Chapter Twelve
Cai ran. He knew he wouldn’t be fast
enough—not to close the distance between himself and that fire and
stop whatever hellish thing was in the offing there—but his heart
was easy. Fen would aid him. Fen would find a way. His strength met
Cai’s own like the confluence of two rivers. Fen had saved him
twice now—pulled him up, body and soul, from the sea of his grief
for Leof, and the swamps and quicksand that men like Aelfric
created, reminding him lustily every day that his flesh was not a
punishable burden but a joy. There wouldn’t be time to harness up
the chariot, but Fen would help him catch Eldra, and together
they’d fly across the spaces of the night—she would bear both of
them, they’d discovered, provided Fen took the reins, an
arrangement Cai had argued then acceded to, laughing and chagrined.
They would get there.
The stable was empty. The lamp still
glowed on the hollow in the straw where Fen had made himself
comfortable and promised to wait—patiently, if not chastely. His
cassock was gone, and there was no other sign of his
existence.
Which meant nothing. Fen could have
got cold, or gone to humour Aelfric by locking himself up in the
quarantine cell where he was still supposed to spend his nights.
Perhaps he too had seen the fire and gone to investigate, in which
case Cai would encounter him somewhere on the track leading out
across the salt flats. The light was brighter now, golden flashes
dancing in the ruby glow. A massive bonfire, a waste of wood and
resources where there was no need for it, out of season and
fierce…
“Fen,” he called, fear
trying to close his throat, but there was no reply.
Eldra wouldn’t come to him. He thought
he could hear her, but the waning moon was cloudy, the field a
patchwork of shadows. After leaning over the fence, whistling and
jingling her harness for as long as he dared, he gave up and tore
back to the stable. The pony would have to do, weary though the
poor beast was after their journey home. She eyed him in disbelief
as he unhooked her bridle again, but once he was settled on her
broad back, she caught his sense of urgency and clattered out into
the yard.
No sign of Fen on the slope down
to the tidal flats. Still Cai disregarded the chill in his throat.
He couldn’t have the Viking at his side all the time. Best if he
remembered that now. His soul, his very thoughts, had begun to
shape themselves to meet a shadow other, something outside himself, and what would he be
if it was gone? A shadow too. Whatever was left after the
subtraction of Fenrir.
He slapped the pony on the rump, and
she surged to a choppy gallop. He focussed on the difficulty of
staying aboard her, bareback, his cassock slipping underneath him.
The tide was low, drawn out as far as it would go by the weak
quarter moon, but the sand it exposed could turn to treacherous
mud, requiring him to ride carefully from one pale stretch to the
next. Whoever had built that fire must have come this way too. He
was beginning to make out hoofprints and footprints in the drier
places. Who would brave the flats on such a night, and what fire
needed to be kindled so far from Fara and the villages?
The nebulous shape of the flames
resolved itself. On a broad sweep of turf at the foot of the dunes,
driftwood had been piled high, and into the centre of it someone
had driven a single tall post. At the foot of the post—God, and
they could have made it shorter for so pitiful a captive—a shape
barely recognisable as human was huddled, bound round the waist
with crude fisherman’s rope. Its feet were invisible, hidden by
flames. A cloud of white hair, drifting in the updrafts, haloed its
bowed head. Danan.
Cai began to shout. He was still
too far off for the men and women gathered round the pyre to hear
him, but one yell tore from him and then another, raw sounds he had
thought only Fen could rip from him. His lungs convulsed. He was
trying to hurl his voice ahead of him, make it do what his hands
could not. He leaned close over the pony’s neck. Her mane whipped
into his face, stinging him, and he clasped her flanks with his
knees and drove her on at a speed neither of them had known she had
in her. She was snorting and flecked with sweat by the time she had
carried him within earshot of the crowd. Cai kept on yelling, an
incoherent roar that had no at its roots but made no more sense than that.
It didn’t have to. It only had
to make them see him. If they saw him, they would stop. Cai was in
no doubt of this—the people in the firelit circle were villagers,
the ordinary souls he met and dealt with every week. They knew him.
More crucially, he knew them, and not a single one among them would have done this.
They were kind, flawed, human. If they saw him, they would break
whatever trance was holding them. They would cut the ropes and let
Danan go.
Not one of them turned. The thunderous
splash of the pony’s hooves must be reaching them by now.
Desperately, in flashes between the blinding whisk of the pony’s
mane, he tried to make out what was fixing their attention. Not the
helpless little figure in the fire, as if she were somehow
unimportant… Cai caught his breath on a sob. Had they already
killed her? Tied up her body to burn, for God knew what hideous
purpose? They weren’t even watching her. They were watching a dark
shape perched halfway up the side of a dune.
Aelfric was preaching. Cai had never
seen him in full flight before. He’d never had the right
congregation—only a bunch of half-heathen monks, their minds
corrupted to rebellion by Theo’s rule. No, he needed men and women
like the ones before him now. Theo had never tried to teach the
villagers. Cared for them, answered their questions, but even in
his enlightenment believed that some men were born to be priests,
and others to tend cows, and best if each remained in his station.
And so the villagers of Fara were here, their eyes and minds—and,
Cai could see quite clearly now, most of their mouths—wide
open.
Preaching or not, the abbot was ready
for Cai. He didn’t glance at him or break off his monologue until
the pony was within twenty yards of the group. Then he ceased to
stab the air with his claw, and pointed it straight at Cai. “Stop
him!” he screamed, his voice a thin blade that sliced the night.
“Stop the profane consort of the witch!” The finger swung to
Friswide. “You, woman—take your children and stand in his path. He
won’t run them down.”
She actually did it. She had one dirty
infant by the hand, two others, half-asleep, hanging on tight to
her skirts. Without a flicker of change in her vacant expression,
she swung around to plant the whole fragile group of them directly
in the pony’s way.
Cai hauled back on the reins. The pony
chucked her head up and bunched her hindquarters. They were too
close—Cai’s momentum bore him on and he pitched over her shoulder,
narrowly missing one child while the pony veered off to the other
side. He broke his fall with his hands, ducked his head and crashed
onto the turf at Friswide’s feet.
She bent with genuine concern to help
him up. “Brother Caius! What are you doing here?”
“Me?” Cai coughed and spat out
bits of grass. “What are you doing? Godric—Barda—all of you, come here. Help me untie
Danan and put out that fire.” He tried to run and found his path
blocked by Godric, fat and serenely smiling. “Out of my way, man.
Are you responsible for this?”
“No, Caius. Abbot Aelfric
summoned us here. He has captured the witch.”
Cai grabbed him. He bodily set him
aside, but somehow the move put him into the arms of the next
smiling, muscular farmer. “Aelfric!” he yelled past them. “Tell
them to let her go.” He struggled against a surrounding wall of
flesh. “In God’s name…”
“It’s in God’s name that I
act, blasphemer.” Aelfric leaned forwards in his sandy pulpit and
transfixed Cai with a blank, triumphant gaze. “I caught her digging
up dirt from holy men’s graves by light of a full moon.”
“She was gathering herbs, you
idiot. Let her go before she burns. Danan!”
“There is no help for her.
She will burn, and her curse will be lifted from these people. The
grain will be cleansed. The apples will ripen on the bough. The
children—”
“Stop!” Frantic, Cai cut
across him. No grains or apples here, but he grabbed the nearest of
Friswide’s infants and held it high, quickly glancing at the rash
on its cheek. He’d been wrong about the fleas. “These children have
scurvy. They need to eat green plants, that’s all. It isn’t a curse
or a…” The child gave a wriggle of discomfort, and he took it into
his arms, unable to handle it roughly even while visions of taking
it hostage flashed through his head, of threatening to chuck it
onto the fire with Danan. “Danan is a healer. She’d never… Wait.
When did you take her, Aelfric? Last full moon?”
“Aye, and kept her where
neither you nor your savage could find her.”
Cai dumped the child into Friswide’s
hands. If mad, empty preaching was all that worked here now,
perhaps he had some of his own. He was being hemmed in by the
villagers—not angrily, but absolutely—and he struggled to get
enough distance from all of them to see into their faces. “Last
full moon,” he repeated. “Think, all of you, for God’s sake. When
did we find the ergot in the corn? When did your children fall sick
and Barda’s goat die?”
“Why, it was after full
moon,” Barda said. She was the only one amongst them who had looked
troubled at the prospect of burning a human being alive, who seemed
to be unswayed by Aelfric’s power. She reached out and gave Godric
a slap, which almost knocked him down. “It was after full moon,
husband!”
He turned and hit her back. It wasn’t
a slap but a punch to the face, and Cai saw he had wanted to do it
for years. She was twice his size, formidable. He would never have
dared touch her outside of Aelfric’s charmed circle. “Hold your