Chapter Nine #2
driven off the ghostly fret and was making the sea dance in
sapphire and green before Fen called a halt. They had passed a
halfway point. Cai, glad enough to take his cue from so superior an
oarsman, stopped rowing and rested his oar. Fen had pulled
rhythmically all the way out, patterns of purposeful muscle rising
to meet each stroke. He hadn’t so much as broken a sweat, and now
he was looking at Cai as if in surprise that he was
tired.
“I’m not,” Cai said
defensively, trying to hide the tremor in his arms. “Who the hell
could keep up with a Viking, though?”
They were side by side on the boat’s
wooden bench. “Only another Viking,” Fen admitted easily. “Maybe
it’s best you don’t try. I can take her from here.”
“What? No. I just need a
rest.”
“At risk of wounding you, I
may be better on my own. A second oar who isn’t quite
as…”
Cai broke into reluctant laughter.
“Oh, God. Don’t start worrying about my feelings now.”
“Very well. A weak second
oar can unbalance a strong one, make his job harder. Just go and
sit in the prow.”
Cai got up, still smiling. “Are you
saying I’ve been holding you back? Let me see your wound before you
take over this longship. You can… You can just lift up your jerkin
for me this time.”
Their eyes met in burning recognition
of what Cai’s routine check had unleashed yesterday. Fen did as he
was told, and Cai crouched in front of him long enough to ascertain
that the vigorous rowing hadn’t done any damage. No—the muscle was
repairing itself, smoothing out. “You’re fine,” he said, glad his
recent exertions allowed him to sound breathless. “You can cover
up. We’d better not rock the boat.”
He went to sit. Fen watched him
closely. “I was afraid,” he said, “that you wouldn’t wish it. To
lie with me anymore, I mean—knowing what I am.”
Cai glanced up in surprise.
“I don’t know what you are. I only know what you did. Theo used to
say that was what mattered—what we did, not what we’d thought about
doing.”
“That’s good. Because if we
are judged on our wicked thoughts, I am headed fast for Aelfric’s
hell.”
“With me right behind
you.” And
yes, I would lie with you there, though you were the devil
himself. Cai
couldn’t say it, but he held Fen’s gaze until he was sure the
message had got through.
“I feel as if I know your
Theo. Through you, and everything you’ve said about him. Maybe
that’s what the old man meant when he told you there was no need to
grieve.”
Cai shifted in the prow. He dipped his
fingers into the water, thoughtfully fretting its surface. It was
lovely here. Fen picked up the oars, and Cai almost put out a hand
to stop him. What was it all about—this effort to get back to a
shore, a home, where he had lost all sense of belonging? What
awaited him at Fara? “I’m beginning to think,” he said slowly,
“that my poor abbot—though I loved him, Fen, and I always
will—might not have been sane when he died.”
“Well—for what it’s worth,
I too am losing certainties. I believed in the legend of the
amulet, the treasure. But perhaps it was only an excuse for rapine.
Our prophet did come up with Fara this year. The year before, he
was just as convinced it was White Bay.”
A helpless chuckle shook Cai. “Really?
He said a different place…”
“Every year.
Yes.”
Their laughter rang out across the
water, scaring up a piebald cloud of Addy ducks. “Oh, God,” Cai
managed at length, wiping his eyes. “Have we both been such fools?
And as for that old lunatic in his cave, with his seals and his
eagle…”
“Cai. Hush.”
Cai frowned, leaning forwards. He
could hear something. Was it the echoes of their own voices off the
distant rocks? No—more musical than that, familiar to Cai and yet
strangely altered. He shaded his eyes against the sun.
The seals were hauling out onto the
rocks. They had come in their droves, the light striking off their
sleek fur. Instead of tussling for the sunniest places on the
rocks, flopping and jousting with one another on the way, they
seemed to be moving as one.
Their focus was the old man standing
on the rocks at the top of the beach. He was only a skeletal
outline at this distance, but Cai could make out that his hands
were extended, as if in benediction. “He said… He said the seals
came to sing to him.”
“Which would be madness,
except…”
Except that they were singing. It was
a music Cai couldn’t have imagined in this world. Their eerie
barking stretched out and clashed in wild harmonics, as if the
great North Sea itself had found a voice. Cai got up, making the
boat lurch wildly beneath him. He pointed, unable to get a word
out, and Fen stood beside him, grabbing his arm. They were just in
time to see a vast sea-eagle sail out of the dawn, golden talons
wrapped around a fish.
The monastery was silent, its
tumbledown buildings held in quiet sunlight. It was like a future
vision of itself—moss beginning to take hold among the ruins, the
pride of human life that had built her long vanished, sleeping
beneath the hawthorn graves. Cai and Fen dragged the boat ashore,
then climbed the steep path up the cliff face without meeting
another soul. At the top they came to a halt, looking around them.
Cai hadn’t expected to be missed, for anyone to be watching or
waiting on their return, but this was a better opportunity than
he’d anticipated. He turned to Fen.
“This could be a good
moment, you know. For you to go, if you wish.”
“I…I could still have your
horse?”
“Yes. I told you. If you
wanted.”
“And what if I didn’t
want?”
“The horse, or...”
“To go.” Fen evaded Cai’s
look. He was surveying the barns, the fields and the infirmary
building that had been his prison for so long. He still slept in
the quarantine cell, Aelfric having forbidden him to join the
others in the dormitory barn. He was still locked away from
compline to matins, though Cai knew he could make short work of the
window and the ivy beneath it if he wished.
“You’re strong now. I can’t
believe you’d want to stay.”
“Would you come with
me?”
What a wild, strange thought. It sent
a shiver down Cai’s spine and he briefly closed his eyes to savour
it. He’d been on the verge of departure when Benedict had come to
cling to him, renewing for a time his sense of a place here, an
obligation. But whatever Ben had needed, whatever guiding light or
rock, Cai hadn’t been able to provide. No—he hadn’t been expecting
a lookout, much less a welcome party for his return. For the place
to be this quiet, all his brethren must have gone about their usual
daily tasks. “The waters close over our heads, don’t
they?”
“Not over yours. Not if I
can help it.”
Blindly Cai put out a hand. Fen took
it immediately this time. “No. You didn’t let me drown, did you? I
like to lie with you. I think you’re a dangerous, bloodthirsty
nutcase, but…I see in colour again when I’m with you.”
“So?”
“So… Yes. I will
go.”
He didn’t have a thing to pack. All he
had to do was walk with Fen down to the armoury, collect a few
weapons—Broc’s sword, Fen’s ancestral head-splitter—and help him
pull the chariot out into the yard. He could see Eldra from here.
The only living creature to remark their arrival, she at least
seemed pleased to see them, trotting the length of her paddock with
her head held high. Cai had no right to either of Fara’s ponies,
but Eldra was his, and between the shafts of the chariot she would
take them anywhere. South, perhaps. There were cities down there,
places where if Leof’s gentle god was long dead, Aelfric’s
monstrous one was not yet in the ascendant—Roman towns, where for
every Christian you met you would find five who still bowed to the
ancient shrines of Jupiter and Mars. Zoroastrian cults too,
followers of the soldier’s god Mithras, Broc’s particular
favourite. The world was large.
Yes, large. But all the voices of this
little one were rising from the timber church. Cai drew Fen to a
halt as it came into view. They stood together, wordlessly
listening. The church doors were wide open. Only this way could the
building accommodate the full complement of monks. It seldom was
required to, even when Aelfric made Eyulf ring the bell and stood
eagle-eyed with his great black staff, counting his flock through
the doors. There were always tasks to be done that Aelfric still
recognised as essential, or at any rate didn’t dare yet deny. But
everyone was there today, the stragglers crowding on the steps
outside.
Fen was still holding Cai’s hand.
“What’s going on?” he asked softly. “Is it a holy day? Some saint’s
miserable, pointless bloody death to be celebrated?”
“I don’t think so.” Cai
found he was grinning. He didn’t see things quite the way Fen
did—not yet, anyway—but he’d come to appreciate the external point
of view. Men like Aelfric could hammer down a black iron bowl
across the whole world, and so far God hadn’t seen fit to help
those trapped underneath. Poor Ben… “I don’t know. It’s not even a
prayer hour.”
“Well, it’s good timing for
us, whatever the fools are about.”
Cai hesitated. If Aelfric had herded his
brethren together for another dose of hellfire, didn’t Cai, their
physician, owe them whatever antidote he could give? Then again,
he’d learned to his cost that he could only doctor their bodies,
not their souls, and sporadically at that. Whatever Danan had said
to Addy about his skills, really he was only the hit-and-miss quack
she had called him to his face. He rubbed his thumb gently over the
top of Fen’s hand. “You’re right. Come on.”
Eyulf was perched on the tower, the
dinner bell laid neatly in his lap so he wouldn’t forget it or what
it was for. As soon as Cai noticed him, he sprang to his feet,
sending the bell flying, dislodging stones in a terrifying scatter.
He let go one yell of mixed joy and fear, slithered to his backside
and began to fall.
Cai ran. Fen was on his heels, and Cai