Chapter Six #2
firmly corked the jar and set it back in the cabinet. He’d barely
slept in the few hours between midnight office and matins. He’d
come as a novice to Fara with every intent to become a good
Christian. Much of the doctrine—subjugation of earthly desire—had
been strange to him, but between Leof and Theo he had learned to
see the beauty of it too. Aelfric’s version was completely alien to
him. With his lover and his teacher gone, why should he stay, to
see his friends tortured by threats of eternal damnation? “Nothing.
I’m busy, that’s all, and I can’t concentrate with you asking me
all these questions.”
“You’re thinking of
leaving.”
Cai repressed a twitch. How had Fen
plucked that newborn thought from his head? “I’m thinking of
remedies for constipation. You’ll see why, after a few more
servings of Brother Hengist’s egg bread.”
“That stuff would bung up a bull.
Maybe you should leave. I don’t see what a decent soldier’s doing amidst all
these eunuchs anyway. But I for one am glad you were here on the
night I arrived. Now—do you think you could take me for my daily
walk?”
Closing up the cabinet, Cai turned
away. He didn’t dare meet Fen’s eyes. There was a painful prickling
behind his own. He was lost, if he let words of kindness from this
enemy—however rough and fleeting—touch the loneliness gaping under
his ribs. One of the blankets on the cots was rumpled. Cai snatched
it off, shook it out hard and threw it back into place. “Go and put
on your sandals, then.”
Cai had negotiated with Aelfric that
the Viking prisoner should have an hour of exercise each day. He
would get better sooner that way, Cai had argued, and then Cai
would no longer have the flimsy excuse of protecting him as his
patient. After that, Aelfric could do what he wished with him. Cai
had enjoyed the furrow that had crossed the abbot’s brow at the
thought of dealing with a six-foot Viking restored to full health.
All the Canterbury clerics combined would be like gnats on the hide
of a warhorse. Cai had to escort Fenrir personally during these
outings, and any trouble that came from them would be visited—as
usual—not on Cai himself, but on one of his friends.
Aelfric had wrapped chains around Cai.
They were thin and meagre as the abbot himself, but he had chosen
them well. They could tighten like wire, and none of Cai’s strength
could avail him. Remembering poor Benedict moaning in the firelit
dark, Cai realised that Aelfric knew how to choose the right chains
for each man. Yes, it was time for Cai to go. Not back to his
father’s stronghold but somewhere free. He’d take his chances among
the robber bands who roamed the sunlit uplands of Cheviot and
Traprain Law if he had to, shake off the shame and dust of this
place forever.
“Cai. I need you to slow
down.”
Cai had set off blindly across the
courtyard and continued from habit along the track that led to the
clifftop. Fine rain and sea fret were blowing into his eyes.
Normally Fen walked beside him on these trips, his air one of
resigned, almost exaggerated obedience—Cai’s prisoner, even if he
could have picked his captor up and slung him off the cliff with
barely an effort. Now he was lagging behind, one hand pressed to
his side.
“What’s the
matter?”
“You’re meant to be
guarding me. I can’t keep up with you.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Cai slowed up
and waited until Fen had limped to his side. Fen’s breath was
rasping in his throat, his lips tinged with blue. Cai hadn’t
intended to offer his arm, but the gesture came naturally, and Fen
took it easily, as if their bodies had been made to fit together
like this. They stood in the rain, both surprised by their sudden
proximity. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. I thought that
perhaps the next stage of my healing was…a route march.”
“No. You should still take
things slowly. Lean on me.”
They set off again down the track. The
north coast was wearing her wild summer face this morning, sealskin
greys fighting it out with green and startling violet among the
breeze-whipped waves. The wind was fierce but not cold. The sea met
the sky with such purity here, and for all its austerity, its vivid
scents and colours had pierced Cai’s heart from his first hour
within Fara’s walls. He couldn’t imagine life anywhere
else.
“If such a man as your
scarecrow had been set in charge of the clan of Torleik,” Fen said,
his voice still ragged, “we would have taken him and pulled his
lungs out through his back. It is called the blood
eagle.”
Cai frowned in disgust. “I’ve heard of
it. Charming practice though it is, it’s not my solution to
Aelfric.”
“Why not? Because of your
faith? Your Christian convictions?”
“More than that. My
convictions as a man.” Even as he spoke, Cai wondered if he was
telling the truth. If he had Leof’s murderer in front of him, the
heat of battle upon him and an axe in his hand…
“It wasn’t the Torleik who
came here. That night—when your abbot was killed, and your boy—it
wasn’t my men. A different tribe.”
Once more it was as if Fen had pulled
a thought from Cai’s skull. This time Cai felt it as a violation,
and he dropped Fen’s arm, striding on ahead. “Who told you about
my…about Leof?”
“Your brethren are gossips.
I hear many things in my cell. Many reasons why you’d just as soon
poison as heal me. But it wasn’t the Torleik.”
“What difference do you
think that makes to me? Would your lot have treated them any
better—Leof and Theo?”
“No. Perhaps not. I only
wish you to know, because…”
Whatever Fen’s reasons, they were lost
in a rumble of hooves. Reflexively Cai drew Fen to the side of the
track, out of the path of the monastery’s single overworked plough
ox trotting determinedly towards them with her broken harness
trailing in her wake. Normally the most stolid of creatures, she
was moving like a compact landslide, the earth vibrating under her
feet. Behind her ran Benedict, his face distraught.
“Catch her,” he yelled, as
soon as he saw Cai. “Something scared her. She bolted.” Benedict
stumbled and fell, then dragged himself upright and staggered on.
“I couldn’t stop her. I can’t do anything. I am useless—a sinner—a
worm.”
Cai caught Benedict, and Fen caught
the ox. He seized the beast’s trailing harness as she passed, and
without seeming effort pulled her head round, forcing her to a
snorting halt with her great-horned head leaning into his chest.
Cai dropped to his knees with Benedict. “Ben! For God’s sake,
what’s the matter?”
“I am nothing. All the
works of my hands fail me. Aelfric said it would be so.”
“What has he told
you?”
“Enough. Enough. A life of
sin here, and an eternity in the fire.”
He was shuddering, sobs racking his
big frame. Cai rocked him, clasped him roughly. “You know better
than that. How often have you helped me in the infirmary? You’ve
seen what happens when men die. All pain of that kind—burning,
hurting—it stops when the body does. None of it could possibly
follow the soul.”
“But what if it can, Cai?
What if it’s true? In that case I’ve not just damned myself to
eternal torment…I’ve damned Oslaf too!”
“I swear, I will make a Viking eagle out of that
scrawny…” Cai fell silent, fire rising up in his throat. He looked
over Benedict’s shoulder to Fen, who was now watching from a few
feet away, the ox standing tamely at his side. What could he say to
wipe off Aelfric’s dirt from his poor friend’s soul? He wasn’t
Theo, with philosophical arguments at his fingertips for any
occasion.
But Theo had never turned to
philosophy when faced with unhappy men, had he? He had listened,
then asked questions. Simple ones that brought forth equally
simple, powerful answers. “Don’t you believe in a merciful
God?”
“What? Yes,
but…”
“An infinite God,
infinitely merciful. Come on, Ben. It’s one of the dearest beliefs
we hold, the first things they taught us.”
Ben caught his breath. “I…I
remember.”
“Then how can that same God
do as Aelfric teaches? How?”
Benedict didn’t reply. But his
rigidity eased, and after a moment he laid his brow to Cai’s
shoulder. Fresh sobs shook him, but they sounded easier now, less
fraught, as if a dry riverbed inside him had suddenly flooded after
rain.
Fen gathered up the ox’s reins. His
expression was unfathomable. “I will leave you,” he said softly. “I
will mend this beast’s harness and hitch her to the
plough.”
Cai glanced up at him. “Can you do
that?”
“I can. Princes are farmers
in my land too, just as they are in yours.”
Caius left Ben with the plough. The ox
had been harnessed to it and tethered, the rein repaired and one
wayward ploughshare knocked back into place, but the field was
empty. Distractedly bidding Ben to mind his work and not think, Cai
scanned the landscape. Fen was nowhere to be seen. Cai set off at a
run.
On instinct he headed for the
armoury. Fen’s sword, Head-cleaving Bloodsucker or whatever vile thing he’d named it,
was still safe in its rack, and that was something, but…
But Eldra and the chariot were gone,
and that was something else entirely.
Cai bolted out of the barn’s shadows.
He was breathless from his dash down the hill, and now his heart
was trying to punch through his ribs with fear. Had he managed to
unleash upon his brethren and the coastal villages a Viking raider
with a chariot and warhorse at his command? And worse than the fear
of that, sliding around in Cai’s guts like a hungry snake—betrayal,
tiny and cold. What had he expected? The softening in amber eyes,
the brief touch to his hair—what had Cai taken from that, to make
him think Fen would do anything other than rob him and run at his
first chance?
Hoofbeats again. Cai whipped round,
expecting to be mown down, not by an ox this time but by his own
father’s horse. There in the pasture that edged the sea, sudden
sunlight flashing off her trappings, Eldra was circling. She had
been expertly hitched to the chariot, and Fen was standing casually