Chapter One #2
whom ventured west to do business with the less ferocious Saxons
overseas—vikingr, the pirates. The final R was awkward to local tongues and
often got dropped. The meaning was forgotten, too, subsumed in the
terror the name could evoke. Not just pirates—a race, a force, an
implacable visitation from hell. The Vikings… “They always come,”
he said uneasily. “Not yet, though. It’s too soon in the year. The
storms are still bad.” He took the pony’s rein. “Anyway, they
always sail past us at Fara. We’re too poor to bother
with.”
“Things have changed. You
have something they want. They will come.”
Fire, burned-out villages, women
stumbling round the charred remains in search of vanished children…
Cai shook off the memories. He’d ridden with his father through the
coastal settlements on mornings after raids, smelling smoke and
blood, Broccus grimly assessing the damage and giving such aid as
he could. “Not yet,” he repeated flatly. “No.”
“Can you hear the music
anymore?”
Cai listened. All he could hear was
the anxious thud of his own heart and the stir of the wind in the
dune grass. “No. Wait, though… Yes.”
“That’s your own church
bell, foolish boy. Seems you’ll miss your lunch.”
Cai smiled in relief at the rough,
ordinary sound. Theo had done his best to introduce Hours, the
elegant rhythms of monastic life—matins, lauds, prime and the rest,
dividing the day into twelve equal parts—for the spiritual and
temporal regulation of his community, but it hadn’t worked on Fara.
Cai’s brethren were subsistence farmers, out in far-flung fields
all day, tending such livestock and crops as they owned. Now the
bell rang twice a day—once at noon and once at dusk, announcing
food was ready for those close enough to come and eat. “That’s
probably what I was hearing.”
Danan looked down at him. Her
expression was gentler than usual. There was a trace of pity there,
a sorrow whose source Cai couldn’t read. “Yes,” she said. “Probably
that was all.”
“I have to go.”
“Yes. Be well, Cai.
Just…listen for the music of the sea bells when you can. Listen for
it.”
He shrugged. “I will. Goodbye,
Danan.”
He was almost at the foot of the dune,
the pony trudging patiently at his side, when she called to him
again. “Caius.”
He turned, shielding his eyes from the
sun. She was weirdly outlined by it, her shape seeming to coruscate
and shift. She could have been a girl standing there, or a proud
young woman. “Caius, your father grieves for you.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Cai
shouted back cheerfully. “He threw me out when I converted.
Disinherited me too.”
“Nonetheless.”
“He told me to keep my
castrated Christian carcase out of his sight until I’d learned what
a real man was. So I shall. You can pass that on to him when you
next see him—if he’s still grieving, that is.”
Cai strode on briskly, the pony
breaking into a resentful trot beside him. He always felt better
when he’d restated, to himself or anyone else, his reasons for
leaving Broccus and the hillfort far behind him. Broc regarded any
form of learning as a pitiful waste of time. He lived for hunting,
bloodshed and noisy copulation with the endless stream of women he
bought from slave dealers or stole along with cattle from his
neighbours during raids. Cai had had to get away. And he had to
remember the bad things, because the stupid truth was that Cai
grieved for his father too.
They were so alike. That was the
trouble. Broc could be forgiven for thinking his firstborn son, who
resembled him in every detail, would have followed in his rampaging
footsteps. Coal-black eyes, hair to match. Strong frames saved from
squatness by a length of well-nourished bone carried somehow down
the line from Broc’s Roman ancestors, soldiers who’d manned
Hadrian’s great wall in the last days of the empire, married into
the people they called Brittunculi—dirty little Britons!—and stayed behind when the
occupying forces went home. That had been three hundred years ago,
but Broc still kept among his prized possessions a Roman army
standard, indescribably blackened by time. Yours, he’d told Caius again and again.
Yours when you
reach manhood and perpetuate my name.
There was little chance of that at
Fara. The perpetuating part, anyway—Cai, at twenty-four summers,
had long since attained his majority. Broc had provided him with
girls, but Cai hadn’t wanted a slave, or worse still some tired,
resigned castoff of the old man’s. He hadn’t really known what he
wanted, until…
Swift movement flickered on the
white-gold beach that bordered Fara to the north. Cai raised a hand
to shield his eyes against the sun. A shiver of pleasure went
through him, driving off his shadows. In many ways Broccus needn’t
have worried—Cai was a very poor Christian still, frequently
shipwrecked on the tides of sensual enjoyment that came to sweep
his new ascetic principles away. In many ways he was his father’s
son.
He lifted a hand and waved to the
young man running full pelt up the beach, his cassock hitched into
both hands, his flag of fair hair flying. “Leof! Leof!”
They met as they always did after
Cai’s trading trips—arms outstretched, laughter shaking them,
knocking the breath from one another on impact. Cai had been gone
for three weeks this time, much longer than usual, and their
collision was proportionately harder, tumbling them both into the
sand. They rolled in the dune grass, little crushed clusters of
flowering thyme sending up fragrance around them. “Leof. How are
you, you puny Saxon? How is Fara?”
“Oh—the same.” Leof beamed
up at him. His face was smudged as usual with ink from the
scriptorium. “Hengist has discovered a new seaweed we can eat.
Brother Gareth has a wart and thinks it’s plague. Theo’s had me
working all hours on his book.”
“And is it?”
“What?”
“Plague?”
“Oh, no.”
“Thank God for that, then.
I don’t have to hurry home.”
Their mouths met, smile to hungry
smile. For Cai there was nothing finer than this—Brother Leof at
the end of a journey, a passionate reunion in the dunes. He let the
younger man roll on top of him, shuddering with joy at the
surrender. Leof was lighter, less huskily built, but it wasn’t
about strength, and still less force, as he’d have liked to explain
to Broc, if it wasn’t immediately imperative to thrust all thoughts
of his father right out of his mind. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you. Ah, you
look fine out of your cassock.”
“And so will you, out of
yours.”
Leof shook with laughter. “Fool. I
have to talk to you.”
“Talk after
this.”
“But it’s about this, Cai.”
“Well, then—tell me after,
while the subject’s still fresh in your mind.”
The pony regarded them placidly.
Around them, sky and air wove the ancient song of the meeting place
of earth and sea—wave-rush on the shore, gulls mewing and sobbing.
No more bells, except a last dying peal from Fara.
“You’ve missed your lunch,”
Cai whispered, running a hand up beneath Leof’s cassock and
stroking the skinny belly underneath. “And you’re thin. Have you
been eating?”
“I forget. I lose myself.
It seems of more importance to follow the curve of a letter with my
brush than to pursue a clanging, cracked bell to the
refectory.”
“Very noble-minded. But the
curves and the weave and all your wondrous little beasts can’t live
if their creator isn’t fed.” Cai moved his hand, and Leof arched
his head back, groaning. “At least this part of you is still
vigorous.”
“For you it is. Oh,
Caius—my brother, my brother…”
Caius stripped out of his travelling
clothes. The damage to the deerskin leggings wasn’t too bad, he
noted—just one small damp mark, the rest of his seed spilled
blissfully into the turf and the clutch of his own hand, Leof’s
pouring hotly into his throat, where Cai could still taste it,
salty and rich. He shook out his cassock from the pony’s pack but
didn’t immediately put it on. The heavy brown wool was in need of
laundering, at his long journey’s end, and on spring days like this
its weight was unappealing. Still, it was practical, warm in the
draughty monastery buildings, and Brother Hengist had perfected a
wash that kept most of the lice out. Cai stood naked, idly
scratching the pony’s ears, enjoying the caress of the warm wind on
his skin.
“Cai, please get dressed.
No man as beautiful as you should ever be allowed amongst
monks.”
Caius looked at Leof in surprise. He was
sitting curled up on the turf, his skirts firmly tucked around his
ankles. He was pale in the sunlight, and Cai put the cassock down
again and unpacked the last of his bread and cheese. He had a
little wine left too, nice Traprain mead, not as good as the stuff
they brewed up themselves at Fara but restorative nonetheless.
“Here,” he said, dropping down beside Leof and handing him the
flagon and a chunk of bread folded up round the cheese. “I am not
beautiful. I’m a Roman-Briton mongrel with no grace. Not like…” He
pushed Leof’s breeze-winnowed hair off his brow. Of all the
polyglot men who had gathered at Fara—old-blood villagers like
himself, Theo’s Greek contingent, the Angles and Danes from the
colonies further south—he was the fairest, probably nearest in kin
to the strapping great Vikings who tore up the shorelines all
summer long. Not that Cai would ever have said so to
gentle-spirited Leof, who abhorred their very name. “Not like you,
my blue-eyed Saxon. Now eat and drink, and tell me what’s bothering
you.”
Leof wiped his mouth like a child. “I
almost don’t want to. I feel so ungrateful, when I’ve been so happy
with you.”
“You’re not leaving, are you?”
Cai frowned and cast his mind back over the past few weeks, his own
various misdemeanours. Theo was tolerant, but… “Oh. Am
I
leaving?”
“No. Nothing like that. I
missed you so much while you were away, but…I thought more too.
Prayed more.”
“Am I that much of a
disturbance?”
“Not you yourself. Your