The Last Light of the Sun (21 page)

But his shouting might kill them tonight.

So in the darkness and the cold, Osbert, son of Cuthwulf, lies down beside his friend and begins whispering to him as one might murmur to a lover or a child, and each time the king draws a wracked breath to cry out in oblivious agony, his friend clamps a bloodstained hand over his mouth and stifles the sound, again and again, weeping as he does so, for the pity of it.

Then they do hear cries, from outside in the white night, and it seems to Osbert, lying beside his king in that
frigid hut (so cold the lice are probably dead), that their ending has come indeed, the doom no man can escape forever. And he reaches for the sword beside him on the earthen floor, and vows to his father’s spirit and the sun god that he will not let Aeldred be taken alive from here to be ripped apart by Erlings.

He moves to rise, and there is a hand on his arm.

“There are going by,” the swineherd whispers, toothless. “Hold, my lord.”

Aeldred’s head shifts. He drags for breath again. Osbert turns quickly, grips the other man’s head with one hand (hot as a forge it is) and covers the king’s mouth with his other, and he murmurs a prayer for forgiveness, as Aeldred thrashes beside him, trying to give utterance to whatever pain and fever are demanding that he cry.

And whether because of prayer or a moon-shrouded night or the northmen’s haste or nothing more than chance, the Erlings do pass by, how many of them Osbert never knew. And after that the night, too, passes, longer than any night of his life had ever been.

Eventually, Osbert sees, through unstopped chinks in wall and door (wind slashing through), that the flurries of snow have stopped. Looking out for a moment, he sees the blue moon shining before clouds slide to cover it again. An owl cries, hunting over the woods behind them. The wind has died down enough for that.

Towards dawn, the king’s terrible shivering stops, he grows cooler to the touch, the shallow breathing steadies, and then he sleeps.

OSBERT SLIPS INTO THE WOODS
, feeds and waters the horses … precious little, in truth, for the family’s only nurture in winter is carefully rationed salted pork from their swine and unflavoured, mealy oatcakes. Food for
animals is an impossible luxury. The pigs are in the forest, left to forage for themselves.

Amazed, he hears laughter from inside as he returns, ducking through the doorway. Aeldred is taking a badly blackened cake for himself, leaving the others, less charred. The swineherd’s wife is blushing, the king smiling, nothing at all like the man who’d shivered and moaned in the dark, or the one who’d screamed like an Erling
berserkir
on the battlefield. He looks over at his friend and smiles.

“I have just been told, gently enough, that I make a deficient servant, Osbert. Did you know that?”

The woman wails in denial, covers her crimson face with both hands. Her husband is looking back and forth, his face a blank, uncertain what to think.

“It is the only reason we let you claim rank,” Osbert murmurs, closing the door. “The fact that you can’t even clean boots properly.”

Aeldred laughs, then sobers, looking up at his friend. “You saved my life,” he says, “and then these people saved ours.”

Osbert hesitates. “You remember anything of the night?”

The king shakes his head.

“Just as well,” his friend says, eventually.

“We should pray,” Aeldred says. They do, giving thanks on their knees, facing east to the sun, for all known blessings.

They wait until sunset and then they leave, to hide among the marshes, besieged in their own land.

BEORTFERTH IS A LOW-LYING
, wet islet, lost amid dank, spreading salt fens. Only the smaller rodents live there, and marsh birds, water snakes, biting insects in summer. It was the bird-catchers who first found the place, long
ago, making their precarious way through the fens, on foot, or poling flat-bottomed skiffs.

It is almost always foggy here, tendrils of mist, the god’s sun a distant, wan thing, even on the clear days. You can see strange visions here, get hopelessly lost. Horses and men have been sucked down in the stagnant bogs, which are deep in places. Some say there are nameless creatures down there, alive since the days of darkness. The safe paths are narrow, not remotely predictable, you must know them exactly, ride or walk in single file, easy to ambush. Groves of gnarled trees rise up in places, startling and strange in the greyness, roots in water, leading the wanderer to stray and fall.

In winter it is always damp, unhealthy, there is desperately little in the way of food, and that winter—when the Erlings won the Battle of Camburn Field—was a cruelly harsh one. Endless freezing rain and snow, thin, greyyellow ice forming in the marsh, the wet wind slashing. Almost every one of them has a cough, rheumy eyes, loose bowels. All of them are hungry, and cold.

It is Aeldred’s finest hour. It is this winter that will create and define him as what he will become, and some will claim to have sensed this as it was happening.

Osbert is not one of them, nor Burgred. Concealing their own coughs and fluxes as best they can, flatly denying exhaustion, refusing to acknowledge hunger, Aeldred’s two commanders (as young as he was, that winter) will each say, long afterwards, that they survived by
not
thinking ahead, addressing only the demands of each day, each hour. Eyes lowered like a man pushing a plough through a punishing, stony field.

In the first month they arrange and supervise the building of a primitive fort on the isle, more a windbreak with a roof than anything else. When it is complete, before he ever steps inside, Aeldred stands in a slanting
rain before the forty-seven men who are with him by then (a number never forgotten, all of them named in the
Chronicle)
and formally declares the isle to be the seat of his realm, heart of the Anglcyn in their land, in the name of Jad.

His realm. Forty-seven men. Ingemar Svidrirson and his Erlings are inside Raedhill’s walls, foraging unopposed through a beaten countryside. Not a swift sea raid for slaves and glory and gold. Here to settle, and rule.

Osbert looks across sparse, patchy grass in rain towards Burgred of Denferth, and then back at the man who leads them in this hunted, misty refuge, with salt in the biting air, and for the first time since Camburn Field he allows himself the
idea
of hope. Looking up from the plough. Aeldred kneels in prayer; they all do.

That same afternoon, having given thanks, in piety, their first raiding party rides out from the swamps.

Fifteen of them, Burgred leading. They are gone two days, to make a wide loop away from here. They surprise and kill eight Erlings foraging for winter provisions in a depleted countryside, and bring their weapons and horses (and the provisions) back. A triumph, a victory. While they are out, four men have come wandering in through the fens, to join the king.

Hope, a licence to dream. The beginnings of these things. Men gather close around a night fire in Beortferth Hall, walls and a roof between them and the rain at last. There is one bard among them, his instrument damply out of tune. It doesn’t matter. He sings the old songs, and Aeldred joins in the singing, and then all of them do. They take turns on watch outside, on the higher ground, and farther out, at the entrances to the marshes, east and north. Sound carries here; those on watch can hear the singing sometimes. It is a warming for them, amazingly so.

That same night, Aeldred’s fever comes again.

They have their one singer, and a single aged cleric with bad knees, some artisans, masons, bird-catchers, fletchers, farmers, fighting men from the
fyrd,
with and without weapons. No leech. No one with knives and cups to bleed him, or any sure knowledge of herbs. The cleric prays, kneeling painfully, sun disk in his hands, where the king lies by the fire and Osbert—for it is seen as his task—tries, in anguish, to decide whether Aeldred, thrashing and crying out, oblivious, lost to them and to Jad’s created world, needs to be warmed or cooled at any given moment, and his heart breaks again and again all the long night.

BY SPRINGTIME THERE ARE
almost two hundred of them on the isle. The season has brought other life: herons, otters, the loud croaking of frogs in the marsh. There are more wooden structures now, even a small chapel, and they have organized, of necessity, a network of food suppliers, hunting parties. The hunters become more than that, if Erlings are seen.

The northmen have had a difficult winter of their own, it appears. Short of food, not enough of them to safely extend their reach beyond the fastness of Raedhill until others come—
if
they come—when the weather turns. And their own foraging parties have been encountering, with disturbing frequency, horsed Anglcyn fighters with murderous vengeance in their eyes and hands, emerging from some base the Erlings cannot find in this too-wide, forested, hostile countryside. It is one thing to beat a royal army in a field, another to hold what you claim.

The mood on the isle is changing. Spring can do that, quickening season. They have a routine now, shelter, birdsong, greater numbers each day.

Amid all this, those of the Beortferth leaders not taking parties out from the fens are … learning how to read.

It is a direct order of the king’s, an obsession. An idea he has about the kingdom he would make. Aeldred himself, stealing time, labours at a rough-hewn wooden table at a translation into Anglcyn of the single, charred Rhodian text someone found amid the ruins of a chapel west and south of them. Burgred has not been shy about teasing the king about this task. It is entirely uncertain, he maintains, what ultimate good it will be to have a copy in their own tongue of a classical text on the treatment of cataracts.

The consolations of learning, the king replies, airily enough, are profound, in and of themselves. He swears a good deal, however, as he works, not seeming especially consoled. It is a source of amusement to many of them, though not necessarily to those engaged, at a given moment, in sounding out their letters like children under the cleric’s irritable instruction.

Among the new recruits making their way late in winter, through the fens to Beortferth was a lean grey man claiming training in leechcraft. He has bled the king by cup and blade, achieving little, if anything. There is also a woman with them now, old, stooped like a hoop—and so safe among so many restless men. She has wandered the marshes, gathered herbs (spikemarrow, wortfen), and spoken a charm into them—when the pinch-mouthed cleric was not nearby to mutter of heathenish magics—and has applied these, pounded into a green paste, to the king’s forehead and chest when his fever takes him.

This, too, as best Osbert can judge, does nothing beyond causing angry-looking reddish weals. When Aeldred burns and shivers Osbert will take him in his
arms and whisper, endlessly, of summer sunlight and tended fields of rye, of well-built town walls and even of learned men discoursing upon eye diseases and philosophy, and the Erling wolves beaten back and back and away, oversea.

In the mornings, white and weak, but lucid, Aeldred remembers none of this. The nights are harder, he says more than once, for his friend. Osbert denies that. Of course he denies it. He leads raiding parties in search of game, and northmen. He practises his letters with the cleric.

And then one day, the ice gone, birds around and above them, Aeldred son of Gademar, who was the son of Athelbert, sends twenty men out in pairs, riding in different directions, each pair with the image of a sword carved upon a block of wood.

Change is upon them, with the change of season. The gambler’s throw of a kingdom’s dice. If something is to happen it must be before the dragon-ships set sail from the east to cross the sea for these shores. The king on his isle in the marsh summons all that is left of the
fyrd,
and all other men, the host of the Anglcyn, to meet him on the next night of the blue full moon (spirits’ moon, when the dead wake) at Ecbert’s Stone, not far from Camburn Field.

Not far at all from Raedhill.

OSBERT AND BURGRED
, comparing in whispers, have judged their number at a little under eight hundred souls, the summoned men of the west. They have reported as much to the king. There are more, in honesty, than any of them expected. Fewer than they need.

When has any Anglcyn army had the men it needed against an Erling force? They are aware, by starlight, of risk and limitation, not indifferent to these things, but hardly affected by them.

The sun has not yet risen; it is dark and still here at the wood’s edge. A clear night, little wind. This is a forest once said to be haunted by spirits, faeries, the presence of the dead. Not an inappropriate place to gather. Aeldred steps forward, a shadow against the last stars.

“We will do the invocation now,” he says, “then move before light, to come upon them the sooner. We will pass in darkness, to end the darkness.” That phrase, among many, will be remembered, recorded.

There is an element of transgression in doing the god’s rites before his sun rises, but no man there demurs. Aeldred, his clerics beside him (three of them now), leads that host in morning prayer before the morning comes.
May we always be found in the Light.

He rises, they move out, before ever the sun strikes the Stone. Some horsed, mostly on foot, a wide array of weapons and experience. You could call them a rabble if you wanted. But it is a rabble with a king in front of it, and a knowledge that their world may turn on today’s unfolding.

There is an Erling force south-east of them, having come out from Raedhill at the (deliberately offered) rumour of a band of Anglcyn nearby, possibly led by Gademar’s last son, the one who could still dare call himself king of these fields and forests, this land the northmen have claimed. Ingemar could not but respond to this bait.

Aeldred rides at the front, his two friends and thegns on either side. The king turns to look back on his people who have gathered here during the dark of a blue moon night.

He smiles, though only those nearest can see this. Easy in the saddle, unhelmed, long brown hair, blue eyes (his slain father’s eyes), the light, clear voice carrying when he speaks.