by Harper Fox
Cai had done everything he could. He had filled his days, and endless insomniac nights, with every good action Theo could ever have prescribed for him. He had worked until his body failed, and then strapped his mind to the plough and read and learned until his vision had turned to dazzle. He had subdued his sorrows in the griefs of others—sat with new widows and widowers, with mothers of stillborn children. He had taught his brethren and the villagers, guided their minds and physicked their bodies.
He might as well have sat here on the dunes and moped from dawn till dusk, for all the good he’d done himself. The weary pain inside him had never ceased, and he was so lonely he wanted to fill up his pockets with rocks and walk out into the sea. Fen had imagined a moon-bridge that brought souls together before they met in the flesh. Perhaps Cai could follow the track of this rising sun on the water, leave his aching skin and bones behind him with his cassock and…
He jerked upright, scattering sand, sliding halfway down the dune before he could stop himself. What was he thinking? He had spent the night immersed in Oslaf’s griefs—had begun to mix them with his own. Fen wasn’t lying cold and still beneath the soil. He was vividly alive somewhere, perhaps riding Eldra hard across the Dane Land marshes, pursuing his duty as sincerely as Cai had tried to follow his own.
Tried and failed. He couldn’t do it anymore. What was the point of it all, if one day Fen came home and he was lying under the damn hawthorns? Cai had seen the look in his father’s eyes, unsentimental and accurate, sizing him up. His lung was sticking to the inside of his ribs, or so it felt, and each day it hurt him more to breathe. He’d known it to happen with deep wounds like this one—scar tissue forming too fast, too abundantly, binding and strangling where it should heal.
He scrambled back up the dunes. If he was going to follow the track of the dawn sun, it had better be soon. Now, his racing heart told him. Go now. Go now. He could take one of the ponies Broc had brought. No. If he was going to leave Fara, desert his brethren, he’d take nothing with him but the clothes on his back. A huge, sick exultation rose up in him. He would go. Each step he took—down the long track to the Tyne, and then further south still, down maybe as far as Eboracum where trading ships set out across the North Sea—would carry him closer to Fen. God, it was strange—now that he’d made his decision, he could almost catch his lover’s scent in the air. A sense of his own failure clawed at him, but he was past caring.
“Fen,” he gasped, stumbling out onto the slope where the beehive cells lay curled and dreaming in the day’s first light. “Fen, I’m on my way.”
Chapter Nineteen
Leaving was easy after all. Cai did it in a handful of sun-shadowed minutes, in still waters at the turn of the monastery’s tide. He shooed Oslaf gently out of his bed, before it could be said that the abbot of Fara had a new friend and a short memory, and he washed and dressed himself as if for any day.
He breakfasted with his men, noting with detached approval that Oslaf had colour in his face and that he went back for a second slice of Hengist’s fresh bread. He met the boy’s grateful gaze steadily. Afterwards he sat with Hengist among the grain sacks Broccus had brought, which were piled up in the covered part of the church for want of other space, and the two of them went through the tough, basic arithmetic of supply and demand. There would be enough to last the winter—just. If there were no more raids.
When Cai left the church, a blazing autumn day was unfurling its wings. The sunlight held a crystal chill of summer’s end. The shadows were blue-black, deep. The men of Fara had gone to the fields, or to help in the villagers’ dairy and barns. The place was as still as a starling’s nest with all its noisy fledglings flown. Cai changed into his travelling clothes and unhitched his sword from the wall of his hut. After a short tussle with his conscience, he took one of Broc’s horses after all. The others had survived the raid, and maybe this one could be spared. Leading it to a drystone wall so he could clamber on—a leap he had used to make without thinking—Cai reflected that he had no choice. Even this much exertion had left him coughing and fighting for air. He was going to the Dane Lands, and if he tried it on foot he would get as far as Godric’s southern pastures and probably die there amongst his cows. Everything was silent. He turned the horse’s head towards the track that led out across the mud flats.
He rode until the sun was high. When it began to beat upon his skull in silent hammer strokes, it finally occurred to him to wonder why he’d brought no water. Well, there were streams everywhere. He would stop and find one, if he could overcome the need in him, insistent as his pulse, to travel south, and south, and south. Water was easy.
Not so food. Cai touched the place where his satchel would normally hang on journeys like this. He hadn’t brought it. He’d set out with nothing at all. He hadn’t thought as far ahead as paying for his passage on board ship. He could work it, he supposed, as a physician on one of the big merchant vessels, or simply as a deckhand.
“First you have to get there.”
Cai reined in, gasping. There on the track ahead of him a woman was standing. There were no trees or cover for miles around. This was the first lonely moorland stretch of Cai’s journey, and to be there she must have dropped from the sky. She was familiar. Cai rubbed his eyes. “Danan?”
“Who else? Stop that horse before you trample me.”
Cai dismounted, hanging on to the beast’s mane until he was sure his legs would bear him. The old woman was planted squarely in his path, and the trouble Cai was having—another sign of failing health, perhaps, distortions of his vision—was that she no longer seemed old. She was boldly upright. Her hair, though still white as banners of falling snow, drifted in sunny abundance. Her expression was ageless, stern as the angel’s at Eden’s gate.
“I had thought better of you,” she said. “And old Addy certainly did.”
“What are you doing out here? What has Addy got to do with…?” Cai remembered his manners. No matter how she appeared to him, she was frail and alone, and no better equipped for a journey than he was. “I’m sorry. Where were you going? Can I take you?”
“And interrupt your flight?”
“Danan, I don’t understand.”
“You’re leaving, aren’t you? Your men, and the holy lands of Fara, and the book.”
Cai left one arm hooked round the horse’s neck. That way it would look as though he were standing here easily, not about to drop to his knees on the track. “How do you know about the book?”
“I know everything that happens in this land. Don’t you realise that by now? I am always everywhere, just like the wind and the sea.”
“That’s…” Cai shook his head. “That’s what Addy told the ducks.”
“And what did they think?”
“I don’t know. They just waddled after him, but…”
“They seemed to understand it better than you. Caius, you can’t leave Fara. You know that yourself, or why have you come out here in your shirtsleeves, without enough food to get you to the next town?”
“I just wasn’t thinking. I have to go on.”
“You won’t make it.”
Yes. Cai knew. No need for a dying man to pack his bread and cheese. He couldn’t even raise a flicker of denial. “Please let me use up what’s left of myself as I wish.”
“In search of your Viking.” Danan came and took Cai’s arm. She led him off the track, and Cai went with her helplessly, wondering at the wiry strength buoying him up. “Sit down here with me.” He subsided onto the flank of a beautiful green mound he hadn’t noticed before, and she settled beside him, producing from somewhere in her robes a leather flask. “Drink. And listen. It was good of you to come and rescue me from Aelfric’s pyre, even if I didn’t need your aid.”
“Well, it was Fen who really… What do you mean, you didn’t need me? You were about to be roasted alive.”
“It was Addy who said I should wait and let you try your powers—or at any rate, see what would happen if you didn’t
. He’s an old fool. I damn near suffocated, and I singed my robes. Still, you came at last, didn’t you?”
“If I had the least idea what you were talking about…” Cai didn’t mind too much. The sun was warm, the mossy slope beneath him comfortable. He took a deep draught from the flask she offered him, and made a face. “Good Christ, woman. What was that?”
“Just something to sustain you for a while. You’ll need it. Yes, it was good of you, and I am grateful. So I will give you one last prophecy.”
Cai chuckled. “I swear—if you tell me the Vikings are coming…”
“Ah. Did you see it for yourself, boy? Are you getting that kind of power, as your life ebbs? It does happen sometimes, with people of your—”
“Danan, I was joking. Please tell me you are too.”
“Forget Vikings, then, and hear me about just one. Turn back, Caius of Fara. Get on your horse and ride home before something much worse than your own little sorrows comes to pass.”
“One Viking?” Cai jumped to his feet. His blood heated and coursed in his veins. He remembered fighting up through fever clouds while he was ill, fighting Fen’s grip with a bestial strength that seemed to return to him now. “Which one? Tell me!”
“The one whose loss you’ve grieved over.” Danan took his hand. The shimmering cobwebs of restored youth had blown away from her. She was ancient again, and her eyes held sorrow enough for both of them. “You don’t need to mourn him anymore. He’s come home.”
All the way back to Fara, Cai was looking out to sea. Time after time he rode his snorting mount—Swift, he named her halfway home, to bring down the right kind of spirit on her—up the side of a dune, reined her in and scanned the blazing waters. It was too bright for him to see. A Viking fleet of any size could have been concealed in the light, in the troughs between the dancing waves. An hour passed and then another, Cai leaning low over Swift’s neck, scarcely aware of the ground she covered or the thunder of her hooves. The jolting hurt him, but his pain had become a bright, cold fire, a kind of unearthly singing.
The light had changed. The track snaked inland here. Cai halted Swift on the brow of a hill. Scents of gorse rose up at him in clouds, all the sweeter for a touch of frost that morning. Now he could look out as far as the horizon, out to Addy’s island and beyond. He could see every detail, down to the rainbow beaks of the fat little short-winged birds sitting placidly on their rocks. Black-and-white ducks plied their serene course along the shoreline, and a vast sea eagle—Addy’s, perhaps, relieved of its fishing duties—sailed in wide circles overhead. A Christian monk was not supposed to take counsel from bird omens, but Cai would swear to it that no harm could come by water today. The North Sea was peaceful, not a ship in sight…
But an army bearing down on him by land.
Cai reined Swift in at the start of her downhill plunge and sat motionless. What poison had Danan slipped him, to bring on a vision like this? He wiped his eyes, but there they still were—a moving cloud of men and horses, chariots and mounted soldiers, crossing the coastal plain that stretched from Berewic in the north to Fara.
But Fara was not their target. Now Cai could see brightly coloured tunics, metal helmets, manes of long, thick hair. Vikings, dozens upon dozens of them, their ships exchanged for war carts, their motives transformed. Cai had heard for years of places further north than Berewic still, up in the wilds of Scotia, where the pirates came to raid and never left, settled and began new conquests from the land. No, not Fara this time—Fara had nothing. The coast had been scavenged, its bones picked clean, and this army was turning inland—for the Saxon farms and villages, for the strongholds of chieftains like Broccus. Not a raid. An invasion.
And a force was riding out to meet them. Cai froze, his hands clamping tight on the reins. Was he looking through veils of time to a battle played out here five hundred years before? Not since then had a Roman standard been raised in defence of the north coast. With dreamlike slowness, Cai recognised the ancient sign his father had treasured up in the barn along with his chariots—a time-blackened eagle, the letters SPQR worn away almost to nothing beneath it. The Senate and the People of Rome, about as far away from home as they could get… The lead chariot was Broc’s. From somewhere amongst the hills and scattered villages, the forts and the elderly warlords who ruled them, Cai’s father had raised an army.
Cai broke into laughter, startling a lark from the gorse. The old man had threatened to, hadn’t he? Cai had taken it as an empty boast, part of his dream of a noble past. Broc had underestimated him, and he’d returned the favour, years of mutual disdain piling up between them.
His laughter died. Yes, Broc had done more than gather a dozen or so of his hoary friends and their carts. He was leading at least fifty men over the plain from the foothills, and at a cracking pace. They looked good. Cai would have backed them against anything short of the enemy they were facing. They were outnumbered—by how many, Cai couldn’t tell from this distance. Maybe not many. Not enough at any rate for Broc to see sense and back off. The fight would take place—farmers and cowherds against Vikings.
Cai couldn’t let it. All he’d learned from clash after clash with the wolves from the sea was that he couldn’t win, and nor could any landsman. Broc could fight them to a standstill as Cai himself had done, spill out the best blood of the ancient forts to do it, and the next tide would bring in another pack.
He was closer to Fara than he had thought. He must have ridden for miles under the influence of Danan’s potion. The effects were draining from him now, but one more hard gallop would do it.
He didn’t stop to consider just what it would do until he was back on the mud flats again. Swift was slackening her pace, the magic of her name wearing off, foam rising on her neck and flanks. That was no good, no use to Cai, and he signalled frantically to Gareth, who had appeared on the track at the sound of his approach.
“Is Fen here?” Cai yelled, as soon as Swift carried him into earshot. “Did he come back?”
“Caius, where did you go? We’ve been searching for you all day. There’s a horde of vikingr horsemen on their way down from the north, and—”
“Yes, I know. Did Fen come to warn you about them?”
Gareth’s gaze clouded in something Cai fought not to see as pity. “No. No sign of him.”
“Well, look out for him. The other mare Broc gave us—is she in the paddock?”
“Yes, I think so. But—”
“Gareth. Fetch me the horse.”
Cai slithered off Swift’s back and stood with his hands propped on his knees. By the time Gareth came running down from the paddock, he had caught his breath. “Thanks,” he said, grinning, reaching out to grab the fresh beast’s halter. “Help me get the bridle off this one and onto…” He was running short of inspiration, but Broc’s other gift still had a long green strand hanging from her startled mouth. “Onto Clover.”
“Clover? All right. But why, Caius? They’re plough horses, not… What are you going to do?”
“I’m not sure. But if it goes wrong, and you see the vikingr troops making for this place, you take your brethren and leave.”
“Can’t we give them a fight for it?”
“Not this many of them.” Cai shook his head, grinning. “How you’ve changed, my friend! No. This time you run and hide—together, separately, whatever is safest. Take nothing but the book. Here—give me a leg up.”
“You’re not well. You shouldn’t be galloping about the countryside on your own.”
“I know. I just have to try this one thing.”
Once settled on his new mount’s broad back, Cai paused. This mare was bigger than Swift, but raw-boned and awkward. And Cai hadn’t chosen the best name for her either. “Clover the warhorse,” he said doubtfully. Well, he had ridden Broc’s ponies into skirmishes for cattle and land since he was big enough to lift a sword. He shook her reins and set her to a lumbering canter. Gareth held out a hand, and Cai squeezed it in passing. “Don’t worry!” he
called back over his shoulder. “Fen is on his way. Watch the fields, and if the battle turns against us, run!”
He drove the mare hard through the open gates of Fara and down past the village. The villagers—his friends now, Barda and Friswide and even Godric, Wynn the smith and a small mob of children—came tumbling out of their barns and huts to call to him, “Vikingr, vikingr!”
Cai didn’t slow down. He waved at them, slewing the horse around them. Soon the fields gave way to the vast coastal plain he had seen from the cliffs above Fara, where the raiding army and Broc’s were closing upon one another fast. Taking one deep breath and then another, Cai aimed for the centre—the narrowing patch of land between them—and rode on.
Chapter Twenty
A strange, wild faith was kindling inside Cai at last. It was nothing like Leof’s, nothing even Theo could have taught him. Its fires had first touched him during the storm, when he had been shipwrecked and Fen had pulled him from the waves. He had been nothing but a heartbeat in a skeleton, nothing but breathing flesh, and so it was now. His purpose was only to meet the next rush of sunlit wind against his face, and the next, as the horse bore him onwards.
Fen was near. Cai knew it, as certainly as if he were back in the sea with that strong arm reaching down for him. Perhaps he was already at Fara, dishing out orders and chivvying the brethren into action. The very air was sweeter in Cai’s lungs for his closeness. The perfection of the moment wrapped him round.
He could hear voices now. He could make out separate figures through the glimmering light. At the head of the Viking force, a vast charioteer was tearing across the plain. His hair flew out behind him, thick as a sheepskin. When he raised his arm and roared, a noisy chorus roared back at him.
Sigurd! Sigurd! Sigurd!
Sigurd, Fen’s warlord. The leader of the Torleik clan, deposed by Fen’s brother and cast out. How had Gunnar ever managed to defeat such a bear of a man? Well, he had risen from his ashes. His warriors were yelling his name like a battle cry, like the song of a war god. His two-horse chariot was flying full pelt towards Broc’s front line, so fast that he was opening a gap between himself and his own men.
