The Last Light of the Sun Read online

Brogan touched a hand to his forehead and nodded. “Yes, my lord.”

  “Find villagers, farmers, whatever you can. Have these bodies burned before sundown. You yourself are in charge of collecting weapons and armour. Keep them in the mill. There are eighteen Erlings. All were armed in the usual ways. We have a good idea of what should be here when we come back. If anyone steals, there will be executions. We won’t stop to ask questions. Understood?”

  Brogan nodded again, and swallowed hard.

  “Make certain the others here do.”

  The rider wheeled and set off, galloping now, to catch up with the fyrd. Brogan watched him go, a graceful figure in morning light. In the meadow, not far away, lay a number of dead men. Eighteen, the rider had said. His burden now. He cursed himself for coming out to watch. Spat into the stream. It was going to be very hard to stop poor men from stealing knives or rings. Surely the fyrd wouldn’t begrudge—or be able to track—a stray torc or necklace, would they?

  It occurred to him that he and Modig might be able to gather most of the arms and store them before anyone else—

  No, that wouldn’t work. The women would be here soon, for their flour. They would see what had happened. It was impossible to miss: Brogan saw birds already gathering where the bodies lay. He grimaced. This was going to be difficult. He suffered a reversion of his thoughts about king and fyrd. The lords were trouble, whenever they came, whenever they noticed you. He ought to have stayed inside. He was turning to Modig, to tell him to make a start, at least, but found his right arm gripped fiercely by his servant.

  Modig pointed. Brogan saw a man emerge from the stream to their left—a pale, small figure for an Erling, he would say, later—and begin to run south. He was well behind the fyrd, which was almost out of sight. Certainly they were too far away for any call or cry to summon them back to take this last Erling, who’d kept himself hidden, apart from the rest. They’d have to let him go, Brogan thought. Not that he’d get far, alone.

  Modig made a sound deep in his chest. He plunged into the stream, splashing through it, then began running, spade in hand.

  “Stop!” cried Brogan. “Don’t be a fool!”

  The Erling was moving fast, but so was young Modig, chasing him. Far away, the dust of the king’s men could be seen. Brogan watched the two running men till they were out of sight.

  Later that morning he assembled the villagers to gather the weapons and armour—and the rings and arm torcs and belts and boots and brooches and necklaces—of the Erlings. The children ran about, chasing away the birds. Brogan made it very clear, talking more than anyone could remember, that the fyrd was coming back, and that death had been promised to anyone known to have taken anything.

  The presence of eighteen dead raiders, the shock of them, meant that no one did try to palm or pocket a thing, so far as Brogan could tell. They carried the gear in relays across the water to the mill, piled it in his smaller storeroom. Brogan locked the door, hung the key on his belt.

  He picked out only two rings for himself, and a golden torc in the shape of a dragon devouring its own tail. Added three other pieces of jewellery after, when most of the others had gone to bring wood and the two who had stayed behind with him, as guards, were drowsing under the willow by the stream. It was a warm day. Across the water boys were throwing stones at birds and wild dogs near the eighteen dead men.

  It was two of the boys who found the body of Modig, the son of Ord, shortly after midday, a little distance to the south. His ears and nose had been hacked off, and his tongue. That last, Brogan the miller thought, was a sad and vicious thing. He was angry. He’d found a perfect servant, finally, and the young fool had gone and gotten himself killed.

  Life was an ambush, Brogan thought bitterly, a series of them. Over and over till you died.

  Later in the day the villagers began streaming back with armloads and carts of wood, and the cleric. Their women came, too, and all but the youngest children. This was a great event, something unimaginable, never to be forgotten. The king had been here himself, had saved them from Erling raiders, slain them all, right beside the millstream. Their millstream. A tale for the colder nights to come and the long years. Babies not yet born would hear this story, be led to the place where it had happened.

  The new cleric spoke under the open sky, invoking Jad’s power and mercy, then they lit the pyre, using wood that had been gathered for winter hearths, and they burned the Erlings in the field where they’d died.

  After, they dug a grave and buried Modig by the stream and prayed that he might go home to the god, in light.

  In a mist before dawn, some distance west, Bern Thorkellson dismounted to relieve himself in a gully. His first halt since leaving his father outside Esferth.

  He had spent what remained of the night riding very fast, trying to take his mind from that impossible encounter. What was it the gods were doing with their mortal children? You took a horse across black, frozen waters and lived, fought your way into Jormsvik, went on a raid in Anglcyn lands … and were rescued by your father. Twice.

  Your accursed father, whose murders were the reason for all of this. For everything that had happened. And he simply showed up where you were—on the other side of the sea—and knocked you out in an alley and somehow carried you outside the walls and then came back to warn you, and order you on your way. It was all … hugely difficult. Bern could not have said that much about the world seemed clear to him that night.

  He had just finished retying his trousers when a man and woman sat up from a hollow in the ground and stared at him, a handful of paces away.

  This, at least, was clear enough.

  They stood. It was still quite dark, mist around them, rising off the fields. Their clothing and hair were disordered; it was evident what they’d been doing. The same thing young men and women did in meadows all over the world on a summer night. Bern had done it on the isle, in better days.

  He drew his sword. “Lie down again,” he said quietly. His own language, but they’d understand him. “And no one is hurt.”

  “You’re an Erling!” the young man said, too loudly. “What are you doing here with a blade?”

  “My own business. Attend to yours. Lie down again with her.”

  “Rot that,” said the man, who was broad-shouldered, long-limbed. “My father’s the reeve here. Strangers declare themselves when they come by.”

  “Are you a fool?” Bern asked, calmly enough, he’d have thought.

  It was because he was with his girl, Bern later decided, that the Anglcyn did what he did. He reached down, grabbed a thick staff he’d have carried out with him for protection from animals, and stepped forward, swinging it at Bern’s head.

  The woman cried out. Bern dropped to a knee, heard the whistle of the staff. He rose and levelled a short backhand slash with his sword to the man’s right arm, at the elbow. He felt it hit hard, but not bite.

  He’d used the flat of his blade.

  Couldn’t have said why. A memory of summer fields with a girl? Stupidity such as this man’s didn’t deserve to be indulged or rewarded. The Anglcyn ought to have lost an arm, his life. Didn’t the fool know how the world worked? You met a mounted man with a sword, you did what he instructed you, and prayed, urgently, that you’d live to tell about it.

  The staff had fallen to the grass. The Anglcyn’s good hand clutched at his elbow. Bern couldn’t see his eyes in the darkness.

  “Don’t kill us!” the girl said, her first words.

  Bern looked at her. “I hadn’t intended to,” he said. She had fair hair, was tall. It was hard to make out more. “I told you to lie down. Do it now. Though if you let this idiot between your legs again you’re as much a fool as he is.”

  The girl’s mouth opened. She stared at him, for longer than he’d have expected. Then she reached out and pulled the man down beside her into the hollow again, where they’d been warm together moments ago, young and in summertime.

  “Honour your god in the morning,”
Bern said, looking down at them. He wasn’t sure why he’d said that, either.

  He went back to Gyllir and rode away.

  In the hollow behind him, Druce, the son of Finan who was indeed king’s reeve of the lands thereabouts, began swearing viciously, though under his breath, in case.

  Cwene, the baker’s daughter, put a hand to his mouth. “Hush. Does it hurt?” she whispered.

  “Of course it hurts,” he snarled. “He broke my arm.”

  She was clever, understood that his pride was wounded as well, after being so easily subdued in front of her.

  “He had a sword,” she said. “There was naught you could do. I thought you were very brave.”

  She thought he’d been a reckless imbecile. She was aware that they ought to have died here. Druce’s arm should have been severed, not bruised or broken, by that sword. The Erling could have done anything he wanted to her, after, anything at all, then left them dead in the tall grass with no one ever to know exactly what had happened. She said nothing more, lay there beside Druce, looking up at the last stars as blackness became grey, feeling the breeze that blew.

  Eventually they made their way back towards the village, separated in the usual way, went to their homes. Cwene slipped into the house the way she’d come out, through the door that connected to the animal shed. Familiar smells, sounds, everything changed, forever. She should have died in the field. Each breath she took now, for the rest of her days …

  She got into bed beside her sister, who stirred but did not wake. Cwene didn’t sleep. It was too near to morning. She lay there thinking, revisiting what had happened. Her heart was pounding, though she was in bed at home now. She began to weep, silently.

  Three months later, in autumn, the baker beat her until she named the reeve’s son as the father of the child she was carrying. At that point her father became mightily pleased (it was a very good match) and carried his anger across the village to the reeve’s door.

  The baker was a large man himself, and not inconsequential. She and Druce were wed before winter. They had two more children before he was killed by someone who didn’t want to pay his taxes, or lose his farm. Cwene married twice more; outlived them both. Five children survived childhood, including the daughter conceived in the meadow that summer night.

  Cwene had dreams, all her life, of the moment in darkness when an Erling had come upon them, a creature out of nightmare, and had gone away, leaving them their lives as a gift to use or throw away.

  We like to believe we can know the moments we’ll remember of our own days and nights, but it isn’t really so. The future is an uncertain shape (in the dark) and men and women know that. What is less surely understood is that this is true of the past as well. What lingers, or comes back unsummoned, is not always what we would expect, or desire to keep with us.

  It was late in a long life, and three husbands had been laid in the earth, before Cwene realized—and acknowledged to herself—that what she had wanted to do, more than anything before or since, was ride away from her home and everyone she knew in the world with that Erling on his grey horse that night long ago.

  The clever girl had become a wise woman through the turning years; she forgave herself for that longing before she died.

  RIDING SOUTH, Bern was increasingly aware of hunger—he hadn’t eaten since late the day before—but he was also conscious of a cold, steady fear in his gut, and he didn’t let Gyllir slow as the sun rose, climbing the summer sky. He felt appallingly exposed here in these flat lands running to the sea, knowing the fyrd was abroad and looking for Erlings with vengeance in mind.

  The Anglcyn worshipped a god of the sun: would that make a difference? Would it help them, under so much summer light? He had never thought such a thing before, and he didn’t much like thinking about it now, but he’d never been among Jaddites, either. Rabady Isle seemed very far away; their farm at the village edge, even the straw in the barn behind Arni Kjellson’s house. He kept glancing around as he rode, an unceasing sweep of the wide lands to his left.

  The signal flares had been farther east, and Aeldred’s course had lain on the far side of the river—to begin with. There was nothing to say the king hadn’t split his riders in the night, sending some of them this way. Bern, feeling more alone than he had since the night he’d left the isle with Halldr’s horse, had a painful sense that the king’s men would be very good at knowing where the Jormsvik ships might be.

  Gyllir was tired, but there was no help for that. He leaned forward, slapped the horse’s neck, spoke to it as a friend. They had to keep moving. For one thing, his might be the only alert the others could get. They had to have five ships offshore before two hundred men came sweeping down upon them. The gods knew, the men of Jormsvik could fight. It might be a close battle if the fyrd came. They could easily win it, but if enough of them died, or if the ships were damaged, there was no meaning to such a victory. Glorious or not, they’d die in these Anglcyn lands when Esferth and the accursed burhs Aeldred had built sent out the next waves of men. He wasn’t quite ready, Bern realized, to go to Ingavin’s halls.

  He looked east again, no longer into the too-bright sun. Past midday now, the mist had long since burnt away. No hilltop signal fires in this bright daylight. A beautiful afternoon. Birdsong from the forest west, a hawk overhead, circling.

  He had no idea what was happening elsewhere. Could only hasten to the sea. His father had done this too, Bern thought suddenly. Had done more, in fact; that journey alone across the Wall and the breadth of the Anglcyn lands, when he’d escaped from the Cyngael after the Volgan died. And now Thorkell was back here. Had even been among the Cyngael again, taken by them a second time. Bern wanted to think of something derisive but couldn’t.

  I got you out of a walled city. Think on it.

  The quiet, assured voice. And a blow to the head when he’d spoken too fast, as if Bern were still a boy on Rabady. But his father had known about Ivarr, had guessed what Ragnarson would say. How did he always know? He cursed Thorkell, as he had so many times since his father’s exile, but without fever or fire now. He was too tired, had too many things to think about. He was hungry and afraid. He looked left again, and behind him. Nothing there, a shimmer of heat coming off the ripening fields. Gyllir would have to drink soon. He needed water himself. Not quite yet, he decided. It was too exposed where they were right now.

  He didn’t recognize the landscape nearly well enough, couldn’t tell how far he had yet to ride, though they’d come this way going north to Esferth, he and Ecca, on the other side of the river. There had been a number of people on that road, heading for a royal fair the Erlings hadn’t known about. Third year of the fair, someone told them. They hadn’t been hiding on the way north, had pretended to be traders. They’d carried sacks on the horses, purporting to hold the goods they’d trade. Ecca’s anger had begun on the road, with what they’d heard. If this was the third year of a summer fair, then any tale they’d been told about Esferth being empty was hollow as an emptied ale cask. Ivarr Ragnarson, he’d said to Bern, was either a fool or a serpent, and he suspected the latter.

  Bern hadn’t paid enough attention on that ride and was suffering for it now; all the endless shallow dips and folds, up and down, up and down, looked exactly the same. The farmland across the river seemed an unimaginable expanse of fertile soil to someone raised on Rabady Isle’s stony ground.

  He turned in the saddle to look back again. A constant fear of pursuers behind him. The farms began just across the river; anyone in the near fields could see him, a single horseman passing between river and wood. Not alarming in itself, unless they were close enough to see what he was.

  The trees on his right were dark, no tracks or paths into them. Sunlight would fail here. There were woods like this in Vinmark. Untamed, unbroken, stretching forever; gods and beasts within them. This forest would be pretty much impenetrable, he guessed, wild and dangerous, an unbroken density of oak and ash, alder and thorn, marching west to the Cyngael l
ands. Ecca had said that on the way. A better wall than the Wall was the saying. And the woods went right down to cliffs above the strait. They’d seen those cliffs from the ships.

  The Anglcyn would know all this far better than he did. They’d know the Erling ships had to be east of those sheer bluffs, in one shallow bay or another.

  They were. There weren’t so many choices and they hadn’t been overly subtle about choosing one. Too many mistakes on this end-of-summer raid. Ivarr Ragnarson’s raid. They’d anchored, taken hasty counsel, sent Bern and Ecca north to look at Esferth. Ecca had done this many times, knew what he was about, and Bern had a young, reassuring countenance. Brand Leofson had also agreed to let Guthrum and Atli lead a small sweep east, to see what they could find or take while they waited for the report from Esferth, and Ivarr had gone with them.

  Bern was the report from Esferth now.

  Ivarr Ragnarson would kill him, Thorkell had said, if he learned who Bern’s father was. Suddenly, and much too late, Bern understood. Think the rest of it out while you ride, he’d been told. And, He wants to go back west. Back west. Ivarr had just been there, then. In the Cyngael lands.

  And Thorkell had been with him. That was how his father knew what had happened. And about poisoned arrows. Something had happened there … Thorkell had been taken again. Or else …

  There was never enough time to think things through. The world didn’t seem to work that way. Maybe for women weaving and spinning, maybe for Jaddite clerics in their isolated retreats, waking in the night to pray for the sun. But not for a bound servant on Rabady Isle, or a Jormsvik mercenary, either. Riding towards another gentle, grassy rise, almost identical to the one before and the one before that, Bern heard the sounds of battle ahead of him, across the river.

  THE RIDERS GUTHRUM SKALLSON had sent made it back to the ships early in the morning. The help Guthrum requested was dispatched without hesitation by Brand, who was commanding the raid. You didn’t leave men behind. It was one of the things that marked Jormsvik.