Chapter Eleven #3
learned to express himself plainly enough to satisfy any Viking.
“No. You make me want to go again.”
“Mm. So I see. Is there
something in the water, on top of those lonely hills?”
“There’s precious little of
anything up there.” Cai took hold of the exploring hand trying to
assist his newborn erection. Reluctantly he drew it away, lifted it
and kissed its palm. “And there’s no Danan. I followed all her
usual trails, all the places she showed me where the best herbs
grow. No sign of her in the villages either, not for weeks. Did you
fare any better here?”
“No. I did as you asked and
made my way into all the cellars and hidden chambers of this
place.”
“Did you do as I asked and
do it discreetly?”
Fen stretched luxuriantly, settling
himself in Cai’s arms. He had come in a stormy rush, pressed tight
to the stable wall. His belly was still damp and glimmering with
seed. “I didn’t have to. Nobody challenged me.”
Cai surveyed the beautiful frame of
him, strength manifest in every limb, even freshly drained and
sleepy as he was. “No. I’m sure they didn’t. You were meant to be
subtle about it though, Fen.”
“Subtle wouldn’t have got
me into the Canterbury crow’s chambers.”
“Oh, God. What
did?”
“A fat bribe of your poppy
draft to Laban. He’s got a taste for it, you know.”
“Is that who’s been
siphoning it off?”
Fen nodded, the silky shift of his
hair over Cai’s chest distracting. “He’s a troubled
soul.”
“What did you tell
him?”
“Just that I’d keep his
secret, if he kept mine. And that I was looking for something,
which is perfectly true. I checked the studies, the storage rooms,
everywhere. Even beneath Abbot Aelfric’s sacred bunk.”
Cai snorted with laughter. “What did
you find there?”
“A few miserable spiders,
discussing how best to spin their way out of hellfire. I don’t
think your old lady’s in this place, beloved. I’ve looked
everywhere.”
Beloved. Cai closed his eyes. Fen’s easy,
sincere delivery of the word sent it straight into his heart. Since
that harvest-moon night, they’d kept silent on the nature of their
bond, but there was that word, that name Fen pronounced so freely.
Cai kissed his brow. “All right. She may have taken a longer
journey, though I never knew her to travel far from here before.
How was Aelfric while I was away?”
“Quiet. Up here, anyway.”
Fen eased away far enough to look at him. “He concerns me, though.
He’s been down to the village every day.”
“What—preaching to
them?”
“No. Doing as you said
Godric’s wife told you—sitting amongst them and telling them
stories. I followed him down once, sat in the shadows and listened.
He told about a woman who was faithless to her husband, and her
thigh and her belly swelled up and rotted.” Fen gave a twitch of
displeasure. “Where does he get such a tale?”
“From the Bible,
unfortunately. Though you’d have to dig deep to find such a foul
one. Ugh—why doesn’t he tell them about loaves and fishes, or
making the blind man see?”
“I don’t suppose those ones
are frightening enough. They all looked whey-faced by the end of
it, especially the women.”
“Curse him. Why is he doing
this? Are they taking him seriously?”
“I think if the crop hadn’t
failed, they wouldn’t be. And other things happened while you were
gone. The children have come out in an itching rash, and one of
Barda’s goats has died.”
“For God’s sake. Those
goats were ancient. I’ll take a lotion of zinc down for the
children tomorrow—it’s probably fleas.” He sat up, Fen shifting
with a grunt of protest to accommodate him. “Damn it, though—we
could ill afford to lose that grain. The farmers at Traprain can
sell us a little, but we’ll be badly off over the winter. Anything
else?”
“Well, I wanted you to
sleep before I told you this, but we’ll be worse off still if the
apples don’t ripen. Hengist says they should be turning sweet by
now, but they’re still green and sour.”
For the first time, Cai ran out of
reasonable arguments. A primal fear touched him—of a long, dark
winter with no grain or fruit. And, this winter, twenty-nine hungry
men looking at him to ask him why. “Fen,” he whispered uneasily,
the warmth of their joining draining away from him. “What’s going
on around here?”
“I don’t know. But it was
different, wasn’t it—before the men from Canterbury
came?”
Before the raids, too.
Cai didn’t say it.
His lover was here, shoulder pressed to his shoulder, never less of
a Viking pirate than now, with lambent eyes fixed on him in
concern. But Cai often thought as Fen had done beneath that golden
moon—how
have we come to this? “Yes,” he said. “I’ve tried to make it as it was,
restore it a little. But…”
“But Aelfric and the crows
infest it and undo all your good work.”
“Not quite so bad
as—”
“I tell you what we should do.
No—what I should do, since you’re a monk. One night I should drug
their ale with something from your cabinets. And then, while
they’re asleep, I should take my sword Blóekraftr dauei and—”
“Fen!” Cai couldn’t repress
a spasm of horrified laughter. “Stop it.”
“What? I have said I will
drug them, haven’t I? They won’t be in any pain. And then you could
be abbot here in truth, which is what your brethren and these
villagers need.”
“Hush, will you?” Pushing
up onto his knees, Cai put his arms around him. Cai never had come
quite to terms with Viking humour and couldn’t tell now if he was
serious. He held him, trying to enclose within the circle of his
embrace all that was noble in him, the dawning compassion that had
made him spare the life of old Addy, everything that made him a man
Cai should love. He pressed his lips to the graceful arch of his
collarbone, looked into the darkness beyond his shoulder. “We can’t
do such things.”
“Why not? Your world is so
hampered. These men are parasites, poisoning the minds of your
friends. With a few swings of my blade…”
Cai pressed a silencing hand to his mouth.
Fen chuckled and pushed his tongue against his palm, sending bolts
of arousal down his spine. “Demon,” Cai whispered. “Be still.
There’s somebody coming—one of the parasites, I think.”
The track below the stables was dark,
hard to negotiate on a cloudy night. Nevertheless, a black-robed
figure was tearing along it as fast as he could go. Drawing Fen out
of the stable doorway where the lantern made such glories of his
skin and hair, Cai listened, his hand still pressed tight despite
the patterns Fen was now tracing on it with his tongue tip. “It
sounds like Laban. What’s he doing out here at this time of
night?”
“What do you
care?”
The question was only a muffled
vibration, but Cai knew all his sounds by now. “Less and less by
the second. But he may be ill.” Cai recalled the last man he’d
found sobbing and distraught on a pathway at Fara. “I’d better go
and see.”
“Please yourself,
physician.”
“I won’t be long. Will you
wait here?”
“Mm.” Fen settled himself
on the straw. He stretched out one arm along the top of a bale and
drew up his knee, the better to display his hips and thighs,
somehow more powerful to Cai in their lassitude than when they had
been taut and convulsing in the throes of their fuck.
“Don’t,” Cai rasped,
struggling into his cassock. In reply, Fen only grinned and ran a
hand down his own body, then took hold of his rising cock in a grip
Cai knew from vast experience felt bloody wonderful.
“Please.”
“Well, hurry. Yes, I’ll
wait here. But I can’t promise you that I won’t start by
myself.”
Cai ran out into the night. At
that moment he hated not only Laban and the Canterbury clerics but
every duty, every obligation, every man, woman and child who might
get between him and the magnificent creature he’d left behind him.
He hated the stony path for stretching out beneath his feet—the
very air, for being closer to Fen than he was, for wrapping itself
in summer-breeze embrace around him. Visions of rebellion danced
through his head. He would take Fen and leave this place. Perhaps
Broccus wasn’t so wrong about the mindless life of the
senses—perhaps Cai too would become a hillfort chieftain, fight all
day and roll Fen around in his barbaric wolf-skin bed all night.
Where was the world where they could leave Viking and monk far
behind them and live freely as men—where even Cai’s own questions
and doubts would be silenced in his heart? He thrust away the
vision of Broc’s beautiful yellow-eyed hound. His very guts burned
with the need to run back to the stable, fling himself into Fen’s
arms, impale himself on that waiting shaft. We can manage on passion and
spit…
Shuddering, he took up position on a
twist in the track. Laban, if it was him, would have to come
through here. Cai didn’t feel like offering comfort, no matter what
the problem. Perhaps for once his duty to his fellow man could be
discharged simply and fast. “Laban,” he called, stepping forwards
as the dark figure rounded the corner. “It’s me—Brother Caius.
What’s wrong?”
Laban almost knocked him down. His
head was lowered, the hood of his cassock raised and flapping into
his face. Cai seized his arm to steady them both, and Laban came to
a choking, sobbing halt. “Leave me be!”
“Are you ill?”
“No. You don’t have to tend
me. Just let me go.”
“Where? The last man I let
go strung himself up in the church.”
“Oh, if I could be so brave
as that… No, Caius.” Laban doubled up, coughing. “I’m not going to
hell with Benedict.”
“You don’t believe Ben’s in
hell. When Aelfric wanted him buried away from his brethren—you
helped stop that, didn’t you?”
“Aye, and brought down
Aelfric’s curse on myself.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought I could be part
of your world, your life here. I wanted your brethren to be my
friends, far more than I wanted the Canterbury men to be.” He
stopped fighting Cai’s grip and looked at him properly. “I grew up
in a village like the one down the track. My church was a church
like yours. Then I was sent to Rome, and…”
“Forget Rome. It’ll take
Rome a long time to catch up with us here.”
“Less time than you think.
The missionaries are coming, telling even the priests of Iona that
their ways have been wrong. And they’re not cruel madmen like
Aelfric. I’ve met them. They’re good. Oh, so good, so holy. But
they don’t believe that common men should read, or think, or learn
anything outside the Holy Bible…”
“Or the parts of it they’re
taught, because they’ll never be able to read it for
themselves.”
“Yes. And they’ll win,
these sacred demons. They’ll put out all the lights.”
Cai took his shoulders. He’d never
even spoken to Laban, beyond the day’s civilities. And yet here he
was—intelligent, full of solemn anxiety, the same hopes and fears
as Cai’s own. “Stay with me, then,” he said. “Help me fight
them.”
“They can’t be fought. You’ll
learn.” He detached Cai’s hold on him, gently, as if he’d much
rather have remained. “I don’t belong in your world, and I can’t be
part of his.
Not now.”
“Aelfric’s? Why not
now?”
“Not now he’s doing this.
You don’t understand, Caius. There’s only one way from now on. And
everyone who doesn’t follow it will burn.”
The breeze shifted. It brought on its
wings a scent familiar to Cai as his own flesh—wood smoke, resiny
and pleasant, the promise of a warm hearth, a good meal. But all
the fires of Fara were shut down for the night and would stay that
way until Hengist set his baker’s ovens roaring at first light of
dawn. He turned. Far off in the darkness, a red glow was kindling.
It wasn’t on the monastery lands, or in any of the scatter of
villages that could be seen from here. Cai checked his inner
calendar, the ancient wheel of ritual that had shaped his year
until he’d learned a new one from this new, strange church. Too
late for Lugnasadh, too soon for Samhain…
“What is Aelfric doing?” he
demanded. “What is that fire?”
But Laban was gone, the track as dark
and empty as if he had never been there.