Brothers of the Wild North Sea (28 page)

Not words he could say to a Viking, not now. Maybe not ever. He mouthed them for his own satisfaction, invisibly against Fen’s shoulder. Sleep was washing over him, and Fen had made them comfortable in their hollow, pulling the nearest discarded cassock over both of them to keep them warm. The words made a shape against Fen’s skin—a shape in Cai’s own language, not chilly Latin, which Fen might have read and understood. Not
te amo, te amo, te amo…

Fen groaned deeply, a sound of exhaustion, relief, some indefinable yearning thing that made Cai’s sinuses prickle with tears. He buried his face in Cai’s hair.

The lantern had almost burned out. In its very last light, blue summer dawn shining through a gap in the barn roof, Fen stirred and sat up. He ran his hands and then his mouth over Cai’s chest, and then when Cai was hoarsely protesting that he couldn’t—not again, not so soon—lithely straddled his lap.

“You can.”

No point in further argument, not when Cai’s cock was rigid and straining to lift against Fen’s thigh. “What do you do to me?”

“Very little. You woke up with this one.”

Cai laughed painfully. He didn’t doubt it. A besetting problem for him, that, sending him scrambling down to the rock pools to plunge his errant flesh neck-deep in their chill. He’d even told Theo about it—not in so many words, stumbling, awkward—and the abbot had listened kindly, prescribed him meditations and prayers to redirect his dreams. They’d helped a little for a while.

But he was strongly made and full of life, and it was so damn good to ride with his body’s energies instead of quelling them. To have a destination, an immediate use, for this big morning erection… Fen shifted, releasing him. His shaft sprang up, probing into the crack of Fen’s arse, seeking a target Fen was already offering, his powerful crouch angled just right to receive him. Cai grabbed for the oil, and their hands met clumsily over the task of spreading it. The bottle had gone over during their exertions last night, and there wasn’t much left.

“Is it enough?” Cai rasped, sitting up, easing Fen’s buttocks gently apart and drawing him down. “Can you…?”

“Yes. I’ve dealt with worse with none at all.” He groaned, Cai’s tip pushing into him. “Nothing bigger, though. Gods, I take back…everything I said about…castrated monks.”

To be conjoined with him like this—slowly, lit by common day—was more shattering to Cai than their wild encounter in the lantern’s flame. Fen sank down on him until Cai was buried in him to the root. For a long time both sat still, the only sound their ragged breathing, Fen plying unsteady fingers through Cai’s hair. Then he began to rock himself. The movements were tiny, but Cai felt each one as a sweet, wrenching grind, crushing his cock in its tight engagement. He wrapped his arms round Fen’s waist. A ray of dusty sunlight found its way through the window to the east, setting the pale skin alight with unearthly radiance.

Cai kissed his collarbones, sucked briefly at the hollow of his throat. “You look like the god of dawn.”

“That’s a goddess.
Ēostre. And…not very Christian of you.”

“I don’t care. Come for me. Come.”

Fen rose up, arching his spine. He put his head back and let go in a silence more intense than any scream. His cock jetted hard, whiplashing Cai’s stomach and chest with his seed. When he was done, the last spasm finished, his flesh hot and tight all up and down the length of his impalement, he took hold of Cai’s shoulders. “Lie down with me,” he whispered, his voice in rags. “Lie down, like we said.”

“But you’re finished. I…”

“Just come here.” He fell back, lithe and irresistible, part of the force that drew all things down into the earth. Cai went with him, shuddering, still buried deep. Fen opened his thighs, wrapped his legs round Cai’s hips. “That’s it. God, yes—put your weight on me. Fuck me till I can’t see or think anymore. Do it, Cai, beloved—do it now.”

The dew was still heavy on the grass when they left the barn. Cai looked at the glistening strands of marram in disbelief—that a world could be transformed before the day had properly begun.
Cai, beloved
—he had taken the words, folded them carefully and placed them in the back of his mind. Endearments blurted out in passion’s extremity were too sweet, too fleeting to set store by. And yet still the world was transformed. He yawned, stretching, and Fen came and caught him from behind, nuzzling the side of his neck.

“Stop it,” he said half-heartedly, watching a spider swing one silver thread from fern to flowering bramble. “We have to be monks again. Our day’s labours start now.”

“We just mucked out a cowshed. What more do you want?”

Cai grinned. It hadn’t been the most poetic termination to such a night, but he’d felt guilty about the beasts he’d supposedly been out here to tend. The calves were none the worse for the strange noises that had issued from the back of their barn all night. Dagsauga, however, had bestowed upon them sly, placid looks from under her lashes, making Cai laugh as he and Fen shook out the straw and filled the manger. “Well, I’m certain it will go downhill from here.”

“Until tonight, perhaps. Can you find more pregnant oxen to look after? Kindly remember—I never
was
a monk.”

“
Fen
. Let go of me. Maybe we have time to go and wash in the rock pools.”

“Mmm. I like the sound of that much more now than when you first suggested it.”

“Bloody insatiable,” Cai said wonderingly, aware his struggle to be away was unconvincing, his disapproval undermined by the new rush of blood to his groin. “Wait till I get you in that water. The sun hasn’t touched it yet. The last thing on your mind will be—”

“Caius! Cai!”

They sprang apart at the voice, just in time to see Brother Gareth come pelting through the gorse bushes, his cassock hitched inelegantly up above his knees. “Oh! Cai, there you are. Thank God. Brother Hengist’s gone and chopped off his finger with a butcher’s knife. And, Fenrir, begging your pardon, but Wilfrid says, if you’re back from your hunt, please to help him fetch back the goats, which ate their way out of their pen last night.”

Cai exchanged a look of weary amusement with Fen. He set off down the track, the Viking falling into place at his side as if he’d walked there all his life, Gareth jogging impatiently ahead. “Hengist has actually cut his finger
off
, Gareth?”

“Well—maybe not all the way
off
. But there is an awful lot of blood, and he’s fainted, and Eyulf is screaming. And Wilf doesn’t know how the goats chewed a hole through a new willow fence. But the moon was full last night—everything was strange. Brother Demetrios swears he heard wolves howling.”

Chapter Eleven

Another full moon, this time golden as the barley Danan said would ripen in the husk by such light. Cai wasn’t so sure of that. All his life he had worked alongside the farmers at the hillfort to get the crop in at harvest moon, but only because mornings could dawn grey and stormy at this time of year, the summer beginning to wane. Tonight Cai would roll up his sleeves and join his brethren in the one field well enough favoured by the sun and good soil for the barley to grow. He stood in the window of the scriptorium, the empty arch that had once glimmered with sea-green glass, and he watched the gilded orb rise from the sea.

He was tired, but he didn’t mind. Since the moon’s last waning he had worked wherever he was needed. He could see traces of Theo’s monastery rising up around him, and there was no amount of time and energy he would begrudge to restore that. Aelfric kept mostly to his study, a brooding adder. Fen had warned that there was venom in him yet, but Cai thought the man’s will had crumbled along with his little empire, built on the sands of fear. He and the Canterbury clerics—including Laban, whose rebellion had been short-lived—observed the canonical hours and did not complain when the church was not full, although Cai had observed that a surprising number of his brethren did go out of their way to meet the new rule. Cai did it himself when he could. There was a great beauty to it, a kind of stately dance, and there were no more teachings of hellfire.

Freed of Aelfric’s interference, Cai had given his orders with more conviction. Now if he hesitated, one or the other of his brothers would come and demand to be told what to do. So it was that he had begun the restoration of the scriptorium. He had wondered at his own temerity—their bread and butter didn’t depend on it, or even their education, since they had no books to put in it. Still, it brought him a keen joy to see the burnt-out chamber swept clean, the tumbled masonry being mortared back into place. And perhaps the books would come.

Over winter, when there was less to be done in the fields, he might journey down to the Tyne monasteries, examine the libraries there, renew Fara’s supply of inks and vellum. Brother Wulfhere, their carpenter, had died in the first raid, but his apprentice was at work on a new writing desk in his spare time. There was a man at Traprain Law who knew the art of glass. Cai allowed his attention to drift, picturing the room in all its glory, men working peacefully over their script and illuminations, the light of knowledge kindling here again.

There was a bloodstain where Theo had fallen. Cai blinked, coming back to himself. None of them had tried to scrub away the mark. If Cai breathed deeply, he would catch the lingering stench of smoke and charred flesh—real, or just a memory embedded in his senses, he couldn’t tell. He turned back to the window. The clean sea air could continue to sweep through the chamber for now. He leaned on the sill, let the salty evening breeze cool his brow.

He wasn’t the only soul here with solemn thoughts tonight. On the rocks below, the shadows had gathered into the shape of a man—Fenrir, emerging from nothing and almost disappearing into it again, halting at the very edge of the cliff. There he sat and drew his knees up to his chest. Cai could scarcely make him out from here. Conspicuous by day, with his height and his bright hair, at dusk he became part of his surroundings, as if…

As if the night could swallow him. He was looking out across the sea. Even in the melting, merging light, Cai read lonely yearning in the set of his shoulders. Oh, they had had a month of it, he and his Viking. Cai didn’t think there was one concealed refuge in the monastery grounds, one secluded hollow of the dunes, where they hadn’t found each other—stripped and sucked and fought their way into each other’s flesh. Cai was still bruised from their last encounter. He had inflicted marks of his own, and discovered that he too could make a man’s blood sing.

He still didn’t fool himself that he could fill up the empty spaces in Fen’s soul. Fen no longer spoke about his brother or the Torleik tribe. His talk with Cai had ranged broadly, and Cai had found himself expressing ideas and thoughts no other companion had inspired in him, but Gunnar and Sigurd had been consigned to silence. Cai hadn’t tried to rescue them. They were the unknown forces still acting on Fen’s soul, and how could Cai compete? All the life Fen had experienced before his abandonment here, that whole world of seafaring, conquest, brotherhood… No, much easier to let it fade.

As if poor Fen could forget. Suddenly ashamed of himself, Cai turned away from the window. The steps from the scriptorium were still ruinous, half the stairwell burned away, and he made his way cautiously down them, slipping out through cobwebby shadows into the night.

Fen didn’t stir at his approach. Cai had made enough noise not to startle him. He crouched on the rocks behind him—hesitated for a moment, then put his arms around him. “Fen.”

He made a deep sound of welcome, turning far enough to rub his face against Cai’s. “Is it time for us to go and start the harvest?”

“Not yet. I know you grieve for your comrades and your family. Forgive me if I haven’t spoken of them.”

“My comrades…” Fen’s smile brushed Cai’s cheek in the dark. “In fact I was thinking about you.”

Something shifted in Cai’s chest, a relief and pleasure so pure that it hurt. “Were you?”

“Yes. The moon casting her track across the sea like this… It seemed so strange to me that the waters divided us for so long, I had to come and look at them. Maybe there is an earthly bridge as well as the rainbow one into Valhalla. Maybe the moon creates it, and allows men’s souls to know one another before they meet in the flesh. Even… Even if they never do.”

Cai remembered the dream of the wolf, and he nodded. “Maybe,” he said hoarsely. “I rejoice that
we
did.”

“As do I. Even if I was trying to kill you at the time.”

You’re killing me now.
Cai kept that thought to himself, his throat aching and burning. “I’ve been in the scriptorium. I want to rebuild it, but Theo died in there. Leof too. And I felt such sorrow for them, but then I saw you out here, and…” He shut up. What had he been about to say? His tongue kept bringing him to this brink, as dangerous as the cliff edge where they now sat. He rested his brow on Fen’s shoulder, closing his eyes.

Fen laced his fingers through Cai’s. “I too am struggling to understand. I am a warrior. And, yes—I have lost my comrades. I ought to be dead—from shame, if nothing else.”

“There was no shame in it. Not for you.”

“I will never make you understand our laws of battle. Sigurd would say the weakness was in me, to permit them to leave me behind. Hush, Cai—I
know
what you think of that. It’s not what concerns me. Despite all these things, I am happy here. I wouldn’t leave if I could. I…I wouldn’t leave
you
.”