The Last Light of the Sun (57 page)

He looked at the other man again. “You suggested it? Did me a service, then. This has been the worst voyage.”

“I know. I was with Aeldred when they butchered you. It’s because of Ragnarson. Ill luck in the man. You really killed him?”

“On my ship.”

“Should have turned home, then. Didn’t someone tell you to? A good leader cuts losses before they grow.”

Brand blinked, then swore. “Who in Thünir’s name are you to tell me what a leader does? I’m a Jormsvik captain. Who are you?”

“Thorkell Einarson.”

Only that, and Brand knew. Of course he knew. Strangeness piled on strangeness. Red Thorkell. This one was in the songs; had rowed with Siggur, his companion, one of those on the Ferrieres raid when they’d found the sword. The sword Brand had come to regain.

Well,
that
wasn’t about to happen.

A weaker man, he told himself, would have been disturbed by this revelation. Brand wasn’t. He refused to make too much of it. All that history just meant the other man was older than he’d guessed. Good, again.

“Will they honour the terms?” he asked, not commenting on the name or showing any reaction. It was on his mind, though: how could it
not
be?

“The Cyngael? They’re angry. Have been since the raid here. You kill anyone on the way?”

“No one. Oh. Well, one. Woodcutter.”

The red-beard shrugged again. “One isn’t so much.”

Brand spat, cleared his throat. “We didn’t know how to get here. I told you, a terrible raid. Worst since a time in Karch.” That was deliberately told. Let this one know Brand Leofson had been about, too.
Something occurred to him. “You were the Volgan’s oarmate. What are you doing fighting for the pig who killed him?”

“A good question. Not the place to answer it.”

Brand snorted. “You think we’ll find a better place?”

“No.”

Einarson had courteously moved down and to one side, so they stood level on the slope, facing each other. He lifted his blade, pointing to the sky in salute. The conversation, evidently, was over. An arrogant bastard. A pleasure to kill him.

“I’m going to slice you apart,” Brand said—Hoddson’s words a moment ago, he liked the ring of them. He returned the salute.

Einarson seemed unruffled. Brand needed more from him. He was trying to work himself into anger, the fury that had him fighting his best.

“You aren’t good enough,” Thorkell Einarson said.

That
would help. “Oh? Want to see, old man?”

“I suppose I’m about to. You’ve charged your companions with what you want done with your body? Have you a request of me?”

Courtesy again, Erling ritual. He was doing everything properly, and Brand was beginning to hate him. It was useful. He shook his head. “I am ready for what comes. Ingavin watch now and watch over me. Who guards your soul, Einarson? The Jaddite god?”

“Another good question.” The red-haired man hesitated for the first time, then smiled, a curious expression. “No. Habits die hard, after all.” With that same odd look on his face he said, exactly as Brand had done, “I am ready for what comes. Ingavin watch now and watch over me.”

And whatever all that meant, Brand didn’t know, nor did he care. Someone had to start. You could kill a
man at the start. They were only wearing leather. He feinted a thrust and cut low on his backhand. If you took someone in the leg he was finished. A favourite attack, done with power. Blocked. It began.

WHAT HE KNEW
of fighting he knew from his father. A handful of lessons as he’d grown through boyhood, offered irregularly, without notice or warning. At least twice when Thorkell had been suffering the after-effects of stumbling at dawn out of a tavern. He’d grab swords, helms, gloves, order his son to follow him outside. Something in the way of a father’s duty, was the sense of it. There were things Bern needed to know. Thorkell told them, or showed them, briskly, not lingering to amplify, then had Bern take the weapons and armour back in while he carried on himself with whatever else needed tending to on a given day. A son’s footwork as important—not necessarily more so—as a milk goat’s bad foot.

You noted your opponent’s weapon, looked to see if he had more than one, studied the ground, the sun, kept your own blade clean, had at least one knife on you always, because there were times when weapons could clash and shatter. If you were very strong you could use a hammer or an axe, but they were better in battle, not individual combat, and Bern was unlikely to grow big enough for them. He’d do better to be aware of that, work at being quick. You kept your feet moving, always, his father had said.

Nothing ever in the tone, Bern remembered, beyond simple observation. And observation, simple or otherwise, was the underlying note to all the terse words spoken. Bern had killed a Jormsvik captain with these injunctions in his head: judging the other man to be hot-tempered, overconfident, too full of himself for
caution, riding a less-sure horse than Gyllir. Bern was a rider, Gyllir his advantage. You watched the other, his father had said, learned what you could, either before or while you fought.

Bern watched. The late-day light was uncannily clear after the mist of the mornings through which they’d come to this ending. The two men circling each other, engaging, breaking to circle again, were etched by brilliant light. Nothing shrouded now. You could see every movement, every gesture and flex.

His father was years removed from fighting days, had the bad shoulder (his mother used to rub liniment into it at night) and a hip that nothing really helped in wet weather. Brand was harder, still a raider, quicker than such a big man ought to be, but had the bad, covered eye.

He also, Bern realized, after the two men had exchanged half a dozen clashes and withdrawals, did something when he tried a certain attack. Bern was watching; saw it. His father had taught him how. His father was fighting for his life. Bern felt unsteady, light-headed. Couldn’t do anything about that.

“JAD’S BLOOD!
He’s too old to keep parrying. He needs to win quickly!”

Brynn was at Alun’s side, swearing and exclaiming in a steady, ferocious undertone, his own body twisting with the two men fighting below. Alun didn’t see either man faltering yet, or any obvious opportunities to end it quickly. Thorkell was mostly retreating, trying to keep from being forced below the other man on the slope. The Jormsvik leader was very fast, and Alun was putting real effort into resisting a deeply private, shaming awareness of relief: he wasn’t at all sure he could have matched this man. In fact—

“Hah! Again! See it?
See
? Because of the eye!”

“What?” Alun glanced quickly at Brynn.

“Turns his head left before he cuts on the backhand. To follow his line. He gives it away! Holy god of the sun, Thorkell
has
to see that!”

Alun hadn’t noticed it. He narrowed his gaze to concentrate, watch for what Brynn had said, but in that same moment he began to feel something strange: a pulsing, a presence, inexplicable, even painful, inside his head. He tried to thrust it away, attend to the fight, the details of it.
Green
kept impinging, though, the colour green; and it wasn’t the grass or the leaves.

RHIANNON, WATCHING TWO MEN FIGHT,
was dealing with something so new to her she couldn’t identify it at first. It took her some moments to understand that what she was contending with was rage. A fury white as waves in storm, black as a piled-up thundercloud, no shading to it, no nuance at all. Anger, consuming her. Her hands were clenched. She could kill. It was in her: she wanted to kill someone right now.

“We should not have come,” her mother said, softly. “We make them weaker.”

Not
what she wanted to hear. “He’d have taken the fight himself if you hadn’t been here.”

“They’d have stopped him,” Enid said.

“They’d have tried. You’re the only one who could. You know it.”

Her mother looked at her, seemed about to say something, but did not. They watched the men below. It was eerily clear and bright just now.

The men below. What, Rhiannon mer Brynn thought savagely, was a woman? What was her life? Even here in the Cyngael lands, celebrated—or notorious—for their womenfolk, what, really, could they ever hope to be or do at a time like this? A time that
mattered.

Easy enough, she thought bitterly, as swords clashed. They could watch, and wring their delicate hands, her mother and herself, but only if they first disobeyed clear and specific instructions to stay away and hide. Hide, hide! Or they could be targets for an attack, be violated, killed, or taken and sold as slaves, then mourned and exalted in song. Song, Rhiannon thought savagely. She could kill a singer, too.

Women were children till they first bled, then married to make children, and—if Jad was kind—their children would be boys who could farm and defend their land or go off to fight one day. There was a ten-year-old boy here with a small scythe.
A ten-year-old.

She stood by her mother, aware that Enid was still trembling (uncharacteristically) because she’d been so sure Brynn would fight and die here. There might be some pattern or purpose at work, that her mother had saved a red-bearded Erling’s life in the farmyard that night, claiming him, and now that man had taken Brynn’s fight upon himself.

There might be a pattern. Rhiannon didn’t care. Not right now. She wanted them all dead, these Erlings, here simply because they
could
come, in their longships with their swords and axes, because they exulted in killing and blood and death in battle so their gods would grant them yellow-haired maidens for eternity.

Rhiannon wished she had the powers of the Cyngael goddesses of old, the ones they were forbidden even to name since they’d embraced Jad here in the west. She wished she could invoke stone and oak, kill the raiders herself, leave bodies hacked in pieces on this grass. Let those yellow-haired maidens put them back together. If they wanted to.

She’d blood-eagle them. See if the so-fierce raiders of the sea came back here after
that.
Her mood of the long
summer was entirely gone, swept like fog before wind: that wistful, aching, sleepless sense that things had gone awry. They had, they had. But there was a lesson to be learned: love and longing were not what life in the northlands was about. She knew it now. She was seeing it. The world was too hard. You needed to become harder yourself.

She stood beside her mother, her face expressionless, showing no least hint of what was raging within her. You could look at Rhiannon, limned in that brilliant light, and see her as a dark-haired maiden of sorrows. She would kill you, if she could, for thinking that.

ANOTHER YOUNG WOMAN
, in Esferth far to the east, would have entirely understood these thoughts, sharing many, though with a different fire in her, and one she’d lived with all her life, no sudden discovery.

The bitterness of a woman’s lot, the helplessness with which you watched brothers and other men ride out to glory with iron at their sides, was nothing new for her. Judit, daughter of Aeldred, wanted battle and lordship and hardship as much as any Erling raider cresting waves in a dragon-ship, coming ashore in surf.

Instead, she was readying herself for her wedding this winter to a boy in Rheden. She was working, this day, with her mother and her ladies, embroidering. There were skills a highborn lady was expected to bring to her marriage house.

By contrast to both of these, King Aeldred’s younger daughter saw the world in a very different way, although this, too, had been suffering change, moment by moment, through these last, late days of summer.

Right now, with a pulsing pain behind her eyes and images impinging, erratic and uncontrollable like sparks from a fire, Kendra knew only that she needed
to find the Cyngael cleric again, to tell him something important.

He wasn’t at the royal chapel or the smaller one where he’d been before. She was in real distress. The sunlight, late in the day, forced her to screen her eyes. It occurred to her to wonder if this was what happened to her father when his fever took him, but she wasn’t warm or faint. Only hurting, and with a terrifying, impossible awareness of fighting in the west, and a sword in her mind, flashing and going, and coming again, over and over.

It was her brother who found Ceinion for her. Gareth, summoned by a messenger, had taken one frightened look at Kendra sitting on a bench in the small chapel (unable to go back into the light, just yet) and had gone running, shouting for others to join him in the search. He came back (she wasn’t sure how much time had passed) and led her by the elbow through the streets to the bright (too bright), airy room her father had had made for the clerics who were transcribing manuscripts for him. She’d kept her eyes closed, let Gareth guide her.

The king was there, among the working scribes, and Ceinion was with him, blessedly. Kendra walked in, one hand held by her brother, the other to her eyes, and she stopped, desperately unsure of how to proceed with her father here.

“Father. My lord high cleric.” She managed that much, then stopped.

Ceinion looked at her, stood quickly. Could be seen to make a decision of his own. “Prince Gareth, of a kindness will you have a servant bring the brown leather purse from my rooms? Your sister needs a remedy I can offer her.”

“I’ll get it myself,” said Gareth, and hurried out the door. Ceinion spoke a quiet word. The three scribes
stood up at their desks, bowed to the king, and went out past Kendra.

Her father was still here.

“My lady,” said Ceinion, “is this more of that matter of which we spoke before?”

She hesitated, in pain, in something more than pain. They burned witches, for heresy. She looked at her father. And heard Ceinion of Llywerth say, gravely, changing the way of things one more time, “There is no transgression here. Your royal father also knows the world of which you speak.”

Kendra’s mouth fell open. Aeldred had also stood, looking from one to the other of them. He was pale, but thoughtful, calm. Kendra felt as if she were going to fall down.