Chapter Thirteen
“Caius! Brother
Caius!”
Fen yawned and sat up. Quickly Cai put
a hand on the top of his head and pushed him down again. He didn’t
want that fox-bright hair appearing among the ripening ears of
wheat, giving their game away.
“It’s Hengist. He might
want something.”
“He always wants something.
And if I leave him alone for long enough, he finds it all by
himself.” Cai picked out the ripest apple from the four they’d
brought out for their midday meal. It was hard to choose. The
orchard had given with such abundance that they’d had stock to
sell, after drying all they needed for their own winter needs. The
apples weren’t big, but they had blushed a sunrise pink no one at
Fara had ever seen before, and they tasted of summer distilled. Cai
offered the best of them to Fen, who snarled playfully and snatched
an enormous bite. He held it between his teeth, eyes shining an
invitation. Cai chuckled and groaned—after a moment gave in and
tried to seize the morsel back. Their mouths met. Juice ran sweetly
down Cai’s throat. Brother Hengist’s running footsteps faded off
into the distance.
They didn’t have much time. The
villagers’ wheat lands too had ripened with such unexpected vigour
that the Fara brethren had broken off their own labours to come and
help fetch it in. Today was the equinox, daylight and darkness in
balance, the time for second harvest, and after this only the third
one, the Samhain-tide slaughter of beasts. Then Cai’s
world—monastery, village, the handful of men and women who gave it
its pulse and its life—would crouch down for winter, provided for,
safe. Fen and Cai had been working in the fields below the village
since dawn. Soon they would have to get up, join the others, form
up into the scything line and cut their refuge down with their own
hands.
“Caius! Brother
Cai!”
God, Hengist was coming back. That was
too bad. Cai had lost the fight over the apple and was flat on his
back. Fen was pinning him down, growling softly, sharp incisors
skimming his jugular. Every brush, every barely restrained bite,
was jolting Cai closer to the brink. He couldn’t speak. If he
opened his mouth, he would give them away with a howl. He buried
his face in Fen’s cassock, clutched at his backside, at the taut
surging muscle thrusting down on him again and again. The homespun
fabric was in the way. If they came like this, they would leave
marks. And Cai wanted to feel him—needed, had to have, that long,
hot shaft pounding up against his, even if Hengist had found them
and was standing looking on. He tore the cloth out of the way. Fen,
unleashed, gave a cry and an unrestrained shove, driving against
him with all his strength. Cai arched his back, ecstasy squeezing
his eyes shut. He convulsed. Behind his eyelids the sun turned
crimson.
Brother Hengist’s footsteps faded
again. Cai could hardly distinguish them from the slowing thump of
Fen’s heart. His head was on Fen’s shoulder. Fen was running
unsteady fingers through Cai’s hair, the bites transformed to
kisses to his brow and lips, just as devastating. More—the wolf
became gentle, all wildness spent.
“Stop,” Cai whispered.
“Stop. We have to go back to work.”
“Did I hear Hengist
again?”
“Yes. He’s
gone.”
“Was it just the rushing in
my ears, or…did he sound a little desperate?”
Cai had thought so too. But his own
blood had been rushing, and he hadn’t cared. He didn’t care now. He
pushed up onto one elbow, suddenly resentful. “What of it? Why is
it my problem? Why do they always come calling for me?”
Fen smiled. It was a particularly
beautiful, lazy smile, and it left Cai in no doubt of his thoughts.
He snapped off the head of one scarlet poppy and tucked it behind
Cai’s ear, so that neither of them could take him seriously. “Is it
because they love you and trust you? Poor lamb.”
“Well—isn’t it enough that I
doctor them, work for them all day long? Do I have to...” There it
was again, that word Addy and Danan had spoken, the word he heard
echoing round his own head all day long and on Theo’s lips in his
dreams. “Why should I lead them too? All right, men need leaders
when there’s someone around who wants to lead them straight to
hell, but Aelfric’s locked up. He can’t do anyone any more
harm.”
“Locked up?” Fen’s derisive
snort sent a quiver through Cai, a glitter of unlikely new arousal.
“Oh, yes. Because you’re such a hard-arse, aren’t you—holding him
captive in his own rooms, with meals brought to him daily, and his
clerics for company any time he wants them.”
“What would you do with
him?”
“He’s a serpent. I would
crush him underfoot, then chuck him off the cliff.” Fen ruffled
Cai’s hair, knocking the poppy aside. “It would cost us less
too.”
“Oh, I don’t begrudge his
keep. He’s out of the way. I should be too.”
“What do you
mean?”
“It’s the equinox.
Everything is in balance—summer with winter, night with day. I
think men find their balance too, if they’re not being dragged off
to one side or the other. I give it all up.” Cai bestowed one last,
lingering kiss on the corner of Fen’s mouth, then helped him up.
“Come on, before we get scythed.” Together they made their way out
of the waist-high forest of gold and onto the track. “I’m not going
to lead. There’s no point to it, and leading means I have to pick
a—”
“Caius! Brother
Cai!”
Fen broke into laughter. Cai groaned
and raised a hand in surrender to poor Hengist as he trotted once
more across the wheatfield. “Third time lucky, Brother. Here I
am.”
“Oh, Caius.” The
late-autumn heat had been almost too much for the bulky cook. “I’m
glad I found you. I didn’t want to frighten any of the others, and
yet…” He looked shyly at Fen. “May I speak to you
alone?”
Cai was surprised. The brethren of
Fara treated their raider as one of their own now, their fears of
him forgotten. “There’s nothing you can say to me that Fen can’t
hear, surely, unless…” Cai paused. Hengist suffered badly from
piles and was mortified by them. “Unless it’s a medical matter. Do
you need some more celandine oil?”
“No. Er, no, but thank you.
It’s Eyulf.”
“Is he sick?”
“No.” Hengist shuffled his
feet. “Two or three times today he’s come to me, though. He’s been
standing on his toes and making faces, doing his sign for…”
Contracting his brows, Hengist managed a pale imitation. “His sign
for Vikings. Your pardon, Brother Fenrir. And he keeps pointing out
to sea.”
Cai went cold. He tucked his hands
into the sleeves of his cassock and took a few steps down the
track. From here, Fara’s great flank blocked the seaward view. He
wanted to tell Hengist not to fear—that Fara had been stripped of
all of its few assets in the raid that had brought Fenrir to their
shores, that there was nothing left to take, not even the memory of
a legend. But the truth was that this season often brought down a
last flurry of raids before winter weather set in, and the
monastery’s grain stores were full.
“All right,” he said at
last. “Thank you. I should think Eyulf’s been having his nightmares
again, but we’ll post extra lookouts tonight.”
He watched Hengist jog away back to
the crowd of villagers and monks gathering in the field for their
afternoon’s labours. When Fen came and put his arms around him
fiercely from behind, he didn’t look at him.
“I am not going to lead,”
he said grimly, “because leading means you have to pick a side.”
Bitterness rose up in him, sharp as bile. The balance of the
equinox was fleeting, wasn’t it? And after it came the long nights.
“Where will you be, Fen? If the raiders come—which
side?”
Fen’s grip tightened. “I will be at
yours.”
Feint, parry, thrust. Cai had
let the battle drills slip over the past weeks, in the flurry of
the harvests, but Eyulf had given him a healthy reminder. The poor
lad was perched on top of a crumbled wall now, scowling and
twitching and glaring out to sea. Cai hadn’t been able to get
anything more from him, and three days had passed since the
harvest. He might have seen a vikingr sail on the horizon, or only a passing merchant
ship. Or maybe some memory ghost had risen up in his addled brain
to scare him, but Cai wasn’t taking the chance.
Feint, parry… He was partnering
Marcus, another of Aelfric’s cleric’s. Laban hadn’t been seen since
the night of the pyre, despite the best search Cai could spare for
him, and the rest of the Canterbury men had come to a clear
decision over which side their bread was buttered on. They visited
their captive master when he asked but kept their distance—wore
brown robes and took up quiet roles in monastery life. Marcus was
good with a sword. Roman blood in him to match his own, Cai
thought, clapping him on the shoulder and pointing out to him the
man he should take on next.
That left him face-to-face with Fen.
They didn’t fight in the drill yard, unless it was to demonstrate
something, both of them usually kept too busy instructing the
others. But they both had done the rounds of every other man this
afternoon. They squared off against each other mockingly. Fen was
wielding his wolf’s-head sword, Cai his favourite from the hillfort
forge. No one trained with his blade sheathed in sackcloth these
days. That time had gone.
Fen leapt, and Cai took the force of
his blow down at the root of his sword, jarringly, sparks flying.
Muscles wrenched in his back with the effort of defence. Bright
anger splashed through him. He knew what Fen was doing—their
encounters, demonstration fights, had become too ceremonious. They
were too well matched. They would end up in a dance out here, each
aware of what the other would do next, their shared glances sending
signals of brotherhood, not challenge. Now Fen had hurt
him—deliberately called up the fire from his blood. “Very well,” he
growled. “Guard yourself, Viking.”
Fen took his first sword cut on the
rim of his shield. He made it look easy, though Cai could tell from