Chapter Twelve #3
this world’s edge. Leave behind the place where it was possible for
good human creatures to set an old woman to burn, where knives of
guilt pierced Cai for not having somehow taught them better, as if
not only Fara’s monks but her villagers too were burdens on his
soul… “No!”
Fen spared a hand from the reins. He
rubbed his fingers over Cai’s tight-clenched knuckles. “No
what?”
“Don’t stop. Take us
away.”
“Too late, beloved. We’re
already here.”
To come from a gallop to a dead stop
was also a battle manoeuvre, and Eldra was good at it. She propped
her forelegs and commenced a graceful skid, and for the second time
that night Cai was hurled down from horseback and into the dark.
This time he landed in soft sand. He scrambled to his feet in time
to see Fen make an elegant warrior’s dismount and pat Eldra’s neck
as if she’d done him proud. He was smiling broadly—beginning to
shake with laughter.
“Fen, you…you arse!” That was no good. Cai’s own voice
quivered. He tried to find the fury that should have been burning
him up. “You arrogant Viking savage! How dare you sweep in and grab
a…” He floundered for words, then took inspiration from his damp,
sand-covered cassock. “A man of God, as if he’d been nothing
but—”
“A shrieking virgin nun?
That’s what you think of us, isn’t it?”
“Oh—and that’s wrong? A
slander upon your good name?”
“Not at all. But not me.
Not the Torleik. We only take such plunder as will be useful to us,
and I chose to take a fine man.”
Cai stared at him. He hadn’t
heard Torleik in some time now. He’d been starting to think those ghosts
were laid for Fen, exorcised by newer, brighter experience. He
hadn’t heard that proud, easy we that told him where his Viking’s blood loyalties still lay.
His own blood chilled. But Fen gave him no more time to think about
it. Chuckling, he advanced across the sandy crater in the dunes.
“Look at you, my man of God—all on fire with outrage, your hair in
spikes. You have seaweed in it.” He reached out as if to pick some
out, then gave Cai the lightest shove, just enough to tumble him
backwards. Cai took the opportunity and seized Fen’s jerkin as he
fell, dragging him down on top. They crashed together into the
sand, laughing and scuffling.
“Puppies!”
The voice stopped Cai between one
playful punch to Fen’s ribs and the next. He flipped over, dumping
Fen off him. Extricating himself, he pushed up onto his knees.
“Danan?”
“Puppies,” she repeated
sadly. “Supposedly men, and yet—puppies in a basket. It isn’t
enough, you know, Caius of Fara.”
She was perched comfortably atop the
dune. Her hands were folded in her lap, as if she’d come here and
settled down to watch a show. Cai undid the grip Fen was trying to
fasten on his girdle. “Let me go, you fool. Danan—are you all
right?”
“She’s fine,” Fen answered
for her, giving up and helping him to his feet. “I don’t know how.
But there’s not a mark on her. She’s a salamander, or a witch
indeed.”
“That can’t be.” Cai ran up
the dune and knelt beside her. “Danan, my lady. You might think you
aren’t hurt, but you’ve been breathing smoke. And—you’re burned, or
scorched at the least. You must be.”
She sighed. Without warning she
hitched up her skirts and stuck out her bony legs. “See for
yourself, physician. If it will make you feel better. Your tame
raider swept me off in time.”
“Impossible.” Cai inspected
the gnarled toes with their goat’s-hoof nails, the ancient,
calloused feet. He shot a glance at Fen. “And believe me, I wish
the bastard was tame. I don’t understand this. Your lungs should be
burned. You were lifeless on that pyre when I got
there.”
“It seems not.”
“I called to you. Why
didn’t you show me you were alive?”
“Perhaps I was
not.”
He sat up. She seemed to read his
bewilderment and have pity on it, or on something about him—reached
forwards and brushed one hand across his hair. “Don’t let it tax
your brains, boy. Perhaps I was feigning. Your villagers were
strange tonight—perhaps it seemed best to me not to provoke
them.”
“Strange…” Cai shook his head. “I never saw
them like that. How could it happen?”
“Because they have no
leader.”
“Nonsense. People shouldn’t
need a leader to be good. Decent, at least.” Cai resumed his
examination of the thin but healthy limbs, the flesh that should
have reeked of smoke and charring but didn’t. The old woman’s
skirts smelled a little of fresh comfrey leaves and bedstraws, and
that was all. He knew what was coming next and didn’t want to
hear.
“In a perfect world—that of
Theodosius—that is true. He was perfect in his way. You are grossly
imperfect…” She waited till his eyes met hers in sarcastic
acknowledgement. “And better suited to your times.”
“Why does it have to be
me?”
She shrugged. “Why should it be
anyone? You are right. People shouldn’t need a leader. But where
there are men who would lead them astray, they do. Addy
hoped…”
“You do know him, then?
When did you last see him? What did he hope?”
“So many questions. You
exhaust me.”
“I’m sorry.
But—”
“I must go. I have herbs to
gather. I was interrupted, if you recall.”
“Where was Aelfric keeping
you, Danan?”
“Somewhere dark and silent.
Don’t scowl, boy—I found it restful.” She shook off Cai’s
restraining hand and stood up. “Ah, wait. In return for this
rescue, I will give you something—you and that redheaded beast.
Come here, both of you.”
Fen left off checking Eldra’s limbs
and came to kneel at Cai’s side. His expression was mild, as if
he’d never rode up and down a beach roaring and swinging an axe. “I
don’t understand how it is, old salamander,” he said, “but I am
glad you’re unharmed.”
“Unharmed?” She gave him a
cuff to the face. Cai flinched—anyone else would have drawn back a
stump—but Fen only beamed. “I shall bear the mark of your knee in
my arse to the grave.”
“There was no time to stop
and help you to a more maidenly posture.”
She broke into wheezing, rasping
chuckles. “Maidenly! Well, I’ll forgive it in the circumstances.
Now, where is the damn thing…?” She dug like a weasel into a pocket
of her skirts, threw out a half-eaten apple and a barley ear, then
extracted a long red ribbon. “There. Do you know what this
is?”
Cai did, but was too taken aback to
say so. Fen, less inhibited, took the worn length of silk between
his fingers. “Yes. Our custom is the same. This is for
handfastings.” Silent laughter shook him. “I’m honoured, lady, but
perhaps I’m too old for you. And my preference lies
elsewhere.”
“Yes. Even my Caius here
had a few girls before he was certain, but you…you
knew.”
That silenced both of them. Fen
lowered his gaze, and Cai took his hand. He’d grown used to having
secrets pulled raw out of his head, but the process was new to Fen.
Cai wanted to tell Danan to leave him be. There was something
painful in the thought of Fen, young and far away from him,
yearning from the first awakening of his flesh for other
men.
He held tighter, and Danan nodded
approval. “Aye, that will do.”
“What will? Danan, what are
you up to?”
“It will help you. You must
lead, and you will be the better for a good man at your
side.”
Light dawned on Cai. His mouth
dropped open. “Oh, God. Danan, no. Look, he is at my side. He doesn’t
want—”
“Who says I don’t
want?”
Cai started. Fen was still holding the
ribbon. He looked at Cai with fire and cloud-swept moonlight
lighting up the amber of his eyes. “Who says I don’t?” he repeated,
turning his hand in Cai’s grasp so that their fingers meshed. “What
better? It will bind us closer than brothers.”
The secret of the book is in
the binding. Cai stared at the ribbon drifting in the offshore wind,
coiling as if with a life of its own. It felt like an answer, or
part of one, but it faded as he tried to follow it. Why did it
leave him so chilled?
“A battlefield marriage,
Fen?” he said faintly, rubbing the strong fingers between his
own.
“Many such have been made.
And, if it fails to suit, it’s only for…”
“Only a year and a day. I
know.” But
it will suit. That’s what makes me afraid. I will be here on my
knees, asking for its renewal, every year and a day for the rest of
my bloody life. “Aren’t we already closer than brothers?”
It wasn’t the right question. The
moon-clouds won out over the fire. A sorrow whose depths Cai now
knew he had barely comprehended darkened Fen’s gaze. “Please. Let
her make us so.”
Cai raised their joined hands. He
hoped there was nothing for him to say as part of the rite. His
throat was closed, an aching pressure of tears building up behind
his eyes. And Danan, after examining both of them with a solemn
anxiety Cai had never before seen her display, bound the ribbon
once around Fen’s wrist.
“Solstice to solstice, hand
to hand, from blood-mother earth to the heart of man…”
Cai closed his eyes. He tried to
let his doubts go, to lay them on the warm night wind that was
stirring his hair, pushing the wool of his cassock against him in
all the places where he longed to be touched. If Fen wanted this,
then what could be better? The ritual words, older by far than monastery
stones or even the hillfort’s walls, rolled out around him.
Bud into bloom,
bloom to decay, round the great track for a year and a day…
Danan’s voice
altered, losing its rasp of age and smoke. It gave Cai a vision of
oak saplings springing up, each on its own side of a stream. Winter
passed, suns and moons, and in the heat of summer each tree leaned
across the stream and enmeshed its young foliage with the crown of
its brother. More summers, more winters, more suns and moons, and
the two had grown together, their great trunks fused, the stream
parting now to flow round them. Hand to hand and pledge to pledge, from
home and hearth to the bright world’s edge…
Danan stopped. When Cai opened his
eyes, he half-expected to find a priestess of the Druids before
him. They had not all been slaughtered or driven back to their
mountains by the Romans, and she had sounded so young. But there
was only an old woman, looking scorched now after all. She sat down
suddenly on the sand. “No.”
She hadn’t completed the loop of the
ribbon around Cai’s wrist. She let it go, and it drifted from Fen’s
like a trace of blood in the water. Fen picked it up and offered it
to her. “Go on, old woman.”
“No.”
“No what? Go on. It isn’t
finished.”
“It can’t be. The time
isn’t right.”
Fen chuckled. He made as if to
fasten the ribbon himself. “Time? I may be a faithless
vikingr
pirate, but even I
can promise a year and a day.”
“No, Fenrisulfr. You can’t.
Not even that.”
Shuddering, Cai unfastened the silk
binding. He took it from Fen’s wrist too, fingers clumsy on the
intricate weave Danan had made. “Leave it,” he
whispered.
“No! I want us to be more
than brothers.”
“We are.”
“And how does she know my
full name?”
“She knows Addy. Just leave
it. Come on.”
“How did Addy know it?” Fen
turned to face him, eyes wide, suddenly full of angry fear. “Why
did he say I would get my wish of vengeance, knee-deep in water and
blood? I don’t wish that anymore. I want to stay with
you.”
Danan staggered to her feet. Her
movement released a tang of singed fabric onto the air. “I must
go,” she rasped, and broke into a fit of coughing.
“Stay. Finish the
rite.”
“Fen, let her be.” Cai held
out the handfasting ribbon to her, and she took it, pushing it
frantically into her clothes. Cai would have helped her, but she
whipped away from him into the shadows, too swift for him to
follow. He took a few steps in the strange tracks she had left.
There on the sand were her apple and her ear of barley corn. He
picked them up. The apple was hard and green, the corn riddled with
dark pods of fungus. “Danan!” he called, hardly expecting to be
heard. “Is it true? Does the land die without you?”
A weird rush of laughter rippled back
to him. “Of course not, stupid boy.”
Cai bowed his head. There went another
miracle.
“But check your orchards
and your barns. You’ll find the wind has changed.”
It did, in a buffet of air so strong
it almost knocked Cai down. He stumbled, and Fen caught him hard
from behind. There was a wash of freshly broken comfrey stalks, and
then of ozone, and then the breeze was blowing sweetly from the sea
once more.
“What was that?”
Cai turned in his arms. Fen was
shivering, staring into the darkness Danan had left behind her.
“Nothing,” Cai told him fervently. “Nothing. Everything’s all
right.”
“It isn’t. Why wouldn’t she
bind us? Why did she say—?”
“Hush.” Cai stroked his
hair, then hauled him into a ferocious embrace. “Didn’t we agree
she was crazy—her and Addy too? Forget them.”
They were folding down together in the
shelter of the nearest dune when the hare dashed by them. It was a
big one. It scudded past their hiding place, close enough to kick
sand into their eyes. For a moment it sat poised at the dune crest,
gilded eyes glowing.
Fen sat up, unhitching the knife from
his belt. “That’s a beauty. Shall I get it for us?”
Cai had seen him fell a smaller beast
from twice the distance. He grabbed his arm and bore it down. “No.
No, love—not this one.”