Chapter Eight #5
without hesitation before. What had
changed? Everything, the wind-voice breathed in Cai’s ear. Everything has changed. “What—with an
old man running around, and bands of inbred cannibals
prowling?”
“We will find a place. I will keep watch.”
“Even while you’re…” Cai shook his head. He couldn’t say it
either. He wondered if Aelfric had ever experienced desires of the
flesh so intense that they passed into the spirit, and then beyond
words. “Even while you’re doing that?”
“Yes. And so will you. You were a warrior before you became a
monk, and long before you lay down with me. That’s what you’ll be
when everything else is gone.”
Cai
frowned. It was a solid Viking compliment, but he wasn’t sure he
liked it. “That doesn’t enthrall me.”
“What else would you have?”
“Your idea of a beautiful death might be a battlefield one. For
myself, I’ll take a long life and a warm bed at the end of
it.”
“Would you? When you left Fara yesterday, I didn’t think you
wanted to last until sunset.”
“Well, I almost got my wish.” Fen passed an arm round his
waist, and he shivered in surprise and then returned the gesture.
“But everything’s changed. Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“The dunes. The soft beds of thyme.”
Fen was
right—they both were inveterate warriors. Cai caught himself
assessing their chosen dune for defensibility even before they’d
reached it, and he knew he’d have done so without the Viking’s
suggestion. High, isolated a little way from the rest. Good lines
of sight all around, and plenty of crisp marram grass to give away
intruders.
Tucked
away behind its crest, a perfect crescent of white sand. Cai
stepped carefully around its edges. Its surface was unmarred,
shining like the inside of an oyster shell in the sun. He didn’t
want to disturb it till they both did. Then they would rip it to
hell. He didn’t know how it would be, but he knew there’d be a
fight, a combat he longed for and hungered to lose.
“Fen…”
Fen was
immobile on the ridge of the dune. His back was turned, his
attention fixed on the mainland. Afraid their peace was already
about to be shattered, Cai scrambled up to join him. “What is
it?”
“I have understood something.”
He was
quivering finely, like an arrow drawn against a string. Cai
wouldn’t have known it, but the tense vibration transferred itself
when he laid a hand to his arm. “What? Is something
wrong?”
“This island—they call it Fara, yes?”
“Yes. Well—all this scatter of islands are called the Faras,
but this is the largest, so yes.”
“Fara, the island. And the place where the monastery
stands…”
“Fara too, but not an island. Peninsula, not
insula.” The words felt
more than usually awkward in Cai’s mouth. He didn’t want to be up
here talking Latin to this man. He was sure that, a little time
more in each other’s company, they would smooth out the differences
in their north-lands tongues and be able to speak as their natures
intended. “What about it?”
“The Fara treasure. Our legends say it lies on the island of
Fara. Insula, not
peninsula.”
Cai
chuckled. It wasn’t funny, but he could see a bitter irony. “Great.
So you lot have been knocking seven bells out of my poor monastery
for nothing? Didn’t you know the difference?”
“It looks like an island from the sea.”
“Well, next time you see them you
can tell them to leave off, can’t you? They can come and raid…” Cai
fell briefly silent, his mouth drying. “Oh, for God’s sake, Fen.
You can’t think there’s anything here.”
Fen took hold of his sleeve. He pulled
him down into the bright crescent, rucking up its surface. “Sit,”
he said, a trace of command in his voice Cai was more than
half-inclined to argue. “There are things I haven’t told you about
the Fara treasure—just as you didn’t see fit to tell me all the
things you said about it to the old man.”
“That wasn’t on purpose.
There hasn’t been time, and—”
“And you hardly knew me.
Very well. The same constraints have been on me, but now you have
to listen. I need your help.”
Cai couldn’t understand the change in
him. He’d perked up at Addy’s fireside, but this was different—a
feverish distress beneath his eagerness. “You’ll have it, if it
doesn’t mean outright murder,” he said, trying to smile,
immediately regretting his choice of words. What did he expect of
the wolf? “Tell me now.”
“According to a prophet of
my people, the Dane Land tribes once held a treasure, an amulet of
infinite power. It could even bind our gods. And many years ago,
one of the followers of Christ stole this amulet and buried it on a
holy island off the east coast of Britannia.”
“But there are dozens of those.
Why are we feeling the business end of Thor’s hammer?”
“Our prophet had a new
revelation over the winter this year. He named Fara. You do not
understand about this treasure, Cai, and nor did your abbot. No man
not born a Dane could ever understand. In our enemy’s hands, it has
the power to bind our warriors’ might. To suck the wind from our
sails, cause our swords to snap and our proud manhood to
wither.”
Cai looked innocently out to sea. He
still had hopes of this refuge amongst the dunes. He said,
thoughtfully, “God forbid.”
Briefly he thought it had
worked. The fever-lights in Fen’s eyes warmed to gold. He was
laughing softly when he took Cai into his arms, and his kiss was so
thorough and carnal, the push of his tongue so deep, that
everything else faded away. Then he pulled back. He kept a warm
grip round Cai’s shoulders, but he was pale in the tapestried
patterns of the marram-grass shadow, his profile set and fierce.
“Well, it hasn’t happened yet. But my people—the Torleik men,
Sigurd and Gunnar and all my clan—believe in it. That’s why the
monastery raids have been so unrelenting. But this is the island of
Fara, right here.” He got up, letting Cai go. He took up position
on the dune’s western ridge, the light wiping out his details from
behind, leaving only a black silhouette, the ageless shape of a
warrior. “I will find the amulet. Then Sigurd and Gunnar will come
to me, and they will find it in my hands. And the world will change.”
“I thought… I thought you’d
decided your brother was dead.”
“What if he is not?” Fen
didn’t move. He might have been cast in bronze there and left as a
warning, a memory of fear. “What if he lives, and…he ditched me
here, like a dog or a broken shield? Like a thing?”
“He wouldn’t have.” Cai
sprang up. The faceless statue spoke like a man, a living soul
stricken to the core by something far worse than Cai’s sword. Cai
climbed up to join him, took his hand—more like a child than a
lover this time, folding his fingers tight into his own. “He loved
you. You told me so yourself.”
“He loved
power.”
“Fen, come on. Never mind
ancient treasures and fantasies. Lay me down here and show me what
I’ve been missing.”
Fen tore his fingers free. He gave Cai
one look—half-anguished, half-amused, as if Cai had come up with
the one proposal that might have slowed him down, diverted him from
his purpose. Then he turned away. He set off down the slope of the
dune, his long stride devouring the ground. The lowering sun struck
blood-scarlet lights from his hair.
“Help me,” he yelled back
to Cai, not glancing round. “I’ll lay you down later, and you’ll
never forget it. But for now—we’re going to find this damn
treasure!”
Cai couldn’t sleep. He was dirty and
bruised, and darkness had fallen too suddenly for him to go and
bathe in the sea as he’d wanted to do. Addy, sharing with them a
fireside supper of scurvy grass and salmon, had warned them against
venturing too far from the cave in the night. The devils were
restless then and prone to hunt, their weakened eyes more effective
in torchlight than under the sun. The old man had seemed different
when Fen and Cai had returned. His air of distracted hospitality
had vanished, and he had eaten in silence, watching them gravely
from his own side of the fire.
The cave was barely wide enough to
accommodate the three of them, and Fen had offered to take a watch,
although Addy had assured him that wasn’t necessary. He was
crouched outside in the cloudy moonlight now, his tense, powerful
shape just visible. Cai was relieved not to be forced into close
quarters with him. He felt as if some kind of padding had been
stripped off his nerves, leaving them naked and vibrating to Fen’s
slightest touch. In the boathouse that morning it had been wildly
pleasant, and now…
Now he was afraid. He’d gone with Fen,
and he’d done his honest best to help him find the secret of Fara.
All afternoon and into dusk they had quartered the bare little
island. He had turned over rocks, followed streambeds to their
source. He had met Fen coming up to meet him a dozen times, his
face a baulked blank, frustration coming off him in waves. A dozen
times he’d told him to give it up, and a dozen times been
ignored.
To say that he wasn’t the man
Cai knew would be absurd. What did Cai know of him? Shifting
uncomfortably on the cave’s rocky floor—how luxuriant even his own
thin mattress at Fara, by contrast—Cai remembered a beautiful hound
his father had traded for and brought into the hillfort camp. The
seller had been evasive about the beast’s ancestry, although her
upswept yellow eyes ought to have given her away. She’d been good
for a while, herding Broc’s cattle and sleeping at the foot of his
bed, and then one full-moon night she had plucked up a baby by its
nappy rags and trotted away with it into the unknown.
A wolf in the
fold, Broc
had fulminated for weeks afterwards, damning the trader to a
hundred gory deaths, never seeming to realise that he’d opened the
gates to the sheep-fold himself and let the creature in.
Cai dropped into exhausted sleep
at last, and dreamed restlessly of a man with golden eyes who
followed him into the dunes, brought him down with one breathtaking
pounce and began to tear him apart. The dismemberment was painless,
the rip of sharp incisors a shuddering delight, and when he
protested—painlessly bleeding, dying—the wolf looked up at him and
said, But
you let me in, you fine man. You lay down with me. You let me
in.
He woke up, throat convulsing in a
choked-off howl. The cave was full of cobweb light, delicate as
pearls. Every detail of the scene before him was perfect, so lucid
he would take it with him to his grave. Addy was lying flat out on
his back. His mouth was open, his long, thin frame nothing but a
loose collection of bones beneath his cassock. And, rising up from
a crouch of dreadful, virile beauty beside him—Fen, a fisherman’s
knife clutched savagely tight in his fist. Before Cai could move or
make a sound, he was gone, silent and swift, dissolving into the
sea mist that had come in with the tide.