The Last Light of the Sun Page 4

  He didn’t feel guarded any more.

  “We need food and labour out here,” she went on calmly. “We need the fear and assistance of the town, both. All volurs require this, wherever they are. You become her way of starting again after the long quarrel with Halldr. Your coming here tonight was a gift to her.”

  He thought of the woman above him in the bed, lit only by the fire.

  “In more ways than one,” the girl added, as if reading his thoughts.

  “She has no power, no seithr?”

  “I didn’t say that. Although I don’t think she does.”

  “There’s no magic? Nothing to make a man invisible?”

  She laughed again. “If one spearman can’t hit a target when he throws, do you decide that spears are useless?” It was too dark to make out any expression on her face. He realized something.

  “You hate her,” he said. “That’s why you are here. Because … because she had the snake bite you!”

  He could see she was surprised, hesitating for the first time. “I don’t love her, no,” she agreed. “But I wouldn’t be here because of that.”

  “Why then?” Bern asked, a little desperately.

  Again a pause. He wished, now, that there were light. He still hadn’t seen her face.

  She said, “We are kin, Bern Thorkellson. I’m here because of that.”

  “What?” He was stunned.

  “Your sister married my brother, on the mainland.”

  “Siv married … ?”

  “No, Athira wedded my brother Gevin.”

  He felt abruptly angry, couldn’t have said why. “That doesn’t make us kin, woman.”

  Even in darkness he could see that he had wounded her.

  The horse moved again, whickered, impatient with standing.

  The woman said, “I am a long way from home. Your family is the closest I have on this island, I suppose. Forgive me for presuming.”

  His family was landless, his father exiled. He was a servant, compelled to sleep in a barn on straw for two more years.

  “What presumption?” Bern said roughly. “That isn’t what I meant.” He wasn’t sure what he’d meant.

  There was a silence. He was thinking hard. “You were sent to the volur? They reported you had a gift?”

  The hood moved up and down. “Curious, how often unwed youngest daughters have a gift, isn’t it?”

  “Why did I never hear of you?”

  “We are meant to be unattached, to be the more dependent. That’s why they bring girls from distant villages and farms. All the seers do that. I’ve spoken to your mother, though.”

  “You have? What? Why … ?”

  The shrug again. “Frigga’s a woman. Athira gave me a message for her.”

  “You all have your tricks, don’t you?” He felt bitter, suddenly.

  “Swords and axes are so much better, aren’t they?” she said sharply. She was staring at him again, though he knew the darkness hid his face, too. “We’re all trying to make ourselves a life, Bern Thorkellson. Men and women both. Why else are you out here now?”

  Bitterness still. “Because my father is a fool who killed a man.”

  “And his son is what?”

  “A fool about to die before the next moon rises. A good way to … make a life, isn’t it? Useful kin for you to have.”

  She said nothing, looked away. He heard the horse again. Felt the wind, a change in it, as though the night had indeed turned, moving now towards dawn.

  “The snake,” he said awkwardly. “Is it … ?”

  “I’m not poisoned. It hurts.”

  “You … walked out here a long way.”

  “There’s one of us out all night on watch. We take turns, the younger ones. People come in the dark. That’s how I saw you on the horse and told her.”

  “No, I meant … just now. To warn me.”

  “Oh.” She paused. “You believe me, then?”

  For the first time, a note of doubt, wistfulness. She was betraying the volur for him.

  He grinned crookedly. “You are looking right at me, as you said. I can’t be that hard to see. Even a piss-drunk raider falling off his horse will spot me when the sun comes up. Yes, I believe you.”

  She let out a breath.

  “What will they do to you?” he asked. It had just occurred to him.

  “If they find out I was here? I don’t want to think about it.” She paused. “Thank you for asking.”

  He felt suddenly shamed. Cleared his throat. “If I don’t ride back into the village, will they know you … warned me?”

  Her laughter again, unexpected, bright and quick. “They could possibly decide you were clever, by yourself.”

  He laughed too. Couldn’t help it. Was aware that it could be seen as a madness sent by the gods, laughter at the edge of dying one hideous death or another. Not like the mindlessness of the water-disease—a man bitten by a sick fox—but the madness where one has lost hold of the way things are. Laughter here, another kind of strangeness in this dark by the wood among the spirits of the dead, with the blue moon overhead, pursued by a wolf in the sky.

  The world would end when that wolf caught the two moons.

  He had more immediate problems, actually.

  “What will you do?” she asked. The third time she’d seemed to track his thoughts. Perhaps it was more than being a youngest daughter, this matter of having a gift. He wished, again, he could see her clearly.

  But, as it happened, he did know, finally, the answer to her question.

  Once, years ago, his father had been in a genial mood one evening as they’d walked out together to repair a loose door on their barn. Thorkell wasn’t always drunk, or even often so (being honest with his own memories). That summer evening he was sober and easy, and the measure of that mood was that, after finishing the work, the two of them went walking, towards the northern boundary of their land, and Thorkell spoke of his raiding days to his only son, something that rarely happened.

  Thorkell Einarson had not been a man given to boasting, or to offering scraps of advice from the table of his recollections. This made him unusual among the Erlings, or those that Bern knew, at any rate. It wasn’t always easy having an unusual father, though a boy could take some dark pride in seeing Thorkell feared by others as much as he was. They whispered about him, pointed him out, carefully, to merchants visiting the isle. Bern, a watchful child, had seen it happen.

  Other men had told the boy tales; he knew something of what his father had done. Companion and friend to Siggur Volganson himself right to the end. Voyages in storm, raids in the dark. Escaping the Cyngael after Siggur died and his sword was lost. A journey alone across the Cyngael lands, then the width of the Anglcyn kingdom to the eastern coast, and finally home across the sea to Vinmark and this isle.

  “I recollect a night like this, a long time ago,” his father said, leaning back against the boulder that marked the boundary of their land. “We went too far from the boats and they cut us off—Cuthbert’s household guard, his best men—between a wood and a stream.”

  Cuthbert had been king of the Anglcyn in the years when Thorkell was raiding with the Volgan. Bern knew that much.

  He remembered loving moments such as that one had been, the two of them together, the sun setting, the air mild, his father mild, and talking to him.

  “Siggur said something to us that night. He said there are times when all you can do to survive is one single thing, however unlikely it may be, and so you act as if it can be done. The only chance we had was that the enemy was too sure of victory, and had not posted outliers against a night breakout.”

  Thorkell looked at his son. “You understand that everyone posts outlying guards? It is the most basic thing an army does. It is mad not to. They had to have them, there was no chance they didn’t.”

  Bern nodded.

  “So we spoke our prayers to Ingavin and broke out,” Thorkell said, matter-of-factly. “Maybe sixty men—two boats’ worth of us—
against two hundred, at the least. A blind rush in the dark, some of us on stolen horses, some running, no order to it, only speed. The whole thing being to get to their camp, and through it—take some horses on the run if we could—cut back towards the ships two days away.”

  Thorkell paused then, looking out over summer farmlands, towards the woods. “They didn’t have outliers. They were waiting for morning to smash us, were mostly asleep, a few still singing and drinking. We killed thirty or forty of them, got horses for some of our unmounted, took two thegns hostage, by blind luck—couldn’t tell who they were in the dark. And we sold them back to Cuthbert the next day for our freedom to get to the boats and sail away.”

  He’d actually grinned, Bern remembered, behind the red beard. His father had rarely smiled.

  “The Anglcyn in the west rebelled against King Cuthbert after that, which is when Athelbert became king, then Gademar, and Aeldred. Raiding got harder, and then Siggur died in Llywerth. That’s when I decided to become a landowner. Spend my days fixing broken doors.”

  He’d had to escape first, alone and on foot, across the breadth of two different countries.

  You act as if it can be done.

  “I’m crossing to the mainland,” Bern said quietly to the girl in that darkness by the wood.

  She stood very still. “Steal a boat?”

  He shook his head. “Couldn’t take the horse on any boat I could manage alone.”

  “You won’t leave the horse?”

  “I won’t leave the horse.”

  “Then?”

  “Swim,” said Bern. “Clearly.” He smiled, but she couldn’t see it, he knew.

  She was silent a moment. “You can swim?”

  He shook his head. “Not that far.”

  Heroes came to thresholds, to moments that marked them, and they died young, too. Icy water, end of winter, the stony shore of Vinmark a world away across the strait, just visible by daylight if the mist didn’t settle, but not now.

  What was a hero, if he never had a chance to do anything? If he died at the first threshold?

  “I think the horse can carry me,” he said. “I will … act as if it can.” He felt his mood changing, a strangeness overtaking him even as he spoke. “Promise me no monsters in the sea?”

  “I wish I could,” said the girl.

  “Well, that’s honest,” he said. He laughed again. She didn’t, this time.

  “It will be very cold.”

  “Of course it will.” He hesitated. “Can you … see anything?”

  She knew what he meant. “No.”

  “Am I underwater?” He tried to make it a joke.

  Shook her head. “I can’t tell. I’m sorry. I’m … more a youngest daughter than a seer.”

  Another silence. It struck him that it would be appropriate to begin feeling afraid. The sea at night, straight out into the black …

  “Shall I … any word for your mother?”

  It hadn’t occurred to him. Nothing had, really. He thought about it now. “Better you never saw me. That I was clever by myself. And died of it, in the sea.”

  “You may not.”

  She didn’t sound as if she believed that. She would have been rowed across from Vinmark, coming here. She knew the strait, the currents and the cold, even if there were no monsters.

  Bern shrugged. “That will be as Ingavin and Thünir decide. Make some magic, if you have any. Pray for me, if you haven’t. Perhaps we’ll meet again. I thank you for coming out. You saved me from … one bad kind of death, at least.”

  It was past the bottom of the night, and he had a distance to go to the beach nearest the mainland. He said nothing more, and neither did she, though he could see that she was still staring at him in the dark. He mounted up on the horse he wouldn’t leave for Halldr Thinshank’s funeral rites, and rode away.

  Some time before reaching the strand south-east of the forest, he realized he didn’t know her name, or have any clear idea what she looked like. Unlikely to matter; if they met again it would probably be in the afterworld of souls.

  He came around the looming dark of the pine woods to a stony place by the water: rocky and wild, exposed, no boats here, no fishermen in the night. The pounding of the sea, heavy sound of it, salt in his face, no shelter from the wind. The blue moon west, behind him now, the white one not rising tonight until dawn. It would be dark on the ocean water. Ingavin alone knew what creatures might be waiting to pull him down. He wouldn’t leave the horse. He wouldn’t go back. You did whatever was left, and acted as if it could be done. Bern cursed his father aloud, then, for murdering another man, doing that to all of them, his sisters and his mother and himself, and then he urged the grey horse into the surf, which was white where it hit the stones, and black beyond, under the stars.

  CHAPTER II

  “Our trouble,” muttered Dai, looking down through green-gold leaves at the farmyard, “is that we make good poems and bad siege weapons.”

  A siege, in fact, wasn’t even remotely at issue. The comment was so inconsequential, and so typical of Dai, that Alun laughed aloud. Not the wisest thing to do, given where they were. Dai slapped a hand to his brother’s mouth. After a moment, Alun signalled he was under control and Dai moved his hand away, grunting.

  “Anyone in particular you’d like to besiege?” Alun asked, quietly enough. He shifted his elbows carefully. The bushes didn’t move.

  “One poet I can think of,” Dai said, unwisely. He was prone to jests, his younger brother prone to laughing at them; they were both prone under leaves, gazing at penned cattle below. They’d come north to steal cattle. The Cyngael did that to each other, frequently.

  Dai moved a hand quickly, but Alun kept still this time. They couldn’t afford to be seen. There were just twelve of them—eleven, with Gryffeth now captured—and they were a long way north into Arberth. No more than two or three days from the sea, Dai reckoned, though he wasn’t sure exactly where they were, or what this very large farmhouse below them was.

  Twelve had been a marginal number for a raiding party, but the brothers were confident in their abilities, not without some cause. Besides, in Cadyr it was said that any one of their own was worth two of the Arberthi, and at least three from Llywerth. They might do the arithmetic differently in the other two provinces, but that was just vanity and bluster.

  Or it should have been. It was alarming that Gryffeth had been taken so easily, scouting ahead. The good news was that he’d prudently carried Alun’s harp with him, to be taken for a bard on the road. The bad news was that Gryffeth—notoriously—couldn’t sing or play to save his life. If they tested him down below, he was unmasked. And saving his life became an issue.

  So the brothers had left nine men out of sight off the road and climbed this overlook to devise a rescue plan. If they went home without cattle it was bad but not humiliating. Not every raid succeeded; you could still do a few things to make a story worth telling. But if their royal father or uncle had to pay a ransom for a cousin taken on an unauthorized cattle raid into Arberth during a herald’s truce, well, that was … going to be quite bad.

  And if Owyn of Cadyr’s nephew died in Arberth it could mean war.

  “How many, do you think?” Dai murmured.

  “Twenty, give or take a few? It’s a big farmhouse. Who lives here? Where are we?” Alun was still watching the cows, Dai saw.

  “Forget the cattle,” Dai snapped. “Everything’s changed.”

  “Maybe not. We let them out of the pen tonight, four of us scatter them north up the valley, the rest go in after Gryffeth while they’re rounding them up?”

  Dai looked thoughtfully at his younger brother. “That’s unexpectedly clever,” he said, finally.

  Alun punched him on the shoulder, fairly hard. “Hump a goat,” he added mildly. “This was your idea, I’m getting us out of it. Don’t be superior. Which room’s he in?”

  Dai had been trying to sort that out. The farmhouse—whoever owned it was wealthy—was long an
d sprawling, running east to west. He saw the outline of a large hall beyond the double doors below them, wings bending back north at each end of that main building. A house that had expanded in stages, some parts stone, others wood. They hadn’t seen Gryffeth taken in, had only come upon the signs of struggle on the path.

  Two cowherds were watching the cattle from the far side of the fenced enclosure east of the house. Boys, their hands moving ceaselessly to wave at flies. None of the armed men had emerged since a cluster of them had gone in through the main doors, talking angrily, just as the brothers had arrived here in the thicket above the farm. Once or twice they’d heard raised, distant voices within, and a girl had come out for well water. Otherwise it was quiet and hot, a sleepy afternoon, late spring, butterflies, the drone of bees, a hawk circling. Dai watched it for a moment.

  What neither brother said, though both of them knew it, was that it was extremely unlikely they could get a man out of a guarded room, even at night and with a diversion, without men dying on both sides. During a truce. This raid had gone wrong before it had even begun.

  “Are we even certain he’s in there?” Dai said.

  “I am,” said Alun. “Nowhere else likely. Could he be a guest? Um, could they have … ?”

  Dai looked at him. Gryffeth couldn’t play the harp he carried, was wearing a sword and leather armour, had a helmet in his saddle gear, looked exactly the sort of young man—with a Cadyri accent, too—who’d be up to mischief, which he was.

  The younger brother nodded, without Dai saying anything. It was too miserably obvious. Alun swore briefly, then murmured, “All right, he’s a prisoner. We’ll need to move fast, know exactly where we’re going. Come on, Dai, figure it out. In Jad’s name, where have they got him?”

  “In Jad’s holy name, Brynn ap Hywll tends to use the room at the eastern end of the main building for prisoners, when he has them here. If I remember rightly.”

  They whipped around. Dai’s knife was already out, Alun saw.

  The world was a complex place sometimes, saturated with the unexpected. Especially when you left home and the trappings of the known. Even so, there were reasonable explanations for why someone might be up here now, right behind them. One of their own men might have followed with news; one of the guards from below could have intuited the presence of other Cadyri besides the captured one and come looking; they might even have been observed on their way up.