The Last Light of the Sun (28 page)

It occurred to Ebor, staring into night, that this might have been a tryst of some kind, a lovers’ meeting, the Cyngael prince and his own princess. Then he decided that made no sense at all. They wouldn’t have to go outside the walls to bed each other. And the Erling? What was that about? And, rather belatedly, the thought came to Ebor that he hadn’t seen any weapon—no sword or even a knife—carried by the young Cyngael who had spoken to him so softly, with music in his voice. It was desperately unwise to go outside without iron to defend yourself. Why would anyone do that?

He was sweating, he realized; could smell himself. He stayed where he was, watching, staring out, as was his duty here, as the princess had told him to do. And in the meantime he began to pray, which was a duty all men had in the night while Jad did battle beneath the world on their behalf, against powers of malign intent.

He laid his son down by the bank of the stream. Not far from where they’d come walking this morning and found the royal children idling on the grass. With time now (a little) and a bit more light, with the blue moon reflecting off the river, Thorkell looked down at the unconscious figure, reading what changes he could, and what seemed to be unchanged.

He stayed like that for some moments. He was not a soft man in any possible way, but this had to be a strange moment in a man’s life, no one could deny it. He hadn’t thought to ever see his son again. His face was unrevealing in the muted moonlight. He was thinking that there was danger for the boy (not a boy any more) if he was left here in the dark, helpless. Beasts, or mortal predators, might come.

On the other hand, there was only so much a father could do, and he’d made a promise that mattered to the girl. He probably wouldn’t have made it out without her. Would have tried, of course, but it was unlikely. He looked at Bern by moonlight and spent a moment working out how old his son was. The beard aged him, but he remembered the day Bern was born and it didn’t seem so long ago, really. And now the boy was off Rabady, somehow, and raiding with the Jormsvikings, though it made so little sense for them to be here.

Thorkell had his thoughts on that, on what was really happening. His son’s breathing was even and steady. If nothing came here before he woke, he’d be all right. Thorkell knew he ought to leave, before Bern opened his eyes, but it was oddly difficult to move away. The strangeness of this encounter, a sense of a god or gods, or blind chance, working in this. It didn’t even occur to him to run away with Bern. Where would he go? For one thing, he was almost certain who had paid for the Jormsvik ships, however many there turned out to be. He shouldn’t have been quite so sure, really, but he did know a few things, and they fit.

Ivarr Ragnarson had not been caught fleeing from Brynnfell. Two blood-eagled bodies to the west had been the marks of his passage. The Cyngael had never found the ships.

Ivarr had made it home. Stood to reason.

Something else did, too. No thinking man bought mercenaries to raid the Anglcyn coast any more. A waste of money, of time, of lives. Not with what Aeldred had been doing—and was still doing—with his standing army and his
burhs,
and even a fleet of his own being built along this coastline now.

Mercenaries might risk it if you paid them enough, but it didn’t make
sense.
You sailed from Vinmark and raided east and south through Karch now, even down to the trading stations of overstretched Sarantium. Or along the Ferrieres coast, or, possibly, you went past here, west to the Cyngael lands. Not much to be gleaned there these days, for the exposed treasure-houses of the sanctuaries had long since been removed inland and inside walls, and the three Cyngael provinces had never had overmuch in the way of gold in any case. But a man, a particular man, might have his reasons for taking dragon-ships and fighting men back there.

The same reasons he’d had at the beginning of summer. And one more now. A brother newly dead, to join a blood feud that had begun long ago.

And if this was so, if it
was
Ivarr, Thorkell Einarson had good reason to expect nothing but a bad death were he to run away now with his son towards the coast, looking for the ships that would be lying offshore or beached in a cove. Ivarr, repellent and deadly as anyone he’d ever known, would remember the man who had blocked the arrow he’d loosed at Brynn ap Hywll from the wooded slope.

He really oughtn’t to have been so sure of all this, but he was. Something to do with the night, the mood and strangeness of it. Ghost moon overhead. Nearness to the spirit wood, beyond the margins of which men never went. That girl going out, for no reason that made sense,
just following the Cyngael prince. There was something at work tonight. You raided and fought long enough, survived so many different ways of dying, you learned to trust your senses, and this … feeling.

Bern hadn’t learned enough yet, else he’d not have been so easily taken in an alley. Thorkell grimaced, an expression creasing his features for the first time. Fool of a lad. It was a hard world they lived in. You couldn’t
afford
to be a fool.

The boy was making a start, though, had to acknowledge that. Everyone knew how you joined the mercenaries in Jormsvik. The
only
way you could join them. Thorkell looked down at the brown-haired, brown-bearded figure on the grass. A different man might have acknowledged pride.

Thorkell didn’t have time to linger, to ask how Bern had done any of this. Nor did he presume that his only son, awakening, would smile in delight and cry his father’s name aloud, and Ingavin’s in thankfulness.

Bern shouldn’t be long from waking. He would have to hope that was so, that this isolated place wouldn’t draw wolves or thieves in the next while. The boy had filled out across the chest, he saw. You could almost call him a big man. He still remembered carrying him, years ago. Shook his head at that. Weak thoughts, too soft. Men woke each morning, lay down each night, in a blood-soaked world. You needed to remember that. And he needed to walk back to the girl.

Jaddite now, or not, he murmured an ancient prayer, father’s blessing. Habit, nothing else: “Ingavin’s hammer, between you and all harm.”

He turned to go. Paused, and—berating himself even as he did—took from his belt-purse something he’d removed when he surrendered to the Cyngael for the second time in twenty-five years. He carried it now, instead of wearing
it. The hammer on a chain. You didn’t wear the symbols of the thunder god when you took the faith of Jad.

It was an entirely ordinary, unremarkable hammer. Thousands like it. Bern wouldn’t know it as anything unique, but he’d realize it was an Erling who had carried him here, and he’d go back to the ships with the warning that implied. He’d have some talking to do, to explain his survival when Stefa never came back, but Thorkell couldn’t help him with that. A boy became a man, had his own stony way to make on land and sea, like everyone else—then you died where you died, and found out what happened then.

Thorkell had killed an oar-companion tonight. Hadn’t meant to do that. Not truly a friend, Stefa, but they’d shared things, covered each other’s back in battle, slept on cold ground, close, for warmth in wind. You did that, raiding. Then you died where you died. An alley in Esferth for Stefa, pissing in the dark. He wondered if the dead man’s spirit was out here. Probably was. Blue moon shining.

He bent and looped the chain into his son’s fingers and closed them over the hammer, and then he went away along the stream, not looking back, covering ground towards where he’d seen the princess walking in her own folly.

There was a snatch of verse in his head as he went. One his wife used to sing, to all three children when they were young.

He put it out of his mind. Too soft for tonight, for any night.

He is coming. She knows it. Is waiting within the trees, across the stream. He is mortal and can
see
her. They have spoken under stars (no moons) on the night she took a soul for the queen. He has watched the Ride
go through their pool in the wood. Then dropped his iron blade and very nearly touched her by the trees on the slope above the farm. It has not left her, that moment, from then until now. No quietude, in wood, in mound, crossing water under stars with the music of the Ride all around.

She trembles, an aspen leaf, her hair violet, then a paler hue. She is far from home, one moon in the sky. A glowing at the wood’s edge, waiting.

I
ngavin and Thünir were many things, but they were soul-reapers before all else, and the ravens that followed them, the birds of the battlefield and the banners, were emblems of that.

So was the blood-eagle: a sacrifice and a message. A vanquished king or war-leader stripped naked under the holy sky, thrown on the ground, his face to the churned earth. If he wasn’t dead he would be restrained by strong warriors, or with ropes tied to pegs hammered into the earth, or both.

His back would be carved vertically with a long knife or an axe, the bloody opening pulled wide, his ribs cracked back on each side and his lungs drawn out through the opening thus made. They would be draped upon the exposed cage of his ribs: the folded wings of an eagle, blood-crimson, god offering.

It was said that Siggur Volganson, the Volgan, had been so precise and swift in performing the ritual that some of his victims remained alive for a time with their lungs exposed to the watching gods.

Ivarr had not yet been able to achieve this. In fairness, he’d had less opportunity than his grandfather had enjoyed during the years and seasons of the great raids. Times changed.

TIMES CHANGED
. Burgred of Denferth, viciously cursing himself for carelessness, nonetheless knew that none of
the other leaders at court or of the
fyrd
would have taken more than seven or eight riders to investigate the rumour of a ship, or ships, seen along the coast. He’d had five men, two of them new—using the ride south to assess them.

Three of those men were dead now. Assessment rendered meaningless. But
no one
was raiding the Anglcyn coast these days. How could he have expected what he’d found—or what had found his small party tonight? Aeldred had
burhs
all along the coast, watchtowers between them, a standing army, and—as of this summer—the beginnings of a proper fleet for the first time.

The Erlings themselves were different in this generation: settlers in the eastern lands, half of them (or something like that) were Jaddite now, trimming their sails to the winds of faith. Times changed, men changed. Those still roaming the seas in dragon-ships pursuing sanctuary treasures and ransom and slaves went to Ferrieres now, or east, where Burgred had no idea (and didn’t care) what they found.

The lands of King Aeldred were defended, that was what mattered. And if some Erlings remembered this king as a hunted fugitive in wintry swamplands … well, those same Erlings were humbly sending their household warriors or their sons with tribute to Esferth these days, and fearing Aeldred’s reprisals if they were late.

None of which unassailable truths was of any help to Burgred now.

It was night. Summer stars, ocean breeze, a waning blue moon. They had camped on open ground, less than a day’s ride from Esferth, between the
burh
of Drengest, where the new shipyard was, and the watchtower west of it. He could have reached either place, but he was training men, testing them. It was a mild, sweet night. Had been.

The two on guard had shouted their warnings properly. Thinking back, Burgred decided that he and his men had
surprised the Erling party as much as they’d been surprised themselves. Unfortunately, there were at least twenty Erlings—almost half a longship’s worth—and they were skilled fighters. Disturbingly so, in fact. Commands had been barked, registered, implemented in a night skirmish. It hadn’t taken him long to realize where these men were from, and to accept what life and ill fortune had doled out tonight.

He’d ordered his men to drop their weapons, though not before the two guards and one other of his company—Otho, who was a
good
man—lay dead. No great shame surrendering to a score of Jormsvik mercenaries mad enough to be ashore this near to Esferth. He had no idea
why
they were here: the mercenaries were far too pragmatic to offer themselves for raids as foolhardy as this one would be. Who would pay them enough to even consider it? And why?

It made too little sense. And it was not a puzzle worth having more men die while he tried to solve it. Best surrender, much as it burned to do that, let them sell him back to Aeldred for silver and safe passage to wherever they were really going.

“We yield ourselves!” he cried loudly, and dropped his sword on the moonlit grass. They would understand him. The two languages borrowed from each other, and the older Jormsvik raiders would have been here many times in their youth. “You have been foolish beyond all credit to come here, but sometimes folly is rewarded, for Jad works in ways we do not understand.”

The largest of the Erlings—eyes behind a helm—grinned and spat. “Jad, you say? I think not. Your name?” he rasped. He already knew what this was about.

No reason to hide it. Indeed, the whole point was his name, and what it was worth. It would save his life, and the lives of his three surviving men. These were mercenaries.
“I am Burgred, Earl of Denferth,” he said. “Captain of King Aeldred’s
fyrd
and his Household Guard.”

“Hah!” roared the big man in front of him. Laughter and shouts from the others, raucous and triumphant, unable to believe their good fortune. They knew him. Of course they knew him. And experienced men would also know that Aeldred would pay to have him back. Burgred cursed again, under his breath.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, angrily. “Do you not know how little you can win along this coast now? When did the men of Jormsvik begin selling themselves for small coin and certain battle?”

He had spent his entire life, it seemed, fighting them and studying them. He was aware of a hesitation.

“We were told Drengest could be taken,” the man in front of him said, finally.