by Harper Fox
“My brother came back from shepherding with tales of a fleet on the horizon. I had to come. I was afraid you’d pack me off home.”
“No, not this time. We need every man we can get. Are you strong enough to lift a sword?”
“I think so.”
“Go and find Fen and make sure. He’s down at the armoury. He’ll put you through some drills.”
“They are certainly coming, then?”
“We still don’t know. At nightfall they were still a long way out, but…”
“Caius?” That was Gareth. He was such a changed man from the night of the first raid, when an axe through the shoulder had driven out all trivial fears of the flesh from him. He was pale now, but Cai noted with gratitude his soldierly bearing. He came up close before he spoke, kept his voice low. “Cai, Brother Fen says we should make ready. The tide has turned. The Vikings are making for land.”
Cai had to conduct himself at least as well. He braced against the painful leap of his heart. “Understood. Go at once and give the signal.” He turned to the boy. “Oslaf, I’m sorry. We don’t have time to make a warrior of you just now—will you go and help Hengist guard our stores?”
“Whatever you command. But I wish I could have fought with you.”
“I know. And you will again one day. But you’re too dear to me, for Benedict’s sake and your own.”
Cai watched him dart off. From the newly built bell tower, a low, insistent tolling began. The bell was new too, or newly purchased—a tradeoff from the smith at Berewic for part of their rich apple crop and some mead. Cai had watched his brothers proudly lift it into place only the week before. Had these things been done just in time for hell and death to rise up out of the waters and knock them back down? At least the upper level of the church had been built in willow and daub, not stone. That would save them some trouble next time.
He caught that grim thought on the hoof. Fen had been right about fear and its power to distort the mind, and Cai wasn’t immune. Cedric was waiting in a doorway, watching him for his cue. Curtly Cai gestured him to be about his business, and strode off to find his own.
The bell rang softly, its tongue muffled up in a sack. The strangled note of it lent a dreadful tension to the night, pulsing out across Fara’s dark, huddled buildings. Only a few lanterns shone from windows on the landward side, casting a fitful light on Cai’s path as he made his way to the cliffs, one man then the next running out at the signal to join him.
The sea bells… How Cai had made them ring that first night, screaming out the monastery’s whereabouts to any ship not yet come in to land! And even the second time, how they had left all their lights burning, a gesture of defiance before they had joined the attack… Not this time. Not this time. More men poured in from their posts around the buildings, and Cai fell back, making room so they could run with him in the shadows. Only the monks of Fara would hear this bell, would see these lights. From the seaward side, Fara would be only a cluster of ruins, the burnt-out husks from the last raid. There was just an outside chance that the blanket of night would shield them, and the fleet pass by.
Fen stepped out to meet them in the place where the track turned to a narrow defile at the top of the cliffs. His hair had grown long enough to drift in the night wind. Cai had faced him half a year ago in this very place—had for one instant met those eyes, which took fire into themselves when there was none, and kindled fires in Cai that would burn him to ash before they died. He took up a stance of soldierly respect in front of Cai—a deputy to his commander—and one look at him told Cai the truth. “They are coming.”
“Yes. Only two ships, thank the gods, but putting in hard and straight for us.”
Cai drew a breath. He looked at Fen, one eyebrow on the rise. They shared the silent thought. Only two? That was the difference between an immediate wipeout and a decent fight. Two might almost be enjoyable.
He saw the same idea flashing round the brethren waiting behind Fen, drawn up in orderly fashion, their skirts hitched into their girdles, weapons ready. “Gentlemen of God,” Cai called to them. “Each vikingr ship bears about twenty men, and none of them are passengers. We are thirty. We can do it, but not a man here is to relax. I want stealth, brutality and a most unchristian attitude from all of you. Is that understood?”
It wasn’t the time for a battle cheer. Cai saw it coming and hushed it, grinning. “Later. When we’re bearing down on them like skirt-wearing demons from Abbot Aelfric’s hell. Now get into your places, and wait for Fen’s signal and mine.”
The raiders would make landfall in the bay below the cliffs. Cai knew that from bitter experience. It was the natural place, the beach sloping smoothly there, offering easy anchorage, a fast run in to shore. On a dark night like this, only the thinnest waning moon to light their way, the broad white sands would gleam temptingly, and there beyond them Fara’s great rock—a desirable stronghold, inhabited or not.
Cai signalled his division of the men off to the left. Fen was crouched at the top of a whinstone outcrop. He had already directed the brethren under his command to their hiding places among the dunes to the right. The bay might be wide and hard to control, but it could be used as a trap, with men positioned correctly in places leading up to the defile. Timing would be crucial. Fen knew more about that than Cai did—he and Cai had agreed, just the night before in a brief interval of their loving, that he would give the sign.
Cai clambered up the rock and knelt beside him, taking care not to break the skyline. “Do you see them?”
“Yes.” Fen gave him an odd, amused sidelong glance. “How do you not?”
Cai looked again, this time following the set of Fen’s shoulders and head. A cold thrill seized him, a mix of nausea and excitement. It was like learning to see the passage of a serpent through water, a creature he’d been taught was only mythical. And, as Fen said, now he’d got the trick of it, how could he not? Two great vessels, their lines like water, like billowing sails. They forged a path along the troughs of the waves, the diagonal drift of the tide. Their uplifted prows bore bestial heads—one a square-mouthed dragon, gaping, crudely hewn, the next a spiral of surpassing beauty with a swan’s head at its centre. Their timbers fanned out from these delicate points to broad, sturdy hulls. Cai had never seen his enemy, not until he was face-to-face, breath to breath, locked in bloody combat. He had never really seen the ships. “They’re beautiful.”
But Fen had turned away. He had slumped down against the rock. His fist was clenched tight around the hilt of his Blóðkraftr sword, his knuckles white and stark.
“What is it?” Cai whispered, ducking down beside him. “Is your belt loose?”
“No. The first boat—does it have a wolf’s-head prow?”
“No. A dragon, I thought.” Cai risked another glance. “I don’t know, though. A godless heathen beast of some kind—I can’t tell.”
“It’s a wolf. The sail bears the signs of the Torleik.”
“Is it…? Do you think they’ve come for you at last? To rescue you?”
Fen shook his head. “Not in that kind of battle array. And the second boat, the beaked dragon…”
“I thought that one was a swan.”
Fen chuckled painfully. “That one belongs to the Volsung. Vicious bastards who pirate with us in the summer, then steal our damn cattle all winter. This is a raid, not a rescue.”
“Fen—what are you going to do?”
Their gazes locked. “I never thought I’d see that sail again.”
Cai put a hand on his shoulder. “Fen.”
He struggled out from under Cai’s grasp and crouched a few yards away, hunched up, hair concealing his face. And in that moment Cai’s world, from church to dunes, from turf to cloud-shadowed sky, fractured and began to crack apart. He had asked. He hadn’t understood how a loyal Viking, with ideas of brotherhood higher and nobler than any Cai had attained about God, could change sides to fight alongside a foreign monk. Even if they were lovers—even if they had la
in in the fragrant barn last night and sworn to one another blood faith till they died, even if Fen had done that while he was coaxing one last come from Cai’s exhausted flesh, and Cai had given it back to him in the teeth of ecstasy. Yes, yes, yes. Still Cai had asked him. Where will you be? Which side? And Fen had answered, and Cai had believed.
But Fen couldn’t fight the Torleik. Of course he bloody couldn’t. Cai lurched to his feet and almost fell at the rip of sick vertigo through him. Fen’s back was still turned, his head down. He looked scarcely human—an outcrop of the dunes or the rock. Cai would remember him that way. He wouldn’t think of him anymore as a living creature, the wolf from the sea who had become his companion, so dear to him he would wake with the bastard’s name on his lips, fall asleep saying it instead of his prayers. Cai would never think of him again at all.
He had a war to win. All round the bay, like fox cubs in holes, his men were waiting. They were men he’d trained and put there himself, and just now they were waiting for a signal that was never going to come, not from the lump of dune sand or stone wrapped up in its cassock and rocking, the only living thing about it its bright hair. Cai turned his back. He wanted to spit out the terrible snake-venom taste from his mouth, but he was afraid to find out that he could never rid himself of it. He controlled his breathing, the heave in his lungs that wanted to burst into sobs or retching.
He mustn’t break the skyline. He had rehearsed all this—his own track down from the defile to the place where he would be able to see Fen, ready and waiting in his appointed foxhole. Only the smallest change was needed. He made one last check of his sword belt with cold, steady hands. Then he ran silently down the track. Instead of turning right he ducked into the dune grass at his left, found Fen’s empty place and slipped into it. He was the son of Broccus, the scion of a race that had been dealing with barbarian invaders for seven hundred years. Goths, Vandals, Huns—fireside tales around the hillfort’s hearth, of noble Roman emperors beating back the alien hordes. Even as a child, Cai had believed maybe one word in ten. Maybe one in a hundred now. But one in a hundred was better than nothing, now that he was left with nothing, and he could assess the moment to strike as well as any other man. He had to believe that.
Here came the boats. He leaned forwards, crouched in readiness. God, they were beautiful—fine beyond the craftsmanship of any western shore dweller, Saxon or Roman. The plain, strapping ugliness of the men who poured out of them was almost a relief. They were huge for the most part, jerking Cai back into his flesh in visceral fear of them. There were a handful like Fen, lean and graceful as they saw to their anchorage and leapt over the prow, but for the most part they were the men of their legend, hairy great axe-swingers, thick manes drawn into plaits or horses’ tails, bulky shoulders straining leather jerkins.
Not afraid, and not in any hurry. They grinned as they waded in from the boats, took a moment to splash one another and bark cheerful insults back and forth. Darkening the monastery, muffling the bell, had been good strategy. These men thought they were coming to claim an empty rock. “Geiri, you son of a goat. If I’d had to share that oar bench with your great farting arse for one more league…”
Cai shook his head, as if he could rattle the understanding out of his ears. Fen had taught him too much. He didn’t want to know about these brutes, their discomforts or their humanity. “I could drink a river. I’m sick of the taste of my piss.”
“Hogni started drinking his before we ran out of water!”
A roar of laughter. Cai squeezed his eyes shut. He fought the urge to ball up. He’d only met his Vikings in combat until now. It was easy to hate with a bellowing axe-man roaring down on you. How Fen had hated every living Christian at Fara, until one of them had cared for him! The laughter rolling up at Cai was rich and familiar. It could have been Fen’s.
When Cai looked again, the world was in darkness. Briefly he wondered if he’d wished himself blind as well as deaf, and had his prayer granted. The moon was gone, a great black cloud whose advance Cai hadn’t seen devouring her whole from the west. Down on the beach, the raiders were cursing, blaming one another for failing to notice the weather. One of them was calling for a light.
“Bring the torches from the ships.”
Cai clutched hard at the roots of the seagrass. This changed everything. Many torches, casting flaring firelight up the flanks of the dunes, would expose the monks in their hiding places as the dull moonlight could not. Fen’s stratagem of waiting, the moment he and Cai had worked out so painstakingly when enough of the Vikings would be clustered together in the defile—all that would fall apart. One torch, though… Cai knew how one torch in blackness could blind you before it began to help you out, how it cast everything beyond its own nimbus into a void.
He took Fen’s plans and snapped them, crumbled them to dust, mentally brushed his palms together and cast off their ashes into the wind. Cai would give the signal on his own judgement now. The lighting of the first torch would save them. There was no moon now—in the dunes nearby he could hear someone panting in panic at the lack of it, and sent out a silent plea to him to wait, have faith, to believe—but the raiders’ first torch would show them to one another, light up their target before they themselves could be seen. In its way it was perfect. Better than any tactic of Fen’s. Cai could be better without him. He could survive.
He was sobbing when the torch flared up, but so deep down inside himself that it didn’t matter. So dryly that it didn’t blind him, and the leap of battle fever in his blood came at the moment when his heart would have shattered. He felt nothing.
His men were waiting, terrified in darkness. Fen wasn’t in his appointed place and neither were the damn Vikings. Cai had to make his move, and now. To make it strong and good. He sprang upright. He flung a hand into the air and loosed a cry his father would have been proud of, a bestial howl that brought the monks leaping out of their holes as if stabbed. For a second it could all have gone to hell. They staggered on the dune slopes, discomposed, black rabbits as likely to run for cover as to fight. But Cai yelled again, this time pointing to the clustering men on the beach. They were shielding their eyes, blinking—too dazzled to see what creature was shrieking in the night above their heads. Cai seized his moment, and the warrior monks of Fara attacked.
They blazed in on their wave of surprise, and it took them further than Cai could have dreamed. What warriors he had trained! Wilf took the first kill, goatherd turned berserker, lashing about him with his broadsword as if born to the trade. Feint, parry, thrust—he dropped his target with the gawp of astonishment still on his handsome Viking face. Gareth rushed in after him.
Demetrios the Greek, leaping about like a deranged mechanical scarecrow, forgetting every damn thing Cai had taught him but somehow making progress anyway, staying out of reach of returning strikes. Yes, they were fine. Cai, wading in, had an instant to love and admire them. The torch was out, knocked to sputtering death in the wet sand, but the moon had emerged again, just enough for Cai to see, and what the hell had he been thinking—of course the torch would go. He sent a prayer to the ancient hillfort goddess of the moon for her mercy. For not letting him dump his dearest friends and brethren into the battle in the pitch dark, to flail around as they might. So much for Cai as a strategist. Fen would have stopped him—would have known.
Desperately Cai plunged between Brother Cedric and the axe slicing down on him, deflecting it with the hilt of his sword. Cedric grunted, needing no second invitation. He jabbed as Cai had taught him, straight into the raider’s undefended gut.
They were outnumbered. Without Fen, it mattered. The Vikings were regrouping, working out that they hadn’t been leapt on by demons but by men—men in skirts, the puny castrated Christians who fell like wheat to their scythe. The first of them who took the time to draw in breath for laughter regretted it—Cai dived in past his unready shield and ran him through. He spun to face the next. This one was not laughing. His face was a blur in the moonlight, great,
thick plait unwinding as he whipped round for his opponent. He was lean and massive, copper gleaming dully in his hair. He focussed on Cai—God, amber eyes, cold as death—and snarled. “Blóð ok sorg!”
Cai lost peripheral vision. There was a tunnel, and he was rushing through it. The sounds of battle around him faded out. He raised his shield just in time for the whole weight of the Viking’s sword to crash down on it. The raider followed up with an axe-blade swipe that nearly tore the shield from Cai’s hand. Something punched him in the ribs. Hot pain consumed him, knocking him down to one knee in the sand. It was only for a moment. Then the pain burned out in rage and hate, and he surged up swinging.
He was back in the training yard with Fen. Do you ever hold back on me? Don’t you hold back on me! Fen had sworn he didn’t. Cai had believed him. But perhaps Fen couldn’t help himself. Perhaps when it was flesh you had loved, you couldn’t unleash your full Viking fury on it—not even to save it or teach it to save itself.
This Viking didn’t love Cai at all. He was bulkier than Fen, a fraction taller—otherwise his exact equivalent, and Cai was learning the difference. His blade hit Cai’s with the force of a rockfall. Muscles ripped in Cai’s shoulders as he parried. He slipped away, got in one good stabbing thrust. The raider growled and retreated a step. Cai went after him. He would not allow himself to see how like Fen he was, so like that he had to be kin. That he had to be…
The step back had only been to gain a little space. Cai hadn’t even slowed him down. The great blade flashed in the moonlight again and Cai flung his shield up—just in time to catch a blow so fierce that it deadened his arm. The shield flew from his grasp and landed in the sand. Cai spun away, the swift dancer’s move that had saved him on the battlefield before. It worked—the Viking cleaved the air an inch behind him—but something was wrong. When he tried to recover, to whip back into the gap he’d left and fight on, shield or no shield, his legs wouldn’t carry him. He staggered. The beach beneath him, good firm sand for a skirmish, gave a treacherous heave. It knocked him sideways. Down on one knee again, he watched as if from five miles out while the raider grinned, took a double-handed grip on his sword hilt and prepared his final blow.
