The Reluctant Berserker (22 page)

Carrying his burden straight into the woods, he headed, fast as he could, dodging branches and brambles, through the darkness towards the road. When he reached it, Leofgar squirmed in his hold. “Put me down.”

“You’re not going to run back?”

There were no clouds in the sky, and from one end of the world to the other, the flat land was covered by a sheet of stars. In that steel-coloured light, Leofgar’s voice was uncanny, cold and pitiless as the sky. “I go back on my own terms.”

Curst creature
, Wulfstan thought, tempted for a moment simply to drop the harper on the packed ground and walk away. He felt hard done by, angry. He had given up much and hoped for some gratitude, not this eerie passionless calm.

He told himself again that every man reacted to shock in his own way and forced himself to gentleness, letting the harper down to stand beside him, slight and taut as a bowstring. “Of course. But a wise man would not go now. They are armed and angry and expecting us. Quickly now. We’ll get to Fealo, we’ll outdistance them.”

Suiting his actions to his words, he moved off. When he was sure Leofgar was following, he began to run. There was as yet no sound of pursuit, and as he leaped the ditch to find the small hollow where he had concealed his horse, he wondered at it.

“Quick. Onto the horse. We’ll go back to the priory, ask them to shelter us.”

Leofgar set a hand to Fealo’s bridle, stopping him, and turning the horse away from the road, further into the wilderness of carr, the wet reeds and the mud, the saw-edged grasses and the clumps of fern and willow. “No. Deala and Hunlaf will try to wake Tatwine—that buys us a little time. When they are sure he’s well, they will seek us along the road. So we should not be on the road to be found. In the middle of the night, they cannot search the wild wood. The darkness beneath the trees will be our shield.”

Wulfstan didn’t like it. He would rather go back to the safety of man’s walls and the protection of the holy women. He didn’t want to tell Leofgar that he was afraid—that every step he took away from the human world, every step into the place of spirits, the untamed land, was a step that unmanned him. So he clenched his hand around his sword-hilt and followed the harper into the dark.

After little less than the time it would take to say seven paternosters, the night’s silence was shaken by the sound of horses on the road behind them, hooves thundering and spears rattling by the saddle. Wulfstan did not know whether to be impressed or annoyed at his companion’s wisdom. Annoyed, perhaps, for he would rather have been caught by mortal man than by the land spirits and the water spirits, the ettins and elves that awaited him out here.

They walked and waded through mud and drowned land for what felt like half the night, Wulfgar following the glimpses in starlight of Leofgar’s tall form, willowy as the reeds. At last it occurred to him that the man’s gait was strange, his head was down and his limbs moved almost like the limbs of a puppet cut from wood. As they climbed onto one of the infrequent hummocks of drier, wooded land, he leaned forward and caught Leofgar by the belt, stopping him as instantly as a thunderbolt.

The harper turned, gave him a look of terror, out of eyes that seemed to have drunk up the night sky, were as equally grey and luminous and full of stars. The sight sent a shock through Wulfstan, a blaze as of lightning from head to foot, that made his spine sing and all the members of his body wake up and give voice in harmony.

Since that first moment, there had been something about Leofgar that overawed him, that frightened him. But the fear pleased him. Two breaths, tight and gasping, passed as his mind showed him what he would do if Leofgar narrowed those uncanny eyes, stepped forward and pushed him up against the tree behind. The tree would pin him, and he would be helpless. It would not then be his fault if Leofgar put his narrow hands on him, wrung pleasure out of him as he would wring it from the strings of his harp, and took what Wulfstan could not quite bring himself to offer…

“Wulfstan? What is it?”

He shut his eyes and covered them over with his hands to stop off the source of temptation. For if he did, if he somehow encouraged that to happen, what guarantee was there that it would not end as it did with Cenred? He had a habit of punishing those who gave him what he wanted, and he could not bear for it to happen again. His very heart would break in two if anything he did was to harm Leofgar, whether or not the man proved as false as Cenred had. Even if he too laughed, after.

“It is nothing. Forgive me. Do you not think we’ve walked enough? Let us stop here, eat. Sleep. You have been wronged and—”

“You think I am not man enough to carry on despite it?”

“That’s not what I—”

“Or you think I am some kind of boy who needs to be cosseted, because I do not carry weapons like you?”

“No! I’m just
tired
, Leofgar. I want to stop.” Happily, his wound chose that moment to twinge, so the flinch and the movement to press his hand against it and warm the pain away were not feigned. They did the trick. Seeing Wulfstan’s weakness, Leofgar’s mouth relaxed and his lips came out of hiding. His shoulders slumped.

“I’m sorry. I had forgotten your wound. I had…I am not…”

Wulfstan turned away from the halting attempts at explanation. He didn’t want to see the well-spoken man stutter like a dolt. It hurt to watch.

Under the trees, he found a litter of small branches and piled them atop each other to make a drier seat than the bare ground. When he lowered himself to sit there, wrapping his cloak around himself to keep out the night wind, Leofgar came slowly to perch beside him.

It was like watching a half-trained hawk return to the hand, Leofgar sidled in, sideways, alighting at first as far from Wulfstan as he could get without falling off. Accustomed to the skittishness of raptors, Wulfstan made no move at all and was rewarded by the man shuffling a little closer, bringing up his feet beneath the hem of his cloak and huddling beside him, for all the world like a bird on a cold branch, head sunk in its hunched shoulders and its feathers ruffled.

As if to complete the picture of misery, a cold drop of water hit the end of Wulfstan’s nose, two spattered his cheek, and a moment later it was drizzling with the grey endless relentlessness of the grey endless fens.

Leofgar pulled a length of his cloak over his head, wrapped his arms around his knees and laid his right cheek against them, so that he was looking away from Wulfstan when he said, “I should not be so surly. You came in time.”

He would never have asked the question, didn’t know what to think of the answer. Ventured on “good” because it seemed appropriate. His own mind was mazed in strange thoughts, aware that he would not have fought his own lord, if the same sacrifice had been demanded of him. Ecgbert could have had him for the asking, though he could not imagine the man ever lowering himself to do so.

The falling rain made no noise, but the long leaves of willow above their heads streamed with a hiss in the wind. The sky’s sheaf of silver stars, the spray of heavenly milk were both veiled now behind cloud, and it grew very dark, too dark indeed to see more than an indigo outline of Leofgar’s pale cheek, and the faint glitter of one open eye. Through the shoulder pressed against the man, he could feel him shiver in the deepening cold as his thin summer cloak soaked up water and chilled against his skin.

Leofgar’s voice was oddly remote, as though it did not come from the miserable piece of flesh abandoned there in the dark, as though it belonged to some forlorn angel, cast out from Heaven, too proud for Hell, condemned to wander this earth alone until he be taken back.

“He has my harp.”

“What?”

A swallow, as if the name stuck in his throat. “Tatwine. He took my harp.” A shift of tone told Wulfstan the next thing was not of the same order of agony, though it too was resented. “And my lyre. But my harp, she… My master gave her to me, almost with his last breath. Ten years I was walking beside him, from hall to hall, enduring the scorn of the warriors and their women, singing praises to those who despised us. Years while I learned names that go back to Woden, the wisdom and the runes of the scop-craft, while I stored my mind with words and kennings and histories and tales. Ten years, and he did not beat me once, though I deserved it.”

With a crackle of wood beneath them, the hunched ball that was Leofgar pulled itself tighter together. Wulfstan untucked the ends of his own cloak and draped his arm and a quarter circle of red wool, lined with wolf’s fur, over the harper’s narrow shoulders. For a moment he went rigid as a stone. But the comfort did its work and there was a slight yielding. Leofgar turned his head, so that he was facing Wulfstan, but carried on talking to his knees. Meanwhile a damp and heavy warmth grew up between them, loosening Wulfstan’s tired limbs, as well as his grip on his unruly thoughts.

“The harp was his,” Leofgar went on, “as it was his master’s before him. She’s holy to me—the voice of our lineage. I will not be the one who silences her. I must have her back.”

Wulfstan so liked the tone of determination from him, so liked the feel of that trim waist in the crook of his arm and the long and sinewy torso tucked against his own, that it took him long moments to follow what the man had actually said, and a kind of jealousy slipped his guard, pricked his tongue with unconsidered words. “You can’t think of going back there! He will have the two of them hold you down and watch, next time.”

The shoulder pressed against his went stiff again.

“He will
have to,
to prove his lordship. You challenged him, Leofgar. He will have to prove himself the stronger man now—”

“I
know
how this works!” The voice had turned to ice. It crackled along the edges with sharp icicle spines. “Do you think I—looking like
this
—do not know exactly how this world works for boys and women and slaves? I am none of those things, and I will not let fear rule me. I am a man and I will act as one. Let the thieves who have taken my wealth from me beware, for I will not!”

The cloud was still heavy overhead, but Wulfstan’s sight had grown used to the dark enough to see the narrowed eyes and the hard swordpoint lines of Leofgar’s face. He’d long known he was formed wrong, and so it came as no surprise that these thoughts of being held down and forced, horrifying as they were when applied to Leofgar, made his own belly seethe with want and his breath come short. Leofgar’s anger was a beautiful thing to him, one that would lash him like a penance and clean him, perhaps, as prayer would.

His thoughts—as mentioned before—were tangled as a mess of net thrown up on a beach after a storm. He could not blame them when his right hand of its own accord rose to touch the fine, sharp bones and cold skin of Leofgar’s face. He leaned in and kissed Leofgar unwarily, trying to draw the crackling anger behind the harper’s lips into Wulfstan’s yearning mouth.

Taken by surprise, Leofgar did not react at first, his lips cold and damp against Wulfstan’s. Then he gasped, jammed his pinned elbow into Wulfstan’s ribs, drew back his other hand and slammed the heel of it into Wulfstan’s throat. As Wulfstan doubled over, coughing, there was a flurry of movement, too quick to see—like a cricket’s jump—and when he could breathe again and had dashed the tears from his streaming eyes, Leofgar was gone.

He leaped up. A faint rustle of water to the right might have been the sound of someone’s stealthy wading. “Wait!” he cried, blundering downhill and plunging after it. “Wait, please! Leofgar! I didn’t mean that the way it seemed. Wait!”

Shouting and splashing meant he could no longer hear the ripple of the harper’s light tread. He could see his hand in front of him, but little more than that. “Leofgar! You were supposed to—”
fuck me. You can be my man—I’ll be your boy
.

He couldn’t shout that out here, where the Heavenly Father alone knew what was listening. He couldn’t let the woman who somehow still dogged his steps with her magic know he had killed her son unjustly. Couldn’t let the world know that his cruel friend had been right all along. Not even here, alone in the wild, was he willing to be that honest.

“Please come back! I didn’t…I don’t…”

So, again, he allowed integrity to fall out of his hands like a shield pierced by too many javelins. “Leofgar!”

Silence now in the marsh, but for the whisper of reeds and the slosh and suck of his own footsteps. He stumbled forward in stubborn hopelessness, neither knowing if he yet followed his fleeing friend, nor how to find his own way back. The water closed over his footsteps, and the night lay blind over all.

Chapter Thirteen

Leofgar had laughed when Wulfstan first called him an elf, thinking it strange that the warrior should share his mother’s imaginings. He supposed now, though, there had been some reason behind the thought. Lacking other protections—a lord’s shepherding fist, a settled man’s neighbours and friends—he and his master had been forced to roam parts of the world that did not welcome humans. Even in this land, which St. Guthlac had called “a howling wilderness inhabited by demons” Leofgar felt at home.

Now he walked silently through the land sunk beneath the wave, swinging round to come up beside the line of the road and have it there at his right hand, on its hog’s bristle of ground, as comforting as a city wall in winter when the wolves are howling without.

It felt good to exercise all his caution in walking, in blending into the background and reading the land through the soft soles of his shoes. These were now so soaked he felt like a frog, web-footed, welcome in both worlds.