Brothers of the Wild North Sea (35 page)

But Fen couldn’t fight the Torleik. Of course he bloody couldn’t. Cai lurched to his feet and almost fell at the rip of sick vertigo through him. Fen’s back was still turned, his head down. He looked scarcely human—an outcrop of the dunes or the rock. Cai would remember him that way. He wouldn’t think of him anymore as a living creature, the wolf from the sea who had become his companion, so dear to him he would wake with the bastard’s name on his lips, fall asleep saying it instead of his prayers. Cai would never think of him again at all.

He had a war to win. All round the bay, like fox cubs in holes, his men were waiting. They were men he’d trained and put there himself, and just now they were waiting for a signal that was never going to come, not from the lump of dune sand or stone wrapped up in its cassock and rocking, the only living thing about it its bright hair. Cai turned his back. He wanted to spit out the terrible snake-venom taste from his mouth, but he was afraid to find out that he could never rid himself of it. He controlled his breathing, the heave in his lungs that wanted to burst into sobs or retching.

He mustn’t break the skyline. He had rehearsed all this—his own track down from the defile to the place where he would be able to see Fen, ready and waiting in his appointed foxhole. Only the smallest change was needed. He made one last check of his sword belt with cold, steady hands. Then he ran silently down the track. Instead of turning right he ducked into the dune grass at his left, found Fen’s empty place and slipped into it. He was the son of Broccus, the scion of a race that had been dealing with barbarian invaders for seven hundred years. Goths, Vandals, Huns—fireside tales around the hillfort’s hearth, of noble Roman emperors beating back the alien hordes. Even as a child, Cai had believed maybe one word in ten. Maybe one in a hundred now. But one in a hundred was better than nothing, now that he was left with nothing, and he could assess the moment to strike as well as any other man. He had to believe that.

Here came the boats. He leaned forwards, crouched in readiness. God, they were beautiful—fine beyond the craftsmanship of any western shore dweller, Saxon or Roman. The plain, strapping ugliness of the men who poured out of them was almost a relief. They were huge for the most part, jerking Cai back into his flesh in visceral fear of them. There were a handful like Fen, lean and graceful as they saw to their anchorage and leapt over the prow, but for the most part they were the men of their legend, hairy great axe-swingers, thick manes drawn into plaits or horses’ tails, bulky shoulders straining leather jerkins.

Not afraid, and not in any hurry. They grinned as they waded in from the boats, took a moment to splash one another and bark cheerful insults back and forth. Darkening the monastery, muffling the bell, had been good strategy. These men thought they were coming to claim an empty rock. “Geiri, you son of a goat. If I’d had to share that oar bench with your great farting arse for one more league…”

Cai shook his head, as if he could rattle the understanding out of his ears. Fen had taught him too much. He didn’t want to know about these brutes, their discomforts or their humanity. “I could drink a river. I’m sick of the taste of my piss.”

“Hogni started drinking his before we ran out of water!”

A roar of laughter. Cai squeezed his eyes shut. He fought the urge to ball up. He’d only met his Vikings in combat until now. It was easy to hate with a bellowing axe-man roaring down on you. How Fen had hated every living Christian at Fara, until one of them had cared for him! The laughter rolling up at Cai was rich and familiar. It could have been Fen’s.

When Cai looked again, the world was in darkness. Briefly he wondered if he’d wished himself blind as well as deaf, and had his prayer granted. The moon was gone, a great black cloud whose advance Cai hadn’t seen devouring her whole from the west. Down on the beach, the raiders were cursing, blaming one another for failing to notice the weather. One of them was calling for a light.

“Bring the torches from the ships.”

Cai clutched hard at the roots of the seagrass. This changed everything. Many torches, casting flaring firelight up the flanks of the dunes, would expose the monks in their hiding places as the dull moonlight could not. Fen’s stratagem of waiting, the moment he and Cai had worked out so painstakingly when enough of the Vikings would be clustered together in the defile—all that would fall apart. One torch, though… Cai knew how one torch in blackness could blind you before it began to help you out, how it cast everything beyond its own nimbus into a void.

He took Fen’s plans and snapped them, crumbled them to dust, mentally brushed his palms together and cast off their ashes into the wind. Cai would give the signal on his own judgement now. The lighting of the first torch would save them. There was no moon now—in the dunes nearby he could hear someone panting in panic at the lack of it, and sent out a silent plea to him to wait, have faith, to believe—but the raiders’ first torch would show them to one another, light up their target before they themselves could be seen. In its way it was perfect. Better than any tactic of Fen’s. Cai could be better without him. He could survive.

He was sobbing when the torch flared up, but so deep down inside himself that it didn’t matter. So dryly that it didn’t blind him, and the leap of battle fever in his blood came at the moment when his heart would have shattered. He felt nothing.

His men were waiting, terrified in darkness. Fen wasn’t in his appointed place and neither were the damn Vikings. Cai had to make his move, and now. To make it strong and good. He sprang upright. He flung a hand into the air and loosed a cry his father would have been proud of, a bestial howl that brought the monks leaping out of their holes as if stabbed. For a second it could all have gone to hell. They staggered on the dune slopes, discomposed, black rabbits as likely to run for cover as to fight. But Cai yelled again, this time pointing to the clustering men on the beach. They were shielding their eyes, blinking—too dazzled to see what creature was shrieking in the night above their heads. Cai seized his moment, and the warrior monks of Fara attacked.

They blazed in on their wave of surprise, and it took them further than Cai could have dreamed. What warriors he had trained! Wilf took the first kill, goatherd turned berserker, lashing about him with his broadsword as if born to the trade. Feint, parry, thrust—he dropped his target with the gawp of astonishment still on his handsome Viking face. Gareth rushed in after him.

Demetrios the Greek, leaping about like a deranged mechanical scarecrow, forgetting every damn thing Cai had taught him but somehow making progress anyway, staying out of reach of returning strikes. Yes, they were fine. Cai, wading in, had an instant to love and admire them. The torch was out, knocked to sputtering death in the wet sand, but the moon had emerged again, just enough for Cai to see, and what the hell had he been thinking—of course the torch would go. He sent a prayer to the ancient hillfort goddess of the moon for her mercy. For not letting him dump his dearest friends and brethren into the battle in the pitch dark, to flail around as they might. So much for Cai as a strategist. Fen would have stopped him—would have known.

Desperately Cai plunged between Brother Cedric and the axe slicing down on him, deflecting it with the hilt of his sword. Cedric grunted, needing no second invitation. He jabbed as Cai had taught him, straight into the raider’s undefended gut.

They were outnumbered. Without Fen, it mattered. The Vikings were regrouping, working out that they hadn’t been leapt on by demons but by men—men in skirts, the puny castrated Christians who fell like wheat to their scythe. The first of them who took the time to draw in breath for laughter regretted it—Cai dived in past his unready shield and ran him through. He spun to face the next. This one was not laughing. His face was a blur in the moonlight, great, thick plait unwinding as he whipped round for his opponent. He was lean and massive, copper gleaming dully in his hair. He focussed on Cai—God, amber eyes, cold as death—and snarled. “
Blóð ok sorg!
”

Cai lost peripheral vision. There was a tunnel, and he was rushing through it. The sounds of battle around him faded out. He raised his shield just in time for the whole weight of the Viking’s sword to crash down on it. The raider followed up with an axe-blade swipe that nearly tore the shield from Cai’s hand. Something punched him in the ribs. Hot pain consumed him, knocking him down to one knee in the sand. It was only for a moment. Then the pain burned out in rage and hate, and he surged up swinging.

He was back in the training yard with Fen.
Do you ever hold back on me? Don’t you hold back on me!
Fen had sworn he didn’t. Cai had believed him. But perhaps Fen couldn’t help himself. Perhaps when it was flesh you had loved, you couldn’t unleash your full Viking fury on it—not even to save it or teach it to save itself.

This Viking didn’t love Cai at all. He was bulkier than Fen, a fraction taller—otherwise his exact equivalent, and Cai was learning the difference. His blade hit Cai’s with the force of a rockfall. Muscles ripped in Cai’s shoulders as he parried. He slipped away, got in one good stabbing thrust. The raider growled and retreated a step. Cai went after him. He would not allow himself to see how like Fen he was, so like that he had to be kin. That he had to be…

The step back had only been to gain a little space. Cai hadn’t even slowed him down. The great blade flashed in the moonlight again and Cai flung his shield up—just in time to catch a blow so fierce that it deadened his arm. The shield flew from his grasp and landed in the sand. Cai spun away, the swift dancer’s move that had saved him on the battlefield before. It worked—the Viking cleaved the air an inch behind him—but something was wrong. When he tried to recover, to whip back into the gap he’d left and fight on, shield or no shield, his legs wouldn’t carry him. He staggered. The beach beneath him, good firm sand for a skirmish, gave a treacherous heave. It knocked him sideways. Down on one knee again, he watched as if from five miles out while the raider grinned, took a double-handed grip on his sword hilt and prepared his final blow.

Time stretched and doubled back on itself. Cai had been hearing—for some while now, if he thought about it—a shockingly familiar voice. Familiar as the smile lighting up the vulpine face of this warrior who was going to be his death. Cai raised his sword one more time. He scarcely knew why, except that he was his father’s son, and Broc would have had an apoplexy to see him just kneeling here. The lively blade had turned to lead, and he could barely lift it. He thrust away the raider’s plunging stroke and rolled out from under the next.

The voice rose again, breaking like waves through the blood-beat in his ears. Cai was down, finished. Bitter salt sand was in his mouth. He had no idea why he was hanging on, deflecting his opponent’s frustrated strokes with his sword and then—last helpless gesture—with his arm. No idea…

Except that Fen was there. Fen, hacking a path towards him through the heaving sea of bodies. The voice had been his—roaring out threats and commands, orders to regroup. He was laying about him with
Blóðkraftr
, slaking the blade with Viking blood. Cai twisted like a cat and got out of the way of his assailant one more time. A cry of joy broke from him. Fen stopped dead—homed in on the sound, shoved the last barricade of raiders and monks aside—and came running.

Cai gave up the fight. It was such a relief, blissful as climax in its way. He thudded down onto the sand, air leaving his lungs in a whoosh.
Blóðkraftr
swept over his head, a scythe from heaven and hell. His assailant sprang back. Blade clashed on blade as Fen leapt after him, and then the unique, dreadful sound of flesh on flesh and bone. Hard-muscled impact and the snarls of men shedding their human skins in bloodlust and desire to rip one another apart.

Kindred flesh. On the edge of a faint, Cai clawed back. He struggled to his hands and knees. Kindred bone, kindred skin. Cai knew this—he knew Gunnar. Fen, his face a frenzied blank, had gone beyond such knowledge. Didn’t recognise his brother. Cai lurched up. He threw himself at the entwined pair. “Fen, don’t! Don’t, in God’s name! It’s…”

One man fell. Blood staining his vision like ruby-red glass, mind going dark, Cai lost track of their differences, forgot that a cassock marked one and a salt-stained leather jerkin the other. On a beach a thousand years ago he had found Fen dressed in hides like this, his hair as wild as Gunnar’s. He had found him dying. Which one was this on the sand?

Gunnar. Gunnar, because Fen was standing over him, sanity returning to his face.
Blóðkraftr
, scarlet from tip to hilt, was dripping in his hand. Gunnar, because now Fen was dropping to his knees beside the corpse, a cry like nothing Cai had ever heard before beginning to rip from his lungs.

Cai’s training forced one last move out of him. Fen’s back was unguarded. Scraping up his own sword from the sand, he staggered round to defend him. But there was no one there—no one who could make a difference anyway, not now. A handful of the raiders were retreating, splashing their way back to the boats. Others, who had reached the cliff path and found it undefended, were clambering up there to finish their night’s work. And the beach was littered with the fallen—some in Viking leathers and hides, some in plain moonlit brown.

Fen was hunched over his brother. After that solitary wail he had fallen silent. Cai didn’t know how to touch him. He tried to stumble to Fen’s side, but his feet took him into the water, as if in some way he could get clean of this, clean and clear in the cold, redeeming sea.

The waves were marbled, veined with black. Cai recoiled from the drifting pattern. Who had poured ink into the lucid amber and polluted it so? He had a wild vision of the monstrous squid Theo said he had seen on his sea voyage here, and then a pure memory of Leof, poised in the scriptorium with a freshly cut quill in his hand. And then he remembered that bloodstains by moonlight showed black.