The Last Light of the Sun Read online

  He leaned out the window and looked upstream to his right. Modig had fed the chickens, was at work in the herb and vegetable garden. A virtue to having a farmer’s son here: the garden was looking better than it had in years. Brogan wasn’t fussy about what he ate, but he liked turnips and parsnips with his bread and broth and fish, and a decent seasoning as much as the next man, and Modig had a way with the garden. Of course, thought the miller sourly, if he’d had counsel from the courtiers on what seedlings and how much dung to use, it would doubtless be far better.

  He spat again into the stream below, saw the pale harbinger of sunrise in the east, and muttered his customary two-sentence version of the rites. His own idea of Jad was not of a god who needed a lot of words. You acknowledged him, gave thanks, and got on with what you had to do. And it didn’t need to be done in a chapel. You could pray in a mill over water, gazing out at the fields.

  Gazing out at the fields, Brogan the miller saw—in the last near-darkness of a summer night—twenty men or more downstream from him, kneeling beside the water or knee-deep in it, drinking and filling flasks.

  He drew his head back quickly, because he saw that they carried weapons. Weapons meant—since they were being quiet and were nowhere near the north-south road—that these were outlaws, or even Erlings, and not simply passing by on their way to trade peacefully at the Esferth fair. Brogan swallowed, his palms suddenly sweaty, scalp prickling. He thought of his coins buried in the yard and just outside it. He thought of death. Armed men across the stream. A large number of men.

  Not, in the event, large enough.

  From the north, Brogan suddenly heard a dog. His heart lurched. It was a deep, fierce, triumphant howl; not one of his own dogs, though they immediately started their own wild barking in the fenced yard. He looked out, carefully. The men in the stream had begun scrambling from the water, splashing, stumbling, unsheathing swords. They formed, at a shouted string of commands, a tight, disciplined order and began running south.

  They were Erlings, then. The language gave it away, and no outlaws would be nearly so precise in their formation and movements. Brogan leaned out, looking past where Modig had now stopped working in the garden and was standing rigid, also watching. That howling came again, a sound he would remember. Wouldn’t ever want to be hunted by that. Brogan heard hoofbeats and shouting over the barking of his own dogs, and into his field of vision, streaming down from the north, came a galloping company, swords drawn, spears out, hurtling through the stream.

  In the pre-dawn light he saw a banner, and Brogan the miller understood that this was the king’s fyrd, and that they had seen the Erlings and were going to catch up to them just across the water from his mill. His heart was pounding as if he, too, were running or riding. He had been expecting, moments ago, to be killed here, fingers broken one by one—or worse things—until he told where his money was. The nightmare that came in his sleep.

  Leaning out, he saw the Erlings turn to face the horsemen bearing swiftly down upon them. He didn’t like King Aeldred, all his changes, the new taxes levied to support fyrd and forts, but at this particular moment, watching those horsemen surround the Erlings, such feelings were … suspended.

  Brogan left the mill, went out the door, walked down to the stream. Modig, holding a spade, opened the garden gate and came over, stood beside him. The dogs were still barking. Brogan snapped a command over his shoulder and they stopped.

  There was a grey mist on the millstream, rising. Through it, as the pale sun came up, they watched what happened in the meadow on the other side. The millwheel turned.

  It occurred to Alun at some point during the night ride south that he was surrounded now by Anglcyn warriors, who had traditionally been his enemies, racing to intercept Erlings, who were enemies as well. One of Athelbert’s archers had given him a sword and belt, at the prince’s command. You could name it a friend’s gesture. You had to, really.

  For the Cyngael, he thought, friends were hard to come by in the world. And that, if you stopped to think about it, really did make the feuds between Arberth and Cadyr and Llywerth harder to justify. That wasn’t something people did think about, though, west of the Rheden Wall. Their endless internal warring was … the way things were. The three provinces raided and goaded each other, fought for primacy, always had. His father, Alun knew, would have preferred stealing a herd of cattle from an arrogant Arberthi and hearing his bard sing about it after, to any foray across the Wall into Rheden, or even mauling Erling raiders.

  Though that last might not be true any more, not since Dai was killed. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought his father had changed through the spring and summer. Alun was aware of changes within himself, shaped around loss and what he’d seen in that pool by Brynnfell. He didn’t know where the changes had taken him, but he knew they were there.

  He wasn’t sure exactly where he was right now, galloping south-east between copses of trees, but he did know—or believe—that the man who’d led the raid that killed his brother was somewhere ahead of them. Ivarr Ragnarson had eluded pursuit near Brynnfell, fled to his ships and away—and had now killed a good man here. He needed to die. It was … important he be killed.

  If you stopped to think about it. There was no time to stop tonight—two short rests allowed by the king, no more than a pause to drink at streams, fill flasks, then riding again—but he had plenty of time to think under the summer stars as the blue moon westered through clouds and went down behind the woods. There were riders all around him, but their faces—and his—were shielded from scrutiny. The shelter of darkness, the … need for it. And with that, the memory came back to him, inescapable, who had said exactly that, and when: Needful as night.

  Rhiannon mer Brynn, clad in green at her father’s table, the night his brother had died and had his soul stolen away. He realized he hadn’t let himself think about her, those words, his own song, since then, as if flinching from too fiercely bright a fire. Do you hate me so much, my lord?

  Alun looked over towards the woods. More darkness, blurred in distance, the river somewhere between. He thought of the faerie, her hair changing colour, the light she’d made, and he began to wonder, riding, exactly what the world was, how it was crafted, how he’d make his own peace with Jad … and the high cleric on the horse ahead of him, beside King Aeldred.

  He didn’t know if he felt older now, or younger because less sure of things, but he did understand that everything had altered and could not be remade as it had been before. The speed of things for you, the faerie had said. He didn’t even have a name for her. Did they have names? He hadn’t thought to ask before stumbling out of the wood. He had been afraid, as he’d left the trees, wondering if he would come out into different moonlight and find his world gone.

  Instead, he’d found an Anglcyn princess, inexplicably, waiting there for him.

  I am only this far. As if she’d known of his fear, what he was feeling. No distance at all, just across a quiet stream. The world still his, not altered, yet changed in every way. Her being there another thing to think about, try to understand. He shook his head. There were only so many images, memories, you could deal with at once, Alun decided, before you had to look away.

  And then, as the night ended, all changed again.

  Thinking back, afterwards, he realized he oughtn’t to have been so surprised that they found the Erlings. For one thing, the fyrd knew this land as well as he and his brother had known the valleys and fells of Cadyr, every tuck and fold of their province recorded on a mental map, down to the shepherds’ huts and the farms where daughters might be willing to rise from their beds, wrapped in a shawl, and come out into the dark, soft and warm, to a known whisper at a night window.

  They had been riding along the route that made sense for intercepting a party on foot. The Erlings would be running towards where their ships would have anchored, between the burh at Drengest and the steep coastline farther west where they couldn’t come ashore. You could figure these things out i
f you knew where you were and the land around you. Copses and rivers, slopes and hamlets. Aeldred and his fyrd would know them all: the places where the Erlings who’d killed Burgred of Denforth would be unable to pass, and the ones they’d try to avoid. They might miss the Erlings in darkness or mist, but they’d find their path.

  And they had Cafall with them.

  The dog was the part of this night that neither Alun nor Ceinion, and certainly none of the Anglcyns, had thought about. But it was Cafall—hunting dog, Brynn’s gift—who howled, a wild sound that could terrify and appall, as they approached a stream in the grey before sunrise. Alun’s heart began pounding. Someone near the front raised an arm and pointed, shouting. It was Athelbert, he saw.

  They had been intending to pray here, dismount long enough to perform the dawn rites on the riverbank. Instead, they thundered across, west of a village mill, splashing through water, weapons out, and they came up to the Erlings, who were on foot, and surrounded them in a green meadow as the sun came up.

  There were too many people living here now, too many towns, too many burhs with fighting men inside them. Guthrum Skallson, running with fewer than twenty men (five had taken the horses to the ships with a warning, to bring forty of them back), had seen a hill fire burning, and then another to the north, a little later, and had realized that they were in even more danger than he’d thought. They’d run all through the night.

  He couldn’t say he was surprised when they were found. They’d have taken a different route if the woods and treed slopes had allowed. But they didn’t know these lands, and the best he could do was go back west along the same path they’d taken and hope they met their reinforcements before they were intercepted.

  It hadn’t happened. He hadn’t expected those hilltop flares in the dark, the speed of the Anglcyn response. He’d thought they had a decent chance, that he’d been in worse trouble over the years. Then a dog howled as dawn broke, and the fyrd was there.

  He had the men circle in the meadow as the Anglcyn riders thundered across the stream. No point running, these were mounted men. He saw the banners in the pale light and understood that King Aeldred hadn’t just sent his warriors, he had come himself. They were taken.

  It had happened before. There were resources in Jormsvik, Ingavin knew. They could be bought back, for a price and promises. Likely some of them would be hostages for a time. Likely Guthrum would be one of those. He cursed, under his breath.

  He had eighteen men; there appeared to be close to two hundred surrounding them, mounted. He wasn’t a berserkir, he was a mercenary, hired. This wasn’t war. He let fall his sword, held up open hands. Stepped forward, that the Anglcyn king might know who led this party.

  “How many men did Burgred take south with him?”

  A man with a grey beard spoke, in Anglcyn, but not to Guthrum. He understood the words, though; the languages were near enough.

  “Six, including himself,” said a younger man on a brown horse beside the speaker.

  “Shoot six,” said the bearded man, who would be Aeldred of the Anglcyn. “Not that one.” He pointed to Guthrum.

  The younger one spoke. Six arrows flew. Six of Guthrum’s men—who had lain down their weapons when he had—fell into the grass.

  Guthrum did not fear death. No mercenary could fight as many battles as he had over so many years and live with fear. He didn’t want to die, however. He liked ale and women, battle and comrades, peril and hardship and ease after. The trappings of a warrior in this middleworld.

  He said, “None of them killed your earl. None of them would have.”

  “Indeed,” said the king on the horse in front of him. “So Burgred lives, is coming home even now?”

  Guthrum met that gaze. No Erling ought to cower before these people. “We do not use arrows in Jormsvik.”

  “Ah. So no arrow killed him. Our tidings are false? Good. None will have killed your fellows, if so.”

  Thought he was clever, this king. Guthrum had heard that of him. Problem was, he was clever. In too many ways. Raiding had become impossible here. This journey had been a mistake from the moment they took Ivarr’s money and set sail.

  Ivarr. Guthrum looked around.

  Someone—a younger man, smaller, sitting an Erling horse—had come forward beside the king. He looked down at Guthrum. “Ragnarson was with you?”

  Spoke Anglcyn, but you could tell a Cyngael the moment he opened his mouth. How could he know about Ivarr, though? Guthrum considered for a moment, thinking fast, keeping silent.

  “Shoot another, Athelbert,” said the king.

  They shot another. Atli, this time.

  Guthrum had come to Jormsvik’s walls with Atli Bjarkson fifteen years ago. Walking to the fortress together from homes in the north, meeting on the road, winning their fights on the same morning, joining the same company. A never-forgotten day. The day that split your life into before and after. Guthrum looked down into the grass now in a morning’s first light, far from Vinmark, and he spoke the farewell aloud, invoking Ingavin’s welcome for a friend in the warriors’ halls. Then he turned back to the mounted men surrounding them.

  “You were asked a question,” said King Aeldred. His voice was calm, flat, but there was no way to mistake the rage in him. This might not be a hostage and ransom circumstance, after all. And Guthrum had men here for whom he was responsible.

  “We have surrendered our arms,” he said.

  “And will you tell me Burgred did not when you found them? When you put an arrow in him?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Athelbert. One more, please.”

  “Wait!” Guthrum lifted an urgent hand. The prince named Athelbert, more slowly, did the same. No arrow was loosed. Guthrum swallowed, looking up at the Anglcyn, a black rage in his own heart. He could crush any of these in battle, any two of them; he and Atli could have handled half a dozen.

  “However you know this,” he said, “you are right. Ivarr Ragnarson paid for this raid, and killed the earl. Against my orders and wishes. Do you think we are fools?” He heard the passion in his own voice, moved to master it.

  “I think you are, yes, but would not have thought so in that way. Mercenaries killing a nobleman taken. Where is he, then? This Ragnarson?” There was contempt in the voice. Guthrum could hear it.

  He would have said he despised Ivarr Ragnarson at least as much as those surrounding them did. He felt no loyalty to him at all. Had been on the edge of killing the man himself. And had that last Anglcyn bowshot taken any man there but Atli, he would likely have pointed back to the stream where Ivarr had obviously remained hidden when they fled. One life surrendered, to save those in his charge. A fair and proper deed.

  The flow of time and events is a large river; men and women are usually no more than pebbles in that, carried along. But sometimes, at some moments, they are more. Sometimes the course of the stream is changed, not just for a few people but for many.

  They shouldn’t have killed Atli, Guthrum Skallson thought, standing in a meadow surrounded by his enemies. Our weapons were in the grass. We had yielded ourselves.

  “We took five horses,” he said. “I sent riders back to the ships.”

  Aeldred stared down at him for a long time. The arrogance of it was as wormwood, gall, bitterest taste he knew: as if a woman were looking at him this way. Scarcely to be borne.

  “Yes,” the king said, finally, “you will have done that. And asked for reinforcements to meet you. A ship’s worth? Very well. They will be dealt with next. You have all made a terrible mistake. Jad knows, I have no need or desire of ransom for any of you at all. My need, just now, is otherwise. Athelbert.”

  “My lord!” began another, older man. Another Cyngael. “They have laid down—”

  “No words, Ceinion!” said the king of the Anglcyn.

  He had spared the life of the man who’d blood-eagled his father. Everyone in the northlands knew the tale. He wasn’t doing so now. Aeldred turned away, indifferen
tly, as arrows were notched.

  Guthrum nearly got to him.

  You didn’t let yourself die helplessly in a morning field like a target set up for womanish Anglcyn who dared not fight you properly. Not if you were an Erling and a warrior. He was actually at the king’s reins, reaching up, when the sword took him in the throat. It was the young Cyngael who had moved fastest, Guthrum saw with his last sight.

  He was dying on his feet, though, in battle, as was proper. The gods loved their warriors, their blood, the dragon-ships, red blades, ravens and eagles called you home to halls where mead flowed freely and forever.

  The sun was up, but he couldn’t see it, suddenly. There was a long white wave. He named Ingavin and Thünir, and went to them.

  Expressionless, though with his heart beating fast, Brogan the miller stood by the stream and watched his king and warriors kill the Erlings in the meadow.

  Fifteen or twenty of them. No hostages, none spared. There was no ferocity or passion in the dispatch of the raiders. They were just … dealt with. For more than a hundred years the Anglcyn had lived in terror of these raiders from the sea in their dragon-ships. Now the Erlings were being killed like so many ragged outlaws.

  He decided, just then, that he liked King Aeldred after all. And watching the arrows fly, he came also to a reconsideration of his views on the subject of archery. Beside him, Modig stood gripping his spade, his mouth hanging open.

  The fyrd turned to ride south. As they did, one rider peeled off from the others and came over towards the mill and stream where the two men were. Brogan felt a flicker of apprehension, made himself be calm. These were his defenders, his king.

  “You live here?” the mounted man snapped, reining his mount on the other side of the river. “You are the miller?”