Chapter Five #4
slowly. If you stay off the kelp, you won’t slip.”
“You too.”
“What?”
“You too. Prove to me that
this insane immersion is truly your practice, and not just your
effort to freeze me to death, or drown me.”
“Oh, for God’s…” Cai began
to strip off his own robe. He didn’t want to get into the water. He
didn’t want to be reminded of his last visit here, the warmth
inside his marrow, the pleasant exhaustion that came after loving.
Now that he’d gone to the trouble of getting Fen down here, he
didn’t really care what happened to either of them. If this was the
quickest way of dealing with him, so be it. He splashed into the
water, slithering himself on the seaweed, righted himself and
reached up his hands. “Here. Get in.”
Fen picked his way down the rock. For
a big man, he moved with a cautious grace that made Cai want to
laugh despite the chilly numbness in his breast, and he clutched
Cai’s wrists like a scared child. “Gods, monk!” he rasped when he
was knee-deep. “No wonder you can keep your vows. Who would care
for the pleasures of frig after this?”
“That’s not exactly how it
works. Anyway, how can a rock pool be so cold to you after you’ve
crossed the North Sea on a raid?”
“We cross the sea in boats,
in case you didn’t notice. How is it that your bollocks haven’t
crawled up into your belly forever?”
Cai, not quite hip-deep in the water,
struggled not to follow Fen’s gaze. “Well, if yours do,” he said,
pulling him down to stand beside him, “it’s surely the least you
deserve.” He waited till Fen was off balance, then put a hand
between his shoulders and shoved him into the pool.
He listened with interest. Some of the
language he was hearing was similar to Broc’s, when a horse or a
dog had annoyed him beyond endurance. Fen struggled in the water,
submersing completely, then flipping back out like one of the
silver-skinned porpoises Cai saw from time to time on fishing trips
out beyond the islands. He shouldn’t have been out of his depth,
and even if he was…
The fear that this great seafaring
pirate couldn’t swim seized Cai like a cold hand. He plunged in
after him, stilling his frantic movements with an arm around his
chest. “Easy. Don’t thrash about so. What’s wrong with
you?”
“Nothing.” Fen fought for a
few seconds more, then lost a sobbing, coughing breath, the back of
his skull resting on Cai’s shoulder. “I am cold. I hurt where you
stabbed me. And I don’t…”
“Yes?” Cai was interested
in this string of nothings. “What else?”
“I don’t understand why my
brother hasn’t come back to slit all your throats in the night and
rescue me.”
It was on Cai’s lips to tell him
that one Viking raider was as treacherous as the next—to ask him
what he had expected. The ragged wound with its crude stitches
gaped a dreadful blue-black beneath the water. Where you stabbed me…
Fen had never said
as much before, as if he hadn’t taken the injury personally,
accepting it as one of the chances of war. “What happened that
night? Why did they leave you behind?”
“They did not. They would
not.”
“And yet here you
are.”
“Through no fault of
Gunnar’s. Or Sigurd’s, for that matter. They must have thought I
was dead.”
“I’ve heard legends that
your kind leave no one behind. Not even a corpse.”
Fen dispensed with his grasp. After an
ungainly movement or two, he seemed to find his rhythm. Of course
he could swim. He struck out across the pool, putting as much
distance as he could between himself and Cai. On the far side, he
tried to haul out, finely corded muscles straining in his back.
Then his strength failed him. He slid halfway back into the water,
clutching at the rocks. “You will get me out of here,
monk.”
“In a minute.” Cai swam
over to him. Before Fen could object, he turned him, seizing his
narrow hips and settling him so that he was sitting on a ledge, in
the place where the jade-blue water was most strongly warmed by the
sun. Cai scooped up a handful of sand and rubbed it over Fen’s
thigh, or tried to—he dodged a cuff aimed at his head and
retreated. “Do it yourself, then.”
“What is it
for?”
“It cleanses you. Scrapes
all the scabs and the lice off you.” Treading water, Cai watched
him. He needed some attention himself. He hadn’t cared, over the
last couple of weeks, whether he was dirty or clean, and Aelfric
certainly hadn’t taken any trouble over the matter. He rubbed sand
onto his own limbs, and Fen did the same, hands moving uncertainly
over his powerful shoulders. When he tried to reach down, though,
pain shadowed his face.
“I cannot.”
“Let me. You must know by
now I’m not going to hurt you.”
“No. But you shame me—every
day, with your touch and your interference about my person, and
your questions about my water and my bowels.”
“I’m a physician. There’s
no shame in that.”
“A Dane warrior should need
no physic. A Dane warrior should need no…”
Cai let him run on. His voice was
somehow consonant with the wind and the splash of the water, and if
it helped him to complain and lay down his warrior’s laws while he
submitted to having his legs rubbed with sand, so be it. Cai
allowed his mind to drift. These beautiful limbs were longer than
Leof’s, carved with a strength Leof’s quiet life had never demanded
of him. Badly scarred from what looked like untreated axe wounds.
The big, tense muscle that ran up the back of the thigh made Cai’s
ache in sympathy—and something darker, a vibration of longing. But
all that had died in him, hadn’t it? Cai was glad that Leof had
been his last, that he’d bear onwards into his life with him
memories of such purity.
“Who is Theo?”
Cai looked up. Fen was regarding him,
his gaze like sea-light through honey. Salt had caught his lashes
together, and his shorn hair had grown out enough to spike as the
sun dried his crown.
“You wouldn’t be
interested.”
“Theo who makes you bathe.
Theo who thinks man’s flesh is a beautiful gift from
God.”
Surprised that he’d remembered, Cai
shrugged. “He used to be our abbot here. Before
Aelfric.”
“Aelfric the
scarecrow?”
Cai almost smiled. “I didn’t think you
were listening then. Yes, Aelfric the scarecrow.”
“I shouldn’t think you ever
called your abbot Theo names.”
“No. He was a good man. He
taught us about the movements of the stars, and how to treat one
another well. I loved him.” Suddenly Cai recalled who he was
talking to, and he finished the rubdown ungently, making Fen wince.
“Much good it did me. Your lot killed him in the raid before the
one that bestowed your gracious presence on me.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yes. He died defending our
library and scriptorium. He was armed with a book. You can get out
of the water now.”
Fen couldn’t. Cai watched him struggle
for long enough to satisfy the new surge of pain and hatred in his
heart, then went to give him a hand. He thrust Fen’s discarded
cassock at him, and bent to pick up his own.
“Is that why you took up
the sword, warrior priest?”
Cai couldn’t read Fen’s stare. It was
comprehensive—taking him in from the top of his head to the soles
of his bare feet, paying thorough attention to those places where
he was much less priest than warrior. His shoulders, the
musculature of his arms, as if any moment he might be recruited for
some lightning raid up the coast…
“That’s right,” he said
coldly. “The only throats that will get slit around here will be
Viking ones. Fara is defended. Tell that to your brother, if he
ever comes looking for trouble here again.”