Chapter Seven #2
They wouldn’t do. The third of the clerics, a Roman called Marcus,
had sometimes seemed less sombre than the rest. Cai seized his
shoulders. “Keep Oslaf out of here.”
“Which… Which one is Oslaf?”
There are so few of us, and you are our masters. How can you
not know our names? Cai shook him.
“Benedict’s friend. The young one. God, ask anyone—just keep him
away!”
Marcus
stumbled out. Now that Cai had done that one vital thing, the
distance closed, sweeping his next duty in on him. With it came
hope, stabbing and hot. Hangings didn’t always work. Knots slipped,
men were incompetent. Drops were too short to crush the trachea and
break the neck. For as long as Cai had known him, Ben had never
been the most deft or thoughtful of men. He was a ploughman. A
staunch-hearted warrior when forced, and by nature a lover. All the
actions of his hands had tended to life, not death. “I have to get
him down!”
Ben had
used the pulpit, the makeshift stairs and platform where Theo had
nine times out of ten laid aside his sermon, folded his arms and
addressed them agreeably, man to fellow men. He’d kicked it aside
with great force. Cai dragged it upright from the place where it
had fallen and pushed it back into place. He clambered up its
steps, sick fear slowing him, filling his limbs with lead. The
pulpit wasn’t tall. Nor was Cai, especially—not by contrast with
Ben, who’d been able to stand here, string himself up,
and…
“I can’t reach him.” He tried anyway, leaning far out over the
pulpit’s edge, grabbing a handful of Ben’s cassock and pulling him
into his arms. He could only stretch as far as Ben’s hips. He took
hold, desperately trying to lift him, to relieve the pressure on
his neck. “I can’t reach him. I can’t get him down.”
“Caius. I can.”
Cai
looked down. The church was filling now, men arriving, drawn by the
chaos, taking a few steps and falling still. Aelfric remained
rooted where he was. White faces stared, thank God none of them
Oslaf’s. At the foot of the pulpit, Fenrir stood waiting. He had
recovered from his fright. He was solid and strong, and he sought
Cai’s gaze warmly. “Let me. I can bring him down.”
Cai
couldn’t let go. He stood aside to make room when Fen climbed up to
join him, but he kept his hold on Ben, lifting, lifting. Only when
Fen produced a bronze-handled knife from somewhere within his robes
and reached up did he relinquish some of his burden, easing it into
Fen’s free arm. Fen cut the rope with one savage gesture, and
together they caught the body as it fell. Fen eased the bulk of it
over his shoulder. “I’ve got him. Go down now.”
Cai
stumbled ahead of him down the pulpit steps. Together they laid
Benedict out on the flagstones. Cai dropped to his knees, vaguely
aware that Marcus was holding back the crowd. Now he could see
Ben’s face. In that moment he understood that his friend had got it
right after all—that he’d tied his final knot, and made his last
leap, with perfect efficiency.
Still he
tried. He listened at his chest, silent as an empty barrel. He felt
for the pulse at his throat and his wrist. Theo had taught him a
heretical manner of calling back souls whom God had decreed drowned
by breathing with his own lungs into their mouths, and he did that
for a while, until the deadly cold of Benedict’s mouth under his,
the unnatural movement of his head when he let go of it, finally
bore it in that he would be recalling the spirit into a body so
destroyed that revival would be cruel, an obscenity.
He sat
up. Full sunlight was blazing into the church now. The day would be
hot. “Fen,” he said, his voice echoing hollowly in his ears. “Help
me carry him down into the crypt. I have to…”
There
was no one there. No—the church was thronged now, but the one face
Cai needed was missing.
“Not in the crypt,” Aelfric was croaking at him. “Not a
suicide. Not in holy ground.”
Cai
thrust him aside, his scrawny body as insubstantial as his words.
Maybe Fen, having seen the worst that could happen on this holy
ground, had taken advantage of the chaos and run. Cai didn’t blame
him. It was time for him to do the same.
He
pushed blindly out into the light. He didn’t blame Fen, but he
wanted him, and he loathed him in that moment for creating the
bitter desolation in his heart, a hunger he’d never have known if
they had never met. He set off uphill at a dead run. He kept going
until he reached the outhouses, until his hands were tearing at the
well-known latch of the small barn where he kept his supplies for
journeys, his packs and his secular clothes. He tore off his
cassock and tossed it as hard as he could into one corner, sending
up a cloud of spiders and dust. Beneath its heavy wool he was
sweating coldly, stinking of shock and misery. He’d walk into the
first water he came to, and he didn’t much care if he came out.
Perhaps he could use his last breath on a few of Fen’s curses, and
trust in the sea to bear them home.
There on
the shelf were his shirt and deerskin leggings. He pulled them on
with shaking hands. The shirt fastened with a fine leather strip
across the chest. He had to lace it through fabric loops on each
side, a task that proved impossible when he tried. Swearing, he
tore the lace out altogether and threw it onto the ground. He’d do
without. He’d do without the pack, for that matter—it wasn’t as if
he’d be stopping off at the kitchens for supplies, or buying things
from the settlements, or ever coming home. He was done
here.
Someone
was blocking the door. Not a scarecrow shape this time—a graceful
one, tall and straight. He had picked up Cai’s lace from the ground
and was holding it, a delicate thing in his big hands. “You are
leaving?”
Cai
didn’t answer. He kicked off his sandals, replaced them with the
boots he kept in a wooden chest, safely out of reach of mice. Now
he was ready. “Get out of my way.” Fen didn’t move, and Cai marched
up to stand in front of him, not meeting his eyes. “I thought you
were gone.”
“No. I saw Oslaf heading for the church. Brother Wilfrid had
just told him. He…required restraint.”
Cai
swallowed hard. “What did you do to him?”
“I restrained him. I took him up to the infirmary. I gave him
the poppy, the drug that brings sleep.”
“Oh, God.”
“A little.”
“How did you know...”
“I took note when you gave it to me. He’s asleep. I left
Wilfrid to watch over him. Now, do you want help with the body of
your friend?”
“No!” It came out as a shout, scaring the doves in the rafters.
“Aelfric won’t let him lie in holy ground.”
“Why in Thor’s name not?”
“He took his own life. Another new rule, I suppose. I didn’t
know. No one ever… No one ever did that here before.” His voice
shook. “There was never any need.”
Fen
didn’t touch him. He bowed his head a little, so his brow was
almost brushing Cai’s, and in a concentrated silence broken only by
the wing beats and the music of the doves, he passed the leather
lace through the first loop of Cai’s shirt. Then the next, and the
next, until he drew the strands together in a knot. He repeated,
his voice rough and low, insistent—“So. You are
leaving?”
In a
bunk in the infirmary, Oslaf lay waiting to wake up into hell, a
world of unimaginable pain. Wilfrid, whose sympathies and skills
were those of a goatherd, sat helpless by his side. In the church,
the ruined shell of a fine man lay, defenceless to the black-robed
buzzards who believed him too corrupt to lie in his own monastery’s
soil. None of this had anything to do with Cai anymore. This place
was Aelfric’s now—it belonged to the crows. And yet… “No,” he
snarled, stepping back out of range of Fen’s warmth. “I just have
to get off this damned holy ground for a while.” He shoved his
hands into his pockets and thought for a few moments, frowning at
the hard-packed earth. Water. He wanted water, to be clean again,
or at least away from the mud. “I’m going fishing.”
“Fishing?”
“Yes. I go out sometimes and fish. Food, you know? Meat that
hasn’t been strung up in a cellar for three months. Let me
past.”
“There’s going to be a storm, Cai.”
“Nonsense. The sky is clear. Do I have to knock you down,
or...”
“No.” Fen stepped aside.
A few
yards down the track that led to the boathouses, the weather-beaten
sheds where the monks kept their fishing creels and lobster nets,
Cai turned. Fen was watching him intently, beautiful in the
sunlight. Cai would have given anything to run back into his arms.
“Do something for me, will you?”
“If I can.”
“Oslaf has family. He comes from farming stock up near Berewic.
Find one of the lads who runs errands between here and the village,
and give him a message. Tell them to come for him. Tell them to
come now.”
At last
he was alone. Nothing and no one could touch him out here. Cai let
the oars rest in their rowels, muscle spasms chasing one another
down his back, arms throbbing. The monastery had one small
sailboat, but Cai had taken his usual coracle. It was little more
than cattle hides stretched over a wooden frame. One man could
handle it, though, and he hadn’t wanted the intricacies of sail.
Just to run the craft down the causeway with a tremendous scrape
and rattle, leap into her at the last second, and row and row. He
lowered his head. Sweat trickled down between his shoulder
blades.
The sunlit waters held him. He felt their movement under the
keel, one tiny part of an unimaginable whole of movement, a rocking
and surge that could bear him—if he had strength and fair
weather—right to the frigid wastes of the north, or south to the
Mid-Earth Sea, where Theo had told him, eyes distant with longing,
that dolphins leapt and the sun shone all year round. Far to the
east was Fen’s home, the land of the Danes. Perhaps he ought to
head there, surprise the vikingr
by going to them. They couldn’t be worse, them and
their dark gods, than the nightmare unfolding itself at Fara in the
name of Christ.
No. He
wanted to stay here and feel that mighty rocking, greater than any
man or god. He also wanted to stop crying, because that was what he
had been doing since he cast off, raw sobs racking him. His chest
was sore. Strength was leaching out of him. With an effort, he
caught his breath. Nothing in his heart or mind would accept that
Ben was dead.
“Ben,” he called out, as if his friend’s spirit might still be
nearby and could come back to set things right, wipe out the
atrocity. “Benedict!”
Only the
wind answered him. He curled up, laced his fingers round the back
of his head and closed his eyes.
A thud
on the prow of the boat brought him round. He didn’t know how long
he’d been sitting there. He was sleepy, and a kind of numb peace
had come over him. He didn’t think it was the holy serenity Leof
had said was the goal of their religious lives, but he would take
it. It would do. Leof, Benedict, Theo. Gone. A bird was sitting on
the prow. It was one of the fat little creatures that haunted the
group of rocky islets two miles or so out from Fara. Their beaks
were striped in vivid rainbow colours, their movements comical. The
puffin watched him curiously, shifting its weight from one
outrageous bright pink foot to the other. Then it took off, short
wings beating frantically, towards the nearest island.
The
seals were hauling out there too. It wasn’t basking time. Cai knew
the rhythms for this far better than he knew his canonical hours,
the tidal intervals when the rocks below Fara would almost
disappear beneath the furry, mottled bodies. As he watched, a small
flotilla of beautiful black-and-white ducks bobbed past the
coracle’s prow, calm on the surface but heading purposefully
inland.
Get out of the water. Cai received
the message loud and clear from these three harbingers, and he set
it aside in his mind. The day was still lovely, if he didn’t look
behind him to the place where surly clouds had been gathering since
dawn. The ducks became a glimmering patch in the distance. Eider,
they were called, their feathers highly coveted stuffing for
pillows. Addy ducks, the locals sometimes called them.
You have to find Addy. Addy will give you the treasure—the
secret of Fara.
Cai sat
still. Theo had been silent in his head for a long time now, as if
leaving him to deal with his own problems. In a way that had been
good, because his voice—so close, so vivid—had made Cai fear for
his sanity, but he had also missed him. This was just a memory,
though, an echo. He reached for it, and like a dream it dissolved
from under his grasp, leaving him desolate.
He had come out here to fish. That was what he’d told Fen, and
he would do it. He got up stiffly and shook out the net from its
heap on the deck. He was a good fisherman, adept at spreading his
nets against the current of the sea. Get
out of the water, the creatures of the
islands said. Well, he would when he was done. And if in the
meantime the tempest chose to break on him, he would take that as
God’s word. The Viking had sparked something in him he had thought
was dead, some instinctive yearning to friendship and life, but he
was tired now, and Fen was far away. Yes. He was done with the
fight.
The sun
turned copper green and vanished. Out of the darkness came a
voice—one note, low and huge, filling the horizon. Cai’s fishing
boat sat still in the midst of it on water turned suddenly, deadly
calm, and he listened. This was the voice of the wind, not upon him
yet but racing blackly towards him over the waves.
A
visceral terror awoke in him, nothing to do with his life on the
shore but a blood-simple message from his bones, lungs and heart
that they did not want to be out here, exposed like a cork, with
that demon gale bearing down on them. That they, no matter how
tired Cai’s spirit was, did not want to cease. He grabbed the oars.
He didn’t stand a cat’s chance in hell now, but he began to
row.
The
storm broke like the end of the world. The voice became a shriek,
and the millpond water boiled. Just for a moment Cai had the
advantage of it all—the wind was howling landward, pushing him.
Then the first wave heaped itself out of the mouth of the
demon.
It
smashed over the coracle. Cai ducked and clung to the little
craft’s hull while its force thundered down on him and spent
itself. For seconds the whole boat was under water, then she
somehow righted and heaved back to surface. Scrabbling for purchase
on her soaked deck, Cai managed to look up.
Straight
into the demon’s maw. A wave the size of Fara’s church was rearing
over him. Half-blinded with salt, Cai stared at it. He had time to
hear its snarl, its hungry, sucking roar as it gathered up, tugging
the coracle into its undertow. Cai waited. He would meet his end as
Theo and Leof had met theirs—upright, unafraid. He wouldn’t look
away.