Chapter Sixteen
At first there was only sky. It
brightened and darkened, sometimes incredibly fast—the chariot of
the sun driven westward by an insane charioteer, so maybe Fen had
pushed aside old Lugh or Phoebus Apollo and seized the reins
himself—and sometimes with an agonising slowness. There was one
night that lasted for all eternity, and not all the kindly hands on
him, not even the embrace that eventually closed round him, rocking
him and stroking his hair, could make the stars give way to dawn.
Then the passage of time began again, and Cai, throat sore from all
the howling he had done but couldn’t remember, surfaced enough to
feel a little shame. To be aware of cold water trickling into his
mouth, and his soiled clothing being peeled away from his
body.
Only sky, and then a line appeared
across it. One black bar and then another and another, and finally
two more, cutting across the first ones lengthwise. Then there was
a rich scent of dry straw and heather, and the sky began to vanish,
one swathe at a time. The scents were pleasant, the sounds the
workers made as they went about their business—muted, nevertheless
hushed fiercely by someone from time to time—soothing to him, and
he slept.
“You should have let Oslaf
boil the water for you.”
Cai considered
this. There
didn’t seem to be any hurry. Fen, sitting cross-legged on the floor
beside him, looked as if he had been there for hours. He was pale,
Cai thought, and he hadn’t bothered to keep himself as clean-shaven
as he normally liked. He had lost weight.
Cai put out a hand. His arm was weak
from the deep axe cut, but he knew that had been the least of his
problems. Instead of turf or hard-packed earth, he felt smooth
stone. He was no longer burning in the sun, or being flecked by
autumn rain. He was warm, and the draughts that had made his bones
ache had stopped. He lay watching Fen, who returned his gaze
without expectation or hope.
“Have I had a
fever?”
Fen leaned forwards. His expression
changed indefinably—the tiny shift of meltwater under ice. “Cai?
You heard me?”
“Of course. What is it? You
look dreadful.”
“Those are the first sane
words you’ve spoken in five days. You didn’t know who I
was.”
“God. Five…” Cai tried to
push himself up, and found that his limbs were made of overboiled
mashed turnip. “Where am I?”
“Where the dormitory barn
used to be.”
“Is it... Did it burn
down?”
“Everything did. We’ve
rigged up shelters from the ruins.”
“Everything…”
Cai was about to ask more when the
willow screen blocking the doorway was suddenly shifted aside.
Oslaf entered cautiously, a bucket in one hand, Cai’s medical bag
over his shoulder. “I’ll bathe him this time, Fen. You really ought
to rest, if…”
The bucket clattered down. Water was
too hard to haul up from the well to be lightly regarded, and Oslaf
caught it on instinct before it could spill. Then he stumbled over
to Cai, knelt and planted a fervent, noisy kiss to his brow. “My
brother. We’d given you up.”
“I seem to have caused
trouble.” Cai didn’t have the strength to push Oslaf back, and
submitted while the boy retrieved the bucket and began to wash
him.
Fen had gone to stand in the far
corner of the makeshift shelter. Oslaf glanced at him. “He’s never
left your side,” he said quietly. “Apart from to help us build,
and…other things. He hasn’t slept.”
Cai knew about the
other
things. He
knew the hawthorns would be shadowing a new row of quiet heaps of
earth. Wilf, Marcus, Demetrios… Who else? He drew breath to ask.
Then he too looked at Fen. “Oslaf, I could really use some
food.”
“Well, I’m not sure you
should start eating straight away. You always make us start with
thin gruel and water, after—”
“Oslaf, dear.” Cai patted
the boy’s face.
“What?”
“Just get out.”
“Oh.”
He disappeared, tugging the willow
door back into place behind him. Cai lay still for a few moments.
He touched the floor again, then the mattress beneath him. It was
clean and dry and had been raised a little off the floor on some
kind of frame to keep him clear of the cold stone. His probing
fingers found the front of his cassock, also clean. Cai knew what
an effort it took to wrestle a feverish man into one of those, or
even a deadweight one. He had been scrupulously cared
for.
“Fen.”
The figure in the shadows stirred. He
came to Cai’s bedside slowly, a sculpture brought unexpectedly to
life and still stiff in its limbs. Neither spoke. Then Cai summoned
up all his strength and hitched his lead-weighted body to the far
side of the bed.
Fen lay down beside him. He propped
himself on one elbow and gazed into Cai’s face, a scrutiny Cai
returned with silent fervour. Fingertips brushed lips, new hollows
under cheekbones and eyes, taking an inventory of damage. Together
they tugged up Cai’s robes far enough to examine the stitched-up
hole in his side. They were matching scar for scar now—Cai stroked
the place under Fen’s ribs where his own blade had entered, and Fen
bent to press four solemn kisses around the new wound, above,
below, one to each side, as if in benediction, to set a seal on the
life that had almost spilled itself from there. His hair was like
warm silk on Cai’s belly. If he’d touched him, brushed his lips an
inch further south, Cai would have raised his flag for him,
half-dead as he was. But Fen rested his brow for a moment, then
shook with a convulsive yawn.
There was something better even than
their coupling. Cai discovered it, drawing Fen’s head down to his
shoulder, tears stinging the roots of his lashes at the revelation.
There was the place where all passion and strength had been spent.
Fen was asleep the instant he lay down, warm as winter fire at
Cai’s side. There was the place where they would seek one another,
beyond the furthest reach of desire. On battlefields, beaches,
hollows in the dunes where they had loved one another till their
coming was only dry spasms, scraping, painful… Beyond all of those
places, here they would be. He pressed tighter into Fen’s embrace.
This place had forever in it. Time couldn’t end it, nor even the
limits of life. Not distance—not even the wastes of the wild North
Sea.
When he was well enough, Fen took him
outside to see the new world. He stood, leaning on Fen’s arm,
looking down across the sweep of green turf. The monastery Cai had
helped rebuild had been only a shadow of Theo’s, but there had been
a church, a refectory, the remains of the hall where Theo and then
Aelfric had kept their quarters. Cai had had his infirmary, and a
dream of the restored scriptorium. A dormitory barn, and half a
dozen outbuildings for their beasts and crops…
Now the place looked as it must have
when the first pilgrim monks from Iona and the western coasts had
come here. Every building had fallen. The brethren had made Cai his
shelter in the corner of the dormitory, where two tumbled walls
remained, but other than that they hadn’t tried to restore what had
been. They had started again. The stones from the ruins had been
cleared, and all across the turf, small round huts were
rising.
Beehive cells. Cai had admired the
remains of them on the tidal islets, where the plain wooden cross
marked the far edge of faith and devotion. They were easy to build,
if you knew the art of corbelling. They needed no roof and
contained no timbers for Vikings to burn down. They were pure in
their way, returning to nature’s simplest and most perfect shape,
all the centuries of mathematical learning that had given birth to
the right angle—how to make it, measure it, build with it—blown
away on the sea wind. They were one step forwards from a cave, the
most basic human habitation that could be endured.
“They had to have
shelters,” Fen said quietly. There was an edge of unease in his
voice, as if he had read Cai’s thoughts. “A man came from the
village—that idiot who wanted to burn Danan. He still makes the
huts for his beasts like this. He showed us how.”
Cai squeezed his arm. “You did right.
The village… Is it still standing?”
“More or less. And the men
and women left when you told them to. They are grateful for their
survival. That’s why Godric came up here to help us. He seems a
changed man.”
Cai chuckled. “You should have checked
his rump for the mark of Barda’s sandal. This is good, Fen—all the
things you’ve done. I am grateful too. And I have to get back to
work.”
“Worry about that when you
can walk a straight line on your own.”
“But…who is looking after
the sick men? Where are they?”
“It was a sharp fight,
beloved. Sometimes it happens this way. There were only survivors,
who got away with scratches, and…”
“And the dead.” Cai
swallowed. Fen’s arm went powerfully tight round his waist, and he
braced himself not to huddle into his embrace, plead exhaustion and
be taken back to the world behind the willow screen, where sickness
had shielded him from all the things he didn’t want to know. “Will
you help me down to the churchyard?”
“Can you walk that
far?”
“I don’t know. But I have
to see.”
Five new mounds beneath the hawthorns.
Cai, who had managed the walk but poured out the last of his
strength, asked which one was Wilfrid’s and knelt beside it. This
was the season when the yarrow’s long flowering made its blossoms
significant and lovely on the open turf. Most of the summer’s
colour was fading back to green and tawny gold, but the yarrow
shone bright on this overcast day, its tough, aromatic heads like a
sprinkling of snow. It had feathery leaves. Crushing one between
his fingers, Cai breathed in the scent of its oil, counting off its
medicinal properties in his head to ward off newer knowledge.
Fevers, bleeding, healing—one, two, three. It was no good. Marcus,
Demetrios, Wilf. “Who else?” A cold pain struck him. “Not
Eyulf.”
“No. No, we’ve kept him
away from you because he would have leapt on you like a dog and