand blow swept down like a falling of rocks from a mountain height, crashing through his late parry, biting so deeply into his neck between helmet and breastplate that Brynn had to plant a foot on the fallen man, after, to lever and jerk it out.

He stood back, looked around slowly, flexing his neck and shoulder muscles, a bear in a circle of fire. No one moved, or said a word. Brynn shook his head, as if to clear it, to release fury, come back to himself. He turned to the door of the brewhouse. A girl stood there, in an unbelted tunic, flushing in the torchlight, her dark hair loose, for bed. For being bedded. Brynn looked at her.

“That was bravely done,” he said, quietly. “Let all men know it.”

She bit at her lower lip, was trembling. Ceinion was careful not to look to where Enid stood beside her daughter. Brynn turned around, took a step towards him, then another. Stopped squarely in front of the cleric, feet planted wide on his own soil.

“I’d never have forgiven you,” he said, after a moment.

Ceinion met that gaze. “You’d have been alive to not forgive me. I spoke truth: you do not have leave to go from us. You are needed still.”

Brynn was breathing hard, the coursing rage not yet gone from him, the big chest heaving, not from exertion but from the force of his anger. He looked at the young Cadyri behind Ceinion. Gestured with the blade.

“I thank you for this,” he said. “You were quicker than my own men.”

Owyn’s son said, “No thanks need be. At least my sword is blooded, though by another. I did nothing at all tonight but play a harp.”

Brynn looked down at him a moment from his great height. He was bleeding from the right side, Ceinion saw,
the tunic ripped open there; he didn’t seem aware of it. Brynn glanced away into the shadows of the farmyard, west of them. The cattle were still lowing on the other side in their pen. “Your brother’s dead?”

Alun nodded his head, stiffly.

“Shame upon my life,” said Brynn ap Hywll. “This was a guest in my house.”

Alun made no reply. His own breathing was shallow, by contrast, constricted. Ceinion thought that he needed to be given wine, urgently. Oblivion for a night. Prayer could come after, in the morning with the god’s light.