The Reluctant Berserker (19 page)

Leofgar’s gaze dropped to the frame of Wulfstan’s bed. “It was nobody’s business but our own,” he said. “If you had not finished it with a blow, I would not have taken even the small revenge I felt I was owed.”

Wulfstan laughed and felt more solid than he had done in days, not only his physical wounds soothed. “I admired that, later.” He smiled. “More so now when I understand what kind of risk you took, baiting my temper like a dog with a bear. Did I ever tell you how glad I was to have met you, both then and now? Did I thank you for saving my life?”

“No need.” Leofgar rubbed a thumb along the swaddled neck of his harp, bending his head down to her like a mother cuddling her babe. He did not return the sentiment and say he was glad to know Wulfstan, but he did not leave either. Under the circumstances, Wulfstan thought, that was more than he would have dared ask.

Quiet again for a while as Leofgar stretched out his long legs and nodded a little in his seat. A flap of soft-shoed feet pattered past the door and down into the chapel. Leofgar made to rise to go to his own bed, and the fear of him leaving made Wulfstan blurt out, unbidden, “Can you undo a curse?”

Leofgar froze in place. He insinuated a hand into his harp bag, as though he needed to touch the singing wood in order to think clearly. “I cannot.” He raised his left hand in what could have been a blessing, but was probably just a caution. “The man you killed had a wife skilled in wiccecraft?”

“A mother. Saewyn is her name. I am sad to be her enemy, because I have always admired her. She has raised the land spirits against me—as she has every right to do—and I am dogged by darkness at every step.”

Leofgar’s look now was that of a sober and deep-minded man, experienced in such things. “I cannot remove curses,” he said again. “But I can tell you this; that the land spirits have no strength that is not loaned to them by Almighty God, and I do not think there exists any curse in the nine worlds that is stronger than the word of the Heavenly Kingdom’s Maker.”

He had a slash of a mouth, the scop—his narrow lips the only flaw in his beauty. Yet Wulfstan liked the way they quirked up at the side now, as if to mock his own pretensions to holiness. “I am not a wise man, Glede. I am a man who remembers and retells the deeds of others. Should I sift through my hoard of tales for you, there is only one treasure I can find to bring out. It is the truth that God will shape our lives to whatever end is most pleasing to Him. The demon in the dark may rend our bodies, but it cannot snatch our souls out of His hand.”

“It’s the rending I’m chiefly worried about,” Wulfstan said, in an effort at levity. He lied of course.

The night’s chill had begun to seep through the stones. Outside, only starlight showed in pricklings of white on a black sky. A circular blur and flapping at the window was the little leathery wings of bats. Or Wulfstan hoped it was only bats. He shivered, felt the meal sit heavily with him and the strength—such as it was—seep slowly out of his bones.

The torch flared and flickered, and in its tawny light there was something ironic, something hard and dark about Leofgar’s face. He had no reason to doubt the man, every reason to trust him, and he should, he knew, feel safe. But he was sure that though the land spirits would not prevail against God, yet God would favour a grieving mother over the man who had killed her child.

Some of this must have shown on his face, for Leofgar stirred, shoving his bag back onto his shoulder and standing. “I have given you no comfort. I’m sorry. I am glad to see that you do well and have taken no permanent hurt from your journey.”

He took the one step needed to reach the door, paused there with his hand on the latch and gave a complicated smile. “I depart tomorrow on pilgrimage to the shrine of Aethelthryth at Ely.” The smile strengthened, gleaming out like light from a drawn blade. “I too am glad to have known you, Wulfstan Glede. Who knows what may come to pass if we meet a third time?”

It was a man’s place to seize the world and shape it to his desires. Despite his shortcomings in that area, Wulfstan could not watch the bard turn—angular, like a grey heron stalking gracefully along the borders of a swift stream—without holding out his good hand and saying sharply, “Wait! I too am on pilgrimage to Ely. I should be well enough to ride tomorrow, or the day after. I have not thanked or rewarded you—”

“I do not need to be paid.” Oh, that was as cold as the night, or more so, and for a moment Wulfstan felt like laughing. He’d met some proud bastards in his life, but they had all come at the other end of a sword. Whence came this one’s swelled head?

“I did not offer to. I thought we might be companions on the road. If there are wolfsheads and sea raiders out there—”

“I could protect you?”

Wulfstan was aware the challenge was wrong-headed—that he should be angry at the thought of needing protection. He should laugh at the thought that so skinny a man, with a head packed full of words, could fight off anything that Wulfstan need be afraid of. But he had told Leofgar everything, so it didn’t matter if he admitted this too. “Mmm,” he murmured, sliding down into the warm embrace of his blankets, ready for a great deal more sleep. “I should like that.”

It wasn’t until the morning, when he woke clear-headed and almost strong, and was enduring having his arm redressed and hung from his neck in a sling, that he remembered Leofgar’s surprise at his words, and the shy, sideways smile he had worn when he took the lantern from its holder and departed.

He was all Wulfstan’s weaknesses rolled into one person, and Wulfstan had invited him to spend God knew how many days alone with him in the wild. He should not have been feeling quite so sick with excitement at the thought. But oh, he was.

Chapter Ten

Leofgar woke in the cold hour of dawn, in the empty hall where he had sung for his supper the evening before. A small town had grown up around the nunnery, to ease the holy sisters’ dealings with the outside world—farm their lands, keep their buildings in repair, sell the wine and beer they brewed, and house some of the many pilgrims on the way to the abbey.

To these townsfolk he had given both simple fare and fine—the riddles for them to roar over with ribald laughter, and a snatch of the tale of Grendel so that they would shiver with delighted dread as they went to their beds. Their enjoyment warmed his heart and got beneath his skin, gilding his bones. They’d laughed and listened, and pressed the best of their food and the headiest of their ale on him, and he’d felt like a king. And this morning he had wakened in the ashes of last night’s fire, remembering that he was little more than a beggar.

Brushing the dust of the floor from his hair, he leaned over the firepit to break open the mound of ashes he had raked together before sleeping. In there, a few embers glowed reluctantly at him. It was enough so that, piling on kindling and a couple of faggots, he soon had the fire leaping once more.

The nuns had offered him another cell in the infirmary, but they had looked reluctant about it, since he was hale. So he had turned the offer down and gone where his unholy tales would bring him a welcome.

The folk had been glad of him for a night. They might be glad again if he stayed one more day—but after the third day he should be gone. It did not do to stay too long when one ate but did not work.

Sighing, he dipped water from the barrel into a cauldron and set the cauldron on the hall’s hanging chain to heat over the fire. So it was back to this life, was it? Wandering from stead to stead, staying a day or two and moving on. Bringing news and novelty, and leaving before they grew stale.

He washed his hands and face in the warm water, wishing for soap, then dug some of last night’s stew from the second pot, where it had been set to cool in the corner of the firepit. Had he been wrong to choose this? When he had achieved the dream of all wandering minstrels—to be taken into a lord’s household, made his man, given his protection and his generosity, sheltered by his honour, inspired by his glory, had he been too hasty to throw it all away?

No.

He beat the dust from his cloak, then began to wind the long strips of speckled yellow tablet-weave around the arch of his foot and the calves of his legs, to support his ankles and protect his trousers from all the thorns of the wilderness. Slipping his shoes on after, he sighed again. Why, when he had dreamed of the freedom of this life—when he escaped luxury and warmth in favour of need and the cold earth—did he feel so flat about it? He thought the life would welcome him back like a family embracing a soldier home from the fyrd. Instead he felt thin and chill and unfulfilled.

Do you miss Tatwine? Perhaps for all you desired him not, you liked to be important to him? Perhaps you could have worked at it more willingly; fought your own fears for his friendship?

He tried to think of it, see it, in his head—himself yielding. Lavish would have been his reward
,
unstinting his lord’s love. Could he have…?

No
.

Dressed, and with his resolve confirmed, he picked up his belongings, lifted the locking bars off the hall door and went out to stretch in the porch. The business of the village had already begun: a russet-haired boy taking pigs to the forest to forage, two barefoot girls on the green driving the red cows down to be milked. Over where the ground turned boggy, an old man was piling eel traps into a net bag while his son hauled a coracle onto his back. The nunnery doors were being opened for those who wished to go in and, with only a wall and grill between them, share in the nuns’ service of prime.

Well, this was a pilgrimage after all. It could not hurt if he were to do the same. He could ask after Wulfstan once it was done. The thought modulated the melody of his soul from minor to major, and he was smiling as he set out for the gate.

He heard the horses, cantering fast along the narrow strip of dry path, and thought no evil—he smiled. The smile fell from him like a dropped beaker and smashed by his feet as one of the riders called out, “Leofgar! Stop where you are or I shall drop you where you stand.”

His limbs hardened around him. They were made of wood—he had to ease them in their sockets with a chisel in order to turn. Behind him, three warriors on horseback gleamed in dawn’s light, all in silver mail and in helms. Deala with his bow drawn and Hunlaf with his coppery eyelashes casting a red glow over his coldly satisfied eyes.

The last was Tatwine himself, black browed and boarlike, down to the way he snuffed the wind as though he could scent the harper from a hundred yards distance.

His voice was soft. “Leofgar. We will speak.”

Leofgar looked around himself, saw fishermen, housewives, weavers, goatherds. No help to be had there. He could run, he supposed.
Faster than a horse? Than an arrow? Ah well. ‘Faithful are many, but many are froward.’

He bowed his head. “My lord.”

Tatwine slid from his horse with a dark laugh. “Oh,
am
I?”

Leofgar’s guilt closed his throat, bowed his chest inwards, squeezing all the breath from his lungs. He felt weak and abased, and wished he could reach the anger he knew was there, hidden in the back of his mind like a sword in its scabbard.

Tatwine took him by the chin and turned his face, trying to force him to look into his lord’s eyes. That helped a little, by stirring his stubbornness. He let his gaze slither across the man’s tanned cheek, looked sidelong at the ground.

“You swore an oath,” said Tatwine, in that terrible, gentle voice. “You knelt before my chair and raised your hands to me. I took them in my own, and you swore you were my man, to command as I saw fit. All you had, such as it was, you gave to me in return for my care.” His fingers tightened, the nails digging into the soft skin beneath Leofgar’s jaw. “Did I not care for you? Did I not give you praise and money, horses and fine clothes? Did I not take you with me where I rode, or incline my ear to you when you would speak?”

What to say? There was nothing he
could
say. Not here in public, at least, where other men had begun to put down their tools and turn to look. He was a faithful enough servant at least not to voice his true complaints where any other man might hear.

Tatwine’s hand clenched and the ring on his smallest finger split the side of Leofgar’s mouth. “Did I not?”

It was only a small, weak voice he could summon to reply. “Yes, you did.”

Now the fingers let go, but there was no time to breathe in relief before Tatwine backhanded him across the face so hard he stumbled to one knee in front of Hunlaf’s horse. He kept his head bowed, not wanting to look up at Hunlaf’s enjoyment.

“Why do you repay me like this? Running off like a slave, without a word, just when I had most need of you. Why, Leofgar? I had not taken you for an oathbreaker.”

Leofgar struggled to his feet, only to be slapped straight back. Both times, the sharp stone of the ring scored long cuts in his cheek. As he knelt the second time, not trying to rise again, the blood fell in fat drops onto the dust of the village square. “You know why,” he told it, in an undertone. “Surely you know?”

He kept his voice low enough to be private between the two of them. He didn’t believe Tatwine truly wanted an explanation. This was a drama, such as the Romans put on in their stone bowls, acting out a tale with their bodies to make it live. This was a play for the sake of his retainers and the onlookers and Tatwine’s pride.

That being so, Leofgar knew the part he was supposed to act. So when Tatwine came close once more, he bowed forward abjectly and pressed his face into the dirt in front of the man’s shoes.