Brothers of the Wild North Sea

by Harper Fox

  “And I shall call this horse Eldra—the fire.”

  There was no one else at the bathing pools when Eldra had picked her way down the cliff path and onto the rocks. Cai was relieved. He knew that every kindness shown to Fen was an insult to the memory of his slain brethren, and more so to the living ones who had to witness it. He looped the horse’s leading rein round an outcrop of rock in the shade, then turned to Fen, who had remained silent for the last part of the journey. “I know you wouldn’t let me help you up there. But I think you’ll have to let me help you down.”

  Fen regarded him blankly. “Yes. To my undying mortification.”

  “For God’s sake. All right. Swing your leg over her forequarters, not her rump. It’ll pull your stitches less that way.”

  “It is an unmanly way to dismount.”

  “So is landing on your face in the kelp. Come on.”

  Cai held his arms up for him. Reluctantly Fen consented to be aided down, slithering into Cai’s embrace, where he stood for a moment, trembling. “Enough. I can stand now. Let me go.”

  “Is every little thing a matter of life-and-death Viking honour for you?”

  “Of course.”

  Cai led him down to the pools. The tide was rising, as it had been on the day when he’d come here alone, yearning for the earthly pleasures Leof had just renounced. The water in the rocky basin was bright with the same green-blue reflection of sky. But Cai’s world had ended since then, burned to the ground and grown back again in a shape he still could barely comprehend. Who had that boy been, stretched out in the pool with nothing more on his mind than the hungry tension in his loins? All such needs had fled from him. In the few short hours of sleep he got, his cock remained quiescent, and the idea of his own touch scarcely occurred.

  Ironic that he’d achieved his monastic ideal in such a way. Leof would have said it didn’t count, if he was no longer tempted, but that was one of the many nuances of Christian thinking Cai had never understood. Achieving the result was surely good enough. “Take off your robe and get into the water.”

  “Into the…”

  “Yes. Come on. It’s not too cold on a day like today.”

  The look Fen gave him could have been bottled and used as a wound-cleansing liniment. “My whole body? Into that?”

  “Yes. We dirty Christians do this once a week, whether we need it or not. Theo insisted on it. Come on—the salt water will help heal you.”

  Fen put out a defensive hand when Cai reached to help him lift the cassock over his head, so Cai stepped back and let him get on with it. He kept his attention on the rocks, the rainbow gleam of sea urchins and cockleshells through the sunlit water. He’d seen a hundred naked men before, and once they passed into his hands as patients their bodies lost all significance to him but the parts of them that needed healing. Fen’s splendid shadow was only an image, a thing to admire from his new, cold distance.

  He took the cassock wordlessly, choosing not to complain that Fen had thrust it at him with a princely disregard. Not this time, anyway. “All right. Get in slowly. If you stay off the kelp, you won’t slip.”

  “You too.”

  “What?”

  “You too. Prove to me that this insane immersion is truly your practice, and not just your effort to freeze me to death, or drown me.”

  “Oh, for God’s…” Cai began to strip off his own robe. He didn’t want to get into the water. He didn’t want to be reminded of his last visit here, the warmth inside his marrow, the pleasant exhaustion that came after loving. Now that he’d gone to the trouble of getting Fen down here, he didn’t really care what happened to either of them. If this was the quickest way of dealing with him, so be it. He splashed into the water, slithering himself on the seaweed, righted himself and reached up his hands. “Here. Get in.”

  Fen picked his way down the rock. For a big man, he moved with a cautious grace that made Cai want to laugh despite the chilly numbness in his breast, and he clutched Cai’s wrists like a scared child. “Gods, monk!” he rasped when he was knee-deep. “No wonder you can keep your vows. Who would care for the pleasures of frig after this?”

  “That’s not exactly how it works. Anyway, how can a rock pool be so cold to you after you’ve crossed the North Sea on a raid?”

  “We cross the sea in boats, in case you didn’t notice. How is it that your bollocks haven’t crawled up into your belly forever?”

  Cai, not quite hip-deep in the water, struggled not to follow Fen’s gaze. “Well, if yours do,” he said, pulling him down to stand beside him, “it’s surely the least you deserve.” He waited till Fen was off balance, then put a hand between his shoulders and shoved him into the pool.

  He listened with interest. Some of the language he was hearing was similar to Broc’s, when a horse or a dog had annoyed him beyond endurance. Fen struggled in the water, submersing completely, then flipping back out like one of the silver-skinned porpoises Cai saw from time to time on fishing trips out beyond the islands. He shouldn’t have been out of his depth, and even if he was…

  The fear that this great seafaring pirate couldn’t swim seized Cai like a cold hand. He plunged in after him, stilling his frantic movements with an arm around his chest. “Easy. Don’t thrash about so. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.” Fen fought for a few seconds more, then lost a sobbing, coughing breath, the back of his skull resting on Cai’s shoulder. “I am cold. I hurt where you stabbed me. And I don’t…”

  “Yes?” Cai was interested in this string of nothings. “What else?”

  “I don’t understand why my brother hasn’t come back to slit all your throats in the night and rescue me.”

  It was on Cai’s lips to tell him that one Viking raider was as treacherous as the next—to ask him what he had expected. The ragged wound with its crude stitches gaped a dreadful blue-black beneath the water. Where you stabbed me… Fen had never said as much before, as if he hadn’t taken the injury personally, accepting it as one of the chances of war. “What happened that night? Why did they leave you behind?”

  “They did not. They would not.”

  “And yet here you are.”

  “Through no fault of Gunnar’s. Or Sigurd’s, for that matter. They must have thought I was dead.”

  “I’ve heard legends that your kind leave no one behind. Not even a corpse.”

  Fen dispensed with his grasp. After an ungainly movement or two, he seemed to find his rhythm. Of course he could swim. He struck out across the pool, putting as much distance as he could between himself and Cai. On the far side, he tried to haul out, finely corded muscles straining in his back. Then his strength failed him. He slid halfway back into the water, clutching at the rocks. “You will get me out of here, monk.”

  “In a minute.” Cai swam over to him. Before Fen could object, he turned him, seizing his narrow hips and settling him so that he was sitting on a ledge, in the place where the jade-blue water was most strongly warmed by the sun. Cai scooped up a handful of sand and rubbed it over Fen’s thigh, or tried to—he dodged a cuff aimed at his head and retreated. “Do it yourself, then.”

  “What is it for?”

  “It cleanses you. Scrapes all the scabs and the lice off you.” Treading water, Cai watched him. He needed some attention himself. He hadn’t cared, over the last couple of weeks, whether he was dirty or clean, and Aelfric certainly hadn’t taken any trouble over the matter. He rubbed sand onto his own limbs, and Fen did the same, hands moving uncertainly over his powerful shoulders. When he tried to reach down, though, pain shadowed his face.

  “I cannot.”

  “Let me. You must know by now I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “No. But you shame me—every day, with your touch and your interference about my person, and your questions about my water and my bowels.”

  “I’m a physician. There’s no shame in that.”

  “A Dane warrior should need no physic. A Dane warrior should need no…”

&n
bsp; Cai let him run on. His voice was somehow consonant with the wind and the splash of the water, and if it helped him to complain and lay down his warrior’s laws while he submitted to having his legs rubbed with sand, so be it. Cai allowed his mind to drift. These beautiful limbs were longer than Leof’s, carved with a strength Leof’s quiet life had never demanded of him. Badly scarred from what looked like untreated axe wounds. The big, tense muscle that ran up the back of the thigh made Cai’s ache in sympathy—and something darker, a vibration of longing. But all that had died in him, hadn’t it? Cai was glad that Leof had been his last, that he’d bear onwards into his life with him memories of such purity.

  “Who is Theo?”

  Cai looked up. Fen was regarding him, his gaze like sea-light through honey. Salt had caught his lashes together, and his shorn hair had grown out enough to spike as the sun dried his crown.

  “You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “Theo who makes you bathe. Theo who thinks man’s flesh is a beautiful gift from God.”

  Surprised that he’d remembered, Cai shrugged. “He used to be our abbot here. Before Aelfric.”

  “Aelfric the scarecrow?”

  Cai almost smiled. “I didn’t think you were listening then. Yes, Aelfric the scarecrow.”

  “I shouldn’t think you ever called your abbot Theo names.”

  “No. He was a good man. He taught us about the movements of the stars, and how to treat one another well. I loved him.” Suddenly Cai recalled who he was talking to, and he finished the rubdown ungently, making Fen wince. “Much good it did me. Your lot killed him in the raid before the one that bestowed your gracious presence on me.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Yes. He died defending our library and scriptorium. He was armed with a book. You can get out of the water now.”

  Fen couldn’t. Cai watched him struggle for long enough to satisfy the new surge of pain and hatred in his heart, then went to give him a hand. He thrust Fen’s discarded cassock at him, and bent to pick up his own.

  “Is that why you took up the sword, warrior priest?”

  Cai couldn’t read Fen’s stare. It was comprehensive—taking him in from the top of his head to the soles of his bare feet, paying thorough attention to those places where he was much less priest than warrior. His shoulders, the musculature of his arms, as if any moment he might be recruited for some lightning raid up the coast…

  “That’s right,” he said coldly. “The only throats that will get slit around here will be Viking ones. Fara is defended. Tell that to your brother, if he ever comes looking for trouble here again.”

  Chapter Six

  Dark of the moon, a month after the second raid. The church was completed, and Cai knelt on its stone-flagged floor between Benedict and Brother Martin. This was midnight office, the most ungodly, to Cai’s mind, of all the new canonical hours. He’d stopped objecting to them. He could see how they might work and be beautiful, in a monastery with plentiful resources and time on its hands—a kind of circle-dance of prayer so that no hour would pass without praise of God’s name.

  Matins, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline, midnight office. The names had their own music. They blended with Laban’s plainsong chant and the flickering torchlight. No one needed Cai’s attention in the infirmary, and no less than three men had been set to watch the coast for raiders. Freed for once from anxiety, Cai felt the tug of sleep. Subtly he eased his hood forwards. Beside him, Martin emitted the tiniest snore. Theo had used to provide a chair for him during mass, but the old man had learned the art of sleeping on his knees whilst maintaining an attitude of perfect devotion.

  On Cai’s other side, Benedict knelt with spine erect, tension radiating off him. These days he spent more time with the Canterbury clerics than amongst his brethren. Aelfric spoke to him often, too quietly for anyone else to hear, and Ben would listen, head bowed. Oslaf kept bewildered distance from him, lost weight and grew pale. Cai opened his eyes again. He’d never be free from worry, would he—not at Fara, not now.

  The chanting stopped. That was the signal for the monks to rise and return to their bunks until matins three hours later, the real start of the monastic day. Cai put a hand to Martin’s elbow to wake him and help him up, but Aelfric stepped forwards from the shadows. “No,” he commanded, his voice more like a crow’s caw than ever. “Remain on your knees.”

  Cai bit back a groan. Three hours was little enough time to prepare for a day of farming, weaving, rebuilding and all the other duties that fell upon the brethren now, with their reduced numbers, and no Theo to point each man to his right task and ease the labour. Normally even Aelfric released them without a further sermon.

  “Remain on your knees. It is thus you must hear God’s word on the ultimate fate of your souls. Your former abbot, thinking to spare you, never taught you the one truth that could bring you to salvation. He knew his own heresy, and so he kept silent on the truth of hellfire. He knows it well enough now.”

  Cai tried to lurch to his feet. Ben gripped his arm, and he subsided. Why should he care? Theo was safe, far beyond the reach of the carrion crow. The more Cai objected, the more of Aelfric’s grim attention he drew to himself, and he wished only to slip unnoticed through his shadowed days. Those were the terms of his uneasy truce with the abbot—silence and cooperation, in return for Aelfric’s blind eye to his various privileges. He was still allowed to train his men to fight—to keep a warhorse and chariot, and a wounded Viking raider in a quarantine cell. He lowered his head.

  “Each one of you here will have undergone pain. Perhaps you have broken a bone, or had a colic fever in your guts, or burned yourselves with hot fat from the kitchen fires. Is it not so?”

  Martin suddenly stirred. “Aye, aye. But we have our Caius to mend all of that for us.”

  A ripple of laughter went through the congregated monks. “Hush, Martin,” Cai whispered, giving the old man’s hand an affectionate squeeze. “Just listen. We’ll be out the sooner.”

  “The brother is old, and therefore we forgive him, although I see no need for a band of holy men to keep a brewery, and it is my intent to shut it down. Imagine the worst moment of your pain. Bring it back to mind and feel it now. What made you endure it?”

  Silence fell in the church. Most of Aelfric’s questions during sermons were rhetorical, but he seemed to want an answer to this one. An owl hooted off among the ruins, and the torches rustled. Cai couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  “Because it passes, my lord abbot.”

  Oslaf had pushed back his hood. His pain-filled gaze was fixed not on Aelfric but on Benedict. “We endure because it passes. And…” He paused, focussing for an instant on Cai, a faint smile flickering. “And, in truth, we do have Caius.”

  “I forbid further mention of Caius.” Aelfric took another step towards the congregation. The torchlight cast his shadow up across the ceiling until he was tall and thin as a storm-blasted ash, and his outstretched fingers sprouted long, clasping claws. “We endure because it passes. Yes. But I am here to tell you this—in hell, there is no such mercy as the earthly passage of time. You are pinned like an insect upon the most terrible moment of your agony, and…it will last forever.”

  A sound like a low-moaning wind filled the church. The light of the torches remained steady, though. After a moment Cai identified the source of the keening. Laban and the other clerics had drawn close, heads together, faces invisible beneath their hoods.

  “Forever,” Aelfric repeated, and their voices rose.

  Cai went cold with disgust. Surely men who had been taught by Theo to think for themselves could never fall prey to such theatrics. He began to get up. He would take his brethren with him out of here and into the clean night. Vikings and darkness were less to be feared than these lies.

  But Ben was moaning too. His sound was deep and real, full of grief-stricken terror. Cai took hold of his wrist beneath the sleeve of his cassock. “Come with me,” he whispered. “It’s all righ
t.”

  “No! I can’t move. Don’t leave me.”

  Cai knelt still. Aelfric’s shadow-arms extended, up and across the raftered ceiling, enclosing the whole congregation. “Brother Benedict knows,” he intoned. “He knows the sins that plunge the soul into hellfire. Worst among them all is impure love. What is impure love, Brother Benedict?”

  “All love of the flesh is impure,” Ben gasped out. This was a lesson he’d clearly learned well. Rocking, clutching Cai’s hand, he began to recite. “All fleshly love is lust, a perversion of God’s love. Our bodies are sacred to Christ. To lie with a woman condemns our soul. To lie with one another as with women impales us like insects in the hellfire. Forever. Forever.”

  Cai had had enough. He tore his hand out of Benedict’s and stood up, ready to take on Aelfric barehanded if he had to. Anything to stop this.

  But Aelfric was already on the move. His face was calm and satisfied, as if he’d achieved his goal. The clerics had stopped keening and formed up into a protective phalanx around him. Together, like a river of black pitch through the very firelit hell Aelfric had created with his words, they swept out of the church.

  Benedict sprang up to follow. Cai tried to stop him, and Oslaf, pale as death, made a helpless grab for his sleeve, but Ben left at a run, clumsy, a broken-down piece of machinery shambling in his master’s wake.

  The rest of the brethren gathered together like frightened sheep. They too began to move, Oslaf in their midst. They bumped against Cai, who was rooted where he stood, jostling him blindly. Only Oslaf seemed to see him. They exchanged one glance, and then Oslaf too was gone, melting with the others into the night. A gust of wind rushed through the open door, extinguishing the last torch, and Cai was alone in the dark.

  No. Not quite alone. At his feet, Brother Martin gave a twitch and woke himself with one mighty snore. He looked up peaceably at Cai. “Ah. I was sleeping. Is it over, then?”

  Cai picked him up carefully, waiting till his legs were steady under him before letting him go. He brushed the dust and cobwebs off his robes. “Yes. Yes, it’s over.”