Guy Gavriel Kay - The Last Light of the Sun

The cleric glanced back over his shoulder.

“Gryffeth can’t sing,” Dai explained. “Not that Alun’s much good.”

A joke, Alun thought. Good. Dai was feeling himself again, or starting to.

“There will be a feast, I expect,” Ceinion of Llywerth said. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

“I’m actually better with siege weapons,” Alun said, not helpfully. He was rewarded by hearing his older brother laugh, and quickly smother it.

“YOUR ROYAL FATHER I knew very well. Fought against him, and beside him. A disgraceful youth, if I may be blunt, and a brave man.”

“It would be too much to hope that we might one day receive such a judgement from you, my lord, but to that we will aspire.” Dai bowed after he spoke.

They were in the great hall of Brynnfell, beyond the central doors. A long corridor behind them ran east and west towards the wings. It was a very large house. Gryffeth had already been released—from a room at the end of the eastern corridor, as the cleric had guessed. Alun had had a whispered word with him, and reclaimed his harp.

Dai straightened and smiled. “You will permit me to add, my lord, that disgrace among the Arberthi is sometimes honour in Cadyr. We have not always been favoured with the truce that brings us here, as you know.”

Alun smiled inwardly, kept his expression sincere. Dai had had a lifetime shaping this sort of speech, he thought. Words mattered among the Cyngael, nuance and subtlety. So did cattle-raiding, mind you, but the day’s game had changed.

The scarred older warrior—a head taller than the two brothers—beamed happily down on them. Brynn ap Hywll was big in every way—hands, face, shoulders, girth. Even his greying moustache was thick and full. He was red and fleshy and balding. He wore no weapon in his own home, had rings on several thick fingers and a massive golden torc around his throat. Erling work: the hammer of the thunder god replaced by a suspended sun disk. Something he’d captured or been offered as ransom, Alun guessed.

If Ceinion of Llywerth felt displeasure at seeing something made to hold pagan symbols of Ingavin, he didn’t show it. The high cleric was not at all what Alun had expected him to be, though he couldn’t have said what he had expected. Certainly not the man who had been kissed so enthusiastically by the Lady Enid, as her husband smiled approval.

Alun had a recollection that the cleric’s own wife had died long ago, but he was murky about the details. You couldn’t remember everything a tutor dictated, or a tale-spinning father by the fireside.

“Well spoken, young prince,” Brynn boomed, bringing Alun back to the present. Their host looked genuinely pleased with Dai’s answer. He’d a voice for the battlefield, Brynn, one that would carry.

Their arrival at Brynnfell had gone easily, after all. Alun had a sense that things tended to go that way when Ceinion of Llywerth was involved. If there had been something odd about the cleric arriving with a Cadyri escort when he usually walked alone to his destinations, and was widely known not to have spoken to Prince Owyn for a decade and more … well, sometimes odd things happened, and this was the high cleric.

Brynn was prepared to play along, it seemed, whatever he might privately think. Alun saw the big man’s gaze slide to where Ceinion stood, smooth face benign and attentive, slender hands folded in the sleeves of his robe. “Indeed, it would seem you have set your feet on the path of virtue already, serving as escorts to our beloved cleric, avoiding the scandalous conduct of your sire in his own youth.”

Dai kept a level expression. “His lordship the high cleric is persuasive in his holiness. We are honoured and grateful to be with him.”

“I’ve no doubt,” said Brynn ap Hywll, just a little too dryly.

Dai was afraid Alun would laugh, but he didn’t. Dai was fighting to control exhilaration himself … this was the dance, the thrust and twist of words, of meanings half-shown and then hidden, that underlay all the great songs and deeds of courts.

The Erlings might choose to loot and burn their way to some glorious afterlife of … more looting and burning, but the Cyngael saw the glory of the world— Jad’s holy gift of it—as embodied in more than just swords and raiding.

Though that, perhaps, might explain why they were so often raided and looted—from Vinmark overseas, and under pressure from the Anglcyn now, across the Rheden Wall. He’d said it himself today: poems over siege engines. Words above weapons, too often.

He wasn’t dwelling upon that now. He was exulting in the presence of two of the very great men of the west, as a springtime raid conjured out of boredom and their father’s absence, hunting without them (Owyn was meeting a mistress), had turned into something quite otherwise.

Young Dai ab Owyn was, in other words, in that elevated state of mind and spirit where what occurred that evening could almost have been anticipated. He was alert, receptive, highly attuned … vulnerable. At such times, one can be hammered hard by a variety of things, and the effect can last forever—though it should be said that this did happen more often in tales, bard-spun in meadhalls, than on an impulsive cattle raid gone strange.

Just before the meal began Alun had taken the musician’s stool at the Lady Enid’s request. Brynn’s wife was tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, younger than her husband. A handsome woman with no shyness among the men in the hall. None of the women here seemed shy, come to think of it.

He was tuning his harp (his favourite crwth, made for him), trying not to be distracted. They were playing the triad game in the hall, drinking the cup of welcome after the invocation by Brynn’s own cleric, before the food was brought. Ceinion had predicted a feast and had been proven right. They were drinking wine, not ale. Brynn ap Hywll was a wealthy man.

Some of the company were still standing, others had taken their seats; it was a relaxed gathering, this was a farmhouse not a castle, large and handsome as it might be. The room smelled of new rushes, freshly strewn herbs and flowers—and hunting dogs. There were at least ten wolfhounds, grey, black, brindled. Brynn’s warband, those with him here, were not men to put great weight on ceremony, it seemed.

“Cold as …?” called out a woman near the head of the table. Alun hadn’t sorted the names yet. She was a family cousin, he guessed. Round-faced, light brown hair.

“Cold as a winter lake,” answered a man leaning against the wall halfway down the room.

Cold was an easy start. They all knew the jokes: women’s hearts, or the space between the legs of some of them. Those phrases wouldn’t be offered now, before the drinking had properly begun, and with the ladies present.

“Cold as a loveless hearth,” said another. Worn phrases, too often heard. One more to complete the triad. Alun kept silent, listening to his strings as he tuned. There was always one song before the meal; he was being honoured with it, wasn’t sure what he wanted to sing.

“Cold as a world without Jad,” said Gryffeth suddenly, which wasn’t brilliant but wasn’t bad either, with the high cleric at the head table. It got him a murmur of approval and a smile from Ceinion. Alun saw his brother, next to the cleric, wink at their cousin. Mark one for Cadyr.

“Sorrowful as …?” said another of the ladies, an older one.

Trust the Cyngael, Alun thought wryly, to conjure with sorrow at a spring banquet’s beginning. We are a strange, wonderful people, he thought.

“Sorrowful as a swan alone.” A thin, satisfied-looking man sitting close to the high table. The ap Hywll bard, his own crwth beside him. An important figure. Accredited harpists always were. There was a rustle of approbation. Alun smiled at the man, received no response. Bards could be prickly, jealous of privilege, dangerous to offend. More than one prince had been humiliated by satires written against him. And Alun had been asked to take the stool first tonight. A guest indeed, but not a formally trained or licensed bard. Best to be cautious, he thought. He wished he knew a song about siege engines. Dai would have laughed.