Chapter Four
The wolf’s eyes fell shut. A crescent
of white glimmered through his salt-rimed lower lashes. The rock
splashed harmlessly down into the sand, and the huge, virile
tension holding his body taut over Cai’s drained away. His arms
buckled and he collapsed.
Cai snatched the knife away,
just in time to spare his enemy the passive drop onto the blade. He
didn’t know why—he’d done worse things tonight than cut a man’s
throat. And this was his Viking, the one whose life he’d come down here to take in
place of Leof’s. He rolled out from under the soaked deadweight,
sprang to his feet and stood watching while a wave broke over the
young man’s face. If he was playing dead again, the game would soon
be up. Cai waited. The seventh wave and the ninth one, powerful
heralds of the incoming tide, washed right over the raider’s
body—tumbled him over onto his front. He lay still.
Cai ran to him, seized him by the
armpits and dragged him out of the clutch of the tenth wave. This
time no hand seized his cassock. That had been a convulsion, Cai
thought, a killer’s last impulse to kill. Cai could not identify
the impulses guiding his own actions now. He hauled his burden up
the beach onto dry sand, not caring that the long, well-wrought
limbs jolted over rocks. Maybe death by drowning was too good, too
easy for this brute. Maybe Cai would find the spark of life in him,
fan it up to consciousness and take his cold vengeance after all.
There were things in his medical kit, acids, drugs for cleaning
dirty wounds, drugs that would burn…
He let the young man’s shoulders fall
and thudded down beside him in the sand. He wouldn’t allow his
ragged inhalations to be sobs. He was breathless, that was all. He
undid his satchel, reached in and drew out the first vial that came
to hand—Danan’s poppy, glowing with its own light under the moon.
Cai had let a human creature howl in its lonely death throes. He’d
done it for hours, closing his ears and his heart.
“I’m sorry,” he choked out,
not to the Viking but to Theo’s ghost and Leof’s. He uncapped the
bottle, cleared strands of hair and seaweed from the raider’s pale
mouth and pressed the rim to his lips.
“Gunnar,” the young man
said, on a note of soft wonder. His eyes opened wide. They were
focussed on a distant shore, a homeland far from this bleak coast.
“Gunnar,” he repeated. Tears filled the amber eyes. He reached out,
and Cai flinched away, but this time his scarred, capable hand only
stroked the empty air.
Cai poured the liquid down the man’s
throat. It was a dose for sleep, not death, and he shuddered in
bewilderment as he fastened up his satchel and bent down to take
hold of the fallen man again. It was a quarter of a mile to the
foot of the cliff. If he managed that, there was the path, almost
sheer in parts, a tough climb even unburdened. If Aelfric or one of
the other Canterbury spooks caught sight of him…
“Caius?”
He jumped and let the Viking drop,
nearly hard enough to break his skull on a rock. Staring up into
the darkness, he made out a familiar shape, briefly outlined
against the sky and then beginning a scramble down the path.
Benedict… Cai couldn’t have hoped for anyone better, and yet a
chill of mistrust went through him. Ben should have been asleep.
“What are you doing out here?” he called cautiously. “Where’s
Oslaf?”
“Praying, as the abbot told
him to. It’s where you should be too.”
“And you. But we don’t
march to Aelfric’s drum yet. Or do we?”
Cai hadn’t meant it to sound like a
challenge. After Leof, Ben had been his dearest friend at Fara, his
advocate in the early days when even Theo’s gentle rule had chafed
him. But he hated the new coldness in Ben’s eyes. He waited
warily.
Ben put out one sandalled foot and
gave the raider a shove. “Is it dead?”
“Almost. Don’t kick
him—that’s where I hurt him during the fight.”
“And you came down to
finish him off?”
Cai nodded. That had been his exact
intention. He couldn’t remember when or how he had lost it. “I
can’t, though. Help me carry him up.”
“Are you off your
head?”
“Possibly. I wounded him
myself. I can’t kill him.”
Ben snorted, sounding more like his
old self. “You did for three of his friends up there, no bother at
all.”
“Yes, in the heat of it.”
Cai glanced back out over the moon-burnished sand. The tide had
already covered the place where he had tussled with the Viking. So
all earthly struggles would end, Theo had taught—wiped clear,
smoothed away by God’s hand. “I can’t explain it to you. Are you
going to help me or not?”
“Where will you put
him?”
“To bed, of course. I need
to treat him.”
“In the infirmary? Where John and
the rest of your brothers are still bleeding from
vikingr
swords?”
“I’ll put him in the
quarantine cell. Look—the moon is setting. Carry him up to the
clifftop for me. I won’t ask you to have anything else to do with
it, except…” Cai paused, wiping salt-stung tears out of his eyes.
“Don’t tell Aelfric.”
“Aelfric is going to notice
a six-foot-tall Viking in his monastery. Even in the quarantine
cell.”
Cai almost laughed. But the Benedict
he had once known, that vigorous and hot-tempered ploughman, would
have knocked him down for so much as suggesting the betrayal. “I’ll
deal with Aelfric,” he said hoarsely. “Here. You take his shoulders
and I’ll…”
“No. Leave him to me.” Ben
pushed Cai out of the way. “You bring your kit and his things. That
sword is a good one—the shield too. Is that his helmet down
there?”
Cai looked. The incoming tide had
washed a gleaming curve of metal up into a niche between the rocks.
He went to pick it up. He turned it over in his hands. Yes, he
thought it belonged to the Viking. He remembered how the amber eyes
had widened and shone out from behind its mask. Would Cai have been
able to run the young man through without the disfiguring
metal?
It didn’t matter. Cai gathered the
other weapons and followed Ben up the cliff path, suddenly too
exhausted to do more than put one foot in front of the other. Ben
had slung the Viking over one shoulder. The matted bronze hair hung
down, swinging in time with Ben’s movements. The hand that had
reached out blindly for a long-gone friend also swung, limp and
pale. Cai doubted there was a pulse in its wrist. He wanted to
check, but Ben was moving too fast for him. Probably being carried
like this would kill the raider off before they got to the top of
the cliffs, but Cai could hardly ask Ben to cradle him in his
arms.
If he died, he died. The world
would be that much simpler for Cai. There would only be a
wolf-shaped vacancy, a gap where the sea wind would blow
soundlessly through. Cai remembered his dream and caught his
breath, stumbling on the track. The wolf from the sea…
Yes. The wolf would die. A faint dawn
light was filling the infirmary by the time Cai and Ben got there,
turning the lantern’s flame sallow. Eyes flew wide at their
arrival. Bodies stirred beneath blankets, and Brother John, who had
never emerged from the twilight world into which a Viking’s sword
had plunged him, staggered up from his cot, face contorting in
bewildered horror.
He tried to block Cai’s way. Pushing
him gently aside, Cai directed Ben into the little cell off the
infirmary. Not many diseases survived long in the salty north-coast
gales, but this was where Cai watched over fever cases until he was
sure they would turn into nothing worse. He shoved the door shut
behind him with his foot. “Set him down there.”
Ben dumped his burden without ceremony
onto the quarantine bunk. It was a comfortless wooden frame, bare
of the mattress and blankets that might harbour sickness. “They
won’t let you keep him here. Not Aelfric—your own
brethren.”
“He won’t trouble them for
long,” Cai said grimly. He dropped his kit and the Viking’s weapons
with a clatter on the floor. He’d seen enough of death by now to
recognise its coming—the stillness it set on a brow, the waxen
stiffening of lips that looked made to smile and devour and laugh
at a world now lost to them. He knelt by the bunk. He pushed his
fingertips up under the young man’s jaw. The skin was damp,
unexpectedly fine-grained and smooth. Beneath it was the faintest
pulse, the throb of a tadpole cleaving water. “Not long. Fetch me
cloths and some water.”
“No.”
Benedict had backed away and was
leaning by the door. As Cai watched, he crossed himself. “I won’t
help you treat him, Caius. Not one of his kind.”
“They’re not bloody
demons!”
“They are to me. To all of
us here. They surely were demons to Leof. Or do you
forget?”
Cai couldn’t answer. He waited for
Theo’s voice in his head, the voice that had bidden him to spare
his fallen enemy. But Theo had fallen silent, leaving him only with
the vision of Leof’s destroyed face. If not a demon, he’d at least
brought scarlet-handed murder into his brethren’s midst. “I don’t
forget anything,” he said. “Get the others back to bed, and…tell
Aelfric if you have to. Go.”
He didn’t look up as the door thudded
closed. He couldn’t pull his attention away from the man on the
bunk. Was he gone? After taking from his satchel a piece of
obsidian glass, Cai held it over the pallid mouth. He couldn’t
detect a rise and fall in the Viking’s chest, and he didn’t want to
touch him again, to feel beneath his week’s growth of soft beard
that fine skin. He waited. After long moments, a faint cloud
appeared on the glass.
Cai got up. There was a bucket of
water in the cell already, and a pile of clean rags. He remembered
now putting them in here when he’d been treating the others after
the fight. He washed his hands, scrubbing them afterwards with the
essence of sage and lavender Danan had taught him would help kill
invisible sources of infection before surgery. He had perhaps half
an hour before the effects of the poppy wore off. He drew up a
stool by the cot. “Stay asleep for your own good, demon. I am going