The Last Light of the Sun (23 page)

“I … went to the audience chamber to take the reports.”

Aeldred opened his eyes, turned his head slightly to look at the other man. After a silence, he said, “Would you have had a better life had I driven you away, do you think?”

“I find that hard to imagine, my lord. The better life
and
being driven away.”

Aeldred shook his head a little. “You might walk properly, at least.”

Osbert brought a hand down to his marred leg. “A small price. We live a life of battles.”

Aeldred was looking at him. “I shall answer for you before the god one day,” he said.

“And I shall speak in your defence. You were right, my lord, Burgred and I were wrong. Today is proof, the boy coming, the tribute promised again. Ingemar has kept his oath. It let us do what needed to be done.”

“And here you are, unmarried, without kin or heir, on one leg, awake all night by the side of the man who—”

“Who is king of the Anglcyn under Jad, and has kept us alive and together as a people. We make our choices,
my lord. And marriage is not for every man. I have not lacked for companionship.”

“And heirs?”

Osbert shrugged. “I’ll leave my own name, linked—if the god allows—with yours, in the shaping of this land. I have nephews for my own properties.” They had had this conversation before.

Aeldred shook his head again. There was more grey in his beard of late, Osbert saw. It showed in the lamplight, as did the circles under his eyes, which were always there after fever. “And I am, as ever when this passes, speaking to you as a servant.”

“I
am
a servant, my lord.”

Aeldred smiled wanly. “Shall I say something profane to that?”

“I would be greatly alarmed.” Osbert returned the smile.

The king stretched, rubbed at his face, sat up in the bed. “I surrender. And I believe I will eat. Would you also send for … would you ask my lady wife to come to me?”

“It is the middle of the night, my lord.”

“You said that already.”

Aeldred’s gaze was mild but could not be misconstrued.

Osbert cleared his throat. “I will have someone send—”

“Ask.”

“Ask for her.”

“Would you be so good as to do it yourself? It is the middle of the night.”

A small, ironic movement of the mouth. The king was back among them, there was no doubting it. Osbert bowed, took his cane, and went out.

HE LOOKED AT HIS HANDS
in the lamplight after Osbert left. Steady enough. He flexed his fingers. Could smell his own sweat in the bedsheets. A night and a day and this much of another night. More time than he had to
yield, the grave closer every day. These fevers were a kind of dying. He felt light-headed now, as always. That was understandable. Also physically aroused, as always, though there was no easy way to explain that. The body’s return to itself?

The body was a gift of Jad, a housing in this world for the mind and immortal soul, therefore to be honoured and attended to—though not, on the other hand, over-loved, because that was also a transgression.

Men were shaped, according to the liturgy, in a distant image of the god’s own most-chosen form, of all those infinite ones he could assume. Jad was rendered by artists in his mortal guise—whether golden and glorious as the sun, or dark-bearded and careworn—in wood carving, fresco, ivory, marble, bronze, on parchment, in gold, in mosaic on domes or chapel walls. This truth (Livrenne of Mesangues had argued in his
Commentaries)
only added to the deference properly due to the physical form of man—opening the door to a clerical debate, acrid at times, as to the implications for the form and status of woman.

There had been a period several hundred years ago when such visual renderings of the god had been interdicted by the High Patriarch in Rhodias, under pressure from Sarantium. That particular heresy was now a thing of the past.

Aeldred thought, often, about the works eradicated during that time. He’d been very young when he’d made the journey over sea and land and mountain pass to Rhodias with his father. He remembered some of the holy art they’d seen but also (having been a particular sort of child) those places in sanctuary and palace where the evidence of smashed or painted-over works could be observed.

Waiting now in the lamplit dark of a late-summer night for his wife to come, that he might undress her and
make love, the king found himself musing—not for the first time—on the people of the south: people so ancient, so long established, that they had works of art that had been
destroyed
hundreds of years before these northlands even had towns or walls worthy of the name, let alone a sanctuary of the god that deserved to be called as much.

And then, tracking that thought, you could walk even further back, to the Rhodians of the era before Jad came, who had walked in these lands too, building their walls and cities and arches and temples to pagan gods. Mostly rubble now, since the long retreat, but still reminders of … unattainable glory. All around them here, in this harsh near-wilderness that he was pleased to call a kingdom under Jad.

You
could
be a proper child of the god, virtuous and devout, even in a wilderness. This was taught, and he knew it in his heart. Indeed, many of the most pious clerics had deliberately withdrawn from those same jaded southern civilizations in Batiara, in Sarantium, to seek the essence of Jad in passionate solitude.

Aeldred wasn’t a man like one of those. He knew what he’d found in Rhodias, however ruined it was, and in the lesser Batiaran cities all the way down through the peninsula (Padrino, Varena, Baiana—music in the names).

The king of the Anglcyn would not have denied that his soul (housed in a body that wracked and betrayed him so often) had been marked from childhood during that long-ago journey through the intricate seductions of the south.

He was king of a precarious, dispersed, unlettered people in a winter-shaped, beleaguered land, and he wanted to be more. He wanted
them
to be more, his Anglcyn of this island. And given three generations of peace, he thought it possible. He had made decisions, for more than twenty-five years, denying his heart and soul
sometimes, with that in mind. He would answer to Jad for all of it, not far in the future now.

And he didn’t think three generations would be allowed them.

Not in these northern lands, this boneyard of war. He lived his life, fighting through impediments, including these fevers, in defiance of that bitter thought, as if to
will
it not to be so, envisaging the god, in his chariot under the world, battling through evils every single night, to bring back the sun to the world he had made.

ELSWITH CAME BEFORE
his meal arrived, which was unexpected.

She entered without knocking, closed the door behind her, moved forward into lamplight.

“You are recovered, by the god’s grace?”

He nodded, looking at her. His wife was a large woman, big-boned, as her warrior father had been, heavier now than when she’d come to marry him—but age and eight confinements could do that to a woman. Her hair was as fair as it had been, though, and unbound now—she had been asleep, after all. She wore a dark green night robe, fastened all the way up the front, a sun disk (always) about her neck, pillowed upon the robe between heavy breasts. No rings, no other adornment. Adornments were a vanity, to be shunned.

She had been asking, for years now, to be released from their marriage and this worldly life, to withdraw to a religious house, become one of the Daughters of Jad, live out her days in holiness, praying for her soul, and his.

He didn’t want her to go.

“Thank you for coming,” he said.

“You sent,” she said.

“I told Osbert to say—”

“He did.”

Her expression was austere but not unfriendly. They
weren’t
unfriendly with each other, though both knew that was the talk.

She had not moved from where she’d stopped to look down at him in the bed. He remembered his first sight of her, all those years ago. Tall, fair-haired, well-made woman, not yet eighteen when they’d brought her south. He hadn’t been much older than that, a year from the battles of Camburn, swift to wed because he needed heirs. There had been a time when they were both young. It seemed, occasionally, a disconcerting recollection.

“They are bringing a meal,” he said.

“I heard, outside. I told them to wait until I left.” From any other woman, that might have been innuendo, invitation. Elswith didn’t smile.

He was aroused, even so, even after all these years. “Will you come to me?” he asked. Made it a request.

“I have,” she murmured dryly, but stepped forward nonetheless, a virtuous, honourable woman, keeping a compact—but wanting with all her heart to leave him, leave all of them behind. Had her reasons.

She stood by the bed, the light behind her now. Aeldred sat up, his pulse racing. All these years. She wore no perfume, of course, but he knew the scent of her body and that excited him.

“You are all right?” she asked.

“You know I am,” he said, and began unfastening the front of her robe. Her full, heavy breasts swung free, the disk between them. He looked, and then he touched her.

“Are my hands cold?”

She shook her head. Her eyes were closed, he saw. The king watched her draw a slow breath as his hands moved. It was not lack of pleasure in this, he knew, with a measure of satisfaction. It was piety, conviction, fear for their souls, a yearning towards the god.

He didn’t want her to leave. His own piety: he had married this woman, sired children with her, lived through the tentative reshaping of a realm. Wartime, peacetime, winter, drought. Could not have claimed there was a fire that burned between them, but there was life, a history. He didn’t want another woman in his bed.

He slipped the robe past her ample hips, drew his wife down beside him and then beneath. They made love whenever he recovered from his sickness—and only on those days or nights. A private arrangement, balancing needs. The body and the soul.

After, unclothed beside each other, he looked at the marks of red flushing her very white skin and knew that she would—again—be feeling guilt for her own pleasure. The body housed the soul, for some; imprisoned it, for others. The teachings varied; always had.

He drew a breath. “When Judit is married,” he said, very softly, a hand on her thigh.

“What?”

“I will release you.”

He felt her involuntary movement. She looked quickly at him, then closed her eyes tightly. Had not expected this. Neither had he, in truth. A moment later, he saw the tears on her cheeks.

“Thank you, my lord,” she said, a catch in her throat. “Aeldred, I pray for you always, to holy Jad. For mercy and forgiveness.”

“I know,” said the king.

She was weeping, silently, beside him, tears spilling, hands gripping her golden disk. “Always. For you, your soul. And the children.”

“I know,” he said again.

Had a sudden, oddly vivid image of visiting one day at her retreat, Elswith garbed in yellow, a holy woman
among others. The two of them old, walking slowly in a quiet place. Perhaps, he thought, she was to be his example, and a withdrawal to the god was his own proper course before the end came and brought him either light or dark through the spaces of forever.

Perhaps before the end. Not yet. He knew his sins, they burned in him, but he was in this offered world, and of it, and still carried a dream.

In time, the king and queen of the Anglcyn rose from the royal bed and dressed themselves. Food was sent for and brought in. She kept him company at table while he ate and drank, ravenous, as always, after recovery. The body’s appetites. In and of the world.

They slept, later, in their separate bedchambers, parting with the formal kiss of the god on cheeks and brow. Dawn came not long after, arriving in summer mildness, ushering a bright day, enormous with implication.

H
akon Ingemarson, by ten years his father’s youngest son, enjoyed being called upon to ride west across three rivers and the vague border as an emissary to King Aeldred’s court at Esferth (or wherever else it might be) from their own settlements in the southern part of Erlond.

Aside from the pleasure he took in this very adult responsibility, he found the Anglcyn royal children exhilarating, and was infatuated with the younger daughter.

He was aware that his father was only disposed to send him west when their pledged payments were late, or about to be, taking shrewd advantage of evidence of friendship among the younger generation. He also knew that those at the Anglcyn court were conscious of this, and amused by it.

An ongoing joke, started by Gareth, the younger son, was that if Hakon ever did arrive with the annual tribute, they’d have Kendra sleep with him. Hakon always struggled not to flush, hearing this. Kendra, predictably, ignored it each time, not even bothering with the withering glance her older sister had perfected. Hakon did ask his father to allow him to lead the actual tribute west, when it eventually went, but Ingemar reserved that journey for others, the money well guarded, saving Hakon for explaining—as best he could—their too-frequent delays.

They were sprawled in the summer grass south of Esferth town, near the river, out of sight of the wooden walls. Had eaten here out of doors, four of them, and were idling in late-morning sunshine before returning to town to watch the preparations for the fair continue.

No one spoke. Birdsong from the beech and oak woods to the west across the stream and the rising and falling drone of bees among the meadow flowers were the only sounds. It was warm in the sun, sleep-inducing. But Hakon, reclining on one elbow, was too aware of Kendra beside him. Her golden hair kept coming free of her hat as she concentrated on interweaving grasses into something or other. Athelbert, king’s heir of the Anglcyn, lay beyond his sister, on his back, his own soft cap covering his face. Gareth was reading, of course. He wasn’t supposed to take parchments out of the city, but he did.

Hakon, lazily drifting in the light, became belatedly aware that he could be accused of staring at Kendra, and probably would be with Athelbert around. He turned away, abruptly self-conscious. And sat up quickly.