Brothers of the Wild North Sea

by Harper Fox

  “I don’t know,” Cai whispered. “Is it…bad? Do you regret it?”

  “I regret the years without you. I used to see the other young men bind themselves to one companion, whether in lust or friendship, and I tried to believe I wasn’t made like that. It was my last thought on the beach that night, while I lay dying in the waves—that if I’d had such a companion, he wouldn’t have allowed me to be left behind.”

  “I never will.”

  “And you—I will fight for you until we are stricken down together and our spilled blood mingles in the sand.”

  “That’s a lovely thought.”

  Fen caught the tremor of laughter in Cai’s voice. “It is not given to me to express my feelings more gently. Will you accept this?”

  “Absolutely.”

  They knelt for a long time in silence, only the rush and in-breath of the moon-swollen tide to accompany their thoughts. Then Cai smiled, recalled to the moment by the demands of his importunate flesh. “This is all very noble and pleasant, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. What about it?”

  “It makes me want to fuck your noble Viking bones right through the nearest rock.”

  Fen gave a bark of laughter. “That would seal our bargain very well. Do we have time?”

  “No. I can see the men coming down for the harvest. Addy said we have to lead by example.”

  “To be accurate, I believe he said you had to. But come along. The rock will still be here when we are done.”

  Their path took them down through the churchyard. Out of habit, Cai paused by Leof’s grave. The small mound was greening over now, merging back into the moorland. All summer wildflowers had blossomed around it, a handful of campions or sea pinks to gather, and now the hawthorns were starring the night sky above the wall with moonlit fruit. Cai broke off a stem and laid it at the foot of the plain wooden cross. When he looked round, Fen was brushing fallen leaves and clumps of moss off the grave. The last time Cai had gone through this ritual in his presence, Fen had stood aloof, as if bewildered by tenderness shown to the dead.

  Cai was about to thank him. Then he stopped, his attention caught. Between Leof’s grave and Benedict’s—still raw, painful to see—a scatter of withered herbs lay on the turf. Cai crouched to look at them. “These look like Danan’s.”

  Fen came to stand by him. “How can you tell?”

  “They’re medicinal plants. This is valerian, and this lady’s mantle. She likes to get them at full moon and from a graveyard if she can. They’re at their most powerful then, and… Well. They’re well-nourished.”

  “She must have dropped them.”

  Cai chuckled. “You haven’t met her. She never lets go of anything. I’ll send to the village tomorrow and see that she’s all right.”

  “Addy said something to you about her, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. To take care of her, and about a bad death.” Down in the barley field, the villagers were streaming to join the monks in their labour. A song much older than any of Fara’s hymns was rising up in the warm air. We have sworn a solemn oath, our lady Gráinne must die… Scythes were gleaming in the moonlight. Cai shook his head. “He also said she’d rise up with the next harvest, and that won’t happen unless we get this one in. Come on.”

  On the third morning after the harvest, the milk from the villagers’ dairy herd refused to come to butter. Cai frowned down at the small, panting boy who’d been sent to inform him of this, as if it was anything to do with him. Still, on previous occasions Theo had been known to go and say some words of benediction over the churns. The brethren were dependent on the villagers’ few cows for their butter and cheese, and so Cai went down, blushing with embarrassment, and did his best, the entire population turning out to watch in critical expectation.

  He was no Theo, that was certain. He should have sent Aelfric, whose face alone would have curdled the milk. He said his Our Father, hands outstretched over the churns, and added for good measure a bawdy chant Broc sang to get the bull to go to work in the springtime, translated into Latin to render it holy, but the paddles continued to splash in the churns and still no butter came.

  Reduced to practicalities, Cai advised them to empty out the buckets, churns and troughs, clean them all and try again. He was lifting the first churn to give them a hand when Brother Hengist slipped into the dairy barn, moving as discreetly as such a big man could, and took up position on the other side of the barrel. “Caius! There’s ergot in the grain.”

  It was meant to be a whisper, but Hengist was used to bellowing out to monks three fields away that their dinners were ready, and the villagers tending to the cows around the barn looked up.

  “Hush,” Cai admonished him. “What, in the crop we brought in the other night? There can’t be. We’d have seen it.”

  “I know. But look!”

  He pulled from his sleeve an ear of golden barley. Cai set down his barrel and took it from him, his heart sinking in dismay. The purple-black fungus pods scattered in among the healthy grains were impossible to deny. Cai had seen them before, and their effects on the men and beasts who consumed them. Danan had taught him to make that his first diagnostic check, in cases of hallucination and sudden madness. He crumbled the dark pod between his fingers. Danan… Where was she? The messengers Cai had sent to Traprain and the hillforts hadn’t returned, but that could simply mean the old woman was out on one of her long peregrinations among the hills, or drinking mead with Addy in his cave. “Find Fenrir. He will help you start bringing the crop back out of the barn.”

  “It was Brother Fen who spotted it. He’s already put some of us to work. He says we’ll have to go through it ear by ear.”

  Brother Fen… Cai almost smiled in spite of his anxiety. Had any of them dared call him that to his face? “Well, he’s right. We have to save what we can, but it mustn’t get into our bread or our grain stores.”

  “Is it really so bad? My mother ate it once, and she dreamed she was flying.”

  “One kind can do that. But it gives you seizures too, and the other sort brings on fiery pain in the limbs and makes your toes drop off. So let’s not chance it.”

  “No,” Hengist agreed, wide-eyed.

  “Go back and help them. I’ll be right behind you, after I’ve—”

  “Ergot?”

  Cai and Hengist turned at the shrill cry. Godric, the village’s informal leader, had scrambled onto an upturned bucket. He was a fat, mean-eyed little man whose authority was largely self-assumed, and the people normally paid him no attention. They were turning to him now, though, the fearful word echoing among them. “Ergot—the punishment of holy fire!”

  Cai released a breath of irritation. He wiped his hands on a cloth and stepped into the middle of the barn. “There’s nothing holy about it. And it’s a fungus, not a punishment.”

  “Holy fire!” Godric shouted again, making Cai wonder if he’d been at the infected grain already. “And milk that will not churn. And Friswide’s hens have stopped laying, and last night my hearth burned with a cold green flame. Perhaps there is a witch!”

  Cai had never heard the word spat out in such a way. Weika, the Saxon villagers said, and with reverence—men or women who could take and turn the forces of nature in their hands. Cai took a good look around the circle of faces in the dairy barn. Fears and doubts were dawning there, a darkening of innocent eyes. “A witch?” he queried grimly. “I think perhaps we are lacking one. And—tell me, Hlæford Godric—has anyone from the monastery been down to preach to you here?”

  Godric had plainly been told to keep his mouth shut. He did so now, smugly, enjoying a secret. His wife, less subtle, and indebted to Cai and Danan for the safe delivery of her three children, gave him a shove, which knocked him straight down off his bucket. “Aye, Brother! That new one that looks like a crow. He has been here—not preaching, but telling us strange tales.”

  Yes. Once more Cai felt a bitter twist of admiration for the real abbot of Fara. Whether some among t
hese villagers were nominally Christian or not, they were all of them too hard-nosed and busy to make time for a sermon. Offer them a story, though, and there they would be, gathering round the fire, their Saxon blood hungry for narrative. Not one of them could read or write, but their recall of a song or a story-telling poem was instant, perfect and largely uncritical. You had to be careful what you told them—unless it suited you not to be.

  There would always be somebody to listen, if you chose the right sort of tale. And there would always be somebody like Godric to let you in. “All right,” Cai said. “Do you remember Abbot Theo?”

  Godric’s wife beamed. “Of course. A good man. He could always make the butter come, no offence to you, Brother Cai.”

  “None taken. Do you remember some of the things he said—about thinking for yourselves? Deciding for yourselves what’s right, no matter what others may say?”

  “Oh, yes,” Godric grunted. “A good man, but a fool. He even used to tell us we should disagree with him, if we wished. Aelfric says we should obey.”

  “And is that better?”

  “I don’t know, but it makes more sense. How are we to know what to do otherwise?”

  Cai resisted the urge to run his hands into his hair. He had only just been beginning to work out his own notions of right and wrong when he had lost his teacher. He didn’t mind acting abbot when it came to work schedules, but he wasn’t in any way ready for preaching or the cure of men’s souls. “I’ve told you. Just try to think for yourselves. Just…” The barn faded out from around him. He was back on an island beach, locked in conflict with a Viking who had just decided not to kill. Fen was wild-eyed, glaring at him. You, with your blasted Christian ways, your damned compassion! I feel your pain more than my own. I feel another man’s pain before I inflict it! “Just try to imagine whatever you’re about to do to someone else is happening to you. If you don’t bloody like it, then stop.”

  He paused for breath. Nobody seemed impressed. Perhaps he should have said it in Latin. Only half-convinced himself, he gave it up in favour of practicalities. “Friswide, your hens need more oyster shell in their feed, I should think. And—no offence to you, Barda—your fire could use a good clean. Sea coal does burn green, and gives precious little heat on a blocked hearth.” He turned on Godric. “And you—if an order’s what you want, I’ll give you one. Finish your work here, then bring anyone who can be spared up to the barns and help us save our crop.”

  Cai pulled Fen into his arms. He tightened his embrace, and Fen let go a shuddering moan and subsided against his chest. His hair was damp with sweat—Cai ran his fingers through it, marvelling at the virile strength of every strand. He was letting it grow, avoiding Brother Cedric with his shears. Soon it would be a Viking mane again. “Are you all right?”

  “Gods, yes.” Fen coughed and caught his breath, which was coming as fast as Cai’s. He stroked Cai’s belly, caressing the dark fleece at the base of his cock. “I must send you away more often.”

  Cai chuckled. He’d had a lonely week of it, out among the hills. And for all the gnawing fear in his mind, all the way down from the top of Dragon’s Tail Ridge to the lights of Fara, to the very door of his weary pony’s stable, one need had been consuming him. And there, desire made flesh, a wish granted, had been Fen, leaning in the doorway, pale skin glowing in the lantern’s flame. They had waited until the pony was rubbed down and fed, but no longer than that. Cai frowned, suddenly doubtful. “Did I hurt you?”

  “A little. But we can manage on passion and spit, and I sucked you magnificently before you began, did I not?” Fen gave the curling black hair a tug when Cai groaned. “What—do I offend you, mealy-mouthed monk?”

  Smiling, Cai ignored the jibe. He had learned to express himself plainly enough to satisfy any Viking. “No. You make me want to go again.”

  “Mm. So I see. Is there something in the water, on top of those lonely hills?”

  “There’s precious little of anything up there.” Cai took hold of the exploring hand trying to assist his newborn erection. Reluctantly he drew it away, lifted it and kissed its palm. “And there’s no Danan. I followed all her usual trails, all the places she showed me where the best herbs grow. No sign of her in the villages either, not for weeks. Did you fare any better here?”

  “No. I did as you asked and made my way into all the cellars and hidden chambers of this place.”

  “Did you do as I asked and do it discreetly?”

  Fen stretched luxuriantly, settling himself in Cai’s arms. He had come in a stormy rush, pressed tight to the stable wall. His belly was still damp and glimmering with seed. “I didn’t have to. Nobody challenged me.”

  Cai surveyed the beautiful frame of him, strength manifest in every limb, even freshly drained and sleepy as he was. “No. I’m sure they didn’t. You were meant to be subtle about it though, Fen.”

  “Subtle wouldn’t have got me into the Canterbury crow’s chambers.”

  “Oh, God. What did?”

  “A fat bribe of your poppy draft to Laban. He’s got a taste for it, you know.”

  “Is that who’s been siphoning it off?”

  Fen nodded, the silky shift of his hair over Cai’s chest distracting. “He’s a troubled soul.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Just that I’d keep his secret, if he kept mine. And that I was looking for something, which is perfectly true. I checked the studies, the storage rooms, everywhere. Even beneath Abbot Aelfric’s sacred bunk.”

  Cai snorted with laughter. “What did you find there?”

  “A few miserable spiders, discussing how best to spin their way out of hellfire. I don’t think your old lady’s in this place, beloved. I’ve looked everywhere.”

  Beloved. Cai closed his eyes. Fen’s easy, sincere delivery of the word sent it straight into his heart. Since that harvest-moon night, they’d kept silent on the nature of their bond, but there was that word, that name Fen pronounced so freely. Cai kissed his brow. “All right. She may have taken a longer journey, though I never knew her to travel far from here before. How was Aelfric while I was away?”

  “Quiet. Up here, anyway.” Fen eased away far enough to look at him. “He concerns me, though. He’s been down to the village every day.”

  “What—preaching to them?”

  “No. Doing as you said Godric’s wife told you—sitting amongst them and telling them stories. I followed him down once, sat in the shadows and listened. He told about a woman who was faithless to her husband, and her thigh and her belly swelled up and rotted.” Fen gave a twitch of displeasure. “Where does he get such a tale?”

  “From the Bible, unfortunately. Though you’d have to dig deep to find such a foul one. Ugh—why doesn’t he tell them about loaves and fishes, or making the blind man see?”

  “I don’t suppose those ones are frightening enough. They all looked whey-faced by the end of it, especially the women.”

  “Curse him. Why is he doing this? Are they taking him seriously?”

  “I think if the crop hadn’t failed, they wouldn’t be. And other things happened while you were gone. The children have come out in an itching rash, and one of Barda’s goats has died.”

  “For God’s sake. Those goats were ancient. I’ll take a lotion of zinc down for the children tomorrow—it’s probably fleas.” He sat up, Fen shifting with a grunt of protest to accommodate him. “Damn it, though—we could ill afford to lose that grain. The farmers at Traprain can sell us a little, but we’ll be badly off over the winter. Anything else?”

  “Well, I wanted you to sleep before I told you this, but we’ll be worse off still if the apples don’t ripen. Hengist says they should be turning sweet by now, but they’re still green and sour.”

  For the first time, Cai ran out of reasonable arguments. A primal fear touched him—of a long, dark winter with no grain or fruit. And, this winter, twenty-nine hungry men looking at him to ask him why. “Fen,” he whispered uneasily, the warmth of their jo
ining draining away from him. “What’s going on around here?”

  “I don’t know. But it was different, wasn’t it—before the men from Canterbury came?”

  Before the raids, too. Cai didn’t say it. His lover was here, shoulder pressed to his shoulder, never less of a Viking pirate than now, with lambent eyes fixed on him in concern. But Cai often thought as Fen had done beneath that golden moon—how have we come to this? “Yes,” he said. “I’ve tried to make it as it was, restore it a little. But…”

  “But Aelfric and the crows infest it and undo all your good work.”

  “Not quite so bad as—”

  “I tell you what we should do. No—what I should do, since you’re a monk. One night I should drug their ale with something from your cabinets. And then, while they’re asleep, I should take my sword Blóðkraftr dauði and—”

  “Fen!” Cai couldn’t repress a spasm of horrified laughter. “Stop it.”

  “What? I have said I will drug them, haven’t I? They won’t be in any pain. And then you could be abbot here in truth, which is what your brethren and these villagers need.”

  “Hush, will you?” Pushing up onto his knees, Cai put his arms around him. Cai never had come quite to terms with Viking humour and couldn’t tell now if he was serious. He held him, trying to enclose within the circle of his embrace all that was noble in him, the dawning compassion that had made him spare the life of old Addy, everything that made him a man Cai should love. He pressed his lips to the graceful arch of his collarbone, looked into the darkness beyond his shoulder. “We can’t do such things.”

  “Why not? Your world is so hampered. These men are parasites, poisoning the minds of your friends. With a few swings of my blade…”

  Cai pressed a silencing hand to his mouth. Fen chucked and pushed his tongue against his palm, sending bolts of arousal down his spine. “Demon,” Cai whispered. “Be still. There’s somebody coming—one of the parasites, I think.”