Brothers of the Wild North Sea (30 page)

Cai surveyed the beautiful frame of him, strength manifest in every limb, even freshly drained and sleepy as he was. “No. I’m sure they didn’t. You were meant to be subtle about it though, Fen.”

“Subtle wouldn’t have got me into the Canterbury crow’s chambers.”

“Oh, God. What
did
?”

“A fat bribe of your poppy draft to Laban. He’s got a taste for it, you know.”

“Is that who’s been siphoning it off?”

Fen nodded, the silky shift of his hair over Cai’s chest distracting. “He’s a troubled soul.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Just that I’d keep his secret, if he kept mine. And that I was looking for something, which is perfectly true. I checked the studies, the storage rooms, everywhere. Even beneath Abbot Aelfric’s sacred bunk.”

Cai snorted with laughter. “What did you find there?”

“A few miserable spiders, discussing how best to spin their way out of hellfire. I don’t think your old lady’s in this place, beloved. I’ve looked everywhere.”

Beloved.
Cai closed his eyes. Fen’s easy, sincere delivery of the word sent it straight into his heart. Since that harvest-moon night, they’d kept silent on the nature of their bond, but there was that word, that name Fen pronounced so freely. Cai kissed his brow. “All right. She may have taken a longer journey, though I never knew her to travel far from here before. How was Aelfric while I was away?”

“Quiet. Up here, anyway.” Fen eased away far enough to look at him. “He concerns me, though. He’s been down to the village every day.”

“What—preaching to them?”

“No. Doing as you said Godric’s wife told you—sitting amongst them and telling them stories. I followed him down once, sat in the shadows and listened. He told about a woman who was faithless to her husband, and her thigh and her belly swelled up and rotted.” Fen gave a twitch of displeasure. “Where does he get such a tale?”

“From the Bible, unfortunately. Though you’d have to dig deep to find such a foul one. Ugh—why doesn’t he tell them about loaves and fishes, or making the blind man see?”

“I don’t suppose those ones are frightening enough. They all looked whey-faced by the end of it, especially the women.”

“Curse him. Why is he doing this? Are they taking him seriously?”

“I think if the crop hadn’t failed, they wouldn’t be. And other things happened while you were gone. The children have come out in an itching rash, and one of Barda’s goats has died.”

“For God’s sake. Those goats were ancient. I’ll take a lotion of zinc down for the children tomorrow—it’s probably fleas.” He sat up, Fen shifting with a grunt of protest to accommodate him. “Damn it, though—we could ill afford to lose that grain. The farmers at Traprain can sell us a little, but we’ll be badly off over the winter. Anything else?”

“Well, I wanted you to sleep before I told you this, but we’ll be worse off still if the apples don’t ripen. Hengist says they should be turning sweet by now, but they’re still green and sour.”

For the first time, Cai ran out of reasonable arguments. A primal fear touched him—of a long, dark winter with no grain or fruit. And, this winter, twenty-nine hungry men looking at him to ask him why. “Fen,” he whispered uneasily, the warmth of their joining draining away from him. “What’s going on around here?”

“I don’t know. But it was different, wasn’t it—before the men from Canterbury came?”

Before the raids, too.
Cai didn’t say it. His lover was here, shoulder pressed to his shoulder, never less of a Viking pirate than now, with lambent eyes fixed on him in concern. But Cai often thought as Fen had done beneath that golden moon—
how have we come to this?
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve tried to make it as it was, restore it a little. But…”

“But Aelfric and the crows infest it and undo all your good work.”

“Not quite so bad as—”

“I tell you what we should do. No—what I should do, since you’re a monk. One night I should drug their ale with something from your cabinets. And then, while they’re asleep, I should take my sword
Blóðkraftr dauði
and—”

“Fen!” Cai couldn’t repress a spasm of horrified laughter. “Stop it.”

“What? I have said I will drug them, haven’t I? They won’t be in any pain. And then you could be abbot here in truth, which is what your brethren and these villagers need.”

“Hush, will you?” Pushing up onto his knees, Cai put his arms around him. Cai never had come quite to terms with Viking humour and couldn’t tell now if he was serious. He held him, trying to enclose within the circle of his embrace all that was noble in him, the dawning compassion that had made him spare the life of old Addy, everything that made him a man Cai should love. He pressed his lips to the graceful arch of his collarbone, looked into the darkness beyond his shoulder. “We can’t do such things.”

“Why not? Your world is so hampered. These men are parasites, poisoning the minds of your friends. With a few swings of my blade…”

Cai pressed a silencing hand to his mouth. Fen chucked and pushed his tongue against his palm, sending bolts of arousal down his spine. “Demon,” Cai whispered. “Be still. There’s somebody coming—one of the parasites, I think.”

The track below the stables was dark, hard to negotiate on a cloudy night. Nevertheless, a black-robed figure was tearing along it as fast as he could go. Drawing Fen out of the stable doorway where the lantern made such glories of his skin and hair, Cai listened, his hand still pressed tight despite the patterns Fen was now tracing on it with his tongue tip. “It sounds like Laban. What’s he doing out here at this time of night?”

“What do you care?”

The question was only a muffled vibration, but Cai knew all his sounds by now. “Less and less by the second. But he may be ill.” Cai recalled the last man he’d found sobbing and distraught on a pathway at Fara. “I’d better go and see.”

“Please yourself, physician.”

“I won’t be long. Will you wait here?”

“Mm.” Fen settled himself on the straw. He stretched out one arm along the top of a bale and drew up his knee, the better to display his hips and thighs, somehow more powerful to Cai in their lassitude than when they had been taut and convulsing in the throes of their fuck.

“Don’t,” Cai rasped, struggling into his cassock. In reply, Fen only grinned and ran a hand down his own body, then took hold of his rising cock in a grip Cai knew from vast experience felt bloody wonderful. “Please.”

“Well, hurry. Yes, I’ll wait here. But I can’t promise you that I won’t start by myself.”

Cai ran out into the night. At that moment he hated not only Laban and the Canterbury clerics but every duty, every obligation, every man, woman and child who might get between him and the magnificent creature he’d left behind him. He hated the stony path for stretching out beneath his feet—the very air, for being closer to Fen than he was, for wrapping itself in summer-breeze embrace around him. Visions of rebellion danced through his head. He would take Fen and leave this place. Perhaps Broccus wasn’t so wrong about the mindless life of the senses—perhaps Cai too would become a hillfort chieftain, fight all day and roll Fen around in his barbaric wolf-skin bed all night. Where was the world where they could leave Viking and monk far behind them and live freely as men—where even Cai’s own questions and doubts would be silenced in his heart? He thrust away the vision of Broc’s beautiful yellow-eyed hound. His very guts burned with the need to run back to the stable, fling himself into Fen’s arms, impale himself on that waiting shaft.
We can manage on passion and spit…

Shuddering, he took up position on a twist in the track. Laban, if it was him, would have to come through here. Cai didn’t feel like offering comfort, no matter what the problem. Perhaps for once his duty to his fellow man could be discharged simply and fast. “Laban,” he called, stepping forwards as the dark figure rounded the corner. “It’s me—Brother Caius. What’s wrong?”

Laban almost knocked him down. His head was lowered, the hood of his cassock raised and flapping into his face. Cai seized his arm to steady them both, and Laban came to a choking, sobbing halt. “Leave me be!”

“Are you ill?”

“No. You don’t have to tend me. Just let me go.”

“Where? The last man I let go strung himself up in the church.”

“Oh, if I could be so brave as that… No, Caius.” Laban doubled up, coughing. “I’m not going to hell with Benedict.”

“You don’t believe Ben’s in hell. When Aelfric wanted him buried away from his brethren—you helped stop that, didn’t you?”

“Aye, and brought down Aelfric’s curse on myself.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I thought I could be part of your world, your life here. I wanted your brethren to be my friends, far more than I wanted the Canterbury men to be.” He stopped fighting Cai’s grip and looked at him properly. “I grew up in a village like the one down the track. My church was a church like yours. Then I was sent to Rome, and…”

“Forget Rome. It’ll take Rome a long time to catch up with us here.”

“Less time than you think. The missionaries are coming, telling even the priests of Iona that their ways have been wrong. And they’re not cruel madmen like Aelfric. I’ve met them. They’re good. Oh, so good, so holy. But they don’t believe that common men should read, or think, or learn anything outside the Holy Bible…”

“Or the parts of it they’re taught, because they’ll never be able to read it for themselves.”

“Yes. And they’ll win, these sacred demons. They’ll put out all the lights.”

Cai took his shoulders. He’d never even spoken to Laban, beyond the day’s civilities. And yet here he was—intelligent, full of solemn anxiety, the same hopes and fears as Cai’s own. “Stay with me, then,” he said. “Help me fight them.”

“They can’t be fought. You’ll learn.” He detached Cai’s hold on him, gently, as if he’d much rather have remained. “I don’t belong in your world, and I can’t be part of
his
. Not now.”

“Aelfric’s? Why not now?”

“Not now he’s doing this. You don’t understand, Caius. There’s only one way from now on. And everyone who doesn’t follow it will burn.”

The breeze shifted. It brought on its wings a scent familiar to Cai as his own flesh—wood smoke, resiny and pleasant, the promise of a warm hearth, a good meal. But all the fires of Fara were shut down for the night and would stay that way until Hengist set his baker’s ovens roaring at first light of dawn. He turned. Far off in the darkness, a red glow was kindling. It wasn’t on the monastery lands, or in any of the scatter of villages that could be seen from here. Cai checked his inner calendar, the ancient wheel of ritual that had shaped his year until he’d learned a new one from this new, strange church. Too late for Lugnasadh, too soon for Samhain…

“What is Aelfric doing?” he demanded. “What is that fire?”

But Laban was gone, the track as dark and empty as if he had never been there.

Chapter Twelve

Cai ran. He knew he wouldn’t be fast enough—not to close the distance between himself and that fire and stop whatever hellish thing was in the offing there—but his heart was easy. Fen would aid him. Fen would find a way. His strength met Cai’s own like the confluence of two rivers. Fen had saved him twice now—pulled him up, body and soul, from the sea of his grief for Leof, and the swamps and quicksand that men like Aelfric created, reminding him lustily every day that his flesh was not a punishable burden but a joy. There wouldn’t be time to harness up the chariot, but Fen would help him catch Eldra, and together they’d fly across the spaces of the night—she would bear both of them, they’d discovered, provided Fen took the reins, an arrangement Cai had argued then acceded to, laughing and chagrined. They would get there.

The stable was empty. The lamp still glowed on the hollow in the straw where Fen had made himself comfortable and promised to wait—patiently, if not chastely. His cassock was gone, and there was no other sign of his existence.

Which meant nothing. Fen could have got cold, or gone to humour Aelfric by locking himself up in the quarantine cell where he was still supposed to spend his nights. Perhaps he too had seen the fire and gone to investigate, in which case Cai would encounter him somewhere on the track leading out across the salt flats. The light was brighter now, golden flashes dancing in the ruby glow. A massive bonfire, a waste of wood and resources where there was no need for it, out of season and fierce…

“Fen,” he called, fear trying to close his throat, but there was no reply.

Eldra wouldn’t come to him. He thought he could hear her, but the waning moon was cloudy, the field a patchwork of shadows. After leaning over the fence, whistling and jingling her harness for as long as he dared, he gave up and tore back to the stable. The pony would have to do, weary though the poor beast was after their journey home. She eyed him in disbelief as he unhooked her bridle again, but once he was settled on her broad back, she caught his sense of urgency and clattered out into the yard.

No sign of Fen on the slope down to the tidal flats. Still Cai disregarded the chill in his throat. He couldn’t have the Viking at his side all the time. Best if he remembered that now. His soul, his very thoughts, had begun to shape themselves to meet a shadow
other
, something outside himself, and what would he be if it was gone? A shadow too. Whatever was left after the subtraction of Fenrir.