Chapter Seventeen #2
in the wind, untamed as ever, but over his cassock he was wearing a
sumptuous gold and purple cloak. He had an air of having been
bundled into it. In his hands he was clutching a staff, at once
like his old shepherd’s crook and entirely alien to it—the mark of
the shepherd of souls, its old functional shape wrought out of use
and into beauty, the bishop’s spiralled crozier. He saw Cai and
Fen, and used this mighty symbol of authority to wave at them, a
broad grin breaking across his face. “My friends!” he yelled across
the windswept distance between them. “I am pleased to see you. Wait
there.”
The oarsmen stopped their efforts and
brought the boat to a smooth halt in the shallows. One of them
promptly leapt out and held up his hands. The old man accepted his
aid but waved off the attentions of the guardsman who was trying to
hold his cloak and cassock out of the water. Once out of the boat,
he hitched up his garments for himself, gave his escort a friendly
nod and began to splash through the wavelets, digging his crozier
into the sand for balance.
Cai wanted to run to him, but
something held him still. Fen too was motionless beside him. They
waited until Addy was right in front of them, and then the three
stood and looked at one another, all of them stilled with wonder at
the changes. Addy broke the seagull silence at last. “You see,” he
said sadly, “it’s as I feared. They’ve come for me at
last.”
“Against your will?” Fen
glanced at the soldiers, assessing his next fight. “Just make a
signal. Caius and I will assist you.”
“No, no.” Addy chuckled and
patted Fen’s muscular arm. “What a wolf it is! No, I am here of my
own will, if not of my own desire. They came in this great ugly
boat of theirs. I tried to refuse, but the young man with them was
insistent—quite insistent. He agreed to let me stop and say goodbye
to my friends at Fara, but I fear he’s anxious for my return. I
mustn’t keep him waiting long.”
Cai followed Addy’s swift glance back
over his shoulder. Standing at the rail of the ship was a slender,
fair-haired man. He was dressed quite differently to the soldiers,
in a gorgeous cloak of scarlet, richly embroidered all over in
gold. It was fastened at the shoulder with a brooch whose jewels
flashed visibly even from this far away. He didn’t look like a man
much accustomed to having to wait.
Fen’s distance vision was better than
Cai’s. “That lad in the prow,” Cai said. “Is he wearing a
crown?”
“Not by vikingr standards. Our chieftains have better than
that. But…”
Cai racked his brains for a name. News
came slowly to Fara, and borderlines and monarchs changed fast.
“Addy—did King Ecgbert of Bernicia come to fetch you?”
“Aye, it seems so. A
pleasant young man. He took my spade from me—I was digging my
garden—and gave me this staff. Put this cloak on me with his own
hands. Still I would have refused him. I love my solitude, my seals
and my birds. But men like your new abbot are springing up
everywhere, and I can’t defeat them from here. So I shall go among
them as a teacher and a leader, take up arms in my own way, and try
what that will do.” He adjusted his cloak, one-handed and awkward,
as if it weighed more heavily on him than he could bear. “Oh,
Caius. Tell your brethren to stand—the occasion doesn’t warrant
this.”
Cai turned. Behind him on the sand,
Hengist and Cedric and the others—even Eyulf, his mouth wide open
in amazement—had drawn together into an orderly group and fallen to
their knees.
“Some of them know of your
legend, sir,” Cai said hoarsely. “And all of them recognise the
signs of your authority. It’s what they wish.”
“Well, it seems strange to
me, but…” The old man fell silent. His attention focussed on the
cliff and the green shoulder of Fara’s great rock. “Caius. What
happened here?”
“There was a raid. The
worst we’ve ever known, and Aelfric was killed in it. So you don’t
need to worry about him anymore, but God help the rest of
us—everything is gone.”
“My son…” Addy tottered as
if he would fall, but he gently rejected Cai’s supporting hand.
“There are so few of you. Who else has died?”
“Wilfrid, our goatherd.
Marcus, one of Aelfric’s men who fought bravely with us. Demetrios,
our shepherd, and a brother called John, who was hurt in the first
raid this spring and was meant to be protected. But I couldn’t
protect him.” Suddenly his failure, and the tally of the dead, was
too much for Cai. He covered his face.
“My son, I can’t comfort
you. I can’t bring back your dead. All I have to give you is my
blessing. Will you kneel for it—even though you are a soldier and
the new leader of these men?”
Cai hesitated. It wasn’t pride—he
didn’t have an ounce of pride left in him—but it seemed so strange,
to be asked this under the clear northern sky, in the sunlight that
shone on all men equally. Addy, who had entered his mind as a
creature at one with wind, sun and rain, wouldn’t have asked it.
Perhaps it was part of his new work—and, after all, a king was
watching. Cai wouldn’t let him down. He dropped to his knees on the
sand.
“And will even Fenrisulfr,
the fierce warrior, kneel?”
Cai held his breath. Fen had changed,
but could still flash out like a thunderbolt when occasion called.
But Fen thumped down beside him, and the two knelt like their
brethren, awaiting the old man’s word.
Addy looked them over. Something about
them seemed to please him. He smiled unsteadily and gave another
awkward tug at his cloak. “Not boys anymore,” he said. “Not the
rolling pups who washed up on my island a few months ago. How did
that come to be, Caius? From fighting your fellow man?”
“No. It came from fighting
with myself.”
“Aye. And so are all our
lonely, worthy victories won. I don’t have a faithless rebel monk
and a murderous Viking here with me now. I have battle-forged men
who…” he paused, long enough to push a strand of red hair back from
Fen’s brow, “…who have both understood the nature of sacrifice.
Thank God.”
Now Addy in turn fell to his knees. He
went down hard, as if beneath the weight of something. “Thank God,”
he repeated. His back was turned to the guards and the king on the
ship. “At last I can get this damned treasure of Fara out from
under here and into worthy hands—quick, before anyone
sees.”
He reached into his cloak.
Something tumbled out into his lap—a box so heavy that he barely
caught it before it slid into the sand. Cai had no idea how he had
carried it or even stood upright. The box—no, a casket, with hinges
and elaborate fastenings—was made of solid gold. Not Hibernian
or vikingr… Danan the magpie had taught Cai to recognise both, and
this was richer than either, a deep buttery yellow that glowed in
the sun. It was beautifully worked. All around its edges little
creatures danced, beasts that might have found their way from
Leof’s imagination, when he was drawing things Theo had described
to him but he had never seen. Horses with long noses and
awkward-looking humps to their backs, another breed whose neck had
stretched to monstrous length, and glimmering all around this
fantastic bestiary, jewels in colours Cai could never have dreamed
of, let alone believed could be captured in stone. He put out a
hand to touch the marvellous thing. He found Fen’s hand in his way,
and instead of finishing the gesture, turned his palm up. Fen
seized it, grasping tight.
Addy watched them, his
expression hard to read. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “Worth
a vikingr raid or two in itself, though greater treasures are to be
found nearer to home, as you’ve found out. Listen to me carefully.
This is not the secret Theo told you of while he was dying. The
treasure lies inside. Don’t open it now—wait till I am gone and
you’re alone.” He shifted, drawing the edge of his robe across the
casket to conceal its rainbow fires. “It is a lovely thing. It
holds a book. Theo had travelled to the east, right to the ends of
the Mid-Earth Sea, and he found a place where rebel pagan priests
were guarding a small library, barely more than a cellar. In it
were relics—brands snatched from the burning of a temple called the
Serapeum, which in its turn had held the ancient treasures of the
greatest library of all. Did Theo ever speak to you of
Alexandria?”
Cai cast his mind back. He grasped
Fen’s hand, his one anchor in this strangeness. “Yes. Not often,
though—it seemed to give him pain.”
“He was a man who minded
such things. Alexandria burned too, and scattered the learning of
centuries to the four winds. The Christian Roman emperors needed to
wipe out such scholarship. Much of it came from the Jews, from
Arabs, from pagan Greeks, and by Theo’s time—our time—it had all
been deemed heretical. And Theo himself was under suspicion of
heresy. That’s why he was banished to his post on the world’s
western edge, and why you monks of Fara got such a splendid abbot
for a while.”
Addy sighed, patting the box. “He was
a saint, a holy fool with little thought of his own safety. He
bought as many of these forbidden books as he could afford, and
when he was exiled he chose just one to carry with him, as much as
he could conceal about his person. The rest were destroyed. When I
met him on my voyage back from Rome, he was still grieving,
clutching this one relic to his breast as if it had been a child.
We spent weeks aboard that ship, and by the time we parted, he
trusted me. He had heard of the raids on the north-coast
monasteries, heard to his sorrow that Christianity even in these
far-flung lands was beginning to fear science, mathematics,
astronomy, all the wisdom of the ancient world. So he left the
book, and this glorious casket, with me. I buried it on my island,
Fenrisulfr, and you slept within yards of it. You were quite
right—there are hidden tunnels at the back of my cave. How could I
trust either of you then, even if Theo had told you part of the