Brothers of the Wild North Sea (21 page)

“Would they have eaten us?”

Another shrug. “They eat what they can. Speaking of which, you boys will want your breakfast. I wondered why he dropped me such a big one this morning. God provides.”

Cai shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“The eagle. Such a big fish,” the old man told him easily, as if he ought to have known. “He brings me one each day, clutched in his great claws. This morning, a salmon the size of a young seal! Well, sailors have grand appetites. And being washed ashore is hungry work. Come along.”

The old man set off at a brisk pace. After an exchanged look, Cai and Fen followed him.

“Do you think he knows Latin for more than his prayers?” Fen asked quietly, dropping into stride at Cai’s side. “I understand a bit of your uncouth north-shores tongue, but clearly not enough. I thought he said an eagle dropped a fish for him.”

“He did.” Cai jogged ahead and caught the old man up. “Sir, we’re grateful for the rescue. My friend isn’t from here. Do you speak Latin, so that he can understand?”

“Of course.
Ita vero.
” He switched without effort, the neat Roman syllables falling more naturally from his mouth than they ever would from Cai’s. “But I’m surprised that sailors do.”

“We’re not sailors. We’re…” Cai looked back over his shoulder, daring Fen to argue. “We’re monks. From Fara monastery. We were out fishing, and we got caught in the storm.”

“From Fara?” The old man’s gaunt face lit up. “Fortunate boys! You study under Theo, then—Theodosius of Epiros, a most learned man.”

“Yes. He told us about Epiros.” Cai’s throat ached and closed. If this was the afterworld, Aelfric had been right in part, then—pain
could
chase and follow men there. The cry of the seagulls became desperate shouts from the scriptorium, and Leof whispered to him from out of the surf. “But…Theo is dead, sir.”

The old man stopped short in his tracks. Cai would have stumbled, but Fen was close behind him, catching him by the armpit. Cai turned to him. Only yesterday, he thought he would have to face such things—his grief, and the pain of others—alone. Always alone.
No,
Fen’s burnished gaze told him silently.
Not now.
His grip on Cai turned to a hold, and together they watched the old man, who was now stalking unhappily back and forth along a few feet of sand.

“My friend. Ah, poor Theo, my dear friend. I met him on my way back from Rome, when my elders in Hibernia sent me to study there. What was it? The cholera? He never did like this climate. He missed his dolphins and the warm sea. Was it flux? A pneumonia? Or…” He turned himself around, bare feet carving out an agitated circle in the sand. “Wait. Ah, that’s what the damned old woman wasn’t telling me. There was a Viking raid, she said, then she shut herself up, like the old clam she is. Was that how Theo died?”

Cai couldn’t keep up. His head was spinning, with exhaustion and hunger and the energies he’d spilled out with Fen during the night. “Which old woman?”

“Who? Oh. Danan, she’s calling herself this time. The herbalist, though some would say witch. A gossip, but not enough of one. Starts a story but then doesn’t tell you it all, curse her bones.”

“Danan comes out here?” Cai had never seen her anywhere near a boat. “How?”

“Only the ancient creature herself knows that. Tunnels, she says, though I’ve never found any. Probably she flies. Ah, poor Theodosius! So much learning, to be wasted and spilled out by a…”

He fell silent. The following quiet was terrible, even filled with wave-wash and the breeze. The old man stopped his pacing and drove his staff into the sand. Then he folded his hands into the sleeves of his robes. He stepped up and halted in front of Fen. “Not a sailor,” he murmured. “No, and no monk either.” He was as tall as Fen and could look him straight in the face. Fen remained still beneath his inspection, even when the old man reached to push back his fringe. “Square brow. Straight nose, high cheekbones. Red hair, but not like the western Keltoi. Red like the fox, and like blood.” He shuddered and retracted his hand. “
Vikingr
.”

“
Ita vero,
” Fen growled in return. Cai heard the danger in it and got ready to restrain him, but there was no need. The old man stepped back, lowering his head. His face was deeply marked with the lines of an old, hard-learned lesson in forbearance.

“I have been discourteous,” he said. “Whatever your origins, the wind and the waves have brought you here, and you’re my guest. Do you have a name?”

“Fenrir. This is Cai—Caius.”

“Ah. Caius, a fine old Roman name.” The old man turned his attention to Cai. “And this one
is
a monk, though unshorn and out of his cassock—a man of God, no matter how he feels right now. I am Aedar. Yet for many years now, the villagers along these shores have called me Addy. I’ve come to prefer it.”

“Addy…” Cai ran a hand into his unshorn hair. Another wash of vertigo went through him. “
You’re
Addy? My God… Theo talked to me about you just before he died. He said…”

The old man’s brow furrowed, waiting for him to go on. But the sea and the gulls, the cries from the burning scriptorium, grew too loud for Cai to think past them, and he sat down hard on the sand.

“Caius?” Addy’s hand closed on his shoulder. He glanced in appeal at Fen. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know, do I? He’s the doctor, not me.”

“Is he sick?”

“No. He loved this Theodosius, though, just as much as you do. And yesterday another friend of his died.”

“A monk of Fara?”

“Yes, by his own hand. They have another abbot there now—a damned scarecrow called Aelfric. I’m not of your faith, and they don’t let me into the church, but I’ve been watching. He’s a brute. Cai’s been trying to stop him.”

“This Aelfric—did the churchmen of Canterbury send him?”

“Aye, that was the place.”

Addy sighed deeply. “So it begins. And I am little better, with my questions and my selfish grief, when this boy is half-drowned and wholly starved. You too.”

“Such things don’t bother me, old man.”

“Hm. Tough pirate. Immune to the pangs of love too, I hope.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Just help him up and bring him with you.”

Cai tried to say he didn’t need the help. But he was so tired he could barely see, and when Fen bent down for him, he reached up gratefully, skin heating with memories of that strength closing round him in passion. “I won’t let love give you any pain,” he said indistinctly, letting Fen hoist him to his feet. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”

“Quiet. You’re half-asleep. Let’s just go with this old lunatic and eat his fish, if he hasn’t dreamed it.”

The fish was real, and one of the biggest Cai had ever seen. They ate it solemnly by Addy’s fireside. For a long time silence held sway, made peaceful by the whisper of the flames in their stone pit and the sense of a vast golden day beginning all around. The dawn mists had cleared. The sea was returning pink lights to the roseate sky, as if neither had ever roared and convulsed and tried to consume them whole.

Addy’s cave lay in the shelter of a dune. No more than a deep hollow in a rocky outcrop, its sole comfort was the well-made fire pit outside it. Cai couldn’t see how the old man lived. Addy, a big chunk of salmon gleaming in his hand, returned his gaze tranquilly. If he noticed that his guests sat shoulder to shoulder while they ate, he didn’t remark on it. He passed them a flagon of cold heather ale, and when they were done, produced a bowl of fresh water and a piece of homespun linen so they could wash. “How is it with you now?”

Cai nodded, wiping fish grease off his fingers. “Better. Thank you.” He gave Fen a violent nudge, and the Viking stopped appreciatively tugging bits out from between the salmon’s bones long enough to grunt an acknowledgement too. “But how can you afford to share your food with strangers? And how do you come by the ale?”

“I have plenty.” Addy spread out his robes and settled himself more comfortably by the fire. “As for the ale, that old woman I told you about brings it to me on her devilish visits. Mead from Fara too, in which I can still taste the good work of Brother Martin, though he must be very old now. Is it so?”

“Yes. Martin’s still brewing, though Aelfric wants to shut him down.”

“The Fara mead?” Addy chuckled. “He’ll have an uprising on his hands. Tell me more about him—this new abbot of yours. What does he profess?”

Cai hardly knew how to begin. Fen was warm and solid at his side, though, and not so occupied with his fish that he couldn’t spare Cai a gentle shove. “That we’re all sinners, I suppose.”

“And didn’t Theo teach you the same thing?”

“Yes. Yes, if we did something wrong to one another. But with Aelfric, everything’s wrong. Everything that comes from our bodies, that is. If we want it with our flesh, it’s sending us to hell.”

“He teaches you the doctrine of hellfire?”

Cai hadn’t realised Aelfric’s grim vision was a doctrine. Belatedly he noticed that Addy’s robes were a cassock like his own, patched and worn almost beyond recognition. “I’ve heard of you,” he said wonderingly. “When I was growing up. A crazy old hermit, a holy man who lived on the islands alone. How long have you been out here?”

“Long enough to gain a reputation, it seems.” Addy poked the fire and gave Cai a wry look from under his wiry brows. “I was a missionary, a priest in far west Hibernia. For a while I was at Fara. Then I found that I could hear the voice of God much better in the silences out here, and I stayed. The years have flown past me—how many, I couldn’t say. Certainly more than your lifetime.” He sighed. “And the truth is that my chosen seclusion has now become necessity to me. They want to make me bishop, you see.”

Cai, who had just been about to apologise for calling him crazy, caught Fen’s sidelong look. “Bishop?” he echoed. “Who does?”

“The high men of the church. I prefer my solitude, though, so I am in hiding from them. The beasts of the islands take care of me. As I’ve told you, the eagles bring me fish to eat, and the seals come also, to receive my benediction and sing me their songs.”

Once more Cai nudged Fen, in warning this time. However insane this old man might be, he had rescued them, shared with them his fireside and his food. “Wouldn’t it be better,” he said cautiously, “to come back and live on the mainland? To have shelter and companionship?”

“In my lunatic dotage, you mean?” The old man grinned lucidly, making Cai blush. “Possibly. But the church I knew has altered so much in her ways.” He paused and frowned, as if this was a puzzle he’d tried to work out for himself many times before. “Not that they’re all bad ways. The word of God must reach the whole world, and you can’t do that with a handful of crazed Hibernian saints and visionaries, can you? So the church—the Roman church, in her wish to reform our wild island ways—is sending out men like your Aelfric. And since the voice of the wind and the sea won’t make men behave themselves, they bring with them doctrines like Aelfric’s, to hasten them into the fold.”

“Like sheep,” Fen said suddenly. “To frighten them into belief—whether the creed be good or bad.”

“I’ve lived in this creed all my life. I have to believe it good. But yes—like sheep, Fenrir the wolf.”

They stared at one another—the holy hermit and the Viking, each on his own side of a divide whose ancient depth Cai could sense almost as a physical thing. Into the crackling silence, he said, “Fen doesn’t see men as sheep. Nor do I, and…nor did Theo. He tried to teach us to think for ourselves.”

“He was a good man. A Gnostic, if you understand what that is.”

“Yes, thanks to him. One who finds God for himself through learning and prayer, not following in blind obedience.”

Addy’s eyes gleamed in what might have been approval. “As good a definition as any. Now, Caius—the monk who sits at the side of a Viking wolf, and understands gnosis, and has no truck with sheep or bad shepherds—what do you want to ask me? What did Theo say to you before he died?”

Cai drew up his knees. Theo’s last behest had been such a weight on him, and yet now that the time had come, he was reluctant to speak. His abbot had been living proof to him that a man could combine deep religious convictions with sanity. Cai was quite certain that Fara held no treasures, and it hurt him to think that Theo had believed otherwise—that such a chimera had been his last thought. “He said there was some kind of treasure at Fara. A secret. The
vikingr
believed in it too—it’s what they were raiding for that night.”

“That was all?”

“No.” Once more Cai hesitated. He hadn’t told even Fen this much. “He said this treasure would stop the raids, and I don’t think he meant the
vikingr
would just go away when they got it. I think he meant it had some sort of power. And—he was delirious by this time, dying—he said that the treasure lies not in the book but in the binding.”

He waited. His heart was thumping. He didn’t want to look at Fen, because something in his words had made a difference—Fen was listening intently, all the weight of his attention suddenly brought to bear. The old man too had leaned forwards, about to speak.

Then he looked both of them over. His examination was compassionate, but unhurried and stripped of all sentiment. He released a long sigh. “I am sorry,” he said. “My poor Theo. He was a rational man. But he loved his books above all else, and I fear his last thoughts became tangled up in them. Were they all lost?”