The Last Light of the Sun (52 page)

“No,” he said. “That is not it. You and your mother—”

“Will ride to the farm workers, then begin preparations here. As Rhiannon said.”

Brynn turned and confronted his wife’s steady gaze. A man stood behind her holding a torch.

Enid wore a blue night robe. Her hair was down, almost to her waist. No one ever saw it that way. Rhiannon, seeing the look exchanged between her parents, felt unsettled by the intimacy of it. The hallway was filled with people, and light. She felt herself flush, as if caught in the act of reading or hearing words meant for another. It occurred to her,
even in that moment, to wonder if she would ever exchange such a glance with anyone before she died.

“Enid,” she heard her father say. “Erlings come for the women. You make us … weaker.”

“Not this time. They are coming for you, husband. Erling’s Bane. Volgan’s slayer. The rest of us are ordinary fare. If anyone leaves, we should all leave. Including you.”

Brynn drew himself up. “Abandon Brynnfell to Erlings? At this point in my life? Are you seriously—?”

“No,” said his wife, “I am not. That is why we stay. How many are coming? How much time do we have?”

For a long moment he looked as if he were going to hold his ground, but then, “More than last time, I think. Say eighty of them. Time, I’m not sure. They’ll come from Llywerth again, through the hills.”

“We need more men.”

“I know. Castle’s too far. I’ll send, but they won’t get back in time.”

“What do we have here? Forty?”

“A little less than that, if you mean trained to weapons.”

There were two lines on her mother’s forehead. Rhiannon knew them, they came when she was thinking. Enid said, “We’ll get as many of the farm workers as we can, Rhiannon and I, and their women and children for shelter. We can’t leave them out there.”

“Not the women. Send them north to Cwynerth with the young ones. They’ll be safer away. As you said—Brynnfell is what they want. And me.”

“And the sword,” his wife said quietly.

Rhiannon blinked. She hadn’t thought of that.

“Likely so,” her father was saying, nodding his head. “I’ll send riders to Prydllen and Cwynerth. There should be a dozen men at each, for the harvest.”

“Will they come?”

“Against Erlings? They’ll come. In time, I don’t know.”

“And we defend the farm?”

He was shaking his head. “Not enough men. Too difficult. No. They won’t expect us to have a warning. If we’re quick enough, we can meet them west, at a place we choose. Better ground than here.”

“And if you are wrong?”

Brynn smiled, for the first time that night. “I’m not wrong.”

Rhiannon, listening, realized that her mother, too, had not asked about the warning, how Brynn knew what he seemed to know. She wouldn’t ask, unless perhaps at night when the two of them were alone. Some things were not for the light. Jad ruled the heavens and earth and all the seas, but the Cyngael lived at the edge of the world where the sun went down. They had always needed access to knowledge that went beneath, not to be spoken.

They weren’t speaking of it.

Her mother was looking at her. Frowning again, doing so, that expression everyone had been giving her since the end of spring.

“Let’s go,” Rhiannon said, ignoring it.

“Enid,” her father said, as the two women turned away. They both looked back at him. His face was grim. “Bring every lad over twelve summers. With anything at all that might do for a weapon.”

That was too young, surely. Her mother would refuse, Rhiannon thought.

She was wrong.

Brand Leofson, commanding five Jormsvik ships as they made their way west, knew where he was going. He’d rowed his first dragon-ships in the final years of the
Volgan’s raids, though never with Siggur’s men. Had lost his eye in one of those, had been recovering at home when the last of the Volgan’s journeys had ended in disaster in Llywerth. Hadn’t been there.

Depending on his mood, in the intervening years, and on how much he’d been drinking, he either felt fortunate to have missed that catastrophe, or cursed not to have been one of those—their names were known—who’d been with Siggur in the glory years, at the end.

You could say, if your mind worked that way, that his failure to be in Llywerth was a reason he was taking five undermanned ships west now. The past, what we have done or not done, slips and flows, like a stream to a carved-out channel, into the things we do years after. It is never safe, or wise, to say that anything is over.

They were at risk, he knew it, and so would the other captains, all the more experienced men here. They still had all their ships but they’d lost sixty men. If the weather turned, it would get bad at sea. So far, it hadn’t. On the second night the wind switched to southerly, which pushed them closer than he liked to the rocky coast of Cadyr. But they were Erlings, mariners, knew how to stay clear of a lee shore, and when they reached the western end of the Cyngael coastline and turned north, that wind held with them.

Your danger could become your gift. Ingavin’s storms could drown you at sea—or terrify your foe on land, adding fire and the flash of lightning to your own war cries. And the god, too, Brand was always telling himself, his private thought, had only one eye, after his nights on the tree where the world began.

Salt in the air, sail full on each ship now, stars fading above them as the sun rose, Brand thought of the Volgan and his sword—for the first time in years, if truth be told. He felt a bone-deep stirring within. Ivarr Ragnarson had
been malformed, evil and devious, had deserved to die. But he’d had a clever-enough thought or two in his head, that one, and Brand wouldn’t be the one to deny it.

To have turned home with sixty dead and nothing to show for their loss would have been a disaster. To come back and report the Volgan’s slayer slain and the sword found and reclaimed …

That would be something different. It could make up for the deaths, and more. For not having been one of that company, twenty-five years ago.

IT HAD OCCURRED TO BERN
, rowing west, that there was something unsettling about what he was and how the world saw them all. They were Erlings, riders of the waves, laughing at wind and rain, knifing through roiling seas. Yet he himself was one of them, and he had no idea what to do in rough weather, could only follow directions as best he could and pray the seas did not, in fact, roil.

More: they were Jormsvikings, feared through the world as the deadliest fighters under sun and stars and the two moons. But Bern had never fought a battle in his life, only one single combat on the beach below the walls. That wasn’t a battle. It was nothing like a battle.

What, came the thought, as they turned north and wind took the sails, if all of the others were—more or less—like him? Ordinary men, no better or worse than others. What if it was
fear
that made men believe the Jormsvik mercenaries were deadly? They could be beaten, after all; they
had
just been beaten.

Aeldred’s
fyrd
had used signal fires and archers. Brand, and Garr Hoddson, had called it cowardly, womanish, making mock of the Anglcyn king and his warriors, spitting contempt into the sea.

Bern thought that it would be better to consider learning to use bows themselves, if their enemies did.
Then he thought, even more privately, almost hiding the notion from himself, that he really wasn’t sure raiding in this way was the life for him.

He could curse his father again, easily enough, for it was Thorkell’s exile that had thrust Bern into servitude, and then off the isle without an inheritance. But—in sunlit truth—that channel of the thought-stream wasn’t so easy any more. The farm, his inheritance, was only theirs because of raiding, wasn’t it? His father’s long-sung adventure with Siggur in Ferrieres, a cluster of men burning a royal sanctuary.

And no one had
made
Bern take Halldr Thinshank’s horse to Jormsvik.

He thought of his mother, his sisters on the mainland, and then of the young woman at the woman’s compound—he’d never learned her name—who’d been bitten by the
volur’s
snake, and saved his life because of it. Partly because of it.

Women, he thought, would probably see this differently.

He rowed when ordered, rested when the wind allowed, took food to Gyllir among the other horses standing tethered in the central aisle of the wide ship, shovelled horse dung overboard.

Felt a surge of excitement, despite everything, when they reached the harbour that Garr and Brand both knew, in Llywerth. No one in sight, all along the coast coming north, or here. They pulled the ships ashore in the hour before dawn and spoke their thanks to Ingavin on the beach.

They’d leave the boats here, men to guard them—he might be one of those, had no clear sense of how he’d feel about that. Then the others would head inland to find Brynnfell and kill a man and claim a sword again.

You couldn’t deny it was matter for skald song, through a winter and beyond. In the northlands, that
mattered. Perhaps everyone shared these doubts he was having, Bern thought. He didn’t think so, actually, looking at his shipmates, but it would have been good to have someone to ask. He wondered where his father was. Thorkell had told him not to let them come this way.

He’d tried. You couldn’t say he hadn’t tried. He wasn’t leading this raid, was he? And if your life steered you to the dragon-ships, well … it steered you there. Ingavin and Thünir chose their warriors. And maybe—maybe—he’d come out of this with a share of glory. His own. A name to be remembered.

Men lived and died pursuing that, didn’t they?
Fair fame dies never.
Was Bern Thorkellson of Rabady Isle the one to say they were wrong? Was he that arrogant? Bern shook his head, drawing a glance from the man next to him on the beach.

Bern looked the other way, embarrassed. Saw, beyond the strand, the darkly outlined hills of the Cyngael, knew that the Anglcyn lands lay beyond, far beyond. And farther east, across the seas, where the sun would rise, was home.

No one, he thought, travelled as the Erlings did. No people were so far-faring, so brave. The world knew it. He drew a breath, pushed the dark thoughts away from him. Sunrise came. Brand Leofson picked his men for the raid.

Bern started east with the other chosen ones.

They had been living for three days on nuts and berries, like peasants foraging in a dry season or during a too-long winter with the storeroom empty. Cafall led them to water, so there was that, for themselves and the horses.

It was oppressively dark in the forest, even in daytime. On occasion a square of sky could be seen through the trees, light spilling down, a reminder of a world beyond
the wood. Sometimes at night they caught a glimpse of stars. Once they saw the blue moon, and paused in a glade without a word spoken, looking up. Then they went on. They were following the dog north and west towards Arberth—or they had to assume that was so. None of them could do more than hazard a guess at where they were, how far they’d come, how far yet there was to go. Five days, Alun had said the passage through the forest might be: that, too, had been a guess.

No one had ever done this.

They pushed themselves and the animals hard: an awareness of urgency and the equally strong feeling that it was better to keep moving than be still in one place for too long. They never again heard or sensed the beast-god that had come the first night, or the green creatures of the half-world that had followed.

They knew they were here, however. And when they slept, or tried to (one always awake, on watch), the memory of that unseen creature would come back. They were intruders here, alive only on sufferance. It was frightening, and wearying. One had to work to avoid startling shamefully at sounds in the wood—and all forests were full of sounds.

They knew they had been three nights here, but in another way this had become for them a time outside of time. Athelbert had a vision once, almost asleep in the saddle, of the three of them coming out to a world entirely changed. He didn’t know, for he didn’t speak of this, that Alun had had that same fear, meeting a faerie outside Esferth, before the
fyrd
had ridden south.

Through the first two days they’d talked, mostly to hear voices, human sounds. Athelbert had amused the others, or tried to, singing tavern songs, invariably bawdy. Thorkell, after extended urging, had offered one of the Erling saga-verses, but the younger men
became aware he was doing it only to indulge them. By the fourth day they were riding in silence, following the grey dog in the gloom.

Near sundown, they came to another stream.

Cafall was doing this without urging. Each one of them was aware that they’d have been lost days ago without Alun’s dog. They didn’t speak of this, either. They dismounted, bone-tired, to let the horses drink. Dim, filtered twilight. Clink of harness, creak of saddle leather, crunch and snap of twigs and small branches by the stream, and they nearly died again.

The snake wasn’t green. It was Alun who trod too close, Athelbert who saw it, whipping out his dagger, gripping it to throw. It was Thorkell Einarson who snapped a command:
“Hold! Alun, don’t move!”

The black snakes were poisonous, their bite tended to be lethal.

“I can kill it!” Athelbert rasped through clenched teeth. Alun had frozen where he was, in the act of approaching the water. One foot was incongruously lifted so that he was poised, like some ancient frieze of a runner in one of the villas left behind when the Rhodian legions retreated south. The snake remained coiled, its head moving. An easy-enough target for someone skilled with a blade.

“I swore an oath,” Thorkell said urgently. “Our lives depend—”

In that same moment Alun ab Owyn murmured, very clearly, “Holy Jad defend my soul,” and sprang into the air.

He landed in the water with a splash. The stream was shallow; he came down hard, knees and hands on stone, and cursed. The snake, affronted, disappeared with a slither and glide into underbrush.

The bear cub, which none of them had seen, looked up from the far side of the water where it had been drinking,
backed away a few steps, and essayed a provisional growl in the direction of the man in the stream.