The Last Light of the Sun (20 page)

Ralf Erlickson had spat into the rushes on the governor’s floor. “Women,” he’d said. “Just their games.”

One-hand had shrugged. “Less than before, maybe.” Ralf got the feeling he was taking credit for it.

The details of the town’s reciprocation were evident as he approached the compound. The fence was in good condition; the buildings looked sturdy, doors hanging properly; wood was stacked high already, well before winter. There were signs of construction, a new outbuilding of some kind going up.

A woman in a grey, calf-length tunic watched him approach, standing by the gate.

“Ingavin’s peace on all here,” Ralf said, routinely. “I have a message for one of you.”

“All peace upon you,” she replied, and waited. Didn’t open the gate.

Ralf shifted his feet. He didn’t like these women. He vaguely regretted accepting the errand, but he’d been paid, and it wasn’t a difficult task.

“I am to speak with someone whose name I don’t know,” he said.

She laughed, surprisingly. “Well, you don’t know mine.”

He wasn’t used to laughter in the seer’s compound. He’d come twice in his youth, both times to offer support to friends seeking a
seithr
spell from the
volur.
There’d been no amusement, on either occasion.

“Were you ever bit by a snake?” he asked, and was pleased to see her startle.

“Is that the one you need to see?”

He nodded. After a moment, she opened the gate.

“Wait here,” she said, and left him in the yard as she went into one of the buildings.

He looked around. A warm day, end of summer. He saw beehives, an herb garden, the locked brewhouse. Heard birdsong from the trees. No sign of any other women. He wondered, idly, where they were.

A door opened and someone else came out, alone: wearing blue. He knew what that meant. Under his breath he cursed. He hadn’t expected to deal with the
volur
herself. She was young, he saw. One-hand had told him that, but it was disconcerting.

“You have a message for me,” she murmured. She was hooded, but he saw wide-set blue eyes and pulledback yellow hair. You might even have called her pretty,
though that was a dangerous thought with respect to a
volur.

“Ingavin’s peace,” he said.

“And Fulla’s upon you.” She waited.

“You … the snake … ?”

“I was bitten, yes. In the spring.” She put a hand inside her robe and withdrew it, gripping something. Erlickson stepped back quickly. She wrapped the creature around her neck. It coiled there, head up, looking at him from above her shoulder, then flicked an evil tongue. “We have made our peace, the serpent and I.”

Ralf Erlickson cleared his throat.
Time,
he thought,
to be gone from here.
“Your kinsman sends greetings. From Jormsvik.”

He’d surprised her greatly, he realized, had no idea why. She clasped her hands at her waist.

“That is all? The message?”

He nodded. Cleared his throat again. “He … is well, I can say that.”

“And working for the mercenaries?”

Ralf shook his head, pleased. They didn’t know everything, these women. “He killed a captain in a challenge, midsummer. He’s inside Jormsvik, one of them now. Well, in truth, he isn’t inside, at the moment.”

“Why?” She was holding herself very still.

“Off raiding. Anglcyn coast. Five ships, near two hundred men. A big party, that. Left just before I did.” He’d seen them go. It was late in the season, but they could winter over if they needed to. He had made and mended weapons and armour for many of them.

“Anglcyn coast,” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said.

There was a silence. He heard the bees.

“Thank you for your tidings. Ingavin and the goddesses shield you,” she said, turning away, the serpent still about
her neck and shoulders. “Wait here. Sigla will bring you something.”

Sigla did. Generous enough. He spent some of it at an inn that night, on ale and a girl. Went looking for property the next morning. Not that there was so much of it on the isle. Rabady was small, everyone knew everyone. It might have helped if his parents had still been living, instead of buried here, but that was a waste of a wish. One of the names Sturla had given him was that of a widow, no children, young enough to still bear, he’d been told, some land in her own name, west end of the isle. He brushed his clothes and boots before going to call.

His son was born the next summer. His wife died in the birthing. He buried her back of the house, hired a wet nurse, went looking for another wife. Found one, and younger this time: he was a man with a bit of land now. He felt fortunate, as if he’d made good choices in life. There was an oak tree standing by itself near the south end of his land. He left it untouched, consecrated it to Ingavin, made offerings there, lit fires, midsummer, midwinter.

His son, fourteen years later, cut it down one night after a bad, drunken fight the two of them had. Ralf Erlickson, still drunk in the morning, killed the boy in his bed with a hammer when he found out, smashed in his skull. A father could deal with his family as he chose, that was the way of it.

Or it had been once. Sturla One-hand, still governor, convened the island’s
thring.
They exiled Ralf Erlickson from Rabady for murder, because the lad had been asleep when killed, or so the stepmother said. And since when had the word of a woman been accepted by Erlings in a
thring?

No matter. It was a done thing. He left, or they’d have killed him. Well on in years by then, Ralf Erlickson found
himself on a small boat heading back to the mainland, landless (One-hand had claimed the exile’s property for the town, of course).

Eventually, he made his way back down to Jormsvik, for want of a better thought. Worked at his old trade, but his hand and eye weren’t what they had been. Not surprising, really, it had been a long time. He died there a little while after. Was laid in the earth outside the walls in the usual fashion. He wasn’t a warrior, no pyre. One friend and two of the whores saw him buried.

Life, for all men under the gods, was uncertain as weather or winter seas: the only truth worth calling true, as the ending of one of the sagas had it.

W
hen the king’s fever took him in the night there was not enough love—or mercy—in the world to keep him from the fens and swamps again.

Drenched with sweat upon the royal bed (or pallet, if they were travelling), Aeldred of the Anglcyn would cry out in the dark, not even aware he was doing it, so piteously it hurt the hearts of those who loved him to know where he was going.

They all thought they knew where, and when, by now.

He was seeing his brother and his father die long years ago on Camburn Field by Raedhill. He was riding in icy rain (a winter campaign, the Erlings had surprised them), wounded, and shivering with the first of these fevers at the end of a brutal day’s fighting; and he was king, as of twilight’s coming down upon that headlong, fever-ravaged flight from the northmen who had broken them at last.

King of the Anglcyn, fleeing like an outlaw to hide in the marshes, the
fyrd
broken, lands overrun. His royal father hideously blood-eagled on the wet ground at Camburn in blood and rain. His brother cut in pieces there.

He didn’t know about them until later. He did know it now, a late-summer night in Esferth so many years after, tossing in fever-dream, reliving the winter twilight when Jad had abandoned them for their sins. The blades and axes of the Erlings pursuing them in the wild dark,
the northmen triumphantly crying the accursed names of Ingavin and Thünir like ravens on the rain wind …

It is difficult to see with the rain lashing their faces, a heavy blanket of cloud, night coming swiftly now. Both good and bad: they will be harder to hunt down, but can easily miss their own way, not able to use torches. There are no roads here across moor and tor. There are eight of them with Aeldred, riding west. It is Osbert who is nearest the king (for he is the king now, last of his line), as he always is, and Osbert who shouts them to a jostling halt by the pitiful shelter of a handful of elms. They are soaked to the bone, chilled, most wounded, all exhausted, the wind lashing.

But Aeldred is shivering with fever, slumped forward on his horse, and he cannot speak in answer to his name. Osbert moves his mount nearer, reaches out, touches the king’s brow … and recoils, for Aeldred is burning hot.

“He cannot ride,” he says, leader of the household troop.

“He must!” Burgred snaps, shouting it over the wind. “They will not be far behind us.”

And Aeldred lifts his head, with a great effort, mumbles something they cannot hear. He points west with one hand, twitches his reins to move forward. He slips in the saddle as he does so. Osbert is near enough to hold him, their horses side by side.

The two thegns look at each other over the wracked body of the man who is now their king. “He will die,” Osbert says. Aeldred, son of Gademar, is twenty years old, just.

The wind howls, rain slashes them like needles. It is very dark, they can hardly see each other. After a long moment, Burgred of Denferth wipes water from his face
and nods. “Very well. The seven of us carry on, with the royal banner. We will try to be seen, draw them west. You find a farmhouse somewhere, and pray.”

Osbert nods his head. “Meet in Beortferth, on the island itself, among the salt fens. When we can.”

“The marshes are dangerous. You can find your way through?”

“Maybe not. Have someone watch for us.”

Burgred nods again, looks over at their boyhood friend, this other young man, slumped on his horse. Aeldred in battle was deadly, commanding the left flank of the
fyrd
with his household guard. It was not the left flank that crumbled, not that it mattered now.

“Jad curse this day,” Burgred says.

Then he turns and six men follow him across an open field in the dark, one carrying their banner, moving west again, but deliberately, not as quickly as before.

Osbert, son of Cuthwulf, left alone with his king, leans over and whispers, tenderly, “Dear heart, have you even a little left? We ride for shelter now, and should not have far to go.”

He has no idea if this is true in fact, no clear sense of where they are, but if there are farms or houses they should be north of here. And when Aeldred, with another appalling effort, pushes himself upright and looks vaguely towards him and nods—shivering, still unable to speak—it is northward that Osbert turns, leaving the elms, heading into the wind.

He will remember the next hours all his life, though Aeldred, lost in that first-ever fever, never will. It grows colder, begins to snow. They are both wounded, sweatdrenched, inadequately clothed, and Aeldred is using the last reserves of an iron will just to stay on his horse. Osbert hears wolves on the wind; listens constantly for horses, knowing, if he hears them, that the Erlings have come and
it is over. There are no lights to be seen: no charcoal burner by the woods, no farmers burning candles or a fire so late on a night like this. He strains his eyes into the dark and prays, as Burgred had said he should. The king’s breathing is ragged. He can hear it, the rasp and draw. There is nothing to see but falling snow, and black woods to the west, and the bare, wintry fields through which they ride. A night fit for the world’s end. Wolves around, and the Erling wolves hunting them in the dark.

And then, still shivering uncontrollably, Aeldred lifts his head. A moment he stays thus, looking at nothing, and then speaks his first clear words of the night’s flight. “To the left,” he says. “West of us, Jad help me.” His head drops forward again. Snow falls, the wind blows, more a hammer than a knife.

Aeldred will claim, ever after, to have no recollection of saying those words. Osbert will say that when the king spoke he heard and felt the presence of the god.

Unquestioningly, he turns west, guiding Aeldred’s horse with one hand now, to stay beside his own. Wind on their right, pushing them south. Osbert’s hands are frozen, he can scarcely feel the reins he holds, his own or the king’s. He sees blackness ahead, a forest. They cannot ride into that.

And then there is the hut. Directly in front of them, close to the trees, in their very path. He would have ridden north, right past it. It takes him a moment to
understand
what he is seeing, for his weariness is great, and then Osbert begins to weep, helplessly, and his hands tremble.

Holy Jad has not, after all, abandoned them to the dark.

THEY DARE NOT LIGHT A FIRE
. The horses have been hidden out of sight in the woods, tied to the same tree, to keep each other warm. The snow is shifting and blowing; there will be no tracks. There can be no signs of
their passage near the house. The Erlings are no strangers to snow and icy winds. Their
berserkirs
and wolf-raiders flourish in this weather, wrapped in their animal skins, eyes not human until the fury leaves them. They
will
be out there, in the wind, hunting, for the northmen know by now that one of the line of Athelbert left Camburn Field alive. In some ways it ought not to matter. With a land taken and overrun, an army shattered, what can a king matter, alone?

But in other ways, it means the world, it
could
mean the world, and they will want Aeldred killed, in a manner as vicious as they can devise. So there is no fire in the swineherd’s house where a terrified man and his wife, awakened by a pounding on their door in the wild night, have abandoned a narrow bed to pile threadbare blankets and rags and straw upon the shivering, burning man who—they have been told—is their king under holy Jad.

Whether it is the relative stillness within these thin walls, out of the howling wind, or some portent-laden deepening of his sickness (Osbert is no leech, he does not know), the king begins to cry out on the swineherd’s bed, shouting names at first, then a hoarse rallying cry, some words in ancient Trakesian, and then in the Rhodian tongue of the holy books—for Aeldred is a learned man and has been to Rhodias itself.