The Last Light of the Sun Read online

  Praise for The Last Light of the Sun

  “A tale of raids and blood feuds, told with a blunt relish worthy of any Icelandic saga-teller … Kay writes beautifully, as though he were composing a prose poem, creating memorable characters and telling a story that will stay with you long after you’ve finished the book.”

  —Chronicle Herald (Halifax)

  “A master craftsman … Kay has staked out a marvelous territory somewhere between the historical realism of Dorothy Dunnett and the contemporary urban fantasy of Charles de Lint … An enchanted realm … in which the paranormal is just another dimension … [and] magical … intertwining storylines … add texture and richness.”

  —National Post

  “Brings depth and texture to the ancient tales of the Norse lands … Consummate storytelling.”

  —Library Journal

  “One of Kay’s finest achievements, an expert mélange of the Eddas and The Mabinogion. The characters are well developed and the story is as taut as a garrote.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Richly drawn … stunning … Epic in scale and finely wrought, [Kay’s] latest offering hurtles across a landscape of hard-scrabble villages, warrior fortresses, and spirit-filled forests … Kay is an unerring architect, a nimble sculptor in crafting the harsh, coastal world of the ancient north. Opened gleefully, enjoyed with the satisfaction of hopes fulfilled, The Last Light of the Sun is a delight to be shared.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “The Last Light of the Sun is more than a book: it’s a one-way ticket to another world so skillfully drawn, it’s wrenching to leave it behind.”

  —January Magazine

  “Kay has written some of the most intelligent and respected fantasy of the last twenty years … Together with George R. R Martin, he is one of the best two writers working in the epic fantasy field.”

  —SFX Magazine

  “[Kay] has fashioned a tale as dark, terrifying, powerful, and full of passion as any epic … A complex, satisfying story.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Chance, love, despair, yearning—Kay strikes in 600 fantastic pages all the many paths a person can hazard in this woeful thing called life, in these few failing, precious moments before the last light of the sun.”

  —Georgia Straight

  “What sets Kay apart from most other fantasy authors is his unwillingness to settle for convention or formula.”

  —Times Colonist (Victoria)

  “[Kay] has established himself as the primary voice of a genre—historical fantasy—which he created and pretty much occupies all on his own.”

  —Vancouver Sun

  “A moving saga of cultures at the brink of change.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “A distinguished story that, for those so inclined, poses intriguing historical riddles.”

  —Booklist Reviews

  “Kay takes the familiar elements of epic fantasy … and probes beneath the surface for what the old songs hide … [ The Last Light of the Sun] steadfastly confront[s] us with the significant acts of insignificant people, the ironies of history, and both heroism and the fantastic stripped of accumulated myths and legends. Where we seek patterns, there is only surprise.”

  —Locus

  “Literate, complex, unpredictable, and fascinating.”

  —Canadian Jewish News

  “Another vivid, complex fantasy from Kay’s pen. There is the usual sense that there’s more, so much more, in the background of the story than the reader has been told—the sense of glimpsing a few shining threads in a larger tapestry. A book to savour.”

  —SF Site

  PENGUIN CANADA

  THE LAST LIGHT OF THE SUN

  GUY GAVRIEL KAY is the author of ten novels and a volume of poetry. He won the 2008 World Fantasy Award for Ysabel, has been awarded the International Goliardos Prize, and is a two-time winner of the Aurora Award. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages and have appeared on bestseller lists around the world.

  Visit his Canadian website at www.guygavrielkay.ca and his international website at www.brightweavings.com.

  ALSO BY GUY GAVRIEL KAY

  The Fionavar Tapestry:

  The Summer Tree

  The Wandering Fire

  The Darkest Road

  Tigana

  A Song for Arbonne

  The Lions of Al-Rassan

  The Sarantine Mosaic:

  Sailing to Sarantium

  Lord of Emperors

  Beyond This Dark House

  (poetry)

  Ysabel

  Under Heaven

  THE

  LAST LIGHT

  OF THE SUN

  GUY

  GAVRIEL

  KAY

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,

  Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S A.

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2004

  Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2005

  Published in this edition, 2010

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)

  Copyright © Guy Gavriel Kay, 2004

  Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists

  94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

  no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval

  system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both

  the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

  to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Kay, Guy Gavriel

  The last light of the sun / Guy Gavriel Kay.

  ISBN 978-0-14-317451-6

  I. Title.

  PS8571.A935L38 2010 C813'.54 C2010-900613-5

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that

  it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise

  circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other

  than t
hat in which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477 or 2474

  for George Jonas

  I have a tale for you:

  a stag bells;

  winter pours summer has gone.

  The wind is high, cold;

  the sun is low;

  its course is short the sea is strong running.

  The bracken is very red;

  its shape has been hidden.

  The cry of the barnacle goose has become usual.

  Cold has taken

  the wings of birds.

  Season of ice; this is my tale.

  —FROM THE LIBER HYMNORUM MANUSCRIPT

  CHARACTERS

  (A PARTIAL LISTING)

  The Anglcyn

  Aeldred, son of Gademar, King of the Anglcyn

  Elswith, his queen

  Osbert, son of Cuthwulf, Aeldred’s chamberlain

  Burgred, Earl of Denferth

  The Erlings

  Thorkell Einarson, “Red Thorkell,” exiled from Rabady Isle

  Frigga, his wife, daughter of Skadi

  Bern Thorkellson, his son

  Siv, Athira, his daughters

  Iord, seer of Rabady, at the women’s compound

  Anrid, a woman serving at the compound

  Halldr Thinshank, once governor of Rabady Isle, deceased

  Sturla Ulfarson “Sturla One-hand,” governor of Rabady

  Thira, a prostitute in Jormsvik

  Kjarten Vidurson, ruling in Hlegest

  Siggur Volganson, “the Volgan,” deceased

  Ingemar Svidrirson, of Erlond, paying tribute to King

  Aeldred

  Hakon Ingemarson, his son

  The Cyngael

  Ceinion of Llywerth, high cleric of the Cyngael,

  “Cingalus”

  Dai ab Owyn, heir to Prince Owyn of Cadyr

  Alun ab Owyn, his brother

  Gryffeth ap Ludh, their cousin

  Brynn ap Hywll, of Brynnfell in Arberth (and other

  residences), “Erling’s Bane”

  Enid, his wife

  Rhiannon mer Brynn, his daughter

  Helda, Rania, Eirin, Rhiannon’s women

  Siawn, leader of Brynn’s fighting band

  Other

  Firaz ibn Bakir, merchant of Fezana, in the Khalifate of

  Al-Rassan

  THE

  LAST LIGHT

  OF THE SUN

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER I

  A horse, he came to understand, was missing.

  Until it was found nothing could proceed. The island marketplace was crowded on this grey morning in spring. Large, armed, bearded men were very much present, but they were not here for trade. Not today. The market would not open, no matter how appealing the goods on a ship from the south might be.

  He had arrived, clearly, at the wrong time.

  Firaz ibn Bakir, merchant of Fezana, deliberately embodying in his brightly coloured silks (not nearly warm enough in the cutting wind) the glorious Khalifate of Al-Rassan, could not help but see this delay as yet another trial imposed upon him for transgressions in a less than virtuous life.

  It was hard for a merchant to live virtuously. Partners demanded profit, and profit was difficult to come by if one piously ignored the needs—and opportunities—of the world of the flesh. The asceticism of a desert zealot was not, ibn Bakir had long since decided, for him.

  At the same time, it would be entirely unfair to suggest that he lived a life of idleness and comfort. He had just endured (with such composure as Ashar and the holy stars had granted him) three storms on the very long sea journey north and then east, afflicted, as always at sea, by a stomach that heaved like the waves, and with the roundship handled precariously by a continuously drunken captain. Drinking was a profanation of the laws of Ashar, of course, but in this matter ibn Bakir was not, lamentably, in a position to take a vigorous moral stand.

  Vigour had been quite absent from him on the journey, in any case.

  It was said among the Asharites, both in the eastern homelands of Ammuz and Soriyya, and in Al-Rassan, that the world of men could be divided into three groups: those living, those dead, and those at sea.

  Ibn Bakir had been awake before dawn this morning, praying to the last stars of the night in thanks for his finally being numbered once more among those in the blessed first group.

  Here in the remote, pagan north, at this windscoured island market of Rabady, he was anxious to begin trading his leather and cloth and spices and bladed weapons for furs and amber and salt and heavy barrels of dried cod (to sell in Ferrieres on the way home)—and to take immediate leave of these barbarian Erlings, who stank of fish and beer and bear grease, who could kill a man in a bargaining over prices, and who burned their leaders—savages that they were—on ships among their belongings when they died.

  This last, it was explained to him, was what the horse was all about. Why the funeral rites of Halldr Thinshank, who had governed Rabady until three nights ago, were currently suspended, to the visible consternation of an assembled multitude of warriors and traders.

  The offence to their gods of oak and thunder, and to the lingering shade of Halldr (not a benign man in life, and unlikely to be so as a spirit), was considerable, ibn Bakir was told. Ill omens of the gravest import were to be assumed. No one wanted an angry, unhoused ghost lingering in a trading town. The fur-clad, weapon-bearing men in the windy square were worried, angry, and drunk, pretty much to a man.

  The fellow doing the explaining, a bald-headed, ridiculously big Erling named Ofnir, was known to ibn Bakir from two previous journeys. He had been useful before, for a fee: the Erlings were ignorant, tree-worshipping pagans, but they had firm ideas about what their services were worth.

  Ofnir had spent some years in the east among the Emperor’s Karchite Guard in Sarantium. He had returned home with a little money, a curved sword in a jewelled scabbard, two prominent scars (one on top of his head), and an affliction contracted in a brothel near the Sarantine waterfront. Also, a decent grasp of that difficult eastern tongue. In addition—usefully—he’d mastered sufficient words in ibn Bakir’s own Asharite to function as an interpreter for the handful of southern merchants foolhardy enough to sail along rocky coastlines fighting a lee shore, and then east into the frigid, choppy waters of these northern seas to trade with the barbarians.

  The Erlings were raiders and pirates, ravaging in their longships all through these lands and waters and—increasingly—down south. But even pirates could be seduced by the lure of trade, and Firaz ibn Bakir (and his partners) had reaped profit from that truth. Enough so to have him back now for a third time, standing in a knifelike wind on a bitter morning, waiting for them to get on with burning Halldr Thinshank on a boat with his weapons and armour and his best household goods and wooden images of the gods and one of his slave girls … and a horse.

  A pale grey horse, a beauty, Halldr’s favourite, and missing. On a very small island.

  Ibn Bakir looked around. A sweeping gaze from the town square could almost encompass Rabady. The harbour, a stony beach, with a score of Erling ships and his own large roundship from the south—the first one in, which ought to have been splendid news. This town, sheltering several hundred souls perhaps, was deemed an important market in the northlands, a fact that brought private amusement to the merchant from Fezana, a man who had been received by the khalif in Cartada, who had walked in the gardens and heard the music of the fountains there.

  No fountains here. Beyond the stockade walls and the ditch surrounding them, a quilting of stony farmland could be seen, then livestock grazing, then forest. Beyond the pine woods, he knew, the sea swept round again, with the rocky mainland
of Vinmark across the strait. More farms there, fisher-villages along the coast, then emptiness: mountains and trees for a very long way, to the places where the reindeer ran (they said) in herds that could not be numbered, and the men who lived among them wore antlers themselves to hunt, and practised magics with blood in the winter nights.

  Ibn Bakir had written these stories down during his last long journey home, had told them to the khalif at an audience in Cartada, presented his writings along with gifts of fur and amber. He’d been given gifts in return: a necklace, an ornamental dagger. His name was known in Cartada now.

  It occurred to him that it might be useful to observe and chronicle this funeral—if the accursed rites ever began.

  He shivered. It was cold in the blustering wind. An untidy clump of men made their way towards him, tacking across the square as if they were on a ship together. One man stumbled and bumped another; the second one swore, pushed back, put a hand to his axe. A third intervened, and took a punch to the shoulder for his pains. He ignored it like an insect bite. Another big man. They were all, ibn Bakir thought sorrowfully, big men.

  It came to him, belatedly, that this was not really a good time to be a stranger on Rabady Isle, with the governor (they used an Erling word, but it meant, as best ibn Bakir could tell, something very like a governor) dead and his funeral rites marred by a mysteriously missing animal. Suspicions might fall.

  As the group approached, he spread his hands, palms up, and brought them together in front of him. He bowed formally. Someone laughed. Someone stopped directly in front of him, reached out, unsteadily, and fingered the pale yellow silk of ibn Bakir’s tunic, leaving a smear of grease. Ofnir, his interpreter, said something in their language and the others laughed again. Ibn Bakir, alert now, believed he detected an easing of tension. He had no idea what he’d do if he was wrong.

  The considerable profit you could make from trading with barbarians bore a direct relation to the dangers of the journey—and the risks were not only at sea. He was the youngest partner, investing less than the others, earning his share by being the one who travelled … by allowing thick, rancid-smelling barbarian fingers to tug at his clothing while he smiled and bowed and silently counted the hours and days till the roundship might leave, its hold emptied and refilled.