Brothers of the Wild North Sea (15 page)

“I cannot.”

“Let me. You must know by now I’m not going to hurt you.”

“No. But you shame me—every day, with your touch and your interference about my person, and your questions about my water and my bowels.”

“I’m a physician. There’s no shame in that.”

“A Dane warrior should need no physic. A Dane warrior should need no…”

Cai let him run on. His voice was somehow consonant with the wind and the splash of the water, and if it helped him to complain and lay down his warrior’s laws while he submitted to having his legs rubbed with sand, so be it. Cai allowed his mind to drift. These beautiful limbs were longer than Leof’s, carved with a strength Leof’s quiet life had never demanded of him. Badly scarred from what looked like untreated axe wounds. The big, tense muscle that ran up the back of the thigh made Cai’s ache in sympathy—and something darker, a vibration of longing. But all that had died in him, hadn’t it? Cai was glad that Leof had been his last, that he’d bear onwards into his life with him memories of such purity.

“Who is Theo?”

Cai looked up. Fen was regarding him, his gaze like sea-light through honey. Salt had caught his lashes together, and his shorn hair had grown out enough to spike as the sun dried his crown.

“You wouldn’t be interested.”

“Theo who makes you bathe. Theo who thinks man’s flesh is a beautiful gift from God.”

Surprised that he’d remembered, Cai shrugged. “He used to be our abbot here. Before Aelfric.”

“Aelfric the scarecrow?”

Cai almost smiled. “I didn’t think you were listening then. Yes, Aelfric the scarecrow.”

“I shouldn’t think you ever called your abbot Theo names.”

“No. He was a good man. He taught us about the movements of the stars, and how to treat one another well. I loved him.” Suddenly Cai recalled who he was talking to, and he finished the rubdown ungently, making Fen wince. “Much good it did me. Your lot killed him in the raid before the one that bestowed your gracious presence on me.”

“He’s dead?”

“Yes. He died defending our library and scriptorium. He was armed with a book. You can get out of the water now.”

Fen couldn’t. Cai watched him struggle for long enough to satisfy the new surge of pain and hatred in his heart, then went to give him a hand. He thrust Fen’s discarded cassock at him, and bent to pick up his own.

“Is that why you took up the sword, warrior priest?”

Cai couldn’t read Fen’s stare. It was comprehensive—taking him in from the top of his head to the soles of his bare feet, paying thorough attention to those places where he was much less priest than warrior. His shoulders, the musculature of his arms, as if any moment he might be recruited for some lightning raid up the coast…

“That’s right,” he said coldly. “The only throats that will get slit around here will be Viking ones. Fara is defended. Tell that to your brother, if he ever comes looking for trouble here again.”

Chapter Six

Dark of the moon, a month after the second raid. The church was completed, and Cai knelt on its stone-flagged floor between Benedict and Brother Martin. This was midnight office, the most ungodly, to Cai’s mind, of all the new canonical hours. He’d stopped objecting to them. He could see how they might work and be beautiful, in a monastery with plentiful resources and time on its hands—a kind of circle-dance of prayer so that no hour would pass without praise of God’s name.

Matins, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline, midnight office. The names had their own music. They blended with Laban’s plainsong chant and the flickering torchlight. No one needed Cai’s attention in the infirmary, and no less than three men had been set to watch the coast for raiders. Freed for once from anxiety, Cai felt the tug of sleep. Subtly he eased his hood forwards. Beside him, Martin emitted the tiniest snore. Theo had used to provide a chair for him during mass, but the old man had learned the art of sleeping on his knees whilst maintaining an attitude of perfect devotion.

On Cai’s other side, Benedict knelt with spine erect, tension radiating off him. These days he spent more time with the Canterbury clerics than amongst his brethren. Aelfric spoke to him often, too quietly for anyone else to hear, and Ben would listen, head bowed. Oslaf kept bewildered distance from him, lost weight and grew pale. Cai opened his eyes again. He’d never be free from worry, would he—not at Fara, not now.

The chanting stopped. That was the signal for the monks to rise and return to their bunks until matins three hours later, the real start of the monastic day. Cai put a hand to Martin’s elbow to wake him and help him up, but Aelfric stepped forwards from the shadows. “No,” he commanded, his voice more like a crow’s caw than ever. “Remain on your knees.”

Cai bit back a groan. Three hours was little enough time to prepare for a day of farming, weaving, rebuilding and all the other duties that fell upon the brethren now, with their reduced numbers, and no Theo to point each man to his right task and ease the labour. Normally even Aelfric released them without a further sermon.

“Remain on your knees. It is thus you must hear God’s word on the ultimate fate of your souls. Your former abbot, thinking to spare you, never taught you the one truth that could bring you to salvation. He knew his own heresy, and so he kept silent on the truth of hellfire. He knows it well enough now.”

Cai tried to lurch to his feet. Ben gripped his arm, and he subsided. Why should he care? Theo was safe, far beyond the reach of the carrion crow. The more Cai objected, the more of Aelfric’s grim attention he drew to himself, and he wished only to slip unnoticed through his shadowed days. Those were the terms of his uneasy truce with the abbot—silence and cooperation, in return for Aelfric’s blind eye to his various privileges. He was still allowed to train his men to fight—to keep a warhorse and chariot, and a wounded Viking raider in a quarantine cell. He lowered his head.

“Each one of you here will have undergone pain. Perhaps you have broken a bone, or had a colic fever in your guts, or burned yourselves with hot fat from the kitchen fires. Is it not so?”

Martin suddenly stirred. “Aye, aye. But we have our Caius to mend all of that for us.”

A ripple of laughter went through the congregated monks. “Hush, Martin,” Cai whispered, giving the old man’s hand an affectionate squeeze. “Just listen. We’ll be out the sooner.”

“The brother is old, and therefore we forgive him, although I see no need for a band of holy men to keep a brewery, and it is my intent to shut it down. Imagine the worst moment of your pain. Bring it back to mind and feel it now. What made you endure it?”

Silence fell in the church. Most of Aelfric’s questions during sermons were rhetorical, but he seemed to want an answer to this one. An owl hooted off among the ruins, and the torches rustled. Cai couldn’t think of a thing to say.

“Because it passes, my lord abbot.”

Oslaf had pushed back his hood. His pain-filled gaze was fixed not on Aelfric but on Benedict. “We endure because it passes. And…” He paused, focussing for an instant on Cai, a faint smile flickering. “And, in truth, we do have Caius.”

“I forbid further mention of Caius.” Aelfric took another step towards the congregation. The torchlight cast his shadow up across the ceiling until he was tall and thin as a storm-blasted ash, and his outstretched fingers sprouted long, clasping claws. “We endure because it passes. Yes. But I am here to tell you this—in hell, there is no such mercy as the earthly passage of time. You are pinned like an insect upon the most terrible moment of your agony, and…it will last forever.”

A sound like a low-moaning wind filled the church. The light of the torches remained steady, though. After a moment Cai identified the source of the keening. Laban and the other clerics had drawn close, heads together, faces invisible beneath their hoods.

“Forever,” Aelfric repeated, and their voices rose.

Cai went cold with disgust. Surely men who had been taught by Theo to think for themselves could never fall prey to such theatrics. He began to get up. He would take his brethren with him out of here and into the clean night. Vikings and darkness were less to be feared than these lies.

But Ben was moaning too. His sound was deep and real, full of grief-stricken terror. Cai took hold of his wrist beneath the sleeve of his cassock. “Come with me,” he whispered. “It’s all right.”

“No! I can’t move. Don’t leave me.”

Cai knelt still. Aelfric’s shadow-arms extended, up and across the raftered ceiling, enclosing the whole congregation. “Brother Benedict knows,” he intoned. “He knows the sins that plunge the soul into hellfire. Worst among them all is impure love. What is impure love, Brother Benedict?”

“All love of the flesh is impure,” Ben gasped out. This was a lesson he’d clearly learned well. Rocking, clutching Cai’s hand, he began to recite. “All fleshly love is lust, a perversion of God’s love. Our bodies are sacred to Christ. To lie with a woman condemns our soul. To lie with one another as with women impales us like insects in the hellfire. Forever. Forever.”

Cai had had enough. He tore his hand out of Benedict’s and stood up, ready to take on Aelfric barehanded if he had to. Anything to stop this.

But Aelfric was already on the move. His face was calm and satisfied, as if he’d achieved his goal. The clerics had stopped keening and formed up into a protective phalanx around him. Together, like a river of black pitch through the very firelit hell Aelfric had created with his words, they swept out of the church.

Benedict sprang up to follow. Cai tried to stop him, and Oslaf, pale as death, made a helpless grab for his sleeve, but Ben left at a run, clumsy, a broken-down piece of machinery shambling in his master’s wake.

The rest of the brethren gathered together like frightened sheep. They too began to move, Oslaf in their midst. They bumped against Cai, who was rooted where he stood, jostling him blindly. Only Oslaf seemed to see him. They exchanged one glance, and then Oslaf too was gone, melting with the others into the night. A gust of wind rushed through the open door, extinguishing the last torch, and Cai was alone in the dark.

No. Not quite alone. At his feet, Brother Martin gave a twitch and woke himself with one mighty snore. He looked up peaceably at Cai. “Ah. I was sleeping. Is it over, then?”

Cai picked him up carefully, waiting till his legs were steady under him before letting him go. He brushed the dust and cobwebs off his robes. “Yes. Yes, it’s over.”

“You’re in a bad fettle this morning, monk.”

Cai looked up from the cabinet of herbs and potions he was rearranging. He had plenty of everything, having seen Danan the week before, but he felt a restless need to rattle bottles and slam doors. Just now there was little else for him to do. He had arrived in Fen’s cell that morning to find his patient on his feet, voluntarily washing his face and limbs with a cloth and a bucket of water. He had already fastened a clean linen strip round his loins. He had stayed still when bidden for Cai to check his wound, and dressed himself without complaint in a fresh cassock.

He was healing well. Cai, squinting fiercely into a bottle of willow salve, tried to forget the sight of him in morning light, splashing water into his face, the droplets in a rainbow aura round his head. How he had looked as he had straightened to greet him, something like a smile touching his elegant face. He could stand up properly now, not leaning to favour his side. For once Cai’s ward was empty, and he hadn’t objected when Fen had followed him out of the cell, seated himself on one of the bunks and watched him begin his routine.

“What is it? Has the scarecrow been after you to shave your head again?”

“No.”

“Good. Because…”

Cai tried to analyse the silence behind him. It was warm, he decided. Warm and getting tighter… Before he could turn, Fen’s hand was on his shoulder. Cai would have to remember how quietly he could move. The hand passed briefly, gently, through his hair.

“Because that would be a shame.”

Cai almost dropped the jar of valerian root powder he’d uncorked. “Careful! Do you know how long this stuff takes to grind?”

“It stinks of mouse.” Fen had calmly retreated to the window ledge, as if his caressing touch had never happened. “What does it do?”

“It soothes troubled spirits and promotes the health generally, as its name suggests.”

Fen gave this a moment’s thought. “
Valetudo
,” he said. “Yes, I see. You look as if you could use a dose of it yourself. What’s happened to trouble your spirits, then?”

“Apart from you?” Cai firmly corked the jar and set it back in the cabinet. He’d barely slept in the few hours between midnight office and matins. He’d come as a novice to Fara with every intent to become a good Christian. Much of the doctrine—subjugation of earthly desire—had been strange to him, but between Leof and Theo he had learned to see the beauty of it too. Aelfric’s version was completely alien to him. With his lover and his teacher gone, why should he stay, to see his friends tortured by threats of eternal damnation? “Nothing. I’m busy, that’s all, and I can’t concentrate with you asking me all these questions.”

“You’re thinking of leaving.”

Cai repressed a twitch. How had Fen plucked that newborn thought from his head? “I’m thinking of remedies for constipation. You’ll see why, after a few more servings of Brother Hengist’s egg bread.”