The Last Light of the Sun Page 27

  There was nothing for her to do, but it was too late to go to bed. They went to morning prayers when sunrise came. Her mother joined them, large, calm, a ship with the wind behind her, sure in her faith. Kendra didn’t see Judit in the chapel, but her sister found them later, back in the hall, soberly garbed, hair properly pinned but with a wild fury in her eyes. Judit did not subscribe to the doctrines of composure advocated by Rhodian philosophers. She wanted a sword right now, Kendra knew. Wanted to be on a horse, riding south. Would never, ever, be reconciled to the fact that she couldn’t do that.

  By then, someone had found the dead Erling in the alley and had reported it to Osbert. Kendra had expected that, had been thinking about it when she was supposed to be praying.

  Waiting for a pause in the flow of messages to and from, she went over and told Osbert, quietly, what she knew. He listened, considered, said nothing by way of reproach. That was not his way. He sent a messenger running for the guard who had been on the wall, who came, and another one for the Erling servant of Ceinion of Llywerth, who did not.

  Thorkell Einarson, they discovered, had gone south with the fyrd. So had the Cyngael cleric, though that had been known: a night ride beside Aeldred on a horse they’d given him. A different sort of holy man, this one. And Kendra knew Alun ab Owyn was also with them, and why.

  Someone named Ragnarson. She remembered the way he’d looked, coming out of the wood. She still didn’t want to acknowledge what it was she seemed to know about this, about him—without any idea how she knew. The world, Kendra suddenly thought, heretically, was not as well-made as it might have been.

  She pictured him riding, and the grey dog running beside the horses towards the sea.

  Earlier that same night, a woman was making her way carefully across the fields of Rabady Isle, not precisely sure of her direction in the dark, and more than a little afraid to be abroad after moonrise alone. She could hear the sea and the waving grain at the same time. Harvest was coming, the grain fields were high, making it harder to see her way.

  A little before, under the same waning blue moon, her exiled husband and only son had spoken together in a stream near Esferth. A coming-together that could only having been shaped—she would have said—by the gods for their own purposes, which were not to be understood. The woman would have been grateful for tidings of the son; would have denied interest in the father.

  Her daughters were also away, across the strait on the Vinmark mainland. Neither had sent word for some time. She understood. A family disgrace could make ambitious husbands cautious about such things. There was a king in Hlegest now with increasingly clear ambitions of his own to rule all the Erlings, not just some of them in the north. Times were changing. It meant, among other things, that young men had reason to think carefully, mind their tongues, be discreet with family connections. Shame could come to a man through his wife.

  Frigga, daughter of Skadi, once wife to Red Thorkell, then to Halldr Thinshank, now bound to no man and therefore without protection, was not bitter about her daughters.

  Women had only so much control over their lives. She didn’t know how it was elsewhere. Much the same, she imagined. Bern, her son, ought to have stayed by her when Halldr died instead of disappearing, but Bern had been turned from a landowner’s heir into a servant by his father’s exile, and who could, truly, blame a young man for rejecting that?

  She’d assumed he was dead, after they’d gone looking for him and the horse in the morning and found neither. Had spent nights mourning, not able to let anyone see how much she grieved, because of what he’d obviously done, taking the dead man’s funeral horse.

  Then, a short while ago, at summer’s end, had come tidings that he hadn’t died. They’d stoned the volur for helping Bern Thorkellson get off the isle.

  Frigga didn’t believe it. It made no sense at all, that tale, but she wasn’t about to say that to anyone. There was no one to whom she could talk. She was alone here, and still had no true idea if her son was alive.

  And then, a few days ago, they had named the new volur.

  One-handed Ulfarson, now governor, did the naming, which was a new thing. There were always new things, weren’t there? But the young volur was kin to her, nearly, and Frigga had offered some small kindnesses when the girl had first arrived to serve in the women’s compound. It seemed now to have been a wise thing to have done, though that wasn’t why she’d done it. A woman’s road was hard, always, stony and bleak. You helped each other, if and when you could. Her mother had taught her that.

  She needed help herself now. It had brought her into the night (windy, not yet cold) and these whispering fields. She was afraid of animals, and spirits, and of living men doing what they were likely to do if they had been drinking and came upon a woman alone. She feared the moment, and what the future held for her in the world.

  Frigga stopped, took a deep breath, looked around her by moonlight, and saw the boulder. They had done the stoning here. She knew where she was. Another breath, and a murmured thank-you to the gods. She had been to the women’s compound four times in her life, but the last visit had been twenty years ago, and she had come by daylight, each time with an offering when she was carrying a child, and three of her children had lived. Who understood these things? Who dared say they did? It was Fulla, corn goddess, who decreed what happened to a woman when her birth pangs came. It made sense to seek intercession. Frigga moved to the stone. Touched it, murmured the proper words.

  She didn’t know if what she was doing now could be said to be sensible, but she was, it seemed, no more willing to be a servant than her son had been—to be ordered to bed any man-guest at the behest of Thinshank’s first wife, the widow who’d inherited, with her sons.

  Second wives had little in the way of rights, unless they’d had time to establish their ground in the house. Frigga hadn’t. She wasn’t far, in fact, from being cast out, with winter coming. She had no property, thanks to Thorkell’s second murder. Nor was she young enough to readily persuade any proper man to take her to wife. Her breasts were fallen, her hair grey, there were no children left waiting in her womb.

  She had lingered through a spring and summer, endured what she’d known would come from the day Halldr died, followed by that disastrous funeral: burning him without the horse, the omen of it, the unquiet spirit. She had hoped troubles would pass her by, seen they would not, and finally decided to come out tonight. Much the same path—though she did not know this—her son had taken with a dead man’s horse in the spring. A roll of the gambling dice.

  Women were not actually allowed to touch the dice, of course, for fear of putting a curse on them.

  She saw the first trees, and the light, at the same time.

  ANRID WASN’T ASLEEP. She hadn’t been sleeping since the stoning. The images that came when she closed her eyes. It was wearing her away. Her elevation to volur hadn’t changed this; it hadn’t even been a surprise. She’d seen the unfolding of events in her mind, as if played out on some raised platform, from the time she’d gone to the governor. In truth, from the time she’d devised her course of action after he’d summoned her to come to him.

  It had happened as she’d seen it, including the stoning, when she’d worn the serpent about her body for all of them to see.

  She hadn’t known this about herself: that anger could make her cause people to die. But the volur had had the snake bite her before knowing if its poison was gone. Anrid had been the newest girl, and alone here. Her dying wouldn’t have mattered to anyone in the world. They had made her stand still, eyes closed in sick terror, and had goaded the released serpent with sticks, and it had bitten her. Then they’d sent her back out on watch duty, waiting curiously to see if she died. Anrid had been sick to her stomach in the yard, and then limped out through the gate to where she was supposed to watch. What else had there been for her to do?

  And that night Bern had come. She’d seen him tie the horse and walk into the compound, and the volur had arranged to send
him to a savage death. No uncertainty about that one, no testing of poison. He’d enter the town at sunrise, thinking he was safe, and would be taken and killed. A man who’d come to the seer for help. She had sheathed him in her wrinkled, dried-out flesh, deceiving him entirely. Laughed about it after. The crude jibes of the other old ones, peering through cracks in the wall, complaining they hadn’t had their turn.

  Anrid, turning away in disgust to the darkness again, limping, had taken her own first steps towards the stonings (savage death) later that same night when she spoke to the man, warning him. Bern Thorkellson was kin to her, almost. She told herself that now, over and again. You stood by kin in this world because there was no one else to stand by, or who might ever stand by you. A rule of the northlands. You died if you were too much alone.

  But she saw stones striking flesh whenever she closed her eyes now.

  When they knocked at her door and she rose and opened it and they told her a woman had come, she knew—they would think it was her power—who this had to be, even before her brother’s wife’s mother was led to her chamber. It wasn’t power, it was a quick mind. A different sort of mystery; women weren’t ever credited with that.

  While she waited, Anrid let the snake coil around her; she did that all the time now. The serpent had been her doorway to this. It was important that the others see her handling it, confront their own fear of doing the same. She was still the newest, still the youngest, and now volur. She needed to find a way to survive. Volurs could be killed. She knew it.

  A knock, the door opened. She gestured for Frigga to enter, closed the door herself, letting no one else in. She had already blocked up the holes through which she and the others used to peek. She put the serpent in the basket they’d made for it.

  She hated the snake.

  Anrid turned to the older woman, looked at her a moment, opened her mouth to speak, and began to cry. The tears stunned her with how desperately they fell. Her hands were shaking.

  “Oh, child,” said Frigga.

  Anrid couldn’t stop weeping. You’d have had to kill her to make her stop. “Will you … ?” she began. Choked on her words, tears in her throat. Hands in trembling fists to her mouth. A shuddering of breath. Tried again. “Will you stay with me? Please stay?”

  “Oh, child. Have you a place for me?”

  Anrid could only nod, again and again, a spasm of the head. The older woman, nearly kin, closest thing she had, came forward and they wrapped each other in arms that had not known or given comfort for so long.

  Only the younger one wept, however. Then, later that night, she slept.

  CHAPTER X

  Brogan the miller, awake as usual before dawn, was thinking, as he pissed into the stream before beginning the day, about some of the things he disliked.

  It was a long list. He was a sour, solitary man. Had been drawn to the mill because it gave him a house at the edge of the village, a place removed from (and a stature above) the others. He’d murdered someone to get this mill, but that was an old story and he didn’t think or even dream about it often any more. Brogan didn’t really like people. They talked too much, most of them.

  His servant was, usefully, a mute. He’d been very happy (briefly) when he’d learned that Ord, a farmer with fields east of the village, was looking for work for his youngest son who didn’t talk. Brogan had made arrangements to bring the boy to the mill. He was old enough, a broad-shouldered lad. A straw pallet, food, a day a week to help his father. Milk and cheese for Brogan in exchange for that last.

  And a decent worker who didn’t prattle on when feeding the animals or standing waist-deep in the stream mending the wheel. Brogan, who had come to the mill as a worker himself thirty years ago—and taken certain measures a little later to ensure he’d stay—couldn’t understand why people would mar an easy silence with wasted words.

  There were still stars in the west. First hint of greyness east. Dawn wind ruffling the reeds in the river. Brogan scratched himself and went to unbolt the mill. A warm day coming. Still summertime, though late in the season, with what that meant.

  Brogan didn’t like the new end-of-summer fair, third year now. The road west of their hamlet towards the river (of which the millstream was a tributary) became too busy. Steady traffic from coast to Esferth and then back, afterwards.

  People on roads signified trouble for Brogan the miller. Nothing good about them at all. Strangers stole things, came looking for women or drink, or just mischief to make or find. Brogan had coins buried in three places around the mill. Would have spent some of them by now, but he’d never wanted anything enough to spend good money on it. A woman, now and again, but you could buy one of those for grain, and many of the farmers paid him with flour and wheels of bread. More than he needed. He left his money buried, but worried about it. Long ago, he’d lain awake wondering if someone would find the old miller in his grave, dig him up, see the crushed skull. Now it was the coins that woke him sometimes in the dark. All over the world men knew that millers made money.

  He had three dogs. Didn’t like them, their barking, but they offered protection. And Modig, the mute, was a good-sized lad, handy with a cudgel. Brogan himself wasn’t a big man, but he’d survived a fight or two in his day.

  He’d considered taking a wife, some time ago. Children to do the work as he grew older. The idea had come, lingered a while, and passed: women changed things, and Brogan the miller didn’t like change. That was the principal reason he didn’t like the king. Even after all these years, Aeldred was always changing things. You had to make bows and arrows for yourself now, or buy them, and you were supposed to practise every week, and be tested by someone from the fyrd each spring. Didn’t they have other things to do, the fyrd? Farmers with bows: that was a stupid, dangerous thought. They’d kill each other before the Erlings had a chance.

  It was dark in the mill, but after so many years he knew his way blind. He opened the shutters over the stream, to let in some light and air. Went down the steps, heard the mice skitter from his footfall. He lifted the lock to the sluice, gripped with both hands, put his back to it, and pulled back the chute gate. The water started pouring in. Soon the familiar sounds of the turning wheel and millstones grinding above began. He went back up, took the first sack, opened it, dumped it into the hopper above the turning stones. Through the open window the eastern sky showed brighter. The first women and children would be coming for their flour after sunrise, most of them straight from the dawn prayers in the small chapel.

  Brogan was still thinking about changes as he checked the millstones, which were turning easily. A new cleric in the village now. This one could read and write, was supposed to be teaching people. There were new rules for military service, new taxes for the building of the burhs. Yes, the burhs were supposed to protect them, but Brogan doubted a walled fort at Drengest south and east on the coast, or the other one inland two days east, would do much good for their hamlet or his mill if trouble came. And reading? Reading? What in the name of Jad’s toes and fingers did that have to do with anything? Might be well enough for a soft man at court where they ate with ale-soddened musicians piping and warbling to spoil good meat. But here? In a farming village? Modig would do so much better mending the fence or the waterwheel once he could spell his name! Brogan turned his head to spit expertly out the window into the stream.

  The new cleric had called shortly after arriving. Fair enough: the mill was owned by the chapel and the miller together. That was why Brogan was miller, really. When the old one had come to his unexpected end (a sudden fever in midsummer, taken in the one night, buried sadly by his servant at dawn), it had made sense for the cleric to strike a bargain with the dour young man after the funeral rites. The miller’s assistant, Brogan by name, had seemed to know what he was doing, and the village couldn’t afford to have the mill idle while they considered who should have the position. It was a stroke of good fortune for the young fellow, obviously, but Jad could sometimes bestow generously where you m
ight not have expected it.

  Thirty years later, this newest cleric (fifth one Brogan had worked with) had looked around the mill in a cursory sort of way, clearly uninterested in what he saw, and then, growing enthusiastic, had asked Brogan about installing one of the newer-styled vertical wheels. He’d read a letter from a fellow cleric in Ferrieres about them, he said. More power, a better use of the river.

  Changes, again. Ferrieres. Brogan, wasting more words than he’d wanted to, had explained about the flow of their small stream, the limited needs of the hamlet, and the cost of having a vertical wheel built and attached.

  It was that last, he was sure, that had induced the cleric to nod sagely, stroke a weak, beardless chin, and agree that the simpler ways were often best, fulfilling the god’s purposes entirely well.

  They left the horizontal wheel alone. Brogan took the chapel’s share of the mill’s earnings (in coin or kind) to them every second week. He was prompt about that sort of thing; it kept people from coming round and talking.

  He did hold back a slightly higher portion for himself. If you set that up from the outset, they were unlikely to have questions. He’d been through this before. The cleric had asked about written records on that first visit, Brogan had explained he didn’t know how to write. He’d declined an offer of reading lessons. Leave it to the young ones, he’d said.

  People were always wanting to change things. Brogan couldn’t understand it. Change was going to come, why hurry it along? The king had even sent around new instructions for farmers at the end of this past winter, with the archers from the fyrd, on how to properly handle their fields. Alternating crops. What to grow. As if anyone at court knew anything about farming. Brogan had never been near the king’s court (only twice up to Esferth town, which was twice more than enough) but he knew what he thought of it. You didn’t need to eat dung to know you wouldn’t like the taste.