Chapter Three #3
“I’d rather have been out splitting Viking skulls with you, Cai.
Did you get a lot of them?”
Cai found a smile for the old man’s
innocent bloodlust. “A nice lot. I’m glad you were here. We can’t
spare our brewer.” He raised his voice. “Come on, all of you. It’s
safe. And we need help clearing up.”
“No!” Aelfric strode
through his bewildered flock, knocking the slower ones out of his
way. Crazed or not, he looked down through the foot of height he
had on Cai with grim power, and he carried his own nimbus of
authority with him. “We must all go to our cells and pray in
solitude, in thanks for this deliverance.”
“Aelfric—they don’t
have
cells
anymore.”
“Then let us go and pray in
their ruins.”
Cai gave it up. “You must do as you
think fit. I have wounded men to tend.”
He turned away. A clawlike hand landed
hard on his shoulder. Still raw with battle nerves, Cai tore out
from under it. “Leave me be, scarecrow.”
He hadn’t meant to say it. Despite
everything, he’d learned—come to believe—that an abbot’s place at
Fara was sacred. That his person was due all respect. Now Cai had
insulted him, in front of the Canterbury crows and his faithful.
Worse, if that hand descended again, Cai would lash out. He was
trembling still, the scent of blood and Viking torches in his
nostrils. Aelfric was silent. With eyes like that he didn’t have to
speak. Cai read there all his intentions of cold-hearted
vengeance.
“Forgive me, my lord
abbot,” he rasped. “I must go.”
Cold-hearted vengeance. Theo had
taught that idea as one of his few examples of sin. Men were
animals, he had explained—another heresy—and, when injured, turned
upon their attackers with words or blows before their better selves
could prevent it. That was bad. But to go away and brood upon a
crime, and then exact a punishment—no, not even the beasts would
stoop to that. Perhaps sometimes the animal is the better self, he had mused at the
end of his lesson, and walked off abstractedly, leaving the
brethren looking at one another in outrage and wonder.
But Caius had taken his point. He’d
tried to work on reining in his own quick temper, secure in the
knowledge that he’d never be cold, clever or mean enough to have to
worry about the greater sin. He’d dared to entertain a little rare
pride in his Christian qualities, glad for once that his blood was
warm, his reactions quick and instinctive.
He had been wrong. He was as bad as
Aelfric. A wolf was howling on the beach, and Cai’s blood was
ice-cold.
He washed his hands in the bucket for
the tenth time, watching red spirals float in the moon-silvered
water. He had just dismissed Benedict and Oslaf to their rest. Both
were becoming good medics under his instruction, and his patients
were at peace. The warrior monks of Fara had sustained a few
injuries—some, as Cai had feared, from their own blades—but none
would be fatal, and the infirmary had been almost a merry place
that night, as they laughed at one another and swapped tales. All
were sleeping now, clean and calm and dreaming poppy
dreams.
Not a wolf. A man. The cry came again,
long and desolate. The Vikings had left behind one of their
own.
Cai looked out of the window. He had
heard the first cry hours ago. He’d known for all that time that a
man was dying on the beach alone. His patients had heard it too,
and agreed among themselves, low-voiced and shuddering, that a
slow, lonely death was no more than these devil-men deserved. Only
Oslaf had looked troubled over the verdict, but Cai had sent him
about his errands with a sharp word.
One day, Theo had said, tugging at his
hair in frustration, I will set us all an exercise of treating one
another no better than we deserve, and we will see at the end of
the day how many of us are left standing.
But Theo was dead. Leof was dead,
killed by a Viking, and with him had been buried the best of Cai’s
Christian intent. Ben had forgotten all about Aelfric’s orders, it
seemed, and all night Cai had watched how he and Oslaf worked
together, how in every unoccupied moment gaze had found devoted
gaze. Cai wondered if they’d found some quiet place in the moonlit
ruins to celebrate their impurity, their soul-condemning
love.
Leof, killed by a Viking. Cai dried
his hands. There on the sand, at the sea’s very margin, the wounded
man lay. This one was Cai’s.
The sand was cool beneath his
feet. He could have been alone in the world, one heart beating
under the springtime stars. He took time to look at them, as Theo
had taught—the little constellation of the lyre, the leaping
dolphin and the swan Deneb’s great sail, these three in a triangle
whose rising promised summer. Mars glowed dully near the horizon,
as if pleased with his night’s work. Hundreds of millions of others
glimmered behind the full moon’s cobweb light. Yes, millions,
Theo quietly
reminded him. More than the grains of sand on this beach, and no matter
what you’ve heard, I don’t believe they’re holes pricked by the
angels in the firmament of night.
Cai, who had never thought so, but had
a hard time believing each star was a sun like the one that lit up
his own days, shook his head in wonder. The beach stretched out
before him, a long, broad sweep southwards, every grain a tiny star
in the silver light. The only flaw in its stillness, its perfect
serenity, was the black shape of the man down by the water’s edge.
He was motionless. His cries had stopped. Cai, who was close enough
now to make out his matted hair, drew his sword and began to
run.
“No,” he whispered, barely
audible to himself above the thud of his heart. “Don’t die. You’re
mine.”
Red-bronze hair, streaming over a face
white as bone in the moonlight. The incoming tide was beginning to
lift it, make it drift like seaweed. If Cai left well alone, the
waves would do his work for him. But drowning wasn’t enough.
Drowning wouldn’t wipe out the sword stroke that had ripped Leof
out of the world. Only another would do that. He skidded to a halt
beside the fallen man. He stood still, planted his feet squarely in
the sand and raised the sword high in both hands, blade downward.
One plunge would do it. One blow.
Cai, stop. You already
delivered it.
Cai froze, hands convulsing round the
sword. Theo’s voice was as real as the wash of the sea, but he
couldn’t turn to look. The man at his feet was the raider he’d
encountered in the gully, the first to engage with him. Torchlight,
tawny wolf’s eyes. A brief rip and grind of metal through skin,
against bone and then out again. On to the next. Cai hadn’t thought
the blow a fatal one—hadn’t thought at all after that. But his
blade had put this man here.
Perhaps not. Cai tossed the sword
aside, suddenly frantic to know. The fight had been brief but
savage—perhaps the raider had sustained some other wound. Crouching
beside him, Cai pulled at the thong of his jerkin. Already the salt
water had begun to shrink the leather, tightening the garment
across the young man’s broad chest. Cai pulled out a knife from his
belt and quickly cut through the thong. The skin beneath the jerkin
was still warm, with the fading heat of an apple brought in from
the orchard on a hot day. Smooth as an apple’s too, rippling over
the framework of muscles and bones underneath—and unmarred, except
for the one gaping hole Cai had put there himself.
He sat back on his heels, gasping. He
felt sick. When he searched for his cold, vengeful anger, it was
out of his reach—not far, but enough, like the sword he’d cast
aside. Just beyond his fingertips. He moved to retrieve the weapon,
and his medical kit tugged at his shoulders, the strap pulling
tight. Cai couldn’t remember picking it up when he’d left the
infirmary. He must have grabbed it out of habit.
“I’ve come to kill you, not
heal you,” he told the pale face hoarsely. “You took my friends,
you and your kind. You took Leof.” But the beautiful man laid out
on the sand had passed far beyond care for such things. He had lost
his helmet, the disguising metal stripped from him. His sins,
whatever they had been, were smoothing away in the moonlight. The
seawater rippled and gathered, and shot out one eclipsing wave to
hurry on the dissolution. On an impulse he couldn’t understand, Cai
lifted the Viking’s head clear of the water.
A fist grabbed the front of his
cassock. Cai lurched back, and the Viking shoved onto his elbow,
soaked hair whipping back off his face. Cai lost balance. He landed
hard on his back, the young man seizing the advantage and pouncing
up to straddle him. His thighs clamped tight on Cai’s hips. The
hand Cai had last seen drifting limply in the foam was now clenched
tight around a rock. Amber eyes blazed into his, blind with
uncomprehending hate.
Cai still had hold of his knife. He
was a doctor, and cold vengeance had turned out not to be his gift,
but he was his father’s son—the dagger’s tip was pressed to the
Viking’s throat. “Go on,” he growled. “Brain me with your rock, and
I’ll slit your gullet with this. Then we’ll be quits.”