Brothers of the Wild North Sea Read online

  He let the young man’s shoulders fall and thudded down beside him in the sand. He wouldn’t allow his ragged inhalations to be sobs. He was breathless, that was all. He undid his satchel, reached in and drew out the first vial that came to hand—Danan’s poppy, glowing with its own light under the moon. Cai had let a human creature howl in its lonely death throes. He’d done it for hours, closing his ears and his heart.

  “I’m sorry,” he choked out, not to the Viking but to Theo’s ghost and Leof’s. He uncapped the bottle, cleared strands of hair and seaweed from the raider’s pale mouth and pressed the rim to his lips.

  “Gunnar,” the young man said, on a note of soft wonder. His eyes opened wide. They were focussed on a distant shore, a homeland far from this bleak coast. “Gunnar,” he repeated. Tears filled the amber eyes. He reached out, and Cai flinched away, but this time his scarred, capable hand only stroked the empty air.

  Cai poured the liquid down the man’s throat. It was a dose for sleep, not death, and he shuddered in bewilderment as he fastened up his satchel and bent down to take hold of the fallen man again. It was a quarter of a mile to the foot of the cliff. If he managed that, there was the path, almost sheer in parts, a tough climb even unburdened. If Aelfric or one of the other Canterbury spooks caught sight of him…

  “Caius?”

  He jumped and let the Viking drop, nearly hard enough to break his skull on a rock. Staring up into the darkness, he made out a familiar shape, briefly outlined against the sky and then beginning a scramble down the path. Benedict… Cai couldn’t have hoped for anyone better, and yet a chill of mistrust went through him. Ben should have been asleep. “What are you doing out here?” he called cautiously. “Where’s Oslaf?”

  “Praying, as the abbot told him to. It’s where you should be too.”

  “And you. But we don’t march to Aelfric’s drum yet. Or do we?”

  Cai hadn’t meant it to sound like a challenge. After Leof, Ben had been his dearest friend at Fara, his advocate in the early days when even Theo’s gentle rule had chafed him. But he hated the new coldness in Ben’s eyes. He waited warily.

  Ben put out one sandalled foot and gave the raider a shove. “Is it dead?”

  “Almost. Don’t kick him—that’s where I hurt him during the fight.”

  “And you came down to finish him off?”

  Cai nodded. That had been his exact intention. He couldn’t remember when or how he had lost it. “I can’t, though. Help me carry him up.”

  “Are you off your head?”

  “Possibly. I wounded him myself. I can’t kill him.”

  Ben snorted, sounding more like his old self. “You did for three of his friends up there, no bother at all.”

  “Yes, in the heat of it.” Cai glanced back out over the moon-burnished sand. The tide had already covered the place where he had tussled with the Viking. So all earthly struggles would end, Theo had taught—wiped clear, smoothed away by God’s hand. “I can’t explain it to you. Are you going to help me or not?”

  “Where will you put him?”

  “To bed, of course. I need to treat him.”

  “In the infirmary? Where John and the rest of your brothers are still bleeding from vikingr swords?”

  “I’ll put him in the quarantine cell. Look—the moon is setting. Carry him up to the clifftop for me. I won’t ask you to have anything else to do with it, except…” Cai paused, wiping salt-stung tears out of his eyes. “Don’t tell Aelfric.”

  “Aelfric is going to notice a six-foot-tall Viking in his monastery. Even in the quarantine cell.”

  Cai almost laughed. But the Benedict he had once known, that vigorous and hot-tempered ploughman, would have knocked him down for so much as suggesting the betrayal. “I’ll deal with Aelfric,” he said hoarsely. “Here. You take his shoulders and I’ll…”

  “No. Leave him to me.” Ben pushed Cai out of the way. “You bring your kit and his things. That sword is a good one—the shield too. Is that his helmet down there?”

  Cai looked. The incoming tide had washed a gleaming curve of metal up into a niche between the rocks. He went to pick it up. He turned it over in his hands. Yes, he thought it belonged to the Viking. He remembered how the amber eyes had widened and shone out from behind its mask. Would Cai have been able to run the young man through without the disfiguring metal?

  It didn’t matter. Cai gathered the other weapons and followed Ben up the cliff path, suddenly too exhausted to do more than put one foot in front of the other. Ben had slung the Viking over one shoulder. The matted bronze hair hung down, swinging in time with Ben’s movements. The hand that had reached out blindly for a long-gone friend also swung, limp and pale. Cai doubted there was a pulse in its wrist. He wanted to check, but Ben was moving too fast for him. Probably being carried like this would kill the raider off before they got to the top of the cliffs, but Cai could hardly ask Ben to cradle him in his arms.

  If he died, he died. The world would be that much simpler for Cai. There would only be a wolf-shaped vacancy, a gap where the sea wind would blow soundlessly through. Cai remembered his dream and caught his breath, stumbling on the track. The wolf from the sea…

  Yes. The wolf would die. A faint dawn light was filling the infirmary by the time Cai and Ben got there, turning the lantern’s flame sallow. Eyes flew wide at their arrival. Bodies stirred beneath blankets, and Brother John, who had never emerged from the twilight world into which a Viking’s sword had plunged him, staggered up from his cot, face contorting in bewildered horror.

  He tried to block Cai’s way. Pushing him gently aside, Cai directed Ben into the little cell off the infirmary. Not many diseases survived long in the salty north-coast gales, but this was where Cai watched over fever cases until he was sure they would turn into nothing worse. He shoved the door shut behind him with his foot. “Set him down there.”

  Ben dumped his burden without ceremony onto the quarantine bunk. It was a comfortless wooden frame, bare of the mattress and blankets that might harbour sickness. “They won’t let you keep him here. Not Aelfric—your own brethren.”

  “He won’t trouble them for long,” Cai said grimly. He dropped his kit and the Viking’s weapons with a clatter on the floor. He’d seen enough of death by now to recognise its coming—the stillness it set on a brow, the waxen stiffening of lips that looked made to smile and devour and laugh at a world now lost to them. He knelt by the bunk. He pushed his fingertips up under the young man’s jaw. The skin was damp, unexpectedly fine-grained and smooth. Beneath it was the faintest pulse, the throb of a tadpole cleaving water. “Not long. Fetch me cloths and some water.”

  “No.”

  Benedict had backed away and was leaning by the door. As Cai watched, he crossed himself. “I won’t help you treat him, Caius. Not one of his kind.”

  “They’re not bloody demons!”

  “They are to me. To all of us here. They surely were demons to Leof. Or do you forget?”

  Cai couldn’t answer. He waited for Theo’s voice in his head, the voice that had bidden him to spare his fallen enemy. But Theo had fallen silent, leaving him only with the vision of Leof’s destroyed face. If not a demon, he’d at least brought scarlet-handed murder into his brethren’s midst. “I don’t forget anything,” he said. “Get the others back to bed, and…tell Aelfric if you have to. Go.”

  He didn’t look up as the door thudded closed. He couldn’t pull his attention away from the man on the bunk. Was he gone? After taking from his satchel a piece of obsidian glass, Cai held it over the pallid mouth. He couldn’t detect a rise and fall in the Viking’s chest, and he didn’t want to touch him again, to feel beneath his week’s growth of soft beard that fine skin. He waited. After long moments, a faint cloud appeared on the glass.

  Cai got up. There was a bucket of water in the cell already, and a pile of clean rags. He remembered now putting them in here when he’d been treating the others after the fight. He washed his hands, scrubbing them afterwards wi
th the essence of sage and lavender Danan had taught him would help kill invisible sources of infection before surgery. He had perhaps half an hour before the effects of the poppy wore off. He drew up a stool by the cot. “Stay asleep for your own good, demon. I am going to save you. Or kill you, and I don’t care much which.”

  The sword wound was deep. Dark blood rushed from it when Cai pulled back the Viking’s leather jerkin. The bedframe was soaked with it, a black pool spreading on the floor. Another sign of life, Cai noted bitterly, stemming the tide with rags. Pulse after pulse of it, the heart still beating out the dance somewhere within that elegant chest, with its ribs sprung as beautifully as timbers in the keel of a longship.

  Stitching wouldn’t be possible yet—the edges of the wound were ragged and too far apart. Cai couldn’t remember twisting the blade as he’d dragged it back, but perhaps he had. He’d never been confronted with his own battlefield handiwork before. Quickly he soaked the cleanest of his rags in the solution of sage and lavender, wadded them up and began to pack them into the gaping hole. Blood welled up immediately around them. He grabbed a dry cloth and pressed that on top, then another. Both bloomed crimson, like the poppies that opened in one sunny hour around Benedict’s barley fields and faded as fast. Cai needed an extra set of hands. For want of them he began to unfasten the rough hemp girdle round his waist, then stopped. The Viking’s own belt would do better. Three inches wide and secured on his lean belly by a savage-looking wolf’s-head buckle, it would hold the bandages in place, and Cai could tighten it hard enough to hold pressure on the wound.

  He undid the belt. The buckle was cleverly forged, the mechanism of it belying the crude silver wolf. Hands slipping on blood, he tried to tug the leather strap free, but it was caught behind the young man’s back. Cai reached under him and lifted his hip.

  The Viking stirred. It was much too soon for the effects of the poppy to have worn off, but he was built like a young oak tree, his vigour manifesting in every line of his body. Nevertheless he was blind. Cai knew that when the amber eyes opened and searched for a focus, their pupils immense in the lamplight. Quietly, hampered by the rattle in his throat, he asked a question.

  Cai almost understood him. The language was like trying to look round a corner in his mind. Theo had taught that the narrow sea between here and the Dane Lands had once been dry, nomad hunters following the herds freely across it, bearing their words and ways with them.

  Where am I? Who is here with me?

  Cai ignored him. He ripped the sheepskin hook that secured the belt at the back, jerked it up far enough to cover the wound and drew the strap tight through the buckle. The Viking arched and groaned. Blood gleamed on his lips. The words came again, two out of five familiar to Cai’s ears. Who is here with me? Who?

  Cai sat back. He folded his arms and pushed his hands into the sleeves of his cassock. He wanted to stroke the dying man’s hair back off his brow. He wanted to lean over him, ease his head up and cushion it on his arm. He clenched his fingers tight round his own wrists to hold himself still—he wanted to kiss this enemy’s bloodstained mouth, hold him and bear him gently into death.

  Who is with me?

  “Gunnar,” Cai said softly. He clutched his arms harder, holding himself fiercely still. “I am here with you. Gunnar.”

  The Viking took a fever from his wounds. Despite Cai’s herbs and hand-washing, poisons had entered his blood. By morning, although breath was still rasping in and out of his lungs, his skin was dry and papery, burning beneath Cai’s touch. The fire inside released a terrible last strength in him, and he lashed out howling at Cai, knocking a flagon of water from his hands, then lurched upright on the bunk to seize poor Oslaf, the only one of Cai’s brethren who had consented to enter the quarantine cell, let alone help.

  Cai scrambled up off the floor. He detached the hand that had clenched on Oslaf’s robe, narrowly avoiding a blow from the other. The Viking was flailing around for his sword, now safely stowed away in the armoury.

  “Stop it,” Cai ordered. “Oslaf, fetch me the straps from the surgical tables.” He held the young man down by brute force until Oslaf returned, then pinned one wrist long enough to secure it to the frame of the bunk. Oslaf nervously did the same on the other side. The Viking thrashed on the bed, his eyes alight with delirium and hate. He fought his bindings wildly, then suddenly collapsed, expression draining from his sweat-soaked face to leave it serenely beautiful once more. Cai straightened up, breathless. “Best strap his ankles too. I’ve packed that wound as best I can, but it’ll open up if he thrashes round too much.”

  Oslaf nodded. The raider was still wearing his hide boots and thick deerskin leggings. Cai could have stripped him down while he slept the night before, and for any other sick man he’d have done it—washed him, tended unflinchingly to the inevitable bodily mess of near-death injury. Cai was ashamed of himself for leaving him dressed and filthy, but Benedict’s words had twisted together with his own loathing. To save the brute’s life was one thing. He couldn’t treat him as he had John or Wilfrid, men who had deserved from him a brother’s tenderness.

  He helped Oslaf tie the straps over the leggings, then glanced up at the younger monk. “Thanks. You should go now, though. Don’t make Benedict angry with you.”

  “It might be too late for that. I know what you told me—that I ought to play the game, but…” Oslaf paled, absently patting the Viking’s ankle as if he had been a friend. “I’m not sure it is one anymore. Ben won’t let me near him.”

  “But last night…”

  “He pushed me away. Sent me off to pray with the others.” Tears suddenly clouded Oslaf’s gaze, and he put out a hand to ward off Cai’s sympathy. “Do you think he’ll live, then? This demon of yours?”

  “I don’t understand how he’s still alive now.”

  “My grandmother used to say the hair saps strength in fever. She cut mine off when I was ill.”

  Cai looked at the raider’s sweat-darkened mane. “That’s nonsense, though, isn’t it? A superstition.”

  “Well, I’m alive. His hair looks the most living thing about him now.”

  It was true. The tangled curls seemed to have a vigorous existence of their own, glowing rich russet in the delicate early light filling the cell. “All right. It might be worth a try. I’ll go and find some shears. Will you stay with him till I get back?”

  Cai made his way quickly down to the barn where Brother Petros had kept his shears and shepherd’s crooks. He tried not to look about him. The barn was silent now, cobwebs already drifting from its timbers. The Fara flocks were out at emergency pasture under the care of any brother who could be spared to tend them. Aristocratic Petros, so disgusted at first at the task allotted him, had developed a fierce pride in his shepherding skills. His shears were hanging where he’d left them, gleaming and sharp. He’d branched out into barbering too, standing grimly smiling in the courtyard as his brethren had filed up for their monthly haircut. A sense of unreality washed through Cai still when he thought of that night, the first raid, the holes it had torn in the world. He took the shears and hurried back out of the barn.

  The infirmary was quiet when he got back. Too quiet—nobody propped on an elbow to gossip with his neighbour in the next bunk, none of the usual demands for his attention. The door to the quarantine cell was shut. Oslaf was in the main ward, eyes downcast, washing bottles with ferocious concentration.

  Cai didn’t bother to question him. He swept through the ward. Thrusting the door wide, he saw just what he had expected—Abbot Aelfric, crouching over the Viking’s bunk, beaklike face avid. Cai drew breath to yell and lost it as a grip closed on him from behind. “Ben,” he gasped, trying to twist round. “What is he doing? Let me go.”

  Benedict shook his head. “Be silent. The abbot must talk to his prisoner.”

  “His… Ben, for God’s sake.”

  “He isn’t harming him. Be still.”

  Cai twisted like a wildcat, but there was no shifting Ben
edict’s grasp once it had closed. Involuntarily he began to listen to the abbot’s voice. It was low, almost tender—a litany of soft-voiced Latin. “What do you want? What do you want, boy?”

  He was using the respectful vultis, not vis. And the Viking was awake again, his eyes wide and lucid. Aelfric’s hands were on him. Their movement was caressing. For a moment Cai wondered if he’d been wrong about the carrion bird from the south. Was Aelfric offering help to the injured man—soothing him with that touch?

  “Quid vultis, puer?”

  Cai shook himself. Aelfric had been half out of his wits before the raid, and now—now he was quite insane. He had brought his madness here into Cai’s domain, for God alone knew what vile purpose. His grasp on the Viking wasn’t kindly. He was putting pressure on his wounds. And the boy was lying silent in his effort not to weep.

  Cai had a pair of freshly sharpened shears in his hand. He tossed them aside before he could use them. Fists were better than blades, and an elbow to Benedict’s gut best of all. Ben doubled up with a grunt, and Cai sprang forwards, seizing Aelfric by the hood. “Let him be, you savage bloody buzzard. Leave him alone!”

  Aelfric snapped upright. He was thin but powerful and his backhanded slap made Cai’s nose sting. “How dare you?” he snarled. “Brother Benedict, restrain him. I will have the secret of Fara from this demon if I have to tear it out along with his teeth.” He rounded on the Viking again. “What do you want? What are you and your legion of infidels raiding for? Quid vultis?”

  Not the polite form. The plural. Cai broke into bitter laughter. “You fool, Aelfric. There is no secret. That was poor Theo’s dying dream. Who told you about it?”