Brothers of the Wild North Sea Read online

  Cai had never meant to divide them. He took no joy in military prestige, but he saw the difference in demeanour between those who had become Cai’s men and those who would go to huddle with Aelfric in the crypt. His father would have enjoyed it—the nervous, proud vigour of the soldiers as they tucked up their cassocks into their belts and headed for the armoury, even the most graceless of them made noble by purpose. Cai followed them out. He found poor Eyulf blubbering in a stack of sheepskins in his favourite storage barn, unearthed him and sent him running with the others for shelter. Then he too armed himself and strode out onto the cliffs.

  The longship had ridden in fast on the wind. Hefting his sword, Cai took deep breaths of salt air. By cloudy, scudding moonlight, he saw Benedict at the top of the path, the narrow gully through which the invaders must come. Ben had kept his longstaff in preference to a sword, and was crouched like an avenging troll in readiness, Wilfrid opposite to him. For Ben’s sake, Cai had tried to assign Oslaf a safer place away from the front line, but Oslaf, bewildered by Ben’s new coldness, had refused to let him far out of his sight, and was stationed on the clifftop. He looked up at Cai’s approach. “I can’t see them yet, Caius.”

  “Don’t worry. They’ll be here.”

  “Perhaps they sailed by after all.”

  “No. I saw from the infirmary—the longship is drawn up right under the cliffs. Be at the ready.”

  Oslaf nodded staunchly, and Cai felt sudden pity for him. “Listen. Aelfric’s given Benedict one of his hellfire-and-damnation talks.”

  “About… About me?”

  “That’s right. Ben’s trying to look after you by backing off, that’s all. So be a good lad and play the game. You understand?”

  Oslaf looked up at him, anger and relief in his eyes. “Thank you. Oh, I wish Theo was still here.”

  “So do I, believe me. So do I.”

  There wasn’t time for more. The air beyond the cliff’s edge glowed bronze and resounded with shouts. Confused movement filled the gully, and Ben leapt off the rock where he’d been perched, straight into the path of the oncoming raiders.

  “No!” Cai yelled. He’d told Ben to wait, wait till he’d picked out the leader and could drop on him from behind, get that stick across his throat. By red Viking torchlight he saw Ben tackle the first huge pirate head-on, as if all he wanted was to kill someone or die trying. Oslaf, instead of holding position to defend the main buildings with Cai, dashed straight into the fray, howling his lover’s name like a battle-cry—and Cai, before he could think or reflect, found himself tearing off in Oslaf’s wake.

  Cai’s strategy went to the devil. He should have known. He could wield a sword, more or less, and show others how to do it, but he had no more idea than his father of how to coordinate men. He’d been their doctor, their friend, not their leader. He crashed to a halt face-to-face with a young man whose surpassing beauty was visible even behind the nose guard of his iron helmet. The noble face registered—what—surprise? A strange recognition? Red-bronze hair streamed in the wind. Golden wolf’s eyes flickered wide. The moment passed. A lean arm arced up, sword blade flashing, and he and Cai were nothing but beast meeting beast, both rigid with the will to stay alive. The Viking failed to lift his shield. Cai drove forwards into the gap, the burnished flesh for an instant revealed between a leather jerkin and a belt. His sword tip sank deep. He hauled back, ready for his next man—God, another beauty, so like the first they had to be brothers. This time his arm was knocked aside by a vast, roaring mountain of muscle and hide, the leader, who’d emerged from his tussle with Ben in a bloodstained fury.

  A pitched fight broke out on the cliffs. Men who’d been ordered to stand guard at the infirmary, storehouses and crypt came racing down, yelling like the blue-painted savages Broc’s Roman ancestors had driven from the hills, and joined hand-to-hand in the fray. They were beyond Cai’s control, wild with anguished recall of the last raid—of how it had felt to be sheep in the path of these wolves. Most had never lifted a weapon in anger in their lives. They hacked and jabbed indiscriminately, their training thrown to the winds. Cai yelled out orders unheard. The Vikings would slaughter them wholesale, surely. He was too occupied with his own battle to look, to try to save them.

  His sword descended through air. Thrown off balance, he staggered. His man—a snarling weasel who’d been doing his best to disembowel him with an axe—was gone. All along the clifftop was unfolding a sight he could never have dreamed of. He sat down hard on the turf, hand going slack round the hilt of his sword. The Vikings were running away.

  He leaned back, laughter shaking him. They wouldn’t have expected resistance at all, let alone a suicide-dash by madmen. No strategy Cai could have planned for them would have worked so well. He didn’t understand the cry going up among the last of the raiders rushing back down the cliff path, but he could guess. Retreat! Retreat!

  A warm weight hit his shoulder, and he almost turned and ran Brother Oslaf through on raw-nerved reflex. Oslaf skidded to his knees, throwing his arms around Cai. “We did it! They’re going!”

  “All right. No need to strangle me.”

  “I killed one myself. I lifted my shield, and I lowered it, and…” Oslaf demonstrated, Cai wriggling out of the way. Then Oslaf’s eyes went wide and dark. “I… Oh, God. I slew a man.”

  Cai took the boy’s sword from him. He tucked it back into its sheath. “You helped save your brothers.”

  Oslaf nodded. But Cai knew for some men that answer could never be enough. It wouldn’t have satisfied Leof. Cai dismissed the thought. For himself, he looked at the fallen shapes on the turf with unmixed satisfaction. None of them wore a cassock. Not only had they repelled this raid, but the vikingr would think better of it next time. Oslaf would have to work out his own salvation. He was trying now, his gentle face frowning and lost beneath its bloodstains.

  Cai put a hand on his shoulder. “You did well.”

  But Oslaf wasn’t listening. A big shape was emerging from the smoke, chilling Cai’s marrow until it resolved itself into Benedict’s familiar form. Cai hadn’t seen him since the beginning of the fight. He hadn’t yet had time to fear the worst, but he grinned in relief and waved.

  Oslaf’s joy burst like a leaping salmon. He shot away from Cai and ran full pelt for Ben, who opened his arms wide to catch him. Cai looked away. So much for playing the game…

  And that reminded him. He got to his feet and made his way through the crowd of his laughing, shouting brethren, dodging their embraces and slaps to his back. Once out on the open hillside he began to run. The church was deserted and terribly quiet, though the new construction work was still in place, the door to the crypt intact. Cai raised his hand to knock, then saw candlelight all the way around its edges. That meant the bolts were undone, the wooden bar out of its catch.

  He let himself in. Aelfric was kneeling in the candlelight, at the centre of a tight-packed circle of monks. All were on their knees, their faces in their hands. Cai’s entrance, the creak of the great door, did not interrupt the low, thrumming chant of Latin prayer, although from the outer periphery—Fara monks, Cai noted angrily, not the Canterbury clerics—a few terrified moans broke loose.

  “Aelfric,” he demanded, letting his sword drop with a clatter onto the cover of a tomb. “What is happening here?”

  Aelfric snapped upright. The brethren jerked their heads up, smiles cracking their pale masks as they saw Cai. Aelfric spread his arms. “Deo gratias,” he cried. His hair was standing up like spines around the edge of his tonsure. A light of keen, pure madness filled his eyes. “Praise be to God, we are saved. Did I not say it would be so? Saved, by the power of our prayers.”

  By the edge of my sword, Cai thought, but didn’t say it. There was no point now. Aelfric was lost amidst demons and angels. He turned to the first sane face he saw—Martin, the ancient monk who made up the mead and heather ale. “The Vikings are gone. You can come out now. Why didn’t you lock the damn door?”

  “
He told us not to. He told us to put our faith in God and pray.” Martin lowered his voice. “I’d rather have been out splitting Viking skulls with you, Cai. Did you get a lot of them?”

  Cai found a smile for the old man’s innocent bloodlust. “A nice lot. I’m glad you were here. We can’t spare our brewer.” He raised his voice. “Come on, all of you. It’s safe. And we need help clearing up.”

  “No!” Aelfric strode through his bewildered flock, knocking the slower ones out of his way. Crazed or not, he looked down through the foot of height he had on Cai with grim power, and he carried his own nimbus of authority with him. “We must all go to our cells and pray in solitude, in thanks for this deliverance.”

  “Aelfric—they don’t have cells anymore.”

  “Then let us go and pray in their ruins.”

  Cai gave it up. “You must do as you think fit. I have wounded men to tend.”

  He turned away. A clawlike hand landed hard on his shoulder. Still raw with battle nerves, Cai tore out from under it. “Leave me be, scarecrow.”

  He hadn’t meant to say it. Despite everything, he’d learned—come to believe—that an abbot’s place at Fara was sacred. That his person was due all respect. Now Cai had insulted him, in front of the Canterbury crows and his faithful. Worse, if that hand descended again, Cai would lash out. He was trembling still, the scent of blood and Viking torches in his nostrils. Aelfric was silent. With eyes like that he didn’t have to speak. Cai read there all his intentions of cold-hearted vengeance.

  “Forgive me, my lord abbot,” he rasped. “I must go.”

  Cold-hearted vengeance. Theo had taught that idea as one of his few examples of sin. Men were animals, he had explained—another heresy—and, when injured, turned upon their attackers with words or blows before their better selves could prevent it. That was bad. But to go away and brood upon a crime, and then exact a punishment—no, not even the beasts would stoop to that. Perhaps sometimes the animal is the better self, he had mused at the end of his lesson, and walked off abstractedly, leaving the brethren looking at one another in outrage and wonder.

  But Caius had taken his point. He’d tried to work on reining in his own quick temper, secure in the knowledge that he’d never be cold, clever or mean enough to have to worry about the greater sin. He’d dared to entertain a little rare pride in his Christian qualities, glad for once that his blood was warm, his reactions quick and instinctive.

  He had been wrong. He was as bad as Aelfric. A wolf was howling on the beach, and Cai’s blood was ice-cold.

  He washed his hands in the bucket for the tenth time, watching red spirals float in the moon-silvered water. He had just dismissed Benedict and Oslaf to their rest. Both were becoming good medics under his instruction, and his patients were at peace. The warrior monks of Fara had sustained a few injuries—some, as Cai had feared, from their own blades—but none would be fatal, and the infirmary had been almost a merry place that night, as they laughed at one another and swapped tales. All were sleeping now, clean and calm and dreaming poppy dreams.

  Not a wolf. A man. The cry came again, long and desolate. The Vikings had left behind one of their own.

  Cai looked out of the window. He had heard the first cry hours ago. He’d known for all that time that a man was dying on the beach alone. His patients had heard it too, and agreed among themselves, low-voiced and shuddering, that a slow, lonely death was no more than these devil-men deserved. Only Oslaf had looked troubled over the verdict, but Cai had sent him about his errands with a sharp word.

  One day, Theo had said, tugging at his hair in frustration, I will set us all an exercise of treating one another no better than we deserve, and we will see at the end of the day how many of us are left standing.

  But Theo was dead. Leof was dead, killed by a Viking, and with him had been buried the best of Cai’s Christian intent. Ben had forgotten all about Aelfric’s orders, it seemed, and all night Cai had watched how he and Oslaf worked together, how in every unoccupied moment gaze had found devoted gaze. Cai wondered if they’d found some quiet place in the moonlit ruins to celebrate their impurity, their soul-condemning love.

  Leof, killed by a Viking. Cai dried his hands. There on the sand, at the sea’s very margin, the wounded man lay. This one was Cai’s.

  The sand was cool beneath his feet. He could have been alone in the world, one heart beating under the springtime stars. He took time to look at them, as Theo had taught—the little constellation of the lyre, the leaping dolphin and the swan Deneb’s great sail, these three in a triangle whose rising promised summer. Mars glowed dully near the horizon, as if pleased with his night’s work. Hundreds of millions of others glimmered behind the full moon’s cobweb light. Yes, millions, Theo quietly reminded him. More than the grains of sand on this beach, and no matter what you’ve heard, I don’t believe they’re holes pricked by the angels in the firmament of night.

  Cai, who had never thought so, but had a hard time believing each star was a sun like the one that lit up his own days, shook his head in wonder. The beach stretched out before him, a long, broad sweep southwards, every grain a tiny star in the silver light. The only flaw in its stillness, its perfect serenity, was the black shape of the man down by the water’s edge. He was motionless. His cries had stopped. Cai, who was close enough now to make out his matted hair, drew his sword and began to run.

  “No,” he whispered, barely audible to himself above the thud of his heart. “Don’t die. You’re mine.”

  Red-bronze hair, streaming over a face white as bone in the moonlight. The incoming tide was beginning to lift it, make it drift like seaweed. If Cai left well alone, the waves would do his work for him. But drowning wasn’t enough. Drowning wouldn’t wipe out the sword stroke that had ripped Leof out of the world. Only another would do that. He skidded to a halt beside the fallen man. He stood still, planted his feet squarely in the sand and raised the sword high in both hands, blade downward. One plunge would do it. One blow.

  Cai, stop. You already delivered it.

  Cai froze, hands convulsing round the sword. Theo’s voice was as real as the wash of the sea, but he couldn’t turn to look. The man at his feet was the raider he’d encountered in the gully, the first to engage with him. Torchlight, tawny wolf’s eyes. A brief rip and grind of metal through skin, against bone and then out again. On to the next. Cai hadn’t thought the blow a fatal one—hadn’t thought at all after that. But his blade had put this man here.

  Perhaps not. Cai tossed the sword aside, suddenly frantic to know. The fight had been brief but savage—perhaps the raider had sustained some other wound. Crouching beside him, Cai pulled at the thong of his jerkin. Already the salt water had begun to shrink the leather, tightening the garment across the young man’s broad chest. Cai pulled out a knife from his belt and quickly cut through the thong. The skin beneath the jerkin was still warm, with the fading heat of an apple brought in from the orchard on a hot day. Smooth as an apple’s too, rippling over the framework of muscles and bones underneath—and unmarred, except for the one gaping hole Cai had put there himself.

  He sat back on his heels, gasping. He felt sick. When he searched for his cold, vengeful anger, it was out of his reach—not far, but enough, like the sword he’d cast aside. Just beyond his fingertips. He moved to retrieve the weapon, and his medical kit tugged at his shoulders, the strap pulling tight. Cai couldn’t remember picking it up when he’d left the infirmary. He must have grabbed it out of habit.

  “I’ve come to kill you, not heal you,” he told the pale face hoarsely. “You took my friends, you and your kind. You took Leof.” But the beautiful man laid out on the sand had passed far beyond care for such things. He had lost his helmet, the disguising metal stripped from him. His sins, whatever they had been, were smoothing away in the moonlight. The seawater rippled and gathered, and shot out one eclipsing wave to hurry on the dissolution. On an impulse he couldn’t understand, Cai lifted the Viking’s head clear of the water.

&nb
sp; A fist grabbed the front of his cassock. Cai lurched back, and the Viking shoved onto his elbow, soaked hair whipping back off his face. Cai lost balance. He landed hard on his back, the young man seizing the advantage and pouncing up to straddle him. His thighs clamped tight on Cai’s hips. The hand Cai had last seen drifting limply in the foam was now clenched tight around a rock. Amber eyes blazed into his, blind with uncomprehending hate.

  Cai still had hold of his knife. He was a doctor, and cold vengeance had turned out not to be his gift, but he was his father’s son—the dagger’s tip was pressed to the Viking’s throat. “Go on,” he growled. “Brain me with your rock, and I’ll slit your gullet with this. Then we’ll be quits.”

  Chapter Four

  The wolf’s eyes fell shut. A crescent of white glimmered through his salt-rimed lower lashes. The rock splashed harmlessly down into the sand, and the huge, virile tension holding his body taut over Cai’s drained away. His arms buckled and he collapsed.

  Cai snatched the knife away, just in time to spare his enemy the passive drop onto the blade. He didn’t know why—he’d done worse things tonight than cut a man’s throat. And this was his Viking, the one whose life he’d come down here to take in place of Leof’s. He rolled out from under the soaked deadweight, sprang to his feet and stood watching while a wave broke over the young man’s face. If he was playing dead again, the game would soon be up. Cai waited. The seventh wave and the ninth one, powerful heralds of the incoming tide, washed right over the raider’s body—tumbled him over onto his front. He lay still.

  Cai ran to him, seized him by the armpits and dragged him out of the clutch of the tenth wave. This time no hand seized his cassock. That had been a convulsion, Cai thought, a killer’s last impulse to kill. Cai could not identify the impulses guiding his own actions now. He hauled his burden up the beach onto dry sand, not caring that the long, well-wrought limbs jolted over rocks. Maybe death by drowning was too good, too easy for this brute. Maybe Cai would find the spark of life in him, fan it up to consciousness and take his cold vengeance after all. There were things in his medical kit, acids, drugs for cleaning dirty wounds, drugs that would burn…