Brothers of the Wild North Sea (24 page)

“Who is late, sir?”

“The eagle.”

Cai shot Fen a warning look. “I see,” he said cautiously, getting into the old man’s path and stopping him gently, afraid his restless movements would wear him out. “You know, if you wished, Fen and I could patch together a fishing net and…”

“Ah, no. No. If you provide for me, how will I know the love of God in the beat of the eagle’s wings?” Cai couldn’t answer that. After a moment Addy returned his attentions to earth and gave him a wide smile. “But I would have liked to have given you your breakfasts. Perhaps you had better pursue your own ways now. You mustn’t starve here.”

“We can catch this next tide, if our boat holds up. Are you sure you won’t come with us?”

“No, no. These fools who wish to place me on the bishop’s throne would find me too easily on the mainland. You won’t tell them I’m here, will you? If anyone asks, you will say you met a mad old hermit, and Addy is a legend.”

Cai shrugged. “I promise.” It seemed true enough to him now. Perhaps some shipwrecked monk had become marooned, assumed the name and grown old here in his delusions of power. “Well, if you change your mind or you’re ever ill, light a signal fire on your western beach. We’ll see it from Fara.” Once more he looked around the featureless strip of dunes, where not so much as a rabbit or a goat cropped the turf. “I still don’t see how you live.”

“I told you. God provides.”

Even if He’s a little late this morning.
Cai had been turning away. Then something in the old man’s voice made him pause. There was such certainty in it, the deep note of conviction that had drawn Cai to him the day before.

“Caius, listen. I have said that your new abbot Aelfric is a poor example of the coming faith. Whatever
you
profess—even if it’s no more than belief in yourself as a man—you must be a good example. Do you understand?”

“No,” Cai said honestly, spreading his hands. “Even if I did…I don’t know how.”

“We can’t lead men to purer lives unless our own are pure.” His benign gaze encompassed Fen, and he smiled. “I don’t mean the flesh. For myself, I believe the flesh must have its way, governed by love and by will. But I am a heretic. By the example of your own life, I mean. Cai, you grieve over Theo, and I thought I did too—but there is really very little need.”

“Why?” Cai could hardly get the question out past the pain in his throat. He didn’t think he’d ever grieved for him more poignantly than now, when for all his words the old man’s eyes were bright with tears for him too.

“You’ll see. You’ll see. Now, catch your tide. Unless…” He suddenly focussed on Fen, his smile broadening. “Unless, son, you would like to go and take a look around inside my cave. It’s daylight now, and your search will be easier. Caius and I will wait.”

Fen’s lips parted. Then he stared at the ground, his brow knitting ferociously. “I don’t wish it. No.”

Cai had seen him flush before, in rage and arousal, and sometimes mortification at the forced intimacies of medical care. But this was pure shame. Cai hadn’t thought him capable. Shame at his aborted deed, or only at being found out in it? Addy didn’t seem to care. He was chuckling now, rocking himself back and forth in amusement. “Poor wolf, poor wolf. I would have made a sorry meal for you. Tell me, Fenrisulfr—there being no secret of Fara, what would you have by way of treasure? Can it be attained in this life? I’d grant you it myself if I could.”

Fen looked up. “Vengeance,” he said suddenly, as if Addy had fished the word out of him on a hook. “My kinsmen who abandoned me here among Christians and lunatics—I would have revenge.”

“Ah.” Addy sobered. He folded his hands into his sleeves. “That, I can’t grant. But you will have it one day. Yes—knee-deep in water and blood.”

“Fen, come on.” Cai took hold of him, a firm grip on his rigid arm. “Sir, we should go now.”

“Yes,” Addy said absently, distances opening up in his eyes. “Go in God, blessed be Her name.”

“And you.” Cai hesitated, wondering if he’d misheard. “
Her
name?”

“Ah. Yes. I forget sometimes—forgive me. But that reminds me. That old woman Danan—you said you know her.”

“Yes. I’m a kind of physician at Fara. Not much of one, but…”

“She has told me you are very good. A healer by spirit as well as by skill.”

“Really?” For a moment Cai was distracted. She’d called him a hit-and-miss quack last time they’d talked about his medical skills. “Yes, I know her. She trades me the herbs I need for my work.”

“Take care of her. It matters little really—she’d be back with the corn in spring—but I wouldn’t wish her to die that way.” Addy shivered. “How strange, that the word of God should be put into practice so! No, not that way. Keep watch, Cai. Look out for her.”

The incoming tide ran strongly, but it was still a long haul from the island of Fara to shore. The sun had driven off the ghostly fret and was making the sea dance in sapphire and green before Fen called a halt. They had passed a halfway point. Cai, glad enough to take his cue from so superior an oarsman, stopped rowing and rested his oar. Fen had pulled rhythmically all the way out, patterns of purposeful muscle rising to meet each stroke. He hadn’t so much as broken a sweat, and now he was looking at Cai as if in surprise that he was tired.

“I’m not,” Cai said defensively, trying to hide the tremor in his arms. “Who the hell could keep up with a Viking, though?”

They were side by side on the boat’s wooden bench. “Only another Viking,” Fen admitted easily. “Maybe it’s best you don’t try. I can take her from here.”

“What? No. I just need a rest.”

“At risk of wounding you, I may be better on my own. A second oar who isn’t quite as…”

Cai broke into reluctant laughter. “Oh, God. Don’t start worrying about my feelings now.”

“Very well. A weak second oar can unbalance a strong one, make his job harder. Just go and sit in the prow.”

Cai got up, still smiling. “Are you saying I’ve been holding you back? Let me see your wound before you take over this longship. You can… You can just lift up your jerkin for me this time.”

Their eyes met in burning recognition of what Cai’s routine check had unleashed yesterday. Fen did as he was told, and Cai crouched in front of him long enough to ascertain that the vigorous rowing hadn’t done any damage. No—the muscle was repairing itself, smoothing out. “You’re fine,” he said, glad his recent exertions allowed him to sound breathless. “You can cover up. We’d better not rock the boat.”

He went to sit. Fen watched him closely. “I was afraid,” he said, “that you wouldn’t wish it. To lie with me anymore, I mean—knowing what I am.”

Cai glanced up in surprise. “I
don’t
know what you are. I only know what you did. Theo used to say that was what mattered—what we did, not what we’d thought about doing.”

“That’s good. Because if we are judged on our wicked thoughts, I am headed fast for Aelfric’s hell.”

“With me right behind you.”
And yes, I would lie with you there, though you were the devil himself.
Cai couldn’t say it, but he held Fen’s gaze until he was sure the message had got through.

“I feel as if I know your Theo. Through you, and everything you’ve said about him. Maybe that’s what the old man meant when he told you there was no need to grieve.”

Cai shifted in the prow. He dipped his fingers into the water, thoughtfully fretting its surface. It was lovely here. Fen picked up the oars, and Cai almost put out a hand to stop him. What was it all about—this effort to get back to a shore, a home, where he had lost all sense of belonging? What awaited him at Fara? “I’m beginning to think,” he said slowly, “that my poor abbot—though I loved him, Fen, and I always will—might not have been sane when he died.”

“Well—for what it’s worth, I too am losing certainties. I believed in the legend of the amulet, the treasure. But perhaps it was only an excuse for rapine. Our prophet did come up with Fara this year. The year before, he was just as convinced it was White Bay.”

A helpless chuckle shook Cai. “Really? He said a different place…”

“Every year. Yes.”

Their laughter rang out across the water, scaring up a piebald cloud of Addy ducks. “Oh, God,” Cai managed at length, wiping his eyes. “Have we both been such fools? And as for that old lunatic in his cave, with his seals and his eagle…”

“Cai. Hush.”

Cai frowned, leaning forwards. He could hear something. Was it the echoes of their own voices off the distant rocks? No—more musical than that, familiar to Cai and yet strangely altered. He shaded his eyes against the sun.

The seals were hauling out onto the rocks. They had come in their droves, the light striking off their sleek fur. Instead of tussling for the sunniest places on the rocks, flopping and jousting with one another on the way, they seemed to be moving as one.

Their focus was the old man standing on the rocks at the top of the beach. He was only a skeletal outline at this distance, but Cai could make out that his hands were extended, as if in benediction. “He said… He said the seals came to sing to him.”

“Which would be madness, except…”

Except that they were singing. It was a music Cai couldn’t have imagined in this world. Their eerie barking stretched out and clashed in wild harmonics, as if the great North Sea itself had found a voice. Cai got up, making the boat lurch wildly beneath him. He pointed, unable to get a word out, and Fen stood beside him, grabbing his arm. They were just in time to see a vast sea-eagle sail out of the dawn, golden talons wrapped around a fish.

The monastery was silent, its tumbledown buildings held in quiet sunlight. It was like a future vision of itself—moss beginning to take hold among the ruins, the pride of human life that had built her long vanished, sleeping beneath the hawthorn graves. Cai and Fen dragged the boat ashore, then climbed the steep path up the cliff face without meeting another soul. At the top they came to a halt, looking around them. Cai hadn’t expected to be missed, for anyone to be watching or waiting on their return, but this was a better opportunity than he’d anticipated. He turned to Fen.

“This could be a good moment, you know. For you to go, if you wish.”

“I…I could still have your horse?”

“Yes. I told you. If you wanted.”

“And what if I didn’t want?”

“The horse, or…?”

“To go.” Fen evaded Cai’s look. He was surveying the barns, the fields and the infirmary building that had been his prison for so long. He still slept in the quarantine cell, Aelfric having forbidden him to join the others in the dormitory barn. He was still locked away from compline to matins, though Cai knew he could make short work of the window and the ivy beneath it if he wished.

“You’re strong now. I can’t believe you’d want to stay.”

“Would you come with me?”

What a wild, strange thought. It sent a shiver down Cai’s spine and he briefly closed his eyes to savour it. He’d been on the verge of departure when Benedict had come to cling to him, renewing for a time his sense of a place here, an obligation. But whatever Ben had needed, whatever guiding light or rock, Cai hadn’t been able to provide. No—he hadn’t been expecting a lookout, much less a welcome party for his return. For the place to be this quiet, all his brethren must have gone about their usual daily tasks. “The waters close over our heads, don’t they?”

“Not over yours. Not if I can help it.”

Blindly Cai put out a hand. Fen took it immediately this time. “No. You didn’t let me drown, did you? I like to lie with you. I think you’re a dangerous, bloodthirsty nutcase, but…I see in colour again when I’m with you.”

“So?”

“So… Yes. I will go.”

He didn’t have a thing to pack. All he had to do was walk with Fen down to the armoury, collect a few weapons—Broc’s sword, Fen’s ancestral head-splitter—and help him pull the chariot out into the yard. He could see Eldra from here. The only living creature to remark their arrival, she at least seemed pleased to see them, trotting the length of her paddock with her head held high. Cai had no right to either of Fara’s ponies, but Eldra was his, and between the shafts of the chariot she would take them anywhere. South, perhaps. There were cities down there, places where if Leof’s gentle god was long dead, Aelfric’s monstrous one was not yet in the ascendant—Roman towns, where for every Christian you met you would find five who still bowed to the ancient shrines of Jupiter and Mars. Zoroastrian cults too, followers of the soldier’s god Mithras, Broc’s particular favourite. The world was large.

Yes, large. But all the voices of this little one were rising from the timber church. Cai drew Fen to a halt as it came into view. They stood together, wordlessly listening. The church doors were wide open. Only this way could the building accommodate the full complement of monks. It seldom was required to, even when Aelfric made Eyulf ring the bell and stood eagle-eyed with his great black staff, counting his flock through the doors. There were always tasks to be done that Aelfric still recognised as essential, or at any rate didn’t dare yet deny. But everyone was there today, the stragglers crowding on the steps outside.

Fen was still holding Cai’s hand. “What’s going on?” he asked softly. “Is it a holy day? Some saint’s miserable, pointless bloody death to be celebrated?”