The Last Light of the Sun Read online

  “Understand me,” the Erling said again, in his own tongue. “I kill him if anyone moves!”

  “Then do it!” snapped Brynn ap Hywll. He was barefoot in the grass, only a grey undertunic covering his belly and heavy thighs. Another man would have looked ridiculous, Ceinion thought. Not Brynn, even with a sword to him and the Erling’s left hand bunching his tunic tightly from behind.

  “I want a horse and an oath to your god that I will be allowed passage to our ships. Swear it or he dies!” The voice was high, almost shrill.

  “One horse? Pah! A dozen men you led are standing here! You stain the earth with your breathing.” Brynn was quivering with rage.

  “Twelve horses! I want twelve horses! Or he dies!”

  Brynn roared again. “No one swear that oath! No one dare!”

  “I will kill him!” the Erling screamed. His hands were shaking, Ceinion saw. “I am the grandson of Siggur Volganson!”

  “Then do it!” Brynn howled back. “You castrate coward! Do it!”

  “No!” said Ceinion. He stepped forward into the ring of light. “No! My friend, be silent, in Jad’s name. You do not have permission to leave us!”

  “Ceinion! Don’t swear that oath! Do not!”

  “I will swear it. You are needed.”

  “He won’t do it. He’s a coward. Kill me and die with me, Erling! Go to your gods. Your grandfather would have gutted me like a fish by now! He’d have ripped me open.” There was a white-hot, spitting fury in his voice, near to madness.

  “You killed him!” the Erling snarled.

  “I did! I did! I chopped off his arms and cut his chest open and ate his bloody heart and laughed! So carve me now and let them do the same to you!”

  Ceinion closed his eyes. Opened them. “This must not be. Erling, hear me! I am high cleric of the Cyngael. Hear me! I swear by holiest Jad of the Sun—”

  “No!” roared Brynn. “Ceinion, I forbid—”

  “—that no harm will come to you when you release—”

  “No!”

  “—this man, and that you will be allowed—”

  The small door to the outbuilding—it was the brewhouse—banged open, right behind the two men. The Erling startled like a nervous horse, looked frantically back over his shoulder, swore.

  Died. Brynn ap Hywll, in the moment his captor half turned, hammered an elbow viciously backwards and up into the other man’s unprotected face beneath the nosepiece, smashing his mouth open. He twisted hard away from the sword thrust that followed. It raked blood from his side, no more than that. He stepped back quickly, turned …

  “Here!”

  Ceinion saw a sword arcing through the torchlight. Something beautiful in that flight, something terrible. Alun ab Owyn’s blade was caught by Brynn at the hilt. Ceinion saw his old friend smile then, a grey wolf in winter, at the Cadyri prince who had thrown it. I ate his heart.

  He hadn’t. Might have done, though, the way he’d been that day. Ceinion remembered that fight—against this one’s grandfather. A meeting of giants, crashing together on a blood-slick morning battlefield by the sea. In battle this fury happened to Brynn, the way it did to the Erlings of Ingavin’s bear cult: a madness of war, claiming a soul. If you became what you fought, what were you?'Not the night for that thought. Not here, good men dead in the dark farmyard.

  “He swore an oath!” the Erling bubbled, spitting teeth. Blood in the broken mouth.

  “Jad curse you,” said Brynn. “My people died here. And my guests. Rot your ugly soul!” He moved, barefoot, half-naked. The Cadyri blade in his hand flicked right. The Erling moved to block it. The younger man wore armour, was big, rangy, in his prime.

  Had been. The annihilating backhand blow swept down like a falling of rocks from a mountain height, crashing through his late parry, biting so deeply into his neck between helmet and breastplate that Brynn had to plant a foot on the fallen man, after, to lever and jerk it out.

  He stood back, looked around slowly, flexing his neck and shoulder muscles, a bear in a circle of fire. No one moved, or said a word. Brynn shook his head, as if to clear it, to release fury, come back to himself. He turned to the door of the brewhouse. A girl stood there, in an unbelted tunic, flushing in the torchlight, her dark hair loose, for bed. For being bedded. Brynn looked at her.

  “That was bravely done,” he said, quietly. “Let all men know it.”

  She bit at her lower lip, was trembling. Ceinion was careful not to look to where Enid stood beside her daughter. Brynn turned around, took a step towards him, then another. Stopped squarely in front of the cleric, feet planted wide on his own soil.

  “I’d never have forgiven you,” he said, after a moment.

  Ceinion met that gaze. “You’d have been alive to not forgive me. I spoke truth: you do not have leave to go from us. You are needed still.”

  Brynn was breathing hard, the coursing rage not yet gone from him, the big chest heaving, not from exertion but from the force of his anger. He looked at the young Cadyri behind Ceinion. Gestured with the blade.

  “I thank you for this,” he said. “You were quicker than my own men.”

  Owyn’s son said, “No thanks need be. At least my sword is blooded, though by another. I did nothing at all tonight but play a harp.”

  Brynn looked down at him a moment from his great height. He was bleeding from the right side, Ceinion saw, the tunic ripped open there; he didn’t seem aware of it. Brynn glanced away into the shadows of the farmyard, west of them. The cattle were still lowing on the other side in their pen. “Your brother’s dead?”

  Alun nodded his head, stiffly.

  “Shame upon my life,” said Brynn ap Hywll. “This was a guest in my house.”

  Alun made no reply. His own breathing was shallow, by contrast, constricted. Ceinion thought that he needed to be given wine, urgently. Oblivion for a night. Prayer could come after, in the morning with the god’s light.

  Brynn bent down, wiped both sides of the blade on the black grass, handed it back to Alun. He turned towards the brewhouse. “I need clothing,” he said. “All of you, we will deal with … ”

  He stopped, seeing his wife in front of him.

  “We will deal with the dead, and do what we can for the wounded,” Enid said crisply. “There will be ale for the living, who were so valiant here.” She looked over her shoulder. “Rhiannon, have the kitchen heat water and prepare cloths for wounds. Fetch all my herbs and medications, you know where they are. All of the women are to come to the hall.” She turned back to her husband. “And you, my lord, will apologize tonight and tomorrow and the next day to Kara, here. You likely gave her the fright of a young life, more than any Erling would have, when she came to fetch ale for those still dicing and found you sleeping in the brewhouse. If you want a night’s sleep outside the doors, my lord, choose another place next time, if we have guests?”

  Ceinion loved her even more, then, than he had before.

  Not the only one, he saw. Brynn bent down and kissed his wife on the cheek. “We hear and obey you, my lady,” he said.

  “You are bleeding like a fat, speared boar,” she said. “Have yourself attended to.”

  “Am I permitted the slight dignity of trousers and boots first?” he asked. “Please?” Someone laughed, a release of strain.

  Someone else moved, very fast.

  Siawn, a little tardy, cried out, following. But the red-bearded Erling had torn free of those holding him and, seizing a shield from one of them—not a sword—crashed through the ring around Brynn and his wife.

  He turned away from them, looking up and south, raised the shield. Siawn hesitated, confused. Ceinion wheeled towards the slope and the trees. Saw nothing at all, in the black night.

  Then he heard an arrow strike the lifted shield.

  “There he goes!” said the Erling, speaking Cyngael very clearly.

  He was pointing. Ceinion, whose eyes were good, saw nothing, but Alun ab Owyn shouted, “I see him. Same ridge we were on
today! Heading down the other way.”

  “Don’t touch the arrow!” Ceinion heard. He spun back. The big Erling, not a young man, grey in his hair and beard, set down the shield carefully. “Not even the shaft, mind.”

  “Poison?” It was Brynn.

  “Always.”

  “You know who it was, then?”

  “Ivarr, this one’s brother.” He jerked his head towards the one on the ground. “Black-souled from birth, and a coward.”

  “This one was brave?” Brynn snarled it.

  “He was here with a sword,” said the Erling. “The other one uses arrows, and poison.”

  “And Erlings should be much too brave to do that,” Brynn said icily. “Can’t rape a woman with a bow and arrow.”

  “Yes, you can,” said the Erling quietly, meeting his gaze.

  Brynn took a step towards him.

  “He saved your life!” Ceinion said quickly. “Or Enid’s.”

  “Buying his own,” Brynn snapped.

  The Erling actually laughed. “There’s that,” he said. “Trying to, at any rate. Ask someone what happened inside.”

  But before that could be done, they heard another sound. Drumming hooves. An Erling horse thundered through the yard, leaped the fence. Ceinion, seeing the rider, cried out after him, hopelessly.

  Alun ab Owyn, pursuing a foe he was unlikely ever to see or find, disappeared almost immediately on the dark path that curved around the ridge.

  “Siawn!” said Brynn. “Six men. Follow him!”

  “A horse for me,” cried Ceinion. “That is the heir of Cadyr, Brynn!”

  “I know it is. He wants to kill someone.”

  “Or be killed,” said the red-bearded Erling, watching with interest.

  THE ARCHER HAD a considerable start and poison on his arrows. It was pitch black on the path among the trees. Alun had no knowledge of the Erling horse he’d seized and mounted, and the horse wouldn’t know the woods at all.

  He cleared the fence, landed, kicked the animal ahead. They pounded up the path. He had a sword, no helmet (on the ground, in mud, beside Dai), no torch, felt a degree of unconcern he couldn’t ever remember in himself before. A branch over the path struck his left shoulder, rocked him in the saddle. He grunted with pain. He was doing something entirely mad, knew it.

  He was also thinking as fast as he could. The archer would come out and down from the slope—almost certainly—at the place they had reached earlier today, with Ceinion. The Erling was fleeing, would have a horse waiting for him. Would anticipate pursuit and head back into the trees, not straight along the path to the main trail west.

  Alun lashed the horse around a curve. He was going too fast. It was entirely possible that a stump or boulder would break the animal’s leg, send Alun flying, crack his neck. He flattened himself over the mane and felt the wind of another branch pass over his head. There was a body behind him, on the churned-up earth of a farmyard far from home. He thought of his mother and father. Another blackness there, darker than this night. He rode.

  The only good thing about the moonless sky was that the archer would have trouble finding his way, too—and seeing Alun clearly, if he came close enough for a bowshot. Alun reached the forking trail where the slope came out on the path south-west. Remembered, only this afternoon, climbing up with Dai and then both of them coming down with the high cleric.

  He drew a breath and left the path right there, not hesitating, plunging into the woods.

  It was impossible, almost immediately. Swearing, he pulled the horse to a stop and listened in blackness. Heard—blessed be Jad—a sound through leaves, not far ahead. It could be an animal. He didn’t think it was. He twitched the reins, moved the horse forward, carefully now, picking his way, sword out. A semblance of a trail, no more than that. His eyes were adjusting but there was no light at all. An arrow would kill him, easily.

  He dismounted on that thought. Looped the reins around a tree trunk. His hair was slick with sweat. He heard sounds again—something ahead of him. It wasn’t an animal. Someone unused to being silent in a forest, an unknown wood, far from the sea, amid the terror of pursuit, a raid having gone entirely wrong. Alun gripped his sword and followed.

  He came upon the four Erlings too quickly, before he was ready for them, stumbling through beech trees into a sudden, small space, seeing them there, shadows—two kneeling to catch their breath, one slumped against a tree, the fourth directly in front of him, facing the other way.

  Alun killed that one from behind, kept moving, slashed away the sword of the one leaning by the tree, gripped him and turned him with an arm twisted behind his back, snarled, “Drop blades, both of you!” to the kneeling pair.

  A triad, he thought suddenly, remembering Rhiannon held, then Brynn. Third time tonight. The thought was urgent, sword-swift.

  He remembered what had happened to the other two men who had held their captives this way, and even as the thought came he broke the pattern. He killed the man he was using as a shield, pushing him hard away to fall on the earth, and he stood alone to face two Erlings in a clearing in a wood.

  He had never actually killed before. Two now, in moments.

  “Come on!” he screamed at the pair before him. Both bigger than him, hardened sea-raiders. He saw the nearer one’s head jerk suddenly, looking past Alun, and without any actual thought Alun dove to his right. The arrow from behind flew past him and hit the Erling in the sword arm.

  “Ivarr, no!” the man screamed.

  Alun rolled, scrambled up, turned his back on the two of them, sprinting immediately east into the thicket where the bowman would be. He heard him running through to the other side, then mounting up. The horse was there!

  He wheeled back, running hard, swearing savagely. The fourth of those he’d surprised here was running the other way, towards the path. The wounded man was on his knees, clutching the arrow in his arm, making small, queer sounds. He was as good as dead, they both knew it: poison on the arrowhead, the shaft. Alun ignored him, pushed through to his horse, clawed free the reins, mounted, forced his way back through the trees and then the clearing again to the other side. He could still hear the archer’s horse ahead of them, that rider swearing too, fighting to find a path through in thick, treed blackness. He felt a surging in his blood, fury and hardness and pain. His sword was red, his own doing this time. It didn’t help. It didn’t help.

  He broke through, the horse thrashing into open space, saw water, a pool in the wood, the other rider going around it to the south. Alun roared wordlessly; galloped the Erling horse into the shallow water, splashing through at an angle to shorten the way, cut off the other man.

  He was almost thrown over the animal’s head as it halted, stiff-legged.

  It reared straight back up, neighing, clawing at the air in terror, and then it came down and did not move at all, as if anchored so firmly it might never stir again.

  The entirely unexpected will elicit very different responses in people, and the sudden intrusion of the numinous—the vision utterly outside one’s range of experience—will exaggerate this, of course. One person will be terrified into denial, another will shiver in delight at a making manifest of dreams held close for a lifetime. A third might assume himself intoxicated or bewitched. Those who ground their lives in a firm set of beliefs about the nature of the world are particularly vulnerable to such moments, though not without exception.

  Someone who—like Owyn’s younger son that night—had already had his life broken into shards, who was exposed and raw as a wound, might be said to have been ready for confirmation that he’d never properly understood the world. We are not constant, in our lives, or our responses to our lives. There are moments when this becomes clear.

  Alun’s foot came out of one stirrup when the horse reared. He clutched at the animal’s neck, fought to stay in the saddle, barely did so as the hooves splashed down hard. His sword fell into the shallow water. He swore again, tried to make the horse move, could not. He heard music
. Turned his head.

  Saw a growing, inexplicable presence of light, pale as moonrise, but there were no moons tonight. Then, as the music grew louder, approaching, Alun ab Owyn saw what was passing by him, walking and riding on the surface of that water, in bright procession, the light a shimmering, around them and in them. And everything about the night and the world changed then, was silvered, because they were faeries and he could see them.

  He closed his eyes, opened them again. They were still there. His heart was pounding, as if trying to break free of his breast. He was trammelled, entangled as in nets, between the desperate need to flee from the unholy Jad-cursed demons these must be—by all the teachings of his faith—and the impulse to dismount and kneel in the water of this starlit pool before the very tall, slender figure he saw on an open litter, borne in the midst of the dancing of them all, with her pale garments and nearly white skin and her hair that kept changing its colour in the silvered light that grew brighter as they passed, the music louder now, wild as his heart’s beating. There was a constriction in his chest, he had to remind himself to breathe.

  If these were evil spirits, iron would keep them at bay, so the old tales promised. He’d dropped his sword in the water. It occurred to him that he ought to make the sign of the sun disk, and with that thought he realized that he couldn’t.

  He couldn’t move. His hands on the horse’s reins, the horse rooted in the shallows of the pool, the two of them breathing statues watching what was passing by. And in that growing, spirit-shaped brightness in the depths of a moonless wood at night, Alun saw—for the first time—that the saddle cloth of the Erling horse he rode bore the pagan hammer symbol of Ingavin.

  And then, looking at that queen again—for who else could this possibly be, borne across still waters, shining, beautiful as hope or memory?—Alun saw someone next to her, riding a small, high-stepping mare with bells and bright ribbons in its mane, and there came a harder pounding, like a killing hammer against his wounded heart.

  He opened his mouth—he could do that—and he began to shout against the music, struggling more and more wildly to move arms or legs, to dismount, to go there. He was unable to do anything at all, couldn’t stir from where he and the horse were rooted, as his brother rode past him, changed utterly and not changed at all, dead in the farmyard below them, and riding across night waters here, not seeing Alun, or hearing him, one hand extended, and claimed, laced in the long white fingers of the faerie queen.