The Humming of Numbers

by Joni Sensel

  She added, gently, “We’ve talked more of my sinful father than your holy one.”

  “I’m a monk, not a priest,” he growled, not understanding why her words were making him angry. “Not even that, yet.”

  Reaching into a pocket of her mantle, she drew out a handful of crimped rose petals. Through the haze of frustration in Aidan’s head, the puddle of red yelped forty-four at him.

  “I’d better give these back to you,” she murmured. “You may need God’s grace more than I do, Aidan.”

  Confused and defensive, he let his gaze bounce between the spill of color in her palm to her face. He almost hadn’t heard her words. The red forty-four zinging at him from her palm resonated with the undernote of four in Lana’s eleven, whisking his breath away. The harmony sang of blood and pain, but also of an irresistible fire in the cold universe.

  “There’s that look in your eyes again,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” he protested, appalled that she had spied his distraction.

  “No, ’tis not nothing. You sometimes look at me as if it is all you can do not to—”

  He grabbed her wrist, his hand flashing before he could stop it. The rose petals scattered, thankfully muting their hum.

  “Not do what?” he hissed. “What I’d like to do right now is slap you. I know I would not be the first.”

  She nibbled her lips, looking not afraid but suddenly shy. Her knee pressed into the dirt. Before Aidan could react, she leaned forward to brush her lips against his flushed cheekbone.

  “That,” she said, not lifting her eyes from the ground.

  Aidan couldn’t breathe. One moment he itched to strike her, the next he wanted to wrap himself in her fair, eleven-ish skin, envisioning things worth a month of confessions. He jumped up the moment his legs would obey him, forgetting to keep hold of his robe. The oak apples spilled again. Lana cringed. Not finding some accusation he wanted, he spun on his heel, but his feet would not carry him farther. He closed his eyes, bowed his head, and folded his arms tight over his chest, fighting himself. He had to find some grace that would lead him through this completely unexpected trial. Where was the Holy Spirit when he needed a beacon?

  “I’m making you unhappy. I’m sorry,” came her voice, soft, from below. Movement rustled behind him. “I’ll go.”

  Aidan prayed for help not to turn back around, but either the prayer or the Divinity failed him. She’d risen and fled a few paces away, walking backward to watch him. Her determined face lit when she saw him turn. That shine in her eyes drove a hot spike through Aidan’s body as tangible as the thrust of a spear. He knew he was lost.

  “Don’t leave,” he said.

  “What else can I do?”

  He raised his hands to his face, hiding it.

  “Don’t look at me. Just let me think.”

  He might as well have asked her to let him fly, but after a moment of blind silence, with only the sound of the wind laughing in the trees, thoughts shuddered back into his head. He held still and tried not to chase them, hoping they’d settle and then follow, one on the other, as they once had done routinely.

  When he finally lowered his hands, he was startled to find her within arm’s length again. “Don’t stand so near me,” he pleaded.

  Her face twisted in dismay, but she took a few steps back.

  “Listen to me,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. “Let me take you back to the abbey and tell them I caught you. That’s the only thing that might save me. I spoke to you of the Gospels, and Christ moved your willful heart, and you saw your mistake. They won’t punish you much if you can convince them you’ve become filled with the Spirit. I can give you words to say. All right?”

  “That would be lying, Aidan.” She sounded amused, sparking his fury again.

  “Go tell the truth to the Devil, then. That’s the best I can do.” He snatched up the accursed oak apples once more. She didn’t help this time, but she didn’t leave, either. When he rose, his robe weighted, he was careful not to look at her. He spun and strode away as fast as he could.

  VIII

  Aidan might have more easily escaped Lana if he’d had both hands free to cover his ears.

  “I’ll go back with you,” she said, trailing behind him. “As you said. On one condition.”

  Disbelief bubbled into his throat, choking him. She had a lot of nerve, setting conditions. “What?”

  “You teach me to read.”

  Laughter leapt from Aidan and he almost spilled the oak apples yet again. He threw his free arm over his face to hold in the immodest sounds. His sleeve muffled them well enough, but the trapped foolery ricocheted inside him, flattening his anger and the fear behind it.

  “Why not?” she demanded. “Learned women are judges and poets and scholars, and I’ve even heard of churches led by women bishops and priests.”

  Aidan exhaled hard, struggling to control his voice. Moving forward again, he said, “Go ask them to teach you to read, then. When will I have time or freedom to do it? If the abbot lets me back in at all, I’ll probably be stuck in a penitent’s cell for a week. You might be locked up for good. I won’t dare say two words to you.”

  He risked a quick glance toward her. Stubbornness stamped her face.

  “What do you want with reading, anyway?” he wondered.

  “There’s a part of your Bible I want to read for myself.”

  Aidan gaped, not sure she wasn’t taunting. “Which part? Why?”

  “Where it speaks about the Tree of Knowledge,” she said.

  Still doubtful, he replied, “Scripture is no matter for jest.”

  “’Tis no jest,” she said, hurrying to keep up with his long strides. “See, we call hazels the Tree of Wisdom, but I’m not sure that’s the same. Do you think the words might have changed? Father Niall tells about the first woman biting an apple. But I’ve eaten apples. They don’t make you any smarter that I noticed.”

  “It is not about being smart,” Aidan told her. “The tree you mean was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—knowing right from wrong. That’s why Adam and Eve had to cover their nakedness. They suddenly understood it was wrong.”

  She gave him a long look, and he thought for an instant she was going to argue with him. It would be just like her to declare nothing wrong with nakedness. Instead, she replied, “I think the real fruit might have been hazelnuts. There are many tales about hazelnuts bringing knowledge into the world. And divining, of course. You can divine almost anything with the right hazel rod: metal and water and jewels, or danger and thieves … .”

  He grinned, amused by her simple folk beliefs. He’d watched the divining of water himself, but the rest were little more than charlatans’ tricks. “Good things and evil ones?” he teased.

  “Yes.” Her eyes flashed at his gentle mocking. “You said something before, something strange,” she went on. “You said I was eleven. Obviously I am not eleven years old. What did you mean by that?”

  His grin fading, he watched the forest soil beneath his feet for several long strides. He didn’t want to hand her a weapon she could use against him, and he feared he’d be doing just that if he told her the truth. Yet she had answered his questions honestly enough.

  “If I tell you, will you come back to the abbey?” he asked, not trusting the evidence that she seemed to be following him there anyway. “And behave?”

  “If you have any chance to teach me to read, any chance at all, will you do it?” she countered.

  “Fine.” He shrugged, never believing for a moment that it would come to pass.

  “Good,” she agreed. “We have a deal. So what’s eleven? And then you can tell me what to say when we get there.”

  Aidan squinted, trying out words in his mind before voicing them. “Did you ever hear a sound,” he began, “a harsh sound, maybe, that you could almost feel on your skin?”

  “Like rocks scraping? Sure. Or hammering at the smithy.”

  “
When I look at different people or things, I can hear a sound like that, a sort of buzzing around them. Hear it or feel it, or both. Different things make different sounds, and every sound is a number. Objects sometimes confuse me because they’re quiet and they hum more than one sound at a time and I don’t really understand how they add up. But people are loud, and their numbers are easy. My best friends have always been threes. My mother’s a four. Your father’s an eight. I don’t trust people who make me hear seven. They’re smart but they’re—” He stopped, realizing he was beginning to babble. “I’m not explaining this very well.”

  “Well … maybe not,” she said. “But I think I understand what you mean.”

  Her words hooked him like a fish. He breathed carefully, not wanting to disrupt the novel sensation that someone had even tried to understand.

  She caught his eye. “So you hear eleven when you look at me?”

  “Yes. High and sharp. I’ve been hearing numbers my whole life, and I’ve never met a person higher than ten.”

  “Eleven is a magic number, you know,” she said, after a moment. “Powerful magic.”

  Aidan knew little of numerology beyond the numbers that repeated themselves in the Gospels, fours and sevens and twelves, but he believed her. He could hear the potency of her number in its sound.

  “Thank you, Aidan,” she added. “I think that’s a compliment. It makes me—” She jerked to a stop, her head rising into the breeze.

  “Do you smell that?”

  Aidan inhaled. His nose caught the same seared air. A spike of alarm passed through him as his memory interpreted the scent.

  “That’s not wood smoke,” he said. “That smells like fields burning!”

  “Or thatch!” She ran a few paces, then whirled back toward him. “Oh, Aidan, not raiders … is it?”

  His mind raced, trying to find another explanation, one that wouldn’t carry so much dread. He noticed, then, the hush that had befallen the woods along with the smell of burning. Not a bird tweeped. He released his collected oak apples once more, hoping fervently he’d be picking them up again soon.

  Seeing them spill, Lana tensed to bolt. He grabbed her. She pulled him several steps before he managed to yank her to a halt, his lips near her ear.

  “It might be,” he said, low. He scanned the forest around them. “It might be Vikings, Lana, and if we’re not careful we’ll be dead.”

  She whimpered. “Or worse.”

  He let his eyes touch the pale skin of her throat. Instinct flared within him, leaving his muscles tingling and primed for a fight. He felt protective of her, even possessive. For the first time, his body’s reaction to her did not make him feel guilty. “Yes. Come on.” He pulled her into the shelter of the nearest tree.

  “No. Not this one,” she said, glancing up to its boughs. Pulling from his grip, she darted to another tree not far ahead.

  Too worried to be annoyed, Aidan followed, searching for any hint that they weren’t alone. Foreign raiders had never attacked within his memory, but he’d heard plenty of stories, horrific stories, from not far downriver. Fearsome and implacable pirates, the Norsemen swept down upon farm holdings and monasteries alike, marauding faster than local men could muster. They stole every item of value they could carry, torched anything that would burn, raped women, took slaves, and slaughtered anyone who got in the way. Aidan sent a quick prayer that if the river had conveyed such menace here, his family would stay far out of its reach.

  “Don’t run wild,” he said, as much to himself as to Lana. “It might just be a cottage fire or something.” He double-checked his bearings. “Stay here, out of sight. I’m going to the edge of the wood to take a look.”

  “No, don’t leave me alone!”

  His feet already in motion, he jittered to a stop and looked back. “Well, come on then!”

  “Wait. I’m almost done.” Lana had plucked a small branch from the tree and was busily snapping off twigs and stripping its bark with her teeth.

  “Done with what?” He watched an instant without recognizing the Y-shaped bit of wood she’d formed. “Whatever it is, there’s not time.”

  “You want to walk right into them?” she demanded. “Just be still a minute.” Holding her hands over her head, she balanced one leg of the twig on the pad of each thumb and pointed its stem toward the sky. She pivoted in place, her eyes closed and her feet mincing in a small circle.

  With a start, Aidan realized she had created a makeshift divining rod like those used to site wells. “You’re dowsing water?” he demanded, uncomprehending. “Now?”

  “Not water,” she retorted. “Danger.” The stem of the wand dropped abruptly to point almost due east. She opened her eyes to see where she and her divining rod faced. “’Tis hazel wood, and it has never been wrong for me, Aidan. Whatever it is, it lies that way. And not very far!”

  “The abbey lies that way,” he said, a chill tickling his shoulders.

  “Then we can’t go there.”

  “Don’t be stupid! If it is the Norsemen, the only place that might be safe is behind the abbey’s ramparts.”

  “It is not safe, not now. Or else they’re between it and here.” She clutched Aidan’s arm. “Do you think they might have already hit the homes just downriver?” Her voice careened higher, rasping of one. The jagged sound of that number made it hard for Aidan to think.

  “It might be nothing,” he said, although his instincts said different. “Listen. Let’s …” He wanted to simply head back the direction he’d come, but her conviction was too powerful to ignore completely. “Let’s circle around south, toward Kilcarrick Hill. From that vantage we can see what’s on fire.” He didn’t add that from there it would be a relatively short, downhill dash to the abbey if need be.

  Lana never released her clutch on his sleeve as they sprinted through the trees. Aidan drew her into the shadows of tree trunks and scouted a clear path to the next, then they ran and ducked again. The need to hurry and the desire to hide tugged equally at them. The stench of burning grew thicker by the moment.

  Finally the land sloped up under their feet. Aidan could see blue sky beyond the last clump of trees on the shoulder of the stony hill. He’d just plotted the way in his mind when a bell sounded. Its peals were not the familiar, measured tones calling monks to their afternoon prayers. Instead the bell clanged in frenzied, toneless panic.

  IX

  Aidan stood frozen as the bell’s clamor drifted to them on the breeze. A haze of smoke accompanied it.

  “What does it mean?” Lana whispered.

  “It means we’re in trouble.” Not even an abbey building ablaze would drive the monks to batter the bell like that.

  “I could have told you that!” she hissed. “What are we going to do?”

  Instead of answering, he brushed her grip off his arm and darted the rest of the way up the hill toward the clearing. He couldn’t stand not knowing what was happening in the land below them.

  Breaking from the cover of trees left him feeling abruptly exposed. He dropped to a crouch and scrabbled through the heather and rocks, reminded forcefully of playing Lambs and Wolves as a boy. Like real lambs, however, the losers of this game would bleed. Trying to keep his head down, he skirted the ridge at a slant until he could see past the hill’s girdle of greenery. He tripped over the hem of his robe and skidded to his knees.

  Aidan stared. In the distance, roiling smoke clouded what should have been a view of the river bend and the scattered homes and farmsteads beyond. Orange flames licked at the barley and oats not in one field, but many. Not a soul dotted the fields—if he didn’t count a few dark, inexplicable heaps. Aidan tried to keep his eyes off those limp forms. He did not want to think what or who they might be. The abbey’s earthen ramparts stood defiant, but he could see over the embankment to the buildings inside. Figures darted between walls and through doorways, hurtling in panic or rage but too distant to identify as either monks or intruders. Beyond, higher on the opposite hillside, Aidan
could just make out the earthen defenses around Donagh’s stronghold. The angle and distance hid any activity there, but Aidan didn’t need to see it. Although the lord’s ring fort may not have contained as much gold as the abbey, it represented control of the region. If the Norsemen hadn’t clashed with Donagh’s warriors and servants already, they soon would.

  As Lana caught up to him, the abbey bell stopped. The sudden silence was even more unnerving than the wild clanging had been. With any warning, the monks should have gathered their valuables and barricaded whoever would fit in the souterrain excavated for exactly that purpose. If the bell had been ringing to summon those in the fields, anyone still outside was too late. Aidan fervently hoped that explained the bell’s silence. The alternative was too grim to admit.

  Either way, he and Lana were left on their own. He wouldn’t dare cross the expanse of fields below, even at a dead run, without knowing for certain whether monks or raiders held the abbey. And towing Lana behind him would be like waving gizzards at vultures.

  She took one look toward the tumbling smoke and burst into tears.

  He hushed her quickly. “Just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t within earshot below us,” he hissed.

  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed, muffling herself with her hand. “But the houses … my mother! How can we help them or know who’s all right and who’s not?”

  “We can’t.” Aidan dropped his forehead into his hand. He prayed that his father and brothers had been working a field together, preferably with scythes and sickles at hand. Together they might have a chance of protecting themselves or their women and homes. Pressing that hopeful scenario into his heart, Aidan shoved aside the urge to know what really had happened. Unarmed, it would be suicide to go down into the smoke right now to find out.

  “We can’t,” he repeated, trying to convince his twitchy legs. They wanted to run and know the worst. “Not yet.”

  “What do we do, then?” Lana choked back her tears.

  “We’ve got to find somewhere to hide,” he said, thinking aloud. “They might not move on right away. Or they may keep going upstream and return.” He scoured the riverbanks for boats. He couldn’t spot any through the smoke, but it would not have been hard to conceal them on the reedy and willow-draped banks.