The Humming of Numbers

by Joni Sensel

  “Do not presume to know the Holy mind, novice,” Brother Nathan said, the sharpness returning to his voice.

  Automatically, Aidan recoiled to whisper, “Forgive me.”

  Brother Nathan’s lips curled in a rueful smile. “It is not my place to forgive you. I particularly would not presume to forgive you today. I half expected to hear your confession upon your return. I feared the mundane world would tempt you. Thus my pride and arrogance are revealed, it would seem. I never guessed you would return to hear mine.”

  Aidan dropped his eyes, clamping his teeth on his tongue and feeling disoriented. When he looked back up, Nathan had stepped to the lectern. With the abbot dead, the scriptorium’s master was the senior monk until another abbot could be chosen. Staring over Aidan’s head, he took a deep breath and chanted the first lines of a prayer that, though familiar, seemed ironic tonight: “0 God, come to my aid: O Lord, hasten to help me.” The worship had begun.

  “Take your place, Brother Aidan,” muttered Brother Eamon, who alone had moved up behind him in the aisle. The remaining monks had filed into their usual places. The chapel looked mournfully empty. Aidan shivered as Nathan’s voice echoed, then paused, most likely awaiting his retreat.

  “Given the day’s events, your confusion can be overlooked,” Eamon added. “But you have been out of obedience long enough.”

  As he turned in response, Aidan’s gaze slid to the novices’ corner of the chapel. Its blankness mocked him. His features twisted in dismay, and he ran a hand through his hair as if it could comb away the snarls inside him. Rory should be standing in that blank space, trying to hide his usual smirk. Aidan’s skin crawled at the memory of the lifeless, unturning head. Here in the lamp glow he could see Rory’s gore tracked across his own chest, and the sight ignited his heart. It burned in resentment toward a God who had planned Rory’s death well enough to warn him, but not well enough to include a more compassionate or at least comprehensible alternative in His grand design.

  Straightening, Aidan cast his eyes back again on the bare altar, the crushed reliquaries, and Brother Nathan’s drawn face. It all looked and felt wrong. More important, it sounded wrong. He had grown accustomed to the numbers that always hummed through the chapel under the chanting, the mingling vibrations of monks and song and devotion. He’d been so often engulfed in them, reverberating in the hollows of his mind, that he had stopped hearing them. Now they had changed—or Aidan’s hearing had simply grown clearer. The chapel’s numbers were no longer complex harmonies of dutiful sixes, reverent eights, vibrant threes, and inspired nines. Now they were grim ones and twos overlaid with the slick whine of seven.

  His stomach churning at the disharmony, Aidan turned back to Brother Eamon. He did not dare meet the elder monk’s eyes. The order to take his usual place still hung in the air.

  “No,” he whispered, trying the word in his heart. He could not stand in this discordant chapel and worship while Rory’s corpse still sprawled in the dirt.

  “Brother Aidan.” The warning was terse. Aidan knew he would not get another.

  He swallowed and looked Brother Eamon in the face. “No,” he repeated, harder, before he turned and walked out.

  XIV

  When he lifted Rory’s limp body, Aidan took great care to make sure that the poor head did not remain on the ground. The younger boy felt offensively light, inconsequential. Aidan gulped back the angry tears that sprang into his throat. While he carried his friend into the novices’ hut, he murmured Psalm Forty-six. He thought Rory would want it, and he needed to drown out the chanting and noise that escaped from the chapel. He laid the corpse on his own pallet, finished the psalm, and left without crossing himself. He wouldn’t lay others to rest—there were simply too many—but he could at least tend to that one.

  Aidan was outside the front gate before another coherent thought formed in his mind. He stood motionless under the distant, ice-flecked sky. He had focused all afternoon on getting back to the abbey. Now he had no idea what to do next.

  He considered a return to the woods. The thought of Lana, perhaps frightened but safely removed from this horror, made him aware of his own heart still warm in his chest. A measure of strength flowed from there back into his limbs. He longed for the light of her smile, but before he would deserve it he needed to learn if anywhere else could offer more shelter than where she was now—or if others he cared for had found any.

  With a swift decision, he ran toward the riverbank. The monks had not mentioned whither the Norsemen had departed, if even they knew. Aidan didn’t much care. He could skulk along the banks of the river nearly to his father’s land and cottage. Not even the frogs would likely notice him. With luck, he might find some of his family alive—or at least take hope from a home and yard that were empty instead of littered with corpses.

  Aidan ran as best he could through the mud and undergrowth fringing the river. When he tripped and sprawled over an obstacle in the reeds, he leapt back up with a cry, afraid he’d stumbled over the dead. It took a moment for his strained senses and throbbing shin to inform him differently. He’d tripped on something hard, something humming numbers he associated with wood, not any silent corpse. Careful probing revealed an oar. It led to a boat. No fisherman’s coracle, this; with a chill Aidan realized he’d stumbled over one of the raiders’ craft. That meant they still reveled somewhere nearby, probably waiting for daylight before they would leave.

  His heart in his throat and his ears primed for the noise of approach, he eased among the reeds, identifying two small longboats there. Trampled reeds and a track in the mud suggested a third had already departed. Not the dreaded dragon boats of which he’d heard tales, these were each big enough for only ten or twelve men. A great ship probably awaited downriver while small raiding parties like this one pillaged up and down the banks on both sides.

  As Aidan fidgeted near the two craft, debating how to use the discovery, he found something else. The river lapped at a pile of manuscript pages, pale under the moon. The silver and bronze hinges that had bound them had been hacked off, the jeweled or gold-foiled covers shorn away. With a cry of dismay, he scrabbled through the soaked sheets and lifted them, dripping. It was too dark to tell which books they had been or even how many lay mutilated there. He only knew they were ruined, defiled for the value of their bindings and decorative trim.

  Letting the river take the pages once more, Aidan stood trembling beneath the pricking stars. Fury sparked a vengeful idea. The sooner the raiders moved on, the less damage and death the village would sustain, but he couldn’t force his feet away from the boats without striking back.

  Prayers for guidance firmed his intent without making him feel it had holy approval. Aidan’s conscience whispered that he would be promoting neither Christian forbearance nor peace. He ignored it, making a decision he knew he might pay for with blood. Sweat trickling off his skin despite the cool night air, he tugged and dragged at the narrow ends of the nearest boat until it finally slid into the slime, where the river began lifting its weight.

  When it became clear his plan could succeed, Aidan stripped his robe and soft undergarment over his head and tossed them high up the bank. Though his ancestors had routinely gone warring dressed in little but startling blue paint, he was merely being practical: Wet, the clothing would weight and constrain him too much. Neither weapons nor comrades nor battle-lust nor even fierce paint protected him in its stead, though. Feeling deathly vulnerable in the nude, he waded out with the boat until the cold, muddy water rose to his waist. There he rolled over the near gunwale and thumped down inside, letting the lazy current carry the craft into depth.

  The river swished eagerly over the same gunwale when he rocked it under and kept it there with his weight. Too seaworthy to go down without struggle, the strange craft bucked and fought him, but Aidan persisted. As the swamping hull slid away beneath him at last, he let himself flow out on the water flowing in. Shivering, he hung on to the failing boat only long enough to be sure i
t was not simply rolling, but sinking. Then he struck back toward shore, swimming poorly in an effort not to splash.

  By the time he reached land, he had a lengthy walk back and nerve-splitting trouble finding the second boat again in the dark among the featureless reed beds. He told himself more than once that discovery meant death, regardless of whether he was found naked or dressed. Still, it took all his will to keep casting through the sharp and rattling reeds rather than searching higher on the bank for his tunic and robe. He listened for the numbers of wood and grunted in both pain and relief when he finally banged his toes on the remaining longboat.

  By the time he pulled his clothing back over his head, well over an hour had passed, midnight approached, and the Norsemen would have to retreat from their plunder on foot. With his sabotage done, Aidan began shaking so hard from ignored fear and chill that he could barely get his arms in the sleeves, let alone tie his belt. Somehow, the novice’s robe did not seem to fit him as well as it had before. He ran blindly away from the riverside and dropped into the lee of a drystone wall to regain control of himself.

  Long minutes of silent shivering slowed his heart from wild panic to mere racing. Trying to rub warmth into himself, Aidan’s hands discovered Lana’s charm, wet but still secure around his neck. The oak leaves had long ago fallen away, forgotten. He pressed the twiggy cross against his chest, glad he hadn’t lost it. The awkward confusion he had felt when she’d slipped it over his neck returned to him, somehow comforting compared to what he’d felt since. He wondered what she was doing at that moment, like him, alone in the dark. Praying, Aidan asked that only boredom and sleepiness might find her. He fingered her charm and hoped that his perhaps foolhardy risk hadn’t drained it completely of any protective power it had. He surely still needed it.

  Aidan got back to his feet and set out again for home more stealthily than before, knowing he was probably between the invaders and a place they expected to return to. A vengeful twist in his heart made him long to stay there in hiding and watch for their return simply to enjoy their surprise and anger, but he might as well drown himself and die more easily. The dread havoc they’d already wreaked would probably not match their fury when they found they’d taken a loss of their own. By then, any men willing to fight had better be ready and close at hand. That meant that Aidan needed to alert somebody and perhaps join in a battle before he could even think of returning for Lana. Nowhere else would truly be safe until the raiders were departed or dead.

  Picturing her curled in her woodsy nook, he felt his heart flop. He had just doubled or tripled the odds that she would remain in hiding alone and be forced to come out on her own a day or two hence. He hoped he hadn’t just made a terrible mistake. Any lingering remorse for their kiss vanished.

  Curling away from the river at last, Aidan approached a cluster of wiclcer-and-mud cottages that included his father’s. Thatching still smoldered. Other roofless walls gaped up at the sky. The moon, having cast off the clouds, now provided too much cruel light. Doors hung open and farming tools lay where they’d dropped. The eerie hush over every home and hovel strained Aidan’s faith even though he knew any survivors would be huddling, cold and motionless, to escape notice.

  Then came the corpses. Biting his lip, Aidan stopped and crouched at each shadow only long enough to grasp the outline of faces, when they weren’t too battered to be recognizable. He knew them all, but he kept the moans in his throat until he recognized his nearest brother, Gabriel.

  “Aw, Gabe.” He squeezed his eyes tight so as not to keep seeing the rent in Gabriel’s skull. He tottered there next to the body, his hand on his brother’s cold and motionless chest, trying to drag enough air into his own chest to ward off the dizziness that suddenly swirled in his head. Gabriel had taught Aidan to swim and skip stones. The peacemaker in a tangle of brothers, he had only just taken a wife, a raven-haired giggler named Sarah, whom Aidan had once thrown an eel at.

  “God take your soul, brother,” he murmured, rising unsteadily and moving on without looking down again. He didn’t have time or safety for grief.

  Aidan slid into a tight, icy haze. Though they couldn’t be sounding more than a puff in the dust, his footsteps echoed in his head. He zigzagged between slumped forms like an unhurried dog sniffing cold tracks. His eldest brother’s wife and young son were just more empty, moonlit faces.

  When he finally arrived past the scattered guard of the dead, he stood motionless before the cottage door, stymied. Ajar on darkness, it left him uncertain whether to knock or call a greeting or push silently inside to learn by feel if any kin awaited there. He considered turning away, no longer wanting to know the full sum of the loss.

  “Aidan?”

  Aidan leapt and whirled, banging the back of his head against the door frame. That call, barely a whisper, seemed surely to have come from somebody dead.

  A shadow darted around the corner of the cottage and threw arms around him. Aidan flailed in an instant of panic before he realized the shadow was solid and warm and emitting a quiet sound of nine that he recognized.

  “I saw you approach,” the shadow whispered, holding firm. “I just didn’t know it was you. And then I feared you must be a wraith.”

  “Liam!” Aidan embraced his oldest brother and buried his face in a work-hardened shoulder. As tall as Liam, he still felt like a small, clinging boy. He didn’t care.

  “Praise God you were spared,” Liam murmured. “The heathens already sent a boatload of captives downriver. I’m told many were monks. Things must have gone hard at the abbey.”

  “Like here, from the looks.” Aidan drew back to peer at his brother’s eyes in the darkness, seeing mostly a dead wife and child instead. He crushed a fold of Liam’s tunic in one fist.

  “Your … yours have found peace, Liam,” he said. “Trust it.”

  Liam flinched, looking away. After swallowing twice, he managed, “I came back to make sure of it. I won’t leave them all night for the crows.”

  “Who else?” Aidan reached his hand to the door.

  “No.” Liam stopped him. “Don’t go in.”

  “Who?”

  Groaning, Liam cupped one hand around the back of Aidan’s neck and dropped his forehead to meet Aidan’s own.

  “Both Mother and Father. Gabriel. He traded his life for Sarah’s, and more bitter the draft that I could not do the same. I was too far away. They took Regan prisoner, but she may be dead by now, too. I’d almost rather. Plus … the two you already seem to know.” He drew a ragged breath. “I am glad to take you off the accursed list.”

  The names and faces seeped into Aidan one at time and then all at once, like a douse of cold water atop a trickle. There were only Liam and Michael left. His knees wavered. Liam braced him until he got his legs straight again.

  Aidan’s mouth worked, trying to find words for questions he didn’t really want answered. He finally settled on just one.

  “Quick, most of them? Or hard?” He couldn’t quite keep the sob from his whisper.

  Liam exhaled at length. “Think about who I’ve just named. Mostly hard, that I saw. Fighting.”

  Aidan closed his eyes to focus on breathing. His lungs seemed to be working only in gasps. He raised his eyelids again right away, disturbed by the pictures his mind tried to invent.

  “Well, there’s going to be more fighting to do,” he growled. “I’ve just sunk the rest of their boats. They won’t leave at dawn, or if they do, they won’t be hard to follow. Where are Michael, and Gabe’s wife, and—”

  “Lying low in the smithy. What are you talking about?”

  With savage satisfaction, Aidan told him.

  XV

  Aidan helped his brother bear their dead kin to the cottage. Liam still would not let him in past the doorway, and Aidan decided to trust his brother’s conviction that he would not want to know the carnage done to those already shrouded in shadows. Closer views of the bodies outside as they lifted and carried them were painful enough.

&nb
sp; With that task done quickly, he followed Liam to the smithy. What was left of the clan, perhaps twoscore souls, took shelter there among the half-finished tools and hot coals that could serve as protection, if needed. Lamplight joined the ruddy glow of the forge, however, and the tension had dropped since Liam had left them. Another man had returned from a similar mission to report that the Norsemen were encamped at the brewster’s home. Aidan knew the place, which always smelled of roast pork and served as an alehouse for those pilgrims with silver to trade for beer and a bite. A score of Vikings crammed into it now, drinking heartily, as cheerful and tamed as pilgrims themselves—because they had taken possession of Donagh’s only legitimate son and the most likely heir to his reign.

  Aidan remembered the hooded figure whisked through the woods by the raiders. His stomach cramped. The village sat in the eye of a storm, then, not near its end. The raiders had given Donagh until morning to consider his love for his son and gather a ransom more enticing than the price of a slave. The jovial and cooperative mood perhaps explained why they had left no one guarding their boats. It also explained why no force of Donagh’s guards, however bloodied and ragtag, had come to the defense of the people or to rally the men. Instead, the lord’s most trusted comrades were probably riding hard to his allies to offer land or cattle for silver. A highborn hostage had engendered a temporary truce.

  If the Norsemen discovered their loss before getting their ransom, however, they might prefer vengeance to trade. The young lordling’s death would fall on Aidan’s head, followed eventually by Donagh’s wrath. If the ransom and hostage changed hands before the secret came out, the raiders would keep their prize and the fighting would burst open again anyway. They weren’t likely to stroll away down the riverbank, overladen with booty, without drawing more blood first.

  “Fool!” shrieked old Muirne Connach, rising to slap at Aidan when the latest news had been told. “The deaths of any left here fall on you! Should have been you carted downriver to slavery instead of my Sean!”