Chapter 2 #4
you? I’ll bring more water once it’s boiled.”
“No. Wait—ask Wilfrid to
come up here, and Demetrios too if he’s strong enough. I need them
to carry Brother Wulfhere to the crypt.”
“Wulfhere?” Oslaf paled.
“Oh, Caius. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t have time to
discuss it. We must see to the burials tomorrow. Just
go.”
Once Oslaf was gone, Benedict turned
away and carried on wiping the benches. Cai couldn’t seem to move.
A bitter black fury was filling him. His hands were trembling,
sweat breaking out down his spine. He wanted to take up his cutting
knife and drive it into Ben’s innocent back. “Why?” he rasped. “Why
Leof, not Oslaf?”
Benedict turned to face him. His
expression betrayed no anger, but he sat down on the low windowsill
as if suddenly worn out. “I grieve for you, Brother.”
“Grieve for me? You have no
idea. Why is your boy—yours—running around, warm and alive, while
Leof, who was worth—?”
“I grieve for you. But mind
what you say.”
Caius shut up. He pressed his fingers
to his lips—to the mouth that had started to spew out such horrors.
“Ben,” he whispered. “Forgive me!”
Benedict stretched out his hand. Cai
stumbled across the room to him and crashed to his knees at his
feet. He buried his face in the blood-soaked dark of Ben’s apron.
“Leof! Leof!”
When he had wept until his lungs were
raw and the screams in his head had dulled to exhausted silence, he
sat up. Tears were rolling down Ben’s face too, tracking clean
lines through the dirt. Ben stroked his hair one last time. “Where
did they come from, Cai? What did they want?”
“God knows. You’re
right—the next time will finish us.”
“What can we
do?”
Cai dragged a hand across his eyes.
Already faint moans from the ward were drawing him back to his
duty. “I don’t know. But when I can be spared from here, I will go
and see my father.”
Two days later, Cai was on his knees
again. In part it was simply exhaustion. Both Fara’s ponies had
been needed in the fields. He’d made the journey to the hillfort on
foot in a bare few hours, and his soles were blistered and sore. In
part it was an abandonment of pride. He had made his request, and
his father had thumped down in the chair he liked to think of as
his throne, burst into laughter and told him to kneel like the
Christian he was, if he really desired such a thing.
Cai did desire it. He was no
longer sure that he was a
Christian, and that made submission easier. He lowered his head and
awaited Broc’s verdict.
He closed his eyes, and that was a
mistake. He hadn’t slept since the raid, and so hadn’t dreamed, but
he was beginning to see visions. He was back in the churchyard to
the east of the burnt-out church, looking at five shallow graves.
Only a thin layer of soil clothed Fara, and although every man who
could lift a shovel had taken his turn, the business of digging had
been miserable, long drawn out in the rain. Theo at least was at
rest in the cool silence of the crypt. The stonemason would mark
his tomb. For the others, only a plain wooden cross stood at the
head of each pile of earth. Identity was unimportant—each of these
men, coming to monastic life, had cast off all selfhood, subsumed
who he was in the greater brotherhood of Christ. That was the
theory, anyway. It didn’t quite work out in life. Wulfhere had sung
like an angel. Andreou had been a fat gossip who had loved Theo
more than God. Aethelstan’s booming laugh had carried out over the
noise of his forge, and Petros had made wooden bowls of such
exquisite finish that matrons scrapped over them like cats in the
village market. And Leof…
In death, the theory worked well. Only
Cai and his brethren knew which grave was which, and with them
would vanish the knowledge that Leof lay closest to the wall,
sheltered by hawthorns, cradled in the sacred ground he had
loved.
“Caius!”
Cai jerked his head up. The churchyard
dissolved to a firelit hut. All around him, sights and sounds
familiar to him from earliest childhood took up their places once
again—babies crying, one of Broc’s latest wives nursing a newborn
at her breast. Shepherds and traders wandered in and out. Broc’s
great wolfhounds growled at the sheep being driven past the open
door. The chieftain’s hut was the daily centre of all the
hillfort’s dealings, and Broc wasn’t the man to call a halt to any
of that just because his son had turned up, and so half the
settlement had seen the proud monk from Fara drop to his knees on
command. “Yes, Father?”
“What is there in it for
me?”
Cai took him in.
There am I, twenty
years into the future, he thought. Strong as an ox, jet-black hair only
now being streaked by a line or two of grey. Indestructible. “I
don’t understand.”
“If I grant these things to
you—weapons, horses, men—what will I get in return?”
“You know I have
nothing.”
“That was by your choice.
Before you left me here, you had a kingdom to inherit.”
A kingdom? Twelve miserable
fields and a hilltop? Just two days before, Cai would have said it. He’d
have laughed at the old man’s arrogance, certain he had found a
better world. He couldn’t imagine ever wanting to laugh again, not
if he too survived to Broc’s late years, his own sturdy frame
holding him fast in a life he no longer desired. “Tell me what you
want of me. I must have the weapons. I’ll do whatever you
ask.”
“Come back and be my son
again.”
“You have dozens of sons.”
Cai glanced around the thriving, bustling roundhouse, from whose
every shadow peered a face more or less like his own. “Hundreds by
now, probably.”
“You were my
firstborn.”
Cai swallowed hard. What had Danan
said—that Broccus grieved for him? He hadn’t believed it. All his
life he’d been treated like Broc’s horse or his dog. A good one,
granted—an asset to be shown off on market days and feasts—but
nothing more than that. Coldly he said, “May I get up
now?”
“You’d never have knelt in the
first place if that lunatic Greek hadn’t cut the balls off you.
Yes, get up. Come and stand before me. You’ve grown, I think.
Started to fill out. It’s strange—you still look like a man.”
Cai submitted to the inspection. He
was past being bothered by Broc’s words or the spectacle he was
providing to the clan. He even stood still when Broc pushed up out
of his chair and took his shoulders as if to measure their
width.
“How is he, then?” the old
man asked idly, tugging at his hair. “Theo, and that little Saxon
bedwarmer of yours? Did they get through your raid?”
“No. The lunatic and the
bedwarmer are both dead. You were right, Broccus—peace isn’t the
way. I thought you would help me, but if not… Just let me
go.”
Caius turned and walked off. He could
hear Broc calling after him, but it didn’t seem to matter through
the ongoing racket in his head. The cries and the shouting had
never let up. Sometimes beneath them sea bells whispered, and the
bell from the burnt-out church—fallen along with the tower and
stolen for melt by the raiders—kept up its dull warning
song.
He picked his way around the central
fire, around groups of children playing in the dust. When he trod
on one, he picked it up out of habit and put it on his hip,
jouncing it absently. He’d barely been big enough to walk himself
when his first little half-sib had been thrust into his arms, and
so it had gone on. He’d lived hip-deep among children all his life.
Now he came to think of it, they were the only part of his father’s
world he’d missed, and he held the small body close, blindly
seeking comfort. Probably it was a relative anyway.
The child began to yowl and laugh in
pleasure at the ride, and its mother emerged from one of the
smaller huts, smiling to see Broc’s eldest boy back in camp.
“Caius, Caius! Lost your frock?”
Cai handed the infant down to her.
“Looks that way, doesn’t it? Just for today.”
“Ah, won’t you stay with
us? Don’t mind your old fool of a father.”
“I don’t, Helena. But I
have to go.”
“You should hear him. Cai
this, Cai that, when he’s trying to get your brothers to behave. I
think he’s even proud of you for joining that monastery of
yours.”
“Yes, he sounded it.” Cai looked
into her cheerful face, dusted all over with flour. Yes, she’d been
one of Broc’s women for a while. She hadn’t suffered too much, and
now she had a home, and this sturdy boy. Come back and be my son again.
In a way, it would
be the easiest thing in the world. If he stayed, no doubt the
noises in his head would soon be drowned out by others—the pigs
squealing now, for example, as the inept village butcher began his
task… Cai’s head spun. “I have to go,” he repeated, avoiding her
kindly outstretched hand. “I don’t belong here anymore.”
The question remained as to
where he did belong. Stumbling out of the village, past Broc’s ferocious
outer defences, the wooden palisade and Roman-style earthworks, Cai
tried to think it through. Leof had brought him to Fara. Whenever
Cai had doubted what he was doing there, he had turned to Leof and
seen, in his friend’s devout, loving ways, an ideal pattern for
life. And although Cai knew Abbot Theo had never been supposed to
tell him that the round apple Earth danced round the sun, his
teachings had shown Cai what such a life could be when lit up from
within by learning.
Find Addy. Remember,
Cai—the secret isn’t in the book. It’s in the binding.
Cai jolted to a halt on the track.
Theo’s voice, cutting through his inner racket like a knife, solemn
and clear as if the abbot had been standing in the sunshine beside
him. Leof and Theo were gone. Cai hadn’t been able to save either
from a brutal, unchristian death. And his abbot’s last command,
half-forgotten in the mess inside his skull, meant nothing to
him.
He could feel the revolutions of
the Earth. He wasn’t meant to, he was sure. The vastness of the
rock, and the great invisible force that pinned him to it, meant he