Chapter Five #3
a natural repellent to fleas and other vermin. If it smells sweet,
that’s because of the Tanacetum vulgare—tansy—that drives away ticks. We also use
it to flavour our bread. As for mortifications of the flesh…” He
threw a blanket at Fen and shook out the new mattress. “I can’t
answer for the abbot and his clerics. But the man who used to rule
us here—Abbot Theodosius—forbade us all such things. He said…” Cai
paused, waiting till his voice would be steady again. He was
remembering Theo catching Wilfrid by the arm one day, asking him
why he was limping, and with gentle firmness making him hitch his
cassock up to show the circlet of bramble thorns round his thigh.
“He said it was monstrous to misuse the bodies God gave us. Like
breaking a beautiful gift. Now, do you think you could walk with me
down to the courtyard?”
“Walk with you? I could
sling you over my shoulder and carry you there,” Fen returned, but
with less of his customary snarl. He was watching Cai oddly, as if
reassessing him. “Why should I, though?”
“I haven’t finished
teaching you. Come on.”
“In my blanket?”
“No. In one of these.” Cai
took a fresh cassock out of the linen chest. He waited for the
outcry, but perhaps he’d shocked his patient speechless. Making the
most of it, he shook the garment out. “As you say, it has a skirt.
It’s also warm, comfortable and practical. Put it on.”
“Where… Where are my other
clothes?”
“Incinerated, mostly. We
salvaged what we could, but you’re not walking round this monastery
dressed like a pirate.”
To his surprise, Fen took the garment
from him. He stood up, letting his blanket drop. He showed no sign
of consciousness at his nakedness, and Cai studiously failed to
notice it either, waiting while Fen pulled the cassock over his
head.
“With what shall I gird up
my loins?”
He made a fine figure in the long
brown robes. They had belonged to Brother Petros, who’d been about
the same height. With his shorn head and his direct gaze, he was
pleasing to Cai somehow in the way of an oak sapling—young enough
to bend, set to last a hundred years. “You’ll gird them as you
usually do. The linens are in that box. But don’t bother now—I’m
taking you for a bath.”
Fen refused assistance down the stairs
with a haughty gesture that made Cai want to slap him. In the fresh
air of the courtyard, though, he swayed and grabbed at the low
stone wall that surrounded the well.
“Sit down,” Cai ordered
him, looking out across the fields. The little packhorse he used on
his travels and the monastery’s only other pony were both hard at
work in the hay pasture. “Wait. Sit there, and…” He tugged up Fen’s
hood to conceal his bright hair. “Just for a moment, try not to be
conspicuous.”
Broc’s chariot horse was feeding her
head off in the paddock to the south. She had proven useless
between the shafts of cart or plough, rearing and kicking in a fit
of royal rage to match Fen’s own. Cai had expected from day to day
that Aelfric would order her slaughtered and salted away for winter
meat, but there she was, looking glossy and bored in the sun. She
came when Cai whistled, as if he might at last have something
interesting for her to do, and bumped her chestnut muzzle hard
against his chest. As far as Cai knew, she’d never been tried as a
saddle horse—not that Fara, or indeed Broc’s stronghold, ran to
saddles. He clambered the drystone wall and took her by the
halter.
The Viking sat up straight at the
scrape of hooves in the courtyard. He pushed his hood back, his
face becoming keen and intent. “Roman,” he declared, as Cai led the
mare up to him. “Yes. Roman, with two hundred years of your Briton
puddle-jumpers mixed in, and…” He pushed upright, pain and weakness
forgotten. “And a strain of the Barb. You won’t know what that is,
monk. You think the world ends at the Oceanus
Britannicus.”
“I do know. My abbot Theo told us
of places far beyond that—Barbary, Arabia, where men called Berbers
live in silken tents and ride about the desert on beasts that can
gallop as easily on sand as soil. What does a vikingr pirate know of horseflesh,
though?”
“It’s true that we are
masters of the sea.” Fen ran a thoughtful hand down the mare’s
flank. “And the ponies we use for raids are scrappy beasts, not
like this. They take us to the battle, then we fight on foot, our
stupendous skills in warfare bearing all before us. This explains
what I saw in your weapons barn. I thought it a fever
dream.”
“The chariot?”
“Yes. What does a Christian
monk know of those?”
“I told you—my father is no
Christian. He’s a Roman warlord, or he likes to think he is, and he
gave me this beast and the chariot to help me defend Fara against
monsters like you.” Cai paused, distracted. The morning breeze was
full of the scent of kelp and thyme, too pleasant in his lungs to
fuel hostility. “You really think she has the Berber
strain?”
“Mm. Look at her high
forequarters, her crouped rump.” He leaned stiffly, patting her
fetlocks, and Cai crouched beside him to take a closer look. For a
moment monk and Viking dropped away and they were simply men, heads
together over an intriguing piece of horseflesh. “Her hooves are
rounder than the Roman breeds. What’s her name?”
“I don’t know. I don’t
think she has one.”
“You should always name
things—beasts, ships, swords. It brings down the spirit upon them.
Speaking of which—where is my wolf’s-head blade?”
“Safely locked up.” Cai
took a step back, renewing the distance between them. This man was
his enemy. He had forgotten. “Out of bounds to you. Listen—while
you’re healing, I can treat you like any other sick man. But once
you’re well, you’ll be a prisoner here. You’d better behave like
one, or…” Cai fell silent. He had to have imagined the flicker of
hurt in those dark eyes. “Here. I’ll give you a leg-up.”
“I can manage for myself.”
Fen grasped the horse’s mane just in front of her withers. He
braced to spring up. Then his knuckles whitened, and he let go a
gasp that would have been a scream from a lesser man. He rested his
brow on the mare’s flank. Cai reached for him, but he flinched away
and scrambled, grey-faced, to stand on the low wall that bounded
the well. “I can do it from here, if you will hold her.”
Cai held the mare’s halter while she
danced and sidled. She wasn’t used to a weight on her back, but Fen
sat quietly, and after a moment she settled, head high, exhaling in
wide-nostrilled snorts.
Cai led her out of the courtyard. Once
out on the wide sweep of turf, the salt wind warmly buffeting his
face, he was ashamed. “All right,” he said, not glancing to see how
his magnificent prisoner looked on horseback. “What is its name,
then? Your wolf’s-head sword?”
“Blóekraftr
dauei. The
mighty blade of blood and death.”
Cai shook his head. “It would
be.”
“And I shall call this
horse Eldra—the fire.”
There was no one else at the bathing
pools when Eldra had picked her way down the cliff path and onto
the rocks. Cai was relieved. He knew that every kindness shown to
Fen was an insult to the memory of his slain brethren, and more so
to the living ones who had to witness it. He looped the horse’s
leading rein round an outcrop of rock in the shade, then turned to
Fen, who had remained silent for the last part of the journey. “I
know you wouldn’t let me help you up there. But I think you’ll have
to let me help you down.”
Fen regarded him blankly. “Yes. To my
undying mortification.”
“For God’s sake. All right.
Swing your leg over her forequarters, not her rump. It’ll pull your
stitches less that way.”
“It is an unmanly way to
dismount.”
“So is landing on your face
in the kelp. Come on.”
Cai held his arms up for him.
Reluctantly Fen consented to be aided down, slithering into Cai’s
embrace, where he stood for a moment, trembling. “Enough. I can
stand now. Let me go.”
“Is every little thing a matter of life-and-death
Viking honour for you?”
“Of course.”
Cai led him down to the pools. The
tide was rising, as it had been on the day when he’d come here
alone, yearning for the earthly pleasures Leof had just renounced.
The water in the rocky basin was bright with the same green-blue
reflection of sky. But Cai’s world had ended since then, burned to
the ground and grown back again in a shape he still could barely
comprehend. Who had that boy been, stretched out in the pool with
nothing more on his mind than the hungry tension in his loins? All
such needs had fled from him. In the few short hours of sleep he
got, his cock remained quiescent, and the idea of his own touch
scarcely occurred.
Ironic that he’d achieved his monastic
ideal in such a way. Leof would have said it didn’t count, if he
was no longer tempted, but that was one of the many nuances of
Christian thinking Cai had never understood. Achieving the result
was surely good enough. “Take off your robe and get into the
water.”
“Into the…”
“Yes. Come on. It’s not too
cold on a day like today.”
The look Fen gave him could have been
bottled and used as a wound-cleansing liniment. “My whole body?
Into that?”
“Yes. We dirty Christians
do this once a week, whether we need it or not. Theo insisted on
it. Come on—the salt water will help heal you.”
Fen put out a defensive hand when Cai
reached to help him lift the cassock over his head, so Cai stepped
back and let him get on with it. He kept his attention on the
rocks, the rainbow gleam of sea urchins and cockleshells through
the sunlit water. He’d seen a hundred naked men before, and once
they passed into his hands as patients their bodies lost all
significance to him but the parts of them that needed healing.
Fen’s splendid shadow was only an image, a thing to admire from his
new, cold distance.
He took the cassock wordlessly,
choosing not to complain that Fen had thrust it at him with a
princely disregard. Not this time, anyway. “All right. Get in