The Last Light of the Sun

He had to get to his sword. Dai screamed a warning, and then he did it again. Men sprang from pallets, roaring, seizing weapons. The double doors were thrust open, the first of their people hurtling into the night. Alun heard the cries of the Erlings, Brynn’s warband shouting in reply, saw their own men from Cadyr rushing out. But his own room, and his sword, were back along the corridor the other way. Terribly, the other way.

Alun ran for all he was worth, heart pounding, his brother’s voice in his ears, a fist of fear squeezing his heart.

When he got to the room, Gryffeth—who knew battle sounds as well as any of them—had already claimed his own blade and leather helm. He came forward, handed Alun his, wordlessly. Alun dropped the harp where they were; he unsheathed the sword, dropped the scabbard, too, pushed the helmet down on his head.

The woman with Gryffeth was not wordless, and was terrified.

“Dear Jad! There are no guards where we are. Come! Hurry!”

Alun and Gryffeth looked at each other. Nothing to be said. The heart could crack. They ran the other way, farther down the same dark hallway, the brown-haired girl beside them, her hand somehow in Alun’s, candle fallen away. Then north, skidding at the hall’s turning, up the far wing to the women’s rooms.

Away from the double doors, from the fighting in the farmyard. From Dai.

The girl pointed, breathing in gasps. They burst in. A woman screamed, then saw it was them. Covered her mouth with the back of a hand, backing up against a table. Alun took a fast look, sword out. Three women here, one of them Brynn’s daughter. Two rooms, a connecting door. He went straight across to the eastern window, which was, inexplicably, open. Moved to close the shutters, slide down the wooden bar.

The Erling hammer, descending, splintered wood, shattered the sill, barely missed breaking Alun’s extended arm like so much kindling. A woman screamed. Alun stabbed through the wreckage of the window, blindly into the dark. Heard a grunt of pain. Someone shouted a high warning; he twisted hard, a wracking movement, back and away. Horse hooves loomed, thrust for the splintered window frame, smashed it in—and then a man hurtled through and into the room.

Gryffeth went for him, swearing, had his thrust taken by a round shield, barely dodged the axe blow that followed. The women pressed back, screaming. Alun stepped up beside his cousin—then had to wheel back the other way as a second man came roaring through the window, hammer in hand. They’d figured it out, where the women were. Erlings. Here. Nightmare on a moonless night; a night made for an attack.

But what were they doing so far inland? Why here? It made no sense. This was not where the raids came.

Alun swung at the second man, had his sword blocked, wrenchingly. He was bleeding from the splintered wood, so was the Erling. He stepped back, shielding the women. Heard a clattering noise, boots behind him, and then longed-for words.

“Drop weapons! There are two of you, five of us, more coming.”

Alun threw a glance back, saw one of Brynn’s captains, a man almost as big as the Erlings. Jad be thanked for mercy, he thought. The captain had spoken Anglcyn, but slowly. It was close to the Erling tongue; he’d be understood.

“You may be ransomed,” Brynn’s man went on, “if someone cares enough for you. Touch the women and you die badly, and will wish you were dead before you are.”

A mistake, those words, Alun later thought.

Because, hearing them, the first man moved, cat-quick in a crowded room, and he seized Rhiannon mer Brynn—whose warning had been the one that had drawn Alun back from the window—and wrenched her away from the others. The Erling gripped her in front of him as a shield, her arm behind her back, twisted high, his axe gripped short, held to her throat. Alun caught his breath on a curse.

One of the other women dropped to her knees. The room was crowded with men now, smell of sweat and blood, mud and muck from the yard. They could hear the fighting outside, dogs barking frantically, the cattle lowing and shifting in their pen. Someone cried out, and then stopped.

“Ransom, you say?” the Erling grunted. He was yellow-bearded, wearing armour. Eyes beneath a metal helmet, the long nosepiece. “No. Not so. You drop weapons now or this one’s breast is cut off. You want to see? I don’t know who she is, but clothing is fine. Shall I cut?”

Brynn’s captain stepped forward.

“I said drop weapons!”

A silence, taut, straining. Alun’s mouth was dry, as if full of ashes. Dai was outside. Dai was outside. Had been there alone.

“Let him do it,” said Rhiannon, the daughter of Brynn ap Hywll. “Let him do it, then kill him for me.”

“No! Hear me,” Alun said quickly. “There are better than fifty fighting men here. You will not have so many for a raid. Your leader made a mistake. You are losing out there. Listen! There is nowhere for you to go. Choose your fate here.”

“Chose it when we took ship,” the man rasped. “Ingavin claims his warriors.”

“And his warriors kill women?”

“Cyngael whores, they do.”

One of the men behind Alun made a strangled sound. Rhiannon stood, the one arm twisted behind her back, the axe fretting at her throat. Fear in her eyes, Alun saw; none in her words.

“Then die for this Cyngael whore. Kill him, Siawn! Do it!”

The axe, gripped close to the blade, moved. A tear in the high-necked green gown, blood at her collarbone.

“Dearest Jad,” said the woman on her knees.

A heartbeat without movement, without breath. And then the other Erling, the second man in through the window, dropped his shield with a clatter.

“Leave her, Svein. I’ve been taken by them before.”

“Be a woman for the Cyngael, if you want!” the man named Svein snarled. “Ingavin waits for me! Drop weapons, or I cut her apart!”

Alun, looking at pale, wild eyes, hearing battle madness in the voice, laid down his sword, slowly.

There was blood on the girl. He saw her staring back at him. He was thinking of Dai, outside, that shouted warning before the hooves and fire. No weapon at all. His heart was crying and there was a need to kill and he was trying to find a space within himself to pray.

“Do the same,” he said to Gryffeth, without turning his head.

“Do not!” Rhiannon said, whispering it, but very clear.

Gryffeth looked at her and then at Alun, and then he dropped his blade.

“He will kill her,” said Alun to the men behind him, not looking back. His eyes were on the girl’s. “Let his fellows be defeated outside, and then we will settle with these two. They have nowhere on Jad’s earth to go from here.”

“Then he will kill her,” said the man named Siawn, and he stepped forward, still with his sword. Death in his voice, and an old rage.

The axe moved again, another rip in the green, a second ribbon of blood against white skin. One of the women whimpered. Not the one being held, though she was biting her lip now.

They stayed like that, a moment as long as the one before Jad made the world. Then a hammer was thrown.

The yellow-bearded Erling was wearing his iron helmet or his head would have been pulped like a fruit by that blow. Even so, the sound of the impact was sickening at close range in a crowded room. The man crumpled like a child’s doll stuffed with straw; dead before his body, disjointed and splayed, hit the floor. The axe fell, harmlessly.

It seemed to Alun that no one in the room breathed for several moments. Extreme violence could do that, he thought. This wasn’t a battlefield. They were too close together. Such things should happen … outdoors, not in women’s chambers.

The woman in whose chambers they were standing remained where she’d been held, motionless. The flying hammer had passed near enough to brush her hair. Both arms were at her sides now, and no one was holding an axe to her. Alun could see two streams of blood on her gown, the cuts at throat and collarbone. He watched her draw one slow breath. Her hands were shaking. No other sign. Death had touched her, and turned away. One might tremble a little.

He turned away, to the Erling who had thrown that hammer. Reddish beard streaked with grey; long hair spilling from the helmet bowl. Not a young man. His throw, the slightest bit awry, would have killed Brynn’s daughter, crushing her skull. The man looked around at all of them, then held out empty hands.

“All men are fools,” he said in Anglcyn. They could make it out. “The gods gave us little wisdom, some less than others. That man, Svein, angered me, I confess. We all go to our gods, one way or another. Little profit in hurrying there. He’d have killed the girl, and both of us. Foolish. I will not bring a great deal in ransom, but I do yield me, to you both and to the lady.” He looked from Alun to Siawn behind him, and then to Rhiannon mer Brynn.

“Shall I kill him, my lady?” said Siawn grimly. You could hear the wish in him.

“Yes,” said the brown-haired woman, still on her knees. The third woman, Alun saw, had just been sick, on the far side of the room.