Brothers of the Wild North Sea (23 page)

Fen was immobile on the ridge of the dune. His back was turned, his attention fixed on the mainland. Afraid their peace was already about to be shattered, Cai scrambled up to join him. “What is it?”

“I have understood something.”

He was quivering finely, like an arrow drawn against a string. Cai wouldn’t have known it, but the tense vibration transferred itself when he laid a hand to his arm. “What? Is something wrong?”

“This island—they call it Fara, yes?”

“Yes. Well—all this scatter of islands are called the Faras, but this is the largest, so yes.”

“Fara, the island. And the place where the monastery stands…”

“Fara too, but not an island. Peninsula, not
insula
.” The words felt more than usually awkward in Cai’s mouth. He didn’t want to be up here talking Latin to this man. He was sure that, a little time more in each other’s company, they would smooth out the differences in their north-lands tongues and be able to speak as their natures intended. “What about it?”

“The Fara treasure. Our legends say it lies on the island of Fara.
Insula
, not peninsula.”

Cai chuckled. It wasn’t funny, but he could see a bitter irony. “Great. So you lot have been knocking seven bells out of my poor monastery for nothing? Didn’t you know the difference?”

“It looks like an island from the sea.”

“Well, next time you see them you can tell them to leave off, can’t you? They can come and raid…” Cai fell briefly silent, his mouth drying. “Oh, for God’s sake, Fen. You can’t think there’s anything
here
.”

Fen took hold of his sleeve. He pulled him down into the bright crescent, rucking up its surface. “Sit,” he said, a trace of command in his voice Cai was more than half-inclined to argue. “There are things I haven’t told you about the Fara treasure—just as you didn’t see fit to tell me all the things you said about it to the old man.”

“That wasn’t on purpose. There hasn’t been time, and—”

“And you hardly knew me. Very well. The same constraints have been on me, but now you have to listen. I need your help.”

Cai couldn’t understand the change in him. He’d perked up at Addy’s fireside, but this was different—a feverish distress beneath his eagerness. “You’ll have it, if it doesn’t mean outright murder,” he said, trying to smile, immediately regretting his choice of words. What did he expect of the wolf? “Tell me now.”

“According to a prophet of my people, the Dane Land tribes once held a treasure, an amulet of infinite power. It could even bind our gods. And many years ago, one of the followers of Christ stole this amulet and buried it on a holy island off the east coast of Britannia.”

“But there are dozens of those. Why are
we
feeling the business end of Thor’s hammer?”

“Our prophet had a new revelation over the winter this year. He named Fara. You do not understand about this treasure, Cai, and nor did your abbot. No man not born a Dane could ever understand. In our enemy’s hands, it has the power to bind our warriors’ might. To suck the wind from our sails, cause our swords to snap and our proud manhood to wither.”

Cai looked innocently out to sea. He still had hopes of this refuge amongst the dunes. He said, thoughtfully, “God forbid.”

Briefly he thought it had worked. The fever-lights in Fen’s eyes warmed to gold. He was laughing softly when he took Cai into his arms, and his kiss was so thorough and carnal, the push of his tongue so deep, that everything else faded away. Then he pulled back. He kept a warm grip round Cai’s shoulders, but he was pale in the tapestried patterns of the marram-grass shadow, his profile set and fierce. “Well, it hasn’t happened yet. But my people—the Torleik men, Sigurd and Gunnar and all my clan—believe in it. That’s why the monastery raids have been so unrelenting. But this is the island of Fara, right here.” He got up, letting Cai go. He took up position on the dune’s western ridge, the light wiping out his details from behind, leaving only a black silhouette, the ageless shape of a warrior. “I will find the amulet. Then Sigurd and Gunnar will come to me, and they will find it in
my
hands. And the world will change.”

“I thought… I thought you’d decided your brother was dead.”

“What if he is not?” Fen didn’t move. He might have been cast in bronze there and left as a warning, a memory of fear. “What if he lives, and…he ditched me here, like a dog or a broken shield? Like a thing?”

“He wouldn’t have.” Cai sprang up. The faceless statue spoke like a man, a living soul stricken to the core by something far worse than Cai’s sword. Cai climbed up to join him, took his hand—more like a child than a lover this time, folding his fingers tight into his own. “He loved you. You told me so yourself.”

“He loved power.”

“Fen, come on. Never mind ancient treasures and fantasies. Lay me down here and show me what I’ve been missing.”

Fen tore his fingers free. He gave Cai one look—half-anguished, half-amused, as if Cai had come up with the one proposal that might have slowed him down, diverted him from his purpose. Then he turned away. He set off down the slope of the dune, his long stride devouring the ground. The lowering sun struck blood-scarlet lights from his hair.

“Help me,” he yelled back to Cai, not glancing round. “I’ll lay you down later, and you’ll never forget it. But for now—we’re going to find this damn treasure!”

Cai couldn’t sleep. He was dirty and bruised, and darkness had fallen too suddenly for him to go and bathe in the sea as he’d wanted to do. Addy, sharing with them a fireside supper of scurvy grass and salmon, had warned them against venturing too far from the cave in the night. The devils were restless then and prone to hunt, their weakened eyes more effective in torchlight than under the sun. The old man had seemed different when Fen and Cai had returned. His air of distracted hospitality had vanished, and he had eaten in silence, watching them gravely from his own side of the fire.

The cave was barely wide enough to accommodate the three of them, and Fen had offered to take a watch, although Addy had assured him that wasn’t necessary. He was crouched outside in the cloudy moonlight now, his tense, powerful shape just visible. Cai was relieved not to be forced into close quarters with him. He felt as if some kind of padding had been stripped off his nerves, leaving them naked and vibrating to Fen’s slightest touch. In the boathouse that morning it had been wildly pleasant, and now…

Now he was afraid. He’d gone with Fen, and he’d done his honest best to help him find the secret of Fara. All afternoon and into dusk they had quartered the bare little island. He had turned over rocks, followed streambeds to their source. He had met Fen coming up to meet him a dozen times, his face a baulked blank, frustration coming off him in waves. A dozen times he’d told him to give it up, and a dozen times been ignored.

To say that he wasn’t the man Cai knew would be absurd. What did Cai know of him? Shifting uncomfortably on the cave’s rocky floor—how luxuriant even his own thin mattress at Fara, by contrast—Cai remembered a beautiful hound his father had traded for and brought into the hillfort camp. The seller had been evasive about the beast’s ancestry, although her upswept yellow eyes ought to have given her away. She’d been good for a while, herding Broc’s cattle and sleeping at the foot of his bed, and then one full-moon night she had plucked up a baby by its nappy rags and trotted away with it into the unknown.
A wolf in the fold,
Broc had fulminated for weeks afterwards, damning the trader to a hundred gory deaths, never seeming to realise that he’d opened the gates to the sheep-fold himself and let the creature in.

Cai dropped into exhausted sleep at last, and dreamed restlessly of a man with golden eyes who followed him into the dunes, brought him down with one breathtaking pounce and began to tear him apart. The dismemberment was painless, the rip of sharp incisors a shuddering delight, and when he protested—painlessly bleeding, dying—the wolf looked up at him and said,
But you let me in, you fine man. You lay down with me. You let me in.

He woke up, throat convulsing in a choked-off howl. The cave was full of cobweb light, delicate as pearls. Every detail of the scene before him was perfect, so lucid he would take it with him to his grave. Addy was lying flat out on his back. His mouth was open, his long, thin frame nothing but a loose collection of bones beneath his cassock. And, rising up from a crouch of dreadful, virile beauty beside him—Fen, a fisherman’s knife clutched savagely tight in his fist. Before Cai could move or make a sound, he was gone, silent and swift, dissolving into the sea mist that had come in with the tide.

Chapter Nine

Cai knelt by the old man on the cave floor. He couldn’t breathe, not even to let go of the horrified sob wedged tight in his chest. He didn’t know where to touch him. His throat looked intact, but there were a dozen places in his cassock’s folds where the wound might be concealed.
You’re a doctor,
he told himself fiercely, but it was no good. All hope was gone, all life long fled from a face like that—ravaged and hollow, grey as the dawn.

The sob tore free. Addy snorted himself awake at the sound, opened his eyes and stared up at him. A beatific smile spread across his face, as if he had expected this morning all his life, anticipated everything and awoken full of joy to find it fulfilled. “There’s a good boy,” he said, lifting a bony hand and patting Cai’s face. “There, you see? Don’t worry.”

Cai leapt to his feet. He cracked his head off the cavern’s roof, but the pain was meaningless. The thing that got released in men’s bodies in extremity, the heat in the blood that made them fight or run away like deer—he could feel it, raging through every vein. His heart would rip out through his ribs if he didn’t move. He gave Addy one last look and half-fell out of the cave.

The beach was empty, swathed in mist. No Fara devils seemed to be around, but God help them if he found any now. One line of footprints faded off into the distance. The blood-heat in him pitched, and he took off, heedless of the stones on his bare feet.

Fen had got far enough to let Cai run off some of his terror-born rage, but he was still throbbing all over in the grip of it when the lean figure emerged from the mist. Fen was motionless, his head down. He didn’t flinch or glance up when Cai tore across the last stretch of beach between them.

The knife was still in his hand. Cai knocked it free, and it sailed end over end to bury its blade in the sand. He crashed to a breathless halt beside Fen. “What were you going to do with that?” he yelled. When Fen didn’t stir, he grabbed him by the jerkin. “What were you going to do?”

Fen animated. He shoved Cai’s hand away, and Cai got ready for a fight. Instead Fen fell back a few paces. His eyes were wide, a lostness draining their amber fires to grey. “This… This is all your fault.”

Cai swallowed hard. The mist was catching in his lungs. “
Mine?
”

“Yes. You, with your blasted Christian ways—your doctoring, and your healing, and your damned compassion. With your body that makes me feel as if my own doesn’t belong to me anymore, and yours does, so that I feel your pain more than my own…” Fen paused for breath. “So that I feel another man’s pain before I inflict it! Damn you—I cannot even raise a knife to a useless old man!”

“Am I meant to be
sorry
for that? Fen—you murderous bastard…” Desperately Cai choked back the laughter that was trying to rattle out of him at Fen’s discomfiture, his baffled rage at not being able to commit cold-blooded murder. “Why the hell would you have wanted to?”

“Can’t you see? That old lunatic knows about the treasure. He’s hiding it somewhere on this island, and the only place we haven’t looked is inside that cave, the place where he sleeps. He’s defending something there.”

“Don’t be so stupid. There’s nothing in there but damp.”

“At the back, in the shadows where we couldn’t see. And you heard what he said about tunnels. Don’t look at me like that, monk—I wasn’t going to torture him for what he knows. Just kill him and get him out of the way.”

“Oh, is that all? Why didn’t you say?” Horror and laughter were winding themselves around in Cai like drunken serpents. What was he doing, out here on a barren island with this creature? Why did he want to take him in his arms? “My God. He’s just a poor old man.”

“I know that. Look, you’ve gained your point. I haven’t harmed him, have I? I…I couldn’t.”

He sounded so mournful. Cai reached out to him. “Come here.” Fen obeyed as far as coming to stand in front of him, but wouldn’t take his outstretched hand. “He isn’t hiding anything. Listen—our boat might be ready. I think the sooner we leave here, the better.”

“Why? In case your castrating bloody influence wears off?”

“You were going to murder our host. It might make things awkward over breakfast.”

Fen smiled—an involuntary flicker, quickly erased. “He was sleeping like a dog. He didn’t know.”

“I think he did, Fen.”

“All right. If you want to walk away from so much power, we’ll go.”

“Not yet. First we go back and see that he’s all right. Thank him.”

At last Fen took his hand. He did it reluctantly, but their palms met with a sensual warmth, and after a moment he gripped tight. “Very well, Saint Caius of Nowhere.”

Addy was pacing back and forth along the high-tide line, the hem of his cassock snagging on dried seaweed. He was anxiously watching the sky. He didn’t appear to notice his guests’ approach until Cai called out to him, and then spared them only a distracted glance. “He is late. He is late, and you two must be hungry.”