The Last Light of the Sun Page 20

  Aeldred smiled at her. Added gently, “And when you chastise your older brother, and there is no doubt in me he will have deserved it, try to ensure it doesn’t affect the likelihood of heirs for the kingdom. I’d be grateful.”

  “Ah, so would I, actually,” Athelbert said, in something approaching his customary voice.

  He was not standing normally yet, there was a cramped tilt to his posture, but he was getting closer to upright. Kendra was still in awe, often, at how precisely her father could draw conclusions from limited information. It was something that frightened Athelbert, she knew: a son entirely aware he was expected to be able to follow this man to the throne. The burden of that. You could understand much of what Athelbert did if you thought of it in this way.

  “Please come,” her father was saying to the two Cyngael. “I walked out to greet Hakon Ingemarson, our young eastern friend, rather than wait for my errant children to bring him back so that he might offer his father’s latest explanation for an unsent tribute.” Aeldred turned and smiled at Hakon, to take some of the sting from that. The young Erling managed a proper bow.

  The king turned back to Ceinion. “This is a gift, your early arrival. We will offer thanks in chapel for a safe journey, and our prayers for the soul of Dai ab Owyn, and then—if you will—we shall feast and talk, and there will be music in Esferth while you tell me you have answered my prayers and are come here to stay.”

  The cleric made no reply to that last, Kendra saw. She didn’t think her father had expected one. Hakon, of course, was red-faced again. She felt sorry for him. A likable, well-meaning boy. She ought to think of him as a man, but that was difficult. It was curious: Athelbert was far more childish, but you always knew there was a man there, playing at boy-games because he chose to. And she had seen her brother riding with the fyrd.

  Aeldred gestured. Ceinion and the younger Cyngael fell into stride with him, walking towards the walls of the town, out of sight north of them. Kendra saw Judit step quietly over and reclaim the sword. She hadn’t recognized it as their father’s. Athelbert’s mutilated cap was left where it had fallen, a redness in the grass. Their own servants, who had hovered cautiously at a distance all this time, now came to gather the remains of their meal. Kendra looked west, saw the two Cyngael servants moving forward from the stream, leading a laden donkey.

  It was only then that she saw that one of them was an Erling.

  Ebor, the son of Bordis, never minded being posted to night duty on the walls, wherever the court happened to be. He’d even made some friends by taking watches assigned to others, leaving them free for the taverns. A solitary sort of man (much the same when a boy), he took a deep, hard-to-explain comfort from being awake and alone while others feasted or drank or slept, or did the other things one did in the night.

  Sometimes a woman, walking near the walls, offering her song to the dark, would call up to him from the bottom of the steps. Ebor would decline while on duty, though not always afterwards. A man had his needs, and he’d never married. Youngest son of a farmer, no land, no prospect of it. He’d joined the standing army of the king. Younger sons did that, everywhere. The way the world was made, no point brooding on it. The army gave you companions, shelter, enough money (usually, not always) for ale and a girl and your weapon. Sometimes you fought and some of you died, though less often of late, as the Erling raiders slowly took the measure of Aeldred of the Anglcyn and the forts and fortified burhs he’d been building.

  Some of the Erlings were allies now, actually paying tribute to the king. Something deep, passing strange in that, if one thought on it. Ebor wasn’t a thinker, exactly, but long nights on watch did give you time for reflection.

  Not tonight, however. Tonight, under drifting clouds and the waning blue moon, had been raddled with interruptions, and not from night-walkers offering interludes of love—though one was a woman. If you forced a man to make two decisions in haste, Ebor would later tell the king’s chamberlain, humble and contrite, chances were he’d make a bad one, or two.

  That, Osbert, son of Cuthwulf, would say quietly, is why we have standing orders about the gates at night. To remove the need to make a decision. And Ebor would bow his head, knowing this was so, and that this was not the time to point out that every guard on the wall disobeyed those orders in peacetime.

  He would not be punished. The one death in the night was not initially thought to be connected in any way with events at the gate. This was, as it happened, another error, though not his.

  The women were beginning to leave the hall, led by Elswith, the queen. Ceinion of Llywerth, placed at the king’s right hand, had the distinct impression that the older princess, the red-haired one, was disinclined to surrender the evening, but Judit was going with her lady mother nonetheless. The younger daughter, Kendra, seemed to have already left. He hadn’t seen her go. The quiet one, she was less vivid, more watchful. He liked them both.

  His new Erling manservant, or guard (he still hadn’t decided how to think of him), had also gone out; he’d come and asked permission to do so, earlier. Not a thing he’d really needed to do, under the circumstances, and Ceinion wasn’t sure what to make of it. A request for dispensation, in some way. It had felt like that. He’d wanted to ask more about it, but there were others listening. Thorkell Einarson was a complex man, he’d decided. Most men, past a certain age, could be said to be. The young ones usually weren’t, in his experience. The youths in this hall would want nothing more than glory, any way they could find it.

  There were exceptions. The king, expansive and genial of mood, had already announced that they would essay the Cyngael’s well-known triad game later, in honour of their visitors. Ceinion had glanced along the table at Alun then, wincing, and had known, immediately, that he would not linger for that. Alun ab Owyn had made his excuses, prettily, to the queen, asking leave to go to evening prayer, just before she walked out herself.

  Elswith, clearly impressed by the young prince’s piety, had offered to bring him to the royal sanctuary, but Alun had demurred. No music from him tonight, either, then. He hadn’t brought his harp east on the journey; hadn’t touched it since his brother had died, it appeared. Time needed to run further, Ceinion decided, a memory tugging at him from that wood by Brynn’s farm. He pushed that one away.

  With the food now being cleared and the restraining presence of the ladies gone, serious drinking could be expected at the long table running down the room. There were dice cups out, he saw. The older prince, Athelbert, had left his seat at the high table and moved farther down to join some of the others. Ceinion watched him set a purse in front of himself, smiling.

  Beside Ceinion, King Aeldred leaned back in his cushioned chair, a pleased, anticipatory expression on his face. Ceinion looked past the king and the queen’s nowempty seat to where a portly cleric from Ferrieres was brushing at food on his yellow robe, visibly content with the meal and wine he’d been offered in this remote northern place. Ferrieres prided itself, lately, on being next only to Batiara itself, and Sarantium, in cultivating the elements of civilization. They could afford to do so, Ceinion thought without rancour. Things were different here in the northlands. Harsher, colder, more … marginal. The edge of the world.

  Aeldred turned to him, and Ceinion smiled back at the king, his hands clasped loosely on the tabletop. Alun ab Owyn was ravaged by his brother’s death. Aeldred, at the same age, had seen his own brother and father killed on a battlefield, and learned of unspeakable things done to them. And he had accepted homage, not long after, from the man who had slain and butchered them, and let the man live. That same Erling’s son was at this table now, in an honoured place. Ceinion wondered if he could talk to Alun about that, if it would mean anything. And then he thought again of the forest pool north of Brynnfell, and wished he’d never been there, or the boy.

  He drank from his wine cup. This was the hour when, at a Cyngael feast, the musicians would be summoned to claim and shape a mood. Among the Erlings in Vinmark, too, fo
r that matter, though the songs were not the same, or the mood. There might be wrestlers now, among the Anglcyn, jugglers, knife-throwing contests, drinking bouts. Or all of these at once, in a loud chaos to hold back the night outside.

  Not at this court. “I now wish,” said Aeldred of the Anglcyn, turning to one and then to the other of the clerics flanking him, “to discuss a translation thought I have, to render into our own tongue the writings of Kallimarchos, his meditations on the proper conduct of a good life. And then I would hear your reasoned opinions on the question of images of Jad and suitable decoration for a sanctuary. I hope you are not fatigued. Do you have a sufficiency of wine, each of you?”

  A different sort of king, this one. A different way of pushing back the dark.

  Thorkell hadn’t wanted to go south from Brynnfell with the cleric and the younger son of Owyn ap Glynn and the dog. And he most emphatically hadn’t wanted to continue east with them later in the summer to the Anglcyn lands. But when you cast the gambling bones (as he had) in the midst of a battle, and changed sides (as he had), you lost a large measure of control over your own life.

  He could have fled once the eastern journey started. He’d done that once before, after surrendering to the Cyngael and converting to the sun god’s faith. That had been a young man’s wild flight: on foot, with a hostage, to finally arrive, wounded, bone-weary, among fellow Erlings in the north-east of this wide island.

  A long time ago. A different man, really. And without the history he’d accrued, since. Thorkell Einarson would be known now to the survivors of that raiding party as having turned on his companions to save a Cyngael woman—and her father, the man who’d slain the Volgan, the man who was the reason they’d come inland so dangerously far. He was, to put it delicately, unsure of a welcome among his people in the east.

  Nor did he feel like cutting alone across this country to find out. He had no hearth to row towards—even if a ship would take him at an oar—having been exiled from his own isle for a bad night’s fit of temper after dice.

  The young man who’d made that escape alone hadn’t had a hip that ached when it rained, or a left shoulder that didn’t work well first thing of a morning. The cleric had noticed the second of these on their way here. An observant man, too much so for Thorkell’s ease of mind. One morning Ceinion had disappeared into the edge of the oak and alderwood forest that marched along north of them and returned with leaves he’d steeped with herbs in the iron pot the donkey carried. Without saying much, he’d told Thorkell to put the hot leaves on his shoulder, wrap them with a cloth, and leave them there when they set off. He did it the next day, too, even though the wood was known to be accursed, haunted with spirits. He didn’t go in far, but he did go far enough to get his leaves.

  The poultice helped, which was irritating, in a perverse way. The cleric was older than Thorkell, showed no signs of any stiffness of his own at dawn, kneeling during prayers or rising from them. On the other hand, this man wouldn’t have had years of fighting behind him, or manning a longship oar in storms.

  It seemed to Thorkell that Jad or Ingavin or Thünir—whatever god or gods you cared to name—had caused him to save that girl, ap Hywll’s daughter, and then cast his lot with these Cyngael of the west, an oath-sworn servant to them. There were better fates, but it could also be said there were worse.

  He’d had a better one as a free man and a landowner on Rabady, a farm of his own within sound of the sea. He’d ripped the skein of that destiny himself: killed a man over dice in the tavern by the harbour (his second man, unfortunately), taken with rage like a berserkir, using his fists. It had taken four men to pull him off, they told him after.

  When you did things like that, Thorkell had lived long enough to know, you surrendered your life into the hands of others, even if the dead man had been cheating you. He shouldn’t have had so much to drink that night. Old story.

  He’d left the isle, taken work here and there, survived a winter, then found a raiding ship down south when springtime came. He ought to have considered more carefully. Perhaps. Or else a god had been steering his path towards those western valleys.

  The lady, Brynn’s wife, had claimed him as her own servant, then assigned him as a guard to a reluctant cleric when she’d learned that Ceinion had changed his plans, was journeying south to Cadyr to see Owyn, and from there to Aeldred’s court. There was something between the two of them, Thorkell had decided, but he wasn’t sure what. Didn’t think the cleric was bedding Brynn’s wife (amusing as that would have been).

  He did know the lady had almost certainly saved his own life after the botched raid and the ensuing discovery that Ivarr Ragnarson had blood-eagled two people during his own flight to the ships. He’d had no business doing that: you used the blood-eagle only for a reason, to make a point. You cheapened it, otherwise. There was no point to be made when you were beaten and running home, and when you did it to a farmhand and a girl.

  Ivarr, marked from birth, was strange and dangerous, cold as the black snake that would crush the Worldtree at the end of days and destroy its roots with venom. A coward, too, poison arrows and a bow, which didn’t make him less threatening. Not with his grandfather’s name to wield.

  All of which knowledge did leave open the question of why Thorkell had signed on to that ship, joined a Volgan family raid in the first place. A blood feud two generations down. Ancient history for him, long put behind, or it should have been. Siggur Volganson’s grandsons were, very clearly, not what Siggur had been, and Thorkell was no longer what he had been, either. Was it sentiment? Longing for youth? Or just the lack of a better thought in his head?

  No good answer. A Cyngael farmhouse inland was a long way to go, and had been unlikely to offer much in the way of plunder. The family’s sworn vengeance wasn’t his own blood feud, though he’d been there all those years ago when Siggur was killed and his sword taken.

  You could say he hadn’t seen anything else to do since leaving home, or you could say that in some fashion the dark-hilled, mist-shrouded land of the Cyngael was still entangled with his own destiny. You could say he’d missed the sea, man-killer, fortune-maker. A part-truth, but only that.

  Thünir and Ingavin might know how it was, or the golden sun god, but Thorkell wouldn’t claim to have an answer himself. Men did what they did.

  Right now, in the close, rank darkness of a foetid alley outside a tavern in Esferth, what he was doing was waiting for a man he’d recognized earlier in the day to come out and piss against the wall.

  He’d been in the huge, slope-roofed great hall at the king’s feast this evening, without formal duties, since Aeldred’s servants were attending to their guests. He’d made his way to the high table during an interlude in the serving of courses, to ask permission of the cleric to go outside.

  “Why so?” Ceinion of Llywerth had asked him, softly though. The man was no fool.

  And Thorkell, who wasn’t either, hadn’t lied. Murmured, “Saw someone I don’t think should be here. Want to check what he’s about.”

  True, as far as it went.

  Ceinion, thick grey eyebrows very slightly arched, had hesitated, and then nodded his head. People were looking at them, not a time or place to talk. Thorkell hadn’t been sure what he’d have done if the cleric hadn’t given his consent, had acted otherwise. He could have slipped out without asking permission in that crowded, noisy hall, probably should have. Wasn’t certain why he’d gone up to ask.

  His hip was paining him. It sometimes did, at night, even though it hadn’t been raining of late. They’d covered a deal of rough ground the past few days, to come out in a meadow this morning where the Anglcyn royal children were having an outing on the grass. Thorkell had actually felt a change in the way of the world, seeing that. It was not the sort of thing the Anglcyn would have even considered, barely a day’s ride from the sea, in the years when Thorkell himself was young and he and Siggur and other raiders were beaching longships wherever they pleased along this coast, or on
the other side of the channel in Ferrieres. Ingemar Svidrirson had even ruled these lands for a brief time. But he’d failed to capture the youngest son of the king he’d blood-eagled. A mistake. He’d paid for it, though not with his life, surprisingly. His own youngest son was here now, it turned out, an envoy from a tribute-paying Erling. The world had altered greatly in twenty-five years. All old men thought that way, he supposed. Came with the bad hip and the shoulder. You could let yourself be bitter.

  He looked towards the mouth of the alley again. Couldn’t see much. He’d seen enough when they’d come through the gate today. A well-laid-out, built-up town, Esferth. The court more often here now than in Raedhill. Aeldred was building everywhere, word was. Walled burhs within a day’s ride of each other, garrisons within them. A standing army, the borders expanding, tribute from Erlond, a marriage planned in Rheden. No easy raiding here. Not any more.

  Which was why he was in this rat-skitter alley, instead of in the bright hall, for those truths raised an important question about the man he’d recognized when they had passed into town this afternoon with the king. The two men he’d recognized, actually.

  The questions that came to you were sometimes (not always) answered, if you waited patiently enough. Thorkell heard a noise from the street, saw a shadow, someone entered the alley. He remained motionless. His eyes had adjusted by now and he saw that this time the figure stumbling out of the tavern to unbutton himself and piss into darkness among the strewn garbage was the man he’d rowed and raided with, twenty-five years before. The one who’d gone off to join the mercenaries at Jormsvik, around the same time Thorkell had escaped home and bought his land on Rabady. Word had come with summer traders and gossip that Stefa had killed his man in the challenge before the gates, which hadn’t surprised Thorkell. Stefa had known how to fight. It was all he knew how to do, if you didn’t count drinking.