"The Last Light of the Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

SIX

When the king's fever took him in the night there was not enough love—or mercy—in the world to keep him from the fens and swamps again.

Drenched with sweat upon the royal bed (or pallet, if they were travelling), Aeldred of the Anglcyn would cry out in the dark, not even aware he was doing it, so piteously it hurt the hearts of those who loved him to know where he was going.

They all thought they knew where, and when, by now.

He was seeing his brother and his father die long years ago on Camburn Field by Raedhill. He was riding in icy rain (a winter campaign, the Erlings had surprised them), wounded, and shivering with the first of these fevers at the end of a brutal day's fighting; and he was king, as of twilight's coming down upon that headlong, fever-ravaged flight from the northmen who had broken them at last.

King of the Anglcyn, fleeing like an outlaw to hide in the marshes, the fyrd broken, lands overrun. His royal father hideously blood-eagled on the wet ground at Camburn in blood and rain. His brother cut in pieces there.

He didn't know about them until later. He did know it now, a late-summer night in Esferth so many years after, tossing in fever-dream, reliving the winter twilight when Jad had abandoned them for their sins. The blades and axes of the Erlings pursuing them in the wild dark, the northmen triumphantly crying the accursed names of Ingavin and Thünir like ravens on the rain wind…

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It is difficult to see with the rain lashing their faces, a heavy blanket of cloud, night coming swiftly now. Both good and bad: they will be harder to hunt down, but can easily miss their own way, not able to use torches. There are no roads here across moor and tor. There are eight of them with Aeldred, riding west. It is Osbert who is nearest the king (for he is the king now, last of his line), as he always is, and Osbert who shouts them to a jostling halt by the pitiful shelter of a handful of elms. They are soaked to the bone, chilled, most wounded, all exhausted, the wind lashing.

But Aeldred is shivering with fever, slumped forward on his horse, and he cannot speak in answer to his name. Osbert moves his mount nearer, reaches out, touches the king's brow… and recoils, for Aeldred is burning hot.

"He cannot ride," he says, leader of the household troop. "He must!" Burgred snaps, shouting it over the wind. "They will not be far behind us."

And Aeldred lifts his head, with a great effort, mumbles something they cannot hear. He points west with one hand, twitches his reins to move forward. He slips in the saddle as he does so. Osbert is near enough to hold him, their horses side by side.

The two thegns look at each other over the wracked body of the man who is now their king. "He will die," Osbert says. Aeldred, son of Gademar, is twenty years old, just.

The wind howls, rain slashes them like needles. It is very dark, they can hardly see each other. After a long moment, Burgred of Denferth wipes water from his face and nods. "Very well. The seven of us carry on, with the royal banner. We will try to be seen, draw them west. You find a farmhouse somewhere, and pray."

Osbert nods his head. "Meet in Beortferth, on the island itself, among the salt fens. When we can."

"The marshes are dangerous. You can find your way through?" "Maybe not. Have someone watch for us."

Burgred nods again, looks over at their boyhood friend, this other young man, slumped on his horse. Aeldred in battle was deadly, commanding the left flank of the fyrd with his house-hold guard. It was not the left flank that crumbled, not that it mattered now.

"Jad curse this day," Burgred says.

Then he turns and six men follow him across an open field in the dark, one carrying their banner, moving west again, but deliberately, not as quickly as before.

Osbert, son of Cuthwulf, left alone with his king, leans over and whispers, tenderly, "Dear heart, have you even a little left? We ride for shelter now, and should not have far to go."

He has no idea if this is true in fact, no clear sense of where they are, but if there are farms or houses they should be north of here. And when Aeldred, with another appalling effort, pushes himself upright and looks vaguely towards him and nods—shivering, still unable to speak—it is northward that Osbert turns, leaving the elms, heading into the wind.

He will remember the next hours all his life, though Aeldred, lost in that first-ever fever, never will. It grows colder, begins to snow. They are both wounded, sweat-drenched, inadequately clothed, and Aeldred is using the last reserves of an iron will just to stay on his horse. Osbert hears wolves on the wind; listens constantly for horses, knowing, if he hears them, that the Erlings have come and it is over. There are no lights to be seen: no charcoal burner by the woods, no farmers burning candles or a fire so late on a night like this. He strains his eyes into the dark and prays, as Burgred had said he should. The king's breathing is ragged. He can hear it, the rasp and draw. There is nothing to see but falling snow, and black woods to the west, and the bare, wintry fields through which they ride. A night fit for the world's end. Wolves around, and the Erling wolves hunting them in the dark.

And then, still shivering uncontrollably, Aeldred lifts his head. A moment he stays thus, looking at nothing, and then speaks his first clear words of the night's flight. "To the left," he says. "West of us, Jad help me." His head drops forward again. Snow falls, the wind blows, more a hammer than a knife.

Aeldred will claim, ever after, to have no recollection of saying those words. Osbert will say that when the king spoke he heard and felt the presence of the god.

Unquestioningly, he turns west, guiding Aeldred's horse with one hand now, to stay beside his own. Wind on their right, pushing them south. Osbert's hands are frozen, he can scarcely feel the reins he holds, his own or the king's. He sees blackness ahead, a forest. They cannot ride into that.

And then there is the hut. Directly in front of them, close to the trees, in their very path. He would have ridden north, right past it. It takes him a moment to understand what he is seeing, for his weariness is great, and then Osbert begins to weep, helplessly, and his hands tremble.

Holy Jad has not, after all, abandoned them to the dark.

They dare not light a fire. The horses have been hidden out of sight in the woods, tied to the same tree, to keep each other warm. The snow is shifting and blowing; there will be no tracks. There can be no signs of their passage near the house. The Erlings are no strangers to snow and icy winds. Their berserkirs and wolf-raiders flourish in this weather, wrapped in their animal skins, eyes not human until the fury leaves them. They will be out there, in the wind, hunting, for the northmen know by now that one of the line of Athelbert left Camburn Field alive. In some ways it ought not to matter. With a land taken and overrun, an army shattered, what can a king matter, alone?

But in other ways, it means the world, it could mean the world, and they will want Aeldred killed, in a manner as vicious as they can devise. So there is no fire in the swineherd's house where a terrified man and his wife, awakened by a pounding on their door in the wild night, have abandoned a narrow bed to pile threadbare blankets and rags and straw upon the shivering, burning man who—they have been told—is their king under holy Jad.

Whether it is the relative stillness within these thin walls, out of the howling wind, or some portent-laden deepening of his sickness (Osbert is no leech, he does not know), the king begins to cry out on the swineherd's bed, shouting names at first, then a hoarse rallying cry, some words in ancient Trakesian, and then in the Rhodian tongue of the holy books—for Aeldred is a learned man and has been to Rhodias itself.

But his shouting might kill them tonight.

So in the darkness and the cold, Osbert, son of Cuthwulf, lies down beside his friend and begins whispering to him as one might murmur to a lover or a child, and each time the king draws a wracked breath to cry out in oblivious agony, his friend clamps a bloodstained hand over his mouth and stifles the sound, again and again, weeping as he does so, for the pity of it.

Then they do hear cries, from outside in the white night, and it seems to Osbert, lying beside his king in that frigid hut (so cold the lice are probably dead), that their ending has come indeed, the doom no man can escape forever. And he reaches for the sword beside him on the earthen floor, and vows to his father's spirit and the sun god that he will not let Aeldred be taken alive from here to be ripped apart by Erlings.

He moves to rise, and there is a hand on his arm.

"There are going by," the swineherd whispers, toothless. "Hold, my lord."

Aeldred's head shifts. He drags for breath again. Osbert turns quickly, grips the other man's head with one hand (hot as a forge it is) and covers the king's mouth with his other, and he murmurs a prayer for forgiveness, as Aeldred thrashes beside him, trying to give utterance to whatever pain and fever are demanding that he cry.

And whether because of prayer or a moon-shrouded night or the northmen's haste or nothing more than chance, the Erlings do pass by, how many of them Osbert never knew. And after that the night, too, passes, longer than any night of his life had ever been.

Eventually, Osbert sees, through unstopped chinks in wall and door (wind slashing through), that the flurries of snow have stopped. Looking out for a moment, he sees the blue moon shining before clouds slide to cover it again. An owl cries, hunting over the woods behind them. The wind has died down enough for that.

Towards dawn, the king's terrible shivering stops, he grows cooler to the touch, the shallow breathing steadies, and then he sleeps.

Osbert slips into the woods, feeds and waters the horses… precious little, in truth, for the family's only nurture in winter is carefully rationed salted pork from their swine and unflavoured, mealy oatcakes. Food for animals is an impossible luxury. The pigs are in the forest, left to forage for themselves.

Amazed, he hears laughter from inside as he returns, ducking through the doorway. Aeldred is taking a badly blackened cake for himself, leaving the others, less charred. The swineherd's wife is blushing, the king smiling, nothing at all like the man who'd shivered and moaned in the dark, or the one who'd screamed like an Erling berserkir on the battlefield. He looks over at his friend and smiles.

"I have just been told, gently enough, that I make a deficient servant, Osbert. Did you know that?"

The woman wails in denial, covers her crimson face with both hands. Her husband is looking back and forth, his face a blank, uncertain what to think.

"It is the only reason we let you claim rank," Osbert murmurs, closing the door. "The fact that you can't even clean boots properly."

Aeldred laughs, then sobers, looking up at his friend. "You saved my life," he says, "and then these people saved ours." Osbert hesitates. "You remember anything of the night?" The king shakes his head.

"Just as well," his friend says, eventually.

"We should pray," Aeldred says. They do, giving thanks on their knees, facing east to the sun, for all known blessings.

They wait until sunset and then they leave, to hide among the marshes, besieged in their own land.

Beortferth is a low-lying, wet islet, lost amid dank, spreading salt fens. Only the smaller rodents live there, and marsh birds, water snakes, biting insects in summer. It was the bird-catchers who first found the place, long ago, making their precarious way through the fens, on foot, or poling flat-bottomed skiffs.

It is almost always foggy here, tendrils of mist, the god's sun a distant, wan thing, even on the clear days. You can see strange visions here, get hopelessly lost. Horses and men have been sucked down in the stagnant bogs, which are deep in places. Some say there are nameless creatures down there, alive since the days of darkness. The safe paths are narrow, not remotely predictable, you must know them exactly, ride or walk in single file, easy to ambush. Groves of gnarled trees rise up in places, startling and strange in the greyness, roots in water, leading the wanderer to stray and fall.

In winter it is always damp, unhealthy, there is desperately little in the way of food, and that winter—when the Erlings won the Battle of Camburn Field—was a cruelly harsh one.

Endless freezing rain and snow, thin, grey-yellow ice forming in the marsh, the wet wind slashing. Almost every one of them has a cough, rheumy eyes, loose bowels. All of them are hungry, and cold.

It is Aeldred's finest hour. It is this winter that will create and define him as what he will become, and some will claim to have sensed this as it was happening.

Osbert is not one of them, nor Burgred. Concealing their own coughs and fluxes as best they can, flatly denying exhaustion, refusing to acknowledge hunger, Aeldred's two commanders (as young as he was, that winter) will each say, long afterwards, that they survived by not thinking ahead, addressing only the demands of each day, each hour. Eyes lowered like a man pushing a plough through a punishing, stony field.

In the first month they arrange and supervise the building of a primitive fort on the isle, more a windbreak with a roof than anything else. When it is complete, before he ever steps inside, Aeldred stands in a slanting rain before the forty-seven men who are with him by then (a number never forgotten, all of them named in the Chronicle) and formally declares the isle to be the seat of his realm, heart of the Anglcyn in their land, in the name of Jad.

His realm. Forty-seven men. Ingemar Svidrirson and his Erlings are inside Raedhill's walls, foraging unopposed through a beaten countryside. Not a swift sea raid for slaves and glory and gold. Here to settle, and rule.

Osbert looks across sparse, patchy grass in rain towards Burgred of Denferth, and then back at the man who leads them in this hunted, misty refuge, with salt in the biting air, and for the first time since Camburn Field he allows himself the idea of hope. Looking up from the plough. Aeldred kneels in prayer; they all do.

That same afternoon, having given thanks, in piety, their first raiding party rides out from the swamps.

Fifteen of them, Burgred leading. They are gone two days, to make a wide loop away from here. They surprise and kill eight Erlings foraging for winter provisions in a depleted countryside, and bring their weapons and horses (and the provisions) back. A triumph, a victory. While they are out, four men have come wandering in through the fens, to join the king.

Hope, a licence to dream. The beginnings of these things. Men gather close around a night fire in Beortferth Hall, walls and a roof between them and the rain at last. There is one bard among them, his instrument damply out of tune. It doesn't matter. He sings the old songs, and Aeldred joins in the singing, and then all of them do. They take turns on watch outside, on the higher ground, and farther out, at the entrances to the marshes, east and north. Sound carries here; those on watch can hear the singing sometimes. It is a warming for them, amazingly so.

That same night, Aeldred's fever comes again.

They have their one singer, and a single aged cleric with bad knees, some artisans, masons, bird-catchers, fletchers, farmers, fighting men from the fyrd, with and without weapons. No leech. No one with knives and cups to bleed him, or any sure knowledge of herbs. The cleric prays, kneeling painfully, sun disk in his hands, where the king lies by the fire and Osbert—for it is seen as his task—tries, in anguish, to decide whether Aeldred, thrashing and crying out, oblivious, lost to them and to Jad's created world, needs to be warmed or cooled at any given moment, and his heart breaks again and again all the long night.

By springtime there are almost two hundred of them on the isle. The season has brought other life: herons, otters, the loud croaking of frogs in the marsh. There are more wooden structures now, even a small chapel, and they have organized, of necessity, a network of food suppliers, hunting parties. The hunters become more than that, if Erlings are seen.

The northmen have had a difficult winter of their own, it appears. Short of food, not enough of them to safely extend their reach beyond the fastness of Raedhill until others come—if they come—when the weather turns. And their own foraging parties have been encountering, with disturbing frequency, horsed Anglcyn fighters with murderous vengeance in their eyes and hands, emerging from some base the Erlings cannot find in this too-wide, forested, hostile countryside. It is one thing to beat a royal army in a field, another to hold what you claim.

The mood on the isle is changing. Spring can do that, quickening season. They have a routine now, shelter, birdsong, greater numbers each day.

Amid all this, those of the Beortferth leaders not taking parties out from the fens are… learning how to read.

It is a direct order of the king's, an obsession. An idea he has about the kingdom he would make. Aeldred himself, stealing time, labours at a rough-hewn wooden table at a translation into Anglcyn of the single, charred Rhodian text someone found amid the ruins of a chapel west and south of them. Burgred has not been shy about teasing the king about this task. It is entirely uncertain, he maintains, what ultimate good it will be to have a copy in their own tongue of a classical text on the treatment of cataracts.

The consolations of learning, the king replies, airily enough, are profound, in and of themselves. He swears a good deal, however, as he works, not seeming especially consoled. It is a source of amusement to many of them, though not necessarily to those engaged, at a given moment, in sounding out their letters like children under the cleric's irritable instruction.

Among the new recruits making their way late in winter, through the fens to Beortferth was a lean grey man claiming training in leechcraft. He has bled the king by cup and blade, achieving little, if anything. There is also a woman with them now, old, stooped like a hoop—and so safe among so many restless men.

She has wandered the marshes, gathered herbs (spikemarrow, wortfen), and spoken a charm into them—when the pinch-mouthed cleric was not nearby to mutter of heathenish magics—and has applied these, pounded into a green paste, to the king's forehead and chest when his fever takes him.

This, too, as best Osbert can judge, does nothing beyond causing angry-looking reddish weals. When Aeldred burns and shivers Osbert will take him in his arms and whisper, endlessly, of summer sunlight and tended fields of rye, of well-built town walls and even of learned men discoursing upon eye diseases and philosophy, and the Erling wolves beaten back and back and away, oversea.

In the mornings, white and weak, but lucid, Aeldred remembers none of this. The nights are harder, he says more than once, for his friend. Osbert denies that. Of course he denies it. He leads raiding parties in search of game, and northmen. He practises his letters with the cleric.

And then one day, the ice gone, birds around and above them, Aeldred son of Gademar, who was the son of Athelbert, sends twenty men out in pairs, riding in different directions, each pair with the image of a sword carved upon a block of wood.

Change is upon them, with the change of season. The gambler's throw of a kingdom's dice. If something is to happen it must be before the dragon-ships set sail from the east to cross the sea for these shores. The king on his isle in the marsh summons all that is left of the fyrd, and all other men, the host of the Anglcyn, to meet him on the next night of the blue full moon (spirits' moon, when the dead wake) at Ecbert's Stone, not far from Camburn Field.

Not far at all from Raedhill.

Osbert and Burgred, comparing in whispers, have judged their number at a little under eight hundred souls, the summoned men of the west. They have reported as much to the king. There are more, in honesty, than any of them expected. Fewer than they need.

When has any Anglcyn army had the men it needed against an Erling force? They are aware, by starlight, of risk and limitation, not indifferent to these things, but hardly affected by them.

The sun has not yet risen; it is dark and still here at the wood's edge. A clear night, little wind. This is a forest once said to be haunted by spirits, faeries, the presence of the dead. Not an inappropriate place to gather. Aeldred steps forward, a shadow against the last stars.

"We will do the invocation now," he says, "then move before light, to come upon them the sooner. We will pass in darkness, to end the darkness." That phrase, among many, will be remembered, recorded.

There is an element of transgression in doing the god's rites before his sun rises, but no man there demurs. Aeldred, his clerics beside him (three of them now), leads that host in morning prayer before the morning comes. May we always be found in the Light.

He rises, they move out, before ever the sun strikes the Stone. Some horsed, mostly on foot, a wide array of weapons and experience. You could call them a rabble if you wanted. But it is a rabble with a king in front of it, and a knowledge that their world may turn on today's unfolding.

There is an Erling force south-east of them, having come out from Raedhill at the (deliberately offered) rumour of a band of Anglcyn nearby, possibly led by Gademar's last son, the one who could still dare call himself king of these fields and forests, this land the northmen have claimed. Ingemar could not but respond to this bait.

Aeldred rides at the front, his two friends and thegns on either side. The king turns to look back on his people who have gathered here during the dark of a blue moon night.

He smiles, though only those nearest can see this. Easy in the saddle, unhelmed, long brown hair, blue eyes (his slain father's eyes), the light, clear voice carrying when he speaks.

"It begins now, in Jad's holy name," he says. "Every man here, whatever his birth, will be known for the whole of his life as having been at Ecbert's Stone. Come with me, my darlings, to be wrapped in glory."

It is glorious, in the event: as told by a myriad of chroniclers, sung so often (and variously), woven into legend, or into tapestries hung on stone walls, warming winter rooms. Osbert will live to hear his exploits of the day celebrated—and unrecognizable.

He is at the king's side when they leave the wood and move south towards Camburn where their outliers have reported the Erlings camped by a field they know. Burgred, at Aeldred's command, takes one hundred and fifty men east, along the black line of the trees, to angle south as well, between Camburn and the walls of Raedhill.

The Erlings are not yet awakened under the raven banners, are not yet ready for a day's promised hunting of an Anglcyn band when that band—and rather more than that—appear from the north, moving at speed.

The northmen have their watchmen, of course, and some brief warning. They are not, by any measure, cowards, and the numbers are near to even. Amid screamed orders they scramble into armour, seizing hammers and spears and axes; their leaders have swords. There is, however, much to the elements of surprise and speed in any fight, and disarray can turn a battle before it starts, unless leaders can master it.

They have not expected even numbers today, or the ferocity of the charge that roars into their camp as the first hues of sunlight appear in the east. The northmen form urgent ranks, stand, buckle, hold again for a time. But only for a time.

There is sometimes knowledge that can subvert men's ardour on a battlefield: the Erlings here in Esferth know that they have walls not far away at Raedhill, behind which they can shelter, deal with these Anglcyn at leisure, without the chaos caused by this heavy, venomous, pre-dawn assault.

Responding to the unspoken, their leaders order a pull-back. Not an entirely wrong course. There is some distance to cover to Ingemar and the others back in Raedhill, but in the past the Anglcyn have been content to force the northmen to retreat. After which they would regroup to consider a next step. There is reason, therefore, to believe it will be so again as the sun comes up this bright spring morning, lighting meadow flowers and young grass.

Then there is reason to understand that they are wrong. The men of the Anglcyn are not stopping to debate among themselves, to consider options and alternatives. They are following hard, some of them on horse, some with bows. The withdrawal becomes, in the way of these things, all too often, a flat-out retreat.

And as the Erling escape from their abandoned camp and position becomes a clamorous rout, a flight east towards distant Raedhill, just about at the moment when fear will invest the body and soul of even a brave man, the northmen discover another host of the Anglcyn between them and the walls of safety—and the world, or that small corner of it, changes.

Amid cries of Aeldred and Jad, withdrawal, retreat, rout turn into slaughter, very near the same wet, wintry plain that saw King Gademar blood-eagled as a winter's wet, grey twilight came down.

Less than half a year ago. The time it took Aeldred of Esferth to evolve from a fleeing refugee hiding in a swineherd's bed, shivering with fever, to a king in the field, avenging his father and brother, cutting the northmen to pieces by the blood-soaked field that saw their own defeat.

They even take the raven banner, which has never happened in these lands before. They kill Erlings all the way to the walls of Raedhill and make camp there at sunset, and there they pray with lifted voices at the long day's end.

In the morning the northmen send out emissaries, to offer hostages and sue for peace.

In the midst of the last of the seven days and nights of feasting in Raedhill that accompany King Aeldred's conversion of the Erling leader, Ingemar Svidrirson, into the most holy faith of Jad of the Sun, Burgred of Denferth, the king's lifelong companion, finds that the black bile rising in his gorge is simply too strong.

He leaves the banquet hall, walks alone into the beclouded night past the spearmen on guard, away from the spill of torchlight in the hall and the sounds of revelry, seeking a darkness to equal the one he finds within.

He hawks and spits into the street, trying to dispel the clawing sickness he feels, which has nothing to do with too much ale or food and is, instead, about the desire to commit murder and the need to refrain.

The noise is behind him now and he wants it there. He walks towards the town gates, away from the feasting hall, finds himself in a muddy laneway. Leans against a wooden wall there—a stable, from the sounds within—and draws a deep breath of the night air. Looks up at the stars showing through rents in the swift clouds. Aeldred told him once that there are those in distant lands who worship them. So many ways for men to fall into error, he thinks.

He hears a cough, turns his head quickly. There is no danger here now, except, perhaps, to their souls because of what is happening in the banquet hall. He expects it to be a woman. There are many of them about, with all the soldiers in Raedhill. There's money to be made by night, in rooms with a pallet, or even in the lanes.

It isn't a woman, following.

"Windy out here. I brought us a flask," Osbert says mildly, leaning back against the stable wall beside him. "The Raedhill brewhouse is run by a widow, it seems. Learned all her husband had to teach. King's asked her to join his court, brew for us. I approve."

Burgred doesn't want another drink but takes the flask. He has known Osbert as long as he's known Aeldred, which is to say most of his life. The ale's strong and clean. "Best ale I ever had was made by women," he murmurs. "Religious house in the north, by Blencairn."

"Never been there," Osbert says. "Hold the flask a bit." He turns around. Burgred hears his friend urinating against the wall. Absently he drinks, looking up at the sky again. Blue moon over west, waning towards a crescent above the gates. It was full the night they won the second battle of Camburn Field and camped before these walls: not even a fourteen-night ago. They had Ingemar and his remnant penned in here like sheep, and a dead, unspeakably mutilated king to avenge. Burgred still wants to kill, an urge deeper than desire.

Instead they are feasting that same Erling remnant, offering them gifts and safe passage east across the rivers to that part of these Anglcyn lands that has long been given over to the northmen.

"He doesn't think like we do," Osbert murmurs, as if reading his mind. He takes back the flask.

"Aeldred?"

"No, the miller upstream. Of course Aeldred. You understand that Ingemar knelt before him, kissed his foot in homage, swore fealty, accepted Jad."

Burgred swears, viciously. "Carved his father open from the back, cracked his ribs apart and draped his lungs out on his shoulders. Yes, I know all these things." His hands are fists, just saying it.

The other man is silent for a time. The wind carries the sounds of the banquet to them. Someone is singing. Osbert sighs. "We were less than seven hundred men at the gates. They had two hundred left inside, and the season turning, which could mean dragon-ships, soon. We had no easy way of smashing into a walled, defended town. One day we might, but not now. My friend, you know all these things, too."

"So instead of starving them out, we feast, and honour them?"

"We feast, and honour the god and their coming to his light."

Burgred swears again. "You speak that way, but in your heart you feel as I do. I know it. You want the dead avenged."

Sounds carry to them from the distant hall. "I believe," says the other man, "that it is tearing him apart to do this, and he is doing it nonetheless. Be glad you are not a king."

Burgred looks over at him, the face hard to see in darkness. He sighs. "And these foul Erlings will stay with Jad? You really think so?"

"I have no idea. Some of them have, before. Here's what I do think: the world will know that Ingemar Svidrirson, who wanted to be a king here, has knelt and sworn loyalty to Aeldred of Esferth and accepted a sun disk and royal gifts from him, and will leave him eight hostages, including two sons—and we gave them nothing in exchange. Nothing. And I know that has never happened since first the Erlings came to these shores."

"You call the gifts nothing? Did you see the horses?"

"I saw them. They are the gifts of a great lord to a lesser. They will be seen as such. Jad did defeat Ingavin here, and took the raven banners, too. My friend, come back and drink with me. We have won something important here, and it is just a beginning."

Burgred shakes his head. There is still pain, a congestion in his chest. "I would… follow him under the world to battle demons. He knows that. But…"

"But not if he makes peace with the demons?"

Burgred feels the heaviness, a weight like stones. "It was… easier on the isle, in Beortferth. We knew what we had to do."

"Aeldred still knows. Sometimes… with power… you do things that fall against your heart."

"I may not be suited for power, then."

"You have it, my dear. You will have to learn. Unless you leave us. Will you leave us?"

The wind dies down, faint music fades. They hear horses through the stable wall.

"You know I won't," Burgred says, finally. "He knows I won't."

"We must trust him," Osbert says, softly. "If we can keep him healthy and alive for long enough, they will not take us again. We will leave a kingdom to our children, one they can defend."

Burgred looks at him. Osbert is a shadow in the blackness of the laneway, and a voice forever known. Burgred sighs again, from the heart. "And they will learn how to read Merovius on cataracts, in Trakesian, or he'll slaughter them all."

There is a pause, and then Osbert's laughter in the darkness, rich as southern wine.

+

Fevers were tertian, quartan, daily, or hectic. They stemmed—almost always—from imbalances in the four humours, the alignment of coldness, heat, moisture, dryness in all men. (There were other concerns peculiar to women, each month, or when they gave birth.)

The fevered could be bled, with knife and cup, with leeches, in locations and in degrees according to the teachings followed by the physician. Sometimes the patient died of this. Death walked near to the living at all times. It was known. It was generally considered that a good physician was one who didn't kill you sooner than whatever afflicted you would have.

Those suffering from acute fever might be comforted (or not) by prayer, eased by poultices, wet sheets, warm bodies next to them, music, or silence. They were treated with hydromel and oxymel (and physicians had divergent views as to which sort of honey was best, in the mixing), or with aconite and wild celery when it was thought that witchery lay at the root of their burning. Lemon balm and vervain and willow would be compounded, or buckthorn to purge them inside, sometimes violently. Coltsfoot and fenugreek, sage and wormwood, betony, fennel, hock and melilot were all said to be efficacious, at times.

Valerian might help a sufferer sleep, easing pain.

Fingernails could be clipped and buried under an ash tree by blue moon's light, though not, of course, if any cleric were about to know of it. And that same caution applied to remedies involving gemstones and invocations in the night wood, though it would be foolish to deny that these took place all over the kingdom of the Anglcyn.

At one time or another, all of these remedies and more had been brought to bear in the matter of King Aeldred's fevers, whether they were countenanced by the king and his clergy or not.

None of them were able to reorder the marred world in such a way as to end the fires that still seized him some nights, so many long years after that first one had.

"Why is it dark?"

It was always predictable how the king would emerge, but, more recently, not how long it would take. What was certain was that he would be pale, weak-voiced, lucid, precise, and angry.

Osbert had been dozing on the pallet they always made for him. He woke to the voice.

"It is the middle of the night, my lord. Welcome back."

"I lost a whole day this time? Dear Jad. I haven't got days to lose!" Aeldred was never profane, but the fury was manifest.

"I dealt with the reports as they came. Both new burhs on the coast are on time, nearly complete, fully manned. The shipyard is at work. Be easy."

"What else?" Aeldred was not being easy.

"The taxation officers went out this morning."

"The tribute from Erlond—Svidrirson's? What word?"

"Not yet, but… promised." It was never wise to be less than direct with the king when he returned from wherever the fever took him.

"Promised? How?"

"A messenger rode in after midday. The young one, Ingemar's son."

Aeldred scowled. "He only sends the boy when the tribute's late. Where is he?"

"Housed properly, asleep, I'd imagine. It is late. Be at ease, my lord. Athelbert received him formally in your stead, with his brother."

"On what excuse for my not being there?"

Osbert hesitated. "Your fevers are… known, my lord."

The king scowled again. "And where was Burgred, come to think of it?"

Osbert cleared his throat. "We had rumour of a ship sighted. He went with some of the fyrd to find out more."

"A ship? Erling?"

Osbert nodded. "Or ships."

Aeldred closed his eyes. "That makes little sense." There was a silence. "You have been beside me all the time, of course."

"And others. Your daughters were here tonight. Your lady wife sat with you before going to chapel to pray for your health. She will be relieved to hear you are well again."

"Of course she will."

That had nuances. Most of what Aeldred said had layers, and Osbert knew a great deal about the royal marriage.

The king lay still on his pillow, eyes shut. After a moment, he said, "But you never left, did you?"

"I… went to the audience chamber to take the reports."

Aeldred opened his eyes, turned his head slightly to look at the other man. After a silence, he said, "Would you have had a better life had I driven you away, do you think?"

"I find that hard to imagine, my lord. The better life and being driven away."

Aeldred shook his head a little. "You might walk properly, at least."

Osbert brought a hand down to his marred leg. "A small price. We live a life of battles."

Aeldred was looking at him. "I shall answer for you before the god one day," he said.

"And I shall speak in your defence. You were right, my lord, Burgred and I were wrong. Today is proof, the boy coming, the tribute promised again. Ingemar has kept his oath. It let us do what needed to be done."

"And here you are, unmarried, without kin or heir, on one leg, awake all night by the side of the man who—"

"Who is king of the Anglcyn under Jad, and has kept us alive and together as a people. We make our choices, my lord. And marriage is not for every man. I have not lacked for companionship."

"And heirs?"

Osbert shrugged. "I'll leave my own name, linked—if the god allows—with yours, in the shaping of this land. I have nephews for my own properties." They had had this conversation before.

Aeldred shook his head again. There was more grey in his beard of late, Osbert saw. It showed in the lamplight, as did the circles under his eyes, which were always there after fever. "And I am, as ever when this passes, speaking to you as a servant."

"I am a servant, my lord."

Aeldred smiled wanly. "Shall I say something profane to that?"

"I would be greatly alarmed." Osbert returned the smile.

The king stretched, rubbed at his face, sat up in the bed. "I surrender. And I believe I will eat. Would you also send for… would you ask my lady wife to come to me?"

"It is the middle of the night, my lord."

"You said that already."

Aeldred's gaze was mild but could not be misconstrued. Osbert cleared his throat. "I will have someone send—" "Ask."

"Ask for her."

"Would you be so good as to do it yourself? It is the middle of the night."

A small, ironic movement of the mouth. The king was back among them, there was no doubting it. Osbert bowed, took his cane, and went out.

He looked at his hands in the lamplight after Osbert left. Steady enough. He flexed his fingers. Could smell his own sweat in the bedsheets. A night and a day and this much of another night. More time than he had to yield, the grave closer every day. These fevers were a kind of dying. He felt light-headed now, as always. That was understandable. Also physically aroused, as always, though there was no easy way to explain that. The body's return to itself?

The body was a gift of Jad, a housing in this world for the mind and immortal soul, therefore to be honoured and attended to—though not, on the other hand, over-loved, because that was also a transgression.

Men were shaped, according to the liturgy, in a distant image of the god's own most-chosen form, of all those infinite ones he could assume. Jad was rendered by artists in his mortal guise—whether golden and glorious as the sun, or dark-bearded and careworn—in wood carving, fresco, ivory, marble, bronze, on parchment, in gold, in mosaic on domes or chapel walls. This truth (Livrenne of Mesangues had argued in his Commentaries) only added to the deference properly due to the physical form of man—opening the door to a clerical debate, acrid at times, as to the implications for the form and status of woman.

There had been a period several hundred years ago when such visual renderings of the god had been interdicted by the High Patriarch in Rhodias, under pressure from Sarantium. That particular heresy was now a thing of the past.

Aeldred thought, often, about the works eradicated during that time. He'd been very young when he'd made the journey over sea and land and mountain pass to Rhodias with his father. He remembered some of the holy art they'd seen but also (having been a particular sort of child) those places in sanctuary and palace where the evidence of smashed or painted-over works could be observed.

Waiting now in the lamplit dark of a late-summer night for his wife to come, that he might undress her and make love, the king found himself musing—not for the first time—on the people of the south: people so ancient, so long established, that they had works of art that had been destroyed hundreds of years before these northlands even had towns or walls worthy of the name, let alone a sanctuary of the god that deserved to be called as much.

And then, tracking that thought, you could walk even further back, to the Rhodians of the era before Jad came, who had walked in these lands too, building their walls and cities and arches and temples to pagan gods. Mostly rubble now, since the long retreat, but still reminders of… unattainable glory. All around them here, in this harsh near-wilderness that he was pleased to call a kingdom under Jad.

You could be a proper child of the god, virtuous and devout, even in a wilderness. This was taught, and he knew it in his heart. Indeed, many of the most pious clerics had deliberately withdrawn from those same jaded southern civilizations in Batiara, in Sarantium, to seek the essence of Jad in passionate solitude.

Aeldred wasn't a man like one of those. He knew what he'd found in Rhodias, however ruined it was, and in the lesser Batiaran cities all the way down through the peninsula (Padrino, Varena, Baiana—music in the names).

The king of the Anglcyn would not have denied that his soul (housed in a body that wracked and betrayed him so often) had been marked from childhood during that long-ago journey through the intricate seductions of the south.

He was king of a precarious, dispersed, unlettered people in a winter-shaped, beleaguered land, and he wanted to be more. He wanted them to be more, his Anglcyn of this island. And given three generations of peace, he thought it possible. He had made decisions, for more than twenty-five years, denying his heart and soul sometimes, with that in mind. He would answer to Jad for all of it, not far in the future now.

And he didn't think three generations would be allowed them.

Not in these northern lands, this boneyard of war. He lived his life, fighting through impediments, including these fevers, in defiance of that bitter thought, as if to will it not to be so, envisaging the god, in his chariot under the world, battling through evils every single night, to bring back the sun to the world he had made.

Elswith came before his meal arrived, which was unexpected. She entered without knocking, closed the door behind her, moved forward into lamplight.

"You are recovered, by the god's grace?"

He nodded, looking at her. His wife was a large woman, big-boned, as her warrior father had been, heavier now than when she'd come to marry him—but age and eight confinements could do that to a woman. Her hair was as fair as it had been, though, and unbound now—she had been asleep, after all. She wore a dark green night robe, fastened all the way up the front, a sun disk (always) about her neck, pillowed upon the robe between heavy breasts. No rings, no other adornment. Adornments were a vanity, to be shunned.

She had been asking, for years now, to be released from their marriage and this worldly life, to withdraw to a religious house, become one of the Daughters of Jad, live out her days in holiness, praying for her soul, and his.

He didn't want her to go.

"Thank you for coming," he said.

"You sent," she said.

"I told Osbert to say—"

"He did."

Her expression was austere but not unfriendly. They weren't unfriendly with each other, though both knew that was the talk.

She had not moved from where she'd stopped to look down at him in the bed. He remembered his first sight of her, all those years ago. Tall, fair-haired, well-made woman, not yet eighteen when they'd brought her south. He hadn't been much older than that, a year from the battles of Camburn, swift to wed because he needed heirs. There had been a time when they were both young. It seemed, occasionally, a disconcerting recollection.

"They are bringing a meal," he said.

"I heard, outside. I told them to wait until I left." From any other woman, that might have been innuendo, invitation. Elswith didn't smile.

He was aroused, even so, even after all these years. "Will you come to me?" he asked. Made it a request.

"I have," she murmured dryly, but stepped forward nonetheless, a virtuous, honourable woman, keeping a compact—but wanting with all her heart to leave him, leave all of them behind. Had her reasons.

She stood by the bed, the light behind her now. Aeldred sat up, his pulse racing. All these years. She wore no perfume, of course, but he knew the scent of her body and that excited him.

"You are all right?" she asked.

"You know I am," he said, and began unfastening the front of her robe. Her full, heavy breasts swung free, the disk between them. He looked, and then he touched her.

"Are my hands cold?"

She shook her head. Her eyes were closed, he saw. The king watched her draw a slow breath as his hands moved. It was not lack of pleasure in this, he knew, with a measure of satisfaction. It was piety, conviction, fear for their souls, a yearning towards the god.

He didn't want her to leave. His own piety: he had married this woman, sired children with her, lived through the tentative reshaping of a realm. Wartime, peacetime, winter, drought. Could not have claimed there was a fire that burned between them, but there was life, a history. He didn't want another woman in his bed.

He slipped the robe past her ample hips, drew his wife down beside him and then beneath. They made love whenever he recovered from his sickness—and only on those days or nights. A private arrangement, balancing needs. The body and the soul.

After, unclothed beside each other, he looked at the marks of red flushing her very white skin and knew that she would-again—be feeling guilt for her own pleasure. The body housed the soul, for some; imprisoned it, for others. The teachings varied; always had.

He drew a breath. "When Judit is married," he said, very softly, a hand on her thigh.

"What?"

"I will release you."

He felt her involuntary movement. She looked quickly at him, then closed her eyes tightly. Had not expected this. Neither had he, in truth. A moment later, he saw the tears on her cheeks.

"Thank you, my lord," she said, a catch in her throat. "Aeldred, I pray for you always, to holy Jad. For mercy and forgiveness."

"I know," said the king.

She was weeping, silently, beside him, tears spilling, hands gripping her golden disk. "Always. For you, your soul. And the children."

"I know," he said again.

Had a sudden, oddly vivid image of visiting one day at her retreat, Elswith garbed in yellow, a holy woman among others. The two of them old, walking slowly in a quiet place. Perhaps, he thought, she was to be his example, and a withdrawal to the god was his own proper course before the end came and brought him either light or dark through the spaces of forever.

Perhaps before the end. Not yet. He knew his sins, they burned in him, but he was in this offered world, and of it, and still carried a dream.

In time, the king and queen of the Anglcyn rose from the royal bed and dressed themselves. Food was sent for and brought in. She kept him company at table while he ate and drank, ravenous, as always, after recovery. The body's appetites. In and of the world.

They slept, later, in their separate bedchambers, parting with the formal kiss of the god on cheeks and brow. Dawn came not long after, arriving in summer mildness, ushering a bright day, enormous with implication.