Chapter Eight #2
tuum!
Aelfric didn’t belt out his Our
Fathers like that, as if the words were rocks he could throw to
ward off the devil. The distant voice faded, and Cai decided he’d
been dreaming. He pressed tighter to Fen’s side, moaning softly
when the arms around him locked him more firmly into place. The
storm was over. The tide had gone. The sand was softer than his
bunk at Fara, Fen’s hold on him warmer than sunlight, and he could
fall back into sleep.
Something tugged at his sleeve. Still
not looking, he jerked his arm away. The scrabbling touch came
again, this time at his belt. Trying to pull it free. Well, Fen was
welcome, if he wanted to start over. It had been years since Cai
had awoken with another body next to his. Hundreds of mornings
trying to quell his waking erection in the name of God. Burrowing
against him, Cai shivered at the powerful lift of his own flesh.
The tugging came again—insistent, more like a bird plucking at him
than Fen’s frank grab—and he cracked one eye open to
look.
A monster was standing over him. He
sat bolt upright, tearing out of Fen’s embrace, scattering sand.
The monster jerked back. It put its head on one side. It wasn’t
afraid—just startled by Cai’s sudden movement. It considered for a
moment, then opened its toothless mouth wide and emitted a weird
cry. Four others exactly like it emerged from the pale dawn
light.
Cai’s erection died. He snatched for
the fisherman’s knife at his belt. Behind him Fen was waking up,
scrambling onto his knees. “Cai, what the hell—”
“Fara devils! I’ve heard of
them. They eat shipwrecked sailors.”
“Devils? They look human to
me. Almost.”
There were eight of them now. Yes,
almost human. All of them skeletally thin, dressed in a few rags of
sealskin. Horribly alike in the twist of their wasted features,
their narrow, hairless skulls. Two of them had harelips, stumps of
rotting teeth showing in the gap.
Instinctively Cai got to his feet and
pressed his back to Fen’s, and felt him doing likewise, getting
ready for defence. “I can take three of them. You?”
A contemptuous snort. “These
bags of bones? I’ll take what’s left and come back for
your
three.”
“Wonderful. What are you
going to do about the dozen more that just climbed up over those
rocks?”
“Pater Noster, qui es in
caelis!”
The devils nearest to Cai
started and cringed at the voice. It was much closer now. Cai’s
vision was still blurred with sleep and salt, and he dragged his
sleeve over his eyes. An old man had appeared at the crest of the
nearest dune. He could have been brother to Danan. His wild white
hair flew with the same vigour, and he came leaping down the sandy
slope with much of that lady’s unlikely speed. His hands were raised over his
head. In one of them he clasped a staff like a shepherd’s, and he
gesticulated with it powerfully, gestures of banishment that came
in time with his shouted prayers.
“Sanctificetur nomen tuum!
Adveniat regnum tuum! Fiat voluntas tua…”
Now he was on the flat, his
ragged brown robes flying to expose skinny ankles. The devils began
to fall back from around Cai and Fen, whimpering sounds emerging
from their twisted mouths. “Sicut in caelo et in terra!”
On earth as it is in
heaven. Too
much for the devils of Fara, who turned in one ungainly movement
and began to run, hopping and stumbling in their haste. The old man
galloped after them a little way down the beach, then came to a
gasping halt, arms still upraised. He dropped out of Latin and
continued, sadly, as if to himself, “Give them this day their daily
bread. Just not the flesh of these sailors.”
His arms fell. He turned, leaning on
his staff. “Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”
Cai glanced at Fen, who was staring at
the old man in disbelief. Perhaps they both were dreaming. Benedict
had died, and perhaps Cai had gone down with the coracle. This was
a strange afterworld, with snaggle-toothed cannibal denizens and
fleshly joys beyond imagination in the sea foam, but he would take
it over Aelfric’s hellfire.
“No,” he called, steadying
himself against Fen. “What are they? Why are they afraid of
you?”
“They don’t seem to like
the sound of Latin prayer. I use it to chase them off.” He shrugged
despondently. “I might as well give the poor devils a blessing
while I’m at it.”
“They are devils, then?”
The old man stumped towards them up
the beach. “Not in the sense you mean. They’re as human as you
are—the first people of these islands. Heaven knows how they came
to be cut off here, but they only breed among themselves, and it
damages them.”
“Would they have eaten
us?”
Another shrug. “They eat what they
can. Speaking of which, you boys will want your breakfast. I
wondered why he dropped me such a big one this morning. God
provides.”
Cai shook his head. “I don’t
understand.”
“The eagle. Such a big
fish,” the old man told him easily, as if he ought to have known.
“He brings me one each day, clutched in his great claws. This
morning, a salmon the size of a young seal! Well, sailors have
grand appetites. And being washed ashore is hungry work. Come
along.”
The old man set off at a brisk pace.
After an exchanged look, Cai and Fen followed him.
“Do you think he knows
Latin for more than his prayers?” Fen asked quietly, dropping into
stride at Cai’s side. “I understand a bit of your uncouth
north-shores tongue, but clearly not enough. I thought he said an
eagle dropped a fish for him.”
“He did.” Cai jogged ahead
and caught the old man up. “Sir, we’re grateful for the rescue. My
friend isn’t from here. Do you speak Latin, so that he can
understand?”
“Of course. Ita vero.” He switched without effort,
the neat Roman syllables falling more naturally from his mouth than
they ever would from Cai’s. “But I’m surprised that sailors
do.”
“We’re not sailors. We’re…”
Cai looked back over his shoulder, daring Fen to argue. “We’re
monks. From Fara monastery. We were out fishing, and we got caught
in the storm.”
“From Fara?” The old man’s
gaunt face lit up. “Fortunate boys! You study under Theo,
then—Theodosius of Epiros, a most learned man.”
“Yes. He told us about Epiros.”
Cai’s throat ached and closed. If this was the afterworld, Aelfric
had been right in part, then—pain could chase and follow men there. The cry of the
seagulls became desperate shouts from the scriptorium, and Leof
whispered to him from out of the surf. “But…Theo is dead,
sir.”
The old man stopped short in his
tracks. Cai would have stumbled, but Fen was close behind him,
catching him by the armpit. Cai turned to him. Only yesterday, he
thought he would have to face such things—his grief, and the pain
of others—alone. Always alone. No, Fen’s burnished gaze told him silently.
Not now.
His grip on Cai
turned to a hold, and together they watched the old man, who was
now stalking unhappily back and forth along a few feet of
sand.
“My friend. Ah, poor Theo,
my dear friend. I met him on my way back from Rome, when my elders
in Hibernia sent me to study there. What was it? The cholera? He
never did like this climate. He missed his dolphins and the warm
sea. Was it flux? A pneumonia? Or…” He turned himself around, bare
feet carving out an agitated circle in the sand. “Wait. Ah, that’s
what the damned old woman wasn’t telling me. There was a Viking
raid, she said, then she shut herself up, like the old clam she is.
Was that how Theo died?”
Cai couldn’t keep up. His head was
spinning, with exhaustion and hunger and the energies he’d spilled
out with Fen during the night. “Which old woman?”
“Who? Oh. Danan, she’s
calling herself this time. The herbalist, though some would say
witch. A gossip, but not enough of one. Starts a story but then
doesn’t tell you it all, curse her bones.”
“Danan comes out here?” Cai
had never seen her anywhere near a boat. “How?”
“Only the ancient creature
herself knows that. Tunnels, she says, though I’ve never found any.
Probably she flies. Ah, poor Theodosius! So much learning, to be
wasted and spilled out by a…”
He fell silent. The following
quiet was terrible, even filled with wave-wash and the breeze. The
old man stopped his pacing and drove his staff into the sand. Then
he folded his hands into the sleeves of his robes. He stepped up
and halted in front of Fen. “Not a sailor,” he murmured. “No, and
no monk either.” He was as tall as Fen and could look him straight
in the face. Fen remained still beneath his inspection, even when
the old man reached to push back his fringe. “Square brow. Straight
nose, high cheekbones. Red hair, but not like the western Keltoi.
Red like the fox, and like blood.” He shuddered and retracted his
hand. “Vikingr.”
“Ita vero,” Fen growled in return. Cai
heard the danger in it and got ready to restrain him, but there was
no need. The old man stepped back, lowering his head. His face was
deeply marked with the lines of an old, hard-learned lesson in
forbearance.
“I have been discourteous,”
he said. “Whatever your origins, the wind and the waves have
brought you here, and you’re my guest. Do you have a
name?”
“Fenrir. This is
Cai—Caius.”
“Ah. Caius, a fine old Roman
name.” The old man turned his attention to Cai. “And this
one is a
monk, though unshorn and out of his cassock—a man of God, no matter
how he feels right now. I am Aedar. Yet for many years now, the
villagers along these shores have called me Addy. I’ve come to
prefer it.”
“Addy…” Cai ran a hand into his
unshorn hair. Another wash of vertigo went through him.
“You’re Addy? My God… Theo talked to me about you just before he
died. He said…”
The old man’s brow furrowed, waiting
for him to go on. But the sea and the gulls, the cries from the
burning scriptorium, grew too loud for Cai to think past them, and
he sat down hard on the sand.
“Caius?” Addy’s hand closed
on his shoulder. He glanced in appeal at Fen. “What’s wrong with
him?”