Brothers of the Wild North Sea (31 page)

He slapped the pony on the rump, and she surged to a choppy gallop. He focussed on the difficulty of staying aboard her, bareback, his cassock slipping underneath him. The tide was low, drawn out as far as it would go by the weak quarter moon, but the sand it exposed could turn to treacherous mud, requiring him to ride carefully from one pale stretch to the next. Whoever had built that fire must have come this way too. He was beginning to make out hoofprints and footprints in the drier places. Who would brave the flats on such a night, and what fire needed to be kindled so far from Fara and the villages?

The nebulous shape of the flames resolved itself. On a broad sweep of turf at the foot of the dunes, driftwood had been piled high, and into the centre of it someone had driven a single tall post. At the foot of the post—God, and they could have made it shorter for so pitiful a captive—a shape barely recognisable as human was huddled, bound round the waist with crude fisherman’s rope. Its feet were invisible, hidden by flames. A cloud of white hair, drifting in the updrafts, haloed its bowed head.
Danan.

Cai began to shout. He was still too far off for the men and women gathered round the pyre to hear him, but one yell tore from him and then another, raw sounds he had thought only Fen could rip from him. His lungs convulsed. He was trying to hurl his voice ahead of him, make it do what his hands could not. He leaned close over the pony’s neck. Her mane whipped into his face, stinging him, and he clasped her flanks with his knees and drove her on at a speed neither of them had known she had in her. She was snorting and flecked with sweat by the time she had carried him within earshot of the crowd. Cai kept on yelling, an incoherent roar that had
no
at its roots but made no more sense than that.

It didn’t have to. It only had to make them see him. If they saw him, they would stop. Cai was in no doubt of this—the people in the firelit circle were villagers, the ordinary souls he met and dealt with every week. They knew him. More crucially, he knew
them
, and not a single one among them would have done this. They were kind, flawed, human. If they saw him, they would break whatever trance was holding them. They would cut the ropes and let Danan go.

Not one of them turned. The thunderous splash of the pony’s hooves must be reaching them by now. Desperately, in flashes between the blinding whisk of the pony’s mane, he tried to make out what was fixing their attention. Not the helpless little figure in the fire, as if she were somehow unimportant… Cai caught his breath on a sob. Had they already killed her? Tied up her body to burn, for God knew what hideous purpose? They weren’t even watching her. They were watching a dark shape perched halfway up the side of a dune.

Aelfric was preaching. Cai had never seen him in full flight before. He’d never had the right congregation—only a bunch of half-heathen monks, their minds corrupted to rebellion by Theo’s rule. No, he needed men and women like the ones before him now. Theo had never tried to teach the villagers. Cared for them, answered their questions, but even in his enlightenment believed that some men were born to be priests, and others to tend cows, and best if each remained in his station. And so the villagers of Fara were here, their eyes and minds—and, Cai could see quite clearly now, most of their mouths—wide open.

Preaching or not, the abbot was ready for Cai. He didn’t glance at him or break off his monologue until the pony was within twenty yards of the group. Then he ceased to stab the air with his claw, and pointed it straight at Cai. “Stop him!” he screamed, his voice a thin blade that sliced the night. “Stop the profane consort of the witch!” The finger swung to Friswide. “You, woman—take your children and stand in his path. He won’t run them down.”

She actually did it. She had one dirty infant by the hand, two others, half-asleep, hanging on tight to her skirts. Without a flicker of change in her vacant expression, she swung around to plant the whole fragile group of them directly in the pony’s way.

Cai hauled back on the reins. The pony chucked her head up and bunched her hindquarters. They were too close—Cai’s momentum bore him on and he pitched over her shoulder, narrowly missing one child while the pony veered off to the other side. He broke his fall with his hands, ducked his head and crashed onto the turf at Friswide’s feet.

She bent with genuine concern to help him up. “Brother Caius! What are you doing here?”

“Me?” Cai coughed and spat out bits of grass. “What are
you
doing? Godric—Barda—all of you, come here. Help me untie Danan and put out that fire.” He tried to run and found his path blocked by Godric, fat and serenely smiling. “Out of my way, man. Are you responsible for this?”

“No, Caius. Abbot Aelfric summoned us here. He has captured the witch.”

Cai grabbed him. He bodily set him aside, but somehow the move put him into the arms of the next smiling, muscular farmer. “Aelfric!” he yelled past them. “Tell them to let her go.” He struggled against a surrounding wall of flesh. “In God’s name…”

“It’s in God’s name that I act, blasphemer.” Aelfric leaned forwards in his sandy pulpit and transfixed Cai with a blank, triumphant gaze. “I caught her digging up dirt from holy men’s graves by light of a full moon.”

“She was gathering herbs, you idiot. Let her go before she burns.
Danan!
”

“There is no help for her. She will burn, and her curse will be lifted from these people. The grain will be cleansed. The apples will ripen on the bough. The children—”

“Stop!” Frantic, Cai cut across him. No grains or apples here, but he grabbed the nearest of Friswide’s infants and held it high, quickly glancing at the rash on its cheek. He’d been wrong about the fleas. “These children have scurvy. They need to eat green plants, that’s all. It isn’t a curse or a…” The child gave a wriggle of discomfort, and he took it into his arms, unable to handle it roughly even while visions of taking it hostage flashed through his head, of threatening to chuck it onto the fire with Danan. “Danan is a healer. She’d never… Wait. When did you take her, Aelfric? Last full moon?”

“Aye, and kept her where neither you nor your savage could find her.”

Cai dumped the child into Friswide’s hands. If mad, empty preaching was all that worked here now, perhaps he had some of his own. He was being hemmed in by the villagers—not angrily, but absolutely—and he struggled to get enough distance from all of them to see into their faces. “Last full moon,” he repeated. “Think, all of you, for God’s sake. When did we find the ergot in the corn? When did your children fall sick and Barda’s goat die?”

“Why, it was after full moon,” Barda said. She was the only one amongst them who had looked troubled at the prospect of burning a human being alive, who seemed to be unswayed by Aelfric’s power. She reached out and gave Godric a slap, which almost knocked him down. “It was after full moon, husband!”

He turned and hit her back. It wasn’t a slap but a punch to the face, and Cai saw he had wanted to do it for years. She was twice his size, formidable. He would never have dared touch her outside of Aelfric’s charmed circle. “Hold your lip, wench,” he hissed at her. “The abbot has told us. She worked her evil spells from her captivity, to make us set her free.”

Cai grabbed Godric by the scruff and hauled him back. “Right,” he shouted. “This woman—Danan, who pounds up rosehips to cure your children’s colds, and has never harmed a hair on anyone’s head all her life, has suddenly taken to cursing and…” He gave Godric a shake. “And what? Evil spells? God help us. Did you ever think your trees might have blossomed and your children thrived
because
of her? And—and when this monster stole her and hid her away in some hole beneath the ground, the very earth began to die?”

It wasn’t working. The trouble was that Cai didn’t believe his own words—not as Aelfric believed in his. It would take a madman to hold such convictions, on either side. A creature who could blight the land or nurture it according to her will… No. He twisted around to look at the pyre. Danan hadn’t moved. Perhaps the smoke had killed her, or rendered her insensible—he prayed so. She was just an old woman. Cai ran out of words and reasons. He dropped Godric like a dead rat and threw himself at the crowd.

He could hear thunder. At first he thought it was only the pounding of blood in his ears, and redoubled his efforts to tear through the thicket of bodies, the hands that were holding him back. No one was hurting him. The women were even patting at him soothingly, as if he’d been a distraught child. They were just
there
, solid and stupid and immovable as cattle. “Damn you all! Let me go!”

“
Blóð ok sorg!
”

Cai jerked his head up. No Saxon throat could produce such a sound. The thunder grew louder. The barricade slackened around him, hands falling away, mouths opening. Astonishment and fear—at last, the placid, dreadful smiles disappearing, like cobwebs in the blast of a good north wind.

Godric waved a plump paw back in the direction of Fara. He gaped like a fish, and after a couple of efforts got one word out. “
Vikingr!
”

“
Blóð ok sorg!
” The battle cry rang out again. A thrill of terror shot down Cai’s spine, stiffening the hairs on his nape. He knew the words. They were very like his people’s own, and he’d been taught many blood-hot Viking ones now, shuddering with passion in sand dunes, stables, barns.
Blood and woe
—yes, pure oncoming hell, bearing down out of the night.
Blóð ok sorg
, the long, lonely syllables drawing out, like…

Oh, God, like the cry of a wolf. For a flashing instant even Cai was fooled, the villagers’ terror transmitting itself in a wave of primal body scents. They were scattering around him. He was free now to move, to run to Danan and try to set her free from the pyre.

There was no need. The
vikingr
raider swept down. In his leather jerkin, his bare arms taut with muscle, he was every shore dweller’s nightmare. Eldra was surging beneath him, her movements so blended with his that they seemed like one creature. His wolf’s-head sword was buckled at his side, and in one hand he swung an axe. “
Blóð ok sorg!
”
he yelled one last time, blazing past Cai at a gallop, sparing a second to flash him a lunatic grin. Then he drove Eldra straight at the fire.

He was as likely to decapitate Danan as save her. The blade of the axe flashed once as it fell, and a hollow thunk of metal on wood made Cai wince. He cried out in fear as Danan’s lifeless form drooped forwards, but Fen hauled down hard on Eldra’s rein, sweeping her round in a tight circle in time to grab the old woman before she collapsed. He shouted again—formlessly this time, a roar of victory and laughter—and hoisted her up like a bundle of rags beneath his arm.

The fire leapt skyward, as if in rage at the loss of its prey, blinding Cai to everything beyond it. Fen was gone, the only trace of him a dying percussion of hooves. He turned. The villagers were all staring in the same direction, the terror in their faces dissolving to confusion—and, at last, a different kind of fear, as if awaking from a dream. They began to look like themselves again.

“It was Fenrir,” Cai choked out, only then fully realising it himself. “Fen took her. He saved her.”

Aelfric let loose a shriek. There was something deathly in the sound—a kind of despair, as if some fibre within him had reached a breaking point and snapped. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live! Thou shalt not—”

The tuft of marram grass on which he’d been perched tore out of the sand and gave way. For one eerie moment he remained suspended, that clawed finger swinging to find its next target, feet poised over nothing. Then he dropped like a bundle of sticks in a sack and rolled to the foot of the dune, limbs flailing.

The villagers watched in horror. Then—easily roused, easily swayed—they began to laugh. Cai pushed through them. This time they let him, and he shouldered his way to where Aelfric lay, twitching and panting.

“No,” Cai said, desperately stifling laughter of his own. “Don’t you see, he’s not well in his head? Don’t follow his orders, but…don’t laugh. You, Godric—Blacksmith Wynn—take hold of him. Help him back to the monastery and call his brethren to take care of him.”

“No!” Aelfric lunged into a sitting position. He was like one of the fearsome creations of the Jews, the mindless, unstoppable golems who would carry out their makers’ vengeance to the ends of the earth. “The Bible commands! Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!”

Cai could snap too. His doctorly compassion dried. He took the abbot by his scrawny throat and shoved him back down onto the sand. “You think you know the Bible?” he snarled. “No man alive today knows the Bible. That’s what Theo taught us. A book written in Aramaic—translated through Hebrew and Greek into Latin… All it can be is God’s guide
to us, not his sacred bloody word-for-word commands. Things get lost. Words change. And Theo taught us those ones straight away, to show us an example. The word is
poisoner
in Hebrew. Thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live.”

“Is it so, Brother Caius?”

Cai glanced up. Barda was listening, hands on her hips, her expression thoughtful. She was nursing a split lip, which Godric would have cause to regret later on. “Yes. It’s so.”

“It’s very strange.”

“Not as strange as what you people tried to do out here tonight.” He let Aelfric go and got up, trying to wipe the memory of his bony gullet off his hand. “I’m asking you, as your friend…don’t follow Aelfric. Don’t follow
me
. Just for God’s sake try to think for yourselves. Now, I have to find Fen and see if you’ve managed to kill that old woman between you.”