The Reluctant Berserker (10 page)

“Either you did it because my father wanted it, or you did it because I will be one of his heirs and I would make you rich. These reasons I would not despise in a stranger, for whom they would be evidence of good sense. Yet you, I thought, were my friend, and you should wish me a better future than barrenness and being left to raise your concubines’ brats.”

Her figure was tall and her step stately. Her throat beneath the swathes of white material showed long and slender as a swan’s, and he had heard men talk of the flash of her eyes as though they were deadly weapons, as though—like the elves—they were capable of shooting invisible arrows that punctured a man’s skin and got beneath, to spread poison or delight. If he looked close, however, they seemed only the pale grey of the winter sky. Full of thought, perhaps, but remote as though he and she walked down opposite banks of a river, shouted their thoughts but could not cross.

He didn’t like her being angry with him. “It wouldn’t be so,” he said, hotly. “You are the only woman I would look at. There are none who please me more than you.”

Ecgfreda’s mouth turned up in an expression half-smile, half-grimace, but her braced shoulders dropped, and her eyes warmed. “Then,” she said, “perhaps God has made you for the cloister, and you should not be thinking of marriage at all. If I were so inclined to virtue as you are, that is where I would go.”

It was a strange thought—that he could give up being a warrior, devote himself to a higher power. A strangely attractive one, but for the thought of all those he would disappoint. “Your father—”

“If he has any wisdom, would accept that our wyrd is woven for us in our very nature, and all our choices only tend to that end. Better to accept fate joyfully than to fight it, for it will win no matter what we do.”

They had come to one of the many sets of oaken ladders that gave access to the palisade from all quadrants of the burh. Ecgfreda stopped and tugged her dress up through her tight belt to free her feet of its encumbrance. She took hold of the handrail and backed down the narrow treads. Wulfstan came after and found himself neatly deposited just behind the church.

“Peaceweaver,” he said, ruefully, finding himself manipulated, “have you brought me here entirely to make a point? I think perhaps I would be happier in a life in which I do not have to be on guard for the subtle machinations of thoughtful women.”

“I do it for your own good,” she laughed. “As my mother taught me, and hers taught her down a line as long as any line of fathers. Come, if you are made so perfect for a celibate life, why not go in and speak to Father Aidan, or to God? There is no dishonour in trading a life of striving against men for a life of striving against the infernal powers.”

Her earlier point had now had time to sink to the bottom of the well of Wulfstan’s thought. “I did not mean to insult or disregard you, or to treat you as a coin to be passed from your father to me, when I asked. I meant it because I admire and like you. You are wise and good, and you always counsel me well. I thought that was enough.”

Her laughter settled like a young fire into warmth. “Then,” she said, “I give up my anger at you, and if you will it, we shall be friends again, in so far as I am allowed to be friends with an unmarried youth. On which point I had better return to my women, or we will be seized and married against both our wills.”

She turned and left him at the door of the church, hurrying back across the iron-hard enclosure, bent into the blast of the wind. He—feeling rejected and hollow, relieved and unsettled all at once—burned his fingers with cold as he pushed on the flower-shaped iron nails that studded the door, opened it and went inside.

Even the smoke that blued the air inside smelled a little of heaven, rich and spicy as resin. Compared with the hall it was a small building, and empty but for the altar at one end, spread with a white cloth, on which a rood of silver-gilt wood stood gleaming in a ray of pale sunlight. This entered the house from the wind hole under the eaves at the west and filled the moving blue air with a single, slanted rod of light.

It was just as cold inside as it was out, but it was many times more silent, and Wulfstan felt that he had stepped outside the nine worlds into somewhere poised between them. All the things that had counted outside, in here could be stripped away as little more than dross.

He breathed in, trying to take some peace into his body via the air, and went down on his knees, hard and painful on the laid wooden floor. As he did so, something stirred at the back of his mind, and he would have closed his eyes to concentrate on it had there not also been an answering stir in the far corner of the church. There—outside the beam of light—a patch of shade next to the altar started, stood up, and showed the pale and wary face of Brid the slave.

He had a book cradled in the crook of one elbow, and an ivory pointer in his right hand, but before Wulfstan had time to think and berate him for this, he had laid them both down on the altar so reverently there seemed nothing to say.

“You read?”

The boy stayed in his corner, protected by the darkness, all but invisible himself in his dark tunic and trousers, a dark hood raised and casting shadow on his fair face. Wulfstan noticed he no longer wore the undyed homespun of the other slaves. There were shoes on his feet and woolen bands wrapped around his calves to the knee.

“Father Aidan is teaching me, lord.”

The silence seemed a solid thing around them, as though they were in the centre of a hall made of crystal, protected from the outer world.

“Why read?” Wulfstan asked, drawn again to something strong in the slave, something indomitable. He indicated the good clothes, the slave’s filled-out cheeks that told he was being fed as well as a free man.

“Did I not tell you Ecgbert was a kindly master? What need have you of anything else? Or—if you do—why not do as the other slaves do and take up a craft by which you can earn enough money to buy yourself back?”

“The truth?” Brid’s whisper had a soft edge of humour, as though he found it strange that anyone could expect an honest answer from him. “If I bought myself back, how could I ever redeem what has been done to me? Once a man is fallen as I have, what way back is there?”

Wulfstan wondered what it was the Welshman found so amusing, and guessed perhaps that it was the expression of discomfort on his own face. Was the slave a brave enough man to risk rubbing filth into him as though tanning a hide, just for the flinch? What could it mean that Brid found funny what all other men feared?

“What way?” he asked. “I know not. Is there a way at all?”

Brid drifted forward on silent feet until he was almost within arm’s reach. He put down his hood, and the stubble of his shaved head gleamed like polished brass as he emerged into the light. His tunic was green, it seemed, the deep green of an indigo dye over weld, expensive and far too fine for a slave.

“You ask me that
here
, lord? The only way is the church, which—when one enters it—can wipe out a man’s past as though it had never been. There is no abyss to which any of us could fall, no pitch so black, that could not be washed away by the church’s forgiveness and made as though it had never happened at all. That is why I am learning to read and to make calculations, to write and to memorise the psalms and the services. That is why I am learning to keep Father Aidan’s vestments and to clean the church and to fetch and carry for him freely rather than taking up work for which I might be paid.”

Here it seemed the boy had once more been the pathfinder Wulfstan needed. He might tell what the journey was like, give encouragement or warn Wulfstan off. “You’re thinking of becoming a monk?”

He must have sounded incredulous, for Brid dared an apologetic little smile. “I will not always be a boy, nor a youth. One day my lord will look at me and realise that my beauty has fled like that of all mortal things. Then he will wish to put me out of his sight. I do my best to make him fond of me, and so perhaps on that day, if I plead, rather than send me off to labour on one of his manors in a far distant country, he will donate me to the church. There I will find a new life with everything cleaned, where no man will know I am not deserving of respect. For in the eyes of Christ, the slave and the master are equal, the warrior and the serf are equal, the king and the blind beggar woman at his gates are equal, and all sins are forgotten once pardoned, as though they had never been.”

All sins forgiven. Wulfstan had heard this claim every Sunday and most other days of his life. Yet he felt he had never heard it before. The thought lit a fire in him.
All
sins forgiven, if they were but confessed and repented—and forgiven meant not “treasured up to berate him with every time he put a step wrong” but “utterly wiped out of existence”.

He could have Cenred, and afterwards God could make it as though it had not happened at all. What a magic there was in this! What a freedom!

“You are a remarkable man, Brid,” he said, startled into giving voice to a truth he hadn’t known was in him. “I’m sure you will end as a bishop.”
And who will know that they are being given orders by a man so soft and submissive he let another man plunder him and live?

This time Brid did laugh, startled, with a laughter that reached those chilly, watching eyes and made them bright. “You are a remarkable man also, my lord, to speak so to a slave like myself. Before I was captured I never would have believed such a recovery possible. To learn from one’s own mistakes is life, but to heed the mistakes of others is rare.”

Now he dares give me praise,
Wulfstan thought, with a sensation as though the wind were lifting the collar of his tunic behind him and blowing along his spine. There were many reasons why it did not do to become too familiar with Ecgbert’s bed-boy. “Well,” he said, disconcerted, “be sure you attend my lord with all your heart before then. So great a boon as freedom must be earned.”

Brid’s face closed like a locking box. He bowed and stepped back and all at once was hidden again, unseen in the shadows. “All my will is set on pleasing him, lord, for as long as I may.”

As he hurried to the hall, Wulfstan felt his own heart had become like the chapel—a space full of secrets and silence, inhabited by a riddling presence, shy and speechless and strong. As he plunged back into the hall where the other youths were, as always, wrestling and boasting and drinking, he thought perhaps that Ecgfreda was right. A warrior should not be carrying this weight of mysteries—he should be clear all the way through, resolved, confident in himself and his sword. Perhaps he did think too much. Perhaps he should give it all up and enter the church, where an active mind was an asset.

Cenred looked up at him from his place on the bench, looked up with narrowed eyes as blue as the illuminated sky on the title page of the book Brid had been reading, and everything in him did become clear and certain, narrowed down to a cutting edge of intent. “It will be chill tonight.” He dropped down on the bench beside his friend and felt the warmth of the man’s sturdy thigh against his own. “Will you share your cloak with me?”

Cenred laughed and ducked his head to whisper, “How little time it takes to overcome your scruples, my friend.”

“Mock me and sleep cold.” Wulfstan made to rise, nettled, but Cenred caught the hem of his tunic and urged him back down.

“Forgive me. My father was… He was a man of harsh words. I…”

Wulfstan’s resentment drained away like rain through a hole in a tent roof. Cenred’s brow was furrowed and his gaze turned inwards. It didn’t seem he liked what he saw. “You are not like him,” Wulfstan said quietly. “This we all know, I most of all. Or I would not be here now, broaching this topic with you.”

“A boy sees his father’s example,” Cenred murmured, moving aside as the servants shuffled the first of a long series of trestle tables between him and the wall. Outside the early evening was falling, blue and chill. Cold air coiled through the cracks under the door and stroked along Wulfstan’s fingertips. “Whether he will or no, he learns what the man has to teach. I learned with more fear than love, but I learned nonetheless, and sometimes, when I will it least, the habits break through.”

His brows pinched in further, lowering, leaving his eyes showing as cornflower lines between golden lashes. The rest of that baby-round face was smooth and impassive as always, but Wulfstan remembered the days when it had been covered with bruises, and he reached out and covered Cenred’s knee with his hand, under the table, stroking a thumb reassuringly along the side of it. This they had in common, that they were both out of true, somehow, inside. This it was that made him more tender, more careful with Cenred, who alone out of his lord’s household warriors, Wulfstan had never struck in anger, never laid flat on his back with his ears ringing and the knowledge of defeat embedded in his spine.

Now,
he thought,
now I will lay him flat another way.
The breath caught in his throat as a fierce flush of warmth poured from his hand into every part of him, met the itching intoxication of want that centred in his prick and drove the chill away as effectively as though he had been a fire giant. It was suddenly very hard to think of waiting patiently through the feasting and the drinking for hours on end, until he could finally have another man’s hands on his flushed and needy skin.

The evening did not oblige him by hurrying. His temper frayed under the endless waiting—all his life, he’d been waiting, and these last moments were the worst. One thing only diverted him from his ball-aching hunger, and that came when at the end of the night’s meal, Ecgbert took out his lyre and passed it down the table for every man to play his single party piece.