Chapter Eighteen #4
man—not even in a cassock—it was a hot day, I remember, and Theo
must have let him work in a shirt… This fine tall man pulled his ox
to a halt in the field and asked us if we were all right. Well,
Bertie’s a farmer too, and I had to stand there in the blazing heat
for an hour while the two of them talked about how Ben got his
plough rows so straight.”
Oslaf chuckled. “Bertie was almost a
convert, though I’m not sure he knew what to. And my first night
here, when I had bad dreams and woke up shouting for my
grandmother… Ben had the cell next to mine. I hadn’t really looked
at him at supper or during prayers. He knocked on my door, and I
was so surprised to see my ploughman there. He sat on the edge of
my bunk and talked to me until I fell asleep—all about Theo,
everything I’d learn to be and do…”
In the first faint silvering of dawn,
Cai left the hut. He paused for a moment in the doorway. Oslaf was
curled up tight in the blanket, sleeping with the thoroughness of
exhausted grief.
Cai hadn’t told a single story about
Fen. He smiled, pulling the willow screen over the door. Oslaf had
talked all night. After a while he had forgotten Cai was there and
begun to address something or someone beyond the hut’s confines,
and he had confided to that vast and merciful unknown the whole
history of his time with Ben, from their first awkward kiss to the
alien misery of Ben’s estrangement from him, a deeper hell than any
Aelfric could have devised. Cai had let him run on. He had taken
the boy’s drooping head on his shoulder when finally he had lapsed
into sleep, and lain wide-eyed himself.
Maybe it was just lack of sleep that
was gilding the sunrise, but Cai had never seen a more beautiful
one at Fara. The silver was turning to a fresh rose gold. The
eastern horizon was clear, a thin arc of sun already poised over
the water. Once the whole orb had risen, Cai’s duties would
begin—leading his brethren in prayers, seeing they all got a
sufficient breakfast, assigning them their labours for the day.
Such a sunrise should be seen from the dunes. He had just enough
time.
The tide had swept the beach clean.
The only marks on it were those of the water’s pure dance, ripples
and sandbanks whose crests were beginning to dry out already and
catch diamond light from the sun. This was Cai’s earliest memory of
it. Benedict had been instrumental in his own first days here—had
brought him down to the sands to show him that his new life was not
all self-discipline and Latin verbs. Cai, itching for exercise, had
run like a lunatic along the shoreline, splashing his new cassock
to the waist. The sand had been like a blank canvas and so had he,
for all his turbulent upbringing with Broc. Now when he settled
among the long grasses and looked down, every inch of the strand
was marked for him in event. Here the sea had brought Fen to him.
Here they had fought, and once boldly fucked in the open, a thick
sea mist keeping their secret. Here Fen had taken Gleipnir, the
cord that could bind when fetters failed, and kissed Cai on the
head and walked away.
Cai had done everything he could. He
had filled his days, and endless insomniac nights, with every good
action Theo could ever have prescribed for him. He had worked until
his body failed, and then strapped his mind to the plough and read
and learned until his vision had turned to dazzle. He had subdued
his sorrows in the griefs of others—sat with new widows and
widowers, with mothers of stillborn children. He had taught his
brethren and the villagers, guided their minds and physicked their
bodies.
He might as well have sat here on the
dunes and moped from dawn till dusk, for all the good he’d done
himself. The weary pain inside him had never ceased, and he was so
lonely he wanted to fill up his pockets with rocks and walk out
into the sea. Fen had imagined a moon-bridge that brought souls
together before they met in the flesh. Perhaps Cai could follow the
track of this rising sun on the water, leave his aching skin and
bones behind him with his cassock and…
He jerked upright, scattering sand,
sliding halfway down the dune before he could stop himself. What
was he thinking? He had spent the night immersed in Oslaf’s
griefs—had begun to mix them with his own. Fen wasn’t lying cold
and still beneath the soil. He was vividly alive somewhere, perhaps
riding Eldra hard across the Dane Land marshes, pursuing his duty
as sincerely as Cai had tried to follow his own.
Tried and failed. He couldn’t do
it anymore. What was the point of it all, if one day Fen came home
and he was lying under the damn hawthorns? Cai had seen the look
in his father’s eyes, unsentimental and accurate, sizing him up.
His lung was sticking to the inside of his ribs, or so it felt, and
each day it hurt him more to breathe. He’d known it to happen with
deep wounds like this one—scar tissue forming too fast, too
abundantly, binding and strangling where it should heal.
He scrambled back up the dunes.
If he was going to follow the track of the dawn sun, it had better
be soon. Now, his racing heart told him. Go now. Go now. He could take one of the ponies Broc
had brought. No. If he was going to leave Fara, desert his
brethren, he’d take nothing with him but the clothes on his back. A
huge, sick exultation rose up in him. He would go. Each step he
took—down the long track to the Tyne, and then further south still,
down maybe as far as Eboracum where trading ships set out across
the North Sea—would carry him closer to Fen. God, it was
strange—now that he’d made his decision, he could almost catch his
lover’s scent in the air. A sense of his own failure clawed at him,
but he was past caring.
“Fen,” he gasped, stumbling
out onto the slope where the beehive cells lay curled and dreaming
in the day’s first light. “Fen, I’m on my way.”