by Harper Fox
“Help him! You, whatever you are called—Odleaf… And you, Cook—find me some wood, something to carry him on. Get him to the infirmary.”
“The infirmary burned down, Brother Fen.” That was poor Hengist. Cai wanted to tell Fen to stop snarling at his friends—that there was no need, no hurry. No point. He stared up into the circle of faces now drifting above him like scared clouds. He couldn’t speak. Fen’s hand came down hard on top of the gaping hole in his side. He went pale at the action, and Cai grabbed his wrist, making him press tighter.
“But all his things…” Oslaf leaned over him, shivering. “His cabinet and his medicines—I took them out. I carried them off and hid them in the cellar.”
Fen’s fist shot out. It closed in the neck of poor Oslaf’s cassock. “Well, go and fetch them! Wait. You used to help him doctor people, didn’t you? What does he need?”
“Sheep gut. Suture. And something to pack the wound. Oh, and it must be washed—he always made me boil the water first. And some of the poppy, to help with the pain.”
Cai groaned. Between them they would kill him here, if he wasn’t dead already. He wanted to let go, but it was just too damn annoying to hear them. He made a sign to Fen to raise him, and he dragged himself up far enough to speak, clinging to the strong arm. “There’s no time to boil…bloody water! Sutures and a needle—now!”
He fell back. Fen’s expression was almost comical, caught in transition between fear and hope. Cai began to hope himself. The wound was bad, but it was blood loss that had been bringing death in on him with soft-footed tread. If it could be stopped now… Oslaf had flown off like a well-aimed spear into the night. Cai stroked Fen’s face, leaving a crimson trail. “Press harder with your hand. Push some cloth in and press harder.”
Fen obeyed, his grimace making it easier for Cai to bear the new rush of pain. A time passed, measurable only in the thud of Fen’s heart where Cai was leaning on his chest. Then the circle broke apart as Oslaf came shouldering back through. He was clutching Cai’s leather medical bag. “Hold him, Brother Fen. I’ll give him the poppy to calm him, then I’ll stitch him up myself. I’ve watched him do it often enough. I can—”
“Give me the bag.” Cai thrust out a hand for it. He had no doubt that Oslaf could learn to do it, but his first few tries would be cross-stitch, just as Cai’s had been. Danan had made him practise on a dead sheep. “I said give it to me!”
“You can’t do this yourself.”
“Maybe not. Maybe I’ll…die while you argue about it.”
He snatched for the bag again. This time, to his relief, Fen caught it and dumped it on the ground beside him. “What do you need?”
“The sheep gut and that bone needle. Thread it for me. Prop me up.”
Gunnar’s blade had sliced him cleanly. He managed the first four stitches himself, his jaw clenched, head arching back onto Fen’s shoulder. Blood flowed over his hands, and Oslaf, sobbing, kept wiping enough of it away for him to see.
“Don’t cry, stupid boy. You’ll have to be doctor here if this doesn’t work, you hear me?” That hadn’t helped—Oslaf wept harder. “You’ll know more than I did when I started. Fen, lift me up a bit more. I can’t—”
“Oslaf, give him the poppy.”
“What? No. It’ll make me incapable.”
“I see how this is done now.” Fen, still propping him, reached round and took the needle from his hand. It was slick with blood—Cai couldn’t hold on to it. He opened his mouth to protest, and the neck of a glass vial slipped between his teeth. Oslaf, still weeping but surprisingly strong, held his mouth open and tipped the oily, bitter liquid down his throat.
Stupid boy. You’ve given me too much. But the truth was that Cai didn’t know how it was meant to feel. He’d never used it on himself. He’d seen his patients drift off smiling in the drug’s embrace, and he’d wondered, but the stuff was too precious for experimentation. Oslaf sat back, watching anxiously. Cai wanted to tell him there was nothing to worry about. He wanted to tell Fen, now drawing the edges of his wound together and neatly punching the needle through, how brave and beautiful he was. How quick to learn…
Cai turned his head and whispered it to him, ending it with a kiss, and Fen gave a kind of sobbing chuckle Cai could feel through his spine and kissed him back, roughly, not taking his eyes off his work. “Good stuff that old witch brews up for you, isn’t it? Lie still.”
Cai wanted nothing better. Fen had kissed him, here in front of everyone. Fen had come to rescue him from Gunnar—chosen him, and the horror attendant on that choice slipped away from Cai, just as every bad thing was slipping away. Even the pain was becoming a sweet fire. He hid his face against Fen’s neck so no one could see that the next punch of the needle through his flesh was a pleasure to him, a shattering relief. He was in Fen’s hands. Fen was stitching him together—drawing the dark down around him in warm, beating wings—making him whole.
Chapter Sixteen
At first there was only sky. It brightened and darkened, sometimes incredibly fast—the chariot of the sun driven westward by an insane charioteer, so maybe Fen had pushed aside old Lugh or Phoebus Apollo and seized the reins himself—and sometimes with an agonising slowness. There was one night that lasted for all eternity, and not all the kindly hands on him, not even the embrace that eventually closed round him, rocking him and stroking his hair, could make the stars give way to dawn. Then the passage of time began again, and Cai, throat sore from all the howling he had done but couldn’t remember, surfaced enough to feel a little shame. To be aware of cold water trickling into his mouth, and his soiled clothing being peeled away from his body.
Only sky, and then a line appeared across it. One black bar and then another and another, and finally two more, cutting across the first ones lengthwise. Then there was a rich scent of dry straw and heather, and the sky began to vanish, one swathe at a time. The scents were pleasant, the sounds the workers made as they went about their business—muted, nevertheless hushed fiercely by someone from time to time—soothing to him, and he slept.
“You should have let Oslaf boil the water for you.”
Cai gave this thought. There didn’t seem to be any hurry. Fen, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside him, looked as if he had been there for hours. He was pale, Cai thought, and he hadn’t bothered to keep himself as clean-shaven as he normally liked. He had lost weight.
Cai put out a hand. His arm was weak from the deep axe cut, but he knew that had been the least of his problems. Instead of turf or hard-packed earth, he felt smooth stone. He was no longer burning in the sun, or being flecked by autumn rain. He was warm, and the draughts that had made his bones ache had stopped. He lay watching Fen, who returned his gaze without expectation or hope.
“Have I had a fever?”
Fen leaned forwards. His expression changed indefinably—the tiny shift of meltwater under ice. “Cai? You heard me?”
“Of course. What is it? You look dreadful.”
“Those are the first sane words you’ve spoken in five days. You didn’t know who I was.”
“God. Five…” Cai tried to push himself up, and found that his limbs were made of overboiled mashed turnip. “Where am I?”
“Where the dormitory barn used to be.”
“Is it…? Did it burn down?”
“Everything did. We’ve rigged up shelters from the ruins.”
“Everything…”
Cai was about to ask more when the willow screen blocking the doorway was suddenly shifted aside. Oslaf entered cautiously, a bucket in one hand, Cai’s medical bag over his shoulder. “I’ll bathe him this time, Fen. You really ought to rest, if…”
The bucket clattered down. Water was too hard to haul up from the well to be lightly regarded, and Oslaf caught it on instinct before it could spill. Then he stumbled over to Cai, knelt and planted a fervent, noisy kiss to his brow. “My brother. We’d given you up.”
“I seem to have caused trouble.” Cai didn’t have the
strength to push Oslaf back, and submitted while the boy retrieved the bucket and began to wash him.
Fen had gone to stand in the far corner of the makeshift shelter. Oslaf glanced at him. “He’s never left your side,” he said quietly. “Apart from to help us build, and…other things. He hasn’t slept.”
Cai knew about the other things. He knew the hawthorns would be shadowing a new row of quiet heaps of earth. Wilf, Marcus, Demetrios… Who else? He drew breath to ask. Then he too looked at Fen. “Oslaf, I could really use some food.”
“Well, I’m not sure you should start eating straight away. You always make us start with thin gruel and water, after—”
“Oslaf, dear.” Cai patted the boy’s face.
“What?”
“Just get out.”
“Oh.”
He disappeared, tugging the willow door back into place behind him. Cai lay still for a few moments. He touched the floor again, then the mattress beneath him. It was clean and dry and had been raised a little off the floor on some kind of frame to keep him clear of the cold stone. His probing fingers found the front of his cassock, also clean. Cai knew what an effort it took to wrestle a feverish man into one of those, or even a deadweight one. He had been scrupulously cared for.
“Fen.”
The figure in the shadows stirred. He came to Cai’s bedside slowly, a sculpture brought unexpectedly to life and still stiff in its limbs. Neither spoke. Then Cai summoned up all his strength and hitched his lead-weighted body to the far side of the bed.
Fen lay down beside him. He propped himself on one elbow and gazed into Cai’s face, a scrutiny Cai returned with silent fervour. Fingertips brushed lips, new hollows under cheekbones and eyes, taking an inventory of damage. Together they tugged up Cai’s robes far enough to examine the stitched-up hole in his side. They were matching scar for scar now—Cai stroked the place under Fen’s ribs where his own blade had entered, and Fen bent to press four solemn kisses around the new wound, above, below, one to each side, as if in benediction, to set a seal on the life that had almost spilled itself from there. His hair was like warm silk on Cai’s belly. If he’d touched him, brushed his lips an inch further south, Cai would have raised his flag for him, half-dead as he was. But Fen rested his brow for a moment, then shook with a convulsive yawn.
There was something better even than their coupling. Cai discovered it, drawing Fen’s head down to his shoulder, tears stinging the roots of his lashes at the revelation. There was the place where all passion and strength had been spent. Fen was asleep the instant he lay down, warm as winter fire at Cai’s side. There was the place where they would seek one another, beyond the furthest reach of desire. On battlefields, beaches, hollows in the dunes where they had loved one another till their coming was only dry spasms, scraping, painful… Beyond all of those places, here they would be. He pressed tighter into Fen’s embrace. This place had forever in it. Time couldn’t end it, nor even the limits of life. Not distance—not even the wastes of the wild North Sea.
When he was well enough, Fen took him outside to see the new world. He stood, leaning on Fen’s arm, looking down across the sweep of green turf. The monastery Cai had helped rebuild had been only a shadow of Theo’s, but there had been a church, a refectory, the remains of the hall where Theo and then Aelfric had kept their quarters. Cai had had his infirmary, and a dream of the restored scriptorium. A dormitory barn, and half a dozen outbuildings for their beasts and crops…
Now the place looked as it must have when the first pilgrim monks from Iona and the western coasts had come here. Every building had fallen. The brethren had made Cai his shelter in the corner of the dormitory, where two tumbled walls remained, but other than that they hadn’t tried to restore what had been. They had started again. The stones from the ruins had been cleared, and all across the turf, small round huts were rising.
Beehive cells. Cai had admired the remains of them on the tidal islets, where the plain wooden cross marked the far edge of faith and devotion. They were easy to build, if you knew the art of corbelling. They needed no roof and contained no timbers for Vikings to burn down. They were pure in their way, returning to nature’s simplest and most perfect shape, all the centuries of mathematical learning that had given birth to the right angle—how to make it, measure it, build with it—blown away on the sea wind. They were one step forwards from a cave, the most basic human habitation that could be endured.
“They had to have shelters,” Fen said quietly. There was an edge of unease in his voice, as if he had read Cai’s thoughts. “A man came from the village—that idiot who wanted to burn Danan. He still makes the huts for his beasts like this. He showed us how.”
Cai squeezed his arm. “You did right. The village… Is it still standing?”
“More or less. And the men and women left when you told them to. They are grateful for their survival. That’s why Godric came up here to help us. He seems a changed man.”
Cai chuckled. “You should have checked his rump for the mark of Barda’s sandal. This is good, Fen—all the things you’ve done. I am grateful too. And I have to get back to work.”
“Worry about that when you can walk a straight line on your own.”
“But…who is looking after the sick men? Where are they?”
“It was a sharp fight, beloved. Sometimes it happens this way. There were only survivors, who got away with scratches, and…”
“And the dead.” Cai swallowed. Fen’s arm went powerfully tight round his waist, and he braced himself not to huddle into his embrace, plead exhaustion and be taken back to the world behind the willow screen, where sickness had shielded him from all the things he didn’t want to know. “Will you help me down to the churchyard?”
“Can you walk that far?”
“I don’t know. But I have to see.”
Five new mounds beneath the hawthorns. Cai, who had managed the walk but poured out the last of his strength, asked which one was Wilfrid’s and knelt beside it. This was the season when the yarrow’s long flowering made its blossoms significant and lovely on the open turf. Most of the summer’s colour was fading back to green and tawny gold, but the yarrow shone bright on this overcast day, its tough, aromatic heads like a sprinkling of snow. It had feathery leaves. Crushing one between his fingers, Cai breathed in the scent of its oil, counting off its medicinal properties in his head to ward off newer knowledge. Fevers, bleeding, healing—one, two, three. It was no good. Marcus, Demetrios, Wilf. “Who else?” A cold pain struck him. “Not Eyulf.”
“No. No, we’ve kept him away from you because he would have leapt on you like a dog and pulled out your stitches. One of these is Aelfric’s. Your brethren wouldn’t have him down in the crypt with Theo, and I thought him better out here.”
“He’d have thought so too,” Cai said dully, “at the very end. And the other?”
“Brother John died too.”
“John? He shouldn’t have been fighting. He was broken. He was…”
“I know. The noise scared him and he ran. It was a night when fighting was safer than trying to hide.”
Cai choked faintly. “Much good that did Aelfric. Much good it did any of us.”
Fen came to stand beside him. Cai rested his head against his thigh, and Fen roughly stroked his hair. “Much good it ever does. But what is the choice?”
“I thought you lived for the battle.” Shame burned through Cai as soon as the words were out. “Forgive me. God, forgive me, Fen—your brother. Where does he lie?”
“I have to tell you about Gunnar.” Again came that caress. Cai closed his eyes, surrendering, listening. “In the Dane Lands we are brought up to love whatever is strongest. So I loved my brother—without question, although he was savage, rapacious, so full of greed and bloodlust he wanted to swallow the whole world. A few months ago, he deposed old Sigurd. He took the Torleik for his own—violated all our laws of clan and rightful succession.” Fen let go a painful breath and knelt stiffly at Cai’s side. �
�Still I honoured him in death. Your brethren helped me. We placed him and the other vikingr fallen in the ship they left behind, and we torched it and cast it out to sea.”
Beyond the grey clouds, the rain beginning to patter onto the fresh graves, Cai could see it. Viking burials were legend along the north shore. That beautiful boat, her final cargo laid out on her deck—the night, and the hungry flames reflecting off the water… “I grieve for you. Your love for him was more than the worship of brute power.”
“That love has died in me. The decision to leave me here was his. He knew that I was still alive. He told the crew my injuries were hopeless and ordered them to leave. I was Sigurd’s other heir, his only rival. He seized his opportunity. It’s raining, Cai. Let me take you back.”
“Wait. How do you know this? About Sigurd and what Gunnar did to him—what he did to you?”
“One of the Torleik fallen spoke to me before he died.”
Fen stopped short. They were shoulder to shoulder, and Cai felt him swallow the rest as if it had been a stone. He sought Fen’s hand blindly, wondering at its chill. “What more do you have to tell me?”
“Nothing of significance. Come back with me now. You’re cold.”
“No—you are. Fen—your brother abandoned you here, but the waves didn’t get you. I did. I’ve lived at your side. I eat with you, breathe with you. I can feel whatever you’re trying not to tell me now, bottled up inside you like water behind a dam.”
“You feel too much.” It was a low growl, and Fen turned to him, his grip closing hard. “What more would you have of me? Your brethren are dead here. If you want more bad tidings, we lost half our grain and all the beasts we’d hidden in the caves.”
The news almost distracted Cai. His mind tried to seize the new problem—their reduced numbers, how far the food that remained could be spread amongst those left alive. “I can weather all that,” he said grimly. “Did the vikingr take the animals?”
