Chapter 2 #5
could spend his days in blissful unawareness of moving at all. Such
an illusion was every man’s right, Theo had taught. Learning could
be taken or rejected. But the choice had to be there.
The treasure. The
secret of Fara.
The sky darkened. The track was empty
before and behind him, and he was far enough from the hillfort that
no one could see him, but he made his way into the gorse, a painful
sickness boiling up in him. He wished the Earth would stop. He
wished there wasn’t blood beneath his nails, so deeply ingrained
that no amount of scrubbing would shift it. He doubled up, his
stomach clenching.
He’d forgotten to bring food with him,
and Broccus hadn’t offered any. Still the efforts to vomit tore
through him. He used to suffer from strange, disabling headaches,
days when coloured glass had seemed to float in front of his eyes.
On those days Leof had sat by his bunk, pressing a cold, damp cloth
to his brow. Cai threw up water and stood gasping, wiping away hot
tears.
His head had cleared a little. That
often happened once the sickness had pitched, Leof cleaning him up
and telling him gently how poor an inspiration he was for his
profession. Even the bells and the screams inside his head were
dying down.
Replaced by rapid hoofbeats. Was that
worse? Cai half-fell back out onto the track. A violent four-time
percussion… He didn’t think he could live with that. With relief he
realised the sounds were coming from the hillside above him. One of
Broc’s wild little warhorses was being driven down over the turf.
They’d have made a Roman soldier laugh, Cai suspected, but in their
own right they were grand beasts, crossbred down with native ponies
through the centuries and still showing some of their imperial
blood. An eye for horseflesh was one of the things Cai had been
meant to leave behind him in the outer world, but still he watched
appreciatively as the horse and cart approached.
No, not a cart. Cai wiped his eyes
again, in disbelief this time. Jouncing behind the pony, catching
dull flashes of sun on its ancient bronze fittings, was one of
Broc’s chariots. He had three of them, his legacy from his own
father’s grandfather. Broc swore they were original and had seen
action up near Hadrian’s great wall, but Cai reckoned that, like
the horse, they were inventive copies. The wheels were broad and
tough, better fitted to hillsides than old Roman pavements. Their
frames were gaudy with low-relief bronze plates of goddesses
walloping nine shades of hell out of a more recent enemy—wide-eyed
figures who looked like the very Saxons who had since settled
peacefully here, established monasteries and sent their beautiful
sons to lighten the lives of men like Cai. “Leof,” he whispered,
wondering if the name would ever be out of his mind, off his
tongue.
Maybe the loss of him had finally
unseated Cai’s reason. Broc valued these chariots more than his
cows and his women put together. They seldom saw the light of day,
and were never sent out on errands. Still unsteady, he stepped
forwards to meet the driver, a skinny lad struggling for control.
“Whoa! Pull her up, pull her up. What’s all this?”
“Broccus sent me after you.
He says…” The boy hauled back hard on the snorting pony’s reins,
and Cai took hold of the harness. “He says you’re to have the
weapons you asked for. He also said…” Frowning, the boy repeated
his script. “There’s little point, because you and your
skirt-wearing friends will probably just chop your feet off, but
you’re welcome.”
Cai looked into the willow containers
strapped to the chariot’s frame. About twenty broadswords had been
roughly packed inside, together with a selection of rusted shields.
“He said I was to have all these?”
“Yes. The horse and chariot
too. He also said you could have me.”
Cai had no doubt in what capacity.
“That’s nice. How old are you?” The boy looked blank, and he
clarified, “How many summers? Since you graced this world with your
being?”
“Oh. Fourteen or so, I
think.”
“Well, go back and have
about ten more.”
“What? You’ll be an old man
by then!”
Cai shook his head. He reached up and
lifted the boy from his perch. Springing onto the board in his
place, he took up the reins. They were soft and worn and came more
sweetly to his hands than befitted a humble follower of Christ. He
couldn’t help but think how much faster he would cover the ground
between here and the monastery now. He smelled fresh bread and
noticed the satchel of provisions his unpredictable father had also
packed in among the swords. Some of his sickness and grief had
receded. His imagination pounced forwards to how it would feel to
bring a Briton’s broadsword slicing down onto a Viking’s hairy
skull.
“Tell Broccus I’m
grateful,” he said. “Very.” It struck him that Broc had picked out
for him a lad with fair hair and eyes as close to blue as the stock
of the inland strongholds ever showed. He shivered. “Be sure and
tell him I wasn’t dissatisfied with you. I can’t take anyone back
with me, and…I’m done with that kind of thing. That’s
all.”
He shook the reins. The pony danced
around, making the harness jingle. Cai had only driven a handful of
times, Broc cursing him and bawling out instructions, but he found
his balance easily, measuring tension on the reins where they ran
through the loops. The boy stepped out of the way, and he drove the
chariot sharply forwards, lifting his face to meet the
wind.
A mile north of Fara, Oslaf appeared,
blue around the lips from desperate running. As soon as Cai saw
him, he set the warhorse to a gallop. He’d instructed Benedict as
well as he could in the care of the injured men, but knew he
shouldn’t have left them. Nothing—not even life—had seemed so
important as getting to Broc and acquiring the instruments of
death. He drove the chariot on to meet Oslaf, reining in hard when
he approached the panting monk. “Here,” he called, reaching down.
“Get in. Tell me as we drive.”
“No.” Oslaf lurched at the
movement of the unfamiliar vehicle, grabbed the rail and hung on.
“At least… Slow down. I saw you coming home, and Ben said I should
get to you and warn you…”
“Is Cedric worse?
John?”
“No. They’re healing. Take
this side track, Cai. Stay out of sight of Fara for
now.”
“Why?”
“Follow round so you’ll come in
at the foot of the cliff. What is this devil’s contraption?”
“It’s my father’s, which
amounts to the same thing. What’s wrong?”
“We have a new
abbot.”
Cai steadied the pony, who’d enjoyed
her wild dash over the moors and was skittering impatiently in the
confines of the lane. He calculated the time it took for a message
to reach even the nearest of the brother monasteries. “How? No one
can have heard about Theo yet.”
“They haven’t. This man was
dispatched from the south weeks ago to replace him. His name is
Aelfric. He’s…” Oslaf relinquished his grip to gesture with one
hand, clearly lost for words. “Just don’t let him see you come in,
not with this rig. And…” He glanced incredulously into the baskets.
“And an arsenal. Caius…”
“We have to defend
ourselves.”
“He won’t let you. He says
the raid was a punishment from God.”
Cai almost dropped the reins.
“He says what?”
“Because we don’t obey
Rule. Because Theo was wicked and heretical. He wants his body
taken out of the crypt and—”
The lane was very narrow. Broc’s
chariots had been designed for close combat, though, and his horses
could turn on a sestertius. The mare swung obediently at Cai’s
shout and tug on her left rein. The chariot lumbered round, almost
tipping Oslaf off the side. “Cai, what are you doing?”
“Going home. The fast way.
Where is this idiot from?”
“Canterbury. He has other
men with him, senior clerics. Please turn round again. You can’t
just…”
“Oslaf, be silent. And hang
on.”
The scene before him was dreamlike.
Urging the pony on, Cai struggled to make sense of it. He had been
fighting for his grasp on reality all the way down the coastal
plain, memories overlaying themselves onto his bleak present
moment. He’d driven hard past the place where he’d first seen Leof
on his journey home from trading, averted his eyes from the dunes
where they’d lain down. Now it was as if time had slipped, doubled
back on itself with incomprehensible changes. Men were congregated,
motionless but for the wind-driven flap of their robes, in the
place where the church had been. Shaken by the speed of his
approach, Cai could almost take the vision wholesale, believe in it
as he wanted to—the brotherhood nearly back at full complement,
close to thirty of them standing in the sun.
But five were strangers. They were
gathered around a tall, thin man whose resemblance to Theo vanished
after one cruel sting. The remaining Fara brethren were facing
them. Through a flash of red fury Cai saw John and Cedric amongst
them. Cedric was propped up in Wilfrid’s arms, John on his knees,
his face grey and drawn.
Cai let the mare pick up speed.
She liked open ground, and the church—the remains of it, the
undefended space with its tumble of stones and burnt rafters—stood
all by itself on the hillside. The monks were beginning to turn in
response to the thunder of hooves. Mouths opened, fingers pointed.
The thin man pushed back his hood to see, revealing a harsh tonsure
and a face like a carrion crow’s. Repulsion crawled in Cai’s
marrow, an antipathy that curdled his blood. Deepest instinct told
him that this carrion bird was his enemy, more certainly than
the vikingr who had plundered and burned with blind malice only. For a
moment he wanted to plough straight into the group, smashing
himself and the chariot to bits in the process, but he eased the
speeding pony’s head around, drawing her through an arc to slow her
down.
“You,” he cried as soon as
he was within earshot. “What in God’s name are you doing? Why are
those men out of bed?”
Benedict detached himself from the