Chapter Four #3
you. I can’t.” He turned away. Aelfric shrieked his name, but he
ignored it, blundering out through the ward.
The outer door banged shut behind him.
Once more Cai hauled Aelfric away from the Viking’s bunk. Aelfric
struggled, and Cai, sickened, drew back a fist and knocked his
abbot down with a punch straight out of Broc’s muddy
barnyard.
Aelfric sprawled on the flagstones.
His mouth opened and closed like that of a fresh-landed cod. Before
any sound could come out of it, Cai interrupted, so low and soft
that Aelfric blanched still further. “Leave my friends alone,
scarecrow. My enemies too, for that matter. If there’s any torture
to be done around here…” He paused, glancing at the helpless man
strapped to the bunk. “I’ll do it myself. For a start, I know
better than to interrogate a prisoner in a language he doesn’t
understand. Now get out of my ward.”
Aelfric almost choked. “Yours?” He
staggered to his feet. “This place—the whole of Fara—is mine now,
by God’s decree. I can have you banished with a word.”
“Say it, then.” Cai brushed
dust off his cassock. He didn’t care anymore about this monster, or
the one on the bed. He was tired and lonely, and wanted only to be
back in Leof’s arms among the sun-warmed grasses of the dunes. “Say
your word, and defend Fara yourself next time the raiders come.
Otherwise leave me alone.”
A silence fell in the little room. Cai
didn’t look, but he heard the retreating slither of the abbot’s
robes on the flags. Aelfric didn’t slam the outer door as Ben had
done. He left it contemptuously wide, as if to let all the winds of
heaven come and chill the sick men behind him.
Cai went and closed it. He glanced
around the ward to check that no one had taken harm from the
draught or needed his immediate help. He waited briefly, meeting
each pair of wide eyes in turn, to see if anyone had anything to
say for himself on the subject of wolves in the fold. Then he
returned to the quarantine cell.
The Viking was sobbing. He would have
done anything to prevent it, Cai saw—had already bitten his lip
raw. His eyes were tight shut, his face a bone-white mask. His
chest jerked in helpless spasms. Tears had carved tracks across his
cheekbones, pale in the blood and dirt.
He was trying to curl up around his
injury. Quickly Cai unfastened the straps round his left wrist and
ankle to allow it. The Viking struggled onto his side. He turned
his face to the bare timbers of the bunk, his heavy sheaf of hair
falling to shield him. Rough, unstoppable sounds came from beneath
it.
Cai’s throat ached as if he’d suddenly
swallowed scalding water, and he knelt by the bunk. “I’m sorry,” he
said, his own voice hoarse and strange to him. “I know you don’t
understand me. I’m sorry. Let me see to your wound.”
“I do
understand.”
Cai jerked back. He sat on his heels,
wondering if the clear Latin declaration had come from somewhere
else. “What?”
The Viking shoved his hair back with a
shaking hand. “I do understand,” he repeated, gazing bleakly
straight into Cai’s face. “I speak Latin. I was taught it by a
slave monk in my lord Sigurd’s kingdom—the only thing you puny
Christians are good for.”
Cai swallowed hard. It was as if a
wild beast he’d encountered in the forest had suddenly addressed
him and opened a discourse. “Why… Why didn’t you tell
Aelfric?”
“The scarecrow?” The Viking
managed a half-choked laugh. “I speak only to men. Because you have
aided me, I will speak to you. When I have strength to kill you, I
will do that, but until then, listen to my advice, monk—a favour
for a favour. Give up the treasure of Fara Sancta. Sigurd and the
other Dane Land warlords will keep on raiding till you
do.”
“There is no treasure. No
treasure, no secret. We barely have food to put in our mouths since
the last time you savages burned us. Don’t you think we’d have
surrendered anything we had?”
“Sigurd had to kill many
monks before he found one who would teach him. You are strong
beneath your skirts, or stubborn anyway. Stubborn and stupid. Be
wise, physician. Give it up.”
The Viking’s eyes flickered shut. Cai
reached to ease him over onto his back, but he reanimated. “I am
called Fenrir,” he rasped, the effort bringing blood to his lips.
“Fenrir, after Fenrisulfr, the great wolf of our legends. You must
make me well again, monk, and then you have to set me free. I am a
prince in my own land—second heir to Lord Sigurd’s Torleik realm,
and Sigurd and my brothers and my comrades will be back for me. You
must let me go.”
“Happily. I’d dump you back
on the beach in a heartbeat, your majesty.”
“A prince in my own…” The
Viking writhed, fresh sweat breaking on him. “Oh, gods. Kill me
now, monk. I have soiled myself. I am disgraced.”
Pity went through Cai like a blade. On
its heels came a weird surge of laughter, which he bit back
fiercely, bewildered by it. “No, you’re not. Your body is tired and
weak, that’s all. Will you let me clean you up?”
“The work of a menial. A
slave.”
“Well, you’ve established
that’s all we Christians are good for.”
“I stink like a
pig.”
“You certainly do. I’ve
neglected you. I hoped you would just die.”
Their eyes met. The faintest glimmer
touched the Viking’s pain-filled stare. “You’re honest, at any
rate. What is your name?”
“Caius.”
“Caius?” On the raider’s
lips the word came out like the call of a seabird, and Cai
repressed a shiver. “My father’s father met a Roman general by that
name, a century or so ago. He stuck his head on a
spike.”
“My ancestors did worse to
yours, I’m sure. My father is a chieftain, descended from the Roman
army here.”
“A chieftain… Then you too
are a prince in your own land.”
“All five muddy acres of
it, yes.”
“Very well. I will permit
you to tend me.”
Cai shook his head. He brought two
pails of water over to the bunk and set about his task. The stench
in the cell was bad, but Cai had nursed the whole community of Fara
through a bout of cholera flux, and not much could turn his stomach
now. He only felt sick at having left the Viking—Fenrir, had he
called himself?—to lie like this in his dirt. First he cleaned and
repacked the sword wound, which was bleeding again after Aelfric’s
ministrations. Fenrir moaned and passed out during the process,
which made the rest easier.
Working as swiftly as he could,
Cai stripped him of his boots and deerskin trousers. Underneath
them he wore a subligaculum like Cai’s own, countering the legend
that these vikingr pirates had parts so monstrous they had to be strapped up
inside a bull’s horn. The long strip of linen was stiff with
excrement and blood. Cai unwrapped it briskly from round Fenrir’s
hips, distractedly noting as he pulled away the strip that ran
between his legs that the beaten-bronze loin guard stitched into it
had protected a splendid, shapely length of cock.
He threw the subligaculum aside for
burning, then added to the pile the ruined shirt beneath Fenrir’s
jerkin. The jerkin itself was good of its kind, well crafted, and
would serve again despite the slash through its sheepskin-lined
leather. The trousers too. Cai folded these to be cleaned, thinking
with a pang of how poor Brother Blacksmith would have exclaimed
over the riveted lace-holes and that neat cock-piece.
The Viking was naked, and as finely
made as any of his trappings. Just for the length of one indrawn
breath, the man in Cai took over from the doctor. Skin a shade
between bronze and ivory, marked across the shoulders and chest
with coiling blue-black serpents, needle-pricked designs such as
Danan’s ancestors had used to bear as signs of their warrior caste.
A frame of such lean, tensile strength that even half a breath from
dying it was beautiful. “Fenrisulfr,” Cai said softly, suddenly
assailed by memories of a fire-and-shadow dream.
Cai washed him scrupulously, from the
crease of his backside to his armpits, and then with a fourth or
fifth clean rag took the dust and the traces of tears from his
face. He worked quickly, closing the cell’s lead-framed window as
soon as the air was clear. A fine spring day was rising outside,
belying all the torchlit horrors of the night, but still the breeze
was fresh, and he shook out two blankets from a wooden chest
against the wall.
Fenrir shifted and moaned as the wool
settled over his limbs. His fever was mounting again. Cai felt his
brow and reluctantly fastened him back to the bed. A wolf in the
fold was bad enough, but a delirious one with axe skills didn’t
bear thinking about. He looked at the curtain of hair streaming
down off the end of the bunk. It seemed to be coiling all the more
vigorously as its owner lost strength. Well, superstition or not,
it was doubtless full of lice, impossible to wash without chilling
the Viking to death.
Cai retrieved the shears from the
corner where he’d hurled them out of temptation’s reach. He sat on
the edge of the bed, his thigh pressing gently against Fenrir’s
ribs. Carefully, untangling each strand as far as he could without
tugging, he cut the fox-red mass away.
The mask of a savage archangel
emerged. Maybe this creature was some kind of royalty in his own world. His brow was broad
and capable, his cheekbones sculpted, delicate in their contours as
the corners of his mouth. His nose had been broken at some point
but not badly reset, its slight irregularity lending a charm to a
face that would otherwise have chilled with its aristocratic
perfection. Unable to help himself, Cai ran a hand across the shorn
hair.
“Gunnar,” the Viking
whispered, shifting to find the caress.
Cai shivered. This raider—this demon,
this archangelic wolf—must have his own Leof, his own beloved
bedmate and companion, somewhere in the Dane Lands.
“Gunnar… Bróeir. Bróeir
minn.”
Bróeir… The word was almost the same in the
language Cai had shared with Leof, the familiar rough dialect of
the northern coast. Not a bedmate, then—a brother.
Gunnar, my
brother. Once
more, unwanted pity assailed Cai. He couldn’t understand it. And
much less could he comprehend his own brief, blood-hot rush of
pleasure and relief.