The Last Light of the Sun (43 page)

To get the Volgan’s lost sword back from the Cyngael. On his first raid. That would be remembered, it would always be remembered. Bern touched Ingavin’s hammer, his father’s hammer, at his throat.

There was another part of the verse he’d spoken to his father in the stream; they all knew it, throughout the Erling lands:

Cattle die kinsmen die.

Every man born will die.

Fierce hearth fires end in ash.

Fame once won endures ever.

The ships were being unlashed. Bern moved to help. The risen wind was from the east, a message in that. Ingavin’s wind, carrying them in the night, dragon-prows on a summer sea.

J
adwina was never quite clear, looking back, whether they received the tidings of the earl’s death (she always got his name wrong, but it was difficult to remember things from so long ago) and the slaughtered Erling raiders before or after the evening her life changed—or even that same night, though she didn’t think so. It felt as though it had come afterwards. It had been a bad time for her, but she was fairly certain she’d have remembered if it had been that same night.

The troubles had begun a fourteen-night earlier, when Eadyn lost his hand. An accident, an entirely stupid accident, clearing trees with his father, bending a branch for Osca’s axe. A clean severing, at the wrist. His life marred, all hope of good fortune spurting from him with his blood. The hand on the grass, fingers still flexed, a thing of its own now. Discarded. A young man, broad-shouldered, fair-haired, picked to marry her, and her own inward choice for that (by Jad’s pure grace), turned cripple in a moment’s inattention at the edge of wood and scrubland.

He lived. Their cleric, summoned, knew more than most about leechcraft. Eadyn lay in fever for days, his wrist wrapped in a poultice his mother changed at sunrise and sunset. Osca wasn’t at the bedside or even at home. He spent those days drinking, swearing, weeping, cursing the god, abusing those who tried to comfort him. What comfort was there under the heavens? He had only the
one living son, and a farm that needed Eadyn’s strength as his own began to fail.

It was a calamity. Lives turned, lives
ended,
with such moments. The cleric, wisely, kept his distance until Osca had drunk himself into a vomiting stupor and awoke, a day and night later, ashen and heart-scalded. The god had made the world this way, in his unknowable wisdom, the cleric said to the villagers in their small chapel. But it was hard, he conceded. It could be intolerably hard.

Jadwina thought so too. Her own father had shaken his head grimly when he heard the tale. He had politely waited to see if Eadyn would conveniently die, before calling off the proposed match. What else could he do? A cripple was no marriage. He could never swing an axe properly, handle a plough, mend a fence alone, kill a wolf or wild dog. Couldn’t even practise with a bow as they were ordered by the king to do now.

It was a sorrow for Eadyn and his family, a lesson for everyone else, as the cleric said, but you didn’t have to make it
your
sorrow, too. There were healthy lads in the village, or near enough. You needed to marry daughters usefully. It was a matter of survival. The world, here in the north, or anywhere else probably, wasn’t going to make life easy for you.

At some point during that time—it blurred for Jadwina, looking back—Bevin, the smith, had appeared at their door and asked to speak with her father. Gryn had gone walking with him and returned to say that he’d accepted an offer for her.

The younger son of the village smith wasn’t the match Eadyn, son of Osca, had been—land was land, after all—but he was better than a one-handed cripple. Jadwina received the tidings and—as best she remembered—she dropped a pitcher on the floor. It might have been on purpose; she couldn’t recall. Her father beat her about
the back and shoulders, with her mother calling approval. It had been a new-bought pitcher.

Raud, the smith’s son, now plighted to her, never even spoke with Jadwina. Not then, at any rate.

Some days later, however, towards twilight, as she was bringing the cow back from the northernmost field, Raud stepped out from a copse by the path. He stood before her. He had come from the forge; there was soot in his clothing and on his face.

“Be wed come harvest,” he said, grinning. He had poxed cheeks and long, skinny shanks.

“Not by my will,” Jadwina replied, tossing her head.

He laughed. “Wha’ matters that? You’ll spread legs by will or wi’out.”

“Eadyn is two men to your one!” she said. “And you knows it.”

He laughed again. “He’s one hand to my two. Can’t even do this now.”

He grabbed at her. Before she could twist away, he had a hand twisted in her hair, spilling her kerchief, and another over her mouth, too tightly for her to bite, or scream. He smelled of ash and smoke. He pulled the hand away quickly and hit her on the side of the head, hard enough for the world to rock and sway. Then he hit her again.

The sun was going down. End of summer. She remembered that. No one on the path, home a long walk from where they were. She couldn’t even see the nearest houses of the village.

“Take what’s mine now,” Raud said. “Get a baby in you, they’ll just make me wed you, won’ they? What matters that?” She was on the ground by the path, beneath him. He straddled her, a boot on either side, started untying the rope around his trousers, fumbling in his haste. She drew breath to shout. He kicked her in the ribs.

Jadwina gasped, began to weep. It hurt to breathe. He dragged his leggings down around his muddy boots. Lowered himself to his knees then forward onto her. Began pushing, clumsily, at her lower clothes. She hit him, scratching at his face. He swore, then laughed, his hand groped hard at her, down there.

Then his whole body lurched crazily to one side, his head most of all. Jadwina had a confused, frightening sense of wetness. She was in pain, dizzy and terrified. It took her a moment to understand what had happened. Raud’s blood was all over her. He’d been hit in the neck from above, behind, by an axe. She looked up.

An axe swung one-handed.

Raud’s body, his sex exposed, still erect, his trousers around his ankles, lay sprawled on one side, next to her in the shallow ditch where he’d thrown her down. Instinctively, she shifted away from him. He was, Jadwina saw, already dead. She was afraid she was going to be sick. She put a hand to her side where the worst pain was, then brought it to her face. It came away wet with Raud’s blood.

Eadyn, his face ghost-pale, stood above her. She struggled to sit up. Her side felt as if a blade were in it, as if something were broken and sliding within. He stepped back a little. Her cow was behind him, in the grass on the other side of the path, cropping. No sound but that, and the birds flying to branches at end of day; fields and trees, dark green grass, the sun almost down.

“Was out here trying,” Eadyn said, finally, gesturing with the axe. “See if I can chop. You know? Saw you.”

She seemed able to nod her head.

“Can’t do it rightly,” he said, lifting the axe a little again, letting it fall. “No good.”

Jadwina drew a careful breath, a hand to her side again. She was covered in blood. “Just started, though. You’ll get better at it.”

He shook his head. “Useless man.” She tried not to look at the bandaged stump of his right hand. His good hand, it had been.

“You … you were man enough to save me,” she said.

He shrugged. “From behind him.”

“What matters that?” she said. Her capacity to speak, to think, was coming back. And she had a thought. It frightened her, so she spoke quickly, before fear could take hold. “Lie with me now,” she said. “Give me a child. No one else will want me then. You’ll have to.”

What she saw in him, that moment, in the last fading of the summer daylight, and remembered ever after, was fear, and defeat. It could be read, the way some clerics read words in books.

He shook his head again. “Na, that’ll not do. I’m cripple, girl. They’ll not wed you to me. And how could I fend for a wife and little ones now?”

“We’ll fend the both of us together,” she said.

He was silent. The axe—dark with Raud’s blood—held in his left hand. “Jad rot it forever,” he said finally. “I’m done.” He looked at the dead man. “His brothers’ll kill me now.”

“They’ll not that. I’ll tell the cleric and reeve what happened here.”

“And that’ll matter to them?” He laughed, bitterly. “No. I’m away this night, girl. You clean yourself, say nothing. Maybe take a bit of time before they find this. Give me a chance to be gone.”

Her heart was aching by then, more than her side, a dull, hard pain, but there was—even in that moment—a part of her that had begun despising him. It was like a death, actually, feeling that.

“Where … where will you go?”

“As if I have the least idea,” he said. “Jad be with you, girl.”

He said that over his shoulder, had already turned away.

He left her there, walked north, back up the grassy path the way that she had come, and then on, beyond the pasture. Jadwina watched until she couldn’t see him any more in the twilight. She got herself up, reclaimed her hazel switch, and began leading the cow back home, moving slowly, a hand to her side, leaving a dead man in the grass.

She decided, before she’d reached the first houses, that she wasn’t going to listen to Eadyn. He had left her lying there without a backwards glance. They had been pledged to be married.

She went home exactly as she was, Raud’s blood on her face and hair and hands, all over her clothing. She saw horror—and curiosity—in people’s faces as she took the cow through the village. She kept her head high. Said nothing. They followed her. Of course they followed her. At her door, she told her father and mother, and then the cleric and reeve when they were brought, what had happened, and where. She’d thought she’d be beaten again, but she wasn’t. Too many people about.

Men (and boys, and dogs) went running to look. It was well after nightfall that they brought back Raud’s body. It was reported how he had been when they’d found him, trousers down, exposed. Two of the older women were instructed by the reeve to examine Jadwina. Behind a door they made her lift her skirts and both of them poked at her and came out, cackling, to report that she was intact.

Her father owned land; the smith was only a smith. There was no one to gainsay her tale. Right there, under torches in front of their door, the reeve declared the matter closed to the king’s justice, named the killing a just one. Two of Raud’s brothers went north in the morning after Eadyn. They came back without having
found any sign of him. Raud was buried in the ground behind the chapel.

And it had been some time during those warm, end-of-summer days that they had learned of the Erling raid and the death of the earl, the king’s good friend.

Jadwina hadn’t been inclined to care, or listen very much, which is why she was never certain about the course and timing of events. She remembered agitation and excitement, the cleric talking and talking, the reeve riding out and then back. And on one of the days there had been a black billowing of smoke west of them. It turned out to be, they learned, a burning of slain Erlings.

The king himself, it seemed, had been right there, just beyond the trees and the ridges. A battle almost within sight of where they lived. A victory. For those whose lives had not been utterly undone, as Jadwina’s had been, it counted as entirely memorable.

Later that same year the smith’s wife died, an autumn fever. Two others of the village went to the god as well. Within a fourteen-night of burying his wife, Bevin came to Jadwina’s father again, this time for himself. This was the father of the man who had been pledged to her and had assaulted her and been slain for it.

It didn’t seem to matter to anyone, certainly not her father. There was a kind of cloud, a stain over Jadwina by then. She was sent to him that same week, to the smithy and the house behind it. The cleric spoke new blessings over them in chapel; they had a cleric who liked to keep abreast of new things. Too much haste, some said of the marriage. Others jested that, with Jadwina’s history, her father didn’t want to see a third man maimed or killed before getting her off his hands.

No one ever saw Eadyn again, or heard tell of him. Bevin, the smith, as it turned out, was a mild-humoured man. She hadn’t expected that in someone so red-faced,
and with the sons he had. How could she have expected kindness? They had two children who survived. Jadwina’s memories of the year she was wed softened and blurred, overlaid with others as the seasons passed.

In time, she buried her husband; took no other mate. Her sons shared the smithy, after, with their older half-brothers, and she lived with one of them and his wife, tolerably well. As well as such things can ever be, two women in a small house. She was buried herself, when the god called her home, laid in the growing chapel graveyard, next to Bevin, not far from Raud, under a sun disk and her name.

Three things,
Alun was thinking, remembering the well-worn triad,
will gladden the heart of a man. Riding to a woman under two moons. Riding to battle, companions at his side. Riding home, after long away.

He was doing the third, possibly the second. Hadn’t thought about the first since his brother died. His heart was not glad.

He saw a sudden branch and ducked. The overgrown path they’d chosen could barely be called such. These woods had no formal name in either tongue, Cyngael or Anglcyn. Men did not enter here, save for the edgings, and only by daylight.

He heard his unwanted companion following. Without turning, Alun said, “There will be wolves in here.”

“Or course there will be wolves,” Thorkell Einarson said mildly.

“Bears, still, this time of year. Hunting cats. Boars.” “With autumn coming, boars for certain. Snakes.” “Yes. Two kinds, I believe. The green ones are harmless.” They were a fair distance into the forest already, the light entirely gone, even if it might still be twilight outside. Cafall was a shadow ahead of Alun’s horse.