Chapter Eleven #2
stopped, his attention caught. Between Leof’s grave and
Benedict’s—still raw, painful to see—a scatter of withered herbs
lay on the turf. Cai crouched to look at them. “These look like
Danan’s.”
Fen came to stand by him. “How can you
tell?”
“They’re medicinal plants.
This is valerian, and this lady’s mantle. She likes to get them at
full moon and from a graveyard if she can. They’re at their most
powerful then, and… Well. They’re well-nourished.”
“She must have dropped
them.”
Cai chuckled. “You haven’t met her.
She never lets go of anything. I’ll send to the village tomorrow
and see that she’s all right.”
“Addy said something to you
about her, didn’t he?”
“Yes. To take care of her, and
about a bad death.” Down in the barley field, the villagers were
streaming to join the monks in their labour. A song much older than
any of Fara’s hymns was rising up in the warm air.
We have sworn a
solemn oath, our lady Gráinne must die… Scythes were gleaming in the
moonlight. Cai shook his head. “He also said she’d rise up with the
next harvest, and that won’t happen unless we get this one in. Come
on.”
On the third morning after the
harvest, the milk from the villagers’ dairy herd refused to come to
butter. Cai frowned down at the small, panting boy who’d been sent
to inform him of this, as if it was anything to do with him. Still,
on previous occasions Theo had been known to go and say some words
of benediction over the churns. The brethren were dependent on the
villagers’ few cows for their butter and cheese, and so Cai went
down, blushing with embarrassment, and did his best, the entire
population turning out to watch in critical expectation.
He was no Theo, that was certain. He
should have sent Aelfric, whose face alone would have curdled the
milk. He said his Our Father, hands outstretched over the churns,
and added for good measure a bawdy chant Broc sang to get the bull
to go to work in the springtime, translated into Latin to render it
holy, but the paddles continued to splash in the churns and still
no butter came.
Reduced to practicalities, Cai advised
them to empty out the buckets, churns and troughs, clean them all
and try again. He was lifting the first churn to give them a hand
when Brother Hengist slipped into the dairy barn, moving as
discreetly as such a big man could, and took up position on the
other side of the barrel. “Caius! There’s ergot in the
grain.”
It was meant to be a whisper, but
Hengist was used to bellowing out to monks three fields away that
their dinners were ready, and the villagers tending to the cows
around the barn looked up.
“Hush,” Cai admonished him.
“What, in the crop we brought in the other night? There can’t be.
We’d have seen it.”
“I know. But
look!”
He pulled from his sleeve an ear
of golden barley. Cai set down his barrel and took it from him, his
heart sinking in dismay. The purple-black fungus pods scattered in
among the healthy grains were impossible to deny. Cai had seen them
before, and their effects on the men and beasts who consumed them.
Danan had taught him to make that his first diagnostic check, in
cases of hallucination and sudden madness. He crumbled the dark pod
between his fingers. Danan… Where was she? The messengers Cai had sent to
Traprain and the hillforts hadn’t returned, but that could simply
mean the old woman was out on one of her long peregrinations among
the hills, or drinking mead with Addy in his cave. “Find Fenrir. He
will help you start bringing the crop back out of the
barn.”
“It was Brother Fen who
spotted it. He’s already put some of us to work. He says we’ll have
to go through it ear by ear.”
Brother Fen…
Cai almost smiled in
spite of his anxiety. Had any of them dared call him that to his
face? “Well, he’s right. We have to save what we can, but it
mustn’t get into our bread or our grain stores.”
“Is it really so bad? My
mother ate it once, and she dreamed she was flying.”
“One kind can do that. But
it gives you seizures too, and the other sort brings on fiery pain
in the limbs and makes your toes drop off. So let’s not chance
it.”
“No,” Hengist agreed,
wide-eyed.
“Go back and help them.
I’ll be right behind you, after I’ve—”
“Ergot?”
Cai and Hengist turned at the shrill
cry. Godric, the village’s informal leader, had scrambled onto an
upturned bucket. He was a fat, mean-eyed little man whose authority
was largely self-assumed, and the people normally paid him no
attention. They were turning to him now, though, the fearful word
echoing among them. “Ergot—the punishment of holy fire!”
Cai released a breath of irritation.
He wiped his hands on a cloth and stepped into the middle of the
barn. “There’s nothing holy about it. And it’s a fungus, not a
punishment.”
“Holy fire!” Godric shouted
again, making Cai wonder if he’d been at the infected grain
already. “And milk that will not churn. And Friswide’s hens have
stopped laying, and last night my hearth burned with a cold green
flame. Perhaps there is a witch!”
Cai had never heard the word
spat out in such a way. Weika, the Saxon villagers said, and with reverence—men
or women who could take and turn the forces of nature in their
hands. Cai took a good look around the circle of faces in the dairy
barn. Fears and doubts were dawning there, a darkening of innocent
eyes. “A witch?” he queried grimly. “I think perhaps we are lacking
one. And—tell me, Hlaeford Godric—has anyone from the monastery been down to preach to
you here?”
Godric had plainly been told to keep
his mouth shut. He did so now, smugly, enjoying a secret. His wife,
less subtle, and indebted to Cai and Danan for the safe delivery of
her three children, gave him a shove, which knocked him straight
down off his bucket. “Aye, Brother! That new one that looks like a
crow. He has been here—not preaching, but telling us strange
tales.”
Yes. Once more Cai felt a bitter twist
of admiration for the real abbot of Fara. Whether some among these
villagers were nominally Christian or not, they were all of them
too hard-nosed and busy to make time for a sermon. Offer them a
story, though, and there they would be, gathering round the fire,
their Saxon blood hungry for narrative. Not one of them could read
or write, but their recall of a song or a story-telling poem was
instant, perfect and largely uncritical. You had to be careful what
you told them—unless it suited you not to be.
There would always be somebody to
listen, if you chose the right sort of tale. And there would always
be somebody like Godric to let you in. “All right,” Cai said. “Do
you remember Abbot Theo?”
Godric’s wife beamed. “Of
course. A good man. He could always make the butter come, no offence to you,
Brother Cai.”
“None taken. Do you
remember some of the things he said—about thinking for yourselves?
Deciding for yourselves what’s right, no matter what others may
say?”
“Oh, yes,” Godric grunted. “A
good man, but a fool. He even used to tell us we should disagree
with him,
if we wished. Aelfric says we should obey.”
“And is that
better?”
“I don’t know, but it makes
more sense. How are we to know what to do otherwise?”
Cai resisted the urge to run his
hands into his hair. He had only just been beginning to work out
his own notions of right and wrong when he had lost his teacher. He
didn’t mind acting abbot when it came to work schedules, but he
wasn’t in any way ready for preaching or the cure of men’s souls.
“I’ve told you. Just try to think for yourselves. Just…” The barn
faded out from around him. He was back on an island beach, locked
in conflict with a Viking who had just decided not to kill. Fen was
wild-eyed, glaring at him. You, with your blasted Christian ways, your damned
compassion! I feel your pain more than my own. I feel another man’s
pain before I inflict it! “Just try to imagine whatever you’re about to do
to someone else is happening to you. If you don’t bloody like it,
then stop.”
He paused for breath. Nobody
seemed impressed. Perhaps he should have said it in Latin. Only
half-convinced himself, he gave it up in favour of practicalities.
“Friswide, your hens need more oyster shell in their feed, I should
think. And—no offence to you, Barda—your fire could use a good clean. Sea coal does
burn green, and gives precious little heat on a blocked hearth.” He
turned on Godric. “And you—if an order’s what you want, I’ll give
you one. Finish your work here, then bring anyone who can be spared
up to the barns and help us save our crop.”
Cai pulled Fen into his arms. He
tightened his embrace, and Fen let go a shuddering moan and
subsided against his chest. His hair was damp with sweat—Cai ran
his fingers through it, marvelling at the virile strength of every
strand. He was letting it grow, avoiding Brother Cedric with his
shears. Soon it would be a Viking mane again. “Are you all
right?”
“Gods, yes.” Fen coughed
and caught his breath, which was coming as fast as Cai’s. He
stroked Cai’s belly, caressing the dark fleece at the base of his
cock. “I must send you away more often.”
Cai chuckled. He’d had a lonely week
of it, out among the hills. And for all the gnawing fear in his
mind, all the way down from the top of Dragon’s Tail Ridge to the
lights of Fara, to the very door of his weary pony’s stable, one
need had been consuming him. And there, desire made flesh, a wish
granted, had been Fen, leaning in the doorway, pale skin glowing in
the lantern’s flame. They had waited until the pony was rubbed down
and fed, but no longer than that. Cai frowned, suddenly doubtful.
“Did I hurt you?”
“A little. But we can
manage on passion and spit, and I sucked you magnificently before
you began, did I not?” Fen gave the curling black hair a tug when
Cai groaned. “What—do I offend you, mealy-mouthed monk?”
Smiling, Cai ignored the jibe. He had