by Harper Fox
Time stretched and doubled back on itself. Cai had been hearing—for some while now, if he thought about it—a shockingly familiar voice. Familiar as the smile lighting up the vulpine face of this warrior who was going to be his death. Cai raised his sword one more time. He scarcely knew why, except that he was his father’s son, and Broc would have had an apoplexy to see him just kneeling here. The lively blade had turned to lead, and he could barely lift it. He thrust away the raider’s plunging stroke and rolled out from under the next.
The voice rose again, breaking like waves through the blood-beat in his ears. Cai was down, finished. Bitter salt sand was in his mouth. He had no idea why he was hanging on, deflecting his opponent’s frustrated strokes with his sword and then—last helpless gesture—with his arm. No idea…
Except that Fen was there. Fen, hacking a path towards him through the heaving sea of bodies. The voice had been his—roaring out threats and commands, orders to regroup. He was laying about him with Blóðkraftr, slaking the blade with Viking blood. Cai twisted like a cat and got out of the way of his assailant one more time. A cry of joy broke from him. Fen stopped dead—homed in on the sound, shoved the last barricade of raiders and monks aside—and came running.
Cai gave up the fight. It was such a relief, blissful as climax in its way. He thudded down onto the sand, air leaving his lungs in a whoosh. Blóðkraftr swept over his head, a scythe from heaven and hell. His assailant sprang back. Blade clashed on blade as Fen leapt after him, and then the unique, dreadful sound of flesh on flesh and bone. Hard-muscled impact and the snarls of men shedding their human skins in bloodlust and desire to rip one another apart.
Kindred flesh. On the edge of a faint, Cai clawed back. He struggled to his hands and knees. Kindred bone, kindred skin. Cai knew this—he knew Gunnar. Fen, his face a frenzied blank, had gone beyond such knowledge. Didn’t recognise his brother. Cai lurched up. He threw himself at the entwined pair. “Fen, don’t! Don’t, in God’s name! It’s…”
One man fell. Blood staining his vision like ruby-red glass, mind going dark, Cai lost track of their differences, forgot that a cassock marked one and a salt-stained leather jerkin the other. On a beach a thousand years ago he had found Fen dressed in hides like this, his hair as wild as Gunnar’s. He had found him dying. Which one was this on the sand?
Gunnar. Gunnar, because Fen was standing over him, sanity returning to his face. Blóðkraftr, scarlet from tip to hilt, was dripping in his hand. Gunnar, because now Fen was dropping to his knees beside the corpse, a cry like nothing Cai had ever heard before beginning to rip from his lungs.
Cai’s training forced one last move out of him. Fen’s back was unguarded. Scraping up his own sword from the sand, he staggered round to defend him. But there was no one there—no one who could make a difference anyway, not now. A handful of the raiders were retreating, splashing their way back to the boats. Others, who had reached the cliff path and found it undefended, were clambering up there to finish their night’s work. And the beach was littered with the fallen—some in Viking leathers and hides, some in plain moonlit brown.
Fen was hunched over his brother. After that solitary wail he had fallen silent. Cai didn’t know how to touch him. He tried to stumble to Fen’s side, but his feet took him into the water, as if in some way he could get clean of this, clean and clear in the cold, redeeming sea.
The waves were marbled, veined with black. Cai recoiled from the drifting pattern. Who had poured ink into the lucid amber and polluted it so? He had a wild vision of the monstrous squid Theo said he had seen on his sea voyage here, and then a pure memory of Leof, poised in the scriptorium with a freshly cut quill in his hand. And then he remembered that bloodstains by moonlight showed black.
Cai leaned his hands on his thighs and struggled to stay upright. He surveyed the scene around him—the bodies, the scarlet-black tide. “Oh God,” he said brokenly. “Oh Christ. No. Christ.”
Chapter Fifteen
“I would do it again.”
Fen was beside him in the water. Cai couldn’t remember him getting there. But here he was. Vengeance. You will have it one day, knee-deep in water and blood… “What?” he asked stupidly, swaying.
“He was going to kill you. I would do it again.”
“He was your brother. I…I tried to tell you.”
“The madness of battle was on me. I could only see you. I would cut him down again, Cai.”
“I didn’t want that.” Cai knew that was a lie as soon as it came off his tongue. What else had he been asking Fen to do up on the rocks before this battle? Why else had he run off, stinging with betrayal, when Fen had seen the Torleik sail and hidden his face? “Forgive me. I wanted you at my side. But not to…”
“I have killed my brother.”
Cai followed him back to the shore. He waited while Fen crouched once more by the fallen man. Fen straightened out Gunnar’s limbs, brushed back the thick hair from his face. In doing so he exposed the hole Blóðkraftr had torn in Gunnar’s throat. He twisted away, retching as if he would tear up his heart by the roots.
Cai leaned over him, gripping his shoulder, stroking back hair from a noble Viking face in his turn. He wondered at the strangeness of it—one dead, one alive, one his mortal enemy and the other so dear to him he could hardly breathe. The entire world was becoming strange to Cai, seeming to lift gently off its moorings, as the magical Druids of ancient times had lifted the great stones for their monuments and sailed them away, riding serenely cross-legged on their backs. Had that been a story of Theo’s? No, of Danan’s, and she’d told it as truth, not a legend.
Fen choked and moaned, and Cai struggled back to himself. “Fen. My Fenrir.”
“I am all right.” Fen sat up. He used the sleeve of his cassock to wipe his eyes and his mouth. “Come on. We have to get back.”
“Why? It… It’s over, isn’t it?”
“No.” Fen raised an unsteady hand and pointed to the clifftop. Beyond it, a sullen light was spreading across the sky. “They’re torching whatever’s left standing up there. They’ll do it for vengeance even if there’s nothing to take. If anyone’s still alive…”
“Oslaf.”
“What?”
“Benedict’s boy, the one I sent home. He came back to help us. And Hengist and the others…”
“Come on, then.”
“And I have to let Aelfric go.”
Fen pushed stiffly to his feet. “Are you insane?”
“Perhaps. But I don’t want him trapped like a rat in there. I have to give him his chance, even if it’s just to run away.”
“Cai, are you all right?” Fen took gentle hold of him and surveyed him. “Did he hurt you?”
“Who?”
“Gods’ sake… My brother. I saw him strike at you. Where are you injured?”
“Nowhere. Nothing. Just my arm, I think.”
Fen rolled back his cassock sleeve. Only then did Cai realise that he was blood-daubed from elbow to wrist, an axe-cut so deep across his forearm that bone gleamed in the moonlight. The world drifted further still. “It isn’t bothering me. We have to go.”
“I can tourniquet and bind it.”
Cai smiled despite the wasteland around them. “What the devil with?”
“I am girded with my subligaculum. A Viking is trained not to soil himself in battle. It is still clean.”
The smile became raw, sobbing laughter. Cai closed his grip in the thick rope of hair at the back of Fen’s neck. It was long enough for him to tie it back again, like Gunnar’s, but finer, warm as lambskin. Cai turned him round, away from the sight of the brother he’d slain. Fen was calm again, back in his warrior’s skin, but tears were still carving white tracks down the blood on his face.
“I love you,” Cai said fiercely, still laughing. “I love that you would stand here and rip up your undergarments to bind my wounds. But we don’t have time. We must go.”
Their track back across the battlefield was strewn with the fal
len. The first two were Vikings, one dead, the other locked in his body’s last suffering, and Cai stood by dispassionately—serene on his floating Druid rock—while Fen drew his knife and finished him off. And the third was Wilfrid.
Cai drifted all the way out. He made his physician’s checks, each in the right order. He felt for a pulse, pressed his ear to Wilf’s chest and listened to the silence that had taken up eternal residence there, held his palm over the smiling lips and waited for the slightest warmth of breath. Fen paced angrily up and down the sand, swore hoarsely for the warrior goatherd, then stooped to draw his hood across his face.
“I wanted to train them,” Cai said, his voice flat and grey. “I wanted them to be able to fight and defend themselves. I never wanted this, though. There’s nothing in the whole bloody world I could ever want this much.” He stopped. There was something wrong with his cassock. It was heavier on the left side than the right, its weight dragging at him. The fabric seemed odd—stiff and damp. It didn’t matter. Fen grasped his arm and they ran on.
Halfway up the cliff path, Cai began to flag. He was drowsy, his legs going numb. Fen spun round to catch him as he stumbled, and he caught his hand gratefully, but then waved him back. “You go on. I need to catch my breath a minute.”
“What’s wrong? You look like death.”
“Nothing. A bit sick and dizzy—damn arm’s still bleeding.”
“Let me bind it.”
“Go on and help them. I’ll be right behind you.”
Not far behind, anyway. Cai was sure of that. Once the tide of weariness receded and he was in motion again, he was certain he hadn’t let Fen get too far ahead of him. It was just that the cliff path had doubled in length, and even when he had toiled to the top of it, the monastery buildings were so far away that he could hardly see them at all. Sulphur-coloured clouds were blossoming over them, lit crimson from below. Before Cai could work out what this meant, howls from the darkness to his left drew his attention. He left the track and followed them. He’d retrieved his sword but wasn’t sure he could lift it, so he unsheathed the knife from his girdle belt instead.
A raider was rolling with Eyulf in the remains of a barn, struggling to pin the lad down. Eyulf’s cassock was already up over his thighs and he was shrieking like a pig at slaughter. His assailant, intent upon his business, didn’t look up at Cai’s approach. He made no sound as Cai’s blade sank between his shoulders—dropped deadweight on top of his victim.
Cai dragged Eyulf out from under. He wasn’t hurt, his linen cloth still in place, but he was hysterical, clinging to Cai when he tried to turn and leave. Cai paused for a moment, soothing him, then dealt him a judicious thump to the jaw.
Cai tried to pick him up and couldn’t. That kind of strength had departed from him. He had no time to panic about it, though a kind of numb fear was spreading from his deepest entrails out, so he adapted—dragged the unconscious body by the shoulders instead, and buried him as deeply in the straw as he could, praying he would have sense to stay hidden there when he woke up. Then he continued on his way.
Yes, all his well-known tracks were longer. There was time for dynasties to rise and fall, all the little animals Leof had painted in Theo’s manuscript margins to dance into the ark—not two by two, because Leof had never painted two of anything—but as best they might, and procreate and repopulate the world with exquisite hybrids and monsters, and Cai saw all these things as he slowly closed the gap between himself and the burning ruins. He had been away for a long time and was returning to a transformed world. Something had happened there during his absence. Addy had warned him that the Roman church would rise. Perhaps the time had come, because there was Abbot Aelfric. He was striding out undefended over open ground, and he was carrying a burning cross.
His faith was repelling the demons, just as he had claimed. Two of them were backing off before him, cringing and bowing. He was blasting Latin anathemas at them, his voice a buzzard’s shriek that reached Cai in tatters on the hot wind.
No. Not demons—Vikings, and they were not in retreat. As Cai watched, one of them darted behind Aelfric and aimed a kick at his backside. Aelfric stumbled but marched on. The raiders began a mocking dance around him, now keeping pace with him, now trotting on ahead and resuming their mimicked gestures of fear. One of them crossed himself, starting at the groin, and both howled with laughter.
Cai couldn’t save him. In this world where short roads extended forever, he couldn’t get near him in time. He remembered Danan and the pyre, and for a moment was tempted to join the bestial dance. Then pity awoke in him, and he began to run.
He could pick out Aelfric’s words now, rich with an inspired madness that might have made a saint of him in a different world. Back, you heathen devils! Back to your burning pit, in the name of Christ! He was flailing about him with the cross, oblivious to the burning shards of it showering down onto his head. The Vikings tired of the game. One of them shrugged at the other and casually plunged his sword through Aelfric’s breast.
They would have taken Cai next, but strange guardian spirits were emerging from the smoke. One of them looked like a chimera of some kind, a four-footed beast with slender forequarters and a huge rump. The creature split into two and became Oslaf and Hengist, converging like furies upon the first raider. Next came Fen, transfigured by firelight, nothing but long strides and flashing blade as he bore down on the other Viking, grabbed him by the hair—kin or no kin—and impaled him.
Aelfric was still alive when Cai got to him. The lines of his life had been cut, but he was drifting. Cai had seen it before in the mortally injured, this short time of clear-minded waiting. He was lying on his back, starlight and smoke reflecting in his eyes. When Cai dropped to his knees beside him and eased him off the ground, he smiled. “You, abomination? Still alive?”
“Yes. Why did you do that?”
“My faith is strong. I set out to fight the demons with my holy fire.”
Cai shifted him to ease his breathing. He took a thin strand of hair out of Aelfric’s eyes. “You did it. They’re gone.”
“Don’t humour me, abomination. But it was worth a try.”
Cai looked down at him in surprise. Aelfric’s spirit was in motion again now, beginning its departure.
“Yes,” he said honestly. “I suppose it was.”
“My faith is strong, but… Caius, is that God?”
“If you are seeing him—yes. Don’t be scared.”
“Seeing him?” Aelfric’s eyes widened, and he broke into a wide and dazzled smile. “I have been wrong. Wrong about so many things. Ask the old witch to forgive me.”
He was gone. Cai let the empty shell of him go. He stood up, wondering vaguely once more at the wet, heavy tug of his robes. Fen was there in front of him, propping up Hengist, who had trained well enough in the drill yard but turned primrose green in the wake of his first kill. “Fen, mind your back.”
“It’s all over. Those two were the last of them.”
Cai looked around. From the burning heaps of rubble, men were emerging, running towards him. Seeing who was there and who was missing, frantically counting the gaps, Cai felt the chasm open under him, the gap between joy and unbearable grief. He jumped as someone took his hand. “Oslaf—what are you doing? Get up.”
The boy was kneeling at Cai’s feet. He kissed Cai’s palm, filthy with blood as it was. “Can you be our abbot now? Really, now Aelfric is dead?”
Cai pulled his hand away. “No! It doesn’t work like that. And…” He looked into the ring of faces gathering round him. They were marked with soot and bruises. Some still looked terrified, some triumphant. All they had in common was their focus on him, and a burning trust that melted his last grip on the world. “Why would you want me to? I’ve done nothing but lead you into danger. Wilf is dead on the beach down there because of me—God knows who else.”
Hengist stepped forwards. “We know about our dead, Cai. It would have been all of us if not for you.”
�
��Who else? Tell me.”
“Demetrios, also on the beach. Aelfric’s man Marcus, though he took three raider devils out with him. And—”
“Stop it.”
Cai touched his numb lips. Had he said those words? No—he’d have heard the grim tally out to its end.
Fen had come to stand in front of him, gesturing the others back. His firelit gaze raked Cai over. “Stop it. There’s something wrong. What is it, Cai?”
“Nothing. My arm, maybe.”
No. More than that. If he traced his steps back to the beach, let his fading spirit slip between the corpses of his brethren to the place where he’d battled with Gunnar, he could remember. A blow to his ribs. Just a punch, he’d thought at the time, and wounded men had often reported that to him—a short-term ignorance of their damage, as if the flesh when given too much pain all at once simply thrust some of it aside, laid it away to understand later. Not a fist. A blade. Cai was pleased to have worked this out. He couldn’t have Fen looking at him like that, not with such terror dawning in his eyes.
“It’s here,” he said, finding the rent in his cassock. “I don’t think it’s much, but…”
Fen caught him as he dropped. The turf and the burning sky exchanged places, and he was floating, the earth and Fen’s arms pillowing him. He was stronger than he’d given himself credit for—even now he was aware, although it was like watching and hearing it all through thick fog. Fen laid him flat, easing his head down carefully. That was his last gentle gesture. He tried to haul Cai’s cassock up by the hem, but it had tangled and caught on something. Swearing, he grabbed the cloth at Cai’s waist and ripped. The homespun wool was tough and did not give easily, but Fen turned it to cobwebs, tearing it apart over the wound. Cai’s body jerked as Fen leaned close, cleaning away enough blood to see. He tried to keep still. The pain was finding him now, though, bearing down on him like a vikingr horseman. He cried out, one hoarse yell.
