Chapter Six
Dark of the moon, a month after the
second raid. The church was completed, and Cai knelt on its
stone-flagged floor between Benedict and Brother Martin. This was
midnight office, the most ungodly, to Cai’s mind, of all the new
canonical hours. He’d stopped objecting to them. He could see how
they might work and be beautiful, in a monastery with plentiful
resources and time on its hands—a kind of circle-dance of prayer so
that no hour would pass without praise of God’s name.
Matins, prime, terce, sext, none,
vespers, compline, midnight office. The names had their own music.
They blended with Laban’s plainsong chant and the flickering
torchlight. No one needed Cai’s attention in the infirmary, and no
less than three men had been set to watch the coast for raiders.
Freed for once from anxiety, Cai felt the tug of sleep. Subtly he
eased his hood forwards. Beside him, Martin emitted the tiniest
snore. Theo had used to provide a chair for him during mass, but
the old man had learned the art of sleeping on his knees whilst
maintaining an attitude of perfect devotion.
On Cai’s other side, Benedict knelt
with spine erect, tension radiating off him. These days he spent
more time with the Canterbury clerics than amongst his brethren.
Aelfric spoke to him often, too quietly for anyone else to hear,
and Ben would listen, head bowed. Oslaf kept bewildered distance
from him, lost weight and grew pale. Cai opened his eyes again.
He’d never be free from worry, would he—not at Fara, not
now.
The chanting stopped. That was the
signal for the monks to rise and return to their bunks until matins
three hours later, the real start of the monastic day. Cai put a
hand to Martin’s elbow to wake him and help him up, but Aelfric
stepped forwards from the shadows. “No,” he commanded, his voice
more like a crow’s caw than ever. “Remain on your
knees.”
Cai bit back a groan. Three hours was
little enough time to prepare for a day of farming, weaving,
rebuilding and all the other duties that fell upon the brethren
now, with their reduced numbers, and no Theo to point each man to
his right task and ease the labour. Normally even Aelfric released
them without a further sermon.
“Remain on your knees. It
is thus you must hear God’s word on the ultimate fate of your
souls. Your former abbot, thinking to spare you, never taught you
the one truth that could bring you to salvation. He knew his own
heresy, and so he kept silent on the truth of hellfire. He knows it
well enough now.”
Cai tried to lurch to his feet. Ben
gripped his arm, and he subsided. Why should he care? Theo was
safe, far beyond the reach of the carrion crow. The more Cai
objected, the more of Aelfric’s grim attention he drew to himself,
and he wished only to slip unnoticed through his shadowed days.
Those were the terms of his uneasy truce with the abbot—silence and
cooperation, in return for Aelfric’s blind eye to his various
privileges. He was still allowed to train his men to fight—to keep
a warhorse and chariot, and a wounded Viking raider in a quarantine
cell. He lowered his head.
“Each one of you here will
have undergone pain. Perhaps you have broken a bone, or had a colic
fever in your guts, or burned yourselves with hot fat from the
kitchen fires. Is it not so?”
Martin suddenly stirred. “Aye, aye.
But we have our Caius to mend all of that for us.”
A ripple of laughter went through the
congregated monks. “Hush, Martin,” Cai whispered, giving the old
man’s hand an affectionate squeeze. “Just listen. We’ll be out the
sooner.”
“The brother is old, and
therefore we forgive him, although I see no need for a band of holy
men to keep a brewery, and it is my intent to shut it down. Imagine
the worst moment of your pain. Bring it back to mind and feel it
now. What made you endure it?”
Silence fell in the church. Most of
Aelfric’s questions during sermons were rhetorical, but he seemed
to want an answer to this one. An owl hooted off among the ruins,
and the torches rustled. Cai couldn’t think of a thing to
say.
“Because it passes, my lord
abbot.”
Oslaf had pushed back his hood. His
pain-filled gaze was fixed not on Aelfric but on Benedict. “We
endure because it passes. And…” He paused, focussing for an instant
on Cai, a faint smile flickering. “And, in truth, we do have
Caius.”
“I forbid further mention
of Caius.” Aelfric took another step towards the congregation. The
torchlight cast his shadow up across the ceiling until he was tall
and thin as a storm-blasted ash, and his outstretched fingers
sprouted long, clasping claws. “We endure because it passes. Yes.
But I am here to tell you this—in hell, there is no such mercy as
the earthly passage of time. You are pinned like an insect upon the
most terrible moment of your agony, and…it will last
forever.”
A sound like a low-moaning wind filled
the church. The light of the torches remained steady, though. After
a moment Cai identified the source of the keening. Laban and the
other clerics had drawn close, heads together, faces invisible
beneath their hoods.
“Forever,” Aelfric
repeated, and their voices rose.
Cai went cold with disgust. Surely men
who had been taught by Theo to think for themselves could never
fall prey to such theatrics. He began to get up. He would take his
brethren with him out of here and into the clean night. Vikings and
darkness were less to be feared than these lies.
But Ben was moaning too. His sound was
deep and real, full of grief-stricken terror. Cai took hold of his
wrist beneath the sleeve of his cassock. “Come with me,” he
whispered. “It’s all right.”
“No! I can’t move. Don’t
leave me.”
Cai knelt still. Aelfric’s shadow-arms
extended, up and across the raftered ceiling, enclosing the whole
congregation. “Brother Benedict knows,” he intoned. “He knows the
sins that plunge the soul into hellfire. Worst among them all is
impure love. What is impure love, Brother Benedict?”
“All love of the flesh is
impure,” Ben gasped out. This was a lesson he’d clearly learned
well. Rocking, clutching Cai’s hand, he began to recite. “All
fleshly love is lust, a perversion of God’s love. Our bodies are
sacred to Christ. To lie with a woman condemns our soul. To lie
with one another as with women impales us like insects in the
hellfire. Forever. Forever.”
Cai had had enough. He tore his hand
out of Benedict’s and stood up, ready to take on Aelfric barehanded
if he had to. Anything to stop this.
But Aelfric was already on the move.
His face was calm and satisfied, as if he’d achieved his goal. The
clerics had stopped keening and formed up into a protective phalanx
around him. Together, like a river of black pitch through the very
firelit hell Aelfric had created with his words, they swept out of
the church.
Benedict sprang up to follow. Cai
tried to stop him, and Oslaf, pale as death, made a helpless grab
for his sleeve, but Ben left at a run, clumsy, a broken-down piece
of machinery shambling in his master’s wake.
The rest of the brethren gathered
together like frightened sheep. They too began to move, Oslaf in
their midst. They bumped against Cai, who was rooted where he
stood, jostling him blindly. Only Oslaf seemed to see him. They
exchanged one glance, and then Oslaf too was gone, melting with the
others into the night. A gust of wind rushed through the open door,
extinguishing the last torch, and Cai was alone in the
dark.
No. Not quite alone. At his feet,
Brother Martin gave a twitch and woke himself with one mighty
snore. He looked up peaceably at Cai. “Ah. I was sleeping. Is it
over, then?”
Cai picked him up carefully, waiting
till his legs were steady under him before letting him go. He
brushed the dust and cobwebs off his robes. “Yes. Yes, it’s
over.”
“You’re in a bad fettle
this morning, monk.”
Cai looked up from the cabinet of
herbs and potions he was rearranging. He had plenty of everything,
having seen Danan the week before, but he felt a restless need to
rattle bottles and slam doors. Just now there was little else for
him to do. He had arrived in Fen’s cell that morning to find his
patient on his feet, voluntarily washing his face and limbs with a
cloth and a bucket of water. He had already fastened a clean linen
strip round his loins. He had stayed still when bidden for Cai to
check his wound, and dressed himself without complaint in a fresh
cassock.
He was healing well. Cai, squinting
fiercely into a bottle of willow salve, tried to forget the sight
of him in morning light, splashing water into his face, the
droplets in a rainbow aura round his head. How he had looked as he
had straightened to greet him, something like a smile touching his
elegant face. He could stand up properly now, not leaning to favour
his side. For once Cai’s ward was empty, and he hadn’t objected
when Fen had followed him out of the cell, seated himself on one of
the bunks and watched him begin his routine.
“What is it? Has the
scarecrow been after you to shave your head again?”
“No.”
“Good. Because…”
Cai tried to analyse the silence
behind him. It was warm, he decided. Warm and getting tighter…
Before he could turn, Fen’s hand was on his shoulder. Cai would
have to remember how quietly he could move. The hand passed
briefly, gently, through his hair.
“Because that would be a
shame.”
Cai almost dropped the jar of valerian
root powder he’d uncorked. “Careful! Do you know how long this
stuff takes to grind?”
“It stinks of mouse.” Fen
had calmly retreated to the window ledge, as if his caressing touch
had never happened. “What does it do?”
“It soothes troubled
spirits and promotes the health generally, as its name
suggests.”
Fen gave this a moment’s
thought. “Valetudo,” he said. “Yes, I see. You look as if you could use a
dose of it yourself. What’s happened to trouble your spirits,
then?”
“Apart from you?” Cai