Brothers of the Wild North Sea

by Harper Fox

  “Yes. What else?”

  “It is not,” Fen said. “Put your hand on mine.” Cai obeyed, and instantly Fen lunged forwards, making the monks scatter. “There. Did I move, or the sword?”

  “I don’t know. Both of you.”

  “Exactly. Both, and each as alive as the other. The blade is a part of you.” Fen thrust again, bearing Cai forwards with him. This time the action felt natural and easy, the leap of energy palpable between man and sword, and no, Cai couldn’t tell which was which.

  “I’m not sure…” he gasped, “…I want my brethren thinking of their weapons as part of themselves. We’re men of God.”

  Fen handed the sword back to him but didn’t step away. “When the vikingr next come, do you think they will care? Go easy on you because you are poor men of God, fighting against your will? Don’t hold it as if you wanted to cast it away. Take the hilt in your palm as if it were part of the bone running down from your elbow.”

  “Like that?”

  “Yes. It hurts me a bit less to see you, anyway. Show your men.”

  He turned and made his way back to his seat among the ruins. He was favouring his side again, and his final demonstration thrust had made him go pale. Resisting the urge to run after him, Cai faced the brethren, who were gathering round, interested to see what a Viking had had to teach on the subject of dealing with Vikings.

  “Well,” he said reluctantly. “He’s right, isn’t he? We have to go into battle as warriors, not monks, no matter how we would wish to live the rest of our lives. Watch me. Take the hilt in your palm like so—as if it were a part of you, an extension of your bone…”

  “And where will you be? When the vikingr next come?”

  They were descending the slope from the training ground. Cai had a patient waiting for him in the infirmary, Fen a stint with Benedict behind the plough. There was no reason for them to be lingering here, taking the walk slowly, shoulder occasionally brushing shoulder in companionable bumps. The morning sun was pleasant, though, belying grey clouds gathering out at sea.

  “I will be long gone by then. As soon as I can walk more than a few fields’ length.”

  “You can almost manage that now. And I’ve told you, you can take Eldra, if you’re so anxious to be gone. A chariot horse is no use for close fighting, not on this type of ground.”

  “Very well, I will. If you’re so anxious to be rid of me.”

  They stopped and looked at one another. Cai tried to interpret the glimmer in Fen’s eyes. Was that suppressed laughter? “No. I mean, I know you can’t stay here. But…”

  “Caius! Brother Caius!”

  Cai turned in time to see Oslaf taking the steps from the main building at a run. Oslaf’s skirts were flying, his face a colourless blank. “Oslaf? What’s wrong?”

  “Ben. Was he with you for drill practice?”

  “No. He doesn’t come anymore.” Cai steadied Oslaf as the young man halted in front of him. “Why? Can’t you find him?”

  “He should be out in the fields, but the ox is still in her stable. I haven’t seen him this morning at all.”

  “All right.” As soon as the words were out, Cai knew that it wasn’t. The ground seemed to shift beneath his feet, a shadow to pass over the sun still struggling against the coppery eastern clouds. “We’ll help you look. You run up to the infirmary, check that he’s not there. Fen, will you go and look in the barns?”

  Cai set off downslope again. Oslaf disappeared across the courtyard. Barely five seconds later, Fen emerged from a gap between outbuildings and fell back into step at Cai’s side. “You don’t think Benedict’s in the infirmary.”

  “No.”

  “Or in the barns either.”

  “No.”

  “Where, then?”

  Cai couldn’t tell him. His mouth and throat were numb, as if he’d been swimming in icy water. He could only keep walking. In the bright sweep of open ground below, the newly rebuilt church shone innocently under its thatch. A sanctuary, a place of rest and prayer. Or so it had been, until Aelfric had opened up beneath it the burning pit. He broke into a run.

  He was blinded from the sunlight, and his vision flashed red and green as he stared around him in the shadows. The church was cool and silent, the lull in the canonical tide between terce and sext.

  It was also empty. His eyes cleared enough for him to be certain of that much. The doors banged behind him, admitting a wash of clean air and Fen, gasping for breath, one hand pressed to his side.

  “I couldn’t keep up with you.”

  “Sorry.” Cai too was breathless, now he had time to think about it. He leaned his hands on his knees, dizzy with relief. “I thought… I don’t know what I thought. But he isn’t here.”

  Fen came to stand beside him. Through the thump and rush of his own pulse, Cai became aware of his stillness—his absolute, focussed rigidity. The tension of a wolf scenting blood…

  “Cai. He is.”

  The doors thudded open again, and this time stayed wide, each of them caught and submissively held by one of the Canterbury clerics. In the middle stood Aelfric, cutting out a thin, mean shape from the brilliance behind him. Aelfric too scanned the church. “Brother Benedict is missing,” he said harshly. “I will not have such abandonment of discipline. Where is he?” His attention fastened on Cai and Fen like a grappling hook, and he gestured to Laban to take hold of Fen, who for once offered no resistance, falling back against the wall. “You, physician—I’ve turned a blind eye to your harbouring of this monster. His brute strength has its uses. But don’t you dare bring it in here, with its heathen corruption. This is holy ground.”

  Cai began to chuckle. He couldn’t help it. He was still elated, and Aelfric was so vile, so rich a contradiction of everything Cai had been taught about his new faith. “Aren’t we supposed to bring them in here if we can? The corrupt heathens, so we can convert them and…”

  He faded out. Aelfric wasn’t listening. Wasn’t looking at him either. His gaze was suddenly fixed where Fen’s had been. Where a faint, slight movement was now catching at Cai too, forcing him to look up—up and up into the shadows of the roof space.

  A human shape was hanging from the rafters. Cai took this much in, and then the sight and all it stood for seemed to rush to the far distance. He whipped round, looking for a human face. Not Aelfric, not Laban. They wouldn’t do. The third of the clerics, a Roman called Marcus, had sometimes seemed less sombre than the rest. Cai seized his shoulders. “Keep Oslaf out of here.”

  “Which… Which one is Oslaf?”

  There are so few of us, and you are our masters. How can you not know our names? Cai shook him. “Benedict’s friend. The young one. God, ask anyone—just keep him away!”

  Marcus stumbled out. Now that Cai had done that one vital thing, the distance closed, sweeping his next duty in on him. With it came hope, stabbing and hot. Hangings didn’t always work. Knots slipped, men were incompetent. Drops were too short to crush the trachea and break the neck. For as long as Cai had known him, Ben had never been the most deft or thoughtful of men. He was a ploughman. A staunch-hearted warrior when forced, and by nature a lover. All the actions of his hands had tended to life, not death. “I have to get him down!”

  He’d used the pulpit, the makeshift stairs and platform where Theo had nine times out of ten laid aside his sermon, folded his arms and addressed them agreeably, man to fellow men. He’d kicked it aside with great force. Cai dragged it upright from the place where it had fallen and pushed it back into place. He clambered up its steps, sick fear slowing him, filling his limbs with lead. The pulpit wasn’t tall. Nor was Cai, especially—not by contrast with Ben, who’d been able to stand here, string himself up, and…

  “I can’t reach him.” He tried anyway, leaning far out over the pulpit’s edge, grabbing a handful of Ben’s cassock and pulling him into his arms. He could only stretch as far as Ben’s hips. He took hold, desperately trying to lift him, to relieve the pressure on his neck. “I c
an’t reach him. I can’t get him down.”

  “Caius. I can.”

  Cai looked down. The church was filling now, men arriving, drawn by the chaos, taking a few steps and falling still. Aelfric remained rooted where he was. White faces stared, thank God none of them Oslaf’s. At the foot of the pulpit, Fenrir stood waiting. He had recovered from his fright. He was solid and strong, and he sought Cai’s gaze warmly. “Let me. I can bring him down.”

  Cai couldn’t let go. He stood aside to make room when Fen climbed up to join him, but he kept his hold on Ben, lifting, lifting. Only when Fen produced a bronze-handled knife from somewhere within his robes and reached up did he relinquish some of his burden, easing it into Fen’s free arm. Fen cut the rope with one savage gesture, and together they caught the body as it fell. Fen eased the bulk of it over his shoulder. “I’ve got him. Go down now.”

  Cai stumbled ahead of him down the pulpit steps. Together they laid Benedict out on the flagstones. Cai dropped to his knees, vaguely aware that Marcus was holding back the crowd. Now he could see Ben’s face. In that moment he understood that his friend had got it right after all—that he’d tied his final knot, and made his last leap, with perfect efficiency.

  Still he tried. He listened at his chest, silent as an empty barrel. He felt for the pulse at his throat and his wrist. Theo had taught him a heretical manner of calling back souls whom God had decreed drowned by breathing with his own lungs into their mouths, and he did that for a while, until the deadly cold of Benedict’s mouth under his, the unnatural movement of his head when he let go of it, finally bore it in that he would be recalling the spirit into a body so destroyed that revival would be cruel, an obscenity.

  He sat up. Full sunlight was blazing into the church now. The day would be hot. “Fen,” he said, his voice echoing hollowly in his ears. “Help me carry him down into the crypt. I have to…”

  There was no one there. No—the church was thronged now, but the one face Cai needed was missing.

  “Not in the crypt,” Aelfric was croaking at him. “Not a suicide. Not in holy ground.”

  Cai thrust him aside, his scrawny body as insubstantial as his words. Maybe Fen, having seen the worst that could happen on this holy ground, had taken advantage of the chaos and run. Cai didn’t blame him. It was time for him to do the same.

  He pushed blindly out into the light. He didn’t blame Fen, but he wanted him, and he loathed him in that moment for creating the bitter desolation in his heart, a hunger he’d never have known if they had never met. He set off uphill at a dead run. He kept going until he reached the outhouses, until his hands were tearing at the well-known latch of the small barn where he kept his supplies for journeys, his packs and his secular clothes. He tore off his cassock and tossed it as hard as he could into one corner, sending up a cloud of spiders and dust. Beneath its heavy wool he was sweating coldly, stinking of shock and misery. He’d walk into the first water he came to, and he didn’t much care if he came out. Perhaps he could use his last breath on a few of Fen’s curses, and trust in the sea to bear them home.

  There on the shelf were his shirt and deerskin leggings. He pulled them on with shaking hands. The shirt fastened with a fine leather strip across the chest. He had to lace it through fabric loops on each side, a task that proved impossible when he tried. Swearing, he tore the lace out altogether and threw it onto the ground. He’d do without. He’d do without the pack, for that matter—it wasn’t as if he’d be stopping off at the kitchens for supplies, or buying things from the settlements, or ever coming home. He was done here.

  Someone was blocking the door. Not a scarecrow shape this time—a graceful one, tall and straight. He had picked up Cai’s lace from the ground and was holding it, a delicate thing in his big hands. “You are leaving?”

  Cai didn’t answer. He kicked off his sandals, replaced them with the boots he kept in a wooden chest, safely out of reach of mice. Now he was ready. “Get out of my way.” Fen didn’t move, and Cai marched up to stand in front of him, not meeting his eyes. “I thought you were gone.”

  “No. I saw Oslaf heading for the church. Brother Wilfrid had just told him. He…required restraint.”

  Cai swallowed hard. “What did you do to him?”

  “I restrained him. I took him up to the infirmary. I gave him the poppy, the drug that brings sleep.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “A little.”

  “How did you know…?”

  “I took note when you gave it to me. He’s asleep. I left Wilfrid to watch over him. Now, do you want help with the body of your friend?”

  “No!” It came out as a shout, scaring the doves in the rafters. “Aelfric won’t let him lie in holy ground.”

  “Why in Thor’s name not?”

  “He took his own life. Another new rule, I suppose. I didn’t know. No one ever… No one ever did that here before.” His voice shook. “There was never any need.”

  Fen didn’t touch him. He bowed his head a little, so his brow was almost brushing Cai’s, and in a concentrated silence broken only by the wing beats and the music of the doves, he passed the leather lace through the first loop of Cai’s shirt. Then the next, and the next, until he drew the strands together in a knot. He repeated, his voice rough and low, insistent—“So. You are leaving?”

  In a bunk in the infirmary, Oslaf lay waiting to wake up into hell, a world of unimaginable pain. Wilfrid, whose sympathies and skills were those of a goatherd, sat helpless by his side. In the church, the ruined shell of a fine man lay, defenceless to the black-robed buzzards who believed him too corrupt to lie in his own monastery’s soil. None of this had anything to do with Cai anymore. This place was Aelfric’s now—it belonged to the crows. And yet… “No,” he snarled, stepping back out of range of Fen’s warmth. “I just have to get off this damned holy ground for a while.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and thought for a few moments, frowning at the hard-packed earth. Water. He wanted water, to be clean again, or at least away from the mud. “I’m going fishing.”

  “Fishing?”

  “Yes. I go out sometimes and fish. Food, you know? Meat that hasn’t been strung up in a cellar for three months. Let me past.”

  “There’s going to be a storm, Cai.”

  “Nonsense. It’s beautiful. Do I have to knock you down, or…?”

  “No.” Fen stepped aside.

  A few yards down the track that led to the boathouses, the weather-beaten sheds where the monks kept their fishing creels and lobster nets, Cai turned. Fen was watching him intently, beautiful in the sunlight. Cai would have given anything to run back into his arms. “Do something for me, will you?”

  “If I can.”

  “Oslaf has family. He comes from farming stock up near Berewic. Find one of the lads who runs errands between here and the village, and give him a message. Tell them to come for him. Tell them to come now.”

  At last he was alone. Nothing and no one could touch him out here. Cai let the oars rest in their rowels, muscle spasms chasing one another down his back, arms throbbing. The monastery had one small sailboat, but Cai had taken his usual coracle. It was little more than cattle hides stretched over a wooden frame. One man could handle it, though, and he hadn’t wanted the intricacies of sail. Just to run the craft down the causeway with a tremendous scrape and rattle, leap into her at the last second, and row and row. He lowered his head. Sweat trickled down between his shoulder blades.

  The sunlit waters held him. He felt their movement under the keel, one tiny part of an unimaginable whole of movement, a rocking and surge that could bear him—if he had strength and fair weather—right to the frigid wastes of the north, or south to the Mid-Earth Sea, where Theo had told him, eyes distant with longing, that dolphins leapt and the sun shone all year round. Far to the east was Fen’s home, the land of the Danes. Perhaps he ought to head there, surprise the vikingr by going to them. They couldn’t be worse, them and their dark gods, than the nightmare unfolding itself at Fara
in the name of Christ.

  No. He wanted to stay here and feel that mighty rocking, greater than any man or god. He also wanted to stop crying, because that was what he had been doing since he cast off, raw sobs racking him. His chest was sore. Strength was leaching out of him. With an effort, he caught his breath. Nothing in his heart or mind would accept that Ben was dead.

  “Ben,” he called out, as if his friend’s spirit might still be nearby and could come back to set things right, wipe out the atrocity. “Benedict!”

  Only the wind answered him. He curled up, laced his fingers round the back of his head and closed his eyes.

  A thud on the prow of the boat brought him round. He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there. He was sleepy, and a kind of numb peace had come over him. He didn’t think it was the holy serenity Leof had said was the goal of their religious lives, but he would take it. It would do. Leof, Benedict, Theo. Gone. A bird was sitting on the prow. It was one of the fat little creatures that haunted the group of rocky islets two miles or so out from Fara. Their beaks were striped in vivid rainbow colours, their movements comical. The puffin watched him curiously, shifting its weight from one outrageous bright pink foot to the other. Then it took off, short wings beating frantically, towards the nearest island.

  The seals were hauling out there too. It wasn’t basking time. Cai knew the rhythms for this far better than he knew his canonical hours, the tidal intervals when the rocks below Fara would almost disappear beneath the furry, mottled bodies. As he watched, a small flotilla of beautiful black-and-white ducks bobbed past the coracle’s prow, calm on the surface but heading purposefully inland.

  Get out of the water. Cai received the message loud and clear from these three harbingers, and he set it aside in his mind. The day was still lovely, if he didn’t look behind him to the place where surly clouds had been gathering since dawn. The ducks became a glimmering patch in the distance. Eider, they were called, their feathers highly coveted stuffing for pillows. Addy ducks, the locals sometimes called them.