Brothers of the Wild North Sea Page 5

  “You’d never have knelt in the first place if that lunatic Greek hadn’t cut the balls off you. Yes, get up. Come and stand before me. You’ve grown, I think. Started to fill out. It’s strange—you still look like a man.”

  Cai submitted to the inspection. He was past being bothered by Broc’s words or the spectacle he was providing to the clan. He even stood still when Broc pushed up out of his chair and took his shoulders as if to measure their width.

  “How is he, then?” the old man asked idly, tugging at his hair. “Theo, and that little Saxon bedwarmer of yours? Did they get through your raid?”

  “No. The lunatic and the bedwarmer are both dead. You were right, Broccus—peace isn’t the way. I thought you would help me, but if not… Just let me go.”

  Caius turned and walked off. He could hear Broc calling after him, but it didn’t seem to matter through the ongoing racket in his head. The cries and the shouting had never let up. Sometimes beneath them sea bells whispered, and the bell from the burnt-out church—fallen along with the tower and stolen for melt by the raiders—kept up its dull warning song.

  He picked his way around the central fire, around groups of children playing in the dust. When he trod on one, he picked it up out of habit and put it on his hip, jouncing it absently. He’d barely been big enough to walk himself when his first little half-sib had been thrust into his arms, and so it had gone on. He’d lived hip-deep among children all his life. Now he came to think of it, they were the only part of his father’s world he’d missed, and he held the small body close, blindly seeking comfort. Probably it was a relative anyway.

  The child began to yowl and laugh in pleasure at the ride, and its mother emerged from one of the smaller huts, smiling to see Broc’s eldest boy back in camp. “Caius, Caius! Lost your frock?”

  Cai handed the infant down to her. “Looks that way, doesn’t it? Just for today.”

  “Ah, won’t you stay with us? Don’t mind your old fool of a father.”

  “I don’t, Helena. But I have to go.”

  “You should hear him. Cai this, Cai that, when he’s trying to get your brothers to behave. I think he’s even proud of you for joining that monastery of yours.”

  “Yes, he sounded it.” Cai looked into her cheerful face, dusted all over with flour. Yes, she’d been one of Broc’s women for a while. She hadn’t suffered too much, and now she had a home, and this sturdy boy. Come back and be my son again. In a way, it would be the easiest thing in the world. If he stayed, no doubt the noises in his head would soon be drowned out by others—the pigs squealing now, for example, as the inept village butcher began his task… Cai’s head spun. “I have to go,” he repeated, avoiding her kindly outstretched hand. “I don’t belong here anymore.”

  The question remained as to where he did belong. Stumbling out of the village, past Broc’s ferocious outer defences, the wooden palisade and Roman-style earthworks, Cai tried to think it through. Leof had brought him to Fara. Whenever Cai had doubted what he was doing there, he had turned to Leof and seen, in his friend’s devout, loving ways, an ideal pattern for life. And although Cai knew Abbot Theo had never been supposed to tell him that the round apple Earth danced round the sun, his teachings had shown Cai what such a life could be when lit up from within by learning.

  Find Addy. Remember, Cai—the secret isn’t in the book. It’s in the binding.

  Cai jolted to a halt on the track. Theo’s voice, cutting through his inner racket like a knife, solemn and clear as if the abbot had been standing in the sunshine beside him. Leof and Theo were gone. Cai hadn’t been able to save either from a brutal, unchristian death. And his abbot’s last command, half-forgotten in the mess inside his skull, meant nothing to him.

  He could feel the revolutions of the Earth. He wasn’t meant to, he was sure. The vastness of the rock, and the great invisible force that pinned him to it, meant he could spend his days in blissful unawareness of moving at all. Such an illusion was every man’s right, Theo had taught. Learning could be taken or rejected. But the choice had to be there. The treasure. The secret of Fara.

  The sky darkened. The track was empty before and behind him, and he was far enough from the hillfort that no one could see him, but he made his way into the gorse, a painful sickness boiling up in him. He wished the Earth would stop. He wished there wasn’t blood beneath his nails, so deeply ingrained that no amount of scrubbing would shift it. He doubled up, his stomach clenching.

  He’d forgotten to bring food with him, and Broccus hadn’t offered any. Still the efforts to vomit tore through him. He used to suffer from strange, disabling headaches, days when coloured glass had seemed to float in front of his eyes. On those days Leof had sat by his bunk, pressing a cold, damp cloth to his brow. Cai threw up water and stood gasping, wiping away hot tears.

  His head had cleared a little. That often happened once the sickness had pitched, Leof cleaning him up and telling him gently how poor an inspiration he was for his profession. Even the bells and the screams inside his head were dying down.

  Replaced by rapid hoofbeats. Was that worse? Cai half-fell back out onto the track. A violent four-time percussion… He didn’t think he could live with that. With relief he realised the sounds were coming from the hillside above him. One of Broc’s wild little warhorses was being driven down over the turf. They’d have made a Roman soldier laugh, Cai suspected, but in their own right they were grand beasts, crossbred down with native ponies through the centuries and still showing some of their imperial blood. An eye for horseflesh was one of the things Cai had been meant to leave behind him in the outer world, but still he watched appreciatively as the horse and cart approached.

  No, not a cart. Cai wiped his eyes again, in disbelief this time. Jouncing behind the pony, catching dull flashes of sun on its ancient bronze fittings, was one of Broc’s chariots. He had three of them, his legacy from his own father’s grandfather. Broc swore they were original and had seen action up near Hadrian’s great wall, but Cai reckoned that, like the horse, they were inventive copies. The wheels were broad and tough, better fitted to hillsides than old Roman pavements. Their frames were gaudy with low-relief bronze plates of goddesses walloping nine shades of hell out of a more recent enemy—wide-eyed figures who looked like the very Saxons who had since settled peacefully here, established monasteries and sent their beautiful sons to lighten the lives of men like Cai. “Leof,” he whispered, wondering if the name would ever be out of his mind, off his tongue.

  Maybe the loss of him had finally unseated Cai’s reason. Broc valued these chariots more than his cows and his women put together. They seldom saw the light of day, and were never sent out on errands. Still unsteady, he stepped forwards to meet the driver, a skinny lad struggling for control. “Whoa! Pull her up, pull her up. What’s all this?”

  “Broccus sent me after you. He says…” The boy hauled back hard on the snorting pony’s reins, and Cai took hold of the harness. “He says you’re to have the weapons you asked for. He also said…” Frowning, the boy repeated his script. “There’s little point, because you and your skirt-wearing friends will probably just chop your feet off, but you’re welcome.”

  Cai looked into the willow containers strapped to the chariot’s frame. About twenty broadswords had been roughly packed inside, together with a selection of rusted shields. “He said I was to have all these?”

  “Yes. The horse and chariot too. He also said you could have me.”

  Cai had no doubt in what capacity. “That’s nice. How old are you?” The boy looked blank, and he clarified, “How many summers? Since you graced this world with your being?”

  “Oh. Fourteen or so, I think.”

  “Well, go back and have about ten more.”

  “What? You’ll be an old man by then!”

  Cai shook his head. He reached up and lifted the boy from his perch. Springing onto the board in his place, he took up the reins. They were soft and worn and came more sweetly to his hands than befitted a hu
mble follower of Christ. He couldn’t help but think how much faster he would cover the ground between here and the monastery now. He smelled fresh bread and noticed the satchel of provisions his unpredictable father had also packed in among the swords. Some of his sickness and grief had receded. His imagination pounced forwards to how it would feel to bring a Briton’s broadsword slicing down onto a Viking’s hairy skull.

  “Tell Broccus I’m grateful,” he said. “Very.” It struck him that Broc had picked out for him a lad with fair hair and eyes as close to blue as the stock of the inland strongholds ever showed. He shivered. “Be sure and tell him I wasn’t dissatisfied with you. I can’t take anyone back with me, and…I’m done with that kind of thing. That’s all.”

  He shook the reins. The pony danced around, making the harness jingle. Cai had only driven a handful of times, Broc cursing him and bawling out instructions, but he found his balance easily, measuring tension on the reins where they ran through the loops. The boy stepped out of the way, and he drove the chariot sharply forwards, lifting his face to meet the wind.

  A mile north of Fara, Oslaf appeared, blue around the lips from desperate running. As soon as Cai saw him, he set the warhorse to a gallop. He’d instructed Benedict as well as he could in the care of the injured men, but knew he shouldn’t have left them. Nothing—not even life—had seemed so important as getting to Broc and acquiring the instruments of death. He drove the chariot on to meet Oslaf, reining in hard when he approached the panting monk. “Here,” he called, reaching down. “Get in. Tell me as we drive.”

  “No.” Oslaf lurched at the movement of the unfamiliar vehicle, grabbed the rail and hung on. “At least… Slow down. I saw you coming home, and Ben said I should get to you and warn you…”

  “Is Cedric worse? John?”

  “No. They’re healing. Take this side track, Cai. Stay out of sight of Fara for now.”

  “Why?”

  “Follow round so you’ll come in at the foot of the cliff. What is this devil’s contraption?”

  “It’s my father’s, which amounts to the same thing. What’s wrong?”

  “We have a new abbot.”

  Cai steadied the pony, who’d enjoyed her wild dash over the moors and was skittering impatiently in the confines of the lane. He calculated the time it took for a message to reach even the nearest of the brother monasteries. “How? No one can have heard about Theo yet.”

  “They haven’t. This man was dispatched from the south weeks ago to replace him. His name is Aelfric. He’s…” Oslaf relinquished his grip to gesture with one hand, clearly lost for words. “Just don’t let him see you come in, not with this rig. And…” He glanced incredulously into the baskets. “And an arsenal. Caius…”

  “We have to defend ourselves.”

  “He won’t let you. He says the raid was a punishment from God.”

  Cai almost dropped the reins. “He says what?”

  “Because we don’t obey Rule. Because Theo was wicked and heretical. He wants his body taken out of the crypt and—”

  The lane was very narrow. Broc’s chariots had been designed for close combat, though, and his horses could turn on a sestertius. The mare swung obediently at Cai’s shout and tug on her left rein. The chariot lumbered round, almost tipping Oslaf off the side. “Cai, what are you doing?”

  “Going home. The fast way. Where is this idiot from?”

  “Canterbury. He has other men with him, senior clerics. Please turn round again. You can’t just…”

  “Oslaf, be silent. And hang on.”

  The scene before him was dreamlike. Urging the pony on, Cai struggled to make sense of it. He had been fighting for his grasp on reality all the way down the coastal plain, memories overlaying themselves onto his bleak present moment. He’d driven hard past the place where he’d first seen Leof on his journey home from trading, averted his eyes from the dunes where they’d lain down. Now it was as if time had slipped, doubled back on itself with incomprehensible changes. Men were congregated, motionless but for the wind-driven flap of their robes, in the place where the church had been. Shaken by the speed of his approach, Cai could almost take the vision wholesale, believe in it as he wanted to—the brotherhood nearly back at full complement, close to thirty of them standing in the sun.

  But five were strangers. They were gathered around a tall, thin man whose resemblance to Theo vanished after one cruel sting. The remaining Fara brethren were facing them. Through a flash of red fury Cai saw John and Cedric amongst them. Cedric was propped up in Wilfrid’s arms, John on his knees, his face grey and drawn.

  Cai let the mare pick up speed. She liked open ground, and the church—the remains of it, the undefended space with its tumble of stones and burnt rafters—stood all by itself on the hillside. The monks were beginning to turn in response to the thunder of hooves. Mouths opened, fingers pointed. The thin man pushed back his hood to see, revealing a harsh tonsure and a face like a carrion crow’s. Repulsion crawled in Cai’s marrow, an antipathy that curdled his blood. Deepest instinct told him that this carrion bird was his enemy, more certainly than the vikingr who had plundered and burned with blind malice only. For a moment he wanted to plough straight into the group, smashing himself and the chariot to bits in the process, but he eased the speeding pony’s head around, drawing her through an arc to slow her down.

  “You,” he cried as soon as he was within earshot. “What in God’s name are you doing? Why are those men out of bed?”

  Benedict detached himself from the group and ran to intercept him. “Caius, wait.”

  “No! Take the horse. Hold her.” Cai leapt down, not caring whether Ben had obeyed his order or not. He vaulted into the church over the tumbledown wall and ran to Brother John. “All right,” he said to him, crouching at his side. “Just hold on and…” He broke off, lifting a scarlet hand. “He’s bleeding,” he yelled, and thrust out his red palm at the newcomers. “Who the devil are you? What have you done?”

  The tonsured man stepped forwards. If he was startled by Cai’s intervention, his face didn’t betray it. In fact he looked coldly amused. “I am Abbot Aelfric of Canterbury, sent to mend the devil’s work in this blasphemous pigsty. God and the Vikings have begun my mission for me. Now—before I order you tossed from the cliffs—who are you?”

  Cai hauled in a breath. Before he could expel it, a shadow fell across him—Ben’s huge bulk, interposing itself between him and Aelfric. “My lord abbot,” he said, planting a hand on Cai’s shoulder and pushing him down. “This is our physician, Brother Caius. Forgive him. The men killed in the raid were his close friends, as—as they were to all of us.”

  “This wild-eyed savage is a monk? Where is his cassock?”

  “He’s been travelling. Abbot Theodosius used to permit him to wear—”

  “Where is his tonsure?” Aelfric turned back to address the brethren, dismissing Benedict without a glance. “And all of yours? Where are your hours for prayer? Why have I come here to find you doing as you wish, through all the day and the night? You say the Vikings raided here. I say again—God wielded his sword over you, and sent a cleansing fire. In truth…” He paused, eyes shining coldly. “Cast your minds back to that night. In truth, did Vikings come? Or were they demons, cast up from your own blackened consciences to reprove your sins?”

  Caius burst into laughter. “You think we dreamed this raid?” He stood up, knocking aside Ben’s restraining hand. “Wilfrid—press the hem of John’s cassock here, as I have been doing. To staunch the hole the dream-demon made in him. Tonsures, Aelfric? Hours for prayer? You try both, in a freezing winter here. You’ll want every hair on your shiny pate by the end of it. Ask the newborn lambs in the snow if Brother Shepherd can come home to pray nine times a day.”

  “Caius!”

  “What?” Cai swung round to face Ben. “Why is anyone listening to this man?”

  “Because he’s our abbot,” Ben replied flatly. Cai opened his mouth, but Ben took his shoulders. Low and urg
ent, too soft for anyone else to hear, he went on, “Besides, what if…? Oh God, what if he’s right?”

  The sense of nightmare had lifted from Cai for a while, during his wild gallop from Broc’s stronghold. Now it came down again, like a killing jar over an insect. Strength ran out of him. If Ben, the strongest and best of his friends here, had fallen under the spell of this lunatic… All the light and warmth in Cai’s world lay buried in the shallow mound beneath the hawthorn trees. He had briefly forgotten. “I don’t care,” he said dully. “I just want John and Cedric out of here. Will you help me or not?”

  Ben hesitated. Peripherally Cai saw Aelfric smile, as if winning a finely calculated point. Then Oslaf, who had finished securing horse and chariot to a post, pushed through the crowd towards them. “Benedict,” he demanded breathlessly. “What’s wrong with you? We must help Cai.”

  He took Ben’s hand. The gesture was potent—much more than brother to brother. Cai wanted to shield them, but Aelfric had seen it too. His gaze had focussed, knife-blade predatory, upon their joined hands.

  Benedict shook himself and seemed to come out of a trance. “Yes. Sorry.” He lifted his head. “Forgive me, my lord abbot, but Caius is right.”

  Aelfric let it go. He did so easily, as if he had found something better to pursue. “Go, then. I have said what I wish to for now. All those who need to, go with your physician. For now.”

  Cai and Oslaf took charge of Cedric, who had stayed upright somehow, his eyes blank and lost. Benedict picked John up bodily and cradled him. Leading the way out of the church, Cai saw his new abbot’s thin lips working, moving as if in prayer. Abominations, Cai lip-read, and averted his gaze so as not to know any more. Aelfric was watching Oslaf and Ben like a hawk. Abominations. A few of the monks who had suffered no injury during the raid did their best to creep out with the others, but Aelfric’s retinue, starved-looking men like himself, moved to block their path.