Chapter Eighteen #2
old man halted. He raised a hand. Cai returned the gesture,
wondering if he were still asleep. For once in his life, Broc had
asked for permission.
He
rattled up the track and came to a stop outside the church, the
other drivers flanking him. Cai went to meet them. He had pulled up
his hood against the sharp autumn wind, tucked his hands into the
sleeves of his cassock. Broc looked down at him from the seat of
his cart. He gave a derisory chuckle, much more familiar to Cai
than the show of politeness at the gate. “Well, freeze my balls if
it isn’t my firstborn, looking every inch the monk.”
The last
time Broc had seen him, Cai had been wearing his travelling
clothes. He’d never set eyes on him in his cassock. “What did you
expect?”
“From the stories I’ve been hearing—chain mail perhaps, and a
sword. I heard my godly son became a warrior. Took up arms and
fought off Viking marauders—saved this place, for what it’s worth.
I heard they made you abbot.”
Cai
pushed back his hood. He didn’t want to be angry. He didn’t have
the strength for it, and he hated the dull surge of rage the old
man could make him feel. “Nobody made me anything. What do you want
here?”
“I thought I’d come and look at my son’s domain. See what made
him give up a kingdom. So far I see a church with no roof and what
I hope are your pigsties.”
Cai
began to walk away. A cold, thin rain was falling, and he could
smell Fen in the folds of his damp robes. Laundry was less of a
priority these days, though Hengist did his best. The scent was a
reality. Broc had to be a bad dream. He’d vanish if Cai ignored him
for long enough.
“Caius!”
Something different in that voice, as alien as the hesitation
at the gate. Remonstrance, and a rasp of—what? Fear? Unable to
imagine it, Cai turned back to see. But Broc was leaping down from
the cart, his face hidden.
“Here!” he shouted, dragging down a sack and hefting it as if
it weighed nothing. “Barley grain for your bread and your next
planting. Half a dozen of those, and…” He gestured to his
companions, who also began unloading their carts. “Where is your
sheep pasture?”
Mutely
Cai pointed uphill to the enclosure where three lonely beasts now
grazed, the only remnants of Wilf’s runaways. Broc’s second wagon
seemed to burst apart in a surge of bleating life, and Cai found
himself knee-deep in the hardy little black-faced crossbreeds who
thrived on the hillfort’s bleak slopes. Before he could speak, Broc
nodded to his companion, who whistled to a grizzled herding dog and
turned the flock into a river, flowing away uphill. “Ten ewes and a
tup, to restart your stock. Half a dozen sacks of corn. Half a
dozen oats. Two decent-sized horses, fit for plough or
cart.”
“Why, Broccus?”
“Why what?”
“This. Now.”
Broc
balled his hands into fists. He braced them on his hips and looked
about him. “I heard the last raid cleaned you out, that’s
all.”
“I can’t give you anything to pay for these.”
“If I’d wanted barter, I’d have taken them to Traprain market,
not this ruin. When I heard how boldly you’d fought, boy, and
trained other men to do likewise…” Broc hesitated, then went on as
if being forced to confession at sword point. “I was proud of
you.”
Cai came to stand in front of him. His heart was beating fast,
the shrieks of dying friends and enemies resounding in his ears.
“Proud of me?” He swallowed. “I came here a raw, ignorant brat. I
have learned to read, write, speak Latin. I can doctor men and
teach them. And now—now when you hear that I’ve broken my every
vow, grabbed a sword and learned how to hack men to bits with
it—now you’re
proud?”
Broc
stared at him blankly. His face was Cai’s, sculpted by a few more
rounds of summer light and winter hail, a mirror of the future Cai
had come here to avoid. “I should load these wagons back up and go,
you brat.”
“If you wish.”
“Caius—what do you expect of me?”
Cai
blinked. The old man sounded bitter, but the anger had vanished
from his voice. “What do you mean?”
“When I said you looked like a monk, you asked me what I
expected. You were right. It was a foolish thing to say.” Broc ran
a hand through his hair so that it stood up in a perplexed crest.
“What do I look like to you? A saint? A priest? I am the man you
have known all your life. I steal cattle, swive women, defend my
hillfort. My boy ran away from me to become everything I am not.
Forgive me, that my heart burned with joy to hear he had become a
warrior.”
He
unhitched the two horses from their leading rein, tethered them
with a wooden ground spike, and clambered back into the cart. He
shouted at his herdsman, pointing off down the track to indicate
that he should catch up with him there, and shook his pony’s
reins.
Cai
watched his retreat. Dusk was falling, and it wouldn’t take long
for the mist to swallow him up. There would be no evidence for his
existence, apart from some tracks in the turf.
Those,
the two horses, the black-faced sheep now terrorising Wilf’s three
sorry survivors, and the lifesaving abundance piled up all around
Cai’s feet. Cai stood frozen for a few seconds more, and then he
ran after him.
“Broccus! Broccus…” Cai couldn’t run far anymore. It hadn’t
mattered until now. His lungs were too tight for him to throw his
voice ahead of him, or at any rate Broc was affecting not to hear.
Slipping on the muddy track, Cai forced his heavy limbs on. The
wagons drew further ahead. Once they were on the flats, Cai would
lose them. “Father!”
Broc
reined in. He didn’t turn or look down as Cai stumbled up to him,
panting, grabbing at the cart shaft for support. “Father. These
things you’ve brought…” A spasm of coughing seized him, and he
tried again. “They’re the difference between life and death. I
tried my best, but…we haven’t got enough. We’d have
starved.”
“Well? Am I taking them away from you?”
“You’ve got a long trip home. Will you stay?”
The old
man’s shoulder twitched. His grip on the reins relaxed. “What—in
your pigsties? No. We’ll bed down in one of the villagers’ barns
for the night.”
“At least eat with us.”
“Lentils and scurvy grass?”
“No.” Just as well you didn’t turn up
yesterday, though. “A good fish supper
tonight.”
“Very well. Turn around, Gowan!” Broc held out a broad,
calloused paw to his son. “You’d better climb up. What’s the matter
with you, boy? You look like a ghost that’s been left out to bleach
in the rain.”
Only one
cresset flickered in the church that night. The light was enough
for the two men and the book they held between them. Cai had spared
his brethren their lesson for that night, sending them off to their
cells with an extra jug of ale in honour of Broc’s visit. Then he
had awkwardly asked the old man if he would come to the church—not
to meet God, or anything so injurious to digestion. Just to see the
book.
Broc was
as uneasy as a bear, even in the stripped-back nave, which apart
from its stark wooden cross now scarcely betrayed any signs of its
function. He occupied old Martin’s chair as if it had been his
hillfort throne, thighs splayed, only a vague notion of courtesy
preventing him from propping up his feet on the stool in front of
him.
Cai sat
on a bench at his side. “My abbot Theo brought this back from the
East with him. He hid it with Addy—with Aedar, I mean, the new
bishop—and Aedar gave it to me.”
“From the East? Kent?”
“Further even than that. A land called Arabia, beyond the
Mid-Earth Sea.”
“Why did he leave it with you?”
“I’m still not sure. He told me I should learn and teach from
it, spread light. And I will, as long as I’m able.”
Broc’s
attention had been on the book. Now he looked up thoughtfully at
his son. “As long as you’re able? Why shouldn’t that be for a long
time yet?” Cai didn’t reply, and the old man pursed his lips, brow
furrowing. “You know, I’d thought there was no hurry, but…isn’t it
time you had a child?”
“A child?”
“Yes. A boy, an heir—someone to carry on what you are. I will
raise him, if you are… If you couldn’t keep him here.”
Cai
chuckled. “Well, I couldn’t sit with him in my lap while I talked
to my monks about chastity. Broc, you have dozens of sons. Go and
tell them to get heirs.”
“None of them are firstborn,” Broccus returned grimly. Cai,
who’d heard that sole argument for his value all his life, shook
his head, and Broccus sighed. “I mean…none of them are my Caius.
Could you not consider it, lad? If I sent you down the choicest of
my women? I have one girl—good birth, willing, fertile as a
springtime coney. Couldn’t you bring yourself to have her just
once?”
My Caius. Cai, who’d been about to
snarl at the old man to mind his business, lost a breath as the
words sank in. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “I’m grateful. But…I
couldn’t lie with a woman. Not now.”
Broccus
blanched. “Are those rumours true, then? What have they done to
you?”
“Nothing. No.” Frowning, Cai gave his father an amused,
disgusted grin. “No! Not for that reason.”
“What, then? Oh, is her place taken?” Broc exhaled noisily. “I
see. And around here, not by a woman, I assume.”
“No. Not by a woman.”
A
silence followed, broken by the crackle of the torch in its
cresset. “Which one is he, then?”
More silence. Cai clasped his hands round the back of his head
and curled over until his fringe was brushing the
Gospel of Science, the
page where a small man was standing on the surface of the moon to
demonstrate her phases, and Cai dearly wished he could join him
there.
“I heard it said, not that I believed it, that you fought with
a half-tame Viking at your side. I didn’t see that kind of fox in
your chicken coop tonight. Is he gone?”
“Yes.”
“And is that why the bones of your back are sticking out like a
starved hound’s?”
How
could the old man know that? Cai, returning from the moon, realised
that for the first time in his grown-up life, his father’s arm was