Brothers of the Wild North Sea (19 page)

“Caius. I can.”

Cai looked down. The church was filling now, men arriving, drawn by the chaos, taking a few steps and falling still. Aelfric remained rooted where he was. White faces stared, thank God none of them Oslaf’s. At the foot of the pulpit, Fenrir stood waiting. He had recovered from his fright. He was solid and strong, and he sought Cai’s gaze warmly. “Let me. I can bring him down.”

Cai couldn’t let go. He stood aside to make room when Fen climbed up to join him, but he kept his hold on Ben, lifting, lifting. Only when Fen produced a bronze-handled knife from somewhere within his robes and reached up did he relinquish some of his burden, easing it into Fen’s free arm. Fen cut the rope with one savage gesture, and together they caught the body as it fell. Fen eased the bulk of it over his shoulder. “I’ve got him. Go down now.”

Cai stumbled ahead of him down the pulpit steps. Together they laid Benedict out on the flagstones. Cai dropped to his knees, vaguely aware that Marcus was holding back the crowd. Now he could see Ben’s face. In that moment he understood that his friend had got it right after all—that he’d tied his final knot, and made his last leap, with perfect efficiency.

Still he tried. He listened at his chest, silent as an empty barrel. He felt for the pulse at his throat and his wrist. Theo had taught him a heretical manner of calling back souls whom God had decreed drowned by breathing with his own lungs into their mouths, and he did that for a while, until the deadly cold of Benedict’s mouth under his, the unnatural movement of his head when he let go of it, finally bore it in that he would be recalling the spirit into a body so destroyed that revival would be cruel, an obscenity.

He sat up. Full sunlight was blazing into the church now. The day would be hot. “Fen,” he said, his voice echoing hollowly in his ears. “Help me carry him down into the crypt. I have to…”

There was no one there. No—the church was thronged now, but the one face Cai needed was missing.

“Not in the crypt,” Aelfric was croaking at him. “Not a suicide. Not in holy ground.”

Cai thrust him aside, his scrawny body as insubstantial as his words. Maybe Fen, having seen the worst that could happen on this holy ground, had taken advantage of the chaos and run. Cai didn’t blame him. It was time for him to do the same.

He pushed blindly out into the light. He didn’t blame Fen, but he wanted him, and he loathed him in that moment for creating the bitter desolation in his heart, a hunger he’d never have known if they had never met. He set off uphill at a dead run. He kept going until he reached the outhouses, until his hands were tearing at the well-known latch of the small barn where he kept his supplies for journeys, his packs and his secular clothes. He tore off his cassock and tossed it as hard as he could into one corner, sending up a cloud of spiders and dust. Beneath its heavy wool he was sweating coldly, stinking of shock and misery. He’d walk into the first water he came to, and he didn’t much care if he came out. Perhaps he could use his last breath on a few of Fen’s curses, and trust in the sea to bear them home.

There on the shelf were his shirt and deerskin leggings. He pulled them on with shaking hands. The shirt fastened with a fine leather strip across the chest. He had to lace it through fabric loops on each side, a task that proved impossible when he tried. Swearing, he tore the lace out altogether and threw it onto the ground. He’d do without. He’d do without the pack, for that matter—it wasn’t as if he’d be stopping off at the kitchens for supplies, or buying things from the settlements, or ever coming home. He was done here.

Someone was blocking the door. Not a scarecrow shape this time—a graceful one, tall and straight. He had picked up Cai’s lace from the ground and was holding it, a delicate thing in his big hands. “You are leaving?”

Cai didn’t answer. He kicked off his sandals, replaced them with the boots he kept in a wooden chest, safely out of reach of mice. Now he was ready. “Get out of my way.” Fen didn’t move, and Cai marched up to stand in front of him, not meeting his eyes. “I thought you were gone.”

“No. I saw Oslaf heading for the church. Brother Wilfrid had just told him. He…required restraint.”

Cai swallowed hard. “What did you do to him?”

“I restrained him. I took him up to the infirmary. I gave him the poppy, the drug that brings sleep.”

“Oh, God.”

“A little.”

“How did you know…?”

“I took note when you gave it to me. He’s asleep. I left Wilfrid to watch over him. Now, do you want help with the body of your friend?”

“No!” It came out as a shout, scaring the doves in the rafters. “Aelfric won’t let him lie in holy ground.”

“Why in Thor’s name not?”

“He took his own life. Another new rule, I suppose. I didn’t know. No one ever… No one ever did that here before.” His voice shook. “There was never any need.”

Fen didn’t touch him. He bowed his head a little, so his brow was almost brushing Cai’s, and in a concentrated silence broken only by the wing beats and the music of the doves, he passed the leather lace through the first loop of Cai’s shirt. Then the next, and the next, until he drew the strands together in a knot. He repeated, his voice rough and low, insistent—“So. You are leaving?”

In a bunk in the infirmary, Oslaf lay waiting to wake up into hell, a world of unimaginable pain. Wilfrid, whose sympathies and skills were those of a goatherd, sat helpless by his side. In the church, the ruined shell of a fine man lay, defenceless to the black-robed buzzards who believed him too corrupt to lie in his own monastery’s soil. None of this had anything to do with Cai anymore. This place was Aelfric’s now—it belonged to the crows. And yet… “No,” he snarled, stepping back out of range of Fen’s warmth. “I just have to get off this damned holy ground for a while.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and thought for a few moments, frowning at the hard-packed earth. Water. He wanted water, to be clean again, or at least away from the mud. “I’m going fishing.”

“Fishing?”

“Yes. I go out sometimes and fish. Food, you know? Meat that hasn’t been strung up in a cellar for three months. Let me past.”

“There’s going to be a storm, Cai.”

“Nonsense. It’s beautiful. Do I have to knock you down, or…?”

“No.” Fen stepped aside.

A few yards down the track that led to the boathouses, the weather-beaten sheds where the monks kept their fishing creels and lobster nets, Cai turned. Fen was watching him intently, beautiful in the sunlight. Cai would have given anything to run back into his arms. “Do something for me, will you?”

“If I can.”

“Oslaf has family. He comes from farming stock up near Berewic. Find one of the lads who runs errands between here and the village, and give him a message. Tell them to come for him. Tell them to come now.”

At last he was alone. Nothing and no one could touch him out here. Cai let the oars rest in their rowels, muscle spasms chasing one another down his back, arms throbbing. The monastery had one small sailboat, but Cai had taken his usual coracle. It was little more than cattle hides stretched over a wooden frame. One man could handle it, though, and he hadn’t wanted the intricacies of sail. Just to run the craft down the causeway with a tremendous scrape and rattle, leap into her at the last second, and row and row. He lowered his head. Sweat trickled down between his shoulder blades.

The sunlit waters held him. He felt their movement under the keel, one tiny part of an unimaginable whole of movement, a rocking and surge that could bear him—if he had strength and fair weather—right to the frigid wastes of the north, or south to the Mid-Earth Sea, where Theo had told him, eyes distant with longing, that dolphins leapt and the sun shone all year round. Far to the east was Fen’s home, the land of the Danes. Perhaps he ought to head there, surprise the
vikingr
by going to them. They couldn’t be worse, them and their dark gods, than the nightmare unfolding itself at Fara in the name of Christ.

No. He wanted to stay here and feel that mighty rocking, greater than any man or god. He also wanted to stop crying, because that was what he had been doing since he cast off, raw sobs racking him. His chest was sore. Strength was leaching out of him. With an effort, he caught his breath. Nothing in his heart or mind would accept that Ben was dead.

“Ben,” he called out, as if his friend’s spirit might still be nearby and could come back to set things right, wipe out the atrocity. “Benedict!”

Only the wind answered him. He curled up, laced his fingers round the back of his head and closed his eyes.

A thud on the prow of the boat brought him round. He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there. He was sleepy, and a kind of numb peace had come over him. He didn’t think it was the holy serenity Leof had said was the goal of their religious lives, but he would take it. It would do. Leof, Benedict, Theo. Gone. A bird was sitting on the prow. It was one of the fat little creatures that haunted the group of rocky islets two miles or so out from Fara. Their beaks were striped in vivid rainbow colours, their movements comical. The puffin watched him curiously, shifting its weight from one outrageous bright pink foot to the other. Then it took off, short wings beating frantically, towards the nearest island.

The seals were hauling out there too. It wasn’t basking time. Cai knew the rhythms for this far better than he knew his canonical hours, the tidal intervals when the rocks below Fara would almost disappear beneath the furry, mottled bodies. As he watched, a small flotilla of beautiful black-and-white ducks bobbed past the coracle’s prow, calm on the surface but heading purposefully inland.

Get out of the water.
Cai received the message loud and clear from these three harbingers, and he set it aside in his mind. The day was still lovely, if he didn’t look behind him to the place where surly clouds had been gathering since dawn. The ducks became a glimmering patch in the distance. Eider, they were called, their feathers highly coveted stuffing for pillows. Addy ducks, the locals sometimes called them.

You have to find Addy. Addy will give you the treasure—the secret of Fara.

Cai sat still. Theo had been silent in his head for a long time now, as if leaving him to deal with his own problems. In a way that had been good, because his voice—so close, so vivid—had made Cai fear for his sanity, but he had also missed him. This was just a memory, though, an echo. He reached for it, and like a dream it dissolved from under his grasp, leaving him desolate.

He had come out here to fish. That was what he’d told Fen, and he would do it. He got up stiffly and shook out the net from its heap on the deck. He was a good fisherman, adept at spreading his nets against the current of the sea.
Get out of the water,
the creatures of the islands said. Well, he would when he was done. And if in the meantime the tempest chose to break on him, he would take that as God’s word. The Viking had sparked something in him he had thought was dead, some instinctive yearning to friendship and life, but he was tired now, and Fen was far away. Yes. He was done with the fight.

The sun turned copper green and vanished. Out of the darkness came a voice—one note, low and huge, filling the horizon. Cai’s fishing boat sat still in the midst of it on water turned suddenly, deadly calm, and he listened. This was the voice of the wind, not upon him yet but racing blackly towards him over the waves.

A visceral terror awoke in him, nothing to do with his life on the shore but a blood-simple message from his bones, lungs and heart that they did not want to be out here, exposed like a cork, with that demon gale bearing down on them. That they, no matter how tired Cai’s spirit was, did not want to cease. He grabbed the oars. He didn’t stand a cat’s chance in hell now, but he began to row.

The storm broke like the end of the world. The voice became a shriek, and the millpond water boiled. Just for a moment Cai had the advantage of it all—the wind was howling landward, pushing him. Then the first wave heaped itself out of the mouth of the demon.

It smashed over the coracle. Cai ducked and clung to the little craft’s hull while its force thundered down on him and spent itself. For seconds the whole boat was under water, then she somehow righted and heaved back to surface. Scrabbling for purchase on her soaked deck, Cai managed to look up.

Straight into the demon’s maw. A wave the size of Fara’s church was rearing over him. Half-blinded with salt, Cai stared at it. He had time to hear its snarl, its hungry, sucking roar as it gathered up, tugging the coracle into its undertow. Cai waited. He would meet his end as Theo and Leof had met theirs—upright, unafraid. He wouldn’t look away.

Chapter Eight

He was swimming. It might have been for minutes or for years. His sense of time had gone down with the coracle, shattered to shards.

No. Not even swimming, not anymore. His arms were numb. He was clutching a spar from the wreckage. Each wave drove him under for longer, left him less time to suck lungfuls of air in between. He was starting to like the submersions. It was quiet down there, out of the shriek of the wind, the brutal chaos above. Down there was a memory, one that branched off from reality and blossomed on its own. Down there he hit the sands again with Fen, and this time no guilt about Leof rose to stop him, because Leof knew all, understood all, forgave all, and was no more likely to condemn him than the sun or the marram grasses waving over his head. Down there Fen’s arms closed round him, and even better than the sweet rush of hunger and release was the reality of that body on his, as if all his life his flesh had yearned for this brother, this counterpart, a missing piece of himself at last returned to him.