Brothers of the Wild North Sea (3 page)

“No, my lord abbot.”

“Nor do any of us. Keep your goats under control and let Demetrios gather his weeds. Well, Caius, my physician—did I miss anything out?”

Cai brought the pony to a halt. Others of his brethren were running to take charge of the beast, unsaddle him and carry Cai’s packages upslope. Theo was bounding down the steps that still divided them.

“Bloodlessness and haemorrhaging in the late stages,” Cai called up to him, “but otherwise, well done.”

“Ah, you see—I attend, I learn. Still, I’m glad to see you back—Brother Gareth has plague.”

“Yes, so I’m told.”

“How was your journey? Did you trade off all our wool?”

“Yes, and next year’s shearing too, if we’ll weave it ourselves for the market.”

“Good boy, good boy.” Theo leapt the last four steps in one and strode to greet them, hands extended. “Let me bless you. Leof, you too, though I did see you only an hour ago.”

Cai hitched up his cassock hem and dropped to his knees on the turf, Leof mirroring his action at his side. Never in his life had Cai knelt to any man, or any god, until he came to Fara. Here, though, in the pure sweet air, the gesture had been stripped of shame for him. He bowed his head and waited for his abbot’s benediction.

“Blessed be the travellers who come safely home,” Theo pronounced, resting his hands on their skulls.

“Praise be to God,” they chorused back. They had all three switched into Church Latin, their only common tongue, Leof and Cai dropping the homely dialect of the northern shores. The transition was a reflex for Cai by now. He’d struggled at first, but a two-year immersion in the language of Bible and churchmen the world over had had its effect, and he’d discovered to his surprise that Broccus had prepared his mind for some of it, with the bawdy old chants handed down to him from his Roman forebears.

The benediction over, Theodosius ruffled their hair, first Cai’s dark mop and then Leof’s fair one. “I should tonsure you,” he said worriedly. “I know I should. You two and all the others.”

Cai smiled up at him, pushing to his feet. He’d gathered from his trading trips that certain aspects of monastic life were different here than in other communities. There were no astronomy lessons for the brotherhoods down south—why should there be, when God had fixed the Earth at the centre of creation, leaving nothing new to know?—and Cai had learned to raise his hood when dealing with the monks of Tyne, or risk a storm of disapprobation for his unshorn head.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, setting off with Leof and Theo up the steps. “Don’t you think there ought to be some kind of dispensation? For brethren like ourselves, I mean, who tend the fires of faith this far to the north. After all, the bulk of our bodies’ heat loss occurs through the top of the skull, I’ve observed.”

“Does it?” Theo glanced over at him, dark eyes gleaming. The scientist in him would defeat the churchman every time, as Cai had also observed. “Have you?”

“I have. When Brother Petros got caught out in the snowdrifts with the sheep, a rabbit skin on the top of his head did him more good than all our clothes and blankets. Even than the fire.”

“Is it so? Well, you may have a point. Enough to let me put off the evil day, anyhow—I don’t quite understand why our bald pates are pleasing in the sight of God.”

“Because, my lord abbot,” Leof offered shyly, “he doesn’t wish us to be covered up from him.”

“Why, Leof, you sound as if he told you so himself. No. It’s simply a sign of our renunciation of the world and its vainglory.”

“In that case, I should like it to be done.” Leof cast a wistful glance at Cai, as if he might like the hair he’d run his fingers through in worldly, vainglorious pleasure to be left well alone. “To me, at any rate.”

“Then so it shall be, child—as soon as I get my shears back from Brother Petros. Caius, you’ve arrived home in good time. Did Leof tell you my first chapter is complete?”

“No, my lord abbot.”
We’ve been a little busy.
Cai pushed the thought away from him. “But that’s good news. Did you decide yet on a title?”

“Yes.” They had reached a turning in the long stone flight. Theo took up position on a flat rock and spread his arms as if to address the sunny infinity of moorlands and dunes that lay before him. “Poor copy though it is, I shall call it the
Gospel of Science
.”

Leof flinched. Like all the brethren of Fara, he loved and feared Theo in equal measure. He would never contradict him, but Cai had observed how he’d sit in Theo’s lectures, head bowed, his hands clasped in his lap, as if silently begging God to overlook the blasphemy one more time. Well—good and conventional churchmen did not get appointed to world’s-edge outposts like Fara, and Theo had not been so much sent as banished there. He was a renegade, a once-powerful teacher caught in the rebellious possession of books now deemed heretical by the Roman Church. Stripped of his treasured volumes, his power and authority, he had been shipped off to the far west—where, according to the beliefs of his masters, he might well tumble right off the planet’s rim and trouble them no more.

He had noticed Leof’s involuntary twitch. Cai tensed. A man of sublime patience, a father to his flock who would help Cai bathe their wounds with his own hands, he could still fly out in rage at wilful ignorance and superstition. “Does my choice trouble you, child?”

“Yes,” Leof said bravely. “The gospels are the words of Christ, not…arrows and dots, and long strings of numbers fit to bewilder all God-fearing men.”

Theo smiled. “Well, I do hope not
all
of them. Not forever, anyway.” He resumed his climb, making room beside him on the path for Leof to walk at his side. Cai, bringing up the rear, looked at them both in affection. “Remember, Leof. All I am doing is trying to recall and write down a fragment of the books that were lost. My gospel—we can call it something else for now—will only ever be a copy, a shadow, of that great wealth. I use mathematics and diagrams because, in their neatness, they can convey what an army of monks writing all day and night could not teach. You, the best and most godly of my brethren, need not be disturbed by it at all.”

“Yes, my lord abbot. Thank you.”

“And although it would distress me, I will give you dispensation from illuminating my heresies—if you wish.”

Leof jerked his head up. Cai could have laughed aloud at his open-mouthed dismay. “Why—no, sir. Please not that.”

“Good. Because I value them, your vines and grapes and little dancing stoats.”

“Those are foxes, sir.”

“Ah. Well, nonetheless. You’ll carry on?”

“Of course. I wish I saw what my plants and my beasts have to do with your—your gospel, however.”

Theo put an arm around his shoulders. “Science makes an error,” he said, the gentle laughter fading from his voice, “in cutting itself off from nature. In thinking of itself as separate. I feel a chill inside my heart when I imagine where such an error might lead. So, my clever painter, though your vines and foxes may not illustrate the turning of the Earth upon its axis, or the distance to the moon, I hope they will remind the men of some future day that foxes, moon and Earth are one, and all the work of one great hand. Yes—I do believe that, for all my blasphemous ways. It’s not so hard, as a doctrine—even for the likes of Brother Cai.”

Cai, who had been dreaming, surfaced at the sound of his name. “The distance to the moon?” he echoed longingly.

“Indeed. We do it with mathematics, and that triangle whose sides are three, four, five. I’ll show you all tonight, after our feast.”

“Are we feasting?”

“As far as our duties and our resources allow. A chapter’s end deserves a celebration, don’t you think? I only wish we had some of old Danan’s cure for sore heads in the morning.”

“Ah, we do. I ran into her on the trackway coming home. I traded her some jewellery for comfrey, poppy, tonics—everything we need.”

“Good boy, good boy.”

“Danan told Cai that the Vikings are coming,” Leof said suddenly, as if he’d been dreaming too. “It was one of her prophecies.”

Theo patted him. “The Vikings always come. We don’t need to worry yet, though. It’s still too cold and rough for raiding.”

“Yes, I know. That’s what I told Cai.”

Cai left them outside the scriptorium. By then the two were arguing contentedly over the relative virtues of vellum and non-calfskin parchments, and they barely noticed him go.

Shaking his head, Cai made his way straight to the infirmary, to see that his precious supplies were being properly stored away. He glanced in satisfaction round the sunny room, one of the few in the monastery that were glazed, allowing his patients the benefits of warmth and light at once. All but one of the narrow cots were empty, assuring Cai that he was doing his job well. Sitting on the edge of the occupied bunk, he treated Gareth’s warts and tried to ease the painful hypochondria that lay behind them with kindly admonitions as to letting the imagination run rife over faith, work and good common sense. Then he discharged him, to his patient’s disappointment, and went down to the laundry.

He was sticky and sandy from his interlude with Leof in the dunes. Taking a fresh cassock from Brother Hengist’s neatly folded supply, he found himself reluctant to put it on over his dirty skin. He glanced at the angle of the sun and decided he had time to run down to the bathing pools to wash.

He wasn’t really qualified to lecture poor Gareth on the perils of imagination. The pools were deserted at this time of day, and the tide had come in far enough to fill their natural granite basins with salty, crystalline blue. Cai swam about among the drifting seaweeds, diving and huffing at the pleasure of the water on his limbs, then scrubbed himself clean as best he could with handfuls of soft sand. By the time he was done, his skin was tingling with wellbeing, and what he’d have liked more than anything else was for Leof to appear, ready to cast off his garments and his new restraint.

Cai drew a shuddery breath. It was all very well to agree on a celibate life not five minutes after satiation. Keeping the resolve would be much harder, he could see. His shaft had risen at the thought of Leof’s pale, lithe body in the water with him. Leaning his shoulders on the shell-encrusted rock, he allowed his spine to stretch, his hips to float. His palm ached to explore his aroused flesh, and briefly he reached down, stroking, lifting the warm, compact weight of his balls. An idea flitted through his mind that maybe his own touch didn’t count.

He groaned aloud at his own weakness. Of course it did. What chance did he stand of purging his earthly desires, if he couldn’t keep his hands off himself? Cursing his father for bequeathing him not only a large, restless cock but a need to use it often and hard, Cai scrambled out of the water. The cracked church bell was ringing again, this time to announce Theo’s feast.

Perhaps he’d moved too fast. Perhaps—although he did his best to discourage such beliefs—the fear of the naïve younger monks was true, and undischarged seed
could
rush up into the brain and wreak havoc there. The sunlight around him darkened to black, with fringes and tassels of scarlet.
The Vikings are coming…
He dropped to his hands and knees, lowering his brow onto the stone.

The fit lasted only a few seconds. The sunlight returned. Trembling, he sat up and looked around him at the brilliant day, the rich spring light only now beginning to take on a russet flush in the west. High on the crag above him, Demetrios and Wilfrid were making their way home, to all appearances the best friends in the world, the goats trotting peacefully in front of them. Wilf was even carrying the Greek’s basket of leaves. Cai was only hungry, tired from travel. All was well.

Chapter Two

For the brethren of Fara, a feast was a modest affair. Theo, knowing that fields had to be tended and goats fed no matter how many chapters of his book had been finished, allotted his guests one good tankard each of mead and rolled out a small vat of heather ale to be shared around. A sheep had been killed, and Caius finished bottling up his remedy for sore heads, then followed the scent of roasting mutton down to the refectory.

The sight he found there pleased him. He took his place quietly between Brothers Leof and Benedict, and accepted his mead from the abbot’s own hand. This was very different from his father’s idea of a celebration. By now a drunken, coerced girl would have been dancing on the table. With not enough women to go round between Broc’s friends, Cai would have found himself fighting off the sweaty attentions of a warlord before the main course had been served.

Life wasn’t perfect here at Fara. Men squabbled, petty grudges were borne. Around him at the long wooden table Cai found every type of human face, from Leof’s ethereal beauty to the lumpen grin of poor Brother Eyulf, a halfwit rescued by Theo to work in the kitchens, who closely resembled the turnips of his trade. But they all turned to Theo, as he stood to give them grace, and Cai could see nothing but goodwill, as if by common consent each one of them had left the unworthy parts of himself behind for now, and come with warm fraternal hearts to join the feast.

Theo led the ancient Latin grace with a careful sincerity that made the words new. Then he blessed each one of the thirty men gathered, thanking them briefly for their work—the shepherd and the weaver, the doctor and the cook. He nodded to Brother Michael, who struck up a north-shores ballad on his smallpipes—music during dinner being the rarest of treats—and signaled for the meal to begin.