Chapter Fourteen
One man too many. It was better than
one too few, but Cai couldn’t work it out. The night had come down
black and hard, and in his urgent tracks from lookout posts to
armoury to storerooms, he didn’t have time to worry too much about
the unknown figure. It was quick and thin, familiar somehow in the
glimpses he had of it. Only when Cai rounded the stairwell of a
firelit corridor and crashed right into the fragile shape did he
realise. He snatched back the cassock hood before the stranger
could try to dodge past him. “Oslaf!”
“Yes. Forgive me,
Cai.”
Forgive him? Cai could have kissed
him. He still looked frail, but a few weeks of his grandmother’s
care had taken the death-shadows from his eyes. “What in God’s name
are you doing here? Why have you been hiding from me?”
“My brother came back from
shepherding with tales of a fleet on the horizon. I had to come. I
was afraid you’d pack me off home.”
“No, not this time. We need
every man we can get. Are you strong enough to lift a
sword?”
“I think so.”
“Go and find Fen and make
sure. He’s down at the armoury. He’ll put you through some
drills.”
“They are certainly coming,
then?”
“We still don’t know. At
nightfall they were still a long way out, but…”
“Caius?” That was Gareth.
He was such a changed man from the night of the first raid, when an
axe through the shoulder had driven out all trivial fears of the
flesh from him. He was pale now, but Cai noted with gratitude his
soldierly bearing. He came up close before he spoke, kept his voice
low. “Cai, Brother Fen says we should make ready. The tide has
turned. The Vikings are making for land.”
Cai had to conduct himself at least as
well. He braced against the painful leap of his heart. “Understood.
Go at once and give the signal.” He turned to the boy. “Oslaf, I’m
sorry. We don’t have time to make a warrior of you just now—will
you go and help Hengist guard our stores?”
“Whatever you command. But
I wish I could have fought with you.”
“I know. And you will again
one day. But you’re too dear to me, for Benedict’s sake and your
own.”
Cai watched him dart off. From the
newly built bell tower, a low, insistent tolling began. The bell
was new too, or newly purchased—a tradeoff from the smith at
Berewic for part of their rich apple crop and some mead. Cai had
watched his brothers proudly lift it into place only the week
before. Had these things been done just in time for hell and death
to rise up out of the waters and knock them back down? At least the
upper level of the church had been built in willow and daub, not
stone. That would save them some trouble next time.
He caught that grim thought on the
hoof. Fen had been right about fear and its power to distort the
mind, and Cai wasn’t immune. Cedric was waiting in a doorway,
watching him for his cue. Curtly Cai gestured him to be about his
business, and strode off to find his own.
The bell rang softly, its tongue
muffled up in a sack. The strangled note of it lent a dreadful
tension to the night, pulsing out across Fara’s dark, huddled
buildings. Only a few lanterns shone from windows on the landward
side, casting a fitful light on Cai’s path as he made his way to
the cliffs, one man then the next running out at the signal to join
him.
The sea bells…
How Cai had made
them ring that first night, screaming out the monastery’s
whereabouts to any ship not yet come in to land! And even the
second time, how they had left all their lights burning, a gesture
of defiance before they had joined the attack… Not this time. Not
this time. More men poured in from their posts around the
buildings, and Cai fell back, making room so they could run with
him in the shadows. Only the monks of Fara would hear this bell,
would see these lights. From the seaward side, Fara would be only a
cluster of ruins, the burnt-out husks from the last raid. There was
just an outside chance that the blanket of night would shield them,
and the fleet pass by.
Fen stepped out to meet them in the
place where the track turned to a narrow defile at the top of the
cliffs. His hair had grown long enough to drift in the night wind.
Cai had faced him half a year ago in this very place—had for one
instant met those eyes, which took fire into themselves when there
was none, and kindled fires in Cai that would burn him to ash
before they died. He took up a stance of soldierly respect in front
of Cai—a deputy to his commander—and one look at him told Cai the
truth. “They are coming.”
“Yes. Only two ships, thank
the gods, but putting in hard and straight for us.”
Cai drew a breath. He looked at Fen,
one eyebrow on the rise. They shared the silent thought. Only two?
That was the difference between an immediate wipeout and a decent
fight. Two might almost be enjoyable.
He saw the same idea flashing
round the brethren waiting behind Fen, drawn up in orderly fashion,
their skirts hitched into their girdles, weapons ready. “Gentlemen
of God,” Cai called to them. “Each vikingr ship bears about twenty men, and none of
them are passengers. We are thirty. We can do it, but not a man
here is to relax. I want stealth, brutality and a most unchristian
attitude from all of you. Is that understood?”
It wasn’t the time for a battle cheer.
Cai saw it coming and hushed it, grinning. “Later. When we’re
bearing down on them like skirt-wearing demons from Abbot Aelfric’s
hell. Now get into your places, and wait for Fen’s signal and
mine.”
The raiders would make landfall in the
bay below the cliffs. Cai knew that from bitter experience. It was
the natural place, the beach sloping smoothly there, offering easy
anchorage, a fast run in to shore. On a dark night like this, only
the thinnest waning moon to light their way, the broad white sands
would gleam temptingly, and there beyond them Fara’s great rock—a
desirable stronghold, inhabited or not.
Cai signalled his division of the men
off to the left. Fen was crouched at the top of a whinstone
outcrop. He had already directed the brethren under his command to
their hiding places among the dunes to the right. The bay might be
wide and hard to control, but it could be used as a trap, with men
positioned correctly in places leading up to the defile. Timing
would be crucial. Fen knew more about that than Cai did—he and Cai
had agreed, just the night before in a brief interval of their
loving, that he would give the sign.
Cai clambered up the rock and knelt
beside him, taking care not to break the skyline. “Do you see
them?”
“Yes.” Fen gave him an odd,
amused sidelong glance. “How do you not?”
Cai looked again, this time following
the set of Fen’s shoulders and head. A cold thrill seized him, a
mix of nausea and excitement. It was like learning to see the
passage of a serpent through water, a creature he’d been taught was
only mythical. And, as Fen said, now he’d got the trick of it, how
could he not? Two great vessels, their lines like water, like
billowing sails. They forged a path along the troughs of the waves,
the diagonal drift of the tide. Their uplifted prows bore bestial
heads—one a square-mouthed dragon, gaping, crudely hewn, the next a
spiral of surpassing beauty with a swan’s head at its centre. Their
timbers fanned out from these delicate points to broad, sturdy
hulls. Cai had never seen his enemy, not until he was face-to-face,
breath to breath, locked in bloody combat. He had never really seen
the ships. “They’re beautiful.”
But Fen had turned away. He had
slumped down against the rock. His fist was clenched tight around
the hilt of his Blóekraftr sword, his knuckles white and stark.
“What is it?” Cai
whispered, ducking down beside him. “Is your belt
loose?”
“No. The first boat—does it
have a wolf’s-head prow?”
“No. A dragon, I thought.”
Cai risked another glance. “I don’t know, though. A godless heathen
beast of some kind—I can’t tell.”
“It’s a wolf. The sail
bears the signs of the Torleik.”
“Is it... Do you think they’ve
come for you at last? To rescue you?”
Fen shook his head. “Not in that kind
of battle array. And the second boat, the beaked
dragon…”
“I thought that one was a
swan.”
Fen chuckled painfully. “That one
belongs to the Volsung. Vicious bastards who pirate with us in the
summer, then steal our damn cattle all winter. This is a raid, not
a rescue.”
“Fen—what are you going to
do?”
Their gazes locked. “I never thought
I’d see that sail again.”
Cai put a hand on his shoulder.
“Fen.”
He struggled out from under
Cai’s grasp and crouched a few yards away, hunched up, hair
concealing his face. And in that moment Cai’s world, from church to
dunes, from turf to cloud-shadowed sky, fractured and began to
crack apart. He had asked. He hadn’t understood how a loyal Viking,
with ideas of brotherhood higher and nobler than any Cai had
attained about God, could change sides to fight alongside a foreign
monk. Even if they were lovers—even if they had lain in the
fragrant barn last night and sworn to one another blood faith till
they died, even if Fen had done that while he was coaxing one last
come from Cai’s exhausted flesh, and Cai had given it back to him
in the teeth of ecstasy. Yes, yes, yes. Still Cai had asked him.
Where will you be?
Which side? And Fen had answered, and Cai had believed.
But Fen couldn’t fight the Torleik. Of
course he bloody couldn’t. Cai lurched to his feet and almost fell
at the rip of sick vertigo through him. Fen’s back was still
turned, his head down. He looked scarcely human—an outcrop of the
dunes or the rock. Cai would remember him that way. He wouldn’t
think of him anymore as a living creature, the wolf from the sea
who had become his companion, so dear to him he would wake with the
bastard’s name on his lips, fall asleep saying it instead of his
prayers. Cai would never think of him again at all.
He had a war to win. All round the