The Last Light of the Sun. Guy Gavriel Kay

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      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.

      “No,” said Rhiannon. Her face was bone-white. She still hadn’t moved. “He’s yielded. Saved my life.”

      “And what do you think he would have done if there’d been more of them here?” the man named Siawn asked harshly. “Or fewer of us in the house tonight, by Jad’s mercy? Do you think you’d still be clothed, and standing?” Alun had had the same thought.

      They were speaking Cyngael. The Erling looked from one of them to the other, then he chuckled, and answered in their own language, heavily accented. He had been raiding here before; he’d said as much.

      “She would have been claimed by Mikkel, who is the only reason we are so far from the ships. Or by his brother, which would have been worse. They’d have stripped her and taken her, in front of all of us, I imagine.” He looked at Alun. “Then they’d have found a bad way to kill her.”

      “Why? Why that? She’s … just a woman.” Alun needed to leave, but also needed to understand. And another part of him was afraid to go. The world, his life, might change forever when he went outside. As long as he was here, in this room …

      “This is the house of Brynn ap Hywll,” said the Erling. “Our guide told us that.”

      “And so?” Alun asked. They’d had a guide. He registered that. Knew the Arberthi would, as well.

      Rhiannon was breathing carefully, he saw. Not looking at anyone. Had never once screamed, he thought, only that one warning to him, when the horse smashed the window.

      The Erling took off his iron helmet. His red hair was plastered to his skull, hung limply to his shoulders. He had a battered, broken-nosed face. “Mikkel Ragnarson leads this raid, with his brother. One purpose only, though I did try to change his mind for those of us who came for our own sakes, not his. He is the son of Ragnar Siggurson, and grandson of Siggur, the one we named the Volgan. This is vengeance.”

      “Oh, Jad!” cried the man named Siawn. “Oh, Jad and all the Blessed Victims! Brynn was outside when they came! Let’s go!”

      Alun had already picked up his sword, had turned, twisted through the others, was flying as fast as he could down the corridor for the double doors. Siawn’s desperate cry came from behind him.

      Brynn ap Hywll hadn’t been the only one outside.

      He hadn’t killed anyone yet, the thought came. A need was rising, with his terror.

      TERROR WENT AWAY like smoke on a wind as soon as he was out through the doors and saw what there was to see. Its passing left behind a kind of hollowness: a space not yet filled by anything. He had been quite certain, in fact, from the moment he’d heard Dai’s first cry, but there was knowing, and knowing.

      The attack was over. There hadn’t been enough of the Erlings to cope with Brynn’s warband here and their own Cadyri, even with the element of surprise. It was obviously to have been a raid on an isolated farmhouse—a large, specifically chosen farmhouse, but even so, this had been meant to kill Brynn ap Hywll, not meet his gathered force. Someone had erred, or had very bad luck. He’d said that himself, inside. Before he’d come running out into the yard to see the body lying here not far from the open doors. Not far at all.

      He stopped running. Others were moving, all around him. They seemed oddly distant, vague, blurred somehow. He stood very still, and then, with an effort that took a great deal out of him, as though his body had become extremely heavy, Alun went forward again.

      Dai hadn’t had anything but the knife in his belt when he’d gone out, but there was an Erling sword in his hand now. He was face down in the grass and mud, a dead raider beside him. Alun went over to that place, where he lay, and he knelt in the mud and put down his own blade, and took off his helmet and set it down, and then, after another moment, he turned his brother over and looked at him.

      Not cheap, the selling of his life, the “Lament for Seisyth” went. The one the bards sang, at one point or another, in the halls of all three provinces during those winter nights when men longed for spring’s quickening and the blood СКАЧАТЬ