The Last Light of the Sun (29 page)

Burgred blinked. “
Drengest?
You are mocking me.”

There was a silence. They weren’t mocking him. Burgred laughed. “What fool told you that? What fools listened to him? Have you
seen
Drengest yet? You must have.”

The Erling planted his sword in the earth, removed his helm. His long yellow hair was plastered to his head. “We’ve seen it,” he said.

“You understand there are nearly one hundred men of the
fyrd
in there, over and above the rest of the people inside the walls? You’ve seen the walls? You’ve seen the fleet being built? You were going to attack
Drengest?
You know how close you are to Esferth here? What do you have, thirty longships? Forty? Fifty? Is Jormsvik emptied for this folly? Are you all summer-mad?”

“Five ships,” the Erling said at length, shifting his feet. A professional, not a madman, aware of everything Burgred was saying, which made this even harder to understand.

Five longships meant two hundred men. Fewer, if they had horses. A large raid, an expensive one. But not nearly enough to come here. “You were led to believe you could take that
burh,
where our fleet’s being built and guarded, with five ships? Someone lied to you,” Burgred of Denferth said flatly.

Last words spoken in a worthy life.

He had time to recall, bewildered again, that the Erlings had always seen bows as the weapon of a coward, before the moonlight left his eyes and he went to seek the god with an arrow in his chest.

GUTHRUM SKALLSON BLINKED
in the moonlight, not quite believing what he’d just seen. Then he did believe it, and turned.

He wasn’t a
berserkir,
had never been that wild on a battlefield, was happy to wear armour, thank you, but the rage that filled him in that moment was very great and he moved swiftly with it. Crossed to the man with the bow and swung his arm in a full backhanded sweep, smashing it into the archer’s face, sending him sprawling in the blue-tinted grass.

He followed, still in a fury, swearing. Bent over the crumpled form, seized the fallen bow, cracked it over his knee, then grabbed the belt-quiver and scattered the arrows with one furious, wide, wheeling motion in an arc across the summer field. He was breathing hard, at the edge of murder.

“You’ll die for doing that,” the man on the ground said, through a smashed mouth, in his eerie voice.

Guthrum blinked again. He shook his head, as if stunned. It was not to be borne. He lifted the man with one hand; he weighed less than any of them, by a good deal. Holding him in the air by the bunched-up tunic, so his feet swung free, Guthrum pulled the knife from his belt.

“No!” shouted Atli, behind him. Guthrum ignored that.

“Say it to me again,” he grunted to the little man dangling in front of him.

“I will kill you for that blow,” said the man he held at his mercy. The words came out half a whistle, through bleeding lips.

“Right, then,” said Guthrum.

He moved the knife, in a short, practised motion. And was brought up hard by a heavy hand seizing his wrist, gripping fiercely, pulling it back.

“We won’t get final payment if he dies,” Atli grunted. “Hold!”

Guthrum swore at him. “Do you know how much silver he just cost us?”

“Of course I know!”

“You heard the white-faced coward threaten my life? Mine!”

“You struck him a blow.”

“Ingavin’s blood! He killed our ransom, you thickheaded fool!”

Atli nodded. “Right. He’s also paying us. And he’s a Volganson. The last one. You want to go home with that blood on your blade? We’ll settle this on the ships. Best get out of here now, and off this coast. Aeldred’ll be coming soon as they find these bodies.”

“Of
course
he will.”

“Then let’s go. We kill the last two?” Atli awaited orders.

“Of course we kill them,” gasped the little man Guthrum was still holding in the air. Guthrum threw him away, into the grass. He lay there, crumpled and small, not moving.

Guthrum swore. What he
wanted
to do was send the last two Anglcyn back to Esferth to explain, to say the killing was unintended. That they were leaving these shores. There
were a great many Erlings hereabouts, or living not far east of here. The last thing Jormsvik needed was their own people enraged because the Anglcyn had cut off trading rights, or raised the tribute tax, or decided to kill a score of them and display the heads on pikes for the death of Aeldred’s earl and friend. It could happen. It
had
happened.

But he couldn’t let them go back. There was no explanation that would achieve anything useful. Living men would name the Jormsvik raiders as the men who’d killed an earl of the Anglcyn with a coward’s bow, after he’d surrendered. It wouldn’t do at all.

He sighed, glared at the figure in the grass again.

“Kill them,” he said, reluctantly. “Then we move.”

It is a truth hardly to be challenged that most men prefer not to have others decree the manner and time of their dying. Jormsvik mercenaries, responsible on an individual and collective basis for so many deaths, were not unaware of this. At the same time, the engrossing and unsettling events in that moonlit meadow, from the time the Anglcyn was shot to the moment Guthrum issued that last order, had compelled attention—and diverted it.

One of the captive Anglcyn twisted, in the moment Guthrum spoke, grabbed a boot-top knife, stabbed the nearest of the men guarding him, ripped free of the belated clutch of another, and tore off into the night. Not, normally, a problem. There were twenty of them here, they were swift and experienced fighters.

They did not, however, have horses.

And a moment later the fleeing Anglcyn did. Six mounts had been tethered nearby. They ought to have been claimed already. They hadn’t been. The arrow, the loss of an earl’s ransom, Guthrum’s assault on the man paying them. There were reasons, obviously, but it was a mistake.

Running hard, they reached the other horses. Five of them mounted up without an order spoken. No need for orders here. They gave chase. They were not horsemen, however, these Erlings, these dragon-ship raiders, scourges of the white wave, sea foam. They could ride, but not as an Anglcyn did. And he had chosen the best horse—the earl’s, almost certainly. The dead earl’s, their lost ransom. It was all bad. Then it got worse.

They heard his horn sound, shattering the night.

The riders reined up hard. The others on foot behind them in the meadow looked at each other, and then at Guthrum, who was leading this party. Every man there knew they were in enormous peril suddenly. Inland. On foot, all but five of them. A full day from the ships, at least, with a fortified
burh
and a guard tower nearby, and Esferth itself just to the north. It would be day, bright and deadly, long before they got back to the shore.

Guthrum swore again, viciously. He killed the last Anglcyn himself, almost absently, a sword in the chest, ripped out as soon as it went in, wiped dry on the grass, sheathed again. The riders came back. The accursed horn was still sounding, shredding the dark.

“You five ride back,” he rasped. “Tell Brand to land a ship’s worth of men, start this way. You guide them. Look for us. We’ll be coming fast as we can, the way we came. But if we’re chased we might be caught, and we’ll need more men in a fight.”

“Forty enough?” Atli asked.

“No idea, but I can’t risk more. Let’s go.”

“I want a horse!” said the small, vicious man who’d caused all this, sitting up now on the grass. “I’ll lead them back.”

“Fuck that forever!” said Guthrum savagely. “You wanted to come ashore with us, you’ll run back with us. And if you can’t keep up we’ll leave you for Aeldred.
They’d like a Volganson, I imagine. Get on your feet. Steady run, all of you. Riders, go!”

The horn was still blowing, fading east as they started back west themselves. Ivarr got up promptly enough, Guthrum saw. Ragnarson wiped at his mouth, spat blood, then started running with them. He was light-boned, quick-footed. Kept spitting blood for a time, but said nothing more. In the moonlight his features were stranger than ever, the whiteness not entirely human. Ought to have been exposed at birth, Guthrum thought grimly, looking like that as he came into the middle-world. Would have been, in any other family. He’d been threatened with death by this one, Siggur Volganson’s heir. It didn’t occur to him to be afraid but he did regret not killing him.

An earl, he kept thinking, as they went. An
earl!
Aeldred’s friend from childhood. They could have taken the prodigious ransom for Burgred of Denferth, turned straight around, and rowed home for a rich and easy winter in the Jormsvik taverns. Instead, they had a hard, dangerous run ahead; the horn would bring riders in the dark—riders who would learn what had happened, and who knew the terrain far better than they did. They could die here.

He might have been a farmer by now, Guthrum thought. Repairing fences, eyeing rainclouds before harvest time. He actually amused himself, briefly, with the thought, running through night in Anglcyn lands. It had never been likely. Farmers didn’t go to Ingavin’s halls, or drink from Thünir’s horn when they were called from the middle-world. He’d chosen his life a long time ago. No regrets, under the blue moon and the stars.

The moon was over the woods, Bern saw, awakening. Then he grasped that he was lying on grass, looking up at trees, beside a river in the dark.

He’d been pissing in the alley and …

He sat up. Too quickly. The moon lurched, stars described arcs as if falling. He gasped. Touched his head: a lump, the stickiness of blood. He cursed, confused, his heart hammering. Looked around, too quickly again: the dizziness assaulted him, blood loud in his ears. He seemed to be holding something. Looked down at the object in his hand.

Knew his father’s neck chain and hammer, immediately.

No doubt, no hesitation, even here, so far away from home, from childhood. Small sons could be like that, memorizing each and every thing about the father, a figure larger than anything in the world, filling the house, then emptying it when he left, on the dragon-ships again. There were thousands of necklaces like this one, and there was not one like it in the world the gods had made.

He was very still, listening to the river running over stones, the crickets and frogs. There were fireflies above the water and the reeds. The forest was black beyond the stream. Something had just happened that he could never even have imagined.

He tried to think clearly, but his head was hurting. His father was here. Had been in Esferth, had knocked him out—or rescued him?—and taken him outside the walls and left … this.

As a sign of what? Bern swore again. His father had never been a man to make anything clear or easy. But if he could take any idea from being here and holding Thorkell’s necklace, it was that his father wanted him out of Esferth.

Suddenly, belatedly, he thought about Ecca, who was—significantly—
not
here outside the walls. Bern stood up then, wincing, unsteady. He couldn’t stay where he was. There were always people outside a city, especially now with the king present, and all his household, and a
late-summer fair beginning soon. There was a second city’s worth of tents around to the north. They’d seen them earlier, when they’d come up.

Finding so many people here had been a large issue. Ecca had wrestled with considerable anger as they’d come to understand what was happening in Esferth and near it. That supposedly unfinished
burh
on the coast, Drengest, was entirely complete, walls secure, defended, a number of ships already built in the harbour.

Not even remotely a place where five ships’ worth of men could raid and run, which is what they’d been told they could do. And Esferth itself, which was supposed to be half empty, exposed to an attack that would shape a legend, was thronged with merchants and the Anglcyn
fyrd,
and Aeldred himself was here with his household guard. It was not a mistake, not a misreading of signs, Ecca had snarled. It appeared they had been lied to, by the man who’d paid them to come.

Ivarr Ragnarson, the Volgan’s heir. The one everyone whispered ought surely to have been killed when he came out of his mother’s womb white as a spirit, hairless, a malformed freak of nature, unworthy of life and his lineage.

It was that lineage that had saved him. Everyone knew the tale: how a
volur
in her trance had spoken to his father and forbidden him to expose the child. Ragnar Siggurson, hesitant by nature, too careful, never the strongest man (following a father who
had
been the strongest of men), had let the child live, to grow up strange and estranged, and vicious.

Bern had his own thoughts about
volurs
and their trances. Not that it mattered. He was desperately unsure what to do. Ecca was a shipmate, his companion on this scouting mission. A Jormsvik raider didn’t leave companions behind unless he had no choice at all; they
were bound to each other, by oath and history. But this was Bern’s first raid, he didn’t know enough yet, didn’t know if this was a time when you
did
leave to carry an urgent message back. Should he return to Esferth when the gates opened at sunrise and look for Ecca, or find Gyllir in the wood where they’d left the horses and hurry to the ships with a warning?

Was that the meaning in Thorkell’s necklace, in his being out here alone? Was Ecca taken? Dead? And if not, what would happen if he returned to the ships after Bern did and asked why his companion had left without him? And just how, in fact, Bern had gotten outside the walls? How he’d explain that, Bern had no idea. And what if Ecca rode back and the ships were gone because Bern had told them it was wiser to cast off?

Too many conflicting needs, conjured thoughts. Hesitations of his own devising (another son of a strong father?). He didn’t know, standing unsteadily alone by the water, if he was …
direct
enough for this raiding life. He’d be dealing more easily with all of this, he thought, if his head didn’t hurt so much.

Something caught his eye, south and east. A bonfire burning on a hill. He watched that light in the darkness, saw it occluded, reappear, vanish again, return. He realized, after a moment, that this was a message. Knew it could not possibly be good for him, or for those waiting by the ships … or for Guthrum’s party ashore to the south.