Brothers of the Wild North Sea (14 page)

“Walk with you? I could sling you over my shoulder and carry you there,” Fen returned, but with less of his customary snarl. He was watching Cai oddly, as if reassessing him. “Why should I, though?”

“I haven’t finished teaching you. Come on.”

“In my blanket?”

“No. In one of these.” Cai took a fresh cassock out of the linen chest. He waited for the outcry, but perhaps he’d shocked his patient speechless. Making the most of it, he shook the garment out. “As you say, it has a skirt. It’s also warm, comfortable and practical. Put it on.”

“Where… Where are my other clothes?”

“Incinerated, mostly. We salvaged what we could, but you’re not walking round this monastery dressed like a pirate.”

To his surprise, Fen took the garment from him. He stood up, letting his blanket drop. He showed no sign of consciousness at his nakedness, and Cai studiously failed to notice it either, waiting while Fen pulled the cassock over his head.

“With what shall I gird up my loins?”

He made a fine figure in the long brown robes. They had belonged to Brother Petros, who’d been about the same height. With his shorn head and his direct gaze, he was pleasing to Cai somehow in the way of an oak sapling—young enough to bend, set to last a hundred years. “You’ll gird them as you usually do. The linens are in that box. But don’t bother now—I’m taking you for a bath.”

Fen refused assistance down the stairs with a haughty gesture that made Cai want to slap him. In the fresh air of the courtyard, though, he swayed and grabbed at the low stone wall that surrounded the well.

“Sit down,” Cai ordered him, looking out across the fields. The little packhorse he used on his travels and the monastery’s only other pony were both hard at work in the hay pasture. “Wait. Sit there, and…” He tugged up Fen’s hood to conceal his bright hair. “Just for a moment, try not to be conspicuous.”

Broc’s chariot horse was feeding her head off in the paddock to the south. She had proven useless between the shafts of cart or plough, rearing and kicking in a fit of royal rage to match Fen’s own. Cai had expected from day to day that Aelfric would order her slaughtered and salted away for winter meat, but there she was, looking glossy and bored in the sun. She came when Cai whistled, as if he might at last have something interesting for her to do, and bumped her chestnut muzzle hard against his chest. As far as Cai knew, she’d never been tried as a saddle horse—not that Fara, or indeed Broc’s stronghold, ran to saddles. He clambered the drystone wall and took her by the halter.

The Viking sat up straight at the scrape of hooves in the courtyard. He pushed his hood back, his face becoming keen and intent. “Roman,” he declared, as Cai led the mare up to him. “Yes. Roman, with two hundred years of your Briton puddle-jumpers mixed in, and…” He pushed upright, pain and weakness forgotten. “And a strain of the Barb. You won’t know what that is, monk. You think the world ends at the Oceanus Britannicus.”

“I do know. My abbot Theo told us of places far beyond that—Barbary, Arabia, where men called Berbers live in silken tents and ride about the desert on beasts that can gallop as easily on sand as soil. What does a
vikingr
pirate know of horseflesh, though?”

“It’s true that we are masters of the sea.” Fen ran a thoughtful hand down the mare’s flank. “And the ponies we use for raids are scrappy beasts, not like this. They take us to the battle, then we fight on foot, our stupendous skills in warfare bearing all before us. This explains what I saw in your weapons barn. I thought it a fever dream.”

“The chariot?”

“Yes. What does a Christian monk know of those?”

“I told you—my father is no Christian. He’s a Roman warlord, or he likes to think he is, and he gave me this beast and the chariot to help me defend Fara against monsters like you.” Cai paused, distracted. The morning breeze was full of the scent of kelp and thyme, too pleasant in his lungs to fuel hostility. “You really think she has the Berber strain?”

“Mm. Look at her high forequarters, her crouped rump.” He leaned stiffly, patting her fetlocks, and Cai crouched beside him to take a closer look. For a moment monk and Viking dropped away and they were simply men, heads together over an intriguing piece of horseflesh. “Her hooves are rounder than the Roman breeds. What’s her name?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think she has one.”

“You should always name things—beasts, ships, swords. It brings down the spirit upon them. Speaking of which—where is my wolf’s-head blade?”

“Safely locked up.” Cai took a step back, renewing the distance between them. This man was his enemy. He had forgotten. “Out of bounds to you. Listen—while you’re healing, I can treat you like any other sick man. But once you’re well, you’ll be a prisoner here. You’d better behave like one, or…” Cai fell silent. He had to have imagined the flicker of hurt in those dark eyes. “Here. I’ll give you a leg-up.”

“I can manage for myself.” Fen grasped the horse’s mane just in front of her withers. He braced to spring up. Then his knuckles whitened, and he let go a gasp that would have been a scream from a lesser man. He rested his brow on the mare’s flank. Cai reached for him, but he flinched away and scrambled, grey-faced, to stand on the low wall that bounded the well. “I can do it from here, if you will hold her.”

Cai held the mare’s halter while she danced and sidled. She wasn’t used to a weight on her back, but Fen sat quietly, and after a moment she settled, head high, exhaling in wide-nostrilled snorts.

Cai led her out of the courtyard. Once out on the wide sweep of turf, the salt wind warmly buffeting his face, he was ashamed. “All right,” he said, not glancing to see how his magnificent prisoner looked on horseback. “What is its name, then? Your wolf’s-head sword?”

“
Blóðkraftr dauði
. The mighty blade of blood and death.”

Cai shook his head. “It would be.”

“And I shall call this horse
Eldra
—the fire.”

There was no one else at the bathing pools when Eldra had picked her way down the cliff path and onto the rocks. Cai was relieved. He knew that every kindness shown to Fen was an insult to the memory of his slain brethren, and more so to the living ones who had to witness it. He looped the horse’s leading rein round an outcrop of rock in the shade, then turned to Fen, who had remained silent for the last part of the journey. “I know you wouldn’t let me help you up there. But I think you’ll have to let me help you down.”

Fen regarded him blankly. “Yes. To my undying mortification.”

“For God’s sake. All right. Swing your leg over her forequarters, not her rump. It’ll pull your stitches less that way.”

“It is an unmanly way to dismount.”

“So is landing on your face in the kelp. Come on.”

Cai held his arms up for him. Reluctantly Fen consented to be aided down, slithering into Cai’s embrace, where he stood for a moment, trembling. “Enough. I can stand now. Let me go.”

“Is
every
little thing a matter of life-and-death Viking honour for you?”

“Of course.”

Cai led him down to the pools. The tide was rising, as it had been on the day when he’d come here alone, yearning for the earthly pleasures Leof had just renounced. The water in the rocky basin was bright with the same green-blue reflection of sky. But Cai’s world had ended since then, burned to the ground and grown back again in a shape he still could barely comprehend. Who had that boy been, stretched out in the pool with nothing more on his mind than the hungry tension in his loins? All such needs had fled from him. In the few short hours of sleep he got, his cock remained quiescent, and the idea of his own touch scarcely occurred.

Ironic that he’d achieved his monastic ideal in such a way. Leof would have said it didn’t count, if he was no longer tempted, but that was one of the many nuances of Christian thinking Cai had never understood. Achieving the result was surely good enough. “Take off your robe and get into the water.”

“Into the…”

“Yes. Come on. It’s not too cold on a day like today.”

The look Fen gave him could have been bottled and used as a wound-cleansing liniment. “My whole body? Into that?”

“Yes. We dirty Christians do this once a week, whether we need it or not. Theo insisted on it. Come on—the salt water will help heal you.”

Fen put out a defensive hand when Cai reached to help him lift the cassock over his head, so Cai stepped back and let him get on with it. He kept his attention on the rocks, the rainbow gleam of sea urchins and cockleshells through the sunlit water. He’d seen a hundred naked men before, and once they passed into his hands as patients their bodies lost all significance to him but the parts of them that needed healing. Fen’s splendid shadow was only an image, a thing to admire from his new, cold distance.

He took the cassock wordlessly, choosing not to complain that Fen had thrust it at him with a princely disregard. Not this time, anyway. “All right. Get in slowly. If you stay off the kelp, you won’t slip.”

“You too.”

“What?”

“You too. Prove to me that this insane immersion is truly your practice, and not just your effort to freeze me to death, or drown me.”

“Oh, for God’s…” Cai began to strip off his own robe. He didn’t want to get into the water. He didn’t want to be reminded of his last visit here, the warmth inside his marrow, the pleasant exhaustion that came after loving. Now that he’d gone to the trouble of getting Fen down here, he didn’t really care what happened to either of them. If this was the quickest way of dealing with him, so be it. He splashed into the water, slithering himself on the seaweed, righted himself and reached up his hands. “Here. Get in.”

Fen picked his way down the rock. For a big man, he moved with a cautious grace that made Cai want to laugh despite the chilly numbness in his breast, and he clutched Cai’s wrists like a scared child. “Gods, monk!” he rasped when he was knee-deep. “No wonder you can keep your vows. Who would care for the pleasures of frig after this?”

“That’s not exactly how it works. Anyway, how can a rock pool be so cold to you after you’ve crossed the North Sea on a raid?”

“We cross the sea in boats, in case you didn’t notice. How is it that your bollocks haven’t crawled up into your belly forever?”

Cai, not quite hip-deep in the water, struggled not to follow Fen’s gaze. “Well, if yours do,” he said, pulling him down to stand beside him, “it’s surely the least you deserve.” He waited till Fen was off balance, then put a hand between his shoulders and shoved him into the pool.

He listened with interest. Some of the language he was hearing was similar to Broc’s, when a horse or a dog had annoyed him beyond endurance. Fen struggled in the water, submersing completely, then flipping back out like one of the silver-skinned porpoises Cai saw from time to time on fishing trips out beyond the islands. He shouldn’t have been out of his depth, and even if he was…

The fear that this great seafaring pirate couldn’t swim seized Cai like a cold hand. He plunged in after him, stilling his frantic movements with an arm around his chest. “Easy. Don’t thrash about so. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.” Fen fought for a few seconds more, then lost a sobbing, coughing breath, the back of his skull resting on Cai’s shoulder. “I am cold. I hurt where you stabbed me. And I don’t…”

“Yes?” Cai was interested in this string of nothings. “What else?”

“I don’t understand why my brother hasn’t come back to slit all your throats in the night and rescue me.”

It was on Cai’s lips to tell him that one Viking raider was as treacherous as the next—to ask him what he had expected. The ragged wound with its crude stitches gaped a dreadful blue-black beneath the water.
Where you stabbed me…
Fen had never said as much before, as if he hadn’t taken the injury personally, accepting it as one of the chances of war. “What happened that night? Why did they leave you behind?”

“They did not. They would not.”

“And yet here you are.”

“Through no fault of Gunnar’s. Or Sigurd’s, for that matter. They must have thought I was dead.”

“I’ve heard legends that your kind leave no one behind. Not even a corpse.”

Fen dispensed with his grasp. After an ungainly movement or two, he seemed to find his rhythm. Of course he could swim. He struck out across the pool, putting as much distance as he could between himself and Cai. On the far side, he tried to haul out, finely corded muscles straining in his back. Then his strength failed him. He slid halfway back into the water, clutching at the rocks. “You will get me out of here, monk.”

“In a minute.” Cai swam over to him. Before Fen could object, he turned him, seizing his narrow hips and settling him so that he was sitting on a ledge, in the place where the jade-blue water was most strongly warmed by the sun. Cai scooped up a handful of sand and rubbed it over Fen’s thigh, or tried to—he dodged a cuff aimed at his head and retreated. “Do it yourself, then.”

“What is it for?”

“It cleanses you. Scrapes all the scabs and the lice off you.” Treading water, Cai watched him. He needed some attention himself. He hadn’t cared, over the last couple of weeks, whether he was dirty or clean, and Aelfric certainly hadn’t taken any trouble over the matter. He rubbed sand onto his own limbs, and Fen did the same, hands moving uncertainly over his powerful shoulders. When he tried to reach down, though, pain shadowed his face.