Chapter Nineteen
Leaving was easy after all. Cai did it
in a handful of sun-shadowed minutes, in still waters at the turn
of the monastery’s tide. He shooed Oslaf gently out of his bed,
before it could be said that the abbot of Fara had a new friend and
a short memory, and he washed and dressed himself as if for any
day.
He breakfasted with his men, noting
with detached approval that Oslaf had colour in his face and that
he went back for a second slice of Hengist’s fresh bread. He met
the boy’s grateful gaze steadily. Afterwards he sat with Hengist
among the grain sacks Broccus had brought, which were piled up in
the covered part of the church for want of other space, and the two
of them went through the tough, basic arithmetic of supply and
demand. There would be enough to last the winter—just. If there
were no more raids.
When Cai left the church, a blazing
autumn day was unfurling its wings. The sunlight held a crystal
chill of summer’s end. The shadows were blue-black, deep. The men
of Fara had gone to the fields, or to help in the villagers’ dairy
and barns. The place was as still as a starling’s nest with all its
noisy fledglings flown. Cai changed into his travelling clothes and
unhitched his sword from the wall of his hut. After a short tussle
with his conscience, he took one of Broc’s horses after all. The
others had survived the raid, and maybe this one could be spared.
Leading it to a drystone wall so he could clamber on—a leap he had
used to make without thinking—Cai reflected that he had no choice.
Even this much exertion had left him coughing and fighting for air.
He was going to the Dane Lands, and if he tried it on foot he would
get as far as Godric’s southern pastures and probably die there
amongst his cows. Everything was silent. He turned the horse’s head
towards the track that led out across the mud flats.
He rode until the sun was high. When
it began to beat upon his skull in silent hammer strokes, it
finally occurred to him to wonder why he’d brought no water. Well,
there were streams everywhere. He would stop and find one, if he
could overcome the need in him, insistent as his pulse, to travel
south, and south, and south. Water was easy.
Not so food. Cai touched the place
where his satchel would normally hang on journeys like this. He
hadn’t brought it. He’d set out with nothing at all. He hadn’t
thought as far ahead as paying for his passage on board ship. He
could work it, he supposed, as a physician on one of the big
merchant vessels, or simply as a deckhand.
“First you have to get
there.”
Cai reined in, gasping. There on the
track ahead of him a woman was standing. There were no trees or
cover for miles around. This was the first lonely moorland stretch
of Cai’s journey, and to be there she must have dropped from the
sky. She was familiar. Cai rubbed his eyes. “Danan?”
“Who else? Stop that horse
before you trample me.”
Cai dismounted, hanging on to the
beast’s mane until he was sure his legs would bear him. The old
woman was planted squarely in his path, and the trouble Cai was
having—another sign of failing health, perhaps, distortions of his
vision—was that she no longer seemed old. She was boldly upright.
Her hair, though still white as banners of falling snow, drifted in
sunny abundance. Her expression was ageless, stern as the angel’s
at Eden’s gate.
“I had thought better of
you,” she said. “And old Addy certainly did.”
“What are you doing out here?
What has Addy got to do with...” Cai remembered his manners. No
matter how she appeared to him, she was frail and alone, and no
better equipped for a journey than he was. “I’m sorry. Where were
you going? Can I take you?”
“And interrupt your
flight?”
“Danan, I don’t
understand.”
“You’re leaving, aren’t
you? Your men, and the holy lands of Fara, and the
book.”
Cai left one arm hooked round the
horse’s neck. That way it would look as though he were standing
here easily, not about to drop to his knees on the track. “How do
you know about the book?”
“I know everything that
happens in this land. Don’t you realise that by now? I am always
everywhere, just like the wind and the sea.”
“That’s…” Cai shook his
head. “That’s what Addy told the ducks.”
“And what did they
think?”
“I don’t know. They just
waddled after him, but…”
“They seemed to understand
it better than you. Caius, you can’t leave Fara. You know that
yourself, or why have you come out here in your shirtsleeves,
without enough food to get you to the next town?”
“I just wasn’t thinking. I
have to go on.”
“You won’t make
it.”
Yes. Cai knew. No need for a dying man
to pack his bread and cheese. He couldn’t even raise a flicker of
denial. “Please let me use up what’s left of myself as I
wish.”
“In search of your Viking.”
Danan came and took Cai’s arm. She led him off the track, and Cai
went with her helplessly, wondering at the wiry strength buoying
him up. “Sit down here with me.” He subsided onto the flank of a
beautiful green mound he hadn’t noticed before, and she settled
beside him, producing from somewhere in her robes a leather flask.
“Drink. And listen. It was good of you to come and rescue me from
Aelfric’s pyre, even if I didn’t need your aid.”
“Well, it was Fen who
really… What do you mean, you didn’t need me? You were about to be
roasted alive.”
“It was Addy who said I
should wait and let you try your powers—or at any rate, see what
would happen if you didn’t. He’s an old fool. I damn near
suffocated, and I singed my robes. Still, you came at last, didn’t
you?”
“If I had the least idea
what you were talking about…” Cai didn’t mind too much. The sun was
warm, the mossy slope beneath him comfortable. He took a deep
draught from the flask she offered him, and made a face. “Good
Christ, woman. What was that?”
“Just something to sustain
you for a while. You’ll need it. Yes, it was good of you, and I am
grateful. So I will give you one last prophecy.”
Cai chuckled. “I swear—if you tell me
the Vikings are coming…”
“Ah. Did you see it for
yourself, boy? Are you getting that kind of power, as your life
ebbs? It does happen sometimes, with people of your—”
“Danan, I was joking.
Please
tell me you are
too.”
“Forget Vikings, then, and
hear me about just one. Turn back, Caius of Fara. Get on your horse
and ride home before something much worse than your own little
sorrows comes to pass.”
“One Viking?” Cai jumped to
his feet. His blood heated and coursed in his veins. He remembered
fighting up through fever clouds while he was ill, fighting Fen’s
grip with a bestial strength that seemed to return to him now.
“Which one? Tell me!”
“The one whose loss you’ve
grieved over.” Danan took his hand. The shimmering cobwebs of
restored youth had blown away from her. She was ancient again, and
her eyes held sorrow enough for both of them. “You don’t need to
mourn him anymore. He’s come home.”
All the way back to Fara, Cai was
looking out to sea. Time after time he rode his snorting
mount—Swift, he named her halfway home, to bring down the right
kind of spirit on her—up the side of a dune, reined her in and
scanned the blazing waters. It was too bright for him to see. A
Viking fleet of any size could have been concealed in the light, in
the troughs between the dancing waves. An hour passed and then
another, Cai leaning low over Swift’s neck, scarcely aware of the
ground she covered or the thunder of her hooves. The jolting hurt
him, but his pain had become a bright, cold fire, a kind of
unearthly singing.
The light had changed. The track
snaked inland here. Cai halted Swift on the brow of a hill. Scents
of gorse rose up at him in clouds, all the sweeter for a touch of
frost that morning. Now he could look out as far as the horizon,
out to Addy’s island and beyond. He could see every detail, down to
the rainbow beaks of the fat little short-winged birds sitting
placidly on their rocks. Black-and-white ducks plied their serene
course along the shoreline, and a vast sea eagle—Addy’s, perhaps,
relieved of its fishing duties—sailed in wide circles overhead. A
Christian monk was not supposed to take counsel from bird omens,
but Cai would swear to it that no harm could come by water today.
The North Sea was peaceful, not a ship in sight…
But an army bearing down on him by
land.
Cai reined Swift in at the start of
her downhill plunge and sat motionless. What poison had Danan
slipped him, to bring on a vision like this? He wiped his eyes, but
there they still were—a moving cloud of men and horses, chariots
and mounted soldiers, crossing the coastal plain that stretched
from Berewic in the north to Fara.
But Fara was not their target. Now Cai
could see brightly coloured tunics, metal helmets, manes of long,
thick hair. Vikings, dozens upon dozens of them, their ships
exchanged for war carts, their motives transformed. Cai had heard
for years of places further north than Berewic still, up in the
wilds of Scotia, where the pirates came to raid and never left,
settled and began new conquests from the land. No, not Fara this
time—Fara had nothing. The coast had been scavenged, its bones
picked clean, and this army was turning inland—for the Saxon farms
and villages, for the strongholds of chieftains like Broccus. Not a
raid. An invasion.
And a force was riding out to meet
them. Cai froze, his hands clamping tight on the reins. Was he
looking through veils of time to a battle played out here five
hundred years before? Not since then had a Roman standard been
raised in defence of the north coast. With dreamlike slowness, Cai
recognised the ancient sign his father had treasured up in the barn
along with his chariots—a time-blackened eagle, the letters SPQR
worn away almost to nothing beneath it. The Senate and the People
of Rome, about as far away from home as they could get… The lead
chariot was Broc’s. From somewhere amongst the hills and scattered
villages, the forts and the elderly warlords who ruled them, Cai’s
father had raised an army.
Cai broke into laughter, startling a
lark from the gorse. The old man had threatened to, hadn’t he? Cai
had taken it as an empty boast, part of his dream of a noble past.
Broc had underestimated him, and he’d returned the favour, years of
mutual disdain piling up between them.
His laughter died. Yes, Broc had done
more than gather a dozen or so of his hoary friends and their
carts. He was leading at least fifty men over the plain from the
foothills, and at a cracking pace. They looked good. Cai would have
backed them against anything short of the enemy they were facing.
They were outnumbered—by how many, Cai couldn’t tell from this
distance. Maybe not many. Not enough at any rate for Broc to see
sense and back off. The fight would take place—farmers and cowherds
against Vikings.
Cai couldn’t let it. All he’d learned
from clash after clash with the wolves from the sea was that he
couldn’t win, and nor could any landsman. Broc could fight them to
a standstill as Cai himself had done, spill out the best blood of
the ancient forts to do it, and the next tide would bring in
another pack.
He was closer to Fara than he had
thought. He must have ridden for miles under the influence of
Danan’s potion. The effects were draining from him now, but one
more hard gallop would do it.
He didn’t stop to consider just what
it would do until he was back on the mud flats again. Swift was
slackening her pace, the magic of her name wearing off, foam rising
on her neck and flanks. That was no good, no use to Cai, and he
signalled frantically to Gareth, who had appeared on the track at
the sound of his approach.
“Is Fen here?” Cai yelled,
as soon as Swift carried him into earshot. “Did he come
back?”
“Caius, where did you go? We’ve
been searching for you all day. There’s a horde of
vikingr
horsemen on their
way down from the north, and—”
“Yes, I know. Did Fen come
to warn you about them?”
Gareth’s gaze clouded in something Cai
fought not to see as pity. “No. No sign of him.”
“Well, look out for him.
The other mare Broc gave us—is she in the paddock?”
“Yes, I think so.
But—”
“Gareth. Fetch me the
horse.”
Cai slithered off Swift’s back and
stood with his hands propped on his knees. By the time Gareth came
running down from the paddock, he had caught his breath. “Thanks,”
he said, grinning, reaching out to grab the fresh beast’s halter.
“Help me get the bridle off this one and onto…” He was running
short of inspiration, but Broc’s other gift still had a long green
strand hanging from her startled mouth. “Onto Clover.”
“Clover? All right. But
why, Caius? They’re plough horses, not… What are you going to
do?”
“I’m not sure. But if it goes
wrong, and you see the vikingr troops making for this place, you take your
brethren and leave.”
“Can’t we give them a fight
for it?”
“Not this many of them.”
Cai shook his head, grinning. “How you’ve changed, my friend! No.
This time you run and hide—together, separately, whatever is
safest. Take nothing but the book. Here—give me a leg
up.”
“You’re not well. You
shouldn’t be galloping about the countryside on your
own.”
“I know. I just have to try
this one thing.”
Once settled on his new mount’s broad
back, Cai paused. This mare was bigger than Swift, but raw-boned
and awkward. And Cai hadn’t chosen the best name for her either.
“Clover the warhorse,” he said doubtfully. Well, he had ridden
Broc’s ponies into skirmishes for cattle and land since he was big
enough to lift a sword. He shook her reins and set her to a
lumbering canter. Gareth held out a hand, and Cai squeezed it in
passing. “Don’t worry!” he called back over his shoulder. “Fen is
on his way. Watch the fields, and if the battle turns against us,
run!”
He drove the mare hard through
the open gates of Fara and down past the village. The villagers—his
friends now, Barda and Friswide and even Godric, Wynn the smith and
a small mob of children—came tumbling out of their barns and huts
to call to him, “Vikingr, vikingr!”
Cai didn’t slow down. He waved at
them, slewing the horse around them. Soon the fields gave way to
the vast coastal plain he had seen from the cliffs above Fara,
where the raiding army and Broc’s were closing upon one another
fast. Taking one deep breath and then another, Cai aimed for the
centre—the narrowing patch of land between them—and rode
on.