Chapter One #3
friendship means everything to me. It’s just that I can hear the
voice of God more clearly when you’re not here to make my flesh
sing. Caius—please put your cassock back on.”
Cai got up. What surprised him was
that he wasn’t more surprised. He unfolded the garment and slipped
its familiar weight over his head. In the musky dark of his own
scent, a bitter anger touched him. He wasn’t quite used to Leof’s
god even now, and he felt as if he’d lost to a rival. He emerged,
tossing back the hood from his head, and saw Leof white and
stricken, tears beginning to gleam on his face.
“Oh, Cai. You do still love
me, don’t you?”
Cai strode over to him. He knelt
beside him and hauled him into his arms. “Of course.” Yes, he had
been waiting for this. Leof becoming his lover at all was an
example of something Theo called irony. Leof’s gentle teachings
about peace, detachment, release from the hungers of the
flesh—these had drawn Cai to him in the first place. He kissed the
bowed head on his shoulder, remembering his first sight of that
flaxen hair across a rowdy marketplace in Alnwick. Cai had bartered
with him for Fara mead, and then while the wagons were being packed
up towards sundown, had walked with him up onto the hill that
overlooked the town.
Cai had had a bad day. He’d gone to
seek his father and found him grunting and sweating over a slave
girl young enough to be his grandchild. He’d had a bad week,
trailing the old goat around the strongholds, joining in brief,
bloody skirmishes when Broc took a fancy to a neighbour’s cow,
plough or daughters. Leof hadn’t preached. He’d simply talked about
Fara—the wide, quiet spaces, the companionship of like-minded men,
the chance to learn. Cai had met him three times after that. On the
third occasion he’d decided he wanted to become a monk, and had
celebrated by rolling the wide-eyed, willing Leof down into the hay
in an abandoned barn. And willing Leof had remained, but Cai knew
he had pulled the lad out of his natural ways. “How could I not
love you? Please don’t weep.”
“Don’t you
mind?”
“Yes.” Just not as much as I’d expected to.
You touch my innermost soul, but not like that—even when I’m coming
with you, racked by that fierce joy, I still can hear the gulls
call, the waves wash on the sand. “It’s your choice, though.”
“I want to try to be
celibate again. We did take vows of chastity, you know.”
“Yes, but that means
keeping clear of village maidens, doesn’t it?”
Leof chuckled wistfully. “I think it
means this too.”
“Well, Theo never
specified.”
“No. He leaves us to choose
for ourselves—perhaps too much.” He sat up, and Cai offered him a
rag from his provisions pack to blow his nose. “Cai—will you try it
too? You say you don’t hear God when he speaks to you, and maybe
that’s been my fault, letting us both be distracted by… Oh. Kissing
me that way is not a good start, is it?”
Cai sat back, ashamed. He didn’t mind
Leof’s choice, but his own nature was sensual, contrary, his flesh
already missing what it knew it could no longer have. “I’m sorry.
Come on. We should go, before Theo spots us out here with his
spyglass. I didn’t tell you—I met Danan on the path not half an
hour ago.”
“Did you?” Leof put out a
hand to be hoisted up, gratitude for the change of subject in his
eyes. “What gossip did she have for you?”
“Not much. She did have a
prophecy, though. The Vikings are coming, she said.”
“The Vikings always come.
Not yet, though—it’s still much too cold for good
raiding.”
“That’s what I told her.” Cai put
an arm around Leof’s waist. The gesture was only fraternal, and
Leof seemed to perceive it that way, relaxing into his embrace and
beginning to walk at his side. Perhaps I’ll make a good monk after
all. Perhaps
I can separate it out—flesh from spirit, and hear the voice of God
as you do. “Oh, that reminds me. I have to listen.”
“Wonders will never cease.
To what?”
“The music of the bells,
Danan said. The sea bells.”
The tide was out, the causeway
crossing easy. The pony tossed its head in the salty wind that
swept across the mudflats and started to pull ahead of Caius on its
leading rein. Cai restrained it gently. He didn’t want his bottles
and supplies to be jostled about, but he shared the little beast’s
enthusiasm for home. The monastery stood on a vast outcrop of
rock—the final flourish, so they said, of a great spine of it that
ran right across the country to the west coast, bearing for many of
its rippling miles the remains of Emperor Hadrian’s great wall. On
its northern side, where windswept slopes ran down to the beach,
the brethren had terraced the land and persuaded from it—with the
aid of many tons of stinking kelp—crops of oats and barley. There
was Brother Benedict now, the only one of them strong enough to
handle the plough unaided, pacing the length of one terrace behind
a patient ox. Beside him walked his inseparable companion Oslaf,
chanting Saxon myths and Christian psalms to him to keep him
entertained and his furrows running in a straight line. On the
rocky landward side where little else grew, Demetrios was
collecting scurvy grass and bellowing in Greek at Wilfrid’s goats,
who also loved the succulent green leaves.
Oslaf spotted Cai and Leof and lifted
a hand in greeting. Cai grinned, waving back. Leof was lit up with
pleasure too. It was a good place for a homecoming. A hard-worked,
hand-to-mouth existence, but a rational one, with time for
contemplation and learning. Cai was young enough, sickened enough
by his father’s bestial ways, to imagine he’d found his path. If he
didn’t believe as Leof did—if he couldn’t yet kneel in Fara’s
church and truly accept he was bathed in the presence of God—that
would come.
A powerful voice boomed out across the
salt flats. “Wilfrid!”
Cai was close enough to see the
goatherd jump as if slapped. At the top of the narrow trail that
led up Fara’s western flank, a tall, spare figure had
appeared—Abbot Theodosius, never far from the workday crises of his
monks. His desk in the scriptorium was placed to give him a view
out over the widest possible sweep of the land. “Wilfrid, do you
wish a flaking rash to break across your skin?”
“No, my lord
abbot.”
“Do you wish... Let me see… Do
you wish for loose teeth, a dry mouth, mysterious bruising and
seizures?”
“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