Chapter 2 #6
group and ran to intercept him. “Caius, wait.”
“No! Take the horse. Hold
her.” Cai leapt down, not caring whether Ben had obeyed his order
or not. He vaulted into the church over the tumbledown wall and ran
to Brother John. “All right,” he said to him, crouching at his
side. “Just hold on and…” He broke off, lifting a scarlet hand.
“He’s bleeding,” he yelled, and thrust out his red palm at the
newcomers. “Who the devil are you? What have you done?”
The tonsured man stepped
forwards. If he was startled by Cai’s intervention, his face didn’t
betray it. In fact he looked coldly amused. “I am Abbot Aelfric of
Canterbury, sent to mend the devil’s work in this blasphemous
pigsty. God and the Vikings have begun my mission for me.
Now—before I order you tossed from the cliffs—who are
you?”
Cai hauled in a breath. Before he
could expel it, a shadow fell across him—Ben’s huge bulk,
interposing itself between him and Aelfric. “My lord abbot,” he
said, planting a hand on Cai’s shoulder and pushing him down. “This
is our physician, Brother Caius. Forgive him. The men killed in the
raid were his close friends, as—as they were to all of
us.”
“This wild-eyed savage is a
monk? Where is his cassock?”
“He’s been travelling.
Abbot Theodosius used to permit him to wear—”
“Where is his tonsure?”
Aelfric turned back to address the brethren, dismissing Benedict
without a glance. “And all of yours? Where are your hours for
prayer? Why have I come here to find you doing as you wish, through
all the day and the night? You say the Vikings raided here. I say
again—God wielded his sword over you, and sent a cleansing fire. In
truth…” He paused, eyes shining coldly. “Cast your minds back to
that night. In truth, did Vikings come? Or were they demons, cast
up from your own blackened consciences to reprove your
sins?”
Caius burst into laughter. “You
think we dreamed this raid?” He stood up, knocking aside Ben’s restraining
hand. “Wilfrid—press the hem of John’s cassock here, as I have been
doing. To staunch the hole the dream-demon made in him. Tonsures,
Aelfric? Hours for prayer? You try both, in a freezing winter here.
You’ll want every hair on your shiny pate by the end of it. Ask the
newborn lambs in the snow if Brother Shepherd can come home to pray
nine times a day.”
“Caius!”
“What?” Cai swung round to
face Ben. “Why is anyone listening to this man?”
“Because he’s our abbot,” Ben
replied flatly. Cai opened his mouth, but Ben took his shoulders.
Low and urgent, too soft for anyone else to hear, he went on,
“Besides, what if... Oh God, what if he’s right?”
The sense of nightmare had lifted from
Cai for a while, during his wild gallop from Broc’s stronghold. Now
it came down again, like a killing jar over an insect. Strength ran
out of him. If Ben, the strongest and best of his friends here, had
fallen under the spell of this lunatic… All the light and warmth in
Cai’s world lay buried in the shallow mound beneath the hawthorn
trees. He had briefly forgotten. “I don’t care,” he said dully. “I
just want John and Cedric out of here. Will you help me or
not?”
Ben hesitated. Peripherally Cai saw
Aelfric smile, as if winning a finely calculated point. Then Oslaf,
who had finished securing horse and chariot to a post, pushed
through the crowd towards them. “Benedict,” he demanded
breathlessly. “What’s wrong with you? We must help Cai.”
He took Ben’s hand. The gesture was
potent—much more than brother to brother. Cai wanted to shield
them, but Aelfric had seen it too. His gaze had focussed,
knife-blade predatory, upon their joined hands.
Benedict shook himself and seemed to
come out of a trance. “Yes. Sorry.” He lifted his head. “Forgive
me, my lord abbot, but Caius is right.”
Aelfric let it go. He did so easily,
as if he had found something better to pursue. “Go, then. I have
said what I wish to for now. All those who need to, go with your
physician. For now.”
Cai and Oslaf took charge of
Cedric, who had stayed upright somehow, his eyes blank and lost.
Benedict picked John up bodily and cradled him. Leading the way out
of the church, Cai saw his new abbot’s thin lips working, moving as
if in prayer. Abominations, Cai lip-read, and averted his gaze so as not to
know any more. Aelfric was watching Oslaf and Ben like a
hawk. Abominations. A few of the monks who had suffered no injury
during the raid did their best to creep out with the others, but
Aelfric’s retinue, starved-looking men like himself, moved to block
their path.
Aelfric spread his arms. “I will
purify this place of all abomination,” he declaimed aloud, his
voice a crow’s caw on the wind. “I will rebuild it in sanctity. You
who remain here—never mind your goats and your laundry. Dedicate
daylight today to gathering these fallen stones. Your church must
be built out of rock, like Peter’s of Rome.”
Cai stopped dead. Oslaf had started up
the stairs to the infirmary with Cedric. He shielded his eyes from
the sun. “Don’t be a fool, Aelfric,” he said. His anger had gone.
To himself he sounded reasonable. He had to stop this stranger in
such a fundamental mistake. “The Vikings knock down churches
wherever they raid. I don’t think they care what we worship, or
who, but the sight of our churches provokes them. We build in
willow and thatch so it won’t matter so much—so we can put them
back up again.”
“Blasphemy!” Aelfric swung
a finger at Cai, who thought he would soon become very tired of
that gesture. And that word. “Blasphemy, to say the burning of a
church matters not! A church built out of faith and sacred stone
can never fall. We will build it. You will help us the moment your
duties are done.”
Cai shrugged and turned away. He
didn’t know what battle he was facing here, if there was a battle
at all. Benedict and all the Fara brethren had been devoted to
Theo. A stranger marching into Theo’s monastic realm, threatening
to desecrate his corpse… Cai would have expected to find Aelfric
and his men in a heap at the foot of the cliff, hurled there by
Benedict’s great hands. How had the crow taken charge? If Cai could
bring himself to care, he’d have to find out, discover the nature
of his power. And meanwhile… “Oslaf,” he called softly, running up
the stairs to catch up with him. “I’ll take Cedric now. Can you get
back down to the chariot—take it down to the stables without our
new friend noticing?”
“I’ll try.”
“Good. And if he stops
you—well, for God’s sake don’t let him see the swords.”
To stay out of Aelfric’s way was the
best. Over the next couple of days, Cai managed this well. John
took fever from his enforced attendance in the church, and Cai
stayed at his bedside, wrestling away the dark angel more by sheer
force than medical skill. Half a dozen times he reached for Danan’s
poppy vial, but held off, reading the lights in John’s eyes as a
will to survive and praying he was right. Aelfric didn’t intrude
into the infirmary, and Cai didn’t encounter him again until at
last he could leave John for long enough to go in search of
food.
His route took him past Theo’s
office. That was how the brethren had referred to the bare little
cell by the scriptorium, though Theo had dispensed most of his
administrative wisdom directly, outdoors or looking over his
charges’ shoulders while they worked. The room had been the
storehouse for his curiosities and teaching aids—a row of skulls,
some from beasts whose living forms Cai couldn’t begin to imagine,
some human—and on the shelves below, the array of devices he had
used to teach the brethren his wild, anticlerical science.
The
Gospel of
Science, Cai
thought, Theo’s last words resounding in his head again.
Only a copy, dear
Caius. Don’t worry.
A dark-robed form was moving round the
room. This was such a familiar sight that at first Cai didn’t react
to it. Tall and thin, bending over the shelves…
Glass shattered on the stone flags.
The floor was already glimmering with shards. Theo’s bronze
spyglass lay in a corner, crushed as if a great foot had landed on
it. The device he had called a sextant, the copper arc on its
complex wooden frame—the thing he used to tell the distances
between the stars—was in pieces against the far wall. While Cai
watched in the doorway, Aelfric turned and swept the last shelf
clear of its skulls, a single contemptuous gesture.
When he was done, he planted his hands
on Theo’s desk and glared at Cai as if he had expected to find him
there. “You will understand this,” he growled. “God made all
men—even you, physician—as the sublime peak of his creation. He did
not set them adrift on some bare rock to float amongst the stars.
He placed them at the centre. The sun…goes round…the
Earth.”
Cai wanted to weep. He wanted to fall
on his knees, scrape up as many pieces of his beloved abbot’s
precious toys as he could, fold them into his robes and make them
whole again. “You’re worse than the Vikings,” he got out, the words
scalding in his throat. “Even they didn’t… Even they left these
things alone.”
“Yes. The demons recognised
the devil’s instruments.”
For once Aelfric was on his own. Every
other time when Cai had encountered him, he had been surrounded by
his retinue of grim-faced clerics. Cai too was alone. Aelfric was
lean, but Cai sensed a strength in him. It would be no cowardice to
take him on now—by the rules of Broc’s stronghold, not the
cloister. Man to man, and the loser to repent the error of his ways
as he dropped like a stone from the window.
Caius, don’t
worry.
This time the voice was almost
physical. Cai barely restrained himself from jerking around. He
felt as if Theo had laid a warm hand on his shoulder.
Don’t worry. Don’t
let him destroy you or drive you away. Guard my flock.
Cai decided he was going mad. That was
far from unlikely, given his last few days. He had seen better men
than himself break down over less. That was fine. If he had to hear
voices, Theo’s would be the one he chose, unless it had been
Leof’s. But that sweet soul was resting in a peace beyond Cai’s
understanding, his voice the sea-wind song among the gorse. Cai
went up to the desk. Aelfric tensed for confrontation, but there
was no need.
“Have you set a
watch?”
“A watch?”
“At night. The raid here
came early this year. But now they’ve come once, they’ll do it
again. They think we have something they want.”
“The demons will not come
when men’s hearts here are pure. And pure they shall
be.”
Cai gave it up. He could watch
the sea himself. He no longer seemed to need sleep. “By your own
wisdom, then. But remember this.” He took up the stub of a candle
from Theo’s desk and put it upright. “Here is the sun. Imagine its
light if you can.” He placed in front of it the round stone Theo
used as a paperweight, and produced from a pocket in his cassock a
small pink apple. It was one of Broc’s, from the orchard where
sweet Roman strains still grew. He set it down in front of the
stone, so that all three objects were in a line. “We
are
on the rock, my lord
abbot. The apple is the moon. Just now our rock, this stone, sits
between the sun and moon, and so the moon is dark. In fourteen
days, this apple moon has moved to our rock’s other side, and so we
see her face in full. So we must be between the sun and the
moon—not at the centre of them.” Cai paused and drew in a deep
breath. “Preach what you will. Darken men’s minds if you must—tell
them the sun and all creation dances round you. As long as there’s
a candle, a stone or an apple anywhere in this monastery—I can
prove otherwise.”