The Last Light of the Sun (55 page)

She’d have gone quietly back along her own path, walking home with the morning milk, if she hadn’t heard voices. She didn’t understand the words—which was the point, of course. She would have, if these men had been from Llywerth. They weren’t. They were speaking Erling, and Meiri’s sister, fiercely loved, had been slain and defiled by one of them at the beginning of summer.

She didn’t go home. Anger can channel fear sometimes, master it. Meiri knew this land as she knew the tangles of her own brown hair. She crouched down, leaving the milk behind in the path (a fox found it later in the day, drank its fill). In the greyness she moved towards the voices and the trail. After a bit she went on her belly among the grass and scrub and wriggled closer. She didn’t know anything about how Erlings (or anyone else) arranged themselves on a march-and-ride, so it was good fortune more than anything else that no outriders were sweeping the scrub-land north of the trail. Much of what happens in a life turns on good fortune or bad, which unsettles as much as it does anything else.

What she saw, peering through brambles, was a company of Erlings, some horsed, more of them afoot, stopped to talk, barely visible in the darkness and not-yet-lifted fog. What she heard was “Brynnfell,” twice, unmistakably, the name springing at her from snapped and snarled words that made no sense at all, over the hammering of her blood.

She knew what she needed to know. She started to wriggle backwards on knees and elbows. Heard something behind her. Froze where she was, not breathing. She didn’t pray. Ought to have, of course, but was too bone-frightened.

The lone horseman continued moving, passing just behind where she lay. She heard him cut down beyond the bushes she’d been peering through and rejoin the company on the road. Any raiding party had outriders, especially in hostile country where you weren’t sure of your way. A dog would have found her, but the Erlings had no dogs.

Meirion fought a desire to stay where she was, motionless, forever, or until they went away. She heard the riders dismount. The river was close here, just to the south. They might be stopping for water and food.

She wanted that.

Listening carefully, behind her as well now, she crawled backwards, regained her own path. Left the milk where it was and began to run. She knew where these raiders were going and what needed to be done. She wasn’t certain if the men in the fields would listen to her. She was prepared to kill someone to make them do so.

She didn’t have to. Sixteen farmers and farmhands, and ten-year-old Derwyn ap Hwyth, who never let himself be left behind, set off before the sun was fully up, running east to Brynnfell, taking the old track. That one stopped at their forest. It was a known and tamed wood, though, source of kindling and building logs, and there was a trail that would bring them out, eventually, near Brynn ap Hywll’s farm.

Meirion’s father, whose bad leg meant he couldn’t keep up, took the one horse in the village and went north to Penavy. Found twelve men working by there. Said what needed to be said. They, too, went running, straight from the harvest fields, seizing whatever came to hand that was sharp and could be carried for a day and a night at speed.

Almost thirty men. Meirion’s response. Not trained fighters, but hardy, knowing the land, and filled—each
one of them—with anger bright and cold as a winter sun. This wasn’t a vast invading fleet of dragon-prows from Erling lands. This was a raid, skulking through their land. They would fear the northmen, always, but they would not run from them.

It was crippled Ryce’s daughter, his surviving daughter, who had come upon the raiders and carried—like a queen of legend—needful tidings back of where they were bound. A woman of the Cyngael, worthy of song. And they all knew, in the lands and villages around, what had been done to her sister.

They would reach Brynnfell half a day before the Erlings did.

The afternoon of the day she saw the raiders, Meirion—in a frenzy born of waiting—took Elyn’s pallet apart. She began to carry the straw and bedding up the tor. Her mother and the other women saw what she was doing and set themselves to help, gathering wood, arranging it on the flat summit. All of them working, women walking up and down the hill. Late in the day, the sun westering and the last crescent of the blue moon rising (no moons at all tomorrow), they lit a bonfire there for Elyn. Only a girl. No one important at all, by any measure you might ever think to use.

Bern could not shake a premonition, death hovering like some dark bird, one of Ingavin’s ravens, waiting.

Fog among encroaching hills. Sounds muffled, vision limited. Even when day broke and the mist lifted, that sense of oppression, of a waiting stillness in the land, lingered. He felt they were being watched. They probably were, though they saw no one. This was a strange land, Bern thought, different from any he’d known, and they were moving away from the sea. He had no illusions of
being prophetic, of any kind of truesight or knowing. He told himself this was no more than apprehension. He’d never been in a battle, and they were heading towards one.

But it wasn’t fear. It really wasn’t. He had memories of fear. The night before his Jormsvik fight he’d lain beside a prostitute, hadn’t slept at all, listened to her untroubled breathing. He’d been quite certain it was the last night he’d know. Fear had been within him then; there was something different now. He was wrapped in a sense of strangeness, something unknown. Fog in these hills and the nature of the lives men lived. His father entangled in it, much as he might want to deny that.

Denial would be a lie, simple as that. Thorkell had
told
him not to let them sail to the Cyngael lands. Brand had
killed
the last of the Volgans for his deception, yet here they were now, on the quest Ivarr had tried to deceive them into taking on.

Brand One-eye and the other leaders had seized upon Ivarr’s idea: vengeance and the Volgan’s sword. A way out of humiliation. So they were doing what he’d wanted them to do, even though they’d killed him for it and tossed him to the sea. It could make you feel things had gone awry.

Brand had spoken of it calmly enough, sailing west and then north with the wind to where they’d beached. How this was a bad time for them to suffer defeat. (Was there a
good
time, Bern had wondered.) How claiming the sword would be a triumph, hewn brilliantly out of failure and defeat. A talisman against ambitious men in the north who thought they could be king and impose their will upon the Jormsvikings.

Bern wasn’t so sure. It seemed to him that these named reasons were covering something else. That Brand Leofson was wishing he’d thought of Ivarr’s quest himself, that what the one-eyed man was seeing, in his mind, was glory.

That would be fair enough, ordinarily. What else, as the skalds sang to harp by hearth fire all winter, was there for the brave to seek?
Wealth dies with a man, his name lives ever.

Ingavin’s halls were for warriors. Ripe, pliant maidens with red lips and yellow hair did not offer mead (and themselves) to farmers and smiths at the golden tables of the gods.

But his father had told them not to come this way.

They weren’t even certain where they were going in these hills and narrow valleys. Brand and Carsten had known the harbour from years before, but neither of them, nor Garr Hoddson, had ever been as far inland as Brynnfell. They’d started east, thirty riders, sixty on foot, fifty left to the ships to get them offshore if they were found. Scarcely enough for that, Bern had thought, but he was one of the youngest here, what did he know?

Carsten had urged a fast out-and-back raid with just the horsemen, since they were only going to kill one man and find one thing. Brand and Garr had disagreed. Ap Hywll’s farm would be defended. They’d have to go more slowly, with men on foot, a larger force. Bern, on Gyllir, was one of the horsemen sweeping both sides of the path (just a track, really) as they went.

They saw no one. A good thing, you might have said, preserving their secrecy—but Bern couldn’t shake the feeling that others were seeing
them.
They didn’t belong here—somehow the land would know it—and the sea, their real haven, was farther away every moment.

On the second day, going through a range of hills in a drizzle of rain, one of the outriders had found a woodcutter and brought him back, hands tied behind him, running before the horse at sword-point.

The man was small, dark, raggedly clothed. His teeth were rotting. He didn’t speak Erling; none of them spoke
Cyngael. They hadn’t
expected
to be here, hadn’t chosen any of those who did know the tongue. This was supposed to have been a raid on undefended Anglcyn
burhs.
That’s what Ivarr had paid them for.

They tried talking to the woodcutter in Anglcyn, which should have been close enough. The man didn’t know that language either. He’d soiled himself in terror, Bern saw.

Brand, impatient, edgy, angry now, had drawn his sword, seized the man’s left arm and sliced his hand off at the wrist. The woodcutter, hair plastered with rain, drenched in his sweat and stink, had stared blankly at the stump of his wrist.

“Brynnfell!” Brand had roared in the falling rain. “Brynnfell! Where?”

The woodcutter had looked up at him a moment, vacant-eyed, then fainted dead away. Brand had sworn savagely, spat, looked around as if for someone to blame. Garr, scowling, put a sword through the Cyngael where he lay. They’d moved on. The rain continued to fall.

Bern’s feeling of oppression had begun to grow then. They’d travelled through the evening, stopping only briefly at night. They heard animals moving, owls overhead and in the trees on the slopes around, saw nothing at all. Before morning they’d come out of the hills into more open lowlands though the mist was still there.

There would be farms here, but Brand thought Brynn’s was another day away, at least. He was going by half-remembered stories. They made a stop before dawn, doled out provisions, drank at the river just south of them, moved on as the sun came up.

Bern thought of his father, mending a barn door on Rabady, a sunset hour. Glory, it occurred to him, might come at a heavy price. It might not be the thing for every man.

He leaned forward, patted Gyllir on the neck. They continued east, a forest appearing north of them, the river murmuring south, running beside their path and then turning away. Bern didn’t like the secretive, green-grey closeness of this land. The sun went down, the last crescent of the blue moon was in front of them, and then overhead, and then behind. They stopped for another meal, continued through the night. They were mercenaries of Jormsvik, could do without sleep for a night or two to gain the advantages of surprise and fear. Speed was the essence of a raid: you landed, struck, left death and terror, took what you wanted and were gone. If you couldn’t do that you didn’t belong, you shouldn’t be on the dragon-ships, you were as soft as those you came to kill.

You might as well be a farmer or a smith.

It was a brighter morning, at least. They seemed to have left the mists behind. They went on.

Late in the day, with a breeze and white clouds overhead, they were met by Brynn ap Hywll and a company of men at a place where they were moving up a slope and the Cyngael were waiting above them. Not soft, not surprised, or afraid.

Looking up, Bern saw his father there.

ALUN DIDN’T SEE IVARR RAGNARSON
. The sun was behind the Erlings, forcing him to squint. Brynn had taken the higher ground, but the light might become a problem. The numbers were close, and they had twenty men in reserve, hidden on either side of the slope. The Erlings had horsemen, twenty-five or so, he guessed. They weren’t the best riders in the world, but horses made a difference. And these were Jormsvikings they were about to face, with a company that was mostly farm labourers.

It was better than it might have been, but it wasn’t good.

The Erlings had stopped at first sight of them. Alun’s instinct would have been to charge while the horses were halted, use the downslope to effect, but Brynn had given orders to wait. Alun wasn’t sure why.

He found out, soon enough. Ap Hywll called out, the big voice carrying down the slope, “Hear me! You have made a mistake. You will not get home. Your ships will be taken before you return to them. We had warning of your coming.” He was speaking in Anglcyn.

“That is a lie!” A one-eyed man, easily as big as Brynn, moved his horse forward. Battles began this way in the tales, Alun thought. Challenge, counter-challenge. Speeches for the harpers. This wasn’t a tale. He was still scanning the Erlings for the man he needed to kill.

Brynn had the same thought, it seemed. “You know it is true, or we wouldn’t be here with more men than you have. Surrender Ivarr Ragnarson and give hostages and you’ll sail alive from these shores.”

“I shit upon that!” the big man shouted. And then, “Ragnarson’s dead, anyhow.”

Alun blinked. He looked at Thorkell Einarson, beside him. The red-bearded Erling was staring at the opposing forces. His own people.

“How so?” Brynn cried. “How is he dead?”

“By my blade at sea, for deceiving us.”

Amazingly, Brynn ap Hywll threw his head back and laughed. The sound was startling, utterly unexpected. No one spoke, or moved. Brynn controlled himself. “Then what in Jad’s name are you doing here?”

“Come to kill you,” the other man said. His face had reddened at the laughter. “Are you ready to find your god?”

A silence. Late afternoon, late summer. Late in life, really, for both of the men speaking now.

“I’ve been ready a long time,” said Brynn, gravely. “I don’t need a hundred men to go with me. Tell me your name.”

“Brand Leofson, of Jormsvik.”

“You lead this company?”

“I do.”

“They accept that?”

“What does that mean?”

“They will follow orders you give?”

“Kill any man who doesn’t.”

“Of course you will. Very well. You leave two ships to us, twenty hostages of our choosing, and all your weapons. The rest of you will be allowed to go. I will send a rider to Llywerth and another to Prince Owyn in Cadyr—they will let you leave. I cannot speak to what will happen when you sail past the Anglcyn coast.”