Read The Last Light of the Sun Online
Authors: Guy Gavriel Kay
Sitting in that wood that lay like a locked barrier between Cyngael lands and Anglcyn, awake while two young men slept, he did find himself recalling—unexpectedly—an evening long ago. A summer’s twilight, mild as a maiden. The boy—eight summers old, ten?—
had come out with him while he repaired a door on the barn. Bern had carried his father’s tools, Thorkell seemed to remember, had been amusingly proud to do so. He’d fixed the door then they’d walked somewhere—he didn’t remember where, the boundaries of their land—and for some reason he’d told Bern the story of the raid when the Anglcyn royal guard had trapped them too far from the sea.
He really didn’t tell many of the old tales. Maybe that’s why the evening was with him. The scent of the summer flowers, a breeze, the rock—he remembered now, he’d been leaning against the rock at their northern boundary, the boy looking up at him as he listened, so intent it could make you smile. One evening, one story. They’d walked back to the house, after. No more to it than that. Bern wouldn’t even recall the evening, he knew. Nothing of any meaning had taken place.
Bern was bearded and grown. Their land was gone; an exile’s house always went to someone else. You could say the boy had made his own choice, but you could also say Thorkell had taken choices away from him, put him in a circumstance where a poisonous serpent like Ivarr Ragnarson might think through whose son this was and take vengeance for what had happened at Brynnfell. You could say his father had put him on that branching path.
Even so, you might even find a reason to chuckle about all of this tonight, if that was the way your humour worked. All you needed to do was think about it. Consider the three of them in this wood. Alun ab Owyn was really here, more than a little maddened, because of a dead brother. Athelbert had come because of his father—the need to make
proof
of himself in Aeldred’s eyes and his own. And Thorkell Einarson, exiled from Rabady, was—truthfully—in this forest for his son.
Someone should make a song of it,
he thought, shaking his head. He spat into the darkness. He was too tired to laugh, but felt like it, a little.
A small sound. The grey dog had lifted his head, seemed to be watching him. He really was weary, but it almost seemed as if the dog were tracking his thoughts. An unsettling animal, more to it than you’d expect.
He had no idea which way the Jormsvik ships were going, none of them did. This desperate, foolish journey might be entirely unnecessary. You had to come to terms with that. You could be dying for no reason at all. Well, what of that? Reason or no reason, you were just as dead. He’d already lived longer than he’d expected to.
He heard a different sound.
The dog again; Cafall had risen, was standing rigidly, head lifted. Thorkell blinked in surprise. Then the animal whimpered.
And that sound, from that source, frightened him beyond words. He scrambled to his feet. His heart was pounding even before he, too, caught the smell.
That smell first, then sounds, he never saw a thing. The other two men rose, jerked from sleep at the first loud crashing, as if pulled upright like toys on a string. Athelbert began swearing; both unsheathed their swords.
None of them could see anything at all. It was black beyond power of sight to penetrate, stars and moon blocked by the encircling trees and their green-black summer leaves. The pool beside them dark, utterly still.
Such pools, Thorkell thought, rather too late, were where the creatures that ruled the night came to drink, or hunt.
“Jad’s holy blood,” whispered Athelbert, “what is that?”
Thorkell, had he been less afraid, might have made the easy, profane jest. Because it
was
blood they smelled. And flesh: pungent, rotting, like a kill left in the sun. A smell
of earth, too, underneath, heavy, loamy, an animal odour with all of these.
Another sound, sharp in the black, something cracking: a small tree, a branch. Athelbert swore again. Alun had not yet spoken. The dog whimpered again, and Thorkell’s hand on his hammer began to shake. One of the horses tossed its head and whinnied loudly. No secret to their presence now, if ever there had been.
“Stand close,” he snapped, under his breath, though there was hardly a reason to be quiet now.
The other two came over. Alun still had his sword out. Athelbert sheathed his now, took his bow, notched an arrow. There was nothing to be seen, nowhere to shoot. Something fell heavily, north of them. Whatever this was, it was large enough to knock over trees.
And it was in that moment that Thorkell had an image burst within his mind and lodge there, as if rooted. His jaw clenched, to stop himself from crying out.
He had been a fighter almost all his life, had seen brain matter and entrails spilled to lie slippery on sodden ground, had watched a woman’s face burn away, melting to bone. He’d seen blood-eaglings, a Karchite hostage torn apart between whipped horses, and never flinched, even when he was sober. These were the northlands, life was what it was. Hard things happened. But his hands were trembling now like an old man’s. He actually wondered if he was going to fall. He thought of his grandmother, these long years dead, who had known of such things as the creature out there in the night must be, perhaps even its name.
“Ingavin’s blind eye! Kneel!” he rasped, the words forming themselves, forced from him. But when he looked over he saw that the other two were already kneeling on that dark ground by the pool. The smell from beyond the glade was overpowering, you could gag or
retch; Thorkell apprehended something hideous and immense, ancient, not to be in any way confronted by three men, frail with mortality, in a place where they should not be.
In terror then, weariness entirely gone, Thorkell looked at the shapes of the two men kneeling beside him, and he made a decision, a choice, took a path. The gods called you to themselves—wherever and whatever the gods might be—as it pleased them to do so. Men lived and died, knowing this.
He stayed on his feet.
IN ALL OF US
, fear and memory interweave in complex, changing ways. Sometimes it is the thing unseen that will linger and appall long afterwards. Sliding into dreams from the blurred borders of awareness, or emerging, perhaps, when we stand alone, on first waking, at the fence of a farmyard or the perimeter of an encampment in that misty hour when the idea of morning is not quite incarnate in the east. Or it can assail us like a blow in the bright shimmer of a crowded market at midday. We do not ever move entirely beyond what has brought us mortal terror.
Alun would never know it, for it was not a thing that could be shared in words, but the image, the
aura
he had in his mind as he sank to his knees, was exactly what Thorkell Einarson apprehended within himself, and Athelbert was aware of the same thing in the blackness of that glade.
The smell, to Alun, was death. Decay, corruption, that which had been living and was no longer so, not for a long time, and yet was moving as it rotted, crashing in some vast bulk through trees. He had a sense of a creature larger than the woods should, by rights, have held. His heart hammered. Blessed Jad of Light, the god
behind the sun: was he not to defend his children from terrors such as this, whatever it was?
He was drenched in sweat. “I’m … I’m sorry,” he stammered to Athelbert beside him. “This is my doing, my mistake.”
“Pray,” was all the Anglcyn said.
Alun did so, choking on the rotting stench that filled the grove. He saw Cafall trembling, ahead of him. The horses were steadier, strangely. One had whinnied; now they stood transfixed, statues, as if unable to move or make a sound. And he remembered how he and a different horse had been immobilized like that inside another pool in another wood when the queen of the faeries had passed by.
This was, he knew, another creature from that spirit world. What else could it be? Massive, carrying the odour of decaying animal and death. Not like the faeries. This was … something beyond them. “Get
down!
” he said to Thorkell.
The Erling had not knelt, didn’t turn his head. Afterwards, Alun would have a thought about that, but in that moment whatever it was that bulked beyond the clearing roared aloud.
The trees shook. It seemed to Alun, ears and mind blasted by immensity of sound, that the stars above the forest had to be swinging in their courses like carried censers in a wind.
Almost deafened, his hands in helpless spasm, he stared into the blank night and waited for this death to claim them. Cafall was on his belly, flat to the ground. Beside the dog, still on his feet, Thorkell Einarson took his hammer and—moving slowly, as if in some dream Alun was having, or pushing into a gale—he laid the shaft across both his palms and he stepped
towards
the sound, and then he set the hammer down, carefully, an offering upon the grass.
Alun didn’t understand. He didn’t understand anything beyond terror and the awareness of their transgression and the engulfing power just out of sight.
Thorkell spoke then, in the Erling tongue and, his ears still ringing, Alun yet understood enough to hear him say, “We seek only passage, lord. Only that. Will harm no living creature of the wood, if it be thy will to grant us leave.” And then there was something else, spoken more softly, and Alun did not hear it.
There came a second roaring, even louder than the first, whether in reply or entirely oblivious to the feeble words of a mortal man, and it seemed to those in the glade as if that noise could flatten trees.
It was Athelbert, of the three of them, who thought he heard another thing within that sound, woven into it. He never put it into words, then or after, but what he sensed while he cowered, stuttering prayers in the gut-harrowing certainty of dying, was pain. Something older than he could even attempt to fathom. The downward reach of his soul didn’t go deep enough for that. He heard it, though, and had no idea why this was allowed.
There was no third roaring.
Alun had been waiting for it, instinctively, but then, in the silence, it occurred to him that triads, things in threes, were a shaping of bards, a mortal conceit, a way of the Cyngael, not a grounded truth of the spirit world.
He would take that, with some other things, away from that glade. For it seemed they were going to be allowed to leave. The silence continued. It grew, rippled, reclaimed the woods around. None of them moved. The stars did, ceaselessly, far above, and the blue moon was still rising, climbing the long track laid out for it in the sky. Time does not pause, for men or beasts, though it might seem to us to have stopped at some moments, or
we might wish it to do so at others, to suspend a shining, call back a gesture or a blow, or someone lost. The dog stood up.
THORKELL WAS STILL SHIVERING
. The odour was gone, that smell of maggot-eaten meat and fur and old blood. He felt sweat drying on his skin, cold in the night. He found himself eerily calm. He was thinking, in fact, of how many people he had killed in his raiding years. Another in an alley last night, once a shipmate. And of all of them, named or nameless, known, or seen only in the red moment his hammer or axe blade slew them, the one he so much wanted back, the moment he’d reclaim from time if he could, was Nikar Kjellson’s killing in the tavern at home a year ago.
In the otherworldly stillness of this glade, he could very nearly
see
himself going out through the low tavern door, stooping under the beam into a soft night, walking home under stars through a quiet town to his wife and son, instead of accepting one more flask of ale and a last round of wagering on the tumbled dice.
He’d have that one back, if the world were a different place.
It
was
different now, he thought, after what had just happened, but not in the way he needed it to be. It occurred to him, with something bordering astonishment, that he might weep. He rubbed a hand through his beard, drew it across his eyes, felt time grip him again, carrying them, small boats on a too-wide sea.
“Why are we alive?” Alun ab Owyn asked. His voice was rough. It was, Thorkell thought, the right question, the only one worth asking, and he had no answer.
“We didn’t matter enough to kill,” Athelbert said, surprising the other two. Thorkell looked over at him.
They were shapes here, only, all of them. “What did you say to it, at the end? When you put down the hammer?”
Thorkell was trying to decide what to answer when the dog growled, deep in its throat.
“Dear Jad,” Alun said.
Thorkell saw where he was pointing. He caught his breath. Something green was shimmering at the edge of their glade, beyond the pool; a human form, or nearly so. He looked the other way, quickly. A second one on their right, then a third, beside that one. No sound at all this time, just the pale green glowing of these figures. He turned back to the Cyngael prince.
“Do you know … ? Is this what you … ?” he began.
“No,” said Alun. And again, “No.” Flatly, no hope offered. “Cafall, hold!”
The dog was still growling, straining forward. The horses, Thorkell saw, were agitated now; there was a risk they might break free of their tethers, or hurt themselves trying.
The shapes, whatever they were, were about the height of a man, but the shimmer and glow of them, wavering, made their appearance hard to determine. He wouldn’t have seen
anything if
they hadn’t cast that faint green illumination. There were at least six of them, perhaps one or two more behind those ringing the glade. His hammer was on the grass, where he’d laid it down.
“Do I shoot?” said Athelbert.
“No!” Thorkell said quickly. “I swore that we’d harm no living thing.”
“So we wait till they … ?”
“We don’t know what this is,” Alun said.
“You imagine they’re bringing pillows for our weary heads?” Athelbert snapped.
“I have no idea what to imagine. I can only—”
A never-finished thought, that one. Speech can be rendered meaningless sometimes, the sought-after clarity of words. The fierce white light that burst from the pond, shattering darkness like glass, made all three of them throw hands before their eyes and cry aloud.