by Harper Fox
The track below the stables was dark, hard to negotiate on a cloudy night. Nevertheless, a black-robed figure was tearing along it as fast as he could go. Drawing Fen out of the stable doorway where the lantern made such glories of his skin and hair, Cai listened, his hand still pressed tight despite the patterns Fen was now tracing on it with his tongue tip. “It sounds like Laban. What’s he doing out here at this time of night?”
“What do you care?”
The question was only a muffled vibration, but Cai knew all his sounds by now. “Less and less by the second. But he may be ill.” Cai recalled the last man he’d found sobbing and distraught on a pathway at Fara. “I’d better go and see.”
“Please yourself, physician.”
“I won’t be long. Will you wait here?”
“Mm.” Fen settled himself on the straw. He stretched out one arm along the top of a bale and drew up his knee, the better to display his hips and thighs, somehow more powerful to Cai in their lassitude than when they had been taut and convulsing in the throes of their fuck.
“Don’t,” Cai rasped, struggling into his cassock. In reply, Fen only grinned and ran a hand down his own body, then took hold of his rising cock in a grip Cai knew from vast experience felt bloody wonderful. “Please.”
“Well, hurry. Yes, I’ll wait here. But I can’t promise you that I won’t start by myself.”
Cai ran out into the night. At that moment he hated not only Laban and the Canterbury clerics but every duty, every obligation, every man, woman and child who might get between him and the magnificent creature he’d left behind him. He hated the stony path for stretching out beneath his feet—the very air, for being closer to Fen than he was, for wrapping itself in summer-breeze embrace around him. Visions of rebellion danced through his head. He would take Fen and leave this place. Perhaps Broccus wasn’t so wrong about the mindless life of the senses—perhaps Cai too would become a hillfort chieftain, fight all day and roll Fen around in his barbaric wolf-skin bed all night. Where was the world where they could leave Viking and monk far behind them and live freely as men—where even Cai’s own questions and doubts would be silenced in his heart? He thrust away the vision of Broc’s beautiful yellow-eyed hound. His very guts burned with the need to run back to the stable, fling himself into Fen’s arms, impale himself on that waiting shaft. We can manage on passion and spit…
Shuddering, he took up position on a twist in the track. Laban, if it was him, would have to come through here. Cai didn’t feel like offering comfort, no matter what the problem. Perhaps for once his duty to his fellow man could be discharged simply and fast. “Laban,” he called, stepping forwards as the dark figure rounded the corner. “It’s me—Brother Caius. What’s wrong?”
Laban almost knocked him down. His head was lowered, the hood of his cassock raised and flapping into his face. Cai seized his arm to steady them both, and Laban came to a choking, sobbing halt. “Leave me be!”
“Are you ill?”
“No. You don’t have to tend me. Just let me go.”
“Where? The last man I let go strung himself up in the church.”
“Oh, if I could be so brave as that… No, Caius.” Laban doubled up, coughing. “I’m not going to hell with Benedict.”
“You don’t believe Ben’s in hell. When Aelfric wanted him buried away from his brethren—you helped stop that, didn’t you?”
“Aye, and brought down Aelfric’s curse on myself.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought I could be part of your world, your life here. I wanted your brethren to be my friends, far more than I wanted the Canterbury men to be.” He stopped fighting Cai’s grip and looked at him properly. “I grew up in a village like the one down the track. My church was a church like yours. Then I was sent to Rome, and…”
“Forget Rome. It’ll take Rome a long time to catch up with us here.”
“Less time than you think. The missionaries are coming, telling even the priests of Iona that their ways have been wrong. And they’re not cruel madmen like Aelfric. I’ve met them. They’re good. Oh, so good, so holy. But they don’t believe that common men should read, or think, or learn anything outside the Holy Bible…”
“Or the parts of it they’re taught, because they’ll never be able to read it for themselves.”
“Yes. And they’ll win, these sacred demons. They’ll put out all the lights.”
Cai took his shoulders. He’d never even spoken to Laban, beyond the day’s civilities. And yet here he was—intelligent, full of solemn anxiety, the same hopes and fears as Cai’s own. “Stay with me, then,” he said. “Help me fight them.”
“They can’t be fought. You’ll learn.” He detached Cai’s hold on him, gently, as if he’d much rather have remained. “I don’t belong in your world, and I can’t be part of his. Not now.”
“Aelfric’s? Why not now?”
“Not now he’s doing this. You don’t understand, Caius. There’s only one way from now on. And everyone who doesn’t follow it will burn.”
The breeze shifted. It brought on its wings a scent familiar to Cai as his own flesh—wood smoke, resiny and pleasant, the promise of a warm hearth, a good meal. But all the fires of Fara were shut down for the night and would stay that way until Hengist set his baker’s ovens roaring at first light of dawn. He turned. Far off in the darkness, a red glow was kindling. It wasn’t on the monastery lands, or in any of the scatter of villages that could be seen from here. Cai checked his inner calendar, the ancient wheel of ritual that had shaped his year until he’d learned a new one from this new, strange church. Too late for Lugnasadh, too soon for Samhain…
“What is Aelfric doing?” he demanded. “What is that fire?”
But Laban was gone, the track as dark and empty as if he had never been there.
Chapter Twelve
Cai ran. He knew he wouldn’t be fast enough—not to close the distance between himself and that fire and stop whatever hellish thing was in the offing there—but his heart was easy. Fen would aid him. Fen would find a way. His strength met Cai’s own like the confluence of two rivers. Fen had saved him twice now—pulled him up, body and soul, from the sea of his grief for Leof, and the swamps and quicksand that men like Aelfric created, reminding him lustily every day that his flesh was not a punishable burden but a joy. There wouldn’t be time to harness up the chariot, but Fen would help him catch Eldra, and together they’d fly across the spaces of the night—she would bear both of them, they’d discovered, provided Fen took the reins, an arrangement Cai had argued then acceded to, laughing and chagrined. They would get there.
The stable was empty. The lamp still glowed on the hollow in the straw where Fen had made himself comfortable and promised to wait—patiently, if not chastely. His cassock was gone, and there was no other sign of his existence.
Which meant nothing. Fen could have got cold, or gone to humour Aelfric by locking himself up in the quarantine cell where he was still supposed to spend his nights. Perhaps he too had seen the fire and gone to investigate, in which case Cai would encounter him somewhere on the track leading out across the salt flats. The light was brighter now, golden flashes dancing in the ruby glow. A massive bonfire, a waste of wood and resources where there was no need for it, out of season and fierce…
“Fen,” he called, fear trying to close his throat, but there was no reply.
Eldra wouldn’t come to him. He thought he could hear her, but the waning moon was cloudy, the field a patchwork of shadows. After leaning over the fence, whistling and jingling her harness for as long as he dared, he gave up and tore back to the stable. The pony would have to do, weary though the poor beast was after their journey home. She eyed him in disbelief as he unhooked her bridle again, but once he was settled on her broad back, she caught his sense of urgency and clattered out into the yard.
No sign of Fen on the slope down to the tidal flats. Still Cai disregarded the chill in his throat. He couldn’t have the Viking at his si
de all the time. Best if he remembered that now. His soul, his very thoughts, had begun to shape themselves to meet a shadow other, something outside himself, and what would he be if it was gone? A shadow too. Whatever was left after the subtraction of Fenrir.
He slapped the pony on the rump, and she surged to a choppy gallop. He focussed on the difficulty of staying aboard her, bareback, his cassock slipping underneath him. The tide was low, drawn out as far as it would go by the weak quarter moon, but the sand it exposed could turn to treacherous mud, requiring him to ride carefully from one pale stretch to the next. Whoever had built that fire must have come this way too. He was beginning to make out hoofprints and footprints in the drier places. Who would brave the flats on such a night, and what fire needed to be kindled so far from Fara and the villages?
The nebulous shape of the flames resolved itself. On a broad sweep of turf at the foot of the dunes, driftwood had been piled high, and into the centre of it someone had driven a single tall post. At the foot of the post—God, and they could have made it shorter for so pitiful a captive—a shape barely recognisable as human was huddled, bound round the waist with crude fisherman’s rope. Its feet were invisible, hidden by flames. A cloud of white hair, drifting in the updrafts, haloed its bowed head. Danan.
Cai began to shout. He was still too far off for the men and women gathered round the pyre to hear him, but one yell tore from him and then another, raw sounds he had thought only Fen could rip from him. His lungs convulsed. He was trying to hurl his voice ahead of him, make it do what his hands could not. He leaned close over the pony’s neck. Her mane whipped into his face, stinging him, and he clasped her flanks with his knees and drove her on at a speed neither of them had known she had in her. She was snorting and flecked with sweat by the time she had carried him within earshot of the crowd. Cai kept on yelling, an incoherent roar that had no at its roots but made no more sense than that.
It didn’t have to. It only had to make them see him. If they saw him, they would stop. Cai was in no doubt of this—the people in the firelit circle were villagers, the ordinary souls he met and dealt with every week. They knew him. More crucially, he knew them, and not a single one among them would have done this. They were kind, flawed, human. If they saw him, they would break whatever trance was holding them. They would cut the ropes and let Danan go.
Not one of them turned. The thunderous splash of the pony’s hooves must be reaching them by now. Desperately, in flashes between the blinding whisk of the pony’s mane, he tried to make out what was fixing their attention. Not the helpless little figure in the fire, as if she were somehow unimportant… Cai caught his breath on a sob. Had they already killed her? Tied up her body to burn, for God knew what hideous purpose? They weren’t even watching her. They were watching a dark shape perched halfway up the side of a dune.
Aelfric was preaching. Cai had never seen him in full flight before. He’d never had the right congregation—only a bunch of half-heathen monks, their minds corrupted to rebellion by Theo’s rule. No, he needed men and women like the ones before him now. Theo had never tried to teach the villagers. Cared for them, answered their questions, but even in his enlightenment believed that some men were born to be priests, and others to tend cows, and best if each remained in his station. And so the villagers of Fara were here, their eyes and minds—and, Cai could see quite clearly now, most of their mouths—wide open.
Preaching or not, the abbot was ready for Cai. He didn’t glance at him or break off his monologue until the pony was within twenty yards of the group. Then he ceased to stab the air with his claw, and pointed it straight at Cai. “Stop him!” he screamed, his voice a thin blade that sliced the night. “Stop the profane consort of the witch!” The finger swung to Friswide. “You, woman—take your children and stand in his path. He won’t run them down.”
She actually did it. She had one dirty infant by the hand, two others, half-asleep, hanging on tight to her skirts. Without a flicker of change in her vacant expression, she swung around to plant the whole fragile group of them directly in the pony’s way.
Cai hauled back on the reins. The pony chucked her head up and bunched her hindquarters. They were too close—Cai’s momentum bore him on and he pitched over her shoulder, narrowly missing one child while the pony veered off to the other side. He broke his fall with his hands, ducked his head and crashed onto the turf at Friswide’s feet.
She bent with genuine concern to help him up. “Brother Caius! What are you doing here?”
“Me?” Cai coughed and spat out bits of grass. “What are you doing? Godric—Barda—all of you, come here. Help me untie Danan and put out that fire.” He tried to run and found his path blocked by Godric, fat and serenely smiling. “Out of my way, man. Are you responsible for this?”
“No, Caius. Abbot Aelfric summoned us here. He has captured the witch.”
Cai grabbed him. He bodily set him aside, but somehow the move put him into the arms of the next smiling, muscular farmer. “Aelfric!” he yelled past them. “Tell them to let her go.” He struggled against a surrounding wall of flesh. “In God’s name…”
“It’s in God’s name that I act, blasphemer.” Aelfric leaned forwards in his sandy pulpit and transfixed Cai with a blank, triumphant gaze. “I caught her digging up dirt from holy men’s graves by light of a full moon.”
“She was gathering herbs, you idiot. Let her go before she burns. Danan!”
“There is no help for her. She will burn, and her curse will be lifted from these people. The grain will be cleansed. The apples will ripen on the bough. The children—”
“Stop!” Frantic, Cai cut across him. No grains or apples here, but he grabbed the nearest of Friswide’s infants and held it high, quickly glancing at the rash on its cheek. He’d been wrong about the fleas. “These children have scurvy. They need to eat green plants, that’s all. It isn’t a curse or a…” The child gave a wriggle of discomfort, and he took it into his arms, unable to handle it roughly even while visions of taking it hostage flashed through his head, of threatening to chuck it onto the fire with Danan. “Danan is a healer. She’d never… Wait. When did you take her, Aelfric? Last full moon?”
“Aye, and kept her where neither you nor your savage could find her.”
Cai dumped the child into Friswide’s hands. If mad, empty preaching was all that worked here now, perhaps he had some of his own. He was being hemmed in by the villagers—not angrily, but absolutely—and he struggled to get enough distance from all of them to see into their faces. “Last full moon,” he repeated. “Think, all of you, for God’s sake. When did we find the ergot in the corn? When did your children fall sick and Barda’s goat die?”
“Why, it was after full moon,” Barda said. She was the only one amongst them who had looked troubled at the prospect of burning a human being alive, who seemed to be unswayed by Aelfric’s power. She reached out and gave Godric a slap, which almost knocked him down. “It was after full moon, husband!”
He turned and hit her back. It wasn’t a slap but a punch to the face, and Cai saw he had wanted to do it for years. She was twice his size, formidable. He would never have dared touch her outside of Aelfric’s charmed circle. “Hold your lip, wench,” he hissed at her. “The abbot has told us. She worked her evil spells from her captivity, to make us set her free.”
Cai grabbed Godric by the scruff and hauled him back. “Right,” he shouted. “This woman—Danan, who pounds up rosehips to cure your children’s colds, and has never harmed a hair on anyone’s head all her life, has suddenly taken to cursing and…” He gave Godric a shake. “And what? Evil spells? God help us. Did you ever think your trees might have blossomed and your children thrived because of her? And—and when this monster stole her and hid her away in some hole beneath the ground, the very earth began to die?”
It wasn’t working. The trouble was that Cai didn’t believe his own words—not as Aelfric believed in his. It would take a madman to hold such convictions, on either side
. A creature who could blight the land or nurture it according to her will… No. He twisted around to look at the pyre. Danan hadn’t moved. Perhaps the smoke had killed her, or rendered her insensible—he prayed so. She was just an old woman. Cai ran out of words and reasons. He dropped Godric like a dead rat and threw himself at the crowd.
He could hear thunder. At first he thought it was only the pounding of blood in his ears, and redoubled his efforts to tear through the thicket of bodies, the hands that were holding him back. No one was hurting him. The women were even patting at him soothingly, as if he’d been a distraught child. They were just there, solid and stupid and immovable as cattle. “Damn you all! Let me go!”
“Blóð ok sorg!”
Cai jerked his head up. No Saxon throat could produce such a sound. The thunder grew louder. The barricade slackened around him, hands falling away, mouths opening. Astonishment and fear—at last, the placid, dreadful smiles disappearing, like cobwebs in the blast of a good north wind.
Godric waved a plump paw back in the direction of Fara. He gaped like a fish, and after a couple of efforts got one word out. “Vikingr!”
“Blóð ok sorg!” The battle cry rang out again. A thrill of terror shot down Cai’s spine, stiffening the hairs on his nape. He knew the words. They were very like his people’s own, and he’d been taught many blood-hot Viking ones now, shuddering with passion in sand dunes, stables, barns. Blood and woe—yes, pure oncoming hell, bearing down out of the night. Blóð ok sorg, the long, lonely syllables drawing out, like…
Oh, God, like the cry of a wolf. For a flashing instant even Cai was fooled, the villagers’ terror transmitting itself in a wave of primal body scents. They were scattering around him. He was free now to move, to run to Danan and try to set her free from the pyre.
There was no need. The vikingr raider swept down. In his leather jerkin, his bare arms taut with muscle, he was every shore dweller’s nightmare. Eldra was surging beneath him, her movements so blended with his that they seemed like one creature. His wolf’s-head sword was buckled at his side, and in one hand he swung an axe. “Blóð ok sorg!” he yelled one last time, blazing past Cai at a gallop, sparing a second to flash him a lunatic grin. Then he drove Eldra straight at the fire.
