Chapter Twelve #2
lip, wench,” he hissed at her. “The abbot has told us. She worked
her evil spells from her captivity, to make us set her
free.”
Cai grabbed Godric by the scruff
and hauled him back. “Right,” he shouted. “This woman—Danan, who
pounds up rosehips to cure your children’s colds, and has never
harmed a hair on anyone’s head all her life, has suddenly taken to
cursing and…” He gave Godric a shake. “And what? Evil spells? God
help us. Did you ever think your trees might have blossomed and
your children thrived because of her? And—and when this monster stole her and
hid her away in some hole beneath the ground, the very earth began
to die?”
It wasn’t working. The trouble was
that Cai didn’t believe his own words—not as Aelfric believed in
his. It would take a madman to hold such convictions, on either
side. A creature who could blight the land or nurture it according
to her will… No. He twisted around to look at the pyre. Danan
hadn’t moved. Perhaps the smoke had killed her, or rendered her
insensible—he prayed so. She was just an old woman. Cai ran out of
words and reasons. He dropped Godric like a dead rat and threw
himself at the crowd.
He could hear thunder. At first
he thought it was only the pounding of blood in his ears, and
redoubled his efforts to tear through the thicket of bodies, the
hands that were holding him back. No one was hurting him. The women
were even patting at him soothingly, as if he’d been a distraught
child. They were just there, solid and stupid and immovable as cattle. “Damn
you all! Let me go!”
“Blóe ok
sorg!”
Cai jerked his head up. No Saxon
throat could produce such a sound. The thunder grew louder. The
barricade slackened around him, hands falling away, mouths opening.
Astonishment and fear—at last, the placid, dreadful smiles
disappearing, like cobwebs in the blast of a good north
wind.
Godric waved a plump paw back in
the direction of Fara. He gaped like a fish, and after a couple of
efforts got one word out. “Vikingr!”
“Blóe ok
sorg!” The
battle cry rang out again. A thrill of terror shot down Cai’s
spine, stiffening the hairs on his nape. He knew the words. They
were very like his people’s own, and he’d been taught many
blood-hot Viking ones now, shuddering with passion in sand dunes,
stables, barns. Blood and woe—yes, pure oncoming hell, bearing down out of the
night. Blóe
ok sorg, the
long, lonely syllables drawing out, like…
Oh, God, like the cry of a wolf. For a
flashing instant even Cai was fooled, the villagers’ terror
transmitting itself in a wave of primal body scents. They were
scattering around him. He was free now to move, to run to Danan and
try to set her free from the pyre.
There was no need. The
vikingr
raider swept down.
In his leather jerkin, his bare arms taut with muscle, he was every
shore dweller’s nightmare. Eldra was surging beneath him, her
movements so blended with his that they seemed like one creature.
His wolf’s-head sword was buckled at his side, and in one hand he
swung an axe. “Blóe ok sorg!” he
yelled one last time, blazing past Cai at a gallop, sparing a
second to flash him a lunatic grin. Then he drove Eldra straight at
the fire.
He was as likely to decapitate Danan
as save her. The blade of the axe flashed once as it fell, and a
hollow thunk of metal on wood made Cai wince. He cried out in fear
as Danan’s lifeless form drooped forwards, but Fen hauled down hard
on Eldra’s rein, sweeping her round in a tight circle in time to
grab the old woman before she collapsed. He shouted
again—formlessly this time, a roar of victory and laughter—and
hoisted her up like a bundle of rags beneath his arm.
The fire leapt skyward, as if in rage
at the loss of its prey, blinding Cai to everything beyond it. Fen
was gone, the only trace of him a dying percussion of hooves. He
turned. The villagers were all staring in the same direction, the
terror in their faces dissolving to confusion—and, at last, a
different kind of fear, as if awaking from a dream. They began to
look like themselves again.
“It was Fenrir,” Cai choked
out, only then fully realising it himself. “Fen took her. He saved
her.”
Aelfric let loose a shriek. There was
something deathly in the sound—a kind of despair, as if some fibre
within him had reached a breaking point and snapped. “Thou shalt
not suffer a witch to live! Thou shalt not—”
The tuft of marram grass on which he’d
been perched tore out of the sand and gave way. For one eerie
moment he remained suspended, that clawed finger swinging to find
its next target, feet poised over nothing. Then he dropped like a
bundle of sticks in a sack and rolled to the foot of the dune,
limbs flailing.
The villagers watched in horror.
Then—easily roused, easily swayed—they began to laugh. Cai pushed
through them. This time they let him, and he shouldered his way to
where Aelfric lay, twitching and panting.
“No,” Cai said, desperately
stifling laughter of his own. “Don’t you see, he’s not well in his
head? Don’t follow his orders, but…don’t laugh. You,
Godric—Blacksmith Wynn—take hold of him. Help him back to the
monastery and call his brethren to take care of him.”
“No!” Aelfric lunged into a
sitting position. He was like one of the fearsome creations of the
Jews, the mindless, unstoppable golems who would carry out their
makers’ vengeance to the ends of the earth. “The Bible commands!
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!”
Cai could snap too. His doctorly
compassion dried. He took the abbot by his scrawny throat and
shoved him back down onto the sand. “You think you know the Bible?”
he snarled. “No man alive today knows the Bible. That’s what Theo
taught us. A book written in Aramaic—translated through Hebrew and
Greek into Latin… All it can be is God’s guide to us, not his sacred bloody
word-for-word commands. Things get lost. Words change. And Theo
taught us those ones straight away, to show us an example. The word
is poisoner in Hebrew. Thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to
live.”
“Is it so, Brother
Caius?”
Cai glanced up. Barda was listening,
hands on her hips, her expression thoughtful. She was nursing a
split lip, which Godric would have cause to regret later on. “Yes.
It’s so.”
“It’s very
strange.”
“Not as strange as what you
people tried to do out here tonight.” He let Aelfric go and got up,
trying to wipe the memory of his bony gullet off his hand. “I’m
asking you, as your friend…don’t follow Aelfric. Don’t
follow me.
Just for God’s sake try to think for yourselves. Now, I have to
find Fen and see if you’ve managed to kill that old woman between
you.”
Eldra’s hoofprints lay crisp on the
damp sand. A direction would be easy, though the great, bounding
distance between each set of prints told Cai he might have a long
walk. And where would Fen have taken her? Back to the monastery and
the infirmary there, if he had any sense. But the deep-gouged marks
were headed south, so unless he’d doubled back among the
dunes…
The four-time drum began again. It was
so faint that Cai briefly wondered if Eldra’s prints had somehow
retained their sound and were echoing it back to him. The uncertain
moonlight was illuminating a thin stretch of the strand, the place
where the incoming tide was sweeping up the beach. The percussion
gained a dimension—a wild splashing, flying hooves cleaving
water—and out of this premonitory sound-ghost came a shape, a
moonlit vision of a man on horseback. Fen was coming
back.
He was riding unburdened. Cai began to
run towards him. It was too soon for him to start demanding where
he’d put poor Danan, if she was dead or alive, but he raised a hand
and hailed him. Alive or dead, Fen had tried to save her. Had come
tearing to the rescue when Cai had given up on him, had been stupid
enough for one instant to think himself abandoned. His heart leapt.
“Fenrir! Fen!”
Fen didn’t slow. He and Eldra swept
past him, Cai getting one more glimpse of that mad, beautiful
smile. Then Fen bore back on the reins, his obedient warhorse once
more responding, beginning the battlefield manoeuvre she’d learned
with Broc’s chariot behind her and had used tonight to let her
master get behind Danan, scoop her up and go. It was a trick to
rescue comrades cut off by a skirmish. Broc also used it to round
people up.
The horse was rushing down on him. Cai
stepped back, already knowing it useless, trying to get out of her
track. Fen was leaning forwards past her shoulder, one arm
stretched out. “Blood and sorrow, monk,” he cried, his rich voice
cracking with laughter. “Your turn now!”
“Don’t you bloody dare.” Cai
backed up further, hands raised defensively. Once more Eldra passed
him, but slowing now, turning neatly to cut off his retreat. “Fen—I
am serious. You are not carting me off like a damn bag of flour…
Fen! Do not!”
“Save your dignity, then.
Jump.”
There was one moment when Cai could do
it. The villagers were roaring with laughter. If he glanced at
them, took the time to tell them to shut up and be about their
business, he would miss this ride. And he didn’t want to. Even less
than being borne off from the scene like a struggling sheep by this
insane Viking did he want to be left behind, alone on the sand. He
seized Fen’s arm. Fen hoisted him and he leapt. He landed with a
ball-jarring thud across Eldra’s rump and almost slid off over her
tail. He seized Fen’s belt and hung on.
Fen took off with him into the night.
Cai wrapped his arms round his waist. He had no idea of where they
were heading but he didn’t care—closed his eyes and pressed his
brow to Fen’s shoulder to increase the feel of the unknown. Let
Eldra bear them off into the void. Theo had said the earth was
round, but that was hard to believe on a north-lands beach, where
the moonlit horizon stretched out forever on a pure, empty plane.
Let Fen drive Eldra on and on, and perhaps they would hurtle off