Brothers of the Wild North Sea (6 page)

“Wulfhere?” Oslaf paled. “Oh, Caius. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t have time to discuss it. We must see to the burials tomorrow. Just go.”

Once Oslaf was gone, Benedict turned away and carried on wiping the benches. Cai couldn’t seem to move. A bitter black fury was filling him. His hands were trembling, sweat breaking out down his spine. He wanted to take up his cutting knife and drive it into Ben’s innocent back. “Why?” he rasped. “Why Leof, not Oslaf?”

Benedict turned to face him. His expression betrayed no anger, but he sat down on the low windowsill as if suddenly worn out. “I grieve for you, Brother.”

“Grieve for me? You have no idea. Why is your boy—yours—running around, warm and alive, while Leof, who was worth—?”

“I grieve for you. But mind what you say.”

Caius shut up. He pressed his fingers to his lips—to the mouth that had started to spew out such horrors. “Ben,” he whispered. “Forgive me!”

Benedict stretched out his hand. Cai stumbled across the room to him and crashed to his knees at his feet. He buried his face in the blood-soaked dark of Ben’s apron. “Leof! Leof!”

When he had wept until his lungs were raw and the screams in his head had dulled to exhausted silence, he sat up. Tears were rolling down Ben’s face too, tracking clean lines through the dirt. Ben stroked his hair one last time. “Where did they come from, Cai? What did they want?”

“God knows. You’re right—the next time will finish us.”

“What can we do?”

Cai dragged a hand across his eyes. Already faint moans from the ward were drawing him back to his duty. “I don’t know. But when I can be spared from here, I will go and see my father.”

Two days later, Cai was on his knees again. In part it was simply exhaustion. Both Fara’s ponies had been needed in the fields. He’d made the journey to the hillfort on foot in a bare few hours, and his soles were blistered and sore. In part it was an abandonment of pride. He had made his request, and his father had thumped down in the chair he liked to think of as his throne, burst into laughter and told him to kneel like the Christian he was, if he really desired such a thing.

Cai did desire it. He was no longer sure that he
was
a Christian, and that made submission easier. He lowered his head and awaited Broc’s verdict.

He closed his eyes, and that was a mistake. He hadn’t slept since the raid, and so hadn’t dreamed, but he was beginning to see visions. He was back in the churchyard to the east of the burnt-out church, looking at five shallow graves. Only a thin layer of soil clothed Fara, and although every man who could lift a shovel had taken his turn, the business of digging had been miserable, long drawn out in the rain. Theo at least was at rest in the cool silence of the crypt. The stonemason would mark his tomb. For the others, only a plain wooden cross stood at the head of each pile of earth. Identity was unimportant—each of these men, coming to monastic life, had cast off all selfhood, subsumed who he was in the greater brotherhood of Christ. That was the theory, anyway. It didn’t quite work out in life. Wulfhere had sung like an angel. Andreou had been a fat gossip who had loved Theo more than God. Aethelstan’s booming laugh had carried out over the noise of his forge, and Petros had made wooden bowls of such exquisite finish that matrons scrapped over them like cats in the village market. And Leof…

In death, the theory worked well. Only Cai and his brethren knew which grave was which, and with them would vanish the knowledge that Leof lay closest to the wall, sheltered by hawthorns, cradled in the sacred ground he had loved.

“Caius!”

Cai jerked his head up. The churchyard dissolved to a firelit hut. All around him, sights and sounds familiar to him from earliest childhood took up their places once again—babies crying, one of Broc’s latest wives nursing a newborn at her breast. Shepherds and traders wandered in and out. Broc’s great wolfhounds growled at the sheep being driven past the open door. The chieftain’s hut was the daily centre of all the hillfort’s dealings, and Broc wasn’t the man to call a halt to any of that just because his son had turned up, and so half the settlement had seen the proud monk from Fara drop to his knees on command. “Yes, Father?”

“What is there in it for me?”

Cai took him in.
There am I, twenty years into the future,
he thought. Strong as an ox, jet-black hair only now being streaked by a line or two of grey. Indestructible. “I don’t understand.”

“If I grant these things to you—weapons, horses, men—what will I get in return?”

“You know I have nothing.”

“That was by your choice. Before you left me here, you had a kingdom to inherit.”

A kingdom? Twelve miserable fields and a hilltop?
Just two days before, Cai would have said it. He’d have laughed at the old man’s arrogance, certain he had found a better world. He couldn’t imagine ever wanting to laugh again, not if he too survived to Broc’s late years, his own sturdy frame holding him fast in a life he no longer desired. “Tell me what you want of me. I must have the weapons. I’ll do whatever you ask.”

“Come back and be my son again.”

“You have dozens of sons.” Cai glanced around the thriving, bustling roundhouse, from whose every shadow peered a face more or less like his own. “Hundreds by now, probably.”

“You were my firstborn.”

Cai swallowed hard. What had Danan said—that Broccus grieved for him? He hadn’t believed it. All his life he’d been treated like Broc’s horse or his dog. A good one, granted—an asset to be shown off on market days and feasts—but nothing more than that. Coldly he said, “May I get up now?”

“You’d never have knelt in the first place if that lunatic Greek hadn’t cut the balls off you. Yes, get up. Come and stand before me. You’ve grown, I think. Started to fill out. It’s strange—you still
look
like a man.”

Cai submitted to the inspection. He was past being bothered by Broc’s words or the spectacle he was providing to the clan. He even stood still when Broc pushed up out of his chair and took his shoulders as if to measure their width.

“How is he, then?” the old man asked idly, tugging at his hair. “Theo, and that little Saxon bedwarmer of yours? Did they get through your raid?”

“No. The lunatic and the bedwarmer are both dead. You were right, Broccus—peace isn’t the way. I thought you would help me, but if not… Just let me go.”

Caius turned and walked off. He could hear Broc calling after him, but it didn’t seem to matter through the ongoing racket in his head. The cries and the shouting had never let up. Sometimes beneath them sea bells whispered, and the bell from the burnt-out church—fallen along with the tower and stolen for melt by the raiders—kept up its dull warning song.

He picked his way around the central fire, around groups of children playing in the dust. When he trod on one, he picked it up out of habit and put it on his hip, jouncing it absently. He’d barely been big enough to walk himself when his first little half-sib had been thrust into his arms, and so it had gone on. He’d lived hip-deep among children all his life. Now he came to think of it, they were the only part of his father’s world he’d missed, and he held the small body close, blindly seeking comfort. Probably it was a relative anyway.

The child began to yowl and laugh in pleasure at the ride, and its mother emerged from one of the smaller huts, smiling to see Broc’s eldest boy back in camp. “Caius, Caius! Lost your frock?”

Cai handed the infant down to her. “Looks that way, doesn’t it? Just for today.”

“Ah, won’t you stay with us? Don’t mind your old fool of a father.”

“I don’t, Helena. But I have to go.”

“You should hear him. Cai this, Cai that, when he’s trying to get your brothers to behave. I think he’s even proud of you for joining that monastery of yours.”

“Yes, he sounded it.” Cai looked into her cheerful face, dusted all over with flour. Yes, she’d been one of Broc’s women for a while. She hadn’t suffered too much, and now she had a home, and this sturdy boy.
Come back and be my son again.
In a way, it would be the easiest thing in the world. If he stayed, no doubt the noises in his head would soon be drowned out by others—the pigs squealing now, for example, as the inept village butcher began his task… Cai’s head spun. “I have to go,” he repeated, avoiding her kindly outstretched hand. “I don’t belong here anymore.”

The question remained as to where he
did
belong. Stumbling out of the village, past Broc’s ferocious outer defences, the wooden palisade and Roman-style earthworks, Cai tried to think it through. Leof had brought him to Fara. Whenever Cai had doubted what he was doing there, he had turned to Leof and seen, in his friend’s devout, loving ways, an ideal pattern for life. And although Cai knew Abbot Theo had never been supposed to tell him that the round apple Earth danced round the sun, his teachings had shown Cai what such a life could be when lit up from within by learning.

Find Addy. Remember, Cai—the secret isn’t in the book. It’s in the binding.

Cai jolted to a halt on the track. Theo’s voice, cutting through his inner racket like a knife, solemn and clear as if the abbot had been standing in the sunshine beside him. Leof and Theo were gone. Cai hadn’t been able to save either from a brutal, unchristian death. And his abbot’s last command, half-forgotten in the mess inside his skull, meant nothing to him.

He could feel the revolutions of the Earth. He wasn’t meant to, he was sure. The vastness of the rock, and the great invisible force that pinned him to it, meant he could spend his days in blissful unawareness of moving at all. Such an illusion was every man’s right, Theo had taught. Learning could be taken or rejected. But the choice had to be there.
The treasure. The secret of Fara.

The sky darkened. The track was empty before and behind him, and he was far enough from the hillfort that no one could see him, but he made his way into the gorse, a painful sickness boiling up in him. He wished the Earth would stop. He wished there wasn’t blood beneath his nails, so deeply ingrained that no amount of scrubbing would shift it. He doubled up, his stomach clenching.

He’d forgotten to bring food with him, and Broccus hadn’t offered any. Still the efforts to vomit tore through him. He used to suffer from strange, disabling headaches, days when coloured glass had seemed to float in front of his eyes. On those days Leof had sat by his bunk, pressing a cold, damp cloth to his brow. Cai threw up water and stood gasping, wiping away hot tears.

His head had cleared a little. That often happened once the sickness had pitched, Leof cleaning him up and telling him gently how poor an inspiration he was for his profession. Even the bells and the screams inside his head were dying down.

Replaced by rapid hoofbeats. Was that worse? Cai half-fell back out onto the track. A violent four-time percussion… He didn’t think he could live with that. With relief he realised the sounds were coming from the hillside above him. One of Broc’s wild little warhorses was being driven down over the turf. They’d have made a Roman soldier laugh, Cai suspected, but in their own right they were grand beasts, crossbred down with native ponies through the centuries and still showing some of their imperial blood. An eye for horseflesh was one of the things Cai had been meant to leave behind him in the outer world, but still he watched appreciatively as the horse and cart approached.

No, not a cart. Cai wiped his eyes again, in disbelief this time. Jouncing behind the pony, catching dull flashes of sun on its ancient bronze fittings, was one of Broc’s chariots. He had three of them, his legacy from his own father’s grandfather. Broc swore they were original and had seen action up near Hadrian’s great wall, but Cai reckoned that, like the horse, they were inventive copies. The wheels were broad and tough, better fitted to hillsides than old Roman pavements. Their frames were gaudy with low-relief bronze plates of goddesses walloping nine shades of hell out of a more recent enemy—wide-eyed figures who looked like the very Saxons who had since settled peacefully here, established monasteries and sent their beautiful sons to lighten the lives of men like Cai. “Leof,” he whispered, wondering if the name would ever be out of his mind, off his tongue.

Maybe the loss of him had finally unseated Cai’s reason. Broc valued these chariots more than his cows and his women put together. They seldom saw the light of day, and were never sent out on errands. Still unsteady, he stepped forwards to meet the driver, a skinny lad struggling for control. “Whoa! Pull her up, pull her up. What’s all this?”

“Broccus sent me after you. He says…” The boy hauled back hard on the snorting pony’s reins, and Cai took hold of the harness. “He says you’re to have the weapons you asked for. He also said…” Frowning, the boy repeated his script. “There’s little point, because you and your skirt-wearing friends will probably just chop your feet off, but you’re welcome.”

Cai looked into the willow containers strapped to the chariot’s frame. About twenty broadswords had been roughly packed inside, together with a selection of rusted shields. “He said I was to have all these?”

“Yes. The horse and chariot too. He also said you could have me.”

Cai had no doubt in what capacity. “That’s nice. How old are you?” The boy looked blank, and he clarified, “How many summers? Since you graced this world with your being?”

“Oh. Fourteen or so, I think.”