Brothers of the Wild North Sea (2 page)

“He told me to keep my castrated Christian carcase out of his sight until I’d learned what a real man was. So I shall. You can pass that on to him when you next see him—if he’s still grieving, that is.”

Cai strode on briskly, the pony breaking into a resentful trot beside him. He always felt better when he’d restated, to himself or anyone else, his reasons for leaving Broccus and the hillfort far behind him. Broc regarded any form of learning as a pitiful waste of time. He lived for hunting, bloodshed and noisy copulation with the endless stream of women he bought from slave dealers or stole along with cattle from his neighbours during raids. Cai had had to get away. And he had to remember the bad things, because the stupid truth was that Cai grieved for his father too.

They were so alike. That was the trouble. Broc could be forgiven for thinking his firstborn son, who resembled him in every detail, would have followed in his rampaging footsteps. Coal-black eyes, hair to match. Strong frames saved from squatness by a length of well-nourished bone carried somehow down the line from Broc’s Roman ancestors, soldiers who’d manned Hadrian’s great wall in the last days of the empire, married into the people they called
Brittunculi
—dirty little Britons!—and stayed behind when the occupying forces went home. That had been three hundred years ago, but Broc still kept among his prized possessions a Roman army standard, indescribably blackened by time.
Yours,
he’d told Caius again and again.
Yours when you reach manhood and perpetuate my name.

There was little chance of that at Fara. The perpetuating part, anyway—Cai, at twenty-four summers, had long since attained his majority. Broc had provided him with girls, but Cai hadn’t wanted a slave, or worse still some tired, resigned castoff of the old man’s. He hadn’t really known what he wanted, until…

Swift movement flickered on the white-gold beach that bordered Fara to the north. Cai raised a hand to shield his eyes against the sun. A shiver of pleasure went through him, driving off his shadows. In many ways Broccus needn’t have worried—Cai was a very poor Christian still, frequently shipwrecked on the tides of sensual enjoyment that came to sweep his new ascetic principles away. In many ways he was his father’s son.

He lifted a hand and waved to the young man running full pelt up the beach, his cassock hitched into both hands, his flag of fair hair flying. “Leof! Leof!”

They met as they always did after Cai’s trading trips—arms outstretched, laughter shaking them, knocking the breath from one another on impact. Cai had been gone for three weeks this time, much longer than usual, and their collision was proportionately harder, tumbling them both into the sand. They rolled in the dune grass, little crushed clusters of flowering thyme sending up fragrance around them. “Leof. How are you, you puny Saxon? How is Fara?”

“Oh—the same.” Leof beamed up at him. His face was smudged as usual with ink from the scriptorium. “Hengist has discovered a new seaweed we can eat. Brother Gareth has a wart and thinks it’s plague. Theo’s had me working all hours on his book.”

“And is it?”

“What?”

“Plague?”

“Oh, no.”

“Thank God for that, then. I don’t have to hurry home.”

Their mouths met, smile to hungry smile. For Cai there was nothing finer than this—Brother Leof at the end of a journey, a passionate reunion in the dunes. He let the younger man roll on top of him, shuddering with joy at the surrender. Leof was lighter, less huskily built, but it wasn’t about strength, and still less force, as he’d have liked to explain to Broc, if it wasn’t immediately imperative to thrust all thoughts of his father right out of his mind. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you. Ah, you look fine out of your cassock.”

“And so will you, out of yours.”

Leof shook with laughter. “Fool. I have to talk to you.”

“Talk after this.”

“But it’s
about
this, Cai.”

“Well, then—tell me after, while the subject’s still fresh in your mind.”

The pony regarded them placidly. Around them, sky and air wove the ancient song of the meeting place of earth and sea—wave-rush on the shore, gulls mewing and sobbing. No more bells, except a last dying peal from Fara.

“You’ve missed your lunch,” Cai whispered, running a hand up beneath Leof’s cassock and stroking the skinny belly underneath. “And you’re thin. Have you been eating?”

“I forget. I lose myself. It seems of more importance to follow the curve of a letter with my brush than to pursue a clanging, cracked bell to the refectory.”

“Very noble-minded. But the curves and the weave and all your wondrous little beasts can’t live if their creator isn’t fed.” Cai moved his hand, and Leof arched his head back, groaning. “At least this part of you is still vigorous.”

“For you it is. Oh, Caius—my brother, my brother…”

Caius stripped out of his travelling clothes. The damage to the deerskin leggings wasn’t too bad, he noted—just one small damp mark, the rest of his seed spilled blissfully into the turf and the clutch of his own hand, Leof’s pouring hotly into his throat, where Cai could still taste it, salty and rich. He shook out his cassock from the pony’s pack but didn’t immediately put it on. The heavy brown wool was in need of laundering, at his long journey’s end, and on spring days like this its weight was unappealing. Still, it was practical, warm in the draughty monastery buildings, and Brother Hengist had perfected a wash that kept most of the lice out. Cai stood naked, idly scratching the pony’s ears, enjoying the caress of the warm wind on his skin.

“Cai, please get dressed. No man as beautiful as you should ever be allowed amongst monks.”

Caius looked at Leof in surprise. He was sitting curled up on the turf, his skirts firmly tucked around his ankles. He was pale in the sunlight, and Cai put the cassock down again and unpacked the last of his bread and cheese. He had a little wine left too, nice Traprain mead, not as good as the stuff they brewed up themselves at Fara but restorative nonetheless. “Here,” he said, dropping down beside Leof and handing him the flagon and a chunk of bread folded up round the cheese. “I am not beautiful. I’m a Roman-Briton mongrel with no grace. Not like…” He pushed Leof’s breeze-winnowed hair off his brow. Of all the polyglot men who had gathered at Fara—old-blood villagers like himself, Theo’s Greek contingent, the Angles and Danes from the colonies further south—he was the fairest, probably nearest in kin to the strapping, great Vikings who tore up the shorelines all summer long. Not that Cai would ever have said so to gentle-spirited Leof, who abhorred their very name. “Not like you, my blue-eyed Saxon. Now eat and drink, and tell me what’s bothering you.”

Leof wiped his mouth like a child. “I almost don’t want to. I feel so ungrateful, when I’ve been so happy with you.”

“You’re not leaving, are you?” Cai frowned and cast his mind back over the past few weeks, his own various misdemeanours. Theo was tolerant, but… “Oh. Am
I
leaving?”

“No. Nothing like that. I missed you so much while you were away, but…I thought more too. Prayed more.”

“Am I that much of a disturbance?”

“Not you yourself. Your friendship means everything to me. It’s just that I can hear the voice of God more clearly when you’re not here to make my flesh sing. Caius—
please
put your cassock back on.”

Cai got up. What surprised him was that he wasn’t more surprised. He unfolded the garment and slipped its familiar weight over his head. In the musky dark of his own scent, a bitter anger touched him. He wasn’t quite used to Leof’s god even now, and he felt as if he’d lost to a rival. He emerged, tossing back the hood from his head, and saw Leof white and stricken, tears beginning to gleam on his face.

“Oh, Cai. You do still love me, don’t you?”

Cai strode over to him. He knelt beside him and hauled him into his arms. “Of course.” Yes, he had been waiting for this. Leof becoming his lover at all was an example of something Theo called irony. Leof’s gentle teachings about peace, detachment, release from the hungers of the flesh—these had drawn Cai to him in the first place. He kissed the bowed head on his shoulder, remembering his first sight of that flaxen hair across a rowdy marketplace in Alnwick. Cai had bartered with him for Fara mead, and then while the wagons were being packed up towards sundown, had walked with him up onto the hill that overlooked the town.

Cai had had a bad day. He’d gone to seek his father and found him grunting and sweating over a slave girl young enough to be his grandchild. He’d had a bad week, trailing the old goat around the strongholds, joining in brief, bloody skirmishes when Broc took a fancy to a neighbour’s cow, plough or daughters. Leof hadn’t preached. He’d simply talked about Fara—the wide, quiet spaces, the companionship of like-minded men, the chance to learn. Cai had met him three times after that. On the third occasion he’d decided he wanted to become a monk, and had celebrated by rolling the wide-eyed, willing Leof down into the hay in an abandoned barn. And willing Leof had remained, but Cai knew he had pulled the lad out of his natural ways. “How could I not love you? Please don’t weep.”

“Don’t you mind?”

“Yes.”
Just not as much as I’d expected to. You touch my innermost soul, but not like that—even when I’m coming with you, racked by that fierce joy, I still can hear the gulls call, the waves wash on the sand.
“It’s your choice, though.”

“I want to try to be celibate again. We did take vows of chastity, you know.”

“Yes, but that means keeping clear of village maidens, doesn’t it?”

Leof chuckled wistfully. “I think it means this too.”

“Well, Theo never specified.”

“No. He leaves us to choose for ourselves—perhaps too much.” He sat up, and Cai offered him a rag from his provisions pack to blow his nose. “Cai—will you try it too? You say you don’t hear God when he speaks to you, and maybe that’s been my fault, letting us both be distracted by… Oh. Kissing me that way is not a good start, is it?”

Cai sat back, ashamed. He didn’t mind Leof’s choice, but his own nature was sensual, contrary, his flesh already missing what it knew it could no longer have. “I’m sorry. Come on. We should go, before Theo spots us out here with his spyglass. I didn’t tell you—I met Danan on the path not half an hour ago.”

“Did you?” Leof put out a hand to be hoisted up, gratitude for the change of subject in his eyes. “What gossip did she have for you?”

“Not much. She did have a prophecy, though. The Vikings are coming, she said.”

“The Vikings always come. Not yet, though—it’s still much too cold for good raiding.”

“That’s what I told her.” Cai put an arm around Leof’s waist. The gesture was only fraternal, and Leof seemed to perceive it that way, relaxing into his embrace and beginning to walk at his side.
Perhaps I’ll make a good monk after all.
Perhaps I can separate it out—flesh from spirit, and hear the voice of God as you do.
“Oh, that reminds me. I have to listen.”

“Wonders will never cease. To what?”

“The music of the bells, Danan said. The sea bells.”

The tide was out, the causeway crossing easy. The pony tossed its head in the salty wind that swept across the mudflats and started to pull ahead of Caius on its leading rein. Cai restrained it gently. He didn’t want his bottles and supplies to be jostled about, but he shared the little beast’s enthusiasm for home. The monastery stood on a vast outcrop of rock—the final flourish, so they said, of a great spine of it that ran right across the country to the west coast, bearing for many of its rippling miles the remains of Emperor Hadrian’s great wall. On its northern side, where windswept slopes ran down to the beach, the brethren had terraced the land and persuaded from it—with the aid of many tons of stinking kelp—crops of oats and barley. There was Brother Benedict now, the only one of them strong enough to handle the plough unaided, pacing the length of one terrace behind a patient ox. Beside him walked his inseparable companion Oslaf, chanting Saxon myths and Christian psalms to him to keep him entertained and his furrows running in a straight line. On the rocky landward side where little else grew, Demetrios was collecting scurvy grass and bellowing in Greek at Wilfrid’s goats, who also loved the succulent green leaves.

Oslaf spotted Cai and Leof and lifted a hand in greeting. Cai grinned, waving back. Leof was lit up with pleasure too. It was a good place for a homecoming. A hard-worked, hand-to-mouth existence, but a rational one, with time for contemplation and learning. Cai was young enough, sickened enough by his father’s bestial ways, to imagine he’d found his path. If he didn’t believe as Leof did—if he couldn’t yet kneel in Fara’s church and truly accept he was bathed in the presence of God—that would come.

A powerful voice boomed out across the salt flats. “Wilfrid!”

Cai was close enough to see the goatherd jump as if slapped. At the top of the narrow trail that led up Fara’s western flank, a tall, spare figure had appeared—Abbot Theodosius, never far from the workday crises of his monks. His desk in the scriptorium was placed to give him a view out over the widest possible sweep of the land. “Wilfrid, do you wish a flaking rash to break across your skin?”

“No, my lord abbot.”

“Do you wish…? Let me see… Do you wish for loose teeth, a dry mouth, mysterious bruising and seizures?”