Brothers of the Wild North Sea

by Harper Fox

  Benedict hung his head. “I won’t have anything more to do with this,” he muttered. “Not for either of you. I can’t.” He turned away. Aelfric shrieked his name, but he ignored it, blundering out through the ward.

  The outer door banged shut behind him. Once more Cai hauled Aelfric away from the Viking’s bunk. Aelfric struggled, and Cai, sickened, drew back a fist and knocked his abbot down with a punch straight out of Broc’s muddy barnyard.

  Aelfric sprawled on the flagstones. His mouth opened and closed like that of a fresh-landed cod. Before any sound could come out of it, Cai interrupted, so low and soft that Aelfric blanched still further. “Leave my friends alone, scarecrow. My enemies too, for that matter. If there’s any torture to be done around here…” He paused, glancing at the helpless man strapped to the bunk. “I’ll do it myself. For a start, I know better than to interrogate a prisoner in a language he doesn’t understand. Now get out of my ward.”

  Aelfric almost choked. “Yours?” He staggered to his feet. “This place—the whole of Fara—is mine now, by God’s decree. I can have you banished with a word.”

  “Say it, then.” Cai brushed dust off his cassock. He didn’t care anymore about this monster, or the one on the bed. He was tired and lonely, and wanted only to be back in Leof’s arms among the sun-warmed grasses of the dunes. “Say your word, and defend Fara yourself next time the raiders come. Otherwise leave me alone.”

  A silence fell in the little room. Cai didn’t look, but he heard the retreating slither of the abbot’s robes on the flags. Aelfric didn’t slam the outer door as Ben had done. He left it contemptuously wide, as if to let all the winds of heaven come and chill the sick men behind him.

  Cai went and closed it. He glanced around the ward to check that no one had taken harm from the draught or needed his immediate help. He waited briefly, meeting each pair of wide eyes in turn, to see if anyone had anything to say for himself on the subject of wolves in the fold. Then he returned to the quarantine cell.

  The Viking was sobbing. He would have done anything to prevent it, Cai saw—had already bitten his lip raw. His eyes were tight shut, his face a bone-white mask. His chest jerked in helpless spasms. Tears had carved tracks across his cheekbones, pale in the blood and dirt.

  He was trying to curl up around his injury. Quickly Cai unfastened the straps round his left wrist and ankle to allow it. The Viking struggled onto his side. He turned his face to the bare timbers of the bunk, his heavy sheaf of hair falling to shield him. Rough, unstoppable sounds came from beneath it.

  Cai’s throat ached as if he’d suddenly swallowed scalding water, and he knelt by the bunk. “I’m sorry,” he said, his own voice hoarse and strange to him. “I know you don’t understand me. I’m sorry. Let me see to your wound.”

  “I do understand.”

  Cai jerked back. He sat on his heels, wondering if the clear Latin declaration had come from somewhere else. “What?”

  The Viking shoved his hair back with a shaking hand. “I do understand,” he repeated, gazing bleakly straight into Cai’s face. “I speak Latin. I was taught it by a slave monk in my lord Sigurd’s kingdom—the only thing you puny Christians are good for.”

  Cai swallowed hard. It was as if a wild beast he’d encountered in the forest had suddenly addressed him and opened a discourse. “Why… Why didn’t you tell Aelfric?”

  “The scarecrow?” The Viking managed a half-choked laugh. “I speak only to men. Because you have aided me, I will speak to you. When I have strength to kill you, I will do that, but until then, listen to my advice, monk—a favour for a favour. Give up the treasure of Fara Sancta. Sigurd and the other Dane Land warlords will keep on raiding till you do.”

  “There is no treasure. No treasure, no secret. We barely have food to put in our mouths since the last time you savages burned us. Don’t you think we’d have surrendered anything we had?”

  “Sigurd had to kill many monks before he found one who would teach him. You are strong beneath your skirts, or stubborn anyway. Stubborn and stupid. Be wise, physician. Give it up.”

  The Viking’s eyes flickered shut. Cai reached to ease him over onto his back, but he reanimated. “I am called Fenrir,” he rasped, the effort bringing blood to his lips. “Fenrir, after Fenrisulfr, the great wolf of our legends. You must make me well again, monk, and then you have to set me free. I am a prince in my own land—second heir to Lord Sigurd’s Torleik realm, and Sigurd and my brothers and my comrades will be back for me. You must let me go.”

  “Happily. I’d dump you back on the beach in a heartbeat, your majesty.”

  “A prince in my own…” The Viking writhed, fresh sweat breaking on him. “Oh, gods. Kill me now, monk. I have soiled myself. I am disgraced.”

  Pity went through Cai like a blade. On its heels came a weird surge of laughter, which he bit back fiercely, bewildered by it. “No, you’re not. Your body is tired and weak, that’s all. Will you let me clean you up?”

  “The work of a menial. A slave.”

  “Well, you’ve established that’s all we Christians are good for.”

  “I stink like a pig.”

  “You certainly do. I’ve neglected you. I hoped you would just die.”

  Their eyes met. The faintest glimmer touched the Viking’s pain-filled stare. “You’re honest, at any rate. What is your name?”

  “Caius.”

  “Caius?” On the raider’s lips the word came out like the call of a seabird, and Cai repressed a shiver. “My father’s father met a Roman general by that name, a century or so ago. He stuck his head on a spike.”

  “My ancestors did worse to yours, I’m sure. My father is a chieftain, descended from the Roman army here.”

  “A chieftain… Then you too are a prince in your own land.”

  “All five muddy acres of it, yes.”

  “Very well. I will permit you to tend me.”

  Cai shook his head. He brought two pails of water over to the bunk and set about his task. The stench in the cell was bad, but Cai had nursed the whole community of Fara through a bout of cholera flux, and not much could turn his stomach now. He only felt sick at having left the Viking—Fenrir, had he called himself?—to lie like this in his dirt. First he cleaned and repacked the sword wound, which was bleeding again after Aelfric’s ministrations. Fenrir moaned and passed out during the process, which made the rest easier.

  Working as swiftly as he could, Cai stripped him of his boots and deerskin trousers. Underneath them he wore a subligaculum like Cai’s own, countering the legend that these vikingr pirates had parts so monstrous they had to be strapped up inside a bull’s horn. The long strip of linen was stiff with excrement and blood. Cai unwrapped it briskly from round Fenrir’s hips, distractedly noting as he pulled away the strip that ran between his legs that the beaten-bronze loin guard stitched into it had protected a splendid, shapely length of cock.

  He threw the subligaculum aside for burning, then added to the pile the ruined shirt beneath Fenrir’s jerkin. The jerkin itself was good of its kind, well crafted, and would serve again despite the slash through its sheepskin-lined leather. The trousers too. Cai folded these to be cleaned, thinking with a pang of how poor Brother Blacksmith would have exclaimed over the riveted lace-holes and that neat cock-piece.

  The Viking was naked, and as finely made as any of his trappings. Just for the length of one indrawn breath, the man in Cai took over from the doctor. Skin a shade between bronze and ivory, marked across the shoulders and chest with coiling blue-black serpents, needle-pricked designs such as Danan’s ancestors had used to bear as signs of their warrior caste. A frame of such lean, tensile strength that even half a breath from dying it was beautiful. “Fenrisulfr,” Cai said softly, suddenly assailed by memories of a fire-and-shadow dream.

  Cai washed him scrupulously, from the crease of his backside to his armpits, and then with a fourth or fifth clean rag took the dust and the traces of tears from his face. He worked quickly, closing the cell’
s lead-framed window as soon as the air was clear. A fine spring day was rising outside, belying all the torchlit horrors of the night, but still the breeze was fresh, and he shook out two blankets from a wooden chest against the wall.

  Fenrir shifted and moaned as the wool settled over his limbs. His fever was mounting again. Cai felt his brow and reluctantly fastened him back to the bed. A wolf in the fold was bad enough, but a delirious one with axe skills didn’t bear thinking about. He looked at the curtain of hair streaming down off the end of the bunk. It seemed to be coiling all the more vigorously as its owner lost strength. Well, superstition or not, it was doubtless full of lice, impossible to wash without chilling the Viking to death.

  Cai retrieved the shears from the corner where he’d hurled them out of temptation’s reach. He sat on the edge of the bed, his thigh pressing gently against Fenrir’s ribs. Carefully, untangling each strand as far as he could without tugging, he cut the fox-red mass away.

  The mask of a savage archangel emerged. Maybe this creature was some kind of royalty in his own world. His brow was broad and capable, his cheekbones sculpted, delicate in their contours as the corners of his mouth. His nose had been broken at some point but not badly reset, its slight irregularity lending a charm to a face that would otherwise have chilled with its aristocratic perfection. Unable to help himself, Cai ran a hand across the shorn hair.

  “Gunnar,” the Viking whispered, shifting to find the caress.

  Cai shivered. This raider—this demon, this archangelic wolf—must have his own Leof, his own beloved bedmate and companion, somewhere in the Dane Lands.

  “Gunnar… Bróðir. Bróðir minn.”

  Bróðir… The word was almost the same in the language Cai had shared with Leof, the familiar rough dialect of the northern coast. Not a bedmate, then—a brother. Gunnar, my brother. Once more, unwanted pity assailed Cai. He couldn’t understand it. And much less could he comprehend his own brief, blood-hot rush of pleasure and relief.

  Chapter Five

  The evening light was sweet. Now that June was here, the scurvy grass was in full flower, masses of it carpeting the rocks and turf along the shoreline. Scattered sea thrift broke its fragrant snowdrifts with taller pink blossoms that danced in the wind. The combined scents, blowing in on a warm sunset breeze, washed over Cai where he sat on a bench outside the armoury. Cai set down the axe he had been polishing and leaned back.

  He could pretend, here in the last light, that all was well. The armoury was just a barn. Its sandstone blocks had soaked up a day’s worth of heat, radiating out now against Cai’s spine. The tide was low, the spur of sand that led to the islets exposed. There, beyond the bright green mermaid’s-hair kelp and the stones that sometimes yielded tiny, intriguing beads Theo had called sea-lily stems, the first monks of Fara had made their homes. Traces were still to be seen of their cells, not rooms in a dormitory hall but individual huts made out of stone, each one shaped like a beehive. Cai had thought his own life at the monastery tough, after the relative riches of his father’s court, but these first comers—holy men from Hibernia and the far west of Scotia—must have existed on little more than seaweed and blind faith.

  No, perhaps not blind. There was a peace and sense of purpose on this shore. The Hibernian saints had come here of their own free will, without an abbot or a settled Church to guide them, and here they had lived out their lives, listening to God’s word on the wind and the water. A hermit’s cave remained there still, marked by a poignant, plain wooden cross. Theo, too lively and sociable a creature to withstand a hermit’s life, had spoken with a kind of longing admiration of these men even while he prepared his brethren’s next lesson in astronomy or physics.

  Music joined the flower scents and skeined itself through them on the breeze. Cai closed his eyes. In this world where all was well, his brothers were singing. The church walls were finished, new timbers arching over the space they enclosed. The work of thatching would take longer, so the voices rose unfettered, a rich chant for vespers. Laban, Aelfric’s grim-faced deputy, concealed a pure tenor inside his scrawny chest and an unexpected gift for teaching the ragbag voices of Fara to join in harmoniously with it. The labours of the fields were disrupted, brethren running everywhere in their attempts to keep up with the new routine of Hours, but in spring it could almost be done, and Cai had to admit the music was lovely. Leof would have delighted in it.

  He allowed himself to drift, imagining he could pick out Leof’s clear note from the mingled voices. He had been up since dawn. The infirmary was clear of all but the most serious cases from the battle a fortnight before, but John required constant attendance, and the Viking, after his wild declarations of princedom and intended murder, had lapsed into a strange, half-waking passivity, watching Cai’s movements about the quarantine cell with dull, hooded eyes, accepting from him spoonfuls of broth before turning his head aside. He hadn’t spoken again, in Latin or his own language. Cai was beginning to think he’d dreamed their exchange after that night of fever and blood.

  He tipped his head back against the stone. As well as doctoring, he’d put in his duty shift as shepherd, helped with the silage crop and carried out his daily drill with the warrior brethren of Fara. At least this last was getting easier. Now that they’d won a fight, his unlikely soldiers trained with confidence as well as hope. They slashed and parried in the ruined hall, and sang like angels for Laban. Wondering at the strangeness of the world, Cai let go, weary nature having her way with him.

  He awoke in darkness. No one had come looking for him, but no one would, not now. A figure coalesced out of the gloom—Demetrios, collecting the fresh leaves of the scurvy grass by light of the thin new moon, a trick Danan had taught for capturing their freshness. Cai drew breath to greet him, then changed his mind. Demetrios was pretending with great sincerity not to have seen him. The Greek had been devoted to Theo. So had Benedict and Oslaf. There wasn’t a soul within the whole of Fara’s bounds who didn’t have cause to detest the vikingr—and equal reason to mistrust the man who had brought one into their midst, healed him and harboured him there. They took their fighting orders from Cai, did as he bade them on the training ground, and left him afterwards without a word.

  Cai didn’t blame them. Sometimes he thought back to the night of Theo’s feast, the lights and the chatter and the smallpipe music, and a slow ache of loneliness would drag through him. Everything had changed since then. He lived in a world of hard work and readiness to fight, not companionship and learning. Even Aelfric was leaving him alone, just as he’d asked, not harrying him over his haircut or his failure to turn up nine times a day for prayers.

  He watched Demetrios fade into the dusk, his basket of herbs balanced on one hip. It was time he went back in too. Oslaf took shifts in the ward, but he wouldn’t feed or tend Fenrir. Cai had no idea why he did it himself.

  Something clattered in the barn. Cai bolted off the bench and stood rigid, staring into the darkness beyond the open door. He’d thought nothing could scare him after two Viking raids, but like most of his brethren he jumped like a cat at sudden noises. Probably a sword had come down off its makeshift rack. Gathering his robes so he could move in silence, he eased into the barn.

  There was just enough light, once his eyes had adjusted. Quickly he worked his way along the racks and shelves, checking that everything was in place. He kept the armoury as orderly as his ward cabinets now, restlessly tidying and cleaning after each drill. He needed to know he could run here and lay hands on any weapon he chose, dole them out in proper order to his fighting men. Nothing was on the floor. Hands outstretched, Cai made a fingertip count of dagger hafts, shields, longstaffs…

  And came up one short on the swords. He froze, listening intently. The barn had ventilation windows on its landward side, high up in the wall but large enough to let a man climb through. A tall, determined one, anyway. Blindly Cai counted his broadsword handles again. Broc’s were all there, round and crude from the hillfort’s smithy. So were the be
tter ones the monks had stripped from the bodies of the Vikings they’d killed. The only one missing had a wolf’s-head bronze casting on its hilt.

  Cai ran. He didn’t try to follow the intruder through the windows. A dash down the overgrown track that edged the barn was quicker, if you didn’t mind nettle stings and scratches from the brambles. Lamps were still burning in the refectory. By their golden light, Cai made out a trail of crushed vegetation leading straight up to the main hall’s southern door.

  The refectory was echoingly empty. No—there was Eyulf, sieving flour for the morning’s bread, his face as usual covered with white dust.

  “Eyulf,” Cai called softly. “Have you seen…?” He remembered who he was talking to and shook his head. “Never mind. Just go to the dormitory barn and make sure the door is barred after you.”

  He was turning away when Eyulf banged on the table with his spoon. He got up from the bench, stood on his tiptoes to make himself taller, drew down his brows in a terrible scowl and took a couple of prowling steps forwards. Then he pointed to the stairs.

  At any other time, Cai would have laughed. “Thank you. Leave your bread for now, all right? I’ll find him.”

  He should have rung the warning bell. He could have had a dozen fighting men at his side in a minute, helping him track down the rogue. Instead he padded softly down the torchlit corridor that led to Aelfric’s office and the rooms where the Canterbury men had established their base. No chance of those high dignitaries bunking down with the brethren in the barn. Maybe this was the night they would learn to regret their splendid isolation. Maybe they had already learned. Aelfric allowed only one torch to burn in each corridor, and only until the lights had exhausted themselves and burned out. It was a good economy. Cressets and lamp oil were lasting much longer at Fara these days, and darkness shut down all reading and study at sunset, as Aelfric’s God intended.